001

Table of Contents

FROM THE PAGES OF TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES

Title Page
Copyright Page
THOMAS HARDY
THE WORLD OF THOMAS HARDY AND TESS OF THE
D‘URBERVILLES
Introduction
TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES
EXPLANATORY NOTE TO THE FIRST EDITION
AUTHOR’S PREFACE TO THE FIFTH AND LATER EDITIONS

PHASE THE FIRST - THE MAIDEN

I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI

PHASE THE SECOND - MAIDEN NO MORE

XII
XIII
XIV
XV

PHASE THE THIRD - THE RALLY

XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
XXIV

PHASE THE FOURTH - THE CONSEQUENCE

XXV
XXVI
XXVII
XXVIII
XXIX
XXX
XXXI
XXXII
XXXIII
XXXIV

PHASE THE FIFTH - THE WOMAN PAYS

XXXV
XXXVI
XXXVII
XXXVIII
XXXIX
XL
XLI
XLII
XLIII
XLIV

PHASE THE SIXTH - THE CONVERT

XLV
XLVI
XLVII
XLVIII
XLIX
L
LI
LII

PHASE THE SEVENTH - FULFILMENT

LIII
LIV
LV
LVI
LVII
LVIII
LIX

ENDNOTES
INDEX OF PLACES
INSPIRED BY TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES
COMMENTS & QUESTIONS
FOR FURTHER READING
 FROM THE PAGES OF
TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES
“Don’t you really know, Durbeyfield, that you are the lineal representative
of the ancient and knightly family of the d‘Urbervilles, who derive their
descent from Sir Pagan d’Urberville, that renowned knight who came from
Normandy with William the Conqueror, as appears by Battle Abbey Roll?”
(pages 11-12)

Tess Durbeyfield at this time of her life was a mere vessel of emotion
untinctured by experience. The dialect was on her tongue to some extent,
despite the village school: the characteristic intonation of that dialect for
this district being the voicing approximately rendered by the syllable UR,
probably as rich an utterance as any to be found in human speech. The
pouted-up deep red mouth to which this syllable was native had hardly as
yet settled into its definite shape, and her lower lip had a way of thrusting
the middle of her top one upward, when they closed together after a word.
(page 21 )

“You are mighty sensitive for a cottage girl!”

(page 69)

She knew how to hit to a hair’s-breadth that moment of evening when the
light and the darkness are so evenly balanced that the constraint of day and
the suspense of night neutralize each other, leaving absolute mental liberty.
It is then that the plight of being alive becomes attenuated to its least
possible dimensions. She had no fear of the shadows; her sole idea seemed
to be to shun mankind—or rather that cold accretion called the world,
which, so terrible in the mass, is so unformidable, even pitiable, in its units.
(page 106)
Unexpectedly he began to like the outdoor life for its own sake, and for
what it brought, apart from its bearing on his own proposed career.
Considering his position he became wonderfully free from the chronic
melancholy which is taking hold of the civilized races with the decline of
belief in a beneficent Power.
(page 147)

She was no longer the milklnaid, but a visionary essence of woman—a

whole sex condensed into one typical form.
(page 160)

The rosy-cheeked, bright-eyed quartet looked so charming in their light

summer attire, clinging to the roadside bank like pigeons on a roof-slope,
that he stopped a moment to regard them before coming close. Their gauzy
skirts had brushed up from the grass innumerable flies and butterflies
which, unable to escape, remained caged in the transparent tissue as in an
aviary. Angel’s eye at last fell upon Tess, the hindmost of the four; she,
being full of suppressed laughter at their dilemma, could not help meeting
his glance radiantly.
(pages 174—175)

“I can’t bear to let anybody have him but me! Yet it is a wrong to him, and
may kill him when he knows!”
(page 217)

Modern life stretched out its steam feeler to this point three or four times a
day, touched the native existences, and quickly withdrew its feeler again, as
if what it touched had been uncongenial.
(page 226)
“I am only a peasant by position, not by nature!”
(page 276)

In considering what Tess was not, he overlooked what she was, and forgot
that the defective can be more than the entire.
(page 312)

“You temptress, Tess; you dear damned witch of Babylon—I could not
resist you as soon as I met you again!”
(page 377)

“It is too late.”

(page 442)
 Published by Barnes & Noble Books
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New York, NY 10011

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Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented was serialized in

The Graphic between July and December 1891, and published in
volume form that same year.
The present text is that of Hardy’s 1912 Wessex edition.

Published in 2005 by Barnes & Noble Classics with new Introduction,

Notes, Biography, Chronology, Index of Places, Inspired By Comments &
Questions, and For Further Reading.

Introduction, Notes, and For Further Reading

Copyright © 2005 by David Galef.

Note on Thomas Hardy, The World of Thomas Hardy and Tess of the d‘Urbervilles,
Index of Places, Inspired by Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and Comments & Questions
Copyright © 2005 by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

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Tess of the d’Urbervilles

ISBN 1-59308-228-2
eISBN : 978-1-411-43326-7
LC Control Number 2004116680
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 THOMAS HARDY
Thomas Hardy was born on June 2, 1840, in the village of Higher
Bockhampton, near Dorchester, a market town in the county of Dorset.
Hardy would spend much of his life in his native region, transforming its
rural landscapes into his fictional Wessex. Hardy’s mother, Jemima,
inspired him with a taste for literature, while his stonemason father,
Thomas, shared with him a love of architecture and music (the two would
later play the fiddle for local groups). As a boy Hardy read widely in the
popular fiction of the day, including the novels of Scott, Dumas, Dickens,
W. Harrison Ainsworth, and G. P. R. James, and in the poetry of Scott,
Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and others. Strongly influenced in his
youth by the Bible and the liturgy of the Anglican Church, Hardy later
contemplated a career in the ministry; but his assimilation of the new
theories of Darwinian evolutionism eventually made him an agnostic and a
severe critic of traditional religion.
Although Hardy was a gifted student at the local schools he attended as a
boy for eight years, his lower-class origins limited further educational
opportunities. At sixteen, he was apprenticed to architect James Hicks in
Dorchester and began an architectural career primarily focused on the
restoration of churches. In Dorchester Hardy was also befriended by Horace
Moule, eight years Hardy’s senior, who acted as an intellectual mentor and
literary adviser throughout his youth and early adulthood. From 1862 to
1867, Hardy worked in London for the distinguished architect Arthur
Blomfield, but he continued to study—literature, art, philosophy, science,
history, the classics—and to write, first poetry and then fiction.
In the early 1870s, Hardy’s first two published novels, Desperate
Remedies and Under the Greenwood Tree, appeared to little acclaim or
sales. With his third novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes, he began the practice of
serializing his fiction in magazines prior to book publication, a method that
he would use throughout his career as a novelist. In 1874, the year of his
marriage to Emma Gifford of St. Juliot, Cornwall, Hardy enjoyed his first
significant commercial and critical success with the book publication of Far
from the Madding Crowd after its serialization in the Cornhill Magazine.
Hardy and his wife lived in several locations in London, Dorset, and
Somerset before settling in southwest London for three years in 1878.
During the late 1870s and early 1880s, Hardy published The Return of the
Native, The Trumpet-Major, A Laodicean, and Two on a Tower while
consolidating his place as a leading English novelist. He would also
eventually produce four volumes of short stories: Wessex Tales, A Group of
Noble Dames, Life’s Little Ironies, and A Changed Man.
In 1883 Hardy and his wife moved back to Dorchester, where Hardy
wrote The Mayor of Casterbridge, set in a fictionalized version of
Dorchester, and went on to design and construct a permanent home for
himself, named Max Gate, completed in 1885. In the later 1880s and early
1890s, Hardy wrote three of his greatest novels, The Woodlanders, Tess of
the d’Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure, all notable for their remarkable
tragic power. The last two were initially published as magazine serials in
which Hardy removed potentially objectionable moral and religious
content, only to restore it when the novels were published in book form;
both serials nevertheless aroused public controversy for their criticisms of
Victorian sexual and religious mores. In particular, the appearance of Jude
the Obscure in 1895 precipitated harsh attacks on Hardy’s alleged
pessimism and immorality. The attacks contributed to his decision to
abandon the writing of fiction after the appearance of his last-published
novel, The Well-Beloved.
In the later 1890s, Hardy returned to the writing of poetry that he had
abandoned for fiction thirty years earlier. Wessex Poems appeared in 1898,
followed by several volumes of poetry at regular intervals over the next
three decades. Between 1904 and 1908 Hardy published a three-part epic
verse drama, The Dynasts, based on the Napoleonic Wars of the early
nineteenth century. Following the death of his first wife in 1912, Hardy
married his literary secretary Florence Dugdale in 1914. Hardy received a
variety of public honors in the last two decades of his life and continued to
publish poems until his death at Max Gate on January 11, 1928.
His ashes were interred in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey in
London and his heart in Stinsford outside Dorchester. Regarded as one of
England’s greatest authors of both fiction and poetry, Hardy has inspired
such notable twentieth-century writers as Marcel Proust, John Cowper
Powys, D. H. Lawrence, Theodore Dreiser, and John Fowles.
 THE WORLD OF THOMAS HARDY AND
TESS OF THE D‘URBERVILLES

1840 The eldest of four children, Thomas Hardy is born on June 2 in

Higher Bockhampton, near Dorchester in the county of Dorset.
His father, Thomas, is a builder and master stonemason ; his
mother, Jemima, is a former domestic servant with literary
interests who teaches her son to read at an early age. Hardy’s frail
health prevents him from entering the village school until age
eight.

1848 Hardy enters the newly established National School in his parish.
His early reading includes Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, John
Dryden’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, Bernardin de Saint-
Pierre’s Paul and Virginia, and many of the popular novelists and
poets of the day. He cultivates his love of music, playing the
fiddle with his father in the parish choir and at local dances.

1850 Jemima enrolls her son at school in Dorchester, where for the next
six years he studies under a distinguished local schoolmaster,
Isaac Last; he will begin the study of Latin at the age of twelve.

1856 After helping his father design renovations for a country church,
Hardy is awarded an apprenticeship to Dorchester architect John
Hicks. He studies Greek and other subjects in his free time and
develops a close friendship with Horace Moule, a university-
educated vicar’s son who becomes his mentor.

1862 Hardy leaves Dorset to work for a prominent architect, Arthur

Blomfield, in London. While pursuing his professional duties, he
attempts to develop his talents as a poet but fails to publish any
poetry at this time. He visits museums , goes to the theater, takes
French lessons, and attends a reading by Charles Dickens.

1863 Hardy develops a three-year romantic interest in Eliza Nicholls,

 who works as a personal maid for an upper-class family in
London. He is awarded a prize from the Architectural Association
for his design of a country mansion, and a Silver Medal from the
Royal Institute of British Architects for an essay on architecture.

1865 Hardy’s humorous prose sketch “How I Built Myself a House”

appears in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal. Several of his earliest
surviving poems date from this time.

1867 Failing health necessitates a return to Dorchester, where Hardy

again works for John Hicks. He writes his first novel, The Poor
Man and the Lady (authored by “the Poor Man”).

1869 The Poor Man and the Lady is rejected for publication because of
its subversive depiction of English class relations. Hardy is given
advice by George Meredith on writing fiction that will appeal to
the Victorian public. He takes a position in Weymouth as an
architect specializing in church restoration.

1870 Hardy meets his future wife, Emma Lavinia Gifford, while on a
trip to Cornwall, where he is sent to supervise the restoration of a
small rural church. Emma lives with her sister and brother-in-law,
the vicar of the church Hardy is restoring.

1871 Tinsley Brothers publishes the novel Desperate Remedies at

Hardy’s expense and without the author’s name. The novel is
barely noticed and sells poorly.

1872 Hardy moves back to London, where he creates architectural

plans for schools. Emma’s father refuses to allow Hardy to marry
her. Hardy publishes Under the Greenwood Tree with Tinsley;
another novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes, is serialized in Tinsley’s
Magazine and the NewYork Tribune.

1873 Shortly after he begins work on Far from the Madding Crowd, to
be serialized in the Cornhill Magazine, Hardy is devastated by the
suicide of his old friend Horace Moule, whom he had visited in
Moule’s rooms at Cambridge University a few months before.
1874 Far from the Madding Crowd, Hardy’s first commercially
successful novel, appears. Hardy and Emma Gifford marry in
London and travel to France for their honeymoon. Over the next
four years, Hardy and his wife will live in Dorset, Somerset, and
London.

1878 The Return of the Native, set in the immediate environs of

Hardy’s birthplace, is published, marking Hardy’s debut as a
tragic novelist. The novel elicits mixed reviews, with some critics
now recognizing him as one of England’s leading writers. Hardy
and his wife settle in London in the area of Wadsworth Common
for three years. Hardy socializes with a number of writers in
London.

1880 The Trumpet-Major, a historical novel set in the Napoleonic era,

is published. Hardy suffers from an undiagnosed debilitating
illness and is confined to bed for many months. During this time
he dictates a novel, A Laodicean, to his wife.

1881 Hardy and his wife, their marriage strained, leave London for the
town of Wimborne in Dorset. Hardy researches a novel on
astronomy, to be titled Two on a Tower; it will be published in
1882.

1883 The Hardys move to Dorchester, where Hardy designs and begins
construction of a house; his father and brother perform the
construction work.

1885 The Hardys move into Max Gate, henceforth his permanent
residence, a mile outside Dorchester and two miles from his
birthplace; here he will write some of his greatest novels.

1886 The Mayor of Casterbridge is published (Casterbridge is Hardy’s

name for Dorchester). Hardy sets about completing The
Woodlanders, an unfinished narrative begun a decade earlier; the
novel will appear in 1887.

1888 Wessex Tales, Hardy’s first collection of short stories, is

 published ; three more volumes of stories will follow.

1891 Tess of the d’Urbervilles appears in a bowdlerized version for

serial publication in the Graphic, but is restored to the author’s
intended version for book publication. Though the novel raises a
storm of controversy for its treatment of marriage and religion, it
is popular with the public. Many praise Hardy as England’s
greatest novelist.

1892 Hardy’s father dies. Serialization of The Pursuit of the

WellBeloved begins; it will be published in volume form as The
Well-Beloved in 1897.

1893 On a trip to Dublin, Hardy meets Florence Henniker, with whom

he will have a long-term literary and sentimental relationship .
Marital troubles between Hardy and Emma are ongoing.

1895 Jude the Obscure is serialized in bowdlerized form in Harper’s

New Monthly Magazine, but is restored to its original form for
book publication. Like Tess, Jude is highly controversial and
precipitates harsh attacks for its alleged pessimism and
immorality. Hardy turns to the writing of poetry; his first volume
will appear in 1898.

1904 Hardy’s mother dies. The first part of The Dynasts, an epic poetic
drama on the Napoleonic Wars, is published, with two more parts
appearing over the next three years.

1912 Hardy receives the Gold Medal of the Royal Society of Literature
. Emma Hardy dies, inspiring the highly personal Poems of 1912-
13.

1914 Hardy marries his longtime secretary, Florence Dugdale. The

onset of World War I seems to confirm Hardy’s tragic philosophy
of life, most recently dramatized in the The Dynasts and depicted
in much of his poetry and fiction.

1919 Collected Poems is published. Three more volumes of poetry will

 appear during the last decade of Hardy’s life.

1920 Hardy is celebrated in England and abroad on his eightieth

birthday. King George V and the Prime Minister send their
greetings.

