Tess of the dUrbervilles - Page 246/283

Thus the Durbeyfields, once d'Urbervilles, saw descending upon them

the destiny which, no doubt, when they were among the Olympians of

the county, they had caused to descend many a time, and severely

enough, upon the heads of such landless ones as they themselves were

now. So do flux and reflux--the rhythm of change--alternate and

persist in everything under the sky.

LI

At length it was the eve of Old Lady-Day, and the agricultural world

was in a fever of mobility such as only occurs at that particular

date of the year. It is a day of fulfilment; agreements for outdoor

service during the ensuing year, entered into at Candlemas, are to

be now carried out. The labourers--or "work-folk", as they used to

call themselves immemorially till the other word was introduced from

without--who wish to remain no longer in old places are removing to

the new farms.

These annual migrations from farm to farm were on the increase here.

When Tess's mother was a child the majority of the field-folk about

Marlott had remained all their lives on one farm, which had been the

home also of their fathers and grandfathers; but latterly the desire

for yearly removal had risen to a high pitch. With the younger

families it was a pleasant excitement which might possibly be an

advantage. The Egypt of one family was the Land of Promise to the

family who saw it from a distance, till by residence there it became

it turn their Egypt also; and so they changed and changed.

However, all the mutations so increasingly discernible in village

life did not originate entirely in the agricultural unrest. A

depopulation was also going on. The village had formerly contained,

side by side with the argicultural labourers, an interesting and

better-informed class, ranking distinctly above the former--the class

to which Tess's father and mother had belonged--and including the

carpenter, the smith, the shoemaker, the huckster, together with

nondescript workers other than farm-labourers; a set of people

who owed a certain stability of aim and conduct to the fact of

their being lifeholders like Tess's father, or copyholders, or

occasionally, small freeholders. But as the long holdings fell

in, they were seldom again let to similar tenants, and were mostly

pulled down, if not absolutely required by the farmer for his hands.

Cottagers who were not directly employed on the land were looked

upon with disfavour, and the banishment of some starved the trade of

others, who were thus obliged to follow. These families, who had

formed the backbone of the village life in the past, who were the

depositaries of the village traditions, had to seek refuge in the

large centres; the process, humorously designated by statisticians as

"the tendency of the rural population towards the large towns", being

really the tendency of water to flow uphill when forced by machinery.