feat_summary_path: finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Tess of the D'Urbervilles/section_3_part_1.txt
feat_book_id: Tess of the D'Urbervilles.chapter 10
feat_summary_id: chapter 10
feat_summary: {"name": "CHAPTER 10", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820050202/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmTessD20.asp", "summary": "Chaseborough is a market town where the villagers go to shop, particularly on Saturdays. For a long time, Tess does not go to Chaseborough; however, she finds her first trip there so enjoyable that she begins to visit regularly. On one of her visits in September, she discovers that Chaseborough is having a fair. She does her usual marketing and then searches for somebody with whom to walk back home. Her co-workers, however, are engaged in drinking, dancing, and merry making. While she waits for them, Alec comes by and offers to give her a ride. Since she does not really trust him, she refuses his offer. When her fellow workers finally leave the fair, some of them are drunk and begin to taunt Tess on the way back to Trantridge. When Tess has had enough of them and is ready to walk on alone, Alec rides by on his horse and again offers her a ride. This time Tess feels she must accept his help.", "analysis": "Notes Tess has previously made several trips into Chaseborough to shop without any problems, but she has never been there in the midst of a fair. Her trip in September is not problem free. Her friends are caught up in the drinking and merry making at the fair, and Tess is forced to wait for them for a long time, not wanting to walk home alone for three miles. Alec comes by and offers a ride, but Tess refuses to go with him. Once the group starts for home, it is obvious that Tess's friends have had too much to drink. An argument breaks out between Tess and two of the women, and Tess is ready to walk on alone when Alex rides past again. This time she accepts his offer of help, for she is uneasy with her drunken friends, the hour is late, and she is tired, hungry, and thirsty. Under normal circumstances, Tess would never have gone away with Alec, as seen earlier in the chapter when she refused his offer of a ride. Fate has begun its intervention in the life of this young, innocent girl. The chapter highlights Alec's wayward ways of life. He is used to having his own way, which Hardy indicates is a usual tendency of the rich. The women in his past have obliged him, feeling honored to be noticed by a wealthy man. Alec expects Tess to react to him in a similar manner. He is surprised by her coolness towards him and irked by her constant refusals of his advances. Tess's indifference to him just makes Alec want her more"}
text: 
  
  Every village has its idiosyncrasy, its constitution, often its own
  code of morality.  The levity of some of the younger women in and
  about Trantridge was marked, and was perhaps symptomatic of the
  choice spirit who ruled The Slopes in that vicinity.  The place had
  also a more abiding defect; it drank hard.  The staple conversation
  on the farms around was on the uselessness of saving money; and
  smock-frocked arithmeticians, leaning on their ploughs or hoes, would
  enter into calculations of great nicety to prove that parish relief
  was a fuller provision for a man in his old age than any which could
  result from savings out of their wages during a whole lifetime.
  
  The chief pleasure of these philosophers lay in going every Saturday
  night, when work was done, to Chaseborough, a decayed market-town two
  or three miles distant; and, returning in the small hours of the next
  morning, to spend Sunday in sleeping off the dyspeptic effects of the
  curious compounds sold to them as beer by the monopolizers of the
  once-independent inns.
  
  For a long time Tess did not join in the weekly pilgrimages.  But
  under pressure from matrons not much older than herself--for a
  field-man's wages being as high at twenty-one as at forty, marriage
  was early here--Tess at length consented to go.  Her first experience
  of the journey afforded her more enjoyment than she had expected,
  the hilariousness of the others being quite contagious after her
  monotonous attention to the poultry-farm all the week. She went again
  and again.  Being graceful and interesting, standing moreover on the
  momentary threshold of womanhood, her appearance drew down upon her
  some sly regards from loungers in the streets of Chaseborough; hence,
  though sometimes her journey to the town was made independently, she
  always searched for her fellows at nightfall, to have the protection
  of their companionship homeward.
  
  This had gone on for a month or two when there came a Saturday in
  September, on which a fair and a market coincided; and the pilgrims
  from Trantridge sought double delights at the inns on that account.
  Tess's occupations made her late in setting out, so that her comrades
  reached the town long before her.  It was a fine September evening,
  just before sunset, when yellow lights struggle with blue shades in
  hairlike lines, and the atmosphere itself forms a prospect without
  aid from more solid objects, except the innumerable winged insects
  that dance in it.  Through this low-lit mistiness Tess walked
  leisurely along.
  