1928 Hardy dies of a heart attack on January 11 at Max Gate. His ashes
are placed in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey in London;
his heart is buried next to the remains of his first wife, Emma, in
Stinsford, outside Dorchester.
 INTRODUCTION
More than three-quarters of a century after Thomas Hardy’s death, the
stamp he put on literature remains unmistakable. Just as readers talk about a
Dickensian manner or a Conradian style, a Hardyesque outlook is instantly
recognizable, where harsh circumstances seem to dictate what happens.
Hardy’s world is rooted in nature and the countryside that he so lyrically
describes, even as it is dying out and ushering in a colder, harder future.
This state of affairs, which Hardy sums up with such authority, is evident in
Tess of the d’Urbervilles, which concerns the undoing of a pure-hearted
woman. Though true tragedy is derived ultimately from character, Hardy’s
fatalistic vision at times appears to dwarf individual actions. One early
morning, on what will turn out to be a doomed trip to the market, Tess’s
brother Abraham asks her about the stars:
“Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?”
“Yes.”
“All like ours?”
“I don’t know; but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples
on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound—a few blighted.”
“Which do we live on—a splendid one or a blighted one?”
“A blighted one” (p. 40).
If novels contain their own guides for interpretation, one can do no better
when reading Hardy than to look toward these powerful scenes. Christianity
and its parables no longer serve the old purposes of communion and faith—
note the blighted apples on the tree—but the perception of this problem
doesn’t seem to help much: The tree of knowledge yields only bitter fruit
for Hardy’s characters. Or as Hardy himself points out, in a commentary on
love and chance:
In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call
seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the
hour of loving.... We may wonder whether at the acme and summit of
the human progress these anachronisms will be corrected by a finer
 intuition, a closer interaction of the social machinery than that which
now jolts us round and along; but such completeness is not to be
prophesied, or even conceived as possible (p. 53).
These two excerpts not only proclaim Hardy’s philosophy but also display
his two modes of narration: earthy storytelling and more abstract
description. Life is hard, and love often plays cruel tricks, a state of affairs
increasingly apparent to Tess. But to understand this state of affairs is no
guarantee of satisfaction or even safety. A superior consciousness,
especially in a woman, leads to alienation from one’s community, as in
Hardy’s best-known novels: Eustacia Vye in The Return of the Native, Tess
Durbeyfield in Tess of the d‘Urbervilles, and Sue Bridehead in Jude the
Obscure. In any event, Hardy always has a thesis to pursue, whether it’s the
sorry state of matrimony or the plight of the rural poor. As a novelist, he
portrays it through the predicament of real individuals. These depictions
carry a brooding power, such as when Tess stumbles upon a grove with
half-dead partridges and takes pity on them by breaking their necks: “Poor
darlings—to suppose myself the most miserable being on earth in the sight
o’ such misery as yours! ” (p. 327). Is Tess, wounded as she is, simply
identifying with the birds and putting them out of their pain? Is she the
counterpart of the innocent Edgar in King Lear, who cries, “O gods! Who
is’t can say ‘I am at the worst’?” when he spies someone even worse off? Is
the scene Hardy’s way of foreshadowing the murder that will follow? The
semi-allegorical style is at times poetic, sometimes heavily didactic, infused
with nineteenth-century Gothic melodrama yet also intellectual and
psychologically probing, a prototype of what would eventually come to be
known as Modernism.
Hardy’s background suggests the dualities in the patterns of his fiction:
the Victorian belief in social improvement versus a skepticism about the
efficacy of reform; a love of the natural world versus the knowledge that
nature is a mindless, impersonal system; and a nostalgia for previous eras
despite the recognition that he himself probably would not have flourished
back then. Born in 1840 and brought up in the rugged countryside of
Dorset, which he turned into the Wessex of his fiction and poetry, Hardy
became intimately acquainted with not just the local flora and fauna but
seemingly every rise and bend in the region, or as Hardy mentions
regarding Tess: “Every contour of the surrounding hills was as personal to
her as that of her relatives’ faces” (p. 46). But Hardy went beyond the little
village of Stinson near his home. The school he attended from age nine to
sixteen was in Dorchester, 5 miles away, a distance that he walked back and
forth daily. Thus, when he opens a scene with “It was a hazy sunrise in
August. The denser nocturnal vapours, attacked by the warm beams, were
dividing and shrinking into isolated fleeces within hollows and coverts,
where they waited till they should be dried away to nothing” (p. 108), or
describes how the “ripe hue of the red and dun kine absorbed the evening
sunlight” (p. 128), the pictorial naturalism speaks with the authority of
someone who’s done a great deal of traipsing through the southwest of
England. In fact, Hardy also drew upon real towns and their citizens. Thus,
Dorchester becomes Casterbridge, Marnhull is really Marlott, Sturminster-
Newton turns into Stourcastle, Trantridge is suggestive of the real town of
Pentridge, and so on. (See the Map of Wessex and the Index of Places in
this edition.) Even during Hardy’s lifetime, commentators compiled
descriptions and photos of “Hardy country.” Visitors still make pilgrimages
to those towns and other landmarks, a surprising number of which have
been preserved.
Yet, living in the village of Higher Bockhampton near Stinson, Hardy
grew up as many of the old rural ways were dying out: livelihoods, such as
that of John Durbeyfield, described as a haggler or peddler; formerly
independent businesses, such as inns, gradually taken over by franchises;
and customs, such as May Day, a festival hearkening back to “when one-
handed clocks sufficiently subdivided the day” (p. 32); or simply the way
John’s wife, Joan, makes a mirror in the country way, by hanging a sheet on
the outside of a window. Taking longer to fade are attitudes, such as the
timeworn view that a woman with a sexual past is “ruined”—but not a man.
Hardy only half regrets the vanishing of old ways. After all, the small
rural towns of England in the mid-nineteenth century formed a world in
which the family washing was never quite done, drinking was the sole
pastime for many, and the death of a horse meant the loss of a livelihood.
When Tess is down on her luck, she hires herself out first as a dairymaid,
then as a reed-puller, and finally as a digger for swedes, or rutabagas. These
jobs involve hard manual labor, as well as cooperation among workers.
Hardy describes the tasks in the kind of detail that a novelist uses when the
readership may be only half acquainted with its rural past: singing at cows
to coax a greater yield of milk, or how to draw straw from corn stalks. If
Hardy is able to place us in a bygone world, in fact he had the same
transporting effect on his contemporary readers; most were far removed
from rural life. At the same time, the rigor and plod of agricultural work
forms a comment on the condition of the rural poor. As with Dickens’s
novels, Hardy’s writings—including an essay from 1883 called “The
Dorsetshire Labourer”—led to social change. Hardy, after all, was born into
a world both more genteel and more barbarous than ours, with aspects that
shock us today, even as ours, with its blatant sexuality, would shock people
then. Hardy couldn’t directly refer to the rape scene between Tess and Alec
in the forest, and what little he hinted at disturbed many of his readers. Yet
our own society, so inured to erotic display, is more offended by social
injustice. Unfair as Hardy’s world seems, his citizens observe a certain
decorum and a sense of charity that partly compensate for life’s inequalities.
Like many other artists with vision, Hardy himself is poised between eras:
the nineteenth century, with its old ways, fixed views, and trust in
providence; and the twentieth century, with its progressive culture, powerful
technology, and fading faith. In the middle of these poles is a lack of fixity
and an insufficient attention to struggling individuals. It isn’t a particularly
happy place, and anyone truly sensitive tends to feel alienated. As A. E.
Housman (1859-1936) put it in one of his last poems: “I, a stranger and
afraid / In a world I never made.” Moreover, even as country livelihoods are
dying out, large-scale belief is also decaying. When Hardy wrote his novels,
the slow erosion of faith often led people to stray from old tenets of
morality and conduct, but nothing had replaced those old stays. In an earlier
era dominated by the church, perhaps, people fit in better. By contrast,
Hardy’s characters feel estranged from their fellow citizens—which doesn’t
mean that family is the cure-all. To observe “Nature’s holy plan” (p. 31), a
phrase from Wordsworth that Hardy uses sarcastically to describe the
family unit, is to understand the tyranny of parents over their offspring:
If the heads of the Durbeyfield household chose to sail into difficulty,
disaster, starvation, disease, degradation, death, thither were these half-
dozen little captives under hatches compelled to sail with them—six
helpless creatures, who had never been asked if they wished for life on any
terms, much less if they wished for it on such hard conditions as were
involved in being of the shiftless house of Durbeyfield (p. 31).
In a grim low burlesque scene that parallels this description, Hardy depicts
a cornfield at harvest:
Rabbits, hares, snakes, rats, mice, retreated inwards as into a fastness,
unaware of the ephemeral nature of their refuge, and of the doom that
awaited them later in the day when, their covert shrinking to a more and
more horrible narrowness, they were huddled together, friends and foes, till
the last few yards of upright wheat fell also under the teeth of the unerring
reaper, and they were every one put to death by the sticks and stones of the
harvesters (p. 109).
For all the glory of flora and fauna in his world, Hardy is more Darwinian
than sentimentalist; he subscribes to the famous vision in Tennyson’s In
Memoriam: “Nature, red in tooth and claw.” The universe is a pitiless place,
with age-old patterns of behavior repeating themselves to extinction.
But Hardy should not be condemned as a hopeless doomsayer. He is
simply reflecting what the eminent Hardy critic Michael Millgate termed
“the ancient pessimism of the rural poor” (Thomas Hardy: A Biography;
see “For Further Reading”). Hardy notes in the novel: “As Tess’s own
people down in those retreats are never tired of saying among each other in
their fatalistic way: ‘It was to be’ ” (p. 91). One could just as well quote
Thomas Hobbes’s famous view of human life: solitary, poor, nasty, brutish,
and short. In any event, Hardy’s depictions of existential anguish, pragmatic
and based on the rigors of experience, serve to highlight humanity’s plight,
to draw attention to perceived injustice. When his characters suffer social
ostracism, readers are supposed to protest, as they did in great numbers.
Labeled a pessimist, Hardy told an interviewer that he preferred to be called
a pessimistic meliorist: someone who believes in improvement while
remaining gloomy about how much can be achieved. His novels speak out
against unfair labor practices, sexual hypocrisy, and other double standards.
What Hardy helped to spur, and was partly spurred by, was the
questioning of set ways. Thus, Hardy’s novels reflect the birth of the social
freethinker, the New Man and the New Woman: Angel Clare; Jude Fawley
in Jude the Obscure, his eyes fixed on Christminster (Hardy’s stand-in for
Oxford) and a living for a self-educated fellow like him; Sue Bridehead,
who is independent enough to leave her husband; Eustacia Vye in The
Return of the Native, out of place in Egdon Heath; and to some extent Tess
herself, questioning why she is the one who suffers in a tragedy of mythic
proportions. All are linked by an awareness that something is wrong, gone,
or not yet arrived, just as they also have visions of change, though in certain
ways they are still emotionally tied to a vanishing world.
For Tess, a great divide exists between the intellectual realization that
she’s been wronged and the pulls of love and shame that almost rip her
apart. That Alec d’Urberville has violated her is a sin she is forced to live
with; that Angel Clare cannot love a woman so despoiled makes life
unbearable for her; that she is the victim in this entanglement finally leads
her to seek her own sort of justice—by committing an unredeemable act.
Tess’s problem is half how society judges her; the other half is her own
tortured consciousness. Her mother, who counseled her not to reveal the
truth about her past, understands better than her daughter how society
works. But Tess initially feels that she is somehow at fault, just as Jude the
Obscure’s Sue Bridehead feels guilt at leaving her husband, whom she
doesn’t love, and eventually returns to him as a sort of penance. This kind
of shame is a product of social conditioning and not simply of human
existence, yet society encompasses all but the most isolated of individuals,
and the reader cannot simply nag Tess to ignore her training. As for culture
and the human condition, the first can be ameliorated, as Hardy might put it,
whereas the second cannot.
Hardy particularly inveighs against the double standards of the time. The
social code was different for men and women in the improprieties allowed
(and still is, in most parts of the world). In the late 1800s, the figure of the
New Woman, spirited and with an emancipated vision, emerged; but as
Hardy portrays her, she is all too often stuck with an old conscience. Tess
cannot stop blaming herself or stop loving Angel, even as she acknowledges
that Alec took advantage of her innocence; and Angel, for all his talk of
social progressivism, is a hypocrite. Moreover, if Angel Clare is the New
Man, serving humanity, not God, with his “intellectual liberty,” he is still
hamstrung by old ideas of maidenly virtue. To this extent, he presents an
odd parallel to Tess: They are both independent thinkers who can’t sever
their emotional ties to social conventions. Yet Tess is pure and loyal, even
as her girlish spirits are wrecked by Alec’s assault. As Hardy observes her
afterward, no sooner does she feel cheerful than “cold reason came back to
mock her spasmodic weakness; the ghastliness of her momentary pride
would convict her, and recall her to reserved listlessness again” (p. 105).
Walking in nature, she feels herself “a figure of Guilt intruding into the
haunts of Innocence” (p. 107). Hardy also dissects Angel:
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 (p. 286).
The hard question is what can be changed and what remains unalterable.
Modern psychology tells us that self-awareness is the first step to cure. Yet
what Hardy’s characters learn about their situations doesn’t bring release
but rather tortured consciousness, as Sophocles once showed in Oedipus the
King. This is the tragic dimension of Hardy’s art, in which virtuous people
are aware of what’s happening to them but are powerless to save
themselves. The dilemma is partly situational—we live on a doomed star—
and partly psychological: if only they could learn to live with themselves.
Hardy plants emotional fixations in his characters: Tess’s adoration of
Angel; Angel’s obsession with purity At times, Hardy will step away from
the narrative action to comment, as if building a case history. Note how he
describes his protagonist:
Tess really wished to walk uprightly, while her father did nothing of the
kind; but she resembled him in being content with immediate and small
achievements, and in having no mind for laborious effort towards such petty
social advancement as could alone be effected by a family so heavily
handicapped as the once powerful d’ Urbervilles were now (p. 130).
And here Hardy sums up Angel: “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” (p.
286). In character analyses like these, Hardy acts as a precursor to Freud,
whose write-ups of his patients function as psychological narratives.
As for Tess herself, she remains a complicated individual, though based
on a type that had become a novelistic cliché, a maiden wronged. Two
tentative titles for the novel were The Body and Soul of Sue (an earlier
name for Tess) and Too Late, Beloved! The sub-title of the novel, often
omitted nowadays, remains A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented. In fact, the
situation that swallows up Tess was not that uncommon, given what little
power a country girl had in such a situation. Real-life models are thought to
derive from several women Hardy knew: a physical resemblance here, a girl
who worked as a dairymaid there, and a recalled incident concerning an
illegitimate child. Still, Tess herself is a work of art by Thomas Hardy. She
has some education and can speak above the local dialect, having passed the
Sixth Standard at school. In addition, she has a temper, as she shows in the
scene where Alec tries to scare her by riding furiously down the hill to
Trantridge with her. Even when Alec rides with her to the forest, she does
not succumb without full protest, though it takes love to complete her
martyrdom. When the second advent of Alec causes her to miss a last
chance at happiness, the vengeance she takes is swift and terrible. That Tess
eventually kills for love, so to speak, bothered many contemporary readers.
Yet as Hardy wrote in a December 1891 letter to H. W. Massingham, “the
doll of English fiction must be abolished, if England is to have a school of
fiction at all.”
As Hardy portrays her at the outset, Tess is a comely young woman of
sixteen, though she retains a few childlike aspects. Yet as the eldest of seven
surviving children, she has a caretaker role toward her siblings. As Angel
sees her, she is like a daughter of Nature, a picture of such innocence that
Hardy uses her as a stand-in for Eve, when she and Angel are the first
persons up in the mornings at the dairy. Still, her mother describes her as an
“odd maid.” She is also tried beyond her years and eventually becomes a
creature of despair. For much of the novel, she vacillates between numbness
and bitterness. Her refrain is “I wish I had never been born,” echoing the
line the chorus utters in Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus: “Never to have
been born is much the best.” Religion is of little comfort. Reflecting on her
wretched state, she thinks of the opening verse from Ecclesiastes in the
Bible, “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 eyesockets
 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 (p. 325).
In a later scene, after confronting Alec in the d’Urberville ancestral crypt,
she wonders why she is with the living rather than with the family corpses
—on the wrong side of the vault door, as she puts it.
Yet tragedy is universal, and Tess is by no means the world’s first victim.
To a modern audience, her plight may even seem quaint, with readers
assuring themselves that they would have told off both Alec and Angel in
no uncertain terms. One must return to a time when virtue for an unmarried
woman meant to be virgo intactus (literally, “an untouched virgin”). Just as
important, one must project oneself into the mind of Tess, wracked by guilt
over a crime she didn’t commit. As Hardy notes: “Let the truth be told—
women do as a rule live through such humiliations, and regain their spirits,
and again look about them with an interested eye. While there’s life there’s
hope is a conviction not so entirely unknown to the ‘betrayed’ as some
amiable theorists would have us beheve” (p. 130). Yet Tess has still to meet
Angel and become love-struck over a man who marries and then rejects her.
Perhaps she could straighten up from this cruel twist as well, but she won’t
let herself. The ancient Roman fabulist Ovid put it best when he rewrote
Virgil’s line “Love conquers all” to imply an experience more soul-rending
than uplifting: “Love is a kind of warfare.”
In any event, something tortured resides in Tess. Though some
commentators have termed such an outlook a type of female masochism,
Tess derives no pleasure of self-denial from her experience. Rather, an aura
of extreme humility hangs about her, to the point of irritating the reader—
though less so in Hardy’s day, when proper comportment for young women
dictated a modesty that we might deem repressive. In fact, to some extent,
Tess resembles a saint, with an echo of allegorical figures like Chaucer’s
patient Griselda, who endures myriad rejections from her husband before
she is welcomed back. By the time Tess meets Angel for the last time, she
has practically completed her self-abnegation. She has become like Job in
the Bible, though Job remains a holy servant, whereas Tess finds no
consolation in faith. Nor does she receive any reward, and reconciliation for
her arrives too late.
 As for the others in the novel, they range from duty-bound souls to churls
and rascals, with some in between. One of the joys in reading Hardy is
encountering regional characters, such as Mrs. Rolliver, who illegally
serves liquor at her off-license establishment under the pretext that it’s a
private club; or Dairyman Crick, whose Sunday finery is comically at odds
with his farm clothes. Three of the dairymaids at his farm, Marian, Izz
Huett, and Retty, form a cross-section of the rural labor force; they are also
a trio in love with Angel Clare, as well as Tess’s confidantes. And since
personality comes not just from environment but also from heredity, it’s
edifying to see the two adults who reared the protagonist. Tess’s father, John
Durbeyfield, an old-fashioned peddler, hearing that he’s a descendant of the
d’Urberville line, boasts that his family mausoleum has the best skeletons
around. As for his wife, Joan, who passes on rural songs, sayings, and other
lore, she too represents a vanishing past. Hardy is also fine on country
eccentrics, such as the religious sign-painter who inscribes a biblical verse
on a stile that seems to speak directly to Tess. Hardy’s country folk are his
equivalent of the chorus in classical Greek drama, echoing the popular ethos
of the day. They caution against intemperance even as they fall into it. They
work hard and feel keenly. They are the stuff of life, the people Hardy grew
up with in Dorset.
The style in which Hardy delineates his people and their predicaments is
admittedly somewhat melodramatic, but smells of reality. Tess is a powerful
mixture of love and disunity, Gothic overtones and allegory, but with a
whiff of psychology that transcends stereotypes. Yet the term realism is
slippery, as Hardy himself observes in his 1891 essay “The Science of
Fiction” (reprinted in Thomas Hardy’s Public Voice), where he claims,
“Realism is an unfortunate, an ambiguous word.” So many eras of artists
have claimed that their style—Renaissance, Romantic, or Modernist—
accurately represents the real world. A more balanced claim would be that
there are myriad ways of getting at reality. Hardy had many models upon
which to draw, from Greek drama to medieval allegory, Romantic verse,
and Gothic novels. When Alec is identified by the red coal of his cigar at a
dance, when he is linked to the image of a serpent, or simply when he calls
himself “a damn bad fellow” (p. 97), Hardy imbues him with the aspects of
the devil. In a later scene between him and Tess, Hardy rigs the effects:
“The fire flared up, and she beheld the face of d’Urberville” (p. 406). Just in
case the reader misses the supernatural associations, when Hardy arranges
Alec’s death his blood pools in the shape of an ace of hearts.
Admittedly, such imagery can seem contrived at times. Yet Hardy is also
adept at fusing naturalism with symbolism, so that the representation is
simply a piece of life with a haunting suggestive force, and this technique is
one early hallmark of Modernism. One scene that many readers recall long
after they finish the novel describes a host of small field animals doomed by
a mechanical reaper, a fearsome vision of automated death that presages the
eventual destruction of the countryside. Yet the massacre is occasioned by a
harvest that will feed the human populace, and the harvesters themselves
administer the killing blows with sticks and clubs. This type of symbol is
more open-ended than metaphors that employ direct equivalence, and
moreover seems to appear not because of authorial contrivance but rather
because life itself throws up odd parallels. Similarly, when Tess gathers the
buds called “ladies and lords” (from Jack-in-the-pulpit flowers), the act
coincides with Angel’s discussing the pastoral life in ancient Greece, which
puts Tess in mind of her similarity to the Bible’s forlorn Queen of Sheba.
While Angel continues to talk of book-learning, she peels each bud to see
whether inside it is a “lady” or a “lord” and concludes “There are always
more ladies than lords” (p. 155)—which functions as a more profound
comment on the English pastoral and women’s marital prospects than any
lecture on Greek history. Love also has nastier repercussions, epitomized in
a tale told by Dairyman Crick about a girl’s angry mother who goes after an
errant man with an umbrella and then squeezes him in a butter churn: a half-
angry, half-comic sexual metaphor.
Other comparisons are less graceful, such as when Tess baptizes her dying
baby, christening it “Sorrow.” Still, allegories are not always heavy-handed;
moreover, they can shift ground, depending on perspective. For instance,
after Alec’s spiritual conversion, Tess moves from a pure woman to a
temptress, an embodiment of the Flesh—at least to Alec. The most
satisfying allegories are drawn from human nature, an endless repository of
material.
For his plotting, Hardy borrows large-scale patterns from melodramatic
authors like William Harrison Ainsworth (1805-1882), a Lancashire
novelist who wrote Gothic narratives in English settings. An underlying
intent is to present a lesson.
Hardy’s tendency toward commentary is similar to that of William
Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863) and Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)—that
is, in the middle of describing an event, he will step out of narration to
present an essay on good and evil:
Why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer,
and practically blank as snow as yet, there should have been traced such a
coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive; why so often the coarse
appropriates the finer thus, the wrong man the woman, the wrong woman
the man, many thousand years of analytical philosophy have failed to
explain to our sense of order (p. 91).
Other passages in the novel display equally sententious rhetorical questions
regarding life and love, fate and fortune. Hardy, who once thought of
becoming a parson, has a tendency to preach. He also relies on thick
foreshadowing, such as when the sleepwalking Angel unwittingly puts Tess
in a coffin.
One of Hardy’s writing techniques is to start with a description of the
land, as in the portrait of Marlott—“a vale whose acquaintance is best made
by viewing it from the summits of the hills that surround it” (p. 17)—and
then focus on the figures in it, in this instance the May Day celebrants. The
move from panorama to close focus is a standard element in Romantic
poetry or in cinematic art, for that matter. But this descriptive mode is only
one part of a novelistic craft that, for all its sensuous lyrical passages, is as
solidly constructed as a house. At age sixteen, Hardy became an apprentice
architect, and his prose shows evidence of that skill. His plots are built upon
cause and effect, with an occasional divergence into coincidence, a
borrowing from Victorian melodrama—as shown in the very section tides
of Tess: “Phase the First,” “The Woman Pays,” and so forth.
A study of Hardy’s letters and literary journal shows that he read and
admired a wide variety of authors, from the Greco-Romans to Arthur
Schopenhauer (1788-1860), though with some disdain for the magazine
fiction of his time, which he considered too straitlaced and insincere (see
his 1890 essay “Candour in English Fiction,” reprinted in Thomas Hardy’s
Public Voice) . He has an autodidact’s zeal for displaying erudition
combined with a country man’s love of his native experience. To put it
another way: At times Hardy is a hybrid of earthiness and Henry James. For
instance, when Tess reveals her secret shame to Angel, Hardy records that
“each diamond on her neck gave a sinister wink like a toad’s” (p. 268), but
after: “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” (p. 271). This type of literary impressionism doesn’t quite trust
its readers to infer from discrete particulars and therefore includes the
anticipated effects, as well. The fiction of Conrad works similarly in that
regard.
In his preface to the Wessex edition of Tess in 1912 (see below), Hardy
states his intent to be not aggressive or didactic but merely representative,
giving more impressions than convictions. In his 1888 essay “The
Profitable Reading of Fiction” (in Thomas Hardy’s Public Voice), he claims
that “the didactic novel is so generally devoid of vraisemblance as to teach
nothing but the impossibility of tampering with natural truth to advance
dogmatic opinions.” This declaration is apt, but advice that Hardy didn’t
always follow On the other hand, many writers put forth dicta that represent
their aesthetic ideals rather than what they themselves always follow, and
the student of literature would do well to heed D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930)
in his cautionary words: “Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.”
Tess was originally published serially in the Graphic, the Fortnightly
Review, and the National Observer. Family magazines were squeamish
about anything sexually indecorous and forced Hardy to alter accordingly,
from deleting the implied rape scene to having Angel use a wheelbarrow to
carry the milkmaids over the ditch rather than hoist them over himself The
serial format and the structure it encourages also theoretically allow the
author to make alterations according to audience reaction, but in fact Hardy
had the manuscript ready before even the first installment was published.
The first edition of Tess was published in three volumes in December 1891,
followed by a second edition in 1892, then one in 1895 with many earlier
cut passages restored. The prefaces that accompany each edition serve in
part to defend the author against charges of blasphemy and indecency: the
crude way Alec treats Tess, for instance, or Hardy’s caustic mention of “the
President of the Immortals” (see p. 465), which is in fact a reference from
Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound. But as Hardy is at pains to make clear in
1891, Tess is “an attempt to give artistic form to a true sequence of things”
(p. 3). A year later, in his second preface, still defending himself, he
maintains that “a novel is an impression, not an argument, and there the
matter must rest” (p. 6). In any event, the enduring value of the novel rather
than a few critical detractors eventually decided the issue, and the Wessex
edition, uniform with the rest of Hardy’s work, accorded the novel
canonical status. As Hardy notes, it includes a few additional pages that
were excised from the manuscript, mainly having to do with the description
of female anatomy in chapter X. This edition of the novel is a reprinting of
the 1912 Wessex edition.
Where do Hardy’s sympathies lie? Certainly he raises significant social
issues, and for all his protestations against didacticism, most readers
become exercised about the moral questions involved and engage with
Hardy’s arguments. In many ways, Hardy may be considered a proto-
feminist, despite some stereotypical pronouncements about women. As he
describes Tess, for instance: “It would have denoted deficiency of
womanhood if she had not instinctively known what an argument lies in
propinquity,” and he refers to the “intuitive heart of woman” (p. 289). But
in the areas where it counted, such as giving women fair treatment, Hardy
held liberal views. The social code that shames Tess after Alec impregnates
her, for instance, is a double standard that clearly doesn’t apply to males, let
alone men of a higher class. The most poignant instance of such unfairness
is Angel’s inability to accept Tess’s sexual past, though he’s committed a
voluntary indiscretion of his own.
Like many writers before him, John Milton included, Hardy also has a
less than rosy view of marriage: two individuals yoked together under the
law and chafing under the constraints. Hardy demonstrates this prickly truth
in the recriminations of a wife whose husband has been a clumsy dancer:
“You shall catch it for this, my gentleman, when you get home!” (p. 80). He
also shows it in scenes from Joan and John Durbeyfield’s glum household.
Hardy’s own marriages, first to Emma Lavinia Gifford and later to Florence
Dugdale, may have had something to do with the gloomy marital scenarios
in his fiction. But Hardy has a point to make about society, not merely a
personal grudge. Marriage confers only social respectability, with all too
often hypocrisy beneath. For instance, Tess’s mother tells her to say nothing
about her past, and later calls her a fool for telling her husband. Given the
society in which they live, she may well be right. The inexorable rules of
logic and nature are what Hardy respects and sometimes fears, but he feels
no such regard for cultural dictates. Tess herself at one point is ashamed for
feeling despondent over her condition, “based on nothing more tangible
than a sense of condemnation under an arbitrary law of society which had
no foundation in Nature” (p. 327). The division between natural and social
law is a theme that Hardy repeatedly exposes in his novels, whether it
involves a man who deserts his wife in The Mayor of Casterbridge or a
woman who dies in childbirth, her unacknowledged stillborn baby buried
with her, in Far from the Madding Crowd. Hardy’s characters suffer keenly,
but the novels at least point toward the possibility of a kindlier spirituality
in place of the hard old verities.
To this end, Hardy depicts some cruel absolutes but by implication
espouses relativity and all it represents. With Tess as a vehicle, Hardy
declares: “Beauty to her, as to all who have felt, lay not in the thing, but in
what the thing symbolized” (p. 347). He goes even further in declaring that
what one knows and feels forms the substance of one’s life, “for the world
is only a psychological phenomenon” (p. 106). Though this view stems
partly from Hardy’s reading of philosophers like Schopenhauer, its
appearance in a nineteenth-century novel was as daring in its way as the
sexual material that offended some readers: showing Alec’s feeding Tess a
strawberry, his hand at her mouth, for instance, or presenting a heroine who
has a child out of wedlock.
These novelistic choices of material and focus have much to do with
Hardy’s singular outlook: an iconoclastic slant looking downward. He
learned self-reliance at an early age. Educated in the classics, he shows in
his writing not only Greek and Latin references but also a classical
temperament, unsparing and unsentimental. His agnosticism was based on
hard observation and lack of consoling inference. For him, the religious
worldview no longer served its old purposes of explanation and consolation.
In his well-known poem “Hap,” he blames crass casualty, or mere
happenstance, for slaying joy in the world. In Tess, when one of Hardy’s
rural eccentrics paints a biblical verse on a stileboard, the authorial voice
declares, “Some people might have cried, ‘Alas, poor Theology!’ at the
hideous defacement—the last grotesque phase of a creed that had served
mankind well in its time” (p. 100). Later, when Tess is staying late to help
harvest a field, the moon appears like “the outworn gold-leaf halo of some
worm-eaten Tuscan saint” (p. 114). Clearly, for Hardy, the old sacred order
has decayed. Yet Hardy at times nourished a belief in fatalism, and
sometimes in a world force deemed the immanent Will, borrowed from
Schopenhauer. Like James Joyce (1882-1941) and other artists brought up
in a faith that they later rejected, Hardy still uses religious props for
symbols, but without the undergirding belief, and with a mix of polytheism
and Judeo-Christianity.
A few larger questions remain. If Hardy was unhappy in his own age,
where did he seek solace? Though the past was more secure, “when faith
was a living thing” (p. 138), that state derived from mass conformity. Yet
Hardy mentions “the chronic melancholy which is taking hold of the
civilized races with the decline of belief in a beneficent Power” (p. 147).
The future bodes even worse. In Jude the Obscure, a child called Little
Father Time obsesses so much about overpopulation that he kills himself
and his siblings.
Hardy’s lifetime (1840—1928) was a period of dislocation, both good and
bad. Many ideas in Hardy’s work derive from Charles Darwin (1809-1882),
Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), and Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), among
other scientists and social engineers. To cite one instance in Tess: Hardy is
concerned with so-called devolution, as in the degeneration of lineage from
the aristocratic d‘Urberville to the lower-class Durbeyfield. As Dairyman
Crick describes it, Angel harps on the subject of old families who have
come down in the world, including, for an authorial “in” joke, the Hardys
(see p. 156). On the other hand, those like the current d’Urbervilles, who
bought out a family name, are merely rich opportunists.
Regarding the events that befall Tess, as with the doomed lovers in
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, one can point to all the old causes: family,
fate, and fortune. To tie these factors together may simply be to note that
character is destiny, as so memorably captured in Greek tragedy. Does this
mean that Hardy’s outlook is essentially tragic? In Tess he mentions “the
tragic mischief” of Tess’s drama, stating at Tess’s first meeting with Alec,
“Thus the thing began” (p. 53). The theme of belatedness runs throughout
Hardy, with missed chances and grave consequences. As Angel tells Tess,
“This hobble of being alive is rather serious” (p. 153). Yet worse than
misfortune is the desolation that follows, to the point of numbness: apathy
on Tess’s part and neglect on the part of others. Perhaps the cruelest words
in nineteenth-century literature occur in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, in which
Jude Fawley wishes for someone to guide him, “But nobody did come,
because nobody does.” Or, as Hardy puts it in Tess: “The world’s concern at
her situation—was founded on an illusion” (p. 113). Hardy’s poem “Tess’s
Lament” dwells principally on his heroine’s early sense of self-blame
—“And it was I who did it all, / Who did it all; ’Twas I who made the blow
to fall / On him who thought no guile”—and subsequent wish for oblivion
—“I cannot bear my fate as writ, / I’d have my life unbe” (see The
Complete Poems).
Yet something abides in Hardy’s characters: the human spirit. In a poem
written during World War I, “In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations,’ ” in
quest of some everlasting truths, Hardy depicts what will last after the
strife:
1
Only a man harrowing clods
In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half asleep as they stalk.
2
Only thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
Though Dynasties pass.
3
Yonder a maid and her wight
Come whispering by:
War’s annals will cloud into night
Ere their story die.
The poem places its faith in human endurance and in the perpetual events of
sowing, reaping, and love to start the cycle again. Transcendence does not
appear much in Hardy’s work, but then neither does it occur often in life.
Nonetheless, there are moments, such as when a host of nighttime revelers,
tipsy with wine after dancing, head home with moonlight halos cast on all,
when humanity seems one with nature. Such is life; such is Hardy’s vision.
Or as Hardy states during Angel’s change of heart near the end: “No man
can be always a cynic and live” (p. 398).

