Chapter 35
Her narrative ended; even its re-assertions and secondary explanations
were done. Tess's voice throughout had hardly risen higher than its opening
tone; there had been no exculpatory phrase of any kind, and she had not
wept.
But the complexion even of external things seemed to suffer transmutation
as her announcement progressed. The fire in the grate looked impish - demoniacally
funny, as if it did not care in the least about her strait. The fender
grinned idly, as if it too did not care. The light from the water-bottle
was merely engaged in a chromatic problem. All material objects around
announced their irresponsibility with terrible iteration. And yet nothing
had changed since the moments when he had been kissing her; or rather,
nothing in the substance of things. But the essence of things had changed.
When she ceased the auricular impressions from their previous endearments
seemed to hustle away into the corners of their brains, repeating themselves
as echoes from a time of supremely purblind foolishness.
Clare performed the irrelevant act of stirring the fire; the intelligence
had not even yet got to the bottom of him. After stirring the embers he
rose to his feet; all the force of her disclosure had imparted itself now.
His face had withered. In the strenuousness of his concentration he treadled
fitfully on the floor. He could not, by any contrivance, think closely
enough; that was the meaning of his vague movement. When he spoke it was
in the most inadequate, commonplace voice of the many varied tones she
had heard from him.
`Tess!'
`Yes, dearest.'
`Am I to believe this? From your manner I am to take it as true. O you
cannot be out of your mind! You ought to be! Yet you are not... . My wife,
my Tess - nothing in you warrants such a supposition as that?'
`I am not out of my mind,' she said.
`And yet--' He looked vacantly at her, to resume with dazed senses:
`Why didn't you tell me before? Ah, yes, you would have told me, in a way
- but I hindered you, I remember!'
These and other of his words were nothing but the perfunctory babble
of the surface while the depths remained paralyzed. He turned away, and
bent over a chair. Tess followed him to the middle of the room where he
was, and stood there staring at him with eyes that did not weep. Presently
she slid down upon her knees beside his foot, and from this position she
crouched in a heap.
`In the name of our love, forgive me!' she whispered with a dry mouth.
`I have forgiven you for the same!'
And, as he did not answer, she said again--
`Forgive me as you are forgiven! I forgive you, Angel.'
`You - yes, you do.'
`But you do not forgive me?'
`O Tess, forgiveness does not apply to the case! You were one person;
now you are another. My God - how can forgiveness meet such a grotesque
- prestidigitation as that!'
He paused, contemplating this definition; then suddenly broke into horrible
laughter - as unnatural and ghastly as a laugh in hell.
`Don't - don't! It kills me quite, that!' she shrieked. `O have mercy
upon me - have mercy!'
He did not answer; and, sickly white, she jumped up.
`Angel, Angel! what do you mean by that laugh?' she cried out.
`Do you know what this is to me?'
He shook his head.
`I have been hoping, longing, praying, to make you happy! I have thought
what joy it will be to do it, what an unworthy wife I shall be if I do
not! That's what I have felt, Angel!'
`I know that.'
`I thought, Angel, that you loved me - me, my very self! If it is I
you do love, O how can it be that you look and speak so? It frightens me!
Having begun to love you, I love you for ever - in all changes, in all
disgraces, because you are yourself. I ask no more. Then how can you, O
my own husband, stop loving me?'
`I repeat, the woman I have been loving is not you.'
`But who?'
`Another woman in your shape.'
She perceived in his words the realization of her own apprehensive foreboding
in former times. He looked upon her as a species of impostor; a guilty
woman in the guise of an innocent one. Terror was upon her white face as
she saw it; her cheek was flaccid, and her mouth had almost the aspect
of a round little hole. The horrible sense of his view of her so deadened
her that she staggered; and he stepped forward, thinking she was going
to fall.
`Sit down, sit down,' he said gently. `You are ill; and it is natural
that you should be.'
She did sit down, without knowing where she was, that strained look
still upon her face, and her eyes such as to make his flesh creep.
`I don't belong to you any more, then; do I, Angel?, she asked helplessly.
`It is not me, but another woman like me that he loved, he says.'
The image raised caused her to take pity upon herself as one who was
ill-used. Her eyes filled as she regarded her position further; she turned
round and burst into a flood of self-sympathetic tears.
Clare was relieved at this change, for the effect on her of what had
happened was beginning to be a trouble to him only less than the woe of
the disclosure itself. He waited patiently, apathetically, till the violence
of her grief had worn itself out, and her rush of weeping had lessened
to a catching gasp at intervals.
`Angel,' she said suddenly, in her natural tones, the insane, dry voice
of terror having left her now. `Angel, am I too wicked for you and me to
live together?'
`I have not been able to think what we can do.'
`I shan't ask you to let me live with you, Angel, because I have no
right to! I shall not write to mother and sisters to say we be married,
as I said I would do; and I shan't finish the good-hussif I cut out and
meant to make while we were in lodgings.'
`Shan't you?'
`No, I shan't do anything, unless you order me to; and if you go away
from me I shall not follow 'ee; and if you never speak to me any more I
shall not ask why, unless you tell me I may.'
`And if I do order you to do anything?'
`I will obey you like your wretched slave, even if it is to lie down
and die.'
`You are very good. But it strikes me that there is a want of harmony
between your present mood of self-sacrifice and your past mood of self-preservation.'
These were the first words of antagonism. To fling elaborate sarcasms
at Tess, however, was much like flinging them at a dog or cat. The charms
of their subtlety passed by her unappreciated, and she only received them
as inimical sounds which meant that anger ruled. She remained mute, not
knowing that he was smothering his affection for her. She hardly observed
that a tear descended slowly upon his cheek, a tear so large that it magnified
the pores of the skin over which it rolled, like the object lens of a microscope.
Meanwhile reillumination as to the terrible and total change that her confession
had wrought in his life, in his universe, returned to him, and he tried
desperately to advance among the new conditions in which he stood. Some
consequent action was necessary; yet what?
`Tess,' he said, as gently as he could speak, `I cannot stay - in this
room - just now. I will walk out a little way.'
He quietly left the room, and the two glasses of wine that he had poured
out for their supper - one for her, one for him - remained on the table
untasted. This was what their Agape had come to. At tea, two or
three hours earlier, they had, in the freakishness of affection, drunk
from one cup.
The closing of the door behind him, gently as it had been pulled to,
roused Tess from her stupor. He was gone; she could not stay. Hastily flinging
her cloak around her she opened the door and followed, putting out the
candles as if she were never coming back. The rain was over and the night
was now clear.
She was soon close at his heels, for Clare walked slowly and without
purpose. His form beside her light gray figure looked black, sinister,
and forbidding, and she felt as sarcasm the touch of the jewels of which
she had been momentarily so proud. Clare turned at hearing her footsteps,
but his recognition of her presence seemed to make no difference in him,
and he went on over the five yawning arches of the great bridge in front
of the house.
The cow and horse tracks in the road were full of water, the rain having
been enough to charge them, but not enough to wash them away. Across these
minute pools the reflected stars flitted in a quick transit as she passed;
she would not have known they were shining overhead if she had not seen
them there - the vastest things of the universe imaged in objects so mean.
The place to which they had travelled to-day was in the same valley
as Talbothays, but some miles lower down the river; and the surroundings
being open she kept easily in sight of him. Away from the house the road
wound through the meads, and along these she followed Clare without any
attempt to come up with him or to attract him, but with dumb and vacant
fidelity.
At last, however, her listless walk brought her up alongside him, and
still he said nothing. The cruelty of fooled honesty is often great after
enlightenment, and it was mighty in Clare now. The outdoor air had apparently
taken away from him all tendency to act on impulse; she knew that he saw
her without irradiation - in all her bareness; that Time was chanting his
satiric psalm at her then--
Behold, when thy face is made bare, he that loved thee shall hate;
Thy face shall be no more fair at the fall of thy fate.
For thy life shall fall as a leaf and be shed as the rain;
And the veil of thine head shall be grief, and the crown shall be pain.
He was still intently thinking, and her companionship had now insufficient
power to break or divert the strain of thought. What a weak thing her presence
must have become to him! She could not help addressing Clare.
`What have I done - what have I done! I have not told of anything
that interferes with or belies my love for you. You don't think I planned
it, do you? It is in your own mind what you are angry at, Angel; it is
not in me. O, it is not in me, and I am not that deceitful woman you think
me!'
`H'm - well. Not deceitful, my wife; but not the same. No, not the same.
But do not make me reproach you. I have sworn that I will not; and I will
do everything to avoid it.'
But she went on pleading in her distraction; and perhaps said things
that would have been better left to silence.
`Angel! - Angel! I was a child - a child when it happened! I knew nothing
of men.'
`You were more sinned against than sinning, that I admit.'
`Then will you not forgive me?'
`I do forgive you, but forgiveness is not all.'
`And love me?'
To this question he did not answer.
`O Angel - my mother says that it sometimes happens so! - she knows
several cases where they were worse than I, and the husband has not minded
it much - has got over it at least. And yet the woman has not loved him
as I do you!'
`Don't, Tess; don't argue. Different societies, different manners. You
almost make me say you are an unapprehending peasant woman, who have never
been initiated into the proportions of social things. You don't know what
you say.'
`I am only a peasant by position, not by nature!'
She spoke with an impulse to anger, but it went as it came.
`So much the worse for you. I think that parson who unearthed your pedigree
would have done better if he had held his tongue. I cannot help associating
your decline as a family with this other fact - of your want of firmness.
Decrepit families imply decrepit wills, decrepit conduct. Heaven, why did
you give me a handle for despising you more by informing me of your descent!
Here was I thinking you a new-sprung child of nature; there were you, the
belated seedling of an effete aristocracy!'
`Lots of families are as bad as mine in that! Retty's family were once
large landowners, and so were Dairyman Billett's. And the Debbyhouses,
who now are carters, were once the De Bayeux family. You find such as I
everywhere; 'tis a feature of our county, and I can't help it.'
`So much the worse for the county.'
She took these reproaches in their bulk simply, not in their particulars;
he did not love her as he had loved her hitherto, and to all else she was
indifferent.
They wandered on again in silence. It was said afterwards that a cottager
of Wellbridge, who went out late that night for a doctor, met two lovers
in the pastures, walking very slowly, without converse, one behind the
other, as in a funeral procession, and the glimpse that he obtained of
their faces seemed to denote that they were anxious and sad. Returning
later, he passed them again in the same field, progressing just as slowly,
and as regardless of the hour and of the cheerless night as before. It
was only on account of his preoccupation with his own affairs, and the
illness in his house, that he did not bear in mind the curious incident,
which, however, he recalled a long while after.
During the interval of the cottager's going and coming, she had said
to her husband--
`I don't see how I can help being the cause of much misery to you all
your life. The river is down there. I can put an end to myself in it. I
am not afraid.'
`I don't wish to add murder to my other follies,' he said.
`I will leave something to show that I did it myself - on account of
my shame. They will not blame you then.'
`Don't speak so absurdly - I wish not to hear it. It is nonsense to
have such thoughts in this kind of case, which is rather one for satirical
laughter than for tragedy. You don't in the least understand the quality
of the mishap. It would be viewed in the light of a joke by nine-tenths
of the world if it were known. Please oblige me by returning to the house,
and going to bed.'
`I will,' said she dutifully.
They had rambled round by a road which led to the well-known ruins of
the Cistercian abbey behind the mill, the latter having, in centuries past,
been attached to the monastic establishment. The mill still worked on,
food being a perennial necessity; the abbey had perished, creeds being
transient. One continually sees the ministration of the temporary outlasting
the ministration of the eternal. Their walk having been circuitous they
were still not far from the house, and in obeying his direction she only
had to reach the large stone bridge across the main river, and follow the
road for a few yards. When she got back everything remained as she had
left it, the fire being still burning. She did not stay downstairs for
more than a minute, but proceeded to her chamber, whither the luggage had
been taken. Here she sat down on the edge of the bed, looking blankly around,
and presently began to undress. In removing the light towards the bedstead
its rays fell upon the tester of white dimity; something was hanging beneath
it, and she lifted the candle to see what it was. A bough of mistletoe.
Angel had put it there; she knew that in an instant. This was the explanation
of that mysterious parcel which it had been so difficult to pack and bring;
whose contents he would not explain to her, saying that time would soon
show her the purpose thereof. In his zest and his gaiety he had hung it
there. How foolish and inopportune that mistletoe looked now.
Having nothing more to fear, having scarce anything to hope, for that
he would relent there seemed no promise whatever, she lay down dully. When
sorrow ceases to be speculative sleep sees her opportunity. Among so many
happier moods which forbid repose this was a mood which welcomed it, and
in a few minutes the lonely Tess forgot existence, surrounded by the aromatic
illness of the chamber that had once, possibly, been the bride-chamber
of her own ancestry.
Later on that night Clare also retraced his steps to the house. Entering
softly to the sitting-room he obtained a light, and with the manner of
one who had considered his course he spread his rugs upon the old horse-hair
sofa which stood there, and roughly shaped it to a sleeping-couch. Before
lying down he crept shoeless upstairs, and listened at the door of her
apartment. Her measured breathing told that she was sleeping profoundly.
`Thank God!' murmured Clare; and yet he was conscious of a pang of bitterness
at the thought - approximately true, though not wholly so - that having
shifted the burden of her life to his shoulders she was now reposing without
care.
He turned away to descend; then, irresolute, faced round to her door
again. In the act he caught sight of one of the d'Urberville dames, whose
portrait was immediately over the entrance to Tess's bedchamber. In the
candlelight the painting was more than unpleasant. Sinister design lurked
in the woman's features, a concentrated purpose of revenge on the other
sex - so it seemed to him then. The Caroline bodice of the portrait was
low - precisely as Tess's had been when he tucked it in to show the necklace;
and again he experienced the distressing sensation of a resemblance between
them.
The check was sufficient. He resumed his retreat and descended.
His air remained calm and cold, his small compressed mouth indexing
his powers of self-control; his face wearing still that terribly sterile
expression which had spread thereon since her disclosure. It was the face
of a man who was no longer passion's slave, yet who found no advantage
in his enfranchisement. He was simply regarding the harrowing contingencies
of human experience, the unexpectedness of things. Nothing so pure, so
sweet, so virginal as Tess had seemed possible all the long while that
he had adored her, up to an hour ago; but
The little less, and what worlds away!
He argued erroneously when he said to himself that her heart was not indexed
in the honest freshness of her face; but Tess had no advocate to set him
right. Could it be possible, he continued, that eyes which as they gazed
never expressed any divergence from what the tongue was telling, were yet
ever seeing another world behind her ostensible one, discordant and contrasting.
He reclined on his couch in the sitting-room, and extinguished the light.
The night came in, and took up its place there, unconcerned and indifferent
the night which had already swallowed up his happiness, and was now digesting
it listlessly; and was ready to swallow up the happiness of a thousand
other people with as little disturbance or change of mien.
Chapter 36
Clare arose in the light of a dawn that was ashy and furtive, as though
associated with crime. The fireplace confronted him with its extinct embers;
the spread supper-table, whereon stood the two full glasses of untasted
wine, now flat and filmy; her vacated seat and his own; the other articles
of furniture, with their eternal look of not being able to help it, their
intolerable inquiry what was to be done? From above there was no sound;
but in a few minutes there came a knock at the door. He remembered that
it would be the neighbouring cottager's wife, who was to minister to their
wants while they remained here.
The presence of a third person in the house would be extremely awkward
just now, and, being already dressed, he opened the window and informed
her that they could manage to shift for themselves that morning. She had
a milk-can in her hand, which he told her to leave at the door. When the
dame had gone away he searched in the back quarters of the house for fuel,
and speedily lit a fire. There was plenty of eggs, butter, bread, and so
on in the larder, and Clare soon had breakfast laid, his experiences at
the dairy having rendered him facile in domestic preparations. The smoke
of the kindled wood rose from the chimney without like a lotus-headed column;
local people who were passing by saw it, and thought of the newly-married
couple, and envied their happiness.
Angel cast a final glance round, and then going to the foot of the stairs,
called in a conventional voice--
`Breakfast is ready!'
He opened the front door, and took a few steps in the morning air. When,
after a short space, he came back she was already in the sitting-room,
mechanically readjusting the breakfast things. As she was fully attired,
and the interval since his calling her had been but two or three minutes,
she must have been dressed or nearly so before he went to summon her. Her
hair was twisted up in a large round mass at the back of her head, and
she had put on one of the new frocks - a pale blue woollen garment with
neck-frillings of white. Her hands and face appeared to be cold, and she
had possibly been sitting dressed in the bedroom a long time without any
fire. The marked civility of Clare's tone in calling her seemed to have
inspired her, for the moment, with a new glimmer of hope. But it soon died
when she looked at him.
