day had ended. Digging began usually at six o'clock and extended
indefinitely into the dusk or moonlight. Just now heaps of dead
weeds and refuse were burning on many of the plots, the dry weather
favouring their combustion.
One fine day Tess and 'Liza-Lu worked on here with their neighbours
till the last rays of the sun smote flat upon the white pegs that
divided the plots. As soon as twilight succeeded to sunset the flare
of the couch-grass and cabbage-stalk fires began to light up the
allotments fitfully, their outlines appearing and disappearing under
the dense smoke as wafted by the wind. When a fire glowed, banks
of smoke, blown level along the ground, would themselves become
illuminated to an opaque lustre, screening the workpeople from one
another; and the meaning of the 'pillar of a cloud', which was a wall
by day and a light by night, could be understood.
As evening thickened, some of the gardening men and women gave over
for the night, but the greater number remained to get their planting
done, Tess being among them, though she sent her sister home. It was
on one of the couch-burning plots that she laboured with her fork,
its four shining prongs resounding against the stones and dry clods
in little clicks. Sometimes she was completely involved in the smoke
of her fire; then it would leave her figure free, irradiated by the
brassy glare from the heap. She was oddly dressed to-night, and
presented a somewhat staring aspect, her attire being a gown bleached
by many washings, with a short black jacket over it, the effect of
the whole being that of a wedding and funeral guest in one. The
women further back wore white aprons, which, with their pale faces,
were all that could be seen of them in the gloom, except when at
moments they caught a flash from the flames.
Westward, the wiry boughs of the bare thorn hedge which formed the
boundary of the field rose against the pale opalescence of the lower
sky. Above, Jupiter hung like a full-blown jonquil, so bright
as almost to throw a shade. A few small nondescript stars were
appearing elsewhere. In the distance a dog barked, and wheels
occasionally rattled along the dry road.
Still the prongs continued to click assiduously, for it was not late;
and though the air was fresh and keen there was a whisper of spring
in it that cheered the workers on. Something in the place, the
hours, the crackling fires, the fantastic mysteries of light and
shade, made others as well as Tess enjoy being there. Nightfall,
which in the frost of winter comes as a fiend and in the warmth of
summer as a lover, came as a tranquillizer on this March day.
Nobody looked at his or her companions. The eyes of all were on the
soil as its turned surface was revealed by the fires. Hence as Tess
stirred the clods and sang her foolish little songs with scarce
now a hope that Clare would ever hear them, she did not for a long
time notice the person who worked nearest to her--a man in a long
smockfrock who, she found, was forking the same plot as herself, and
whom she supposed her father had sent there to advance the work.
She became more conscious of him when the direction of his digging
brought him closer. Sometimes the smoke divided them; then it