David Galef has published nine books: the novels Flesh and Turning
Japanese; two children’s books, The Little Red Bicycle and Tracks; two
translations of Japanese proverbs, Even Monkeys Fall from Trees and Even
a Stone Buddha Can Talk; a work of literary criticism, The Supporting Cast;
an edited anthology of essays called Second Thoughts: A Focus on
Rereading; and, most recently, the short-story collection Laugh Track. In
addition, he has written more than seventy short stories for magazines
ranging from the British Punch to the Czech Prague Revue, the Canadian
Prism International, and the American Shenandoah. His essays and reviews
have appeared in the New York Times, Newsday, the Village Voice,
Twentieth Century Literature, The Columbia History of the British Novel,
and many other places. His awards include a Henfield Foundation grant, a
Writers Exchange award from Poets & Writers, and a Mississippi Arts
Council grant, as well as residencies at Yaddo and Rag-dale. He is a
professor of English at the University of Mississippi, where he also
administers the M.F.A. program in creative writing.

Map of Wessex, prepared by Hardy in 1895.

 TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES

A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented

Poor wounded name! My bosom as a bed

Shall lodge thee.
—W SHAKESPEARE 1
 EXPLANATORY NOTE
TO THE FIRST EDITION
THE MAIN PORTION OF the following story appeared—with slight
modifications—in the Graphic newspaper; other chapters, more especially
addressed to adult readers, in the Fortnightly Review and the National
Observer, as episodic sketches. My thanks are tendered to the editors and
proprietors of those periodicals for enabling me now to piece the trunk and
limbs of the novel together, and print it complete, as originally written two
years ago.
I will just add that the story is sent out in all sincerity of purpose, as an
attempt to give artistic form to a true sequence of things; and in respect of
the book’s opinions and sentiments, I would ask any too genteel reader, who
cannot endure to have said what everybody nowadays thinks and feels, to
remember a well-worn sentence of St Jerome’s: If an offence come out of
the truth, better it is that the offence come than that the truth be concealed.1

November 1891
T.H.
 AUTHOR’S PREFACE TO THE FIFTH AND
LATER EDITIONS
THIS NOVEL BEING ONE wherein the great campaign of the heroine
begins after an event in her experience which has usually been treated as
fatal to her part of protagonist, or at least as the virtual ending of her
enterprises and hopes, it was quite contrary to avowed conventions that the
public should welcome the book, and agree with me in holding that there
was something more to be said in fiction than had been said about the
shaded side of a well-known catastrophe. But the responsive spirit in which
Tess of the d’Urbervilles has been received by the readers of England and
America, would seem to prove that the plan of laying down a story on the
lines of tacit opinion, instead of making it to square with the merely vocal
formulae of society; is not altogether a wrong one, even when exemplified
in so unequal and partial an achievement as the present. For this
responsiveness I cannot refrain from expressing my thanks; and my regret is
that, in a world where one so often hungers in vain for friendship, where
even not to be wilfully misunderstood is felt as a kindness, I shall never
meet in person these appreciative readers, male and female, and shake them
by the hand.
I include among them the reviewers—by far the majority—who have so
generously welcomed the tale. Their words show that they, like the others,
have only too largely repaired my defects of narration by their own
imaginative intuition.
Nevertheless, though the novel was intended to be neither didactic nor
aggressive, but in the scenic parts to be representative simply, and in the
contemplative to be oftener charged with impressions than with convictions,
there have been objectors both to the matter and to the rendering.
The more austere of these maintain a conscientious difference of opinion
concerning, among other things, subjects fit for art, and reveal an inability
to associate the idea of the sub-title adjective with any but the artificial and
derivative meaning which has resulted to it from the ordinances of
civilization. They ignore the meaning of the word in Nature, together with
all aesthetic claims upon it, not to mention the spiritual interpretation
afforded by the finest side of their own Christianity. Others dissent on
grounds which are intrinsically no more than an assertion that the novel
embodies the view of life prevalent at the end of the nineteenth century; and
not those of an earlier and simpler generation—an assertion which I can
only hope may be well founded. Let me repeat that a novel is an impression,
not an argument; and there the matter must rest, as one is reminded by a
passage which occurs in the letters of Schiller to Goethe on judges of this
class: “They are those who seek only their own ideas in a representation,
and prize that which should be as higher than what is. The cause of the
dispute, therefore, lies in the very first principles, and it would be utterly
impossible to come to an understanding with them.” And again: “As soon
as I observe that any one, when judging of poetical representations,
considers anything more important than the inner Necessity and Truth, I
have done with him.”1
In the introductory words to the first edition I suggested the possible
advent of the genteel person who would not be able to endure something or
other in these pages. That person duly appeared among the aforesaid
objectors. In one case he felt upset that it was not possible for him to read
the book through three times, owing to my not having made that critical
effort which “alone can prove the salvation of such an one.” In another, he
objected to such vulgar articles as the Devil’s pitchfork, a lodging-house
carving knife, and a shame-bought parasol, appearing in a respectable story.
In another place he was a gentleman who turned Christian for half-an-hour
the better to express his grief that a disrespectful phrase about the Immortals
should have been used; though the same innate gentility compelled him to
excuse the author in words of pity that one cannot be too thankful for: “He
does but give us of his best.”2 I can assure this critic that to exclaim
illogically against the gods, singular or plural, is not such an original sin of
mine as he seems to imagine. True, it may have some local originality;
though if Shakespeare were an authority on history, which perhaps he is not,
I could show that the sin was introduced into Wessex as early as Heptarchya
itself. Says Glo’ster in Lear, otherwise Ina, king of that country:
As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;
They kill us for their sport.3
The remaining two or three manipulators of Tess were of the
predetermined sort whom most writers and readers would gladly forget;
professed literary boxers, who put on their convictions for the occasion;
modern “Hammers of Heretics;” sworn Discouragers, ever on the watch to
prevent the tentative half-success from becoming the whole success later
on; who pervert plain meanings, and grow personal under the name of
practising the great historical method. However, they may have causes to
advance, privileges to guard, traditions to keep going; some of which a
mere tale-teller, who writes down how the things of the world strike him,
without any ulterior intentions whatever, has overlooked, and may by pure
inadvertence have run foul of when in the least aggressive mood. Perhaps
some passing perception, the outcome of a dream hour would, if generally
acted on, cause such an assailant considerable inconvenience with respect to
position, interests, family, servant, ox, ass, neighbour, or neighbour’s wife.
He therefore valiantly hides his personality behind a publisher’s shutters,
and cries “Shame!” So densely is the world thronged that any shifting of
positions, even the best warranted advance, galls somebody’s kibe.b Such
shiftings often begin in sentiment, and such sentiment sometimes begins in
a novel.

July 1892

The foregoing remarks were written during the early career of this story,
when a spirited public and private criticism of its points was still fresh to
the feelings. The pages are allowed to stand for what they are worth, as
something once said; but probably they would not have been written now.
Even in the short time which has elapsed since the book was first published,
some of the critics who provoked the reply have “gone down into silence,”4
as if to remind one of the infinite unimportance of both their say and mine.