The pair were, in truth, but the ashes of their former fires. To the
hot sorrow of the previous night had succeeded heaviness; it seemed as
if nothing could kindle either of them to fervour of sensation any more.
He spoke gently to her, and she replied with a like undemonstrativeness.
At last she came up to him, looking in his sharply-defined face as one
who had no consciousness that her own formed a visible object also.
`Angel!' she said, and paused, touching him with her fingers lightly
as a breeze, as though she could hardly believe to be there in the flesh
the man who was once her lover. Her eyes were bright, her pale cheek still
showed its wonted roundness, though half-dried tears had left glistening
traces thereon; and the usually ripe red mouth was almost as pale as her
cheek. Throbbingly alive as she was still, under the stress of her mental
grief the life beat so brokenly, that a little further pull upon it would
cause real illness, dull her characteristic eyes, and make her mouth thin.
She looked absolutely pure. Nature, in her fantastic trickery, had set
such a seal of maidenhood upon Tess's countenance that he gazed at her
with a stupefied air.
`Tess! Say it is not true! No, it is not true!'
`It is true.' `Every word?'
`Every word.'
He looked at her imploringly, as if he would willingly have taken a
lie from her lips, knowing it to be one, and have made of it, by some sort
of sophistry, a valid denial. However, she only repeated--
`It is true.'
`Is he living?' Angel then asked.
`The baby died.'
`But the man?'
`He is alive.'
A last despair passed over Clare's face.
`Is he in England?'
`Yes.'
He took a few vague steps.
`My position - is this,' he said abruptly. `I thought - any man would
have thought - that by giving up all ambition to win a wife with social
standing, with fortune, with knowledge of the world, I should secure rustic
innocence as surely as I should secure pink cheeks; but - However, I am
no man to reproach you, and I will not.'
Tess felt his position so entirely that the remainder had not been needed.
Therein lay just the distress of it; she saw that he had lost all round.
`Angel - I should not have let it go on to marriage with you if I had
not known that, after all, there was a last way out of it for you; though
I hoped you would never------'
Her voice grew husky.
`A last way?'
`I mean, to get rid of me. You can get rid of me.'
`How?'
`By divorcing me.'
`Good heavens - how can you be so simple! How can I divorce you?'
`Can't you - now I have told you? I thought my confession would give
you grounds for that.'
`O Tess - you are too, too - childish - unformed - crude, I suppose!
I don't know what you are. You don't understand the law - you don't understand!'
`What - you cannot?'
`Indeed I cannot.'
A quick shame mixed with the misery upon his listener's face.
`I thought - I thought,' she whispered. `O, now I see how wicked I seem
to you! Believe me - believe me, on my soul, I never thought but that you
could! I hoped you would not; yet I believed, without a doubt, that you
could cast me off if you were determined, and didn't love me at - at -
all!'
`You were mistaken,' he said.
`O, then I ought to have done it, to have done it last night! But I
hadn't the courage. That's just like me!'
`The courage to do what?'
As she did not answer he took her by the hand.
`What were you thinking of doing?' he inquired.
`Of putting an end to myself.'
`When?'
She writhed under this inquisitorial manner of his. `Last night,' she
answered.
`Where?'
`Under your mistletoe.'
`My good - ! How?' he asked sternly.
`I'll tell you, if you won't be angry with me!'she said, shrinking.
`It was with the cord of my box. But I could not - do the last thing! I
was afraid that it might cause a scandal to your name.'
The unexpected quality of this confession, wrung from her, and not volunteered,
shook him perceptibly. But he still held her, and, letting his glance fall
from her face downwards, he said,
`Now, listen to this. You must not dare to think of such a horrible
thing! How could you! You will promise me as your husband to attempt that
no more.'
`I am ready to promise. I saw how wicked it was.'
`Wicked! The idea was unworthy of you beyond description.'
`But, Angel,' she pleaded, enlarging her eyes in calm unconcern upon
him, `it was thought of entirely on your account - to set you free without
the scandal of the divorce that I thought you would have to get. I should
never have dreamt of doing it on mine. However, to do it with my own hand
is too good for me, after all. It is you, my ruined husband, who ought
to strike the blow. I think I should love you more, if that were possible,
if you could bring yourself to do it, since there's no other way of escape
for 'ee. I feel I am so utterly worthless! So very greatly in the way!'
`Ssh!'
`Well, since you say no, I won't. I have no wish opposed to yours.'
He knew this to be true enough. Since the desperation of the night her
activities had dropped to zero, and there was no further rashness to be
feared.
Tess tried to busy herself again over the breakfast-table with more
or less success, and they sat down both on the same side, so that their
glances did not meet. There was at first something awkward in hearing each
other eat and drink, but this could not be escaped; moreover, the amount
of eating done was small on both sides. Breakfast over he rose, and telling
her the hour at which he might be expected to dinner, went off to the miller's
in a mechanical pursuance of the plan of studying that business, which
had been his only practical reason for coming here.
When he was gone Tess stood at the window, and presently saw his form
crossing the great stone bridge which conducted to the mill premises. He
sank behind it, crossed the railway beyond, and disappeared. Then, without
a sigh, she turned her attention to the room, and began clearing the table
and setting it in order.
The charwoman soon came. Her presence was at first a strain upon Tess,
but afterwards an alleviation. At half-past twelve she left her assistant
alone in the kitchen, and, returning to the sitting-room, waited for the
reappearance of Angel's form behind the bridge.
About one he showed himself. Her face flushed, although he was a quarter
of a mile off. She ran to the kitchen to get the dinner served by the time
he should enter. He went first to the room where they had washed their
hands together the day before, and as he entered the sitting-room the dish-covers
rose from the dishes as if by his own motion.
`How punctual!' he said.
`Yes. I saw you coming over the bridge,' said she.
The meal was passed in commonplace talk of what he had been doing during
the morning at the Abbey Mill, of the methods of bolting and the old-fashioned
machinery, which he feared would not enlighten him greatly on modern improved
methods, some of it seeming to have been in use ever since the days it
ground for the monks in the adjoining conventual buildings - now a heap
of ruins. He left the house again in the course of an hour, coming home
at dusk, and occupying himself through the evening with his papers. She
feared she was in the way, and, when the old woman was gone, retired to
the kitchen, where she made herself busy as well as she could for more
than an hour.
Clare's shape appeared at the door.
`You must not work like this,'he said. `You are not my servant; you
are my wife.'
She raised her eyes, and brightened somewhat. `I may think myself that
- indeed?' she murmured, in piteous raillery. `You mean in name! Well,
I don't want to be anything more.'
`You may think so, Tess! You are. What do you mean?'
`I don't know,' she said hastily, with tears in her accents. `I thought
I - because I am not respectable, I mean. I told you I thought I was not
respectable enough long ago - and on that account I didn't want to marry
you, only - only you urged me!'
She broke into sobs, and turned her back to him. It would almost have
won round any man but Angel Clare. Within the remote depths of his constitution,
so gentle and affectionate as he was in general, there lay hidden a hard
logical deposit, like a vein of metal in a soft loam, which turned the
edge of everything that attempted to traverse it. It had blocked his acceptance
of the Church; it blocked his acceptance of Tess. Moreover, his affection
itself was less fire than radiance, and, with regard to the other sex,
when he ceased to believe he ceased to follow: contrasting in this with
many impressionable natures, who remain sensuously infatuated with what
they intellectually despise. He waited till her sobbing ceased.
`I wish half the women in England were as respectable as you,' he said,
in an ebullition of bitterness against womankind in general. `It isn't
a question of respectability, but one of principle!'
He spoke such things as these and more of a kindred sort to her, being
still swayed by the antipathetic wave which warps direct souls with such
persistence when once their vision finds itself mocked by appearances.
There was, it is true, underneath, a back current of sympathy through which
a woman of the world might have conquered him. But Tess did not think of
this; she took everything as her deserts, and hardly opened her mouth.
The firmness of her devotion to him was indeed almost pitiful; quick tempered
as she naturally was, nothing that he could say made her unseemly; she
sought not her own; was not provoked; thought no evil of his treatment
of her. She might just now have been Apostolic Charity herself returned
to a self-seeking modern world.
This evening, night, and morning were passed precisely as the preceding
ones had been passed. On one, and only one, occasion did she - the formerly
free and independent Tess - venture to make any advances. It was on the
third occasion of his starting after a meal to go out to the flour-mill.
As he was leaving the table he said `Good-bye', and she replied in the
same words, at the same time inclining her mouth in the way of his. He
did not avail himself of the invitation, saying, as he turned hastily aside'--
`I shall be home punctually.'
Tess shrank into herself as if she had been struck. Often enough had
he tried to reach those lips against her consent - often had he said gaily
that her mouth and breath tasted of the butter and eggs and milk and honey
on which she mainly lived, that he drew sustenance from them, and other
follies of that sort. But he did not care for them now. He observed her
sudden shrinking, and said gently--
`You know, I have to think of a course. It was imperative that we should
stay together a little while, to avoid the scandal to you that would have
resulted from our immediate parting. But you must see it is only for form's
sake.'
`Yes,' said Tess absently.
He went out, and on his way to the mill stood still, and wished for
a moment that he had responded yet more kindly, and kissed her once at
least.
Thus they lived through this despairing day or two; in the same house,
truly; but more widely apart than before they were lovers. It was evident
to her that he was, as he had said, living with paralyzed activities, in
his endeavour to think of a plan of procedure. She was awe-stricken to
discover such determination under such apparent flexibility. His consistency
was, indeed, too cruel. She no longer expected forgiveness now. More than
once she thought of going away from him during his absence at the mill;
but she feared that this, instead of benefiting him, might be the means
of hampering and humiliating him yet more if it should become known.
Meanwhile Clare was meditating, verily. His thought had been unsuspended;
he was becoming ill with thinking; eaten out with thinking, withered by
thinking; scourged out of all his former pulsating flexuous domesticity.
He walked about saying to himself, `What's to be done - what's to be done?'
and by chance she overheard him. It caused her to break the reserve about
their future which had hitherto prevailed.
`I suppose - you are not going to live with me - long, are you, Angel?'
she asked, the sunk corners of her mouth betraying how purely mechanical
were the means by which she retained that expression of chastened calm
upon her face.
`I cannot,' he said, `without despising myself, and what is worse, perhaps,
despising you. I mean, of course, cannot live with you in the ordinary
sense. At present, whatever I feel, I do not despise you. And, let me speak
plainly, or you may not see all my difficulties. How can we live together
while that man lives? - he being your husband in Nature, and not I. If
he were dead it might be different... . Besides, that's not all the difficulty;
it lies in another consideration - one bearing upon the future of other
people than ourselves. Think of years to come, and children being born
to us, and this past matter getting known - for it must get known. There
is not an uttermost part of the earth but somebody comes from it or goes
to it from elsewhere. Well, think of wretches of our flesh and blood growing
up under a taunt which they will gradually get to feel the full force of
with their expanding years. What an awakening for them! What a prospect!
Can you honestly say Remain, after contemplating this contingency? Don't
you think we had better endure the ills we have than fly to others?'
Her eyelids, weighted with trouble, continued drooping as before.
`I cannot say Remain,' she answered. `I cannot; I had not thought so
far.'
Tess's feminine hope - shall we confess it - had been so obstinately
recuperative as to revive in her surreptitious visions of a domiciliary
intimacy continued long enough to break down his coldness even against
his judgment. Though unsophisticated in the usual sense, she was not incomplete;
and it would have denoted deficiency of womanhood if she had not instinctively
known what an argument lies in propinquity. Nothing else would serve her,
she knew, if this failed. It was wrong to hope in what was of the nature
of strategy, she said to herself; yet that sort of hope she could not extinguish.
His last representation had now been made, and it was, as she said, a new
view. She had truly never thought so far as that, and his lucid picture
of possible offspring who would scorn her was one that brought deadly conviction
to an honest heart which was humanitarian to its centre. Sheer experience
had already taught her that, in some circumstances, there was one thing
better than to lead a good life, and that was to be saved from leading
any life whatever. Like all who have been previsioned by suffering, she
could, in the words of M. Sully-Prudhomme, hear a penal sentence in the
fiat, `You shall be born,' particularly if addressed to potential issue
of hers.
Yet such is the vulpine slyness of Dame Nature, that, till now, Tess
had been hoodwinked by her love for Clare into forgetting it might result
in vitalizations that would inflict upon others what she had bewailed as
a misfortune to herself.
She therefore could not withstand his argument. But with the self-combating
proclivity of the super-sensitive, an answer thereto arose in Clare's own
mind, and he almost feared it. It was based on her exceptional physical
nature; and she might have used it promisingly. She might have added besides:
`On an Australian upland or Texan plain, who is to know or care about my
misfortunes, or to reproach me or you?' Yet, like the majority of women,
she accepted the momentary presentment as if it were the inevitable. And
she may have been right. The intuitive heart of woman knoweth not only
its own bitterness, but its husband's, and even if these assumed reproaches
were not likely to be addressed to him or to his by strangers, they might
have reached his ears from his own fastidious brain.
It was the third day of the estrangement. Some might risk the odd paradox
that with more animalism he would have been the nobler man. We do not say
it. Yet Clare's love was doubtless ethereal to a fault, imaginative to
impracticability. With these natures, corporeal presence is sometimes less
appealing than corporeal absence; the latter creating an ideal presence
that conveniently drops the defects of the real. She found that her personality
did not plead her cause so forcibly as she had anticipated. The figurative
phrase was true: she was another woman than the one who had excited his
desire.
`I have thought over what you say,' she remarked to him, moving her
forefinger over the tablecloth, her other hand, which bore the ring that
mocked them both, supporting her forehead. `It is quite true all of it;
it must be. You must go away from me.'
`But what can you do?'
`I can go home.'
Clare had not thought of that.
`Are you sure?' he inquired.
`Quite sure. We ought to part, and we may as well get it past and done.
You once said that I was apt to win men against their better judgment;
and if I am constantly before your eyes I may cause you to change your
plans in opposition to your reason and wish; and afterwards your repentance
and my sorrow will be terrible.'
`And you would like to go home?' he asked.
`I want to leave you, and go home.'
`Then it shall be so.'
Though she did not look up at him, she started. There was a difference
between the proposition and the covenant, which she had felt only too quickly.
`I feared it would come to this,' she murmured, her countenance meekly
fixed. `I don't complain, Angel. I - I think it best. What you said has
quite convinced me. Yes, though nobody else should reproach me if we should
stay together, yet somewhen, years hence, you might get angry with me for
any ordinary matter, and knowing what you do of my bygones you yourself
might be tempted to say words, and they might be overheard, perhaps by
my own children. O, what only hurts me now would torture and kill me then!
I will go - to-morrow.'
`And I shall not stay here. Though I didn't like to initiate it, I have
seen that it was advisable we should part - at least for a while, till
I can better see the shape that things have taken, and can write to you.'
Tess stole a glance at her husband. He was pale, even tremulous; but,
as before, she was appalled by the determination revealed in the depths
of this gentle being she had married - the will to subdue the grosser to
the subtler emotion, the substance to the conception, the flesh to the
spirit. Propensities, tendencies, habits, were as dead leaves upon the
tyrannous wind of his imaginative ascendency.
He may have observed her look, for he explained--
`I think of people more kindly when I am away from them'; adding cynically,
`God knows; perhaps we shall shake down together some day, for weariness;
thousands have done it!'
That day he began to pack up, and she went upstairs and began to pack
also. Both knew that it was in their two minds that they might part the
next morning for ever, despite the gloss of assuaging conjectures thrown
over their proceeding because they were of the sort to whom any parting
which has an air of finality is a torture. He knew, and she knew, that,
though the fascination which each had exercised over the other - on her
part independently of accomplishments - would probably in the first days
of their separation be even more potent than ever, time must attenuate
that effect; the practical arguments against accepting her as a housemate
might pronounce themselves more strongly in the boreal light of a remoter
view. Moreover, when two people are once parted have abandoned a common
domicile and a common environment - new growths insensibly bud upward to
fill each vacated place; unforeseen accidents hinder intentions, and old
plans are forgotten.
Chapter 37
Midnight came and passed silently, for there was nothing to announce it
in the Valley of the Froom.
Not long after one o'clock there was a slight creak in the darkened
farmhouse once the mansion of the d'Urbervilles. Tess, who used the upper
chamber, heard it and awoke. It had come from the corner step of the staircase,
which, as usual, was loosely nailed. She saw the door of her bedroom open,
and the figure of her husband crossed the stream of moonlight with a curiously
careful tread. He was in his shirt and trousers only, and her first flush
of `joy died when she perceived that his eyes were fixed in an unnatural
stare on vacancy. When he reached the middle of the room he stood still
and murmured, in tones of indescribable sadness--
`Dead! dead! dead!'