  She did not discover the coincidence of the market with the fair till
  she had reached the place, by which time it was close upon dusk.  Her
  limited marketing was soon completed; and then as usual she began to
  look about for some of the Trantridge cottagers.
  
  At first she could not find them, and she was informed that most of
  them had gone to what they called a private little jig at the house
  of a hay-trusser and peat-dealer who had transactions with their
  farm.  He lived in an out-of-the-way nook of the townlet, and in
  trying to find her course thither her eyes fell upon Mr d'Urberville
  standing at a street corner.
  
  "What--my Beauty?  You here so late?" he said.
  
  She told him that she was simply waiting for company homeward.
  
  "I'll see you again," said he over her shoulder as she went on down
  the back lane.
  
  Approaching the hay-trussers, she could hear the fiddled notes of
  a reel proceeding from some building in the rear; but no sound of
  dancing was audible--an exceptional state of things for these parts,
  where as a rule the stamping drowned the music.  The front door being
  open she could see straight through the house into the garden at the
  back as far as the shades of night would allow; and nobody appearing
  to her knock, she traversed the dwelling and went up the path to the
  outhouse whence the sound had attracted her.
  
  It was a windowless erection used for storage, and from the open door
  there floated into the obscurity a mist of yellow radiance, which at
  first Tess thought to be illuminated smoke.  But on drawing nearer
  she perceived that it was a cloud of dust, lit by candles within the
  outhouse, whose beams upon the haze carried forward the outline of
  the doorway into the wide night of the garden.
  
  When she came close and looked in she beheld indistinct forms
  racing up and down to the figure of the dance, the silence of their
  footfalls arising from their being overshoe in "scroff"--that is
  to say, the powdery residuum from the storage of peat and other
  products, the stirring of which by their turbulent feet created the
  nebulosity that involved the scene.  Through this floating, fusty
  _debris_ of peat and hay, mixed with the perspirations and warmth of
  the dancers, and forming together a sort of vegeto-human pollen, the
  muted fiddles feebly pushed their notes, in marked contrast to the
  spirit with which the measure was trodden out.  They coughed as
  they danced, and laughed as they coughed.  Of the rushing couples
  there could barely be discerned more than the high lights--the
  indistinctness shaping them to satyrs clasping nymphs--a multiplicity
  of Pans whirling a multiplicity of Syrinxes; Lotis attempting to
  elude Priapus, and always failing.
  
  At intervals a couple would approach the doorway for air, and
  the haze no longer veiling their features, the demigods resolved
  themselves into the homely personalities of her own next-door
  neighbours.  Could Trantridge in two or three short hours have
  metamorphosed itself thus madly!
  
  Some Sileni of the throng sat on benches and hay-trusses by the wall;
  and one of them recognized her.
  
  "The maids don't think it respectable to dance at The Flower-de-Luce,"
  he explained.  "They don't like to let everybody see which be their
  fancy-men.  Besides, the house sometimes shuts up just when their
  jints begin to get greased.  So we come here and send out for
  liquor."
  
  "But when be any of you going home?" asked Tess with some anxiety.
  
  "Now--a'most directly.  This is all but the last jig."
  
  She waited.  The reel drew to a close, and some of the party were in
  the mind of starting.  But others would not, and another dance was
  formed.  This surely would end it, thought Tess.  But it merged in
  yet another.  She became restless and uneasy; yet, having waited so
  long, it was necessary to wait longer; on account of the fair the
  roads were dotted with roving characters of possibly ill intent; and,
  though not fearful of measurable dangers, she feared the unknown.
  Had she been near Marlott she would have had less dread.
  
  "Don't ye be nervous, my dear good soul," expostulated, between his
  coughs, a young man with a wet face and his straw hat so far back
  upon his head that the brim encircled it like the nimbus of a saint.
  "What's yer hurry?  To-morrow is Sunday, thank God, and we can sleep
  it off in church-time.  Now, have a turn with me?"
  