January 1895

The present edition of this novel contains a few pages that have never
appeared in any previous edition. When the detached episodes were
collected as stated in the preface of 1891, these pages were overlooked,
though they were in the original manuscript. They occur in Chapter X.5
Respecting the sub-title, to which allusion was made above, I may add
that it was appended at the last moment, after reading the final proofs, as
being the estimate left in a candid mind of the heroine’s character—an
estimate that nobody would be likely to dispute. It was disputed more than
anything else in the book. Melius fuerat non scribere.c But there it stands.
The novel was first published complete, in three volumes, in November
1891.
March 1912 T.H.
PHASE THE FIRST

THE MAIDEN
 I
ON AN EVENING IN the latter part of May a middle-aged man was
walking homeward from Shaston to the village of Marlott, in the adjoining
Vale of Blakemore or Blackmoor. The pair of legs that carried him were
rickety, and there was a bias in his gait which inclined him somewhat to the
left of a straight line. He occasionally gave a smart nod, as if in
confirmation of some opinion, though he was not thinking of anything in
particular. An empty egg-basket was slung upon his arm, the nap of his hat
was ruffled, a patch being quite worn away at its brim where his thumb
came in taking it off. Presently he was met by an elderly parson astride on a
gray mare, who, as he rode, hummed a wandering tune.
“Good night t’ee,” said the man with the basket.
“Good night, Sir John,” said the parson.
The pedestrian, after another pace or two, halted, and turned round.
“Now, sir, begging your pardon; we met last market-day on this road
about this time, and I zaid ‘Good night,’ and you made reply ‘Good night,
Sir John,’ as now.”
“I did,” said the parson.
“And once before that—near a month ago.”
“I may have.”
“Then what might your meaning be in calling me ‘Sir John’ these
different times, when I be plain Jack Durbeyfield, the haggler?” d
The parson rode a step or two nearer.
“It was only my whim,” he said; and, after a moment’s hesitation: “It was
on account of a discovery I made some little time ago, whilst I was hunting
up pedigrees for the new county history. I am Parson Tringham, the
antiquary, of Stagfoot Lane. Don’t you really know, Durbeyfield, that you
are the lineal representative of the ancient and knightly family of the
d‘Urbervilles, who derive their descent from Sir Pagan d’Urberville, that
renowned knight who came from Normandy with William the Conqueror,
as appears by Battle Abbey Roll?” 1
 “Never heard it before, sir!”
“Well it’s true. Throw up your chin a moment, so that I may catch the
profile of your face better. Yes, that’s the d’Urberville nose and chin—a
little debased. Your ancestor was one of the twelve knights who assisted the
Lord of Estremavilla in Normandy in his conquest of Glamorganshire.
Branches of your family held manors over all this part of England; their
names appear in the Pipe Rolls in the time of King Stephen. In the reign of
King John one of them was rich enough to give a manor to the Knights
Hospitallers; and in Edward the Second’s time your forefather Brian was
summoned to Westminster to attend the great Council there. You declined a
little in Oliver Cromwell’s time, but to no serious extent, and in Charles the
Second’s reign you were made Knights of the Royal Oak for your loyalty.2
Aye, there have been generations of Sir Johns among you, and if
knighthood were hereditary, like a baronetcy; as it practically was in old
times, when men were knighted from father to son, you would be Sir John
now.”
“Ye don’t say so!”
“In short,” concluded the parson, decisively smacking his leg with his
switch, “there’s hardly such another family in England.”
“Daze my eyes, and isn’t there?” said Durbeyfield. “And here have I been
knocking about, year after year, from pillar to post, as if I was no more than
the commonest feller in the parish ... And how long hev this news about me
been knowed, Pa’son Tringham?”
The clergyman explained that, as far as he was aware, it had quite died out
of knowledge, and could hardly be said to be known at all. His own
investigations had begun on a day in the preceding spring when, having
been engaged in tracing the vicissitudes of the d’Urberville family he had
observed Durbeyfield’s name on his waggon, and had thereupon been led to
make inquiries about his father and grandfather till he had no doubt on the
subject.
“At first I resolved not to disturb you with such a useless piece of
information,” said he. “However, our impulses are too strong for our
judgment sometimes. I thought you might perhaps know something of it all
the while.”
 “Well, I have heard once or twice, ‘tis true, that my family had seen better
days afore they came to Blackmoor. But I took no notice o’t, thinking it to
mean that we had once kept two horses where we now keep only one. I’ve
got a wolde silver spoon, and a wold graven seal at home, too; but, Lord,
what’s a spoon and seal? ... And to think that I and these noble
d‘Urbervilles were one flesh all the time. ’Twas said that my gr‘t-grandfer
had secrets, and didn’t care to talk of where he came from ... And where do
we raise our smoke, now, parson, if I may make so bold; I mean, where do
we d’Urbervilles live?”
“You don’t live anywhere. You are extinct—as a county family.”
“That’s bad.”
“Yes—what the mendacious family chronicles call extinct in the male line
—that is, gone down—gone under.”
“Then where do we lie?”
“At Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill: rows and rows of you in your vaults, with
your effigies under Purbeck-marblef canopies.”
“And where be our family mansions and estates?”
“You haven’t any.”
“Oh? No lands neither?”
“None; though you once had ’em in abundance, as I said, for your family
consisted of numerous branches. In this county there was a seat of yours at
Kingsbere, and another at Sherton, and another at Millpond, and another at
Lullstead, and another at Wellbridge.”
“And shall we ever come into our own again?”
“Ah—that I can’t tell!”
“And what had I better do about it, sir?” asked Durbeyfield, after a pause.
“Oh—nothing, nothing; except chasten yourself with the thought of ‘how
are the mighty fallen.’3 It is a fact of some interest to the local historian and
genealogist, nothing more. There are several families among the cottagers
of this county of almost equal lustre. Good night.”
“But you’ll turn back and have a quart of beer wi’ me on the strength o‘t,
Pa’son Tringham? There’s a very pretty brew in tap at The Pure Drop—
though, to be sure, not so good as at Rolliver’s.”
“No, thank you—not this evening, Durbeyfield. You’ve had enough
already.” Concluding thus the parson rode on his way, with doubts as to his
discretion in retailing this curious bit of lore.
When he was gone Durbeyfield walked a few steps in a profound reverie,
and then sat down upon the grassy bank by the roadside, depositing his
basket before him. In a few minutes a youth appeared in the distance,
walking in the same direction as that which had been pursued by
Durbeyfield. The latter, on seeing him, held up his hand, and the lad
quickened his pace and came near.
“Boy, take up that basket! I want ’ee to go on an errand for me.”
The lath-like stripling frowned. “Who be you, then, John Durbeyfield, to
order me about and call me ‘boy’? You know my name as well as I know
yours!”
“Do you, do you? That’s the secret—that’s the secret! Now obey my
orders, and take the message I’m going to charge ’ee wi’ ... Well, Fred, I
don’t mind telling you that the secret is that I’m one of a noble race—it has
been just found out by me this present afternoon, PM.” And as he made the
announcement, Durbeyfield, declining from his sitting position, luxuriously
stretched himself out upon the bank among the daisies.
The lad stood before Durbeyfield, and contemplated his length from
crown to toe.
“Sir John d‘Urberville—that’s who I am,” continued the prostrate man.
“That is if knights were baronets—which they be. ’Tis recorded in history
all about me. Dost know of such a place, lad, as Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill?”
“Ees. I’ve been there to Greenhill Fair.”
“Well, under the church of that city there lie—”
“‘Tisn’t a city, the place I mean; leastwise ’twaddn’ when I was there
—’twas a little one-eyed, blinking sort o’ place.”
“Never you mind the place, boy, that’s not the question before us. Under
the church of that there parish lie my ancestors—hundreds of ’em—in coats
of mail and jewels, in gr’t lead coffins weighing tons and tons. There’s not a
man in the county o’ South-Wessex that’s got grander and nobler skillentons
in his family than I.”
“Oh?”
“Now take up that basket, and goo on to Marlott, and when you’ve come
to The Pure Drop Inn, tell ‘em to send a horse and carriage to me
immed’ately, to carry me hwome. And in the bottom o’ the carriage they be
to put a noggin o’ rum in a small botde, and chalk it up to my account. And
when you’ve done that goo on to my house with the basket, and tell my
wife to put away that washing, because she needn’t finish it, and wait till I
come hwome, as I’ve news to tell her.”
As the lad stood in a dubious attitude, Durbeyfield put his hand in his
pocket, and produced a shilling, one of the chronically few that he
possessed.
“Here’s for your labour, lad.”
This made a difference in the young man’s estimate of the position.
“Yes, Sir John. Thank ‘ee. Anything else I can do for ’ee, Sir John?”
“Tell ‘em at hwome that I should like for supper,—well, lamb’s fry if they
can get it; and if they can’t, black-pot; and if they can’t get that, well;
chitterlingsg will do.”
“Yes, Sir John.”
The boy took up the basket, and as he set out the notes of a brass band
were heard from the direction of the village.
“What’s that?” said Durbeyfield. “Not on account o’ I?”
“‘Tis the women’s club-walking,h Sir John. Why, your da’ter is one o’ the
members.”
“To be sure—I’d quite forgot it in my thoughts of greater things! Well,
vampi on to Marlott, will ye, and order that carriage, and maybe I’ll drive
round and inspect the club.”
The lad departed, and Durbeyfield lay waiting on the grass and daisies in
the evening sun. Not a soul passed that way for a long while, and the faint
notes of the band were the only human sounds audible within the rim of
blue hills.
 II
THE VILLAGE OF MARLOTT lay amid the north-eastern undulations of
the beautiful Vale of Blakemore or Blackmoor aforesaid, an engirdled and
secluded region, for the most part untrodden as yet by tourist or landscape-
painter, though within a four hours’ journey from London.
It is a vale whose acquaintance is best made by viewing it from the
summits of the hills that surround it—except perhaps during the droughts of
summer. An unguided ramble into its recesses in bad weather is apt to
engender dissatisfaction with its narrow, tortuous, and miry ways.
This fertile and sheltered tract of country, in which the fields are never
brown and the springs never dry, is bounded on the south by the bold chalk
ridge that embraces the prominences of Hambledon Hill, Bulbarrow,
Nettlecombe-Tout, Dogbury, High Stoy, and Bubb Down. The traveller
from the coast, who, after plodding northward for a score of miles over
calcareous downs and corn-lands, suddenly reaches the verge of one of
these escarpments, is surprised and delighted to behold, extended like a map
beneath him, a country differing absolutely from that which he has passed
through. Behind him the hills are open, the sun blazes down upon fields so
large as to give an unenclosed character to the landscape, the lanes are
white, the hedges low and plashed,j the atmosphere colourless. Here, in the
valley, the world seems to be constructed upon a smaller and more delicate
scale; the fields are mere paddocks, so reduced that from this height their
hedgerows appear a network of dark green threads overspreading the paler
green of the grass. The atmosphere beneath is languorous, and is so tinged
with azure that what artists call the middle distance partakes also of that
hue, while the horizon beyond is of the deepest ultramarine. Arable lands
are few and limited; with but slight exceptions the prospect is a broad rich
mass of grass and trees, mantling minor hills and dales within the major.
Such is the Vale of Blackmoor.
The district is of historic, no less than of topographical interest. The Vale
was known in former times as the Forest of White Hart, from a curious
legend of King Henry III’s reign,k in which the killing by a certain Thomas
de la Lynd of a beautiful white hart which the king had run down and
spared, was made the occasion of a heavy fine. In those days, and till
comparatively recent times, the country was densely wooded. Even now,
traces of its earlier condition are to be found in the old oak copses and
irregular belts of timber that yet survive upon its slopes, and the hollow-
trunked trees that shade so many of its pastures.
The forests have departed, but some old customs of their shades remain.
Many, however, linger only in a metamorphosed or disguised form. The
May-Dayl dance, for instance, was to be discerned on the afternoon under
notice, in the guise of the club revel, or “club-walking,” as it was there
called.
It was an interesting event to the younger inhabitants of Marlott, though
its real interest was not observed by the participators in the ceremony. Its
singularity lay less in the retention of a custom of walking in procession and
dancing on each anniversary than in the members being solely women. In
men’s clubs such celebrations were, though expiring, less uncommon; but
either the natural shyness of the softer sex, or a sarcastic attitude on the part
of male relatives, had denuded such women’s clubs as remained (if any
other did) of this their glory and consummation. The club of Marlott alone
lived to uphold the local Cereaha.m It had walked for hundreds of years, if
not as benefit-club, as votive sisterhood of some sort; and it walked still.
The banded ones were all dressed in white gowns—a gay survival from
Old Style days, n when cheerfulness and May-time were synonyms—days
before the habit of taking long views had reduced emotions to a
monotonous average. Their first exhibition of themselves was in a
processional march of two and two round the parish. Ideal and real clashed
slightly as the sun lit up their figures against the green hedges and creeper-
laced house-fronts; for, though the whole troop wore white garments, no
two whites were alike among them. Some approached pure blanching; some
had a bluish pallor; some worn by the older characters (which had possibly
lain by folded for many a year) inclined to a cadaverous tint, and to a
Georgiano style.
In addition to the distinction of a white frock, every woman and girl
carried in her right hand a peeled willow wand, and in her left a bunch of
white flowers. The peeling of the former, and the selection of the latter, had
been an operation of personal care.
 There were a few middle-aged and even elderly women in the train, their
silver-wiry hair and wrinkled faces, scourged by time and trouble, having
almost a grotesque, certainly a pathetic, appearance in such a jaunty
situation. In a true view, perhaps, there was more to be gathered and told of
each anxious and experienced one, to whom the years were drawing nigh
when she should say, “I have no pleasure in them,”1 than of her juvenile
comrades. But let the elder be passed over here for those under whose
bodices the life throbbed quick and warm.
The young girls formed, indeed, the majority of the band, and their heads
of luxuriant hair reflected in the sunshine every tone of gold, and black, and
brown. Some had beautiful eyes, others a beautiful nose, others a beautiful
mouth and figure: few, if any, had all. A difficulty of arranging their lips in
this crude exposure to public scrutiny, an inability to balance their heads,
and to dissociate self-consciousness from their features, was apparent in
them, and showed that they were genuine country girls, unaccustomed to
many eyes.
And as each and all of them were warmed without by the sun, so each had
a private little sun for her soul to bask in; some dream, some affection,
some hobby, at least some remote and distant hope which, though perhaps
starving to nothing, still lived on, as hopes will. Thus they were all cheerful,
and many of them merry.
They came round by The Pure Drop Inn, and were turning out of the high
road to pass through a wicket-gate into the meadows, when one of the
women said—
“The Lord-a-Lord! Why, Tess Durbeyfield, if there isn’t thy father riding
hwome in a carriage!”
A young member of the band turned her head at the exclamation. She was
a fine and handsome girl—not handsomer than some others, possibly—but
her mobile peony mouth and large innocent eyes added eloquence to colour
and shape. She wore a red ribbon in her hair, and was the only one of the
white company who could boast of such a pronounced adornment. As she
looked round Durbeyfield was seen moving along the road in a chaise
belonging to The Pure Drop, driven by a frizzle-headed brawny damsel with
her gown-sleeves rolled above her elbows. This was the cheerful servant of
that establishment, who, in her part of factotum, turned groom and ostler at
times. Durbeyfield, leaning back, and with his eyes closed luxuriously, was
waving his hand above his head, and singing in a slow recitative—
“I‘ve-got-a-gr’t-family-vault-at-Kingsbere-and knighted-forefathers-in-
lead-coffins-there! ”
The clubbists tittered, except the girl called Tess—in whom a slow heat
seemed to rise at the sense that her father was making himself foolish in
their eyes.
“He’s tired, that’s all,” she said hastily, “and he has got a lift home,
because our own horse has to rest to-day.”
“Bless thy simplicity, Tess,” said her companions. “He’s got his market-
nitch.p Haw-haw!”
“Look here; I don’t walk another inch with you, if you say any jokes
about him!” Tess cried, and the colour upon her cheeks spread over her face
and neck. In a moment her eyes grew moist, and her glance drooped to the
ground. Perceiving that they had really pained her they said no more, and
order again prevailed. Tess’s pride would not allow her to turn her head
again, to learn what her father’s meaning was, if he had any; and thus she
moved on with the whole body to the enclosure where there was to be
dancing on the green. By the time the spot was reached she had recovered
her equanimity, and tapped her neighbour with her wand and talked as
usual.
Tess Durbeyfield at this time of her life was a mere vessel of emotion
untinctured by experience. The dialect was on her tongue to some extent,
despite the village school: the characteristic intonation of that dialect for
this district being the voicing approximately rendered by the syllable UR,
probably as rich an utterance as any to be found in human speech. The
pouted-up deep red mouth to which this syllable was native had hardly as
yet settled into its definite shape, and her lower lip had a way of thrusting
the middle of her top one upward, when they closed together after a word.
Phases of her childhood lurked in her aspect still. As she walked along to-
day, for all her bouncing handsome womanliness, you could sometimes see
her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkling from her eyes; and
even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and then.
 Yet few knew, and still fewer considered this. A small minority, mainly
strangers, would look long at her in casually passing by, and grow
momentarily fascinated by her freshness, and wonder if they would ever see
her again: but to almost everybody she was a fine and picturesque country
girl, and no more.
Nothing was seen or heard further of Durbeyfield in his triumphal chariot
under the conduct of the ostleress, and the club having entered the allotted
space, dancing began. As there were no men in the company the girls
danced at first with each other, but when the hour for the close of labour
drew on, the masculine inhabitants of the village, together with other idlers
and pedestrians, gathered round the spot, and appeared inclined to negotiate
for a partner.
Among these on-lookers were three young men of a superior class,
carrying small knapsacks strapped to their shoulders, and stout sticks in
their hands. Their general likeness to each other, and their consecutive ages,
would almost have suggested that they might be, what in fact they were,
brothers. The eldest wore the white tie, high waistcoat, and thin-brimmed
hat of the regulation curate; the second was the normal undergraduate; the
appearance of the third and youngest would hardly have been sufficient to
characterize him; there was an uncribbed, uncabined aspect2 in his eyes and
attire, implying that he had hardly as yet found the entrance to his
professional groove. That he was a desultory tentative student of something
and everything might only have been predicted of him.
These three brethren told casual acquaintance that they were spending
their Whitsun holidaysq in a walking tour through the Vale of Blackmoor,
their course being south-westerly from the town of Shaston on the north-
east.
They leant over the gate by the highway, and inquired as to the meaning
of the dance and the white-frocked maids. The two elder of the brothers
were plainly not intending to linger more than a moment, but the spectacle
of a bevy of girls dancing without male partners seemed to amuse the third,
and make him in no hurry to move on. He unstrapped his knapsack, put it,
with his stick, on the hedge-bank, and opened the gate.
“What are you going to do, Angel?” asked the eldest.
 “I am inclined to go and have a fling with them. Why not all of us—just
for a minute or two—it will not detain us long?”
“No—no; nonsense!” said the first. “Dancing in public with a troop of
country hoydens—suppose we should be seen! Come along, or it will be
dark before we get to Stourcastle, and there’s no place we can sleep at
nearer than that; besides, we must get through another chapter of A
Counterblast to Agnosticism3 before we turn in, now I have taken the
trouble to bring the book.”
“All right—I’ll overtake you and Cuthbert in five minutes; don’t stop; I
give my word that I will, Felix.”
The two elder reluctantly left him and walked on, taking their brother’s
knapsack to relieve him in following, and the youngest entered the field.
“This is a thousand pities,” he said gallantly, to two or three of the girls
nearest him, as soon as there was a pause in the dance. “Where are your
partners, my dears?”
“They’ve not left off work yet,” answered one of the boldest. “They’ll be
here by and by. Till then, will you be one, sir?”
“Certainly. But what’s one among so many!”
“Better than none. ’Tis melancholy work facing and footing it to one of
your own sort, and no clipsing and collingr at all. Now, pick and choose.”
“‘Ssh—don’t be so for’ard!” said a shyer girl.
The young man, thus invited, glanced them over, and attempted some
discrimination; but, as the group were all so new to him, he could not very