Under the influence of any strongly-disturbing force Clare would occasionally
walk in his sleep, and even perform strange feats, such as he had done
on the night of their return from market just before their marriage, when
he re-enacted in his bedroom his combat with the man who had insulted her.
Tess saw that continued mental distress had wrought him into that somnambulistic
state now.
Her loyal confidence in him lay so deep down in her heart that, awake
or asleep, he inspired her with no sort of personal fear. If he had entered
with a pistol in his hand he would scarcely have disturbed her trust in
his protectiveness.
Clare came close, and bent over her. `Dead, dead, dead!' he murmured.
After fixedly regarding her for some moments with the same gaze of unmeasurable
woe he bent lower, enclosed her in his arms, and rolled her in the sheet
as in a shroud. Then lifting her from the bed with as much respect as one
would show to a dead body, he carried her across the room, murmuring--
`My poor, poor Tess - my dearest, darling Tess! So sweet, so good, so
true!'
The words of endearment, withheld so severely in his waking hours, were
inexpressibly sweet to her forlorn and hungry heart. If it had been to
save her weary life she would not, by moving or struggling, have put an
end to the position she found herself in. Thus she lay in absolute stillness,
scarcely venturing to breathe, and, wondering what he was going to do with
her, suffered herself to be borne out upon the landing.
`My wife - dead, dead!' he said.
He paused in his labours for a moment to lean with her against the banister.
Was he going to throw her down? Self-solicitude was near extinction in
her, and in the knowledge that he had planned to depart on the morrow,
possibly for always, she lay in his arms in this precarious position with
a sense rather of luxury than of terror. If they could only fall together,
and both be dashed to pieces, how fit, how desirable.
However, he did not let her fall, but took advantage of the support
of the handrail to imprint a kiss upon her lips - lips in the daytime scorned.
Then he clasped her with a renewed firmness of hold, and descended the
staircase. The creak of the loose stair did not awaken him, and they reached
the ground-floor safely. Freeing one of his hands from his grasp of her
for a moment, he slid back the door-bar and passed out, slightly striking
his stockinged toe against the edge of the door. But this he seemed not
to mind, and, having room for extension in the open air, he lifted her
against his shoulder, so that he could carry her with ease, the absence
of clothes taking much from his burden. Thus he bore her off the premises
in the direction of the river a few yards distant.
His ultimate intention, if he had any, she had not yet divined; and
she found herself conjecturing on the matter as a third person might have
done. So easefully had she delivered her whole being up to him that it
pleased her to think he was regarding her as his absolute possession, to
dispose of as he should choose. It was consoling, under the hovering terror
of to-morrow's separation, to feel that he really recognized her now as
his wife Tess, and did not cast her off, even if in that recognition he
went so far as to arrogate to himself the right of harming her.
Ah! now she knew what he was dreaming of - that Sunday morning when
he had borne her along through the water with the other dairymaids, who
had loved him nearly as much as she, if that were possible, which Tess
could hardly admit. Clare did not cross the bridge with her, but proceeding
several paces on the same side towards the adjoining mill, at length stood
still on the brink of the river.
Its waters, in creeping down these miles of meadow-land, frequently
divided, serpentining in purposeless curves, looping themselves around
little islands that had no name, returning and re-embodying themselves
as a broad main stream further on. Opposite the spot to which he had brought
her was such a general confluence, and the river was proportionately voluminous
and deep. Across it was a narrow foot-bridge; but now the autumn flood
had washed the handrail away, leaving the bare plank only, which, lying
a few inches above the speeding current, formed a giddy pathway for even
steady heads; and Tess had noticed from the window of the house in the
daytime young men walking across upon it as a feat in balancing. Her husband
had possibly observed the same performance; anyhow, he now mounted the
plank, and, sliding one foot forward, advanced along it.
Was he going to drown her? Probably he was. The spot was lonely, the
river deep and wide enough to make such a purpose easy of accomplishment.
He might drown her if he would; It would be better than parting to-morrow
to lead severed lives.
The swift stream raced and gyrated under them, tossing, distorting,
and splitting the moon's reflected face. Spots of froth travelled past,
and intercepted weeds waved behind the piles. If they could both fall together
into the current now, their arms would be so tightly clasped together that
they could not be saved; they would go out of the world almost painlessly,
and there would be no more reproach to her, or to him for marrying her.
His last half-hour with her would have been a loving one, while if they
lived till he awoke his daytime aversion would return, and this hour would
remain to be contemplated only as a transient dream.
The impulse stirred in her, yet she dared not indulge it, to make a
movement that would have precipitated them both into the gulf. How she
valued her own life had been proved; but his - she had no right to tamper
with it. He reached the other side with her in safety.
Here they were within a plantation which formed the Abbey grounds, and
taking a new hold of her he went onward a few steps till they reached the
ruined choir of the Abbey-church. Against the north wall was the empty
stone coffin of an abbot, in which every tourist with a turn for grim humour
was accustomed to stretch himself. In this Clare carefully laid Tess. Having
kissed her lips a second time he breathed deeply, as if a greatly desired
end were attained. Clare then lay down on the ground alongside, when he
immediately fell into the deep dead slumber of exhaustion, and remained
motionless as a log. The spurt of mental excitement which had produced
the effort was now over.
Tess sat up in the coffin. The night, though dry and mild for the season,
was more than sufficiently cold to make it dangerous for him to remain
here long, in his half-clothed state. If he were left to himself he would
in all probability stay there till the morning, and be chilled to certain
death. She had heard of such deaths after sleep-walking. But how could
she dare to awaken him, and let him know what he had been doing, when it
would mortify him to discover his folly in respect of her? Tess, however,
stepping out of her stone confine, shook him slightly, but was unable to
arouse him without being violent. It was indispensable to do something,
for she was beginning to shiver, the sheet being but a poor protection.
Her excitement had in a measure kept her warm during the few minutes' adventure;
but that beatific interval was over.
It suddenly occurred to her to try persuasion; and accordingly she whispered
in his ear, with as much firmness and decision as she could summon--
`Let us walk on, darling,' at the same time taking him suggestively
by the arm. To her relief, he unresistingly acquiesced; her words had apparently
thrown him back into his dream, which thenceforward seemed to enter on
a new phase, wherein he fancied she had risen as a spirit, and was leading
him to Heaven. Thus she conducted him by the arm to the stone bridge in
front of their residence, crossing which they stood at the manor-house
door. Tess's feet were quite bare, and the stones hurt her, and chilled
her to the bone; but Clare was in his woollen stockings, and appeared to
feel no discomfort.
There was no further difficulty. She induced him to lie down on his
own sofa bed, and covered him up warmly, lighting a temporary fire of wood,
to dry any dampness out of him. The noise of these attentions she thought
might awaken him, and secretly wished that they might. But the exhaustion
of his mind and body was such that he remained undisturbed.
As soon as they met the next morning Tess divined that Angel knew little
or nothing of how far she had been concerned in the night's excursion,
though, as regarded himself he may have been aware that he had not lain
still. In truth, he had awakened that morning from a sleep deep as annihilation;
and during those first few moments in which the brain, like a Samson shaking
himself, is trying its strength, he had some dim notion of an unusual nocturnal
proceeding. But the realities of his situation soon displaced conjecture
on the other subject.
He waited in expectancy to discern some mental pointing; he knew that
if any intention of his, concluded over-night, did not vanish in the light
of morning, it stood on a basis approximating to one of pure reason, even
if initiated by impulse of feeling; that it was so far, therefore, to be
trusted. He thus beheld in the pale morning light the resolve to separate
from her; not as a hot and indignant instinct, but denuded of the passionateness
which had made it scorch and burn; standing in its bones; nothing but a
skeleton, but none the less there. Clare no longer hesitated.
At breakfast, and while they were packing the few remaining articles,
he showed his weariness from the night's efforts so unmistakably that Tess
was on the point of revealing all that had happened; but the reflection
that it would anger him, grieve him, stultify him, to know that he had
instinctively manifested a fondness for her of which his common-sense did
not approve; that his inclination had compromised his dignity when reason
slept, again deterred her. It was too much like laughing at a man when
sober for his erratic deeds during intoxication.
It just crossed her mind, too, that he might have a faint recollection
of his tender vagary, and was disinclined to allude to it from a conviction
that she would take amatory advantage of the opportunity it gave her of
appealing to him anew not to go.
He had ordered by letter a vehicle from the nearest town, and soon after
breakfast it arrived. She saw in it the beginning of the end - the temporary
end, at least, for the revelation of his tenderness by the incident of
the night raised dreams of a possible future with him. The luggage was
put on the top, and the man drove them off, the miller and the old waiting-woman
expressing some surprise at their precipitate departure, which Clare attributed
to his discovery that the mill-work was not of the modern kind which he
wished to investigate, a statement that was true so far as it went. Beyond
this there was nothing in the manner of their leaving to suggest a fiasco,
or that they were not going together to visit friends.
Their route lay near the dairy from which they had started with such
solemn joy in each other a few days back, and, as Clare wished to wind
up his business with Mr Crick, Tess could hardly avoid paying Mrs Crick
a call at the same time, unless she would excite suspicion of their unhappy
state.
To make the call as unobtrusive as possible they left the carriage by
the wicket leading down from the high road to the dairy-house, and descended
the track on foot, side by side. The withy-bed had been cut, and they could
see over the stumps the spot to which Clare had followed her when he pressed
her to be his wife; to the left the enclosure in which she had been fascinated
by his harp; and far away behind the cowstalls the mead which had been
the scene of their first embrace. The gold of the summer picture was now
gray, the colours mean, the rich soil mud, and the river cold.
Over the barton-gate the dairyman saw them, and came forward, throwing
into his face the kind of jocularity deemed appropriate in Talbothays and
its vicinity on the re-appearance of the newly-married. Then Mrs Crick
emerged from the house, and several others of their old acquaintance, though
Marian and Retty did not seem to be there.
Tess valiantly bore their sly attacks and friendly humours, which affected
her far otherwise than they supposed. In the tacit agreement of husband
and wife to keep their estrangement a secret they behaved as would have
been ordinary. And then, although she would rather there had been no word
spoken on the subject, Tess had to hear in detail the story of Marian and
Retty.
The latter had gone home to her father's, and Marian had left to look
for employment elsewhere. They feared she would come to no good.
To dissipate the sadness of this recital Tess went and bade all her
favourite cows good-bye, touching each of them with her hand, and as she
and Clare stood side by side at leaving, as if united body and soul, there
would have been something peculiarly sorry in their aspect to one who should
have seen it truly; two limbs of one life, as they outwardly were, his
arm touching hers, her skirts touching him, facing one way, as against
all the dairy facing the other, speaking in their adieux as `we', and yet
sundered like the poles. Perhaps something unusually stiff and embarrassed
in their attitude, some awkwardness in acting up to their profession of
unity, different from the natural shyness of young couples, may have been
apparent, for when they were gone Mrs Crick said to her husband--
`How onnatural the brightness of her eyes did seem, and how they stood
like waxen images and talked as if they were in a dream! Didn't it strike
'ee that 'twas so? Tess had always sommat strange in her, and she's not
now quite like the proud young bride of a well-be-doing man.'
They re-entered the vehicle, and were driven along the roads towards
Weatherbury and Stagfoot Lane, till they reached the Lane inn, where Clare
dismissed the fly and man. They rested here a while, and entering the Vale
were next driven onward towards her home by a stranger who did not know
their relations. At a midway point, when Nuttlebury had been passed, and
where there were cross-roads, Clare stopped the conveyance and said to
Tess that if she meant to return to her mother's house it was here that
he would leave her. As they could not talk with freedom in the driver's
presence he asked her to accompany him for a few steps on foot along one
of the branch roads; she assented, and directing the man to wait a few
minutes they strolled away.
`Now, let us understand each other,' he said gently. `There is no anger
between us, though there is that which I cannot endure at present. I will
try to bring myself to endure it. I will let you know where I go to as
soon as I know myself. And if I can bring myself to bear it - if it is
desirable, possible - I will come to you. But until I come to you it will
be better that you should not try to come to me.'
The severity of the decree seemed deadly to Tess; she saw his view of
her clearly enough; he could regard her in no other light than that of
one who had practised gross deceit upon him. Yet could a woman who had
done even what she had done deserve all this? But she could contest the
point with him no further. She simply repeated after him his own words.
`Until you come to me I must not try to come to you?'
`Just so.'
`May I write to you?'
`O yes - if you are ill, or want anything at all. I hope that will not
be the case; so that it may happen that I write first to you.'
`I agree to the conditions, Angel; because you know best what my punishment
ought to be; only - only - don't make it more than I can bear!'
That was all she said on the matter. If Tess had been artful, had she
made a scene, fainted, wept hysterically, in that lonely lane, notwithstanding
the fury of fastidiousness with which he was possessed, he would probably
not have withstood her. But her mood of long-suffering made his way easy
for him, and she herself was his best advocate. Pride, too, entered into
her submission which perhaps was a symptom of that reckless acquiescence
in chance too apparent in the whole d'Urberville family - and the many
effective chords which she could have stirred by an appeal were left untouched.
The remainder of their discourse was on practical matters only. He now
handed her a packet containing a fairly good sum of money, which he had
obtained from his bankers for the purpose. The brilliants, the interest
in which seemed to be Tess's for her life only (if he understood the wording
of the will), he advised her to let him send to a bank for safety; and
to this she readily agreed.
These things arranged he walked with Tess back to the carriage, and
handed her in. The coachman was paid and told where to drive her. Taking
next his own bag and umbrella - the sole articles he had brought with him
hitherwards - he bade her good-bye; and they parted there and then.
The fly moved creepingly up a hill, and Clare watched it go with an
unpremeditated hope that Tess would look out of the window for one moment.
But that she never thought of doing, would not have ventured to do, lying
in a half-dead faint inside. Thus he beheld her recede, and in the anguish
of his heart quoted a line from a poet, with peculiar emendations of his
own--
God's not in his heaven: all's wrong with the world!
When Tess had passed over the crest of the hill he turned to go his own
way, and hardly knew that he loved her still.
Chapter 38
As she drove on through Blackmoor Vale, and the landscape of her youth
began to open around her, Tess aroused herself from her stupor. Her first
thought was how would she be able to face her parents?
She reached a turnpike-gate which stood upon the highway to the village.
It was thrown open by a stranger, not by the old man who had kept it for
many years, and to whom she had been known; he had probably left on New
Year's Day, the date when such changes were made. Having received no intelligence
lately from her home, she asked the turnpike-keeper for news.
`Oh - nothing, miss,' he answered. Marlott is Marlott still. Folks have
died and that. John Durbeyfield, too, hev had a daughter married this week
to a gentleman-farmer; not from John's own house, you know; they was married
elsewhere; the gentleman being of that high standing that John's own folk
was not considered well-be-doing enough to have any part in it, the bridegroom
seeming not to know how't have been discovered that John is a old and ancient
nobleman himself by blood, with family skillentons in their own vaults
to this day, but done out of his property in the time o' the Romans. However,
Sir John, as we call 'n now, kept up the wedding-day as well as he could,
and stood treat to everybody in the parish; and John's wife sung songs
at the Pure Drop till past eleven o'clock.'
Hearing this, Tess felt so sick at heart that she could not decide to
go home publicly in the fly with her luggage and belongings. She asked
the turnpike-keeper if she might deposit her things at his house for a
while, and, on his offering no objection, she dismissed her carriage, and
went on to the village alone by a back lane.
At sight of her father's chimney she asked herself how she could possibly
enter the house? Inside that cottage her relations were calmly supposing
her far away on a wedding-tour with a comparatively rich man, who was to
conduct her to bouncing prosperity; while here she was, friendless, creeping
up to the old door quite by herself, with no better place to go to in the
world.
She did not reach the house unobserved. just by the garden hedge she
was met by a girl who knew her - one of the two or three with whom she
had been intimate at school. After making a few inquiries as to how Tess
came there, her friend, unheeding her tragic look, interrupted with--
`But where's thy gentleman, Tess?'
Tess hastily explained that he had been called away on business, and,
leaving her interlocutor, clambered over the garden-hedge, and thus made
her way to the house.
As she went up the garden-path she heard her mother singing by the back
door, coming in sight of which she perceived Mrs Durbeyfield on the doorstep
in the act of wringing a sheet. Having performed this without observing
Tess, she went indoors, and her daughter followed her.
The washing-tub stood in the same old place on the same old quarter-hogshead,
and her mother, having thrown the sheet aside, was about to plunge her
arms in anew.
`Why - Tess! - my chil' - I thought you was married! - married really
and truly this time - we sent the cider--'
`Yes, mother; so I am.'
`Going to be?'
`No - I am married.'
`Married! Then where's thy husband?'
`Oh, he's gone away for a time.'