  She did not abhor dancing, but she was not going to dance here.  The
  movement grew more passionate: the fiddlers behind the luminous
  pillar of cloud now and then varied the air by playing on the wrong
  side of the bridge or with the back of the bow.  But it did not
  matter; the panting shapes spun onwards.
  
  They did not vary their partners if their inclination were to stick
  to previous ones.  Changing partners simply meant that a satisfactory
  choice had not as yet been arrived at by one or other of the pair,
  and by this time every couple had been suitably matched.  It was then
  that the ecstasy and the dream began, in which emotion was the matter
  of the universe, and matter but an adventitious intrusion likely to
  hinder you from spinning where you wanted to spin.
  
  Suddenly there was a dull thump on the ground: a couple had fallen,
  and lay in a mixed heap.  The next couple, unable to check its
  progress, came toppling over the obstacle.  An inner cloud of dust
  rose around the prostrate figures amid the general one of the room,
  in which a twitching entanglement of arms and legs was discernible.
  
  "You shall catch it for this, my gentleman, when you get home!" burst
  in female accents from the human heap--those of the unhappy partner
  of the man whose clumsiness had caused the mishap; she happened
  also to be his recently married wife, in which assortment there was
  nothing unusual at Trantridge as long as any affection remained
  between wedded couples; and, indeed, it was not uncustomary in their
  later lives, to avoid making odd lots of the single people between
  whom there might be a warm understanding.
  
  A loud laugh from behind Tess's back, in the shade of the garden,
  united with the titter within the room.  She looked round, and saw
  the red coal of a cigar: Alec d'Urberville was standing there alone.
  He beckoned to her, and she reluctantly retreated towards him.
  
  "Well, my Beauty, what are you doing here?"
  
  She was so tired after her long day and her walk that she confided
  her trouble to him--that she had been waiting ever since he saw her
  to have their company home, because the road at night was strange to
  her.  "But it seems they will never leave off, and I really think I
  will wait no longer."
  
  "Certainly do not.  I have only a saddle-horse here to-day; but come
  to The Flower-de-Luce, and I'll hire a trap, and drive you home with
  me."
  
  Tess, though flattered, had never quite got over her original
  mistrust of him, and, despite their tardiness, she preferred to walk
  home with the work-folk.  So she answered that she was much obliged
  to him, but would not trouble him.  "I have said that I will wait for
  'em, and they will expect me to now."
  
  "Very well, Miss Independence.  Please yourself...  Then I shall not
  hurry...  My good Lord, what a kick-up they are having there!"
  
  He had not put himself forward into the light, but some of them
  had perceived him, and his presence led to a slight pause and a
  consideration of how the time was flying.  As soon as he had re-lit
  a cigar and walked away the Trantridge people began to collect
  themselves from amid those who had come in from other farms, and
  prepared to leave in a body.  Their bundles and baskets were gathered
  up, and half an hour later, when the clock-chime sounded a quarter
  past eleven, they were straggling along the lane which led up the
  hill towards their homes.
  
  It was a three-mile walk, along a dry white road, made whiter
  to-night by the light of the moon.
  
  Tess soon perceived as she walked in the flock, sometimes with this
  one, sometimes with that, that the fresh night air was producing
  staggerings and serpentine courses among the men who had partaken too
  freely; some of the more careless women also were wandering in their
  gait--to wit, a dark virago, Car Darch, dubbed Queen of Spades, till
  lately a favourite of d'Urberville's; Nancy, her sister, nicknamed
  the Queen of Diamonds; and the young married woman who had already
  tumbled down.  Yet however terrestrial and lumpy their appearance
  just now to the mean unglamoured eye, to themselves the case was
  different.  They followed the road with a sensation that they were
  soaring along in a supporting medium, possessed of original and
  profound thoughts, themselves and surrounding nature forming
  an organism of which all the parts harmoniously and joyously
  interpenetrated each other.  They were as sublime as the moon and
  stars above them, and the moon and stars were as ardent as they.
  
  Tess, however, had undergone such painful experiences of this kind in
  her father's house that the discovery of their condition spoilt the
  pleasure she was beginning to feel in the moonlight journey.  Yet she
  stuck to the party, for reasons above given.
  