well exercise it. He took almost the first that came to hand, which was not
the speaker, as she had expected; nor did it happen to be Tess Durbeyfield.
Pedigree, ancestral skeletons, monumental record, the d’Urberville
lineaments, did not help Tess in her life’s battle as yet, even to the extent of
attracting to her a dancing-partner over the heads of the commonest
peasantry. So much for Norman blood unaided by Victorian lucre.
The name of the eclipsing girl, whatever it was, has not been handed
down; but she was envied by all as the first who enjoyed the luxury of a
masculine partner that evening. Yet such was the force of example that the
village young men, who had not hastened to enter the gate while no intruder
was in the way, now dropped in quickly, and soon the couples became
leavened with rustic youth to a marked extent, till at length the plainest
woman in the club was no longer compelled to foot it on the masculine side
of the figure.
The church clock struck, when suddenly the student said that he must
leave—he had been forgetting himself—he had to join his companions. As
he fell out of the dance his eyes lighted on Tess Durbeyfield, whose own
large orbs wore, to tell the truth, the faintest aspect of reproach that he had
not chosen her. He, too, was sorry then that, owing to her backwardness, he
had not observed her; and with that in his mind he left the pasture.
On account of his long delay he started in a flying-run down the lane
westward, and had soon passed the hollow and mounted the next rise. He
had not yet overtaken his brothers, but he paused to get breath, and looked
back. He could see the white figures of the girls in the green enclosure
whirling about as they had whirled when he was among them. They seemed
to have quite forgotten him already.
All of them, except, perhaps, one. This white shape stood apart by the
hedge alone. From her position he knew it to be the pretty maiden with
whom he had not danced. Trifling as the matter was, he yet instinctively felt
that she was hurt by his oversight. He wished that he had asked her; he
wished that he had inquired her name. She was so modest, so expressive,
she had looked so soft in her thin white gown that he felt he had acted
stupidly.
However, it could not be helped, and turning, and bending himself to a
rapid walk, he dismissed the subject from his mind.
 III
As FOR TESS DURBEYFIELD, she did not easily dislodge the incident
from her consideration. She had no spirit to dance again for a long time,
though she might have had plenty of partners; but, ah! they did not speak so
nicely as the strange young man had done. It was not till the rays of the sun
had absorbed the young stranger’s retreating figure on the hill that she
shook off her temporary sadness and answered her would-be partner in the
affirmative.
She remained with her comrades till dusk, and participated with a certain
zest in the dancing; though, being heart-whole as yet, she enjoyed treading a
measure purely for its own sake; little divining when she saw “the soft
torments, the bitter sweets, the pleasing pains, and the agreeable
distresses”1 of those girls who had been wooed and won, what she herself
was capable of in that kind. The struggles and wrangles of the lads for her
hand in a jig were an amusement to her—no more; and when they became
fierce she rebuked them.
She might have stayed even later, but the incident of her father’s odd
appearance and manner returned upon the girl’s mind to make her anxious,
and wondering what had become of him she dropped away from the dancers
and bent her steps towards the end of the village at which the parental
cottage lay.
While yet many score yards off, other rhythmic sounds than those she had
quitted became audible to her; sounds that she knew well—so well. They
were a regular series of thumpings from the interior of the house,
occasioned by the violent rocking of a cradle upon a stone floor, to which
movement a feminine voice kept time by singing, in a vigorous gallopade,s
the favourite ditty of “The Spotted Cow”—2
I saw her lie do‘-own in yon’-der green gro‘-ove;
Come, love!’ and I’ll tell’ you where!’
The cradle-rocking and the song would cease simultaneously for a moment,
and an exclamation at highest vocal pitch would take the place of the
melody.
 “God bless thy dimentt eyes! And thy waxen cheeks! And thy cherry
mouth! And thy Cubit’su thighs! And every bit o’ thy blessed body!”
After this invocation the rocking and the singing would recommence, and
the “Spotted Cow” proceed as before. So matters stood when Tess opened
the door, and paused upon the mat within it surveying the scene.
The interior, in spite of the melody, struck upon the girl’s senses with an
unspeakable dreariness. From the holiday gaieties of the field—the white
gowns, the nosegays, the willow-wands, the whirling movements on the
green, the flash of gentle sentiment towards the stranger—to the yellow
melancholy of this one-candled spectacle, what a step! Besides the jar of
contrast there came to her a chill self-reproach that she had not returned
sooner, to help her mother in these domesticities, instead of indulging
herself out-of-doors.
There stood her mother amid the group of children, as Tess had left her,
hanging over the Monday washing-tub, which had now, as always, lingered
on to the end of the week. Out of that tub had come the day before—Tess
felt it with a dreadful sting of remorse—the very white frock upon her back
which she had so carelessly greened about the skirt on the damping grass—
which had been wrung up and ironed by her mother’s own hands.
As usual, Mrs Durbeyfield was balanced on one foot beside the tub, the
other being engaged in the aforesaid business of rocking her youngest child.
The cradle-rockers had done hard duty for so many years, under the weight
of so many children, on that flag-stone floor, that they were worn nearly
flat, in consequence of which a huge jerk accompanied each swing of the
cot, flinging the baby from side to side like a weaver’s shuttle, as Mrs
Durbeyfield, excited by her song, trod the rocker with all the spring that
was left in her after a long day’s seething in the suds.
Nick-knock, nick-knock, went the cradle; the candle-flame stretched itself
tall, and began jigging up and down; the water dribbled from the matron’s
elbows, and the song galloped on to the end of the verse, Mrs Durbeyfield
regarding her daughter the while. Even now, when burdened with a young
family, Joan Durbeyfield was a passionate lover of tune. No ditty floated
into Blackmoor Vale from the outer world but Tess’s mother caught up its
notation in a week.
 There still faintly beamed from the woman’s features something of the
freshness, and even the prettiness, of her youth; rendering it probable that
the personal charms which Tess could boast of were in main part her
mother’s gift, and therefore un-knightly, unhistorical.
“I’ll rock the cradle for ’ee, mother,” said the daughter gently. “Or I’ll
take off my best frock and help you wring up? I thought you had finished
long ago.”
Her mother bore Tess no ill-will for leaving the house-work to her
singlehanded efforts for so long; indeed, Joan seldom upbraided her thereon
at any time, feeling but slightly the lack of Tess’s assistance whilst her
instinctive plan for relieving herself of her labours lay in postponing them.
To-night, however, she was even in a blither mood than usual. There was a
dreaminess, a preoccupation, an exaltation, in the maternal look which the
girl could not understand.
“Well, I’m glad you’ve come,” her mother said, as soon as the last note
had passed out of her. “I want to go and fetch your father; but what’s
more’n that, I want to tell ‘ee what have happened. Y’ll be fess enough, my
poppet,v when th’st know!” (Mrs Durbeyfield habitually spoke the dialect;
her daughter who had passed the Sixth Standard in the National Schoolw
under a Londontrained mistress, spoke two languages; the dialect at home,
more or less; ordinary English abroad and to persons of quality.)
“Since I’ve been away?” Tess asked.
“Ay!”
“Had it anything to do with father’s making such a mommetx of himself
in thik carriage this afternoon? Why did ’er! I felt inclined to sink into the
ground with shame!”
“That wer all a part of the larry!y We’ve been found to be the greatest
gentlefolk in the whole county—reaching all back long before Oliver
Grumble’s time—to the days of the Pagan Turks—with monuments, and
vaults, and crests, and ‘scutcheons, and the Lord knows what all. In Saint
Charles’s days we was made Knights o’ the Royal Oak, our real name being
d’Urberville! ... Don’t that make your bosom plim?z ’Twas on this account
that your father rode home in the vlee;aa not because he’d been drinking, as
people supposed.”
 “I’m glad of that. Will it do us any good, mother?”
“O yes! ‘Tis thoughted that great things may come o’t. No doubt a
mampusabof volk of our own rank will be down here in their carriage as
soon as ’tis known. Your father learnt it on his way hwome from Shaston
and he has been telling me the whole pedigree of the matter.”
“Where is father now?” asked Tess suddenly.
Her mother gave irrelevant information by way of answer: “He called to
see the doctor to-day in Shaston. It is not consumption at all, it seems. It is
fat round his heart, ‘a says. There, it is like this.” Joan Durbeyfield, as she
spoke, curved a sodden thumb and forefinger to the shape of the letter C,
and used the other forefinger as a pointer. “‘At the present moment,’ he says
to your father, ‘your heart is enclosed all round there, and all round there;
this space is still open,‘ ’a says. ‘As soon as it do meet, so,’ ”—Mrs
Durbeyfield closed her fingers into a circle complete—“‘off you will go like
a shadder, Mr Durbeyfield,’ ‘a says. ‘You mid last ten years; you mid go off
in ten months, or ten days.’”
Tess looked alarmed. Her father possibly to go behind the eternal cloud so
soon, notwithstanding this sudden greatness!
“But where is father?” she asked again.
Her mother put on a deprecating look. “Now don’t you be bursting out
angry! The poor man—he felt so raftedac after his uplifting by the pa’son’s
news—that he went up to Rolliver’s half an hour ago. He do want to get up
his strength for his journey tomorrow with that load of beehives, which
must be delivered, family or no. He’ll have to start shortly after twelve to-
night, as the distance is so long.”
“Get up his strength!” said Tess impetuously, the tears welling in her eyes.
“O my God! Go to a public-house to get up his strength! And you as well
agreed as he, mother!”
Her rebuke and her mood seemed to fill the whole room, and to impart a
cowed look to the furniture, and candle, and children playing about, and to
her mother’s face.
“No,” said the latter touchily, “I be not agreed. I have been waiting for ’ee
to bide and keep house while I go to fetch him.”
 “I’ll go.”
“O no, Tess. You see, it would be no use.”
Tess did not expostulate. She knew what her mother’s objection meant.
Mrs Durbeyfield’s jacket and bonnet were already hanging slily upon a
chair by her side, in readiness for this contemplated jaunt, the reason for
which the matron deplored more than its necessity.
“And take the Compleat Fortune-Teller to the outhouse,” Joan continued,
rapidly wiping her hands, and donning the garments.
The Compleat Fortune-Teller was an old thick volume, which lay on a
table at her elbow, so worn by pocketing that the margins had reached the
edge of the type. Tess took it up, and her mother started.
This going to hunt up her shiftless husband at the inn was one of Mrs
Durbeyfield’s still extant enjoyments in the muck and muddle of rearing
children. To discover him at Rolliver’s, to sit there for an hour or two by his
side and dismiss all thought and care of the children during the interval,
made her happy. A sort of halo, an occidental glow, came over life then.
Troubles and other realities took on themselves a metaphysical
impalpability, sinking to mere mental phenomena for serene contemplation,
and no longer stood as pressing concretions which chafed body and soul.
The youngsters, not immediately within sight, seemed rather bright and
desirable appurtenances than otherwise; the incidents of daily life were not
without humorousness and jollity in their aspect there. She felt a little as she
had used to feel when she sat by her now wedded husband in the same spot
during his wooing, shutting her eyes to his defects of character, and
regarding him only in his ideal presentation as lover.
Tess, being left alone with the younger children, went first to the outhouse
with the fortune-telling book, and stuffed it into the thatch. A curious
fetichistic fear of this grimy volume on the part of her mother prevented her
ever allowing it to stay in the house all night, and hither it was brought back
whenever it had been consulted. Between the mother, with her fast-
perishing lumber of superstitions, folk-lore, dialect, and orally transmitted
ballads, and the daughter, with her trained National teachings and Standard
knowledge under an infinitely Revised Code,ad there was a gap of two
hundred years as ordinarily understood. When they were together the
Jacobean and the Victorian ages were juxtaposed.
 Returning along the garden path Tess mused on what the mother could
have wished to ascertain from the book on this particular day. She guessed
the recent ancestral discovery to bear upon it, but did not divine that it
solely concerned herself Dismissing this, however, she busied herself with
sprinkling the linen dried during the daytime, in company with her nine-
year-old brother Abraham, and her sister Eliza-Louisa of twelve and a half,
called
“‘Liza-Lu,” the youngest ones being put to bed. There was an interval of
four years and more between Tess and the next of the family, the two who
had filled the gap having died in their infancy, and this lent her a deputy-
maternal attitude when she was alone with her juniors. Next in juvenility to
Abraham came two more girls, Hope and Modesty; then a boy of three, and
then the baby, who had just completed his first year.
All these young souls were passengers in the Durbeyfield ship—entirely
dependent on the judgment of the two Durbeyfield adults for their
pleasures, their necessities, their health, even their existence. If the heads of
the Durbeyfield household chose to sail into difficulty, disaster, starvation,
disease, degradation, death, thither were these half-dozen little captives
under hatches compelled to sail with them—six helpless creatures, who had
never been asked if they wished for life on any terms, much less if they
wished for it on such hard conditions as were involved in being of the
shiftless house of Durbeyfield. Some people would like to know whence the
poet whose philosophy is in these days deemed as profound and trustworthy
as his song is breezy and pure, gets his authority for speaking of “Nature’s
holy plan.”3
It grew later, and neither father nor mother reappeared. Tess looked out of
the door, and took a mental journey through Marlott. The village was
shutting its eyes. Candles and lamps were being put out everywhere: she
could inwardly behold the extinguisher and the extended hand.
Her mother’s fetching simply meant one more to fetch. Tess began to
perceive that a man in indifferent health, who proposed to start on a journey
before one in the morning, ought not to be at an inn at this late hour
celebrating his ancient blood.
“Abraham,” she said to her little brother, “do you put on your hat—you
bain’t afraid?—and go up to Rolliver’s, and see what has gone wi’ father
and mother.”
The boy jumped promptly from his seat, and opened the door, and the
night swallowed him up. Half an hour passed yet again; neither man,
woman, nor child returned. Abraham, like his parents, seemed to have been
limed and caught by the ensnaring inn.
“I must go myself,” she said. in, started
‘Liza-Lu then went to bed, and less, locking them all in, started on her
way up the dark and crooked lane or street not made for hasty progress; a
street laid out before inches of land had value, and when one-handed docks
sufficiently subdivided the day.
 IV
ROLLIVER’S INN, THE SINGLE alehouse at this end of the long and
broken village, could only boast of an off-licence; hence, as nobody could
legally drink on the premises, the amount of overt accommodation for
consumers was strictly limited to a little board about six inches wide and
two yards long, fixed to the garden palings by pieces of wire, so as to form
a ledge. On this board thirsty strangers deposited their cups as they stood in
the road and drank, and threw the dregs on the dusty ground to the pattern
of Polynesia, and wished they could have a restful seat inside.
Thus the strangers. But there were also local customers who felt the same
wish; and where there’s a will there’s a way.
In a large bedroom upstairs, the window of which was thickly curtained
with a great woollen shawl lately discarded by the landlady Mrs Rolliver,
were gathered on this evening nearly a dozen persons, all seeking beatitude;
all old inhabitants of the nearer end of Marlott, and frequenters of this
retreat. Not only did the distance to The Pure Drop, the fully-licensed tavern
at the further part of the dispersed village, render its accommodation
practically unavailable for dwellers at this end; but the far more serious
question, the quality of the liquor, confirmed the prevalent opinion that it
was better to drink with Rolliver in a corner of the housetop than with the
other landlord in a wide house.’1
A gaunt four-post bedstead which stood in the room afforded sitting-space
for several persons gathered round three of its sides; a couple more men had
elevated themselves on a chest of drawers; another rested on the oak-carved
“cwoffer;”ae two on the washstand; another on the stool; and thus all were,
somehow, seated at their ease. The stage of mental comfort to which they
had arrived at this hour was one wherein their souls expanded beyond their
skins, and spread their personalities warmly through the room. In this
process the chamber and its furniture grew more and more dignified and
luxurious; the shawl hanging at the window took upon itself the richness of
tapestry; the brass handles of the chest of drawers were as golden knockers;
and the carved bed-posts seemed to have some kinship with the magnificent
pillars of Solomon’s temple.
 Mrs Durbeyfield, having quickly walked hitherward after parting from
Tess, opened the front door, crossed the downstairs room, which was in
deep gloom, and then unfastened the stair-door like one whose fingers knew
the tricks of the latches well. Her ascent of the crooked staircase was a
slower process, and her face, as it rose into the light above the last stair,
encountered the gaze of all the party assembled in the bedroom.
“—Being a few private friends I’ve asked in to keep up club-walking at
my own expense,” the landlady exclaimed at the sound of footsteps, as
glibly as a child repeating the Catechism, while she peered over the stairs.
“Oh, ‘tis you, Mrs Durbeyfield—Lard—how you frightened me!—I thought
it might be some gafferaf sent by Gover’ment.”
Mrs Durbeyfield was welcomed with glances and nods by the remainder
of the conclave, and turned to where her husband sat. He was humming
absently to himself, in a low tone: “I be as good as some folks here and
there! I’ve got a great family vault at Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill, and finer
skillentons than any man in Wessex!”
“I’ve something to tell ‘ee that’s come into my head about that—a grand
projick!” whispered his cheerful wife. “Here, John, don’t ’ee see me?” She
nudged him, while he, looking through her as through a window-pane, went
on with his recitative.
“Hush! Don’t ‘ee sing so loud, my good man,” said the landlady; “in case
any member of the Gover’ment should be passing, and take away my
licends.”
“He’s told ’ee what’s happened to us, I suppose?” asked Mrs Durbeyfield.
“Yes—in a way. D’ye think there’s any money hanging by it?”
“Ah, that’s the secret,” said Joan Durbeyfield sagely. “However, ‘tis well
to be kin to a coach, even if you don’t ride in ’en.” She dropped her public
voice, and continued in a low tone to her husband: “I’ve been thinking since
you brought the news that there’s a great rich lady out by Trantridge, on the
edge o’ The Chase, of the name of d’Urberville.”
“Hey—what’s that?” said Sir John.
She repeated the information. “That lady must be our relation,” she said.
“And my projick is to send Tess to claim kin.”
 “There is a lady of the name, now you mention it,” said Durbeyfield.
“Pa’son Tringham didn’t think of that. But she’s nothing beside we—a
junior branch of us, no doubt, hailing along since King Norman’s day”ag
While this question was being discussed neither of the pair noticed, in
their preoccupation, that little Abraham had crept into the room, and was
awaiting an opportunity of asking them to return.
“She is rich, and she’d be sure to take notice o’ the maid,” continued Mrs
Durbeyfield; “and ’twill be a very good thing. I don’t see why two branches
o’ one family should not be on visiting terms.”
“Yes; and we’ll all claim kin!” said Abraham brightly from under the
bedstead. “And we’ll all go and see her when Tess has gone to live with her;
and we’ll ride in her coach and wear black clothes!”
“How do you come here, child? What nonsense be ye talking! Go away,
and play on the stairs till father and mother be ready! ... Well, Tess ought to
go to this other member of our family. She’d be sure to win the lady—Tess
would; and likely enough ’twould lead to some noble gentleman marrying
her. In short, I know it.”
“How?”
“I tried her fate in the Fortune-Teller, and it brought out that very thing! ...
You should ha’ seen how pretty she looked to-day; her skin is as sumpleah
as a duchess’s.”
“What says the maid herself to going?”
“I’ve not asked her. She don’t know there is any such lady-relation yet.
But it would certainly put her in the way of a grand marriage, and she won’t
say nay to going.”
“Tess is queer.”
“But she’s tractable at bottom. Leave her to me.”
Though this conversation had been private, sufficient of its import
reached the understandings of those around to suggest to them that the
Durbeyfields had weightier concerns to talk of now than common folks had,
and that Tess, their pretty eldest daughter, had fine prospects in store.
“Tess is a fine figure o’ fun, as I said to myself to-day when I zeed her
vamping round parish with the rest,” observed one of the elderly boozers in
an undertone. “But Joan Durbeyfield must mind that she don’t get green
malt in floor.”ai It was a local phrase which had a peculiar meaning, and
there was no reply.
The conversation became inclusive, and presently other footsteps were
heard crossing the room below.
“—Being a few private friends asked in to-night to keep up club-walking
at my own expense.” The landlady had rapidly reused the formula she kept
on hand for intruders before she recognized that the newcomer was Tess.
Even to her mother’s gaze the girl’s young features looked sadly out of
place amid the alcoholic vapours which floated here as no unsuitable