`Gone away! When was you married, then? The day you said?'
`Yes, Tuesday, mother.'
`And now 'tis on'y Saturday, and he gone away?'
`Yes; he's gone.'
`What's the meaning o' that? `Nation seize such husbands as you seem
to get, say I!'
`Mother!' Tess went across to Joan Durbeyfield, laid her face upon the
matron's bosom, and burst into sobs. `I don't know how to tell 'ee, mother!
You said to me, and wrote to me, that I was not to tell him. But I did
tell him - I couldn't help it - and he went away!'
`O you little fool - you little fool!' burst out Mrs Durbeyfield, splashing
Tess and herself in her agitation. `My good God! that ever I should ha'
lived to say it, but I say it again, you little fool!'
Tess was convulsed with weeping, the tension of so many days having
relaxed at last.
`I know it - I know - I know!' she gasped through her sobs. `But, O
my mother, I could not help it! He was so good - and I felt the wickedness
of trying to blind him as to what had happened! If - if - it were to be
done again - I should do the same. I could not - I dared not - so sin -
against him!'
`But you sinned enough to marry him first!'
`Yes, yes; that's where my misery do lie! But I thought he could get
rid o' me by law if he were determined not to overlook it. And O, if you
knew - if you could only half know how I loved him how anxious I was to
have him - and how wrung I was between caring so much for him and my wish
to be fair to him!'
Tess was so shaken that she could get no further, and sank a helpless
thing into a chair.
`Well, well; what's done can't be undone! I'm sure I don't know why
children o' my bringing forth should all be bigger simpletons than other
people's - not to know better than to blab such a thing as that, when he
couldn't ha' found it out till too late!' Here Mrs Durbeyfield began shedding
tears on her own account as a mother to be pitied. `What your father will
say I don't know,' she continued: `for he's been talking about the wedding
up at Roliver's and The Pure Drop every day since, and about his family
getting back to their rightful position through you - poor silly man! -
and now you've made this mess of it! The Lord-a-Lord!'
As if to bring matters to a focus, Tess's father was heard approaching
at that moment. He did not however, enter immediately, and Mrs Durbeyfield
said that she would break the bad news to him herself, Tess keeping out
of sight for the present. After her first burst of disappointment Joan
began to take the mishap as she had taken Tess's original trouble, as she
would have taken a wet holiday or failure in the potato-crop; as a thing
which had come upon them irrespective of desert or folly; a chance external
impingement to be borne with; not a lesson.
Tess retreated upstairs, and beheld casually that the beds had been
shifted, and new arrangements made. Her old bed had been adapted for two
younger children. There was no place here for her now.
The room below being unceiled she could hear most of what went on there.
Presently her father entered, apparently carrying a live hen. He was a
foot-haggler now, having been obliged to sell his second horse, and he
travelled with his basket on his arm. The hen had been carried about this
morning as it was often carried, to show people that he was in his work,
though it had lain, with its legs tied, under the table at Rolliver's for
more than an hour.
`We've just had up a story about--' Durbeyfield began, and thereupon
related in detail to his wife a discussion which had arisen at the inn
about the clergy, originated by the fact of his daughter having married
into a clerical family. `They was formerly styled "sir", like my own ancestry,'
he said, `though nowadays their true style, strictly speaking, is "clerk"
only.' As Tess had wished that no great publicity should be given to the
event, he had mentioned no particulars. He hoped she would remove that
prohibition soon. He proposed that the couple should take Tess's own name,
d'Urberville, as uncorrupted. It was better than her husband's. He asked
if any letter had come from her that day.
Then Mrs Durbeyfield informed him that no letter had come, but Tess
unfortunately had come herself.
When at length the collapse was explained to him a sullen mortification,
not usual with Durbeyfield, overpowered the influence of the cheering glass.
Yet the intrinsic quality of the event moved his touchy sensitiveness less
than its conjectured effect upon the minds of others.
`To think, now, that this was to be the end o't!' said Sir John. `And
I with a family vault under that there church of Kingsbere as big as Squire
Jollard's ale-cellar, and my folk lying there in sixes and sevens, as genuine
county bones and marrow as any recorded in history. And now to be sure
what they fellers at Rolliver's and The Pure Drop will say to me! How they'll
squint and glane, and say, "This is yer mighty match is it; this is yer
getting back to the true level of yer forefathers in King Norman's time!"
I feel this is too much, Joan; I shall put an end to myself, title and
all - I can bear it no longer!... . But she can make him keep her if he's
married her?'
`Why, yes. But she won't think o' doing that.'
`D'ye think he really have married her? - or is it like the first--'
Poor Tess, who had heard as far as this, could not bear to hear more.
The perception that her word could be doubted even here, in her own parental
house, set her mind against the spot as nothing else could have done. How
unexpected were the attacks of destiny! And if her father doubted her a
little, would not neighbours and acquaintance doubt her much? O, she could
not live long at home!
A few days, accordingly, were all that she allowed herself here, at
the end of which time she received a short note from Clare, informing her
that he had gone to the North of England to look at a farm. In her craving
for the lustre of her true position as his wife, and to hide from her parents
the vast extent of the division between them, she made use of this letter
as her reason for again departing, leaving them under the impression that
she was setting out to join him. Still further to screen her husband from
any imputation of unkindness to her, she took twenty-five of the fifty
pounds Clare had given her, and handed the sum over to her mother, as if
the wife of a man like Angel Clare could well afford it, saying that it
was a slight return for the trouble and humiliation she had brought upon
them in years past. With this assertion of her dignity she bade them farewell;
and after that there were lively doings in the Durbeyfield household for
some time on the strength of Tess's bounty, her mother saying, and, indeed,
believing, that the rupture which had arisen between the young husband
and wife had adjusted itself under their strong feeling that they could
not live apart from each other.
Chapter 39
It was three weeks after the marriage that Clare found himself descending
the hill which led to the well-known parsonage of his father. With his
downward course the tower of the church rose into the evening sky in a
manner of inquiry as to why he had come; and no living person in the twilighted
town seemed to notice him, still less expect him. He was arriving like
a ghost, and the sound of his own footsteps was almost an encumbrance to
be got rid of.
The picture of life had changed for him. Before this time he had known
it but speculatively; now he thought he knew it as a practical man; though
perhaps he did not, even yet. Nevertheless humanity stood before him no
longer in the pensive sweetness of Italian art, but in the staring and
ghastly attitudes of a Wiertz Museum, and with the leer of a study by Van
Beers.
His conduct during these first weeks had been desultory beyond description.
After mechanically attempting to pursue his agricultural plans as though
nothing unusual had happened, in the manner recommended by the great and
wise men of all ages, he concluded that very few of those great and wise
men had ever gone so far outside themselves as to test the feasibility
of their counsel. `This is the chief thing: be not perturbed,' said the
Pagan moralist. That was just Clare's own opinion. But he was perturbed.
`Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid,' sad the Nazarene.
Clare chimed in cordially; but his heart was troubled all the same. How
he would have liked to confront those two great thinkers, and earnestly
appeal to them as fellow-man to fellow-men, and ask them to tell him their
method!
His mood transmuted itself into a dogged indifference till at length
he fancied he was looking on his own existence with the passive interest
of an outsider.
He was embittered by the conviction that all this desolation had been
brought about by the accident of her being a d'Urberville. When he found
that Tess came of that exhausted ancient line, and was not of the new tribes
from below, as he had fondly dreamed, why had he not stoically abandoned
her, in fidelity to his principles? This was what he had got by apostasy,
and his punishment was deserved.
Then he became weary and anxious, and his anxiety increased. He wondered
if he had treated her unfairly. He ate without knowing that he ate, and
drank without tasting. As the hours dropped past, as the motive of each
act in the long series of bygone days presented itself to his view, he
perceived how intimately the notion of having Tess as a dear possession
was mixed up with all his schemes and words and ways.
In going hither and thither he observed in the outskirts of a small
town a red-and-blue placard setting forth the great advantages of the Empire
of Brazil as a field for the emigrating agriculturist. Land was offered
there on exceptionally advantageous terms. Brazil somewhat attracted him
as a new idea. Tess could eventually loin him there, and perhaps in that
country of contrasting scenes and notions and habits the conventions would
not be so operative which made life with her seem impracticable to him
here. In brief he was strongly inclined to try Brazil, especially as the
season for going thither was just at hand.
With this view he was returning to Emminster to disclose his plan to
his parents, and to make the best explanation he could make of arriving
without Tess, short of revealing what had actually separated them. As he
reached the door the new moon shone upon his face, just as the old one
had done in the small hours of that morning when he had carried his wife
in his arms across the river to the graveyard of the monks; but his face
was thinner now.
Clare had given his parents no warning of his visit, and his arrival
stirred the atmosphere of the Vicarage as the dive of the kingfisher stirs
a quiet pool. His father and mother were both in the drawing-room, but
neither of his brothers was now at home. Angel entered, and closed the
door quietly behind him.
`But - where's your wife, dear Angel?' cried his mother. `How you surprise
us!'
`She is at her mother's - temporarily. I have come home rather in a
hurry because I've decided to go to Brazil.'
`Brazil! Why they are all Roman Catholics there surely!'
`Are they? I hadn't thought of that.'
But even the novelty and painfulness of his going to a Papistical land
could not displace for long Mr and Mrs Clare's natural interest in their
son's marriage.
`We had your brief note three weeks ago announcing that it had taken
place,' said Mrs Clare, `and your father sent your god-mother's gift to
her, as you know. Of course it was best that none of us should be present,
especially as you preferred to marry her from the dairy, and not at her
home, wherever that may be. It would have embarrassed you, and given us
no pleasure. Your brothers felt that very strongly. Now it is done we do
not complain, particularly if she suits you for the business you have chosen
to follow instead of the ministry of the Gospel... . Yet I wish I could
have seen her first, Angel, or have known a little more about her. We sent
her no present of our own, not knowing what would best give her pleasure,
but you must suppose it only delayed. Angel, there is no irritation in
my mind or your father's against you for this marriage; but we have thought
it much better to reserve our liking for your wife till we could see her.
And now you have not brought her. It seems strange. What has happened?'
He replied that it had been thought best by them that she should go
to her parents' home for the present, whilst he came there.
`I don't mind telling you, dear mother,' he said, `that I always meant
to keep her away from this house till I should feel she could come with
credit to you. But this idea of Brazil is quite a recent one. If I do go
it will be unadvisable for me to take her on this my first journey. She
will remain at her mother's till I come back.'
`And I shall not see her before you start?'
He was afraid they would not. His original plan had been, as he had
said, to refrain from bringing her there for some little while not to wound
their prejudices - feelings - in any way; and for other reasons he had
adhered to it. He would have to visit home in the course of a year, if
he went out at once; and it would be possible for them to see her before
he started a second time with her.
A hastily prepared supper was brought in, and Clare made further exposition
of his plans. His mother's disappointment at not seeing the bride still
remained with her. Clare's late enthusiasm for Tess had infected her through
her maternal sympathies, till she had almost fancied that a good thing
could come out of Nazareth - a charming woman out of Talbothays Dairy.
She watched her son as he ate.
`Cannot you describe her? I am sure she is very pretty, Angel.'
`Of that there can be no question!' he said, with a zest which covered
its bitterness.
`And that she is pure and virtuous goes without question?'
`Pure and virtuous, of course, she is.'
`I can see her quite distinctly. You said the other day that she was
fine in figure; roundly built; had deep red lips like Cupid's bow; dark
eyelashes and brows, an immense rope of hair like a ship's cable; and large
eyes violety-bluey-blackish.'
`I did, mother.'
`I quite see her. And living in such seclusion she naturally had scarce
ever seen any young man from the world without till she saw you.
`Scarcely.'
`You were her first love?'
`Of course.'
`There are worse wives than these simple, rosy-mouthed, robust girls
of the farm. Certainly I could have wished - well, since my son is to be
an agriculturist, it is perhaps but proper that his wife should have been
accustomed to an outdoor life.'
His father was less inquisitive; but when the time came for the chapter
from the Bible which was always read before evening prayers, the Vicar
observed to Mrs Clare--
`I think, since Angel has come, that it will be more appropriate to
read the thirty-first of Proverbs than the chapter which we should have
had in the usual course of our reading?'
`Yes, certainly,' said Mrs Clare. `The words of King Lemuel' (she could
cite chapter and verse as well as her husband).'My dear son, your father
has decided to read us the chapter in Proverbs in praise of a virtuous
wife. We shall not need to be reminded to apply the words to the absent
one. May Heaven shield her in all her ways!'
A lump rose in Clare's throat. The portable lectern was taken out from
the corner and set in the middle of the fireplace, the two old servants
came in, and Angel's father began to read at the tenth verse of the aforesaid
chapter--
"`Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies.
She riseth while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her household. She
girdeth her loins with strength and strengtheneth her arms. She perceiveth
that her merchandise is good; her candle goeth not out by night. She looketh
well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness.
Her children arise up and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth
her. Many daughters have done virtuously, but thou excellest them all."'
When prayers were over, his mother said--
`I could not help thinking how very aptly that chapter your dear father
read applied, in some of its particulars, to the woman you have chosen.
The perfect woman, you see, was a working woman; not an idler; not a fine
lady; but one who used her hands and her head and her heart for the good
of others. "Her children arise up and call her blessed; her husband also,
and he praiseth her. Many daughters have done virtuously, but she excelleth
them all." Well, I wish I could have seen her, Angel. Since she is pure
and chaste she would have been refined enough for me.'
Clare could bear this no longer. His eyes were full of tears, which
seemed like drops of molten lead. He bade a quick goodnight to these sincere
and simple souls whom he loved so well; who knew neither the world, the
flesh, nor the devil in their own hearts; only as something vague and external
to themselves. He went to his own chamber.
His mother followed him, and tapped at his door. Clare opened it to
discover her standing without, with anxious eyes.
`Angel,' she asked, `is there something wrong that you go away so soon?
I am quite sure you are not yourself.'
`I am not, quite, mother,' said he.
`About her? Now, my son, I know it is that - I know it is about her!
Have you quarrelled in these three weeks?'
`We have not exactly quarrelled,' he said. `But we have had a difference------'
`Angel - is she a young woman whose history will bear investigation?'
With a mother's instinct Mrs Clare had put her finger on the kind of
trouble that would cause such a disquiet as seemed to agitate her son.
`She is spotless!' he replied; and felt that if it had sent him to eternal
hell there and then he would have told that lie.
`Then never mind the rest. After all, there are few purer things in
nature than an unsullied country maid. Any crudeness of which may offend
your more educated sense at first, will, I am sure, disappear under the
influence of your companionship and tuition.'
Such terrible sarcasm of blind magnanimity brought home to Clare the
secondary perception that he had utterly wrecked his career by this marriage,
which had not been among his early thoughts after the disclosure. True,
on his own account he cared very little about his career; but he had wished
to make it at least a respectable one on account of his parents and brothers.
And now as he looked into the candle its flame dumbly expressed to him
that it was made to shine on sensible people, and that it abhorred lighting
the face of a dupe and a failure.
When his agitation had cooled he would be at moments incensed with his
poor wife for causing a situation in which he was obliged to practise deception
on his parents. He almost talked to her in his anger, as if she had been
in the room. And then her cooing voice, plaintive in expostulation, disturbed
the darkness, the velvet touch of her lips passed over his brow, and he
could distinguish in the air the warmth of her breath.
This night the woman of his belittling deprecations was thinking how
great and good her husband was. But over them both there hung a deeper
shade than the shade which Angel Clare perceived, namely, the shade of
his own limitations. With all his attempted independence of judgment this
advanced and well meaning young man, a sample product of the last five-and-twenty
years, was yet the slave to custom and conventionality when surprised back
into his early teachings. No prophet had told him, and he was not prophet
enough to tell himself, that essentially this young wife of his was as
deserving of the praise of King Lemuel as any other woman endowed with
the same dislike of evil, her moral value having to be reckoned not by
achievement but by tendency. Moreover, the figure near at hand suffers
on such occasions, because it shows up its sorriness without shade; while
vague figures afar off are honoured, in that their distance makes artistic
virtues of their stains. In considering what Tess was not, he overlooked
what she was, and forgot that the defective can be more than the entire.
Chapter 40
At breakfast Brazil was the topic, and all endeavoured to take a hopeful
view of Clare's proposed experiment with that country's soil, notwithstanding
the discouraging reports of some farm labourers who had emigrated thither
and returned home within the twelve months. After breakfast Clare went
into the little town to wind up such trifling matters as he was concerned
with there, and to get from the local bank all the money he possessed.
On his way back he encountered Miss Mercy Chant by the church, from whose
walls she seemed to be a sort of emanation. She was carrying an armful
of Bibles for her class, and such was her view of life that events which
produced heartache in others wrought beatific smiles upon her - an enviable
result, although, in the opinion of Angel, it was obtained by a curiously
unnatural sacrifice of humanity to mysticism.
