whatever part of the world tess came from, it was plain enough by the look of her—and more and more plain as she grew up into a tall and lanky girl, and then into a tall slim woman—that suffolk was a long way off from the land where she was born.
our suffolk folk, for the most part, are shortish and thickset and fair and blue eyed. we[186] men—being whipped about by the wind and weather, and the sea-salt tanned into us—lose our fairness early and go a bun-brown; but our women—having no salt spray in their faces, and only their just allowance of sunshine—have their blue eyes matched with the red and white cheeks that they were born with; and their hair, though sometimes it goes darkish, usually is a bright chestnut or a bright brown. also, our women are steady-going and sensible; though i must say that now and then they are a bit hard to get along with: being given to doing their thinking slowly, and to being mighty fast set in their own notions when once they have made their minds up—the same as we men. as for tess—with her black eyes and her black hair, and her face all a cream white with not a touch of red in it—she was like none of them; and she could think more out-of-the-way things and be more sorts of a girl in five minutes than any suffolk lass that ever i came across could think or be in a whole year!
tess was unlike our girls in another matter: she had a mighty hot spit-fire temper of her own. our girls, the same as our men, are easy-going and anger slowly; but when they do anger they are glowing hot to their very finger-tips, and a[187] long while it takes them to cool off. but tess would blaze up all in a minute—and as often as not with no real reason for it—and be for a while such an out-and-out little fury that she would send everything scudding before her; and then would pull up suddenly in the thick of it, and seem to forget all about it, and like enough laugh at the people around her looking scared! somehow, though, it was seldom that she let me have a turn of her tantrums; and when she did they'd be over in no time, and she'd have her arms around me and be begging me to kiss her and to tell her that i didn't mind. i suppose that she was that way with me because for my part—having from the very first so loved her that quarreling with her was clean impossible—i used just to stand and stare at her in her passions; and like enough be showing by the look in my eyes the puzzled sorrow that i was feeling in my inside. as to answering her anger with my anger, it never once crossed my mind.
with john heath things went differently. he would go ugly when she flew out at him—and would keep his anger by him after hers long was over and done with, and would show it by putting some hurt upon her in a dirty way.[188] a good many thrashings i gave john heath, at one time or another, for that sort of thing; and the greatest piece of unreasonableness that tess ever put on me, which is saying much for it, was on that score: she being then ten years old, or thereabouts, and john and i well turned of sixteen.
some trick that he played on her—i don't know what it was—set her in a rage against him, and he made her worse by laughing at her, and she ended by throwing sand in his eyes. then his anger got up, and he caught her—being twice the size of her—and boxed her ears. i came along just then, and i can see the look of her now. she was not crying, as any ordinary child would have been—john having meant to hurt her, and hit hard. she was standing straight in front of him with her little hands gripped into fists as if she meant to fight him, that cream white face of hers gone a real dead white, a perfect blaze of passion in her big black eyes. in another second or so she'd have been flying at him if i'd given her the chance. but i didn't—i sailed right in and myself gave him what he needed; and when i had finished with him i had so well blackened the two eyes of him that he forgot about the sand. but after[189] it all was over, so far from being obliged to me, what did tess do but fall to crying because i'd hurt him, and to saying that he'd only given her what she deserved! for a week and more she would not speak to me, and all that time she was trotting about sorrowfully at john's heels. it seemed as though all of a sudden she had got to loving him because he had played the man and the master to her; and i'm sure that his love for her had its beginning then too.
john's folks and my folks, as i have said, lived up at the north end of the village, a bit apart, and that made us three keep most together while we were little; but tess never had much to do with the other children, even when she got big enough to be with them at school. they did not get along with her, being puzzled by her whims and fancies and set against her by her spit-fire ways. and she did not get along with them because she was quick about everything and all of them were slow. when she began to grow up, though, matters changed a good deal. the boys—she being like nobody else in the village—picked her out to make love to, and that set the girls by the ears. tess liked the love-making a deal more than i liked her to like it; and she didn't mind what the girls said to[190] her because her wits were nimbler than their wits and she always could give them better than they could send.
so things went while the years went till tess was turned of seventeen, and was shot up into a tall slim woman in all ways so beautiful as to be, i do believe, the most beautiful woman that god ever made. and then it was that grace gryce, damn her for it, found a whip that served to lash her; and so cruel a whip that she was near to lashing the life out of her with it at a single blow.