medium for wrinkled middle-age; and hardly was a reproachful flash from
Tess’s dark eyes needed to make her father and mother rise from their seats,
hastily finish their ale, and descend the stairs behind her, Mrs Rolliver’s
caution following their footsteps.
“No noise, please, if ye’ll be so good, my dears; or I mid lose my licends,
and be summons‘d, and I don’t know what all! ’Night t’ye!”
They went home together, Tess holding one arm of her father, and Mrs
Durbeyfield the other. He had, in truth, drank very little—not a fourth of the
quantity which a systematic tippler could carry to church on a Sunday
afternoon without a hitch in his eastings aj or genuflections; but the
weakness of Sir John’s constitution made mountains of his petty sins in this
kind. On reaching the fresh air he was sufficiently unsteady to incline the
row of three at one moment as if they were marching to London, and at
another as if they were marching to Bath—which produced a comical
effect, frequent enough in families on nocturnal homegoings; and, like most
comical effects, not quite so comic after all. The two women valiantly
disguised these forced excursions and counter-marches as well as they
could from Durbeyfield their cause, and from Abraham, and from
themselves; and so they approached by degrees their own door, the head of
the family bursting suddenly into his former refrain as he drew near, as if to
fortify his soul at sight of the smallness of his present residence—
“I’ve got a fam-ily vault at Kingsbere!”
“Hush—don’t be so silly, Jacky,” said his wife. “Yours is not the only
family that was of ‘count in wold days. Look at the Anktells, and Horseys,
and the Tringhams themselves—gone to seed a’most as much as you—
though you was bigger folks than they, that’s true. Thank God, I was never
of no family, and have nothing to be ashamed of in that way!”
“Don’t you be so sure o’ that. From your naterak ’tis my belief you’ve
disgraced yourselves more than any o’ us, and was kings and queens
outright at one time.”
Tess turned the subject by saying what was far more prominent in her own
mind at the moment than thoughts of her ancestry—
“I am afraid father won’t be able to take the journey with the beehives
tomorrow so early.”
“I? I shall be all right in an hour or two,” said Durbeyfield. It was eleven
o‘clock before the family were all in bed, and two o’clock next morning
was the latest hour for starting with the beehives if they were to be
delivered to the retailers in Casterbridge before the Saturday market began,
the way thither lying by bad roads over a distance of between twenty and
thirty miles, and the horse and waggon being of the slowest. At half-past
one Mrs Durbeyfield came into the large bedroom where Tess and all her
little brothers and sisters slept.
“The poor man can’t go,” she said to her eldest daughter, whose great
eyes had opened the moment her mother’s hand touched the door.
Tess sat up in bed, lost in a vague interspace between a dream and this
information.
“But somebody must go,” she replied. “It is late for the hives already.
Swarming will soon be over for the year; and if we put off taking ‘em till
next week’s market the call for ’em will be past, and they’ll be thrown on
our hands.”
Mrs Durbeyfield looked unequal to the emergency. “Some young feller,
perhaps, would go? One of them who were so much after dancing with ’ee
yesterday,” she presently suggested.
“O no—I wouldn’t have it for the world!” declared Tess proudly. “And
letting everybody know the reason—such a thing to be ashamed of! I think I
could go if Abraham could go with me to kip me company.”
Her mother at length agreed to this arrangement. Little Abraham was
aroused from his deep sleep in a corner of the same apartment, and made to
put on his clothes while still mentally in the other world. Meanwhile Tess
had hastily dressed herself; and the twain, lighting a lantern, went out to the
stable. The rickety little waggon was already laden, and the girl led out the
horse Prince, only a degree less rickety than the vehicle.
The poor creature looked wonderingly round at the night, at the lantern, at
their two figures, as if he could not believe that at that hour, when every
living thing was intended to be in shelter and at rest, he was called upon to
go out and labour. They put a stock of candle-ends into the lantern, hung the
latter to the offside of the load, and directed the horse onward, walking at
his shoulder at first during the uphill parts of the way, in order not to
overload an animal of so little vigour. To cheer themselves as well as they
could, they made an artificial morning with the lantern, some bread and
butter, and their own conversation, the real morning being far from come.
Abraham, as he more fully awoke (for he had moved in a sort of trance so
far), began to talk of the strange shapes assumed by the various dark objects
against the sky; of this tree that looked like a raging tiger springing from a
lair; of that which resembled a giant’s head.
When they had passed the little town of Stourcastle, dumbly somnolent
under its thick brown thatch, they reached higher ground. Still higher, on
their left, the elevation called Bulbarrow or Bealbarrow, well-nigh the
highest in South Wessex, swelled into the sky; engirdled by its earthen
trenches. From hereabout the long road was fairly level for some distance
onward. They mounted in front of the waggon, and Abraham grew
reflective.
“Tess!” he said in a preparatory tone, after a silence.
“Yes, Abraham.”
“Bain’t you glad that we’ve become gentlefolk?”
“Not particular glad.”
“But you be glad that you ’m going to marry a gentleman?”
“What?” said Tess, lifting her face.
“That our great relation will help ’ee to marry a gentleman.”
“I? Our great relation? We have no such relation. What has put that into
your head?”
 “I heard ‘em talking about it up at Rolliver’s when I went to find father.
There’s a rich lady of our family out at Trantridge, and mother said that if
you claimed kin with the lady, she’d put ’ee in the way of marrying a
gentleman.”
His sister became abruptly still, and lapsed into a pondering silence.
Abraham talked on, rather for the pleasure of utterance than for audition, so
that his sister’s abstraction was of no account. He leant back against the
hives, and with upturned face made observations on the stars, whose cold
pulses were beating amid the black hollows above, in serene dissociation
from these two wisps of human life. He asked how far away those twinklers
were, and whether God was on the other side of them. But ever and anon
his childish prattle recurred to what impressed his imagination even more
deeply than the wonders of creation. If Tess were made rich by marrying a
gentleman, would she have money enough to buy a spy-glass so large that it
would draw the stars as near to her as Nettlecombe-Tout?
The renewed subject, which seemed to have impregnated the whole
family, filled Tess with impatience.
“Never mind that now!” she exclaimed.
“Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?”
“Yes.”
“All like ours?”
“I don’t know; but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples
on our stubbard-tree.al Most of them splendid and sound—a few blighted.”
“Which do we live on—a splendid one or a blighted one?”
“A blighted one.”
“‘Tis very unlucky that we didn’t pitch on a sound one, when there were
so many more of ’em!”
“Yes.”
“Is it like that really, Tess?” said Abraham, turning to her much
impressed, on reconsideration of this rare information. “How would it have
been if we had pitched on a sound one?”
“Well, father wouldn’t have coughed and creeped about as he does, and
wouldn’t have got too tipsy to go this journey; and mother wouldn’t have
been always washing, and never getting finished.”
“And you would have been a rich lady ready-made, and not have had to
be made rich by marrying a gentleman?”
“O Aby, don’t—don’t talk of that any more!”
Left to his reflections Abraham soon grew drowsy. Tess was not skilful in
the management of a horse, but she thought that she could take upon herself
the entire conduct of the load for the present, and allow Abraham to go to
sleep if he wished to do so. She made him a sort of nest in front of the
hives, in such a manner that he could not fall, and taking the reins into her
own hands, jogged on as before.
Prince required but slight attention, lacking energy for superfluous
movements of any sort. With no longer a companion to distract her, Tess
fell more deeply into reverie than ever, her back leaning against the hives.
The mute procession past her shoulders of trees and hedges became
attached to fantastic scenes outside reality and the occasional heave of the
wind became the sigh of some immense sad soul, conterminous with the
universe in space, and with history in time.
Then, examining the mesh of events in her own life, she seemed to see the
vanity of her father’s pride; the gentlemanly suitor awaiting herself in her
mother’s fancy; to see him as a grimacing personage, laughing at her
poverty, and her shrouded knightly ancestry. Everything grew more and
more extravagant, and she no longer knew how time passed. A sudden jerk
shook her in her seat, and Tess awoke from the sleep into which she, too,
had fallen.
They were a long way further on than when she had lost consciousness,
and the waggon had stopped. A hollow groan, unlike anything she had ever
heard in her life, came from the front, followed by a shout of “Hoi there!”
The lantern hanging at her waggon had gone out, but another was shining
in her face—much brighter than her own had been. Something terrible had
happened. The harness was entangled with an object which blocked the
way.
In consternation Tess jumped down, and discovered the dreadful truth.
The groan had proceeded from her father’s poor horse Prince. The morning
mail-cart, with its two noiseless wheels, speeding along these lanes like an
arrow, as it always did, had driven into her slow and unlighted equipage.
The pointed shaft of the cart had entered the breast of the unhappy Prince
like a sword, and from the wound his life’s blood was spouting in a stream,
and falling with a hiss into the road.
In her despair Tess sprang forward and put her hand upon the hole, with
the only result that she became splashed from face to skirt with the crimson
drops. Then she stood helplessly looking on. Prince also stood firm and
motionless as long as he could; till he suddenly sank down in a heap.
By this time the mail-cart man had joined her, and began dragging and
unharnessing the hot form of Prince. But he was already dead, and, seeing
that nothing more could be done immediately, the mail-cart man returned to
his own animal, which was uninjured.
“You was on the wrong side,” he said. “I am bound to go on with the
mail-bags, so that the best thing for you to do is to bide here with your load.
I’ll send somebody to help you as soon as I can. It is getting daylight, and
you have nothing to fear.”
He mounted and sped on his way; while Tess stood and waited. The
atmosphere turned pale, the birds shook themselves in the hedges, arose,
and twittered; the lane showed all its white features, and Tess showed hers,
still whiter. The huge pool of blood in front of her was already assuming the
iridescence of coagulation; and when the sun rose a hundred prismatic hues
were reflected from it. Prince lay alongside still and stark; his eyes half
open, the hole in his chest looking scarcely large enough to have let out all
that had animated him.
“‘Tis all my doing—all mine!” the girl cried, gazing at the spectacle. “No
excuse for me—none. What will mother and father live on now? Aby,
Aby!” She shook the child, who had slept soundly through the whole
disaster. “We can’t go on with our load—Prince is killed! ”
When Abraham realized all, the furrows of fifty years were extemporized
on his young face.
“Why, I danced and laughed only yesterday!” she went on to herself “To
think that I was such a fool!”
“‘Tis because we be on a blighted star, and not a sound one, isn’t it,
Tess?” murmured Abraham through his tears.
 In silence they waited through an interval which seemed endless. At
length a sound, and an approaching object, proved to them that the driver of
the mail-cart had been as good as his word. A farmer’s man from near
Stourcastle came up, leading a strong cob. He was harnessed to the waggon
of beehives in the place of Prince, and the load taken on towards
Casterbridge.
The evening of the same day saw the empty waggon reach again the spot
of the accident. Prince had lain there in the ditch since the morning; but the
place of the blood-pool was still visible in the middle of the road, though
scratched and scraped over by passing vehicles. All that was left of Prince
was now hoisted into the waggon he had formerly hauled, and with his
hoofs in the air, and his shoes shining in the setting sunlight he retraced the
eight or nine miles to Marlott.
Tess had gone back earlier. How to break the news was more than she
could think. It was a relief to her tongue to find from the faces of her
parents that they already knew of their loss, though this did not lessen the
self-reproach which she continued to heap upon herself for her negligence.
But the very shiftlessness of the household rendered the misfortune a less
terrifying one to them than it would have been to a striving family, though
in the present case it meant ruin, and in the other it would only have meant
inconvenience. In the Durbeyfield countenances there was nothing of the
red wrath that would have burnt upon the girl from parents more ambitious
for her welfare. Nobody blamed Tess as she blamed herself.
When it was discovered that the knacker and tanner would give only a
very few shillings for Prince’s carcase because of his decrepitude,
Durbeyfield rose to the occasion.
“No,” said he stoically, “I won’t sell his old body. When we d‘Urbervilles
was knights in the land, we didn’t sell our chargers for cat’s meat. Let ’em
keep their shillings! He’ve served me well in his lifetime, and I won’t part
from him now.”
He worked harder the next day in digging a grave for Prince in the garden
than he had worked for months to grow a crop for his family. When the hole
was ready, Durbeyfield and his wife tied a rope round the horse and dragged
him up the path towards it, the children following in funeral train. Abraham
and ’Liza-Lu sobbed, Hope and Modesty discharged their griefs in loud
blares which echoed from the walls; and when Prince was tumbled in they
gathered round the grave. The bread-winner had been taken away from
them; what would they do?
“Is he gone to heaven?” asked Abraham, between the sobs.
Then Durbeyfield began to shovel in the earth, and the children cried
anew. All except Tess. Her face was dry and pale, as though she regarded
herself in the light of a murderess.
 V
THE HAGGLING BUSINESS, WHICH had mainly depended on the horse,
became disorganized forthwith. Distress, if not penury, loomed in the
distance. Durbeyfield was what was locally called a slack-twisted fellow; he
had good strength to work at times; but the times could not be relied on to
coincide with the hours of requirement; and, having been unaccustomed to
the regular toil of the day-labourer, he was not particularly persistent when
they did so coincide.
Tess, meanwhile, as the one who had dragged her parents into this
quagmire, was silently wondering what she could do to help them out of it;
and then her mother broached her scheme.
“We must take the ups wi’ the downs, Tess,” said she; “and never could
your high blood have been found out at a more called-for moment. You
must try your friends. Do ye know that there is a very rich Mrs d‘Urberville
living on the outskirts o’The Chase, who must be our relation? You must go
to her and claim kin, and ask for some help in our trouble.”
“I shouldn’t care to do that,” says Tess. “If there is such a lady, ’twould be
enough for us if she were friendly—not to expect her to give us help.”
“You could win her round to do anything, my dear. Besides, perhaps
there’s more in it than you know of I’ve heard what I’ve heard, good-now”
The oppressive sense of the harm she had done led Tess to be more
deferential than she might otherwise have been to the maternal wish; but
she could not understand why her mother should find such satisfaction in
contemplating an enterprise of, to her, such doubtful profit. Her mother
might have made inquiries, and have discovered that this Mrs d’Urberville
was a lady of unequalled virtues and charity. ButTess’s pride made the part
of poor relation one of particular distaste to her.
“I’d rather try to get work,” she murmured.
“Durbeyfield, you can settle it,” said his wife, turning to where he sat in
the background. “If you say she ought to go, she will go.”
 “I don’t like my children going and making themselves beholden to
strange kin,” murmured he. “I’m the head of the no-blest branch o’ the
family, and I ought to live up to it.”
His reasons for staying away were worse to Tess than her own objection
to going. “Well, as I killed the horse, mother,” she said mournfully, “I
suppose I ought to do something. I don’t mind going and seeing her, but you
must leave it to me about asking for help. And don’t go thinking about her
making a match for me—it is silly.”
“Very well said, Tess!” observed her father sententiously.
“Who said I had such a thought?” asked Joan.
“I fancy it is in your mind, mother. But I’ll go.”
Rising early next day she walked to the hill-town called Shaston, and
there took advantage of a van which twice in the week ran from Shaston
eastward to Chaseborough, passing near Trantridge, the parish in which the
vague and mysterious Mrs d’Urberville had her residence.
Tess Durbeyfield’s route on this memorable morning lay amid the north-
eastern undulations of the Vale in which she had been born, and in which
her life had unfolded. The Vale of Blackmoor was to her the world, and its
inhabitants the races thereof From the gates and stiles of Marlott she had
looked down its length in the wondering days of infancy, and what had been
mystery to her then was not much less than mystery to her now. She had
seen daily from her chamber-window towers, villages, faint white
mansions; above all the town of Shaston standing majestically on its height;
its windows shining like lamps in the evening sun. She had hardly ever
visited the place, only a small tract even of the Vale and its environs being
known to her by close inspection. Much less had she been far outside the
valley. Every contour of the surrounding hills was as personal to her as that
of her relatives’ faces; but for what lay beyond her judgment was dependent
on the teaching of the village school, where she had held a leading place at
the time of her leaving, a year or two before this date.
In those early days she had been much loved by others of her own sex and
age, and had used to be seen about the village as one of three—all nearly of
the same year—walking home from school side by side; Tess the middle
one—in a pink print pinafore, of a finely reticulated pattern, worn over a
stuff frock that had lost its original colour for a nondescript tertiary—
marching on upon long stalky legs, in tight stockings which had little
ladder-like holes at the knees, torn by kneeling in the roads and banks in
search of vegetable and mineral treasures; her then earth-coloured hair
hanging like pot-hooks; the arms of the two outside girls resting round the
waist of Tess; her arms on the shoulders of the two supporters.
As Tess grew older, and began to see how matters stood, she felt quite a
Malthusianam towards her mother for thoughtlessly giving her so many little
sisters and brothers, when it was such a trouble to nurse and provide for
them. Her mother’s intelligence was that of a happy child: Joan Durbeyfield
was simply an additional one, and that not the eldest, to her own long
family of waiters on Providence.
However, Tess became humanely beneficent towards the small ones, and
to help them as much as possible she used, as soon as she left school, to
lend a hand at haymaking or harvesting on neighbouring farms; or, by
preference, at milking or butter-making processes, which she had learnt
when her father had owned cows; and being deft-fingered it was a kind of
work in which she excelled.
Every day seemed to throw upon her young shoulders more of the family
burdens, and that Tess should be the representative of the Durbeyfields at
the d’Urberville mansion came as a thing of course. In this instance it must
be admitted that the Durbeyfields were putting their fairest side outward.
She alighted from the van at Trantridge Cross, and ascended on foot a hill
in the direction of the district known as The Chase, on the borders of which,
as she had been informed, Mrs d’Urberville’s seat, The Slopes, would be
found. It was not a manorial home in the ordinary sense, with fields, and
pastures, and a grumbling farmer, out of whom the owner had to squeeze an
income for himself and his family by hook or by crook. It was more, far
more; a country-house built for enjoyment pure and simple, with not an acre
of troublesome land attached to it beyond what was required for residential
purposes, and for a little fancy farm kept in hand by the owner, and tended
by a bailiff.
The crimson brick lodge came first in sight, up to its eaves in dense
evergreens. Tess thought this was the mansion itself till, passing through the
side wicket with some trepidation, and onward to a point at which the drive
took a turn, the house proper stood in full view. It was of recent erection—
indeed almost new—and of the same rich red colour that formed such a
contrast with the evergreens of the lodge. Far behind the corner of the house
—which rose like a geranium bloom against the subdued colours around—
stretched the soft azure landscape of The Chase—a truly venerable tract of
forest land, one of the few remaining woodlands in England of undoubted
primaeval date, wherein Druidical mistletoe was still found on aged oaks,
and where enormous yew-trees, not planted by the hand of man, grew as
they had grown when they were pollarded for bows. All this sylvan
antiquity, however, though visible from The Slopes, was outside the
immediate boundaries of the estate.
Everything on this snug property was bright, thriving, and well kept; acres
of glass-houses stretched down the inclines to the copses at their feet.
Everything looked like money—like the last coin issued from the Mint. The
stables, partly screened by Austrian pines and evergreen oaks, and fitted
with every late appliance, were as dignified as Chapels-of-Ease. On the
extensive lawn stood an ornamental tent, its door being towards her.
Simple Tess Durbeyfield stood at gaze, in a half-alarmed attitude, on the
edge of the gravel sweep. Her feet had brought her onward to this point
before she had quite realized where she was; and now all was contrary to
her expectation.
“I thought we were an old family; but this is all new!” she said, in her
artlessness. She wished that she had not fallen in so readily with her
mother’s plans for “claiming kin,” and had endeavoured to gain assistance
nearer home.