She had learnt that he was about to leave England, and observed what
an excellent and promising scheme it seemed to be.
`Yes; it is a likely scheme enough in a commercial sense, no doubt,'
he replied. `But, my dear Mercy, it snaps the continuity of existence.
Perhaps a cloister would be preferable.'
`A cloister! O, Angel Clare!'
`Well?'
`Why, you wicked man, a cloister implies a monk, and a monk Roman Catholicism.'
`And Roman Catholicism sin, and sin damnation. Thou art in a parlous
state, Angel Clare.'
`I glory in my Protestantism!' she said severely.
Then Clare, thrown by sheer misery into one of the demoniacal moods
in which a man does despite to his true principles, called her close to
him, and fiendishly whispered in her ear the most heterodox ideas he could
think of. His momentary laughter at the horror which appeared on her fair
face ceased when it merged in pain and anxiety for his welfare.
`Dear Mercy,'he said, `you must forgive me. I think I am going crazy!'
She thought that he was; and thus the interview ended, and Clare re-entered
the Vicarage. With the local banker he deposited the jewels till happier
days should arise. He also paid into the bank thirty pounds - to be sent
to Tess in a few months, as she might require; and wrote to her at her
parents' home in Blackmoor Vale to inform her of what he had done. This
amount, with the sum he had already placed in her hands - about fifty pounds
- he hoped would be amply sufficient for her wants just at present, particularly
as in an emergency she had been directed to apply to his father.
He deemed it best not to put his parents into communication with her
by informing them of her address; and, being unaware of what had really
happened to estrange the two, neither his father nor his mother suggested
that he should do so. During the day he left the parsonage, for what he
had to complete he wished to get done quickly.
As the last duty before leaving this part of England it was necessary
for him to call at the Wellbridge farmhouse, in which he had spent with
Tess the first three days of their marriage, the trifle of rent having
to be paid, the key given up of the rooms they had occupied, and two or
three small articles fetched away that they had left behind. It was under
this roof that the deepest shadow ever thrown upon his life had stretched
its gloom over him. Yet when he had unlocked the door of the sitting-room
and looked into it, the memory which returned first upon him was that of
their happy arrival on a similar afternoon, the first fresh sense of sharing
a habitation conjointly, the first meal together, the chatting by the fire
with joined hands.
The farmer and his wife were in the fields at the moment of his visit,
and Clare was in the rooms alone for some time. Inwardly swollen with a
renewal of sentiments that he had not quite reckoned with, he went upstairs
to her chamber, which had never been his. The bed was smooth as she had
made it with her own hands on the morning of leaving. The mistletoe hung
under the tester just as he had placed it. Having been there three or four
weeks it was turning colour, and the leaves and berries were wrinkled.
Angel took it down and crushed it into the grate. Standing there he for
the first time doubted whether his course in this conjuncture had been
a wise, much less a generous, one. But had he not been cruelly blinded?
In the incoherent multitude of his emotions he knelt down at the bedside
wet-eyed. `O Tess! If you had only told me sooner, I would have forgiven
you! `he mourned.
Hearing a footstep below he rose and went to the top of the stairs.
At the bottom of the flight he saw a woman standing, and on her turning
up her face recognized the pale, dark-eyed Izz Huett.
`Mr Clare,' she said, `I've called to see you and Mrs Clare, and to
inquire if ye be well. I thought you might be back here again.'
This was a girl whose secret he had guessed, but who had not yet guessed
his; an honest girl who loved him - one who would have made as good, or
nearly as good, a practical farmer's wife as Tess.
`I am here alone,'he said; `we are not living here now.' Explaining
why he had come, he asked, `which way are you going home, Izz?'
`I have no home at Talbothays Dairy now, sir,' she said.
`Why is that?'
Izz looked down.
`It was so dismal there that I left! I am staying out this way.' She
pointed in a contrary direction, the direction in which he was journeying.
`Well - are you going there now? I can take you if you wish for a lift.'
Her olive complexion grew richer in hue.
`Thank 'ee, Mr Clare,' she said.
He soon found the farmer, and settled the account for his rent and the
few other items which had to be considered by reason of the sudden abandonment
of the lodgings. On Clare's return to his horse and gig Izz jumped up beside
him.
`I am going to leave England, Izz,' he said, as they drove on.
`Going to Brazil.'
`And do Mrs Clare like the notion of such a journey?' she asked.
`She is not going at present - say for a year or so. I am going out
to reconnoitre - to see what life there is like.'
They sped along eastward for some considerable distance, Izz making
no observation.
`How are the others?' he inquired. `How is Retty?'
`She was in a sort of nervous state when I zid her last; and so thin
and hollow-cheeked that 'a do seem in a decline. Nobody will ever fall
in love wi' her any more,' said Izz absently.
`And Marian?'
Izz lowered her voice.
`Marian drinks.'
`Indeed!'
`Yes. The dairyman has got rid of her.'
`And you!'
`I don't drink, and I ain't in a decline. But - I am no great things
at singing afore breakfast now!'
`How is that? Do you remember how neatly you used to turn 'twas down
in Cupid's Gardens and "The Tailor's Breeches" at morning milking?'
`Ah, yes! When you first came, sir, that was. Not when you had been
there a bit.'
`Why was that falling-off?'
Her black eyes flashed up to his face for one moment by way of answer.
`Izz! - how weak of you - for such as I!' he said, and fell into reverie.
`Then - suppose I had asked you to marry me?'
`If you had I should have said "Yes", and you would have married a woman
who loved 'ee!'
`Really!'
`Down to the ground!' she whispered vehemently. `O my God! did you never
guess it till now!'
By-and-by they reached a branch road to a village.
`I must get down. I live out there,' said Izz abruptly, never having
spoken since her avowal.
Clare slowed the horse. He was incensed against his fate, bitterly disposed
towards social ordinances; for they had cooped him up in a corner, out
of which there was no legitimate pathway. Why not be revenged on society
by shaping his future domesticities loosely, instead of kissing the pedagogic
rod of convention in this ensnaring manner.
`I am going to Brazil alone, Izz,' said he. `I have separated from my
wife for personal, not voyaging, reasons. I may never live with her again.
I may not be able to love you; but - will you go with me instead of her?'
`You truly wish me to go?'
`I do. I have been badly used enough to wish for relief. And you at
least love me disinterestedly.'
`Yes - I will go,' said Izz, after a pause.
`You will? You know what it means, Izz?'
`It means that I shall live with you for the time you are over there
- that's good enough for me.'
`Remember, you are not to trust me in morals now. But I ought to remind
you that it will be wrong-doing in the eyes of civilization - Western civilization,
that is to say.'
`I don't mind that; no woman do when it comes to agony-point, and there's
no other way!'
`Then don't get down, but sit where you are.'
He drove past the cross-roads, one mile, two miles, without showing
any signs of affection.
`You love me very, very much, Izz?' he suddenly asked.
`I do - I have said I do! I loved you all the time we was at the dairy
together!'
`More than Tess?'
She shook her head.
`No,' she murmured, `not more than she.'
`How's that?'
`Because nobody could love 'ee more than Tess did!... . She would have
laid down her life for 'ee. I could do no more.'
Like the prophet on the top of Poor Izz Huett would fain have spoken
perversely at such a moment, but the fascination exercised over her rougher
nature by Tess's character compelled her to grace.
Clare was silent; his heart had risen at these straightforward words
from such an unexpected unimpeachable quarter. In his throat was something
as if a sob had solidified there. His ears repeated, `She would have
laid down her life for 'ee. I could do no more!'
`Forget our idle talk, Izz,' he said, turning the horse's head suddenly.
`I don't know what I've been saying! I will now drive you back to where
your lane branches off.'
`So much for honesty towards 'ee! O - how can I bear it - how can I
- how can I!'
Izz Huett burst into wild tears, and beat her forehead as she saw what
she had done.
`Do you regret that poor little act of justice to an absent one? O,
Izz, don't spoil it by regret!'
She stilled herself by degrees.
`Very well, sir. Perhaps I didn't know what I was saying, either, wh
- when I agreed to go! I wish - what cannot be!'
`Because I have a loving wife already.'
`Yes, yes! You have.'
They reached the corner of the lane which they had passed half an hour
earlier, and she hopped down.
`Izz - please, please forget my momentary levity!' he cried. `It was
so ill-considered, so ill-advised!'
`Forget it? Never, never! O, it was no levity to me!'
He felt how richly he deserved the reproach that the wounded cry conveyed,
and, in a sorrow that was inexpressible, leapt down and took her hand.
`Well, but, Izz, we'll part friends, anyhow? You don't know what I've
had to bear!'
She was a really generous girl, and allowed no further bitterness to
mar their adieux.
`I forgive 'ee, sir!' she said.
`Now Izz,' he said, while she stood beside him there, forcing himself
to the mentor's part he was far from feeling; `I want you to tell Marian
when you see her that she is to be a good woman, and not to give way to
folly. Promise that, and tell Retty that there are more worthy men than
I in the world, that for my sake she is to act wisely and well - remember
the words - wisely and well - for my sake. I send this message to them
as a dying man to the dying; for I shall never see them again. And you,
Izzy, you have saved me by your honest words about my wife from an incredible
impulse towards folly and treachery. Women may be bad, but they are not
so bad as men in these things! On that one account I can never forget you.
Be always the good and sincere girl you have hitherto been; and think of
me as a worthless lover, but a faithful friend. Promise.'
She gave the promise.
`Heaven bless and keep you, sir. Good-bye!'
He drove on; but no sooner had Izz turned into the lane, and Clare was
out of sight, than she flung herself down on the bank in a fit of racking
anguish; and it was with a strained unnatural face that she entered her
mother's cottage late that night. Nobody ever was told how Izz spent the
dark hours that intervened between Angel Clare's parting from her and her
arrival home.
Clare, too, after bidding the girl farewell, was wrought to aching thoughts
and quivering lips. But his sorrow was not for Izz. That evening he was
within a feather-weight's turn of abandoning his road to the nearest station,
and driving across that elevated dorsal line of South Wessex which divided
him from his Tess's home. It was neither a contempt for her nature, nor
the probable state of her heart, which deterred him.
No; it was a sense that, despite her love, as corroborated by Izz's
admission, the facts had not changed. If he was right at first, he was
right now. And the momentum of the course on which he had embarked tended
to keep him going in it, unless diverted by a stronger, more sustained
force than had played upon him this afternoon. He could soon come back
to her. He took the train that night for London, and five days after shook
hands in farewell of his brothers at the port of embarkation.
Chapter 41
From the foregoing events of the winter-time let us press on to an October
day, more than eight months subsequent to the parting of Clare and Tess.
We discover the latter in changed conditions; instead of a bride with boxes
and trunks which others bore, we see her a lonely woman with a basket and
a bundle in her own porterage, as at an earlier time when she was no bride;
instead of the ample means that were projected by her husband for her comfort
through this probationary period, she can produce only a flattened purse.
After again leaving Marlott, her home, she had got through the spring
and summer without any great stress upon her physical powers, the time
being mainly spent in rendering light irregular service at dairy-work near
Port-Bredy to the west of the Black-moor Valley, equally remote from her
native place and from Talbothays. She preferred this to living on his allowance.
Mentally she remained in utter stagnation, a condition which the mechanical
occupation rather fostered than checked. Her consciousness was at that
other dairy, at that other season, in the presence of the tender lover
who had confronted her there - he who, the moment she had grasped him to
keep for her own, had disappeared like a shape in a vision.
The dairy-work lasted only till the milk began to lessen, for she had
not met with a second regular engagement as at Talbothays, but had done
duty as a supernumerary only. However, as harvest was now beginning, she
had simply to remove from the pasture to the stubble to find plenty Of
further occupation, and this continued till harvest was done.
Of the five-and-twenty pounds which had remained to her of Clare's allowance,
after deducting the other half of the fifty as a contribution to her parents
for the trouble and expense to which she had put them, she had as vet spent
but little. But there now followed an unfortunate interval of wet weather,
during which she was obliged to fall back upon her sovereigns.
She could not bear to let them go. Angel had put them into her hand,
had obtained them bright and new from his bank for her; his touch had consecrated
them to souvenirs of himself - they appeared to have had as yet no other
history than such as was created by his and her own experiences - and to
disperse them was like giving away relics. But she had to do it, and one
by one they left her hands.
She had been compelled to send her mother her address from time to time,
but she concealed her circumstances. When her money had almost gone a letter
from her mother reached her. Joan stated that they were in dreadful difficulty;
the autumn rains had gone through the thatch of the house, which required
entire renewal; but this could not be done because the previous thatching
had never been paid for. New rafters and a new ceiling upstairs also were
required, which, with the previous bill, would amount to a sum of twenty
pounds. As her husband was a man of means, and had doubtless returned by
this time, could she not send them the money?
Tess had thirty pounds coming to her almost immediately from Angel's
bankers, and, the case being so deplorable, as soon as the sum was received
she sent the twenty as requested. Part of the remainder she was obliged
to expend in winter clothing, leaving only a nominal sum for the whole
inclement season at hand. When the last pound had gone, a remark of Angel's
that whenever she required further resources she was to apply to his father,
remained to be considered.
But the more Tess thought of the step the more reluctant was she to
take it. The same delicacy, pride, false shame, whatever it may be called,
on Clare's account, which had led her to hide from her own parents the
prolongation of the estrangement, hindered her in owning to his that she
was in want after the fair allowance he had left her. They probably despised
her already; how much more they would despise her in the character of a
mendicant! The consequence was that by no effort could the parson's daughter-in-law
bring herself to let him know her state.
Her reluctance to communicate with her husband's parents might, she
thought, lessen with the lapse of time; but with her own the reverse obtained.
On her leaving their house after the short visit subsequent to her marriage
they were under the impression that she was ultimately going to join her
husband; and from that time to the present she had done nothing to disturb
their belief that she was awaiting his return in comfort, hoping against
hope that his journey to Brazil would result in a short stay only, after
which he would come to fetch her, or that he would write for her to join
him; in any case that they would soon present a united front to their families
and the world. This hope she still fostered. To let her parents know that
she was a deserted wife, dependent, now that she had relieved their necessities,
on her own hands for a living, after the éclat of a marriage
which was to nullify the collapse of the first attempt, would be too much
indeed.
The set of brilliants returned to her mind. Where Clare had deposited
them she did not know, and it mattered little, if it were true that she
could only use and not sell them. Even were they absolutely hers it would
be passing mean to enrich herself by a legal title to them which was not
essentially hers at all.
Meanwhile her husband's days had been by no means free from trial. At
this moment he was lying ill of fever in the clay lands near Curitiba in
Brazil, having been drenched with thunder-storms and persecuted by other
hardships, in common with all the English farmers and farm-labourers who,
just at this time, were deluded into going thither by the promises of the
Brazilian Government, and by the baseless assumption that those frames
which, ploughing and sowing on English Liplands, had resisted all the weathers
to whose moods they had been born, could resist equally well all the weathers
by which they were surprised on Brazilian plains.
To return. Thus it happened that when the last of Tess's sovereigns
had been spent she was unprovided with others to take their place, while
on account of the season she found it increasingly difficult to get employment.
Not being aware of the rarity of intelligence, energy, health, and willingness
in any sphere of life, she refrained from seeking an indoor occupation;
fearing towns, large houses, people of means and social sophistication,
and of manners other than rural. From that direction of gentility Black
Care had come. Society might be better than she supposed from her slight
experience of it. But she had no proof of this, and her instinct in the
circumstances was to avoid its purlieus.
The small dairies to the west, beyond Port-Bredy, in which she had served
as supernumerary milkmaid during the spring and summer required no further
aid. Room would probably have been made for her at Talbothays, if only
out of sheer compassion; but comfortable as her life had been there she
could not go back. The anti-climax would be too intolerable; and her return
might bring reproach upon her idolized husband. She could not have borne
their pity, and their whispered remarks to one another upon her strange
situation; though she would almost have faced a knowledge of her circumstances
by every individual there, so long as her story had remained isolated in
the mind of each. It was the interchange of ideas about her that made her
sensitiveness wince. Tess could not account for this distinction; she simply
knew that she felt it.
She was now on her way to an upland farm in the centre of the county,
to which she had been recommended by a wandering letter which had reached
her from Marian. Marian had somehow heard that Tess was separated from
her husband - probably through Izz Huett - and the good-natured and now
tippling girl, deeming Tess in trouble, had hastened to notify to her former
friend that she herself had gone to this upland spot after leaving the
dairy, and would like to see her there, where there was room for other
hands, if it was really true that she worked again as of old.
