succession.
XLVIII
In the afternoon the farmer made it known that the rick was to be
finished that night, since there was a moon by which they could see
to work, and the man with the engine was engaged for another farm on
the morrow. Hence the twanging and humming and rustling proceeded
with even less intermission than usual.
It was not till 'nammet'-time, about three o-clock, that Tess raised
her eyes and gave a momentary glance round. She felt but little
surprise at seeing that Alec d'Urberville had come back, and was
standing under the hedge by the gate. He had seen her lift her
eyes, and waved his hand urbanely to her, while he blew her a kiss.
It meant that their quarrel was over. Tess looked down again, and
carefully abstained from gazing in that direction.
Thus the afternoon dragged on. The wheat-rick shrank lower, and the
straw-rick grew higher, and the corn-sacks were carted away. At six
o'clock the wheat-rick was about shoulder-high from the ground. But
the unthreshed sheaves remaining untouched seemed countless still,
notwithstanding the enormous numbers that had been gulped down by
the insatiable swallower, fed by the man and Tess, through whose two
young hands the greater part of them had passed. And the immense
stack of straw where in the morning there had been nothing, appeared
as the faeces of the same buzzing red glutton. From the west sky
a wrathful shine--all that wild March could afford in the way of
sunset--had burst forth after the cloudy day, flooding the tired and
sticky faces of the threshers, and dyeing them with a coppery light,
as also the flapping garments of the women, which clung to them like
dull flames.
A panting ache ran through the rick. The man who fed was weary, and
Tess could see that the red nape of his neck was encrusted with dirt
and husks. She still stood at her post, her flushed and perspiring
face coated with the corndust, and her white bonnet embrowned by it.
She was the only woman whose place was upon the machine so as to be
shaken bodily by its spinning, and the decrease of the stack now
separated her from Marian and Izz, and prevented their changing
duties with her as they had done. The incessant quivering, in
which every fibre of her frame participated, had thrown her into a
stupefied reverie in which her arms worked on independently of her
consciousness. She hardly knew where she was, and did not hear Izz
Huett tell her from below that her hair was tumbling down.
By degrees the freshest among them began to grow cadaverous and
saucer-eyed. Whenever Tess lifted her head she beheld always the
great upgrown straw-stack, with the men in shirt-sleeves upon it,
against the gray north sky; in front of it the long red elevator
like a Jacob's ladder, on which a perpetual stream of threshed straw
ascended, a yellow river running uphill, and spouting out on the top
of the rick.
She knew that Alec d'Urberville was still on the scene, observing
her from some point or other, though she could not say where. There