The d‘Urbervilles—or Stoke-d’Urbervilles, as they at first called

themselves—who owned all this, were a somewhat unusual family to find
in such an old-fashioned part of the country. Parson Tringham had spoken
truly when he said that our shambling John Durbeyfield was the only really
lineal representative of the old d‘Urberville family existing in the county, or
near it; he might have added, what he knew very well, that the Stoke-
d’Urbervilles were no more d’Urbervilles of the true tree than he was
himself Yet it must be admitted that this family formed a very good stock
whereon to regraft a name which sadly wanted such renovation.
 When old Mr Simon Stoke, latterly deceased, had made his fortune as an
honest merchant (some said money-lender) in the North, he decided to settle
as a county man in the South of England, out of hail of his business district,
and in doing this he felt the necessity of recommencing with a name that
would not too readily identify him with the smart tradesman of the past, and
that would be less commonplace than the original bald stark words.
Conning for an hour in the British Museum the pages of works devoted to
extinct, half-extinct, obscured, and ruined families appertaining to the
quarter of England in which he proposed to settle, he considered that
d‘Urberville looked and sounded as well as any of them: and d’Urberville
accordingly was annexed to his own name for himself and his heirs
eternally. Yet he was not an extravagant-minded man in this, and in
constructing his family tree on the new basis was duly reasonable in
framing his intermarriages and aristocratic links, never inserting a single
title above a rank of strict moderation.
Of this work of imagination poor Tess and her parents were naturally in
ignorance—much to their discomfiture; indeed, the very possibility of such
annexations was unknown to them; who supposed that, though to be well-
favoured might be the gift of fortune, a family name came by nature.1
Tess still stood hesitating like a bather about to make his plunge, hardly
knowing whether to retreat or to persevere, when a figure came forth from
the dark triangular door of the tent. It was that of a tall young man,
smoking.
He had an almost swarthy complexion, with full lips, badly moulded,
though red and smooth, above which was a well-groomed black moustache
with curled points, though his age could not be more than three- or four-
and-twenty. Despite the touches of barbarism in his contours, there was a
singular force in the gentleman’s face, and in his bold rolling eye.
“Well, my Beauty, what can I do for you?” said he, coming forward. And
perceiving that she stood quite confounded: “Never mind me. I am Mr
d’Urberville. Have you come to see me or my mother?”
This embodiment of a d‘Urberville and a namesake differed even more
from what Tess had expected than the house and grounds had differed. She
had dreamed of an aged and dignified face, the sublimation of all the
d’Urberville lineaments, furrowed with incarnate memories representing in
hieroglyphic the centuries of her family’s and England’s history. But she
screwed herself up to the work in hand, since she could not get out of it, and
answered—
“I came to see your mother, sir.”
“I am afraid you cannot see her—she is an invalid,” replied the present
representative of the spurious house; for this was Mr Alec, the only son of
the lately deceased gentleman. “Cannot I answer your purpose? What is the
business you wish to see her about?”
“It isn’t business—it is—I can hardly say what!”
“Pleasure?”
“Oh no. Why, sir, if I tell you, it will seem—”
Tess’s sense of a certain ludicrousness in her errand was now so strong
that, notwithstanding her awe of him, and her general discomfort at being
here, her rosy lips curved towards a smile, much to the attraction of the
swarthy Alexander.
“It is so very foolish,” she stammered; “I fear I can’t tell you!”
“Never mind; I like foolish things. Try again, my dear,” said he kindly.
“Mother asked me to come,” Tess continued; “and, indeed, I was in the
mind to do so myself likewise. But I did not think it would be like this. I
came, sir, to tell you that we are of the same family as you.”
“Ho! Poor relations?”
“Yes.”
“Stokes?”
“No; d’Urbervilles.”
“Ay, ay; I mean d’Urbervilles.”
“Our names are worn away to Durbeyfield; but we have several proofs
that we are d’Urbervilles. Antiquarians hold we are,—and—and we have an
old seal, marked with a ramping lion on a shield, and a castle over him. And
we have a very old silver spoon, round in the bowl like a little ladle, and
marked with the same castle. But it is so worn that mother uses it to stir the
pea-soup.”
 “A castle argent is certainly my crest,” said he blandly. “And my arms a
lion rampant.”
“And so mother said we ought to make ourselves beknown to you—as
we’ve lost our horse by a bad accident, and are the oldest branch o’ the
family.”
“Very kind of your mother, I’m sure. And I, for one, don’t regret her
step.” Alec looked at Tess as he spoke, in a way that made her blush a little.
“And so, my pretty girl, you’ve come on a friendly visit to us, as relations?”
“I suppose I have,” faltered Tess, looking uncomfortable again.
“Well—there’s no harm in it. Where do you live? What are you?”
She gave him brief particulars; and responding to further inquiries told
him that she was intending to go back by the same carrier who had brought
her.
“It is a long while before he returns past Trantridge Cross. Supposing we
walk round the grounds to pass the time, my pretty Coz?”
Tess wished to abridge her visit as much as possible; but the young man
was pressing, and she consented to accompany him. He conducted her
about the lawns, and flower-beds, and conservatories; and thence to the
fruit-garden and green-houses, where he asked her if she liked strawberries.
“Yes,” said Tess, “when they come.”
“They are already here.” D’Urberville began gathering specimens of the
fruit for her, handing them back to her as he stooped; and, presently,
selecting a specially fine product of the “British Queen” variety, he stood up
and held it by the stem to her mouth.
“No—no!” she said quickly, putting her fingers between his hand and her
lips. “I would rather take it in my own hand.”
“Nonsense!” he insisted; and in a slight distress she parted her lips and
took it in.
They had spent some time wandering desultorily thus. Tess eating in a
half-pleased, half-reluctant state whatever d’Urberville offered her. When
she could consume no more of the strawberries he filled her little basket
with them; and then the two passed round to the rose trees, whence he
gathered blossoms and gave her to put in her bosom. She obeyed like one in
a dream, and when she could affix no more he himself tucked a bud or two
into her hat, and heaped her basket with others in the prodigality of his
bounty. At last, looking at his watch, he said, “Now, by the time you have
had something to eat, it will be time for you to leave, if you want to catch
the carrier to Shaston. Come here, and I’ll see what grub I can find.”
Stoke-d’Urberville took her back to the lawn and into the tent, where he
left her, soon reappearing with a basket of light luncheon, which he put
before her himself. It was evidently the gentleman’s wish not to be
disturbed in this pleasant tête-à-tête by the servantry.
“Do you mind my smoking?” he asked.
“Oh, not at all, sir.”
He watched her pretty and unconscious munching through the skeins of
smoke that pervaded the tent, and Tess Durbeyfield did not divine, as she
innocently looked down at the roses in her bosom, that there behind the blue
narcotic haze was potentially the “tragic mischief” of her drama—one who
stood fair to be the blood-red ray in the spectrum of her young life. She had
an attribute which amounted to a disadvantage just now; and it was this that
caused Alec d’Urberville’s eyes to rivet themselves upon her. It was a
luxuriance of aspect, a fulness of growth, which made her appear more of a
woman than she really was. She had inherited the feature from her mother
without the quality it denoted. It had troubled her mind occasionally, till her
companions had said that it was a fault which time would cure.
She soon had finished her lunch. “Now I am going home, sir,” she said,
rising.
“And what do they call you?” he asked, as he accompanied her along the
drive till they were out of sight of the house.
“Tess Durbeyfield, down at Marlott.”
“And you say your people have lost their horse?”
“I—killed him!” she answered, her eyes filling with tears as she gave
particulars of Prince’s death. “And I don’t know what to do for father on
account of it!”
“I must think if I cannot do something. My mother must find a berth for
you. But, Tess, no nonsense about ‘d’Urberville’; ‘Durbeyfield’ only, you
know—quite another name.”
 “I wish for no better, sir,” said she with something of dignity.
For a moment—only for a moment—when they were in the turning of the
drive, between the tall rhododendrons and conifers, before the lodge
became visible, he inclined his face towards her as if—but no: he thought
better of it, and let her go.
Thus the thing began. Had she perceived this meeting’s import she might
have asked why she was doomed to be seen and coveted that day by the
wrong man, and not by some other man, the right and desired one in all
respects—as nearly as humanity can supply the right and desired; yet to him
who amongst her acquaintance might have approximated to this kind, she
was but a transient impression, half forgotten.
In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call
seldom produces the corner, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour
of loving. Nature does not often say “See!” to her poor creature at a time
when seeing can lead to happy doing; or reply “Here!” to a body’s cry of
“Where?” till the hide-and-seek has become an irksome, outworn game. We
may wonder whether at the acme and summit of the human progress these
anachronisms will be corrected by a finer intuition, a closer interaction of
the social machinery than that which now jolts us round and along; but such
completeness is not to be prophesied, or even conceived as possible.
Enough that in the present case, as in millions, it was not the two halves of a
perfect whole that confronted each other at the perfect moment; a missing
counterpart wandered independently about the earth waiting in crass
obtuseness till the late time came. Out of which maladroit delay sprang
anxieties, disappointments, shocks, catastrophes, and passing-strange
destinies.
When d’Urberville got back to the tent he sat down astride on a chair
reflecting, with a pleased gleam in his face. Then he broke into a loud
laugh.
“Well I’m damned! What a funny thing! Ha-ha-ha! And what a crumbyan
girl!”
 VI
TESS WENT DOWN THE hill to Trantridge Cross, and inattentively
waited to take her seat in the van returning from Chaseborough to Shaston.
She did not know what the other occupants said to her as she entered,
though she answered them; and when they had started anew she rode along
with an inward and not an outward eye.
One among her fellow-travellers addressed her more pointedly than any
had spoken before: “Why, you be quite a posy! And such roses in early
June!”
Then she became aware of the spectacle she presented to their surprised
vision: roses at her breast; roses in her hat; roses and strawberries in her
basket to the brim. She blushed, and said confusedly that the flowers had
been given to her. When the passengers were not looking she stealthily
removed the more prominent blooms from her hat and placed them in the
basket, where she covered them with her handkerchief. Then she fell to
reflecting again, and in looking downwards a thorn of the rose remaining in
her breast accidentally pricked her chin. Like all the cottagers in Blackmoor
Vale, Tess was steeped in fancies and prefigurative superstitions; she
thought this an ill omen—the first she had noticed that day.
The van travelled only so far as Shaston, and there were several miles of
pedestrian descent from that mountain-town into the vale to Marlott. Her
mother had advised her to stay here for the night, at the house of a cottage-
woman they knew, if she should feel too tired to come on; and this Tess did,
not descending to her home till the following afternoon.
When she entered the house she perceived in a moment from her mother’s
triumphant manner that something had occurred in the interim.
“Oh yes; I know all about it! I told ‘ee it would be all right, and now ’tis
proved!”
“Since I’ve been away? What has?” said Tess rather wearily.
Her mother surveyed the girl up and down with arch approval, and went
on banteringly: “So you’ve brought ’em round!”
 “How do you know, mother?”
“I’ve had a letter.”
Tess then remembered that there would have been time for this.
“They say—Mrs d‘Urberville says—that she wants you to look after a
little fowl-farm which is her hobby. But this is only her artful way of getting
’ee there without raising your hopes. She’s going to own ’ ’ee as kin—that’s
the meaning o’t.”
“But I didn’t see her.”
“You zid somebody, I suppose?”
“I saw her son.”
“And did he own ’ee?”
“Well—he called me Coz.”
“An’ I knew it! Jacky—he called her Coz!” cried Joan to her husband.
“Well, he spoke to his mother, of course, and she do want ’ee there.”
“But I don’t know that I am apt at tending fowls,” said the dubious Tess.
“Then I don’t know who is apt. You’ve be’n born in the business, and
brought up in it. They that be born in a business always know more about it
than any ’prentice. Besides, that’s only just a show of something for you to
do, that you midn’t feel beholden.”
“I don’t altogether think I ought to go,” said Tess thoughtfully. “Who
wrote the letter? Will you let me look at it?”
“Mrs d’Urberville wrote it. Here it is.”
The letter was in the third person, and briefly informed Mrs Durbeyfield
that her daughter’s services would be useful to that lady in the management
of her poultry-farm, that a comfortable room would be provided for her if
she could come, and that the wages would be on a liberal scale if they liked
her.
“Oh—that’s all!” said Tess.
“You couldn’t expect her to throw her arms round ‘ee, an’ to kiss and to
coll ’ee all at once.”
Tess looked out of the window.
 “I would rather stay here with father and you,” she said.
“But why?”
“I’d rather not tell you why, mother; indeed, I don’t quite know why.”
A week afterwards she came in one evening from an unavailing search for
some light occupation in the immediate neighbourhood. Her idea had been
to get together sufficient money during the summer to purchase another
horse. Hardly had she crossed the threshold before one of the children
danced across the room, saying, “The gentleman’s been here!”
Her mother hastened to explain, smiles breaking from every inch of her
person. Mrs d‘Urberville’s son had called on horseback, having been riding
by chance in the direction of Marlott. He had wished to know, finally, in the
name of his mother, if Tess could really come to manage the old lady’s
fowl-farm or not; the lad who had hitherto superintended the birds having
proved untrustworthy. “Mr d’Urberville says you must be a good girl if you
are at all as you appear; he knows you must be worth your weight in gold.
He is very much interested in ’ee—truth to tell.”
Tess seemed for the moment really pleased to hear that she had won such
high opinion from a stranger when, in her own esteem, she had sunk so low.
“It is very good of him to think that,” she murmured; “and if I was quite
sure how it would be living there, I would go any-when.”
“He is a mighty handsome man!”
“I don’t think so,” said Tess coldly.
“Well, there’s your chance, whether or no; and I’m sure he wears a
beautiful diamond ring!”
“Yes,” said little Abraham, brightly, from the window-bench; “and I seed
it! and it did twinkle when he put his hand up to his mistarshers. Mother,
why did our grand relation keep on putting his hand up to his mistarshers?”
“Hark at that child!” cried Mrs Durbeyfield, with parenthetic admiration.
“Perhaps to show his diamond ring,” murmured Sir John, dreamily, from
his chair.
“I’ll think it over,” said Tess, leaving the room.
 “Well, she’s made a conquest O’ the younger branch of us, straight off,”
continued the matron to her husband, “and she’s a fool if she don’t follow it
up.”
“I don’t quite like my children going away from home,” said the haggler.
“As the head of the family, the rest ought to come to me.
“But do let her go, Jacky,” coaxed his poor witless wife. “He’s struck wi’
her—you can see that. He called her Coz! He’ll marry her, most likely, and
make a lady of her; and then she’ll be what her forefathers was.”
John Durbeyfield had more conceit than energy or health, and this
supposition was pleasant to him.
“Well, perhaps, that’s what young Mr d‘Urberville means,” he admitted;
“and sure enough he mid have serious thoughts about improving his blood
by linking on to the old line. Tess, the little rogue! And have she really paid
’em a visit to such an end as this?”
Meanwhile Tess was walking thoughtfully among the gooseberry-bushes
in the garden, and over Prince’s grave. When she came in her mother
pursued her advantage.
“Well, what be you going to do?” she asked.
“I wish I had seen Mrs d’Urberville,” said Tess.
“I think you mid as well settle it. Then you’ll see her soon enough.”
Her father coughed in his chair.
“I don’t know what to say!” answered the girl restlessly. “It is for you to
decide. I killed the old horse, and I suppose I ought to do something to get
ye a new one. But—but—I don’t quite like Mr d’Urberville being there!”
The children, who had made use of this idea of Tess being taken up by
their wealthy kinsfolk (which they imagined the other family to be) as a
species of dolorifugeao after the death of the horse, began to cry at Tess’s
reluctance, and teased and reproached her for hesitating.
“Tess won’t go—o—o and be made a la—a—dy of!—no, she says she wo
—o—on’t!” they wailed, with square mouths. ”And we shan’t have a nice
new horse, and lots o’ golden money to buy fairlings!ap And Tess won’t
look pretty in her best cloze no mo—o—ore!”
 Her mother chimed in to the same tune: a certain way she had of making
her labours in the house seem heavier than they were by prolonging them
indefinitely, also weighed in the argument. Her father alone preserved an
attitude of neutrality.
“I will go,” said Tess at last.
Her mother could not repress her consciousness of the nuptial Vision
conjured up by the girl’s consent.
“That’s right! For such a pretty maid as ’tis, this is a fine chance!”
Tess smiled crossly.
“I hope it is a chance for earning money. It is no other kind of chance.
You had better say nothing of that silly sort about parish.”
Mrs Durbeyfield did not promise. She was not quite sure that she did not
feel proud enough, after the visitor’s remarks, to say a good deal.
Thus it was arranged; and the young girl wrote, agreeing to be ready to set
out on any day on which she might be required. She was duly informed that
Mrs d‘Urberville was glad of her decision, and that a spring-cart should be
sent to meet her and her luggage at the top of the Vale on the day after the
morrow, when she must hold herself prepared to start. Mrs d’Urberville’s
handwriting seemed rather masculine.
“A cart?” murmured Joan Durbeyfield doubtingly. “It might have been a
carriage for her own kin!”
Having at last taken her course Tess was less restless and abstracted,
going about her business with some self-assurance in the thought of
acquiring another horse for her father by an occupation which would not be
onerous. She had hoped to be a teacher at the school, but the fates seemed
to decide otherwise.Being mentally older than her mother she did not regard
Mrs Durbeyfield’s matrimonial hopes for her in a serious aspect for a
moment. The light-minded woman had been discovering good matches for
her daughter almost from the year of her birth.
 VII
ON THE MORNING APPOINTED for her departure Tess was awake
before dawn—at the marginal minute of the dark when the grove is still
mute, save for one prophetic bird who sings with a clear-voiced conviction
that he at least knows the correct time of day, the rest preserving silence as
if equally convinced that he is mistaken. She remained upstairs packing till
breakfast-time, and then came down in her ordinary week-day clothes, her
Sunday apparel being carefully folded in her box.
Her mother expostulated. “You will never set out to see your folks
without dressing up more the dand than that?”
“But I am going to work!” said Tess.
“Well, yes,” said Mrs Durbeyfield; and in a private tone, “at first there
mid be a little pretence o’t ... But I think it will be wiser of ’ee to put your
best side outward,” she added.
“Very well; I suppose you know best,” replied Tess with calm
abandonment.
And to please her parent the girl put herself quite in Joan’s hands, saying
serenely—“Do what you like with me, mother.”
Mrs Durbeyfield was only too delighted at this tractability. First she
fetched a great basin, and washed Tess’s hair with such thoroughness that
when dried and brushed it looked twice as much as at other times. She tied
it with a broader pink ribbon than usual. Then she put upon her the white
frock that Tess had worn at the club-walking, the airy fulness of which,
supplementing her enlarged coiffure, imparted to her developing figure an
amplitude which belied her age, and might cause her to be estimated as a
woman when she was not much more than a child.
“I declare there’s a hole in my stocking-heel!” said Tess.
“Never mind holes in your stockings—they don’t speak! When I was a
maid, so long as I had a pretty bonnet the devil might ha’ found me in
heels.”
 Her mother’s pride in the girl’s appearance led her to step back, like a
painter from his easel, and survey her work as a whole.
“You must zee yourself!” she cried. “It is much better than you was
t’other day.”
As the looking-glass was only large enough to reflect a very small portion
of Tess’s person at one time, Mrs Durbeyfield hung a black cloak outside
the casement, and so made a large reflector of the panes, as it is the wont of
bedecking cottagers to do. After this she went downstairs to her husband,
who was sitting in the lower room.
“I’ll tell ‘ee what ’tis, Durbeyfield,” said she exultingly; “he’ll never have
the heart not to love her. But whatever you do, don’t zay too much to Tess
of his fancy for her, and this chance she has got. She is such an odd maid
that it mid zet her against him, or against going there, even now. If all goes
well, I shall certainly be for making some return to that pa’son at Stagfoot
Lane for telling us—dear, good man!”
However, as the moment for the girl’s setting out drew nigh, when the
first excitement of the dressing had passed off, a slight misgiving found
place in Joan Durbeyfield’s mind. It prompted the matron to say that she
would walk a little way—as far as to the point where the acclivity from the
valley began its first steep ascent to the outer world. At the top Tess was
going to be met with the spring-cart sent by the Stoke-d’Urbervilles, and
her box had already been wheeled ahead towards this summit by a lad with
trucks, to be in readiness.
Seeing their mother put on her bonnet the younger children clamoured to
go with her.
“I do want to walk a little-ways wi’ Sissy, now she’s going to marry our
gentleman-cousin, and wear fine cloze!”
“No,” said Tess, flushing and turning quickly, “I’ll hear no more o’ that!
Mother, how could you ever put such stuff into their heads?”
“Going to work, my dears, for our rich relation, and help get enough
money for a new horse,” said Mrs Durbeyfield pacifically.
“Good-bye, father,” said Tess, with a lumpy throat.
“Good-bye, my maid,” said Sir John, raising his head from his breast as
he suspended his nap, induced by a slight excess this morning in honour of
the occasion. “Well, I hope my young friend will like such a comely sample
of his own blood. And tell’n, Tess, that being sunk, quite, from our former
grandeur, I’ll sell him the tide—yes, sell it—and at no onreasonable figure.”
“Not for less than a thousand pound! cried Lady Durbeyfield.
“Tell’n—I’ll take a thousand pound. Well, I’ll take less, when I come to
think o’t. He’ll adorn it better than a poor lammickenaq feller like myself
can. Tell’n he shall hae it for a hundred. But I won’t stand upon trifles—
tell’n he shall hae it for fifty—for twenty pound! Yes, twenty pound—that’s
the lowest. Dammy, family honour is family honour, and I won’t take a
penny less!”
Tess’s eyes were too full and her voice too choked to utter the sentiments
that were in her. She turned quickly, and went out.
So the girls and their mother all walked together, a child on each side of
Tess, holding her hand, and looking at her meditatively from time to time,
as at one who was about to do great things; her mother just behind with the
smallest; the group forming a picture of honest beauty flanked by
innocence, and backed by simple-souled vanity. They followed the way till
they reached the beginning of the ascent, on the crest of which the vehicle
from Trantridge was to receive her, this limit having been fixed to save the
horse the labour of the last slope. Far away behind the first hills the cliff-
like dwellings of Shaston broke the line of the ridge. Nobody was visible in
the elevated road which skirted the ascent save the lad whom they had sent
on before them, sitting on the handle of the barrow that contained all Tess’s
worldly possessions.
“Bide here a bit, and the cart will soon come, no doubt,” said Mrs
Durbeyfield. “Yes, I see it yonder!”
It had come—appearing suddenly from behind the forehead of the nearest
upland, and stopping beside the boy with the barrow. Her mother and the
children thereupon decided to go no farther, and bidding them a hasty good-
bye Tess bent her steps up the hill.
They saw her white shape draw near to the spring-cart, on which her box
was already placed. But before she had quite reached it another vehicle shot
out from a clump of trees on the summit, came round the bend of the road
there, passed the luggage-cart, and halted beside Tess, who looked up as if
in great surprise.
 Her mother perceived, for the first time, that the second vehicle was not a
humble conveyance like the first, but a spick-and-span gig or dog-cart,
highly varnished and equipped. The driver was a young man of three- or
four-and-twenty, with a cigar between his teeth; wearing a dandy cap, drab
jacket, breeches of the same hue, white neckcloth, stick-up collar, and
brown driving-gloves—in short, he was the handsome, horsey young buck
who had visited Joan a week or two before to get her answer about Tess.
Mrs Durbeyfield clapped her hands like a child. Then she looked down,
then stared again. Could she be deceived as to the meaning of this?
“Is dat the gentleman-kinsman who’ll make Sissy a lady?” asked the
youngest child.
Meanwhile the muslined form of Tess could be seen standing still,
undecided, beside this turn-out, whose owner was talking to her. Her
seeming indecision was, in fact, more than indecision: it was misgiving. She
would have preferred the humble cart. The young man dismounted, and
appeared to urge her to ascend. She turned her face down the hill to her
relatives, and regarded the little group. Something seemed to quicken her to
a determination: possibly the thought that she had killed Prince. She
suddenly stepped up; he mounted beside her, and immediately whipped on
the horse. In a moment they had passed the slow cart with the box, and
disappeared behind the shoulder of the hill.
Directly Tess was out of sight, and the interest of the matter as a drama
was at an end, the little ones’ eyes filled with tears. The youngest child said,
“I wish poor, poor Tess wasn’t gone away to be a lady!” and, lowering the
corners of his lips, burst out crying. The new point of view was infectious,
and the next child did likewise, and then the next, till the whole three of
them wailed loud.
There were tears also in Joan Durbeyfield’s eyes as she turned to go
home. But by the time she had got back to the village she was passively
trusting to the favour of accident. However, in bed that night she sighed,
and her husband asked her what was the matter.
“Oh, I don’t know exactly,” she said. “I was thinking that perhaps it
would ha’ been better if Tess had not gone.”
“Oughtn’t ye to have thought of that before?”
 “Well, ‘tis a chance for the maid—Still, if ’twere the doing again, I
wouldn’t let her go till I had found out whether the gentleman is really a
good-hearted young man and choice over her as his kinswoman.”
“Yes, you ought, perhaps, to ha’ done that,” snored Sir John.
Joan Durbeyfield always managed to find consolation somewhere: “Well,
as one of the genuine stock, she ought to make her way with en, if she plays
her trump card aright. And if he don’t marry her afore he will after. For that
he’s all afire wi’ love for her any eye can see.”
“What’s her trump card? Her d’Urberville blood, you mean?”
“No, stupid; her face—as ’twas mine.”
 VIII
HAVING MOUNTED BESIDE HER, Alec d’Urberville drove rapidly
along the crest of the first hill, chatting compliments to Tess as they went,
the cart with her box being left far behind. Rising still, an immense
landscape stretched around them on every side; behind, the green valley of
her birth, before, a gray country of which she knew nothing except from her
first brief visit to Trantridge. Thus they reached the verge of an incline
down which the road stretched in a long straight descent of nearly a mile.
Ever since the accident with her father’s horse Tess Durbeyfield,
courageous as she naturally was, had been exceedingly timid on wheels; the
least irregularity of motion startled her. She began to get uneasy at a certain
recklessness in her conductor’s driving.
“You will go down slow, sir, I suppose?” she said with attempted
unconcern.
D’Urberville looked round upon her, nipped his cigar with the tips of his
large white centre-teeth, and allowed his lips to smile slowly of themselves.
“Why, Tess,” he answered, after another whiff or two, “it isn’t a brave
bouncing girl like you who asks that? Why, I always go down at full gallop.
There’s nothing like it for raising your spirits.”
“But perhaps you need not now?”
“Ah,” he said, shaking his head, “there are two to be reckoned with. It is
not me alone. Tib has to be considered, and she has a very queer temper.”
“Who?”
“Why, this mare. I fancy she looked round at me in a very grim way just
then. Didn’t you notice it?”
“Don’t try to frighten me, sir,” said Tess stiffly.
“Well, I don’t. If any living man can manage this horse I can:—I won’t
say any living man can do it—but if such has the power, I am he.”
“Why do you have such a horse?”
 “Ah, well may you ask it! It was my fate, I suppose. Tib has killed one
chap; and just after I bought her she nearly killed me. And then, take my
word for it, I nearly killed her. But she’s touchy still, very touchy; and one’s
life is hardly safe behind her sometimes.”
They were just beginning to descend; and it was evident that the horse,
whether of her own will or of his (the latter being the more likely), knew so
well the reckless performance expected of her that she hardly required a
hint from behind.
Down, down, they sped, the wheels humming like a top, the dog-cart
rocking right and left, its axis acquiring a slightly oblique set in relation to
the line of progress; the figure of the horse rising and falling in undulations
before them. Sometimes a wheel was off the ground, it seemed, for many
yards; sometimes a stone was sent spinning over the hedge, and flinty
sparks from the horse’s hoofs outshone the daylight. The aspect of the
straight road enlarged with their advance, the two banks dividing like a
splitting stick; one rushing past at each shoulder.
The wind blew through Tess’s white muslin to her very skin, and her
washed hair flew out behind. She was determined to show no open fear, but
she clutched d’Urberville’s rein-arm.
“Don’t touch my arm! We shall be thrown out if you do! Hold on round
my waist!”
She grasped his waist, and so they reached the bottom.
“Safe, thank God, in spite of your fooling!” said she, her face on fire.
“Tess—fie! that’s temper!” said d’Urberville.
“’Tis truth.”
“Well, you need not let go your hold of me so thanklessly the moment you
feel yourself out of danger.”
She had not considered what she had been doing; whether he were man or
woman, stick or stone, in her involuntary hold on him. Recovering her
reserve she sat without replying, and thus they reached the summit of
another declivity.
“Now then, again!” said d’Urberville.
“No, no!” said Tess. “Show more sense, do, please.”
 “But when people find themselves on one of the highest points in the
county, they must get down again,” he retorted.
He loosened rein, and away they went a second time. D’Urberville turned
his face to her as they rocked, and said, in playful raillery: “Now then, put
your arms round my waist again, as you did before, my Beauty.”
“Never!” said Tess independently, holding on as well as she could without
touching him.
“Let me put one little kiss on those holmberryar lips, Tess, or even on that
warmed cheek, and I’ll stop—on my honour, I will!”
Tess, surprised beyond measure, slid farther back still on her seat, at
which he urged the horse anew, and rocked her the more.
“Will nothing else do?” she cried at length, in desperation, her large eyes
staring at him like those of a wild animal. This dressing her up so prettily by
her mother had apparently been to lamentable purpose.
“Nothing, dear Tess,” he replied.
“Oh, I don’t know—very well; I don’t mind!” she panted miserably.
He drew rein, and as they slowed he was on the point of imprinting the
desired salute, when, as if hardly yet aware of her own modesty; she dodged
aside. His arms being occupied with the reins there was left him no power
to prevent her manoeuvre.
“Now, damn it—I’ll break both our necks!” swore her capriciously
passionate companion. “So you can go from your word like that, you young
witch, can you?”
“Very well,” said Tess, “I’ll not move since you be so determined! But I—
thought you would be kind to me, and protect me, as my kinsman!”
“Kinsman be hanged! Now!”
“But I don’t want anybody to kiss me, sir!” she implored, a big tear
beginning to roll down her face, and the corners of her mouth trembling in
her attempts not to cry. “And I wouldn’t ha’ come if I had known!”
He was inexorable, and she sat still, and d’Urberville gave her the kiss of
mastery. No sooner had he done so than she flushed with shame, took out
her handkerchief, and wiped the spot on her cheek that had been touched by
his lips. His ardour was nettled at the sight, for the act on her part had been
unconsciously done.
“You are mighty sensitive for a cottage girl!” said the young man.
Tess made no reply to this remark, of which, indeed, she did not quite
comprehend the drift, unheeding the snub she had administered by her
instinctive rub upon her cheek. She had, in fact, undone the kiss, as far as
such a thing was physically possible. With a dim sense that he was vexed
she looked steadily ahead as they trotted on near Melbury Down and
Wingreen, till she saw, to her consternation, that there was yet another
descent to be undergone.
“You shall be made sorry for that!” he resumed, his injured tone still
remaining, as he flourished the whip anew. “Unless, that is, you agree
willingly to let me do it again, and no handkerchief.”
She sighed. “Very well, sir! ” she said. “Oh—let me get my hat!”
At the moment of speaking her hat had blown off into the road, their
present speed on the upland being by no means slow. D’Urberville pulled
up, and said he would get it for her, but Tess was down on the other side.
She turned back and picked up the article.
“You look prettier with it off, upon my soul, if that’s possible,” he said,
contemplating her over the back of the vehicle. “Now then, up again!
What’s the matter?”
The hat was in place and tied, but Tess had not stepped forward.
“No, sir,” she said, revealing the red and ivory of her mouth as her eye lit
in defiant triumph; “not again, if I know it!”
“What—you won’t get up beside me?”
“No; I shall walk.”
“’Tis five or six miles yet to Trantridge.”
“I don’t care if ’tis dozens. Besides, the cart is behind.”
“You artful hussy! Now, tell me—didn’t you make that hat blow off on
purpose? I’ll swear you did!”
Her strategic silence confirmed his suspicion.
 Then d’Urberville cursed and swore at her, and called her everything he
could think of for the trick. Turning the horse suddenly he tried to drive
back upon her, and so hem her in between the gig and the hedge. But he
could not do this short of injuring her.
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself for using such wicked words!”
cried Tess with spirit, from the top of the hedge into which she had
scrambled. “I don’t like ’ee at all! I hate and detest you! I’ll go back to
mother, I will!”
D’Urberville’s bad temper cleared up at sight of hers; and he laughed
heartily.
“Well, I like you all the better,” he said. “Come, let there be peace. I’ll
never do it any more against your will. My life upon it now! ”
Still Tess could not be induced to remount. She did not, however, object
to his keeping his gig alongside her; and in this manner, at a slow pace, they
advanced towards the village of Trantridge. From time to time d’Urberville
exhibited a sort of fierce distress at the sight of the tramping he had driven
her to undertake by his misdemeanour. She might in truth have safely
trusted him now; but he had forfeited her confidence for the time, and she
kept on the ground, progressing thoughtfully, as if wondering whether it
would be wiser to return home. Her resolve, however, had been taken, and it
seemed vacillating even to childishness to abandon it now, unless for graver
reasons. How could she face her parents, get back her box, and disconcert
the whole scheme for the rehabilitation of her family on such sentimental
grounds?
A few minutes later the chimneys of The Slopes appeared in view, and in
a snug nook to the right the poultry-farm and cottage of Tess’s destination.
 IX
THE COMMUNITY OF FOWLS to which Tess had been appointed as
supervisor, purveyor, nurse, surgeon, and friend, made its head-quarters in
an old thatched cottage standing in an enclosure that had once been a
garden, but was now a trampled and sanded square. The house was overrun
with ivy, its chimney being enlarged by the boughs of the parasite to the
aspect of a ruined tower. The lower rooms were entirely given over to the
birds, who walked about them with a proprietary air, as though the place
had been built by themselves, and not by certain dusty copy-holdersas who
now lay east and west in the churchyard. The descendants of these bygone
owners felt it almost as a slight to their family when the house which had so
much of their affection, had cost so much of their forefathers’ money, and
had been in their possession for several generations before the d‘Urbervilles
came and built here, was indifferently turned into a fowlhouse by Mrs
Stoked’ Urberville as soon as the property fell into hand according to law.
“’Twas good enough for Christians in grandfather’s time,” they said.
The rooms wherein dozens of infants had wailed at their nursing now
resounded with the tapping of nascent chicks. Distracted hens in coops
occupied spots where formerly stood chairs supporting sedate agriculturists.
The chimney-corner and once blazing hearth was now filled with inverted
beehives, in which the hens laid their eggs; while out of doors the plots that
each succeeding householder had carefully shaped with his spade were torn
by the cocks in wildest fashion.
The garden in which the cottage stood was surrounded by a wall, and
could only be entered through a door.
When Tess had occupied herself about an hour the next morningin
altering and improving the arrangements, according to her skilled ideas as
the daughter of a professed poulterer, the door in the wall opened and a
servant in white cap and apron entered. She had come from the manor-
house.
“Mrs d‘Urberville wants the fowls as usual,” she said; but perceiving that
Tess did not quite understand, she explained, “Mis’ess is a old lady, and
blind.”
 “Blind!” said Tess.
Almost before her misgiving at the news could find some time to shape
itself she took, under her companion’s direction, two of the most beautiful
of the Hamburghs in her arms, and followed the maid-servant, who had
likewise taken two, to the adjacent mansion, which, though ornate and
imposing, showed traces everywhere on this side that some occupant of its
chambers could bend to the love of dumb creatures—feathers floating
within view of the front, and hencoops standing on the grass.
In a sitting-room on the ground-floor, ensconced in an armchair with her
back to the light, was the owner and mistress of the estate, a white-haired
woman of not more than sixty, or even less, wearing a large cap. She had
the mobile face frequent in those whose sight has decayed by stages, has
been laboriously striven after, and reluctantly let go, rather than the stagnant
mien apparent in persons long sightless or born blind. Tess walked up to
this lady with her feathered charges—one sitting on each arm.
“Ah, you are the young woman come to look after my birds?” said Mrs
d’Urberville, recognizing a new footstep. “I hope you will be kind to them.
My bailiff tells me you are quite the proper person. Well, where are they?
Ah, this is Strut! But he is hardly so lively to-day, is he? He is alarmed at
being handled by a stranger, I suppose. And Phena too—yes, they are a
little frightened—aren’t you, dears? But they will soon get used to you.”
While the old lady had been speaking Tess and the other maid, in
obedience to her gestures, had placed the fowls severally in her lap, and she
had felt them over from head to tail, examining their beaks, their combs, the
manes of the cocks, their wings, and their claws. Her touch enabled her to
recognize them in a moment, and to discover if a single feather were
crippled or draggled. She handled their crops, and knew what they had
eaten, and if too little or too much; her face enacting a vivid pantomime of
the criticisms passing in her mind.
The birds that the two girls had brought in were duly returned to the yard,
and the process was repeated till all the pet cocks and hens had been
submitted to the old woman—Hamburghs, Bantams, Cochins, Brahmas,
Dorkings, and such other sorts as were in fashion just then—her perception
of each visitor being seldom at fault as she received the bird upon her
knees.
 It reminded Tess of a Confirmation, in which Mrs d‘Urberville was the
bishop, the fowls the young people presented, and herself and the maid-
servant the parson and curate of the parish bringing them up. At the end of
the ceremony Mrs d’Urberville abruptly asked Tess, wrinkling and
twitching her face into undulations, “Can you whistle?”
“Whistle, Ma’am?”
“Yes, whistle tunes.”
Tess could whistle like most other country girls though the
accomplishment was one which she did not care to profess in genteel
company. However, she blandly admitted that such was the fact.
“Then you will have to practise it every day. I had a lad who did it very
well, but he has left. I want you to whistle to my bullfinches; as I cannot see
them I like to hear them, and we teach ’em airs that way. Tell her where the
cages are, Elizabeth. You must begin tomorrow, or they will go back in their
piping. They have been neglected these several days.”
“Mr d‘Urberville whistled to ’em this morning, ma’am,” said Elizabeth.
“He! Pooh!”
The old lady’s face creased into furrows of repugnance, and she made no
further reply.
Thus the reception of Tess by her fancied kinswoman terminated, and the
birds were taken back to their quarters. The girl’s surprise at Mrs
d‘Urberville’s manner was not great; for since seeing the size of the house
she had expected no more. But she was far from being aware that the old
lady had never heard a word of the so-called kinship. She gathered that no
great affection flowed between the blind woman and her son. But in that,
too, she was mistaken. Mrs d’Urberville was not the first mother compelled
to love her offspring resentfully, and to be bitterly fond.