With the shortening of the days all hope of obtaining her husband's
forgiveness began to leave her: and there was something of the habitude
of the wild animal in the unreflecting instinct with which she rambled
on - disconnecting herself by littles from her eventful past at every step,
obliterating her identity, giving no thought to accidents or contingencies
which might make a quick discovery of her whereabouts by others of importance
to her own happiness, if not to theirs.
Among the difficulties of her lonely position not the least was the
attention she excited by her appearance, a certain bearing of distinction,
which she had caught from Clare, being superadded to her natural attractiveness.
Whilst the clothes lasted which had been prepared for her marriage, these
casual glances of interest caused her no inconvenience, but as soon as
she was compelled to don the wrapper of a fieldwoman, rude words were addressed
to her more than once; but nothing occurred to cause her bodily fear till
a particular November afternoon.
She had preferred the country west of the River Brit to the upland farm
for which she was now bound, because, for one thing, it was nearer to the
home of her husband's father; and to hover about that region unrecognized,
with the notion that she might decide to call at the Vicarage some day,
gave her pleasure. But having once decided to try the higher and drier
levels, she pressed back eastward, marching afoot towards the village of
Chalk-Newton, where she meant to pass the night.
The lane was long and unvaried, and, owing to the rapid shortening of
the days, dusk came upon her before she was aware. She had reached the
top of a hill down which the lane stretched its serpentine length in glimpses,
when she heard footsteps behind her back, and in a few moments she was
overtaken by a man. He stepped up alongside Tess and said--
`Good-night, my pretty maid': to which she civilly replied.
The light still remaining in the sky lit up her face, though the landscape
was nearly dark. The man turned and stared hard at her.
`Why, surely, it is the young wench who was at Trantridge awhile - young
Squire d'Urberville's friend? I was there at that time, though I don't
live there now.'
She recognized in him the well-to-do boor whom Angel had knocked down
at the inn for addressing her coarsely. A spasm of anguish shot through
her, and she returned him no answer.
`Be honest enough to own it, and that what I said in the town was true,
though your fancy-man was so up about it - hey, my sly one? You ought to
beg my pardon for that blow of his, considering.'
Still no answer came from Tess. There seemed only one escape for her
hunted soul. She suddenly took to her heels with the speed of the wind,
and, without looking behind her, ran along the road till she came to a
gate which opened directly into a plantation. Into this she plunged, and
did not pause till she was deep enough in its shade to be safe against
any possibility of discovery.
Under foot the leaves were dry, and the foliage of some holly bushes
which grew among the deciduous trees was dense enough to keep off draughts.
She scraped together the dead leaves till she had formed them into a large
heap, making a sort of nest in the middle. Into this Tess crept.
Such sleep as she got was naturally fitful; she fancied she heard strange
noises, but persuaded herself that they were caused by the breeze. She
thought of her husband in some vague warm clime on the other side of the
globe, while she was here in the cold. Was there another such a wretched
being as she in the world? Tess asked herself; and, thinking of her wasted
life, said, `All is vanity.' She repeated the words mechanically, till
she reflected that this was a most inadequate thought for modern days.
Solomon had thought as far as that more than two thousand years ago; she
herself, though not in the van of thinkers, had got much further. If all
were only vanity, who would mind it? All was, alas, worse than vanity -
injustice, punishment, exaction, death. The wife of Angel Clare put her
hand to her brow, and felt its curve, and the edges of her eye-sockets
perceptible under the soft skin, and thought as she did so that a time
would come when that bone would be bare. `I wish it were now,' she said.
In the midst of these whimsical fancies she heard a new strange sound
among the leaves. It might be the wind; yet there was scarcely any wind.
Sometimes it was a palpitation, sometimes a flutter; sometimes it was a
sort of gasp or gurgle. Soon she was certain that the noises came from
wild creatures of some kind, the more so when, originating in the boughs
overhead, they were followed by the fall of a heavy body upon the ground.
Had she been ensconced here under other and more pleasant conditions she
would have become alarmed; but, outside humanity, she had at present no
fear.
Day at length broke in the sky. When it had been day aloft for some
little while it became day in the wood.
Directly the assuring and prosaic light of the world's active hours
had grown strong she crept from under her hillock of leaves, and looked
around boldly. Then she perceived what had been going on to disturb her.
The plantation wherein she had taken shelter ran down at this spot into
a peak, which ended it hitherward, outside the hedge being arable ground.
Under the trees several pheasants lay about, their rich plumage dabbled
with blood; some were dead, some feebly twitching a wing, some staring
up at the sky, some pulsating quickly, some contorted, some stretched out
- all of them writhing in agony, except the fortunate ones whose tortures
had ended during the night by the inability of nature to bear more.
Tess guessed at once the meaning of this. The birds had been driven
down into the corner the day before by some shooting-party; and while those
that had dropped dead under the shot, or had died before nightfall, had
been searched for and carried off, many badly wounded birds had escaped
and hidden themselves away, or risen among the thick boughs, where they
had maintained their position till they grew weaker with loss of blood
in the night-time, when they had fallen one by one as she had heard them.
She had occasionally caught glimpses of these men in girlhood, looking
over hedges, or peering through bushes, and pointing their guns, strangely
accoutred, a bloodthirsty light in their eyes. She had been told that,
rough and brutal as they seemed just then, they were not like this all
the year round, but were, in fact, quite civil persons save during certain
weeks of autumn and winter, when, like the inhabitants of the Malay Peninsula,
they ran amuck, and made it their purpose to destroy life - in this case
harmless feathered creatures, brought into being by artificial means solely
to gratify these propensities - at once so unmannerly and so unchivalrous
towards their weaker fellows in Nature's teeming family.
With the impulse of a soul who could feel for kindred sufferers as much
as for herself, Tess's first thought was to put the still living birds
out of their torture, and to this end with her own hands she broke the
necks of as many as she could find, leaving them to lie where she had found
them till the gamekeepers should come - as they probably would come - to
look for them a second time.
`Poor darlings - to suppose myself the most miserable being on earth
in the sight o' such misery as yours!' she exclaimed, her tears running
down as she killed the birds tenderly. `And not a twinge of bodily pain
about me! I be not mangled, and I be not bleeding, and I have two hands
to feed and clothe me.' She was ashamed of herself for her gloom of the
night, based on nothing more tangible than a sense of condemnation under
an arbitrary law of society which had no foundation in Nature.
Chapter 42
It was now broad day, and she started again, emerging cautiously upon the
highway. But there was no need for caution; not a soul was at hand, and
Tess went onward with fortitude, her recollection of the birds' silent
endurance of their night of agony impressing upon her the relativity of
sorrows and the tolerable nature of her own, if she could once rise high
enough to despise opinion. But that she could not do so long as it was
held by Clare.
She reached Chalk-Newton, and breakfasted at an inn, where several young
men were troublesomely complimentary to her good looks. Somehow she felt
hopeful, for was it not possible that her husband also might say these
same things to her even yet? She was bound to take care of herself on the
chance of it, and keep off these casual lovers. To this end Tess resolved
to run no further risks from her appearance. As soon as she got out of
the village she entered a thicket and took from her basket one of the oldest
field-gowns, which she had never put on even at the dairy - never since
she had worked among the stubble at Marlott. She also, by a felicitous
thought, took a handkerchief from her bundle and tied it round her face
under her bonnet, covering her chin and half her cheeks and temples, as
if she were suffering from toothache. Then with her little scissors, by
the aid of a pocket looking-glass, she mercilessly nipped her eyebrows
off, and thus insured against aggressive admiration she went on her uneven
way.
`What a mommet of a maid!' said the next man who met her to a companion.
Tears came into her eyes for very pity of herself as she heard him.
`But I don't care!' she said. `O no - I don't care! I'll always be ugly
now, because Angel is not here, and I have nobody to take care of me. My
husband that was is gone away, and never will love me any more; but I love
him `just the same, and hate all other men, and like to make 'em think
scornfully of me!'
Thus Tess walks on; a figure which is part of the landscape; a fieldwoman
pure and simple, in winter guise; a gray serge cape, a red woollen cravat,
a stuff skirt covered by a whitey-brown rough wrapper; and buff-leather
gloves. Every thread of that old attire has become faded and thin under
the stroke of raindrops, the burn of sunbeams, and the stress of winds.
There is no sign of young passion in her now--
The maiden's mouth is cold
Fold over simple fold
Binding her head.
Inside this exterior, over which the eye might have roved as over a thing
scarcely percipient, almost inorganic, there was the record of a pulsing
life which had learnt too well, for its years, of the dust and ashes of
things, of the cruelty of lust and the fragility of love.
Next day the weather was bad, but she trudged on, the honesty, directness,
and impartiality of elemental enmity disconcerting her but little. Her
object being a winter's occupation and a winter's home, there was no time
to lose. Her experience of short hirings had been such that she was determined
to accept no more.
Thus she went forward from farm to farm in the direction of the place
whence Marian had written to her, which she determined to make use of as
a last shift only, its rumoured stringencies being the reverse of tempting.
First she inquired for the lighter kinds of employment, and, as acceptance
in any variety of these grew hopeless, applied next for the less light,
till, beginning with the dairy and poultry tendance that she liked best,
she ended with the heavy and coarse pursuits which she liked least - work
on arable land: work of such roughness, indeed, as she would never have
deliberately volunteered for.
Towards the second evening she reached the irregular chalk table-land
or plateau, bosomed with semi-globular tumuli - as if Cybele the Many-breasted
were supinely extended there - which stretched between the valley of her
birth and the valley of her love.
Here the air was dry and cold, and the long cart-roads were blown white
and dusty within a few hours after rain. There were few trees, or none,
those that would have grown in the hedges being mercilessly plashed down
with the quickset by the tenant-farmers, the natural enemies of tree, bush,
and brake. In the middle distance ahead of her she could see the summits
of Bulbarrow and of Nettlecombe Tout, and they seemed friendly. They had
a low and unassuming aspect from this upland, though as approached on the
other side from Blackmoor in her childhood they were as lofty bastions
against the sky. Southerly, at many miles' distance, and over the hills
and ridges coastward, she could discern a surface like polished steel:
it was the English Channel at a point far out towards France.
Before her, in a slight depression, were the remains of a village. She
had, in fact, reached Flintcomb-Ash, the place of Marian's sojourn. There
seemed to be no help for it; hither she was doomed to come. The stubborn
soil around her showed plainly enough that the kind of labour in demand
here was of the roughest kind; but it was time to rest from searching,
and she resolved to stay, particularly as it began to rain. At the entrance
to the village was a cottage whose gable jutted into the road, and before
applying for a lodging she stood under its shelter, and watched the evening
close in.
`Who would think I was Mrs Angel Clare!' she said.
The wall felt warm to her back and shoulders, and she found that immediately
within the gable was the cottage fireplace, the heat of which came through
the bricks. She warmed her hands upon them, and also put her cheek - red
and moist with the drizzle - against their comforting surface. The wall
seemed to be the only friend she had. She had so little wish to leave it
that she could have stayed there all night.
Tess could hear the occupants of the cottage - gathered together after
their day's labour - talking to each other within, and the rattle of their
supper-plates was also audible. But ill the village-street she had seen
no soul as yet. The solitude was at last broken by the approach of one
feminine figure, who, though the evening was cold, wore the print gown
and the tilt-bonnet of summer time. Tess instinctively thought it might
be Marian, and when she came near enough to be distinguishable in the gloom
surely enough it was she. Marian was even stouter and redder in the face
than formerly, and decidedly shabbier in attire. At any previous period
of her existence Tess would hardly have cared to renew the acquaintance
in such conditions; but her loneliness was excessive, and she responded
readily to Marian's greeting.
Marian was quite respectful in her inquiries, but seemed much moved
by the fact that Tess should still continue in no better condition than
at first; though she had dimly heard of the separation.
`Tess - Mrs Clare - the dear wife of dear he! And is it really so bad
as this, my child? Why is your cwomely face tied up in such a way? Anybody
been beating 'ee? Not he?'
`No, no, no! I merely did it not to be clipsed or colled, Marian.'
She pulled off in disgust a bandage which could suggest such wild thoughts.
`And you've got no collar on' (Tess had been accustomed to wear a little
white collar at the dairy).
`I know it, Marian.'
`You've lost it travelling.'
`I've not lost it. The truth is, I don't care anything about my looks;
and so I didn't put it on.'
`And you don't wear your wedding-ring?'
`Yes, I do; but not in public. I wear it round my neck on a ribbon.
I don't wish people to think who I am by marriage, or that I am married
at all; it would be so awkward while I lead my present life.' Marian paused.
`But you be a gentleman's wife; and it seems hardly fair that
you should live like this!'
`O yes it is, quite fair; though I am very unhappy.'
`Well, well. He married you - and you can be unhappy!'
`Wives are unhappy sometimes; from no fault of their husbands - from
their own.'
`You've no faults, deary; that I'm sure of. And he's none. So it must
be something outside ye both.'
`Marian, dear Marian, will you do me a good turn without asking questions?
My husband has gone abroad, and somehow I have overrun my allowance, so
that I have to fall back upon my old work for a time. Do not call me Mrs
Clare, but Tess, as before. Do they want a hand here?'
`O yes; they'll take one always, because few care to come. 'Tis a starve-acre
place. Corn and swedes are all they grow. Though I be here myself, I feel
'tis a pity for such as you to come.'
`But you used to be as good a dairy-woman as I.'
`Yes; but I've got out o' that since I took to drink. Lord, that's the
only comfort I've got now! If you engage, you'll be set swedehacking. That's
what I be doing; but you won't like it.'
`O - anything! Will you speak for me?'
`You will do better by speaking for yourself.'
`Very well. Now, Marian, remember - nothing about him, if I get
the place. I don't wish to bring his name down to the dirt.'
Marian, who was really a trustworthy girl though of coarser grain than
Tess, promised anything she asked.
`This is pay-night,' she said, `and if you were to come with me you
would know at once. I be real sorry that you are not happy; but 'tis because
he's away, I know. You couldn't be unhappy if he were here, even if he
gie'd ye no money - even if he used you like a drudge.'
`That's true; I could not!'
They walked on together, and soon reached the farmhouse, which was almost
sublime in its dreariness. There was not a tree within sight; there was
not, at this season, a green pasture nothing but fallow and turnips everywhere;
in large fields divided by hedges plashed to unrelieved levels.
Tess waited outside the door of the farmhouse till the group of work-folk
had received their wages, and then Marian introduced her. The farmer himself,
it appeared, was not at home, but his wife, who represented him this evening,
made no objection to hiring Tess, on her agreeing to remain till Old Lady-Day.
Female field-labour was seldom offered now, and its cheapness made it profitable
for tasks which women could perform as readily as men.
Having signed the agreement, there was nothing more for Tess to do at
present than to get a lodging, and she found one in the house at whose
gable-wall she had warmed herself. It was a poor subsistence that she had
ensured, but it would afford a shelter for the winter at any rate.
That night she wrote to inform her parents of her new address, in case
a letter should arrive at Marlott from her husband. But she did not tell
them of the sorriness of her situation: it might have brought reproach
upon him.
Chapter 43
There was no exaggeration in Marian's definition of Flintcomb-Ash farm
as a starve-acre place. The single fat thing on the soil was Marian herself;
and she was an importation. Of the three classes of village, the village
cared for by its lord, the village cared for by itself, and the village
uncared for either by itself or by its lord (in other words, the village
of a resident squire's tenantry, the village of free or copy-holders, and
the absentee-owner's village, farmed with the land) this place, Flintcomb-Ash,
was the third.
But Tess set to work. Patience, that blending of moral courage with
physical timidity, was now no longer a minor feature in Mrs Angel Clare;
and it sustained her.
The swede-field in which she and her companion were set hacking was
a stretch of a hundred odd acres, in one patch, on the highest ground of
the farm, rising above stony lanchets or lynchets - the outcrop of siliceous
veins in the chalk formation, composed of myriads of loose white flints
in bulbous, cusped, and phallic shapes. The upper half of each turnip had
been eaten off by the live-stock, and it was the business of the two women
to grub up the lower or earthy half of the root with a hooked fork called
a hacker, that it might be eaten also. Every leaf of the vegetable having
already been consumed, the whole field was in colour a desolate drab; it
was a complexion without features, as if a face, from chin to brow, should
be only an expanse of skin. The sky wore, in another colour, the same likeness;
a white vacuity of countenance with the lineaments gone. So these two upper
and nether visages confronted each other all day long, the white face looking
down on the brown face, and the brown face looking up at the white face,
without anything standing between them but the two girls crawling over
the surface of the former like flies.