  In the open highway they had progressed in scattered order; but now
  their route was through a field-gate, and the foremost finding a
  difficulty in opening it, they closed up together.
  
  This leading pedestrian was Car the Queen of Spades, who carried a
  wicker-basket containing her mother's groceries, her own draperies,
  and other purchases for the week.  The basket being large and heavy,
  Car had placed it for convenience of porterage on the top of her
  head, where it rode on in jeopardized balance as she walked with
  arms akimbo.
  
  "Well--whatever is that a-creeping down thy back, Car Darch?" said
  one of the group suddenly.
  
  All looked at Car.  Her gown was a light cotton print, and from the
  back of her head a kind of rope could be seen descending to some
  distance below her waist, like a Chinaman's queue.
  
  "'Tis her hair falling down," said another.
  
  No; it was not her hair: it was a black stream of something oozing
  from her basket, and it glistened like a slimy snake in the cold
  still rays of the moon.
  
  "'Tis treacle," said an observant matron.
  
  Treacle it was.  Car's poor old grandmother had a weakness for the
  sweet stuff.  Honey she had in plenty out of her own hives, but
  treacle was what her soul desired, and Car had been about to give her
  a treat of surprise.  Hastily lowering the basket the dark girl found
  that the vessel containing the syrup had been smashed within.
  
  By this time there had arisen a shout of laughter at the
  extraordinary appearance of Car's back, which irritated the dark
  queen into getting rid of the disfigurement by the first sudden means
  available, and independently of the help of the scoffers.  She rushed
  excitedly into the field they were about to cross, and flinging
  herself flat on her back upon the grass, began to wipe her gown
  as well as she could by spinning horizontally on the herbage and
  dragging herself over it upon her elbows.
  
  The laughter rang louder; they clung to the gate, to the posts,
  rested on their staves, in the weakness engendered by their
  convulsions at the spectacle of Car.  Our heroine, who had hitherto
  held her peace, at this wild moment could not help joining in with
  the rest.
  
  It was a misfortune--in more ways than one.  No sooner did the dark
  queen hear the soberer richer note of Tess among those of the other
  work-people than a long-smouldering sense of rivalry inflamed her to
  madness.  She sprang to her feet and closely faced the object of her
  dislike.
  
  "How darest th' laugh at me, hussy!" she cried.
  
  "I couldn't really help it when t'others did," apologized Tess,
  still tittering.
  
  "Ah, th'st think th' beest everybody, dostn't, because th' beest
  first favourite with He just now!  But stop a bit, my lady, stop a
  bit!  I'm as good as two of such! Look here--here's at 'ee!"
  
  To Tess's horror the dark queen began stripping off the bodice of
  her gown--which for the added reason of its ridiculed condition she
  was only too glad to be free of--till she had bared her plump neck,
  shoulders, and arms to the moonshine, under which they looked as
  luminous and beautiful as some Praxitelean creation, in their
  possession of the faultless rotundities of a lusty country-girl.
  She closed her fists and squared up at Tess.
  
  "Indeed, then, I shall not fight!" said the latter majestically; "and
  if I had know you was of that sort, I wouldn't have so let myself
  down as to come with such a whorage as this is!"
  
  The rather too inclusive speech brought down a torrent of
  vituperation from other quarters upon fair Tess's unlucky head,
  particularly from the Queen of Diamonds, who having stood in the
  relations to d'Urberville that Car had also been suspected of, united
  with the latter against the common enemy.  Several other women also
  chimed in, with an animus which none of them would have been so
  fatuous as to show but for the rollicking evening they had passed.
  Thereupon, finding Tess unfairly browbeaten, the husbands and lovers
  tried to make peace by defending her; but the result of that attempt
  was directly to increase the war.
  
  Tess was indignant and ashamed.  She no longer minded the loneliness
  of the way and the lateness of the hour; her one object was to get
  away from the whole crew as soon as possible.  She knew well enough
  that the better among them would repent of their passion next day.
  They were all now inside the field, and she was edging back to rush
  off alone when a horseman emerged almost silently from the corner of
  the hedge that screened the road, and Alec d'Urberville looked round
  upon them.
  
  "What the devil is all this row about, work-folk?" he asked.
  
