fields, keeping as well as they could in the shelter of hedges,
which, however, acted as strainers rather than screens. The air,
afflicted to pallor with the hoary multitudes that infested it,
twisted and spun them eccentrically, suggesting an achromatic chaos
of things. But both the young women were fairly cheerful; such
weather on a dry upland is not in itself dispiriting.
'Ha-ha! the cunning northern birds knew this was coming,' said
Marian. 'Depend upon't, they keep just in front o't all the way from
the North Star. Your husband, my dear, is, I make no doubt, having
scorching weather all this time. Lord, if he could only see his
pretty wife now! Not that this weather hurts your beauty at all--in
fact, it rather does it good.'
'You mustn't talk about him to me, Marian,' said Tess severely.
'Well, but--surely you care for'n! Do you?'
Instead of answering, Tess, with tears in her eyes, impulsively faced
in the direction in which she imagined South America to lie, and,
putting up her lips, blew out a passionate kiss upon the snowy wind.
'Well, well, I know you do. But 'pon my body, it is a rum life for
a married couple! There--I won't say another word! Well, as for
the weather, it won't hurt us in the wheat-barn; but reed-drawing is
fearful hard work--worse than swede-hacking. I can stand it because
I'm stout; but you be slimmer than I. I can't think why maister
should have set 'ee at it.'
They reached the wheat-barn and entered it. One end of the long
structure was full of corn; the middle was where the reed-drawing was
carried on, and there had already been placed in the reed-press the
evening before as many sheaves of wheat as would be sufficient for
the women to draw from during the day.
'Why, here's Izz!' said Marian.
Izz it was, and she came forward. She had walked all the way from
her mother's home on the previous afternoon, and, not deeming the
distance so great, had been belated, arriving, however, just before
the snow began, and sleeping at the alehouse. The farmer had agreed
with her mother at market to take her on if she came to-day, and she
had been afraid to disappoint him by delay.
In addition to Tess, Marian, and Izz, there were two women from a
neighbouring village; two Amazonian sisters, whom Tess with a start
remembered as Dark Car, the Queen of Spades, and her junior, the
Queen of Diamonds--those who had tried to fight with her in the
midnight quarrel at Trantridge. They showed no recognition of her,
and possibly had none, for they had been under the influence of
liquor on that occasion, and were only temporary sojourners there
as here. They did all kinds of men's work by preference, including
well-sinking, hedging, ditching, and excavating, without any sense of
fatigue. Noted reed-drawers were they too, and looked round upon the
other three with some superciliousness.
Putting on their gloves, all set to work in a row in front of the
press, an erection formed of two posts connected by a cross-beam,
under which the sheaves to be drawn from were laid ears outward, the
beam being pegged down by pins in the uprights, and lowered as the