Nobody came near them, and their movements showed a mechanical regularity;
their forms standing enshrouded in Hessian `wroppers' - sleeved brown pinafores,
tied behind to the bottom, to keep their gowns from blowing about - scant
skirts revealing boots that reached high up the ankles, and yellow sheepskin
gloves with gauntlets. The pensive character which the curtained hood lent
to their bent heads would have reminded the observer of some early Italian
conception of the two Marys.
They worked on hour after hour, unconscious of the forlorn aspect they
bore in the landscape, not thinking of the justice or injustice of their
lot. Even in such a position as theirs it was possible to exist in a dream.
In the afternoon the rain came on again, and Marian said that they need
not work any more. But if they did not work they would not be paid; so
they worked on. It was so high a situation, this field, that the rain had
no occasion to fall, but raced along horizontally upon the yelling wind,
sticking into them like glass splinters till they were wet through. Tess
had not known till now what was really meant by that. There are degrees
of dampness, and a very little is called being wet through in common talk.
But to stand working slowly in a field, and feel the creep of rain-water,
first in legs and shoulders, then on hips and head, then at back, front,
and sides, and yet to work on till the leaden light diminishes and marks
that the sun is down, demands a distinct modicum of stoicism, even of valour.
Yet they did not feel the wetness so much as might be supposed. They
were both young, and they were talking of the time when they lived and
loved together at Talbothays Dairy, that happy green tract of land where
summer had been liberal in her gifts; in substance to all, emotionally
to these. Tess would fain not have conversed with Marian of the man who
was legally, if not actually, her husband; but the irresistible fascination
of the subject betrayed her into reciprocating Marian's remarks. And thus,
as has been said, though the damp curtains of their bonnets flapped smartly
into their faces, and their wrappers clung about them to wearisomeness,
they lived all this afternoon in memories of green, sunny, romantic Talbothays.
`You can see a gleam of a hill within a few miles o' Froom Valley from
here when 'tis fine,' said Marian.
`Ah! Can you!' said Tess, awake to the new value of this locality.
So the two forces were at work here as everywhere, the inherent will
to enjoy, and the circumstantial will against enjoyment. Marian's will
had a method of assisting itself by taking from her pocket as the afternoon
wore on a pint bottle corked with white rag, from which she invited Tess
to drink. Tess's unassisted power of dreaming, however, being enough for
her sublimation at present, she declined except the merest sip, and then
Marian took a pull herself from the spirits.
`I've got used to it,' she said, `and can't leave it off now. 'Tis my
only comfort - You see I lost him: you didn't; and you can do without it,
perhaps.'
Tess thought her loss as great as Marian's, but upheld by the dignity
of being Angel's wife, in the letter at least, she accepted Marian's differentiation.
Amid this scene Tess slaved in the morning frosts and in the afternoon
rains. When it was not swede-grubbing it was swede-trimming, in which process
they sliced off the earth and the fibres with a bill-hook before storing
the roots for future use. At this occupation they could shelter themselves
by a thatched hurdle if it rained; but if it was frosty even their thick
leather gloves could not prevent the frozen masses they handled from biting
their fingers. Still Tess hoped. She had a conviction that sooner or later
the magnanimity which she persisted in reckoning as a chief ingredient
of Clare's character would lead him to rejoin her.
Marian, primed to a humorous mood, would discover the queer-shaped flints
aforesaid, and shriek with laughter, Tess remaining severely obtuse. They
often looked across the country to where the Var or Froom was known to
stretch, even though they might not be able to see it; and, fixing their
eyes on the cloaking gray mist, imagined the old times they had spent out
there.
`Ah,' said Marian, `how I should like another or two of our old set
to come here! Then we could bring up Talbothays every day here afield,
and talk of he, and of what nice times we had there, and o' the old things
we used to know, and make it all come back again almost, in seeming!' Marian's
eyes softened, and her voice grew vague as the visions returned. `I'll
write to Izz Huett,' she said. `She's biding at home doing nothing now,
I know, and I'll tell her we be here, and ask her to come; and perhaps
Retty is well enough now.'
Tess had nothing to say against the proposal, and the next she heard
of this plan for importing old Talbothays' joys was two or three days later,
when Marian informed her that Izz had replied to her inquiry, and had promised
to come if she could.
There had not been such a winter for years. It came on in stealthy and
measured glides, like the moves of a chess-player. One morning the few
lonely trees and the thorns of the hedgerows appeared as if they had put
off a vegetable for an animal integument. Every twig was covered with a
white nap as of fur grown from the rind during the night, giving it four
times its usual stoutness; the whole bush or tree forming a staring sketch
in white lines on the mournful gray of the sky and horizon. Cobwebs revealed
their presence on sheds and walls where none had ever been observed till
brought out into visibility by the crystallizing atmosphere, hanging like
loops of white worsted from salient points of the out-houses, posts, and
gates.
After this season of congealed dampness came a spell of dry frost, when
strange birds from behind the North Pole began to arrive silently on the
upland of Flintcomb-Ash; gaunt spectral creatures with tragical eyes -
eyes which had witnessed scenes of cataclysmal horror in inaccessible polar
regions of a magnitude such as no human being had ever conceived, in curdling
temperatures that no man could endure; which had beheld the crash of icebergs
and the slide of snow hills by the shooting light of the Aurora; been half
blinded by the whirl of colossal storms and terraqueous distortions; and
retained the expression of feature that such scenes had engendered. These
nameless birds came quite near to Tess and Marian, but of all they had
seen which humanity would never see, they brought no account. The traveller's
ambition to tell was not theirs, and, with dumb impassivity, they dismissed
experiences which they did not value for the immediate incidents of this
homely upland - the trivial movements of the two girls in disturbing the
clods with their hackers so as to uncover something or other that these
visitants relished as food.
Then one day a peculiar quality invaded the air of this open country.
There came a moisture which was not of rain, and a cold which was not of
frost. It chilled the eyeballs of the twain, made their brows ache, penetrated
to their skeletons, affecting the surface of the body less than its core.
They knew that it meant snow, and in the night the snow came. Tess, who
continued to live at the cottage with the warm gable that cheered any lonely
pedestrian who paused beside it, awoke in the night, and heard above the
thatch noises which seemed to signify that the roof had turned itself into
a gymnasium of all the winds. When she lit her lamp to get up in the morning
she found that the snow had blown through a chink in the casement, forming
a white cone of the finest powder against the inside, and had also come
down the chimney, so that it lay sole-deep upon the floor, on which her
shoes left tracks when she moved about. Without, the storm drove so fast
as to create a snow-mist in the kitchen; but as yet it was too dark out-of-doors
to see anything.
Tess knew that it was impossible to go on with the swedes; and by the
time she had finished breakfast beside the solitary little lamp, Marian
arrived to tell her that they were to join the rest of the women at reed-drawing
in the barn till the weather changed. As soon, therefore, as the uniform
cloak of darkness without began to turn to a disordered medley of grays,
they blew out the lamp, wrapped themselves up in their thickest pinners,
tied their woollen cravats round their necks and across their chests, and
started for the barn. The snow had followed the birds from the polar basin
as a white pillar of a cloud, and individual flakes could not be seen.
The blast smelt of icebergs, arctic seas, whales, and white bears, carrying
the snow so that it licked the land but did not deepen on it. They trudged
onwards with slanted bodies through the flossy fields, keeping as well
as they could in the shelter of hedges, which, however, acted as strainers
rather than screens. The air, afflicted to pallor with the hoary multitudes
that infested it, twisted and spun them eccentrically, suggesting an achromatic
chaos of things. But both the young women were fairly cheerful; such weather
on a dry upland is not in itself dispiriting.
`Ha-ha! the cunning northern birds knew this was coming,' said Marian.
`Depend upon't, they keep just in front o't all the way from the North
Star. Your husband, my dear, is, I make no doubt, having scorching weather
all this time. Lord, if he could only see his pretty wife now! Not that
this weather hurts your beauty at all - in fact, it rather does it good.'
`You mustn't talk about him to me, Marian,' said Tess severely.
`Well, but - surely you care for 'n! Do you?'
Instead of answering, Tess, with tears in her eyes, impulsively faced
in the direction in which she imagined South America to lie, and, putting
up her lips, blew out a passionate kiss upon the snowy wind.
`Well, well, I know you do. But upon my body, it is a rum life for a
married couple! There - I won't say another word! Well, as for the weather,
it won't hurt us in the wheat-barn; but reed-drawing is fearful hard work
- worse than swede-hacking. I can stand it because I'm stout; but you be
slimmer than I. I can't think why maister should have set 'ee at it.'
They reached the wheat-barn and entered it. One end of the long structure
was full of corn; the middle was where the reed-drawing was carried on,
and there had already been placed in the reed-press the evening before
as many sheaves of wheat as would be sufficient for the women to draw from
during the day.
`Why, here's Izz!' said Marian.
Izz it was, and she came forward. She had walked all the way from her
mother's home on the previous afternoon, and, not deeming the distance
so great, had been belated, arriving, however, just before the snow began,
and sleeping at the ale-house. The farmer had agreed with her mother at
market to take her on if she came to-day, and she had been afraid to disappoint
him by delay.
In addition to Tess, Marian, and Izz, there were two women from a neighbouring
village; two Amazonian sisters, whom Tess with a start remembered as Dark
Car the Queen of Spades and her junior the Queen of Diamonds - those who
had tried to fight with her in the midnight quarrel at Trantridge. They
showed no recognition of her, and possibly had none, for they had been
under the influence of liquor on that occasion, and were only temporary
sojourners there as here. They did all kinds of men's work by preference,
including well-sinking, hedging, ditching, and excavating, without any
sense of fatigue. Noted reed-drawers were they too, and looked round upon
the other three with some superciliousness.
Putting on their gloves all set to work in a row in front of the press,
an erection formed of two posts connected by a cross-beam, under which
the sheaves to be drawn from were laid ears outward, the beam being pegged
down by pins in the uprights, and lowered as the sheaves diminished.
The day hardened in colour, the light coming in at the barn doors upwards
from the snow instead of downwards from the sky. The girls pulled handful
after handful from the press; but by reason of the presence of the strange
women, who were recounting scandals, Marian and Izz could not at first
talk of old times as they wished to do. Presently they heard the muffled
tread of a horse, and the farmer rode up to the barn-door. When he had
dismounted he came close to Tess, and remained looking musingly at the
side of her face. She had not turned at first, but his fixed attitude led
her to look round, when she perceived that her employer was the native
of Trantridge from whom she had taken flight on the high-road because of
his allusion to her history.
He waited till she had carried the drawn bundles to the pile outside,
when he said, `So you be the young woman who took my civility in such ill
part? Be drowned if I didn't think you might be as soon as I heard of your
being hired! Well, you thought you had got the better of me the first time
at the inn with your fancy-man, and the second time on the road, when you
bolted; but now I think I've got the better of you.' He concluded with
a hard laugh.
Tess, between the Amazons and the farmer like a bird caught in a clap-net,
returned no answer, continuing to pull the straw. She could read character
sufficiently well to know by this time that she had nothing to fear from
her employer's gallantry; it was rather the tyranny induced by his mortification
at Clare's treatment of him. Upon the whole she preferred that sentiment
in man and felt brave enough to endure it.
`You thought I was in love with 'ee I suppose? Some women are such fools,
to take every look as serious earnest. But there's nothing like a winter
afield for taking that nonsense out o' young wenches' heads; and you've
signed and agreed till Lady-Day. Now, are you going to beg my pardon?'
`I think you ought to beg mine.'
`Very well - as you like. But we'll see which is master here. Be they
all the sheaves you've done to-day?'
`Yes, sir.'
`'Tis a very poor show. Just see what they've done over there' (pointing
to the two stalwart women). `The rest, too, have done better than you.'
`They've all practised it before, and I have not. And I thought it made
no difference to you as it is task work, and we are only paid for what
we do.'
`Oh, but it does. I want the barn cleared.'
`I am going to work all the afternoon instead of leaving at two as the
others will do.'
He looked sullenly at her and went away. Tess felt that she could not
have come to a much worse place; but anything was better than gallantry.
When two o'clock arrived the professional reed-drawers tossed off the last
half-pint in their flagon, put down their hooks, tied their last sheaves,
and went away. Marian and Izz would have done likewise, but on hearing
that Tess meant to stay, to make up by longer hours for her lack of skill,
they would not leave her. Looking out at the snow, which still fell, Marian
exclaimed, 'Now, we've got it all to ourselves.' And so at last the conversation
turned to their old experiences at the dairy; and, of course, the incidents
of their affection for Angel Clare.
`Izz and Marian,' said Mrs Angel Clare, with a dignity which was extremely
touching, seeing how very little of a wife she was: `I can't join 'n talk
with you now, as I used to do, about Mr Clare; you will see that I cannot;
because, although he is gone away from me for the present, he is my husband.'
Izz was by nature the sauciest and most caustic of all the four girls
who had loved Clare. `He was a very splendid lover, no doubt,' she said;
`but I don't think he is a too fond husband to go away from you so soon.'
`He had to go - he was obliged to go, to see about the land over there!'
pleaded Tess.
`He might have tided 'ee over the winter.'
`Ah - that's owing to an accident - a misunderstanding; and we won't
argue it,' Tess answered, with tearfulness in her words. `Perhaps there's
a good deal to be said for him! He did not go away, like some husbands,
without telling me; and I can always find out where he is.'
After this they continued for some long time in a reverie, as they went
on seizing the ears of corn, drawing out the straw, gathering it under
their arms, and cutting off the ears with their bill-hooks, nothing sounding
in the barn but the swish of the straw and the crunch of the hook. Then
Tess suddenly flagged, and sank down upon the heap of wheat-ears at her
feet.
`I knew you wouldn't be able to stand it!' cried Marian. `It wants harder
flesh than yours for this work.'
Just then the farmer entered. `Oh, that's how you get on when I am away,'
he said to her.
`But it is my own loss,' she pleaded. `Not yours.'
`I want it finished,' he said doggedly, as he crossed the barn and went
out at the other door.
`Don't 'ee mind him, there's a dear,' said Marian. `I've worked here
before. Now you go and lie down there, and Izz and I will make up your
number.'
`I don't like to let you do that. I'm taller than you, too.'
However, she was so overcome that she consented to lie down awhile,
and reclined on a heap of pull-tails - the refuse after the straight straw
had been drawn - thrown up at the further side of the barn. Her succumbing
had been as largely owing to agitation at re-opening the subject of her
separation from her husband as to the hard work. She lay in a state of
percipience without volition, and the rustle of the straw and the cutting
of the ears by the others had the weight of bodily touches.
She could hear from her corner, in addition to these noises, the murmur
of their voices. She felt certain that they were continuing the subject
already broached, but their voices were so low that she could not catch
the words. At last Tess grew more and more anxious to know what they were
saying, and, persuading herself that she felt better, she got up and resumed
work.
Then Izz Huett broke down. She had walked more than a dozen miles the
previous evening, had gone to bed at midnight, and had risen again at five
o'clock. Marian alone, thanks to her bottle of liquor and her stoutness
of build, stood the strain upon back and arms without suffering. Tess urged
Izz to leave off, agreeing, as she felt better, to finish the day without
her, and make equal division of the number of sheaves.
Izz accepted the offer gratefully, and disappeared through the great
door into the snowy track to her lodging. Marian, as was the case every
afternoon at this time on account of the bottle, began to feel in a romantic
vein.
`I should not have thought it of him - never!' she said in a dreamy
tone. 'And I loved him so! I didn't mind his having you. But this about
Izz is too bad!'
Tess, in her start at the words, narrowly missed cutting off a finger
with the bill-hook.
`Is it about my husband?' she stammered.
`Well, yes. Izz said, "Don't 'ee tell her"; but I am sure I can't help
it! It was what he wanted Izz to do. He wanted her to go off to Brazil
with him.'
Tess's face faded as white as the scene without, and its curves straightened.
`And did Izz refuse to go?' she asked.
`I don't know. Anyhow he changed his mind.'
`Pooh - then he didn't mean it! 'Twas just a man's jest!'
`Yes he did; for he drove her a good-ways towards the station.'
`He didn't take her!'
They pulled on in silence till Tess, without any premonitory symptoms,
burst out crying.
`There!' said Marian. `Now I wish I hadn't told 'ee!'
`No. It is a very good thing that you have done! I have been living
on in a thirtover, lackaday way, and have not seen what it may lead to!
I ought to have sent him a letter oftener. He said I could not go to him,
but he didn't say I was not to write as often as I liked. I won't dally
like this any longer! I have been very wrong and neglectful in leaving
everything to be done by him!' The dim light in the barn grew dimmer, and
they could see to work no longer. When Tess had reached home that evening,
and had entered into the privacy of her little white-washed chamber, she
began impetuously writing a letter to Clare. But falling into doubt she
could not finish it. Afterwards she took the ring from the ribbon on which
she wore it next her heart, and retained it on her finger all night, as
if to fortify herself in the sensation that she was really the wife of
this elusive lover of hers, who could propose that Izz should go with him
abroad, so shortly after he had left her. Knowing that, how could she write
entreaties to him, or show that she cared for him any more?