  The explanation was not readily forthcoming; and, in truth, he did
  not require any.  Having heard their voices while yet some way off he
  had ridden creepingly forward, and learnt enough to satisfy himself.
  
  Tess was standing apart from the rest, near the gate.  He bent over
  towards her.  "Jump up behind me," he whispered, "and we'll get shot
  of the screaming cats in a jiffy!"
  
  She felt almost ready to faint, so vivid was her sense of the crisis.
  At almost any other moment of her life she would have refused such
  proffered aid and company, as she had refused them several times
  before; and now the loneliness would not of itself have forced her
  to do otherwise.  But coming as the invitation did at the particular
  juncture when fear and indignation at these adversaries could be
  transformed by a spring of the foot into a triumph over them, she
  abandoned herself to her impulse, climbed the gate, put her toe upon
  his instep, and scrambled into the saddle behind him.  The pair were
  speeding away into the distant gray by the time that the contentious
  revellers became aware of what had happened.
  
  The Queen of Spades forgot the stain on her bodice, and stood
  beside the Queen of Diamonds and the new-married, staggering young
  woman--all with a gaze of fixity in the direction in which the
  horse's tramp was diminishing into silence on the road.
  
  "What be ye looking at?" asked a man who had not observed the
  incident.
  
  "Ho-ho-ho!" laughed dark Car.
  
  "Hee-hee-hee!" laughed the tippling bride, as she steadied herself on
  the arm of her fond husband.
  
  "Heu-heu-heu!" laughed dark Car's mother, stroking her moustache as
  she explained laconically: "Out of the frying-pan into the fire!"
  
  Then these children of the open air, whom even excess of alcohol
  could scarce injure permanently, betook themselves to the field-path;
  and as they went there moved onward with them, around the shadow of
  each one's head, a circle of opalized light, formed by the moon's
  rays upon the glistening sheet of dew.  Each pedestrian could see
  no halo but his or her own, which never deserted the head-shadow,
  whatever its vulgar unsteadiness might be; but adhered to it, and
  persistently beautified it; till the erratic motions seemed an
  inherent part of the irradiation, and the fumes of their breathing
  a component of the night's mist; and the spirit of the scene, and
  of the moonlight, and of Nature, seemed harmoniously to mingle with
  the spirit of wine.
  
  
  
feat_summary_name: CHAPTER 10
target: Chaseborough is a market town where the villagers go to shop, particularly on Saturdays. For a long time, Tess does not go to Chaseborough; however, she finds her first trip there so enjoyable that she begins to visit regularly. On one of her visits in September, she discovers that Chaseborough is having a fair. She does her usual marketing and then searches for somebody with whom to walk back home. Her co-workers, however, are engaged in drinking, dancing, and merry making. While she waits for them, Alec comes by and offers to give her a ride. Since she does not really trust him, she refuses his offer. When her fellow workers finally leave the fair, some of them are drunk and begin to taunt Tess on the way back to Trantridge. When Tess has had enough of them and is ready to walk on alone, Alec rides by on his horse and again offers her a ride. This time Tess feels she must accept his help.
feat_summary_analysis: Notes Tess has previously made several trips into Chaseborough to shop without any problems, but she has never been there in the midst of a fair. Her trip in September is not problem free. Her friends are caught up in the drinking and merry making at the fair, and Tess is forced to wait for them for a long time, not wanting to walk home alone for three miles. Alec comes by and offers a ride, but Tess refuses to go with him. Once the group starts for home, it is obvious that Tess's friends have had too much to drink. An argument breaks out between Tess and two of the women, and Tess is ready to walk on alone when Alex rides past again. This time she accepts his offer of help, for she is uneasy with her drunken friends, the hour is late, and she is tired, hungry, and thirsty. Under normal circumstances, Tess would never have gone away with Alec, as seen earlier in the chapter when she refused his offer of a ride. Fate has begun its intervention in the life of this young, innocent girl. The chapter highlights Alec's wayward ways of life. He is used to having his own way, which Hardy indicates is a usual tendency of the rich. The women in his past have obliged him, feeling honored to be noticed by a wealthy man. Alec expects Tess to react to him in a similar manner. He is surprised by her coolness towards him and irked by her constant refusals of his advances. Tess's indifference to him just makes Alec want her more