Chapter 44
By the disclosure in the barn her thoughts were led anew in the direction
which they had taken more than once of late - to the distant Emminster
Vicarage. It was through her husband's parents that she had been charged
to send a letter to Clare if she desired; and to write to them direct if
in difficulty. But that sense of her having morally no claim upon him had
always led Tess to suspend her impulse to send these notes; and to the
family at the Vicarage, therefore, as to her own parents since her marriage,
she was virtually non-existent. This self-effacement in both directions
had been quite in consonance with her independent character of desiring
nothing by way of favour or pity to which she was not entitled on a fair
consideration of her deserts. She had set herself to stand or fall by her
qualities, and to waive such merely technical claims upon a strange family
as had been established for her by the flimsy fact of a member of that
family, in a season of impulse, writing his name in a church book beside
hers.
But now that she was stung to a fever by Izz's tale there was a limit
to her powers of renunciation. Why had her husband not written to her?
He had distinctly implied that he would at least let her know of the locality
to which he had journeyed; but he had not sent a line to notify his address.
Was he really indifferent? But was he ill? Was it for her to make some
advance? Surely she might summon the courage of solicitude, call at the
Vicarage for intelligence, and express her grief at his silence. If Angel's
father were the good man she had heard him represented to be, he would
be able to enter into her heart-starved situation. Her social hardships
she could conceal.
To leave the farm on a week-day was not in her power; Sunday was the
only possible opportunity. Flintcomb-Ash being in the middle of the cretaceous
tableland over which no railway had climbed as yet, it would be necessary
to walk. And the distance being fifteen miles each way she would have to
allow herself a long day for the undertaking by rising early.
A fortnight later, when the snow had gone, and had been followed by
a hard black frost, she took advantage of the state of the roads to try
the experiment. At four o'clock that Sunday morning she came downstairs
and stepped out into the starlight. The weather was still favourable, the
ground ringing under her feet like an anvil.
Marian and Izz were much interested in her excursion, knowing that the
journey concerned her husband. Their lodgings were in a cottage a little
further along the lane, but they came and assisted Tess in her departure,
and argued that she should dress up in her very prettiest guise to captivate
the hearts of her parents-in-law; though she, knowing of the austere and
Calvinistic tenets of old Mr Clare, was indifferent, and even doubtful.
A year had now elapsed since her sad marriage, but she had preserved sufficient
draperies from the wreck of her then full wardrobe to clothe her very charmingly
as a simple country girl with no pretensions to recent fashion; a soft
gray woollen gown, with white crape quilling against the pink skin of her
face and neck, and a black velvet jacket and hat.
`'Tis a thousand pities your husband can't see 'ee now - you do look
a real beauty!' said Izz Huett, regarding Tess as she stood on the threshold
between the steely starlight without and the yellow candlelight within.
Izz spoke with a magnanimous abandonment of herself to the situation; she
could not be - no woman with a heart bigger than a hazel-nut could be -
antagonistic to Tess in her presence, the influence which she exercised
over those of her own sex being of a warmth and strength quite unusual,
curiously overpowering the less worthy feminine feelings of spite and rivalry.
With a final tug and touch here, and a slight brush there, they let
her go; and she was absorbed into the pearly air of the fore-dawn. They
heard her footsteps tap along the bard road as she stepped out to her full
pace. Even Izz hoped she would win, and, though without any particular
respect for her own virtue, felt glad that she had been prevented wronging
her friend when momentarily tempted by Clare.
It was a year ago, all but a day, that Clare had married Tess, and only
a few days less than a year that he had been absent from her. Still, to
start on a brisk walk, and on such an errand as hers, on a dry clear wintry
morning, through the rarefied air of these chalky hogs'-backs, was not
depressing; and there is no doubt that her dream at starting was to win
the heart of her mother-in-law, tell her whole history to that lady, enlist
her on her side, and so gain back the truant.
In time she reached the edge of the vast escarpment below which stretched
the loamy Vale of Blackmoor, now lying misty and still in the dawn. Instead
of the colourless air of the uplands the atmosphere down there was a deep
blue. Instead of the great enclosures of a hundred acres in which she was
now accustomed to toil there were little fields below her of less than
half-a-dozen acres, so numerous that they looked from this height like
the meshes of a net. Here the landscape was whitey-brown; down there, as
in Froom Valley, it was always green. Yet it was in that vale that her
sorrow had taken shape, and she did not love it as formerly. Beauty to
her, as to all who have felt, lay not in the thing, but in what the thing
symbolized.
Keeping the Vale on her right she steered steadily westward; passing
above the Hintocks, crossing at right-angles the high-road from Sherton-Abbas
to Casterbridge, and skirting Dogbury Hill and High-Stoy, with the dell
between them called `The Devil's Kitchen'. Still following the elevated
way she reached Cross-in-Hand, where the stone pillar stands desolate and
silent, to mark the site of a miracle, or murder, or both. Three miles
further she cut across the straight and deserted Roman road called Long-Ash
Lane; leaving which as soon as she reached it she dipped down a hill by
a transverse lane into the small town or village of Evershead, being now
about half-way over the distance. She made a halt here, and breakfasted
a second time, heartily enough - not at the Sow-and-Acorn, for she avoided
inns, but at a cottage by the church.
The second half of her journey was through a more gentle country, by
way of Benvill Lane. But as the mileage lessened between her and the spot
of her pilgrimage, so did Tess's confidence decrease, and her enterprise
loom out more formidably. She saw her purpose in such staring lines, and
the landscape so faintly, that she was sometimes in danger of losing her
way. However, about noon she paused by a gate on the edge of the basin
in which Emminster and its Vicarage lay.
The square tower, beneath which she knew that at that moment the Vicar
and his congregation were gathered, had a severe look in her eyes. She
wished that she had somehow contrived to come on a week-day. Such a good
man might be prejudiced against a woman who had chosen Sunday, never realizing
the necessities of her case. But it was incumbent upon her to go on now.
She took off the thick boots in which she had walked thus far, put on her
pretty thin ones of patent leather, and, stuffing the former into the hedge
by the gate-post where she might readily find them again, descended the
hill; the freshness of colour she had derived from the keen air thinning
away in spite of her as she drew near the parsonage.
Tess hoped for some accident that might favour her, but nothing favoured
her. The shrubs on the Vicarage lawn rustled uncomfortably in the frosty
breeze; she could not feel by any stretch of imagination, dressed to her
highest as she was, that the house was the residence of near relations;
and yet nothing essential, in nature or emotion, divided her from them:
in pains, pleasures, thoughts, birth, death, and after-death, they were
the same.
She nerved herself by an effort, entered the swing-gate, and rang the
door-bell. The thing was done; there could be no retreat. No; the thing
was not done. Nobody answered to her ringing. The effort had to be risen
to and made again. She rang a second time, and the agitation of the act,
coupled with her weariness after the fifteen miles' walk, led her to support
herself while she waited by resting her hand on her hip, and her elbow
against the wall of the porch. The wind was so nipping that the ivy-leaves
had become wizened and gray, each tapping incessantly upon its neighbour
with a disquieting stir of her nerves. A piece of blood-stained paper,
caught up from some meat-buyer's dust-heap, beat up and down the road without
the gate; too flimsy to rest, too heavy to fly away; and a few straws kept
it company.
The second peal had been louder, and still nobody came. Then she walked
out of the porch, opened the gate, and passed through. And though she looked
dubiously at the house-front as if inclined to return, it was with a breath
of relief that she closed the gate. A feeling haunted her that she might
have been recognized (though how she could not tell), and orders been given
not to admit her.
Tess went as far as the corner. She had done all she could do; but determined
not to escape present trepidation at the expense of future distress, she
walked back again quite past the house, looking up at all the windows.
Ah - the explanation was that they were all at church, every one. She
remembered her husband saying that his father always insisted upon the
household, servants included, going to morning service, and, as a consequence,
eating cold food when they came home. It was, therefore, only necessary
to wait till the service was over. She would not make herself conspicuous
by waiting on the spot, and she started to get past the church into the
lane. But as she reached the churchyard-gate the people began pouring out,
and Tess found herself in the midst of them.
The Emminster congregation looked at her as only a congregation of small
country-townsfolk walking home at its leisure can look at a woman out of
the common whom it perceives to be a stranger. She quickened her pace,
and ascended the road by which she had come, to find a retreat between
its hedges till the Vicar's family should have lunched, and it might be
convenient for them to receive her. She soon distanced the churchgoers,
except two youngish men, who, linked arm-in-arm, were beating up behind
her at a quick step.
As they drew nearer she could hear their voices engaged in earnest discourse,
and, with the natural quickness of a woman in her situation, did not fall
to recognize in those voices the quality of her husband's tones. The pedestrians
were his two brothers. Forgetting all her plans, Tess's one dread was lest
they should overtake her now, in her disorganized condition, before she
was prepared to confront them; for though she felt that they could not
identify her she instinctively dreaded their scrutiny. The more briskly
they walked the more briskly walked she. They were plainly bent upon taking
a short quick stroll before going indoors to lunch or dinner, to restore
warmth to limbs chilled with sitting through a long service. Only one person
had preceded Tess up the hill - a ladylike young woman, somewhat interesting,
though, perhaps, a trifle guindée and prudish. Tess had nearly
overtaken her when the speed of her brothers-in-law brought them so nearly
behind her back that she could hear every word of their conversation. They
`d nothing, however, which particularly interested her till, observing
the young lady still further in front, one of them remarked, `There is
Mercy Chant. Let us overtake her.'
Tess knew the name. It was the woman who had been destined for Angel's
life-companion by his and her parents, and whom he probably would have
married but for her intrusive self. She would have known as much without
previous information if she had waited a moment, for one of the brothers
proceeded to say: `Ah! poor Angel, poor Angel! I never see that nice girl
without more and more regretting his precipitancy in throwing himself away
upon a dairymaid, or whatever she may be. It is a queer business, apparently.
Whether she has Joined him yet or not I don't know; but she had not done
so some months ago when I heard from him.'
`I can't say. He never tells me anything nowadays. His ill-considered
marriage seems to have completed that estrangement from me which was begun
by his extraordinary opinions.'
Tess beat up the long hill still faster; but she could not outwalk them
without exciting notice. At last they outsped her altogether, and passed
her by. The young lady still further ahead heard their footsteps and turned.
Then there was a greeting and a shaking of hands, and the three went on
together.
They soon reached the summit of the hill, and, evidently intending this
point to be the limit of their promenade, slackened pace and turned all
three aside to the gate whereat Tess had paused an hour before that time
to reconnoitre the town before descending into it. During their discourse
one of the clerical brothers probed the hedge carefully with his umbrella,
and dragged something to light.
`Here's a pair of old boots,' he said. `Thrown away, I suppose, by some
tramp or other.'
`Some impostor who wished to come into the town barefoot, perhaps, and
so excite our sympathies,' said Miss Chant. `Yes, it must have been, for
they are excellent walking-boots - by no means worn out. What a wicked
thing to do! I'll carry them home for some poor person.'
Cuthbert Clare, who had been the one to find them, picked them up for
her with the crook of his stick; and Tess's boots were appropriated.
She, who had heard this, walked past under the screen of her woollen
veil, till, presently looking back, she perceived that the church party
had left the gate with her boots and retreated down the hill.
Thereupon our heroine resumed her walk. Tears, blinding tears, were
running down her face. She knew that it was all sentiment, all baseless
impressibility, which had caused her to read the scene as her own condemnation;
nevertheless she could not get over it; she could not contravene in her
own defenceless person all these untoward omens. It was impossible to think
of returning to the Vicarage. Angel's wife felt almost as if she had been
hounded up that hill like a scorned thing by those - to her - super-fine
clerics. Innocently as the slight had been inflicted, it was somewhat unfortunate
that she had encountered the sons and not the father, who, despite his
narrowness, was far less starched and ironed than they, and had to the
full the gift of charity. As she again thought of her dusty boots she almost
pitied those habiliments for the quizzing to which they had been subjected,
and felt how hopeless life was for their owner.
`Ah!' she said, still sighing in pity of herself, `they didn't
know that I wore those over the roughest part of the road to save these
pretty ones he bought for me - no - they did not know it! And they
didn't think that he chose the colour o' my pretty frock - no -
how could they? If they had known perhaps they would not have cared, for
they don't care much for him, poor thing!'
Then she grieved for the beloved man whose conventional standard of
judgment had caused her all these latter sorrows; and she went her way
without knowing that the greatest misfortune of her life was this feminine
loss of courage at the last and critical moment through her estimating
her father-in-law by his sons. Her present condition was precisely one
which would have enlisted the sympathies of old Mr and Mrs Clare. Their
hearts went out of them at a bound towards extreme cases, when the subtle
mental troubles of the less desperate among mankind failed to win their
interest or regard. In jumping at Publicans and Sinners they would forget
that a word might be said for the worries of Scribes and Pharisees; and
this defect or limitation might have recommended their own daughter-in-law
to them at this moment as a fairly choice sort of lost person for their
love.
Thereupon she began to plod back along the road by which she had come
not altogether full of hope, but full of a conviction that a crisis in
her life was approaching. No crisis, apparently, had supervened; and there
was nothing left for her to do but to continue upon that starve-acre farm
till she could again summon courage to face the vicarage. She did, indeed,
take sufficient interest in herself to throw up her veil on this return
journey, as if to let the world see that she could at least exhibit a face
such as Mercy Chant could not show. But it was done with a sorry shake
of the head. `it is nothing - it is nothing!' she said. `Nobody loves it;
nobody sees it. Who cares about the looks of a castaway like me!'
Her journey back was rather a meander than a march. It had no sprightliness,
no purpose; only a tendency. Along the tedious length of Benvill Lane she
began to grow tired, and she leant upon gates and paused by milestones.
She did not enter any house till, at the seventh or eighth mile, she
descended the steep long hill below which lay the village or townlet of
Evershead, where in the morning she had breakfasted with such contrasting
expectations. The cottage by the church, in which she again sat down, was
almost the first at that end of the village, and while the woman fetched
her some milk from the pantry, Tess, looking down the street, perceived
that the place seemed quite deserted.
`The people are gone to afternoon service, I suppose?' she said.
`No, my dear,'said the old woman. `'Tis too soon for that; the bells
hain't strook out yet. They be all gone to hear the preaching in yonder
barn. A ranter preaches there between the services - an excellent, fiery,
Christian man, they say. But, Lord, I don't go to hear'n! What comes in
the regular way over the pulpit is hot enough for I.'
Tess soon went onward into the village, her footsteps echoing against
the houses as though it were a place of the dead. Nearing the central part
her echoes were intruded on by other sounds; and seeing the barn not far
off the road, she guessed these to be the utterances of the preacher.
His voice became so distinct in the still clear air that she could soon
catch his sentences, though she was on the closed side of the barn. The
sermon, as might be expected, was of the extremest antinomian type; on
`justification by faith, as expounded in the theology of St Paul. This
fixed idea of the rhapsodist was delivered with animated enthusiasm, in
a manner entirely declamatory, for he had plainly no skill as a dialectician.
Although tess had not heard the beginning of the address, she learnt what
the text had been fro its constant iteration--
'O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you, that ye should not
obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently set
forth, crucified among you?'
Tess was all the more interested, as she stood listening behind, in
finding that the preacher's doctrine was a vehement form of the views of
Angel's father, and her interest intensified when the speaker began to
detail his own spiritual experiences of how he had come by those views.
He had, he said, been the greatest of sinners. He had scoffed; he had wantonly
associated with the reckless and the lewd. But a day of awakening had come,
and, in a human sense, it had been brought about mainly by the influence
of a certain clergyman, whom he had at first grossly insulted; but whose
parting words had sunk into his heart, and had remained there, till by
the grace of Heaven they had worked this change in him, and made him what
they saw him.
But more startling to Tess than the doctrine had been the voice, which,
impossible as it seemed, was precisely that of Alec d'Urberville. Her face
fixed in painful suspense she came round to the front of the barn, and
passed before it. The low winter sun beamed directly upon the great double-doored
entrance on this side; one of the doors being open, so that the rays stretched
far in over the threshing-floor to the preacher and his audience, all snugly
sheltered from the northern breeze. The listeners were entirely villagers,
among them being the man whom she had seen carrying the red paint-pot on
a former memorable occasion. But her attention was given to the central
figure, who stood upon some sacks of corn, facing the people and the door.
The three o'clock sun shone full upon him, and the strange enervating conviction
that her seducer confronted her, which had been gaining ground in Tess
ever since she had heard his words distinctly, was at last established
as a fact indeed.
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