In spite of the unpleasant initiation of the day before, Tess inclined to the
freedom and novelty of her new position in the morning when the sun
shone, now that she was once installed there; and she was curious to test her
powers in the unexpected direction asked of her, so as to ascertain her
chance of retaining her post. As soon as she was alone within the walled
garden she sat herself down on a coop, and seriously screwed up her mouth
for the long-neglected practice. She found her former ability to have
degenerated to the production of a hollow rush of wind through the lips, and
no clear note at all.
She remained fruitlessly blowing and blowing, wondering how she could
have so grown out of the art which had come by nature, till she became
aware of a movement among the ivy-boughs which cloaked the garden-wall
no less than the cottage. Looking that way she beheld a form springing from
the coping to the plot. It was Alec d’Urberville, whom she had not set eyes
on since he had conducted her the day before to the door of the gardener’s
cottage where she had lodgings.
“Upon my honour!” cried he, “there was never before such a beautiful
thing in Nature or Art as you look, ‘Cousin’ Tess [‘Cousin’ had a faint ring
of mockery]. I have been watching you from over the wall—sitting like Im-
patience on a monument,1 and pouting up that pretty red mouth to whistling
shape, and whooing and whooing, and privately swearing, and never being
able to produce a note. Why, you are quite cross because you can’t do it.”
“I may be cross, but I didn’t swear.”
“Ah! I understand why you are trying—those bullies! My mother wants
you to carry on their musical education. How selfish of her! As if attending
to these curst cocks and hens here were not enough work for any girl. I
would flatly refuse, if I were you.”
“But she wants me particularly to do it, and to be ready by tomorrow
morning.”
“Does she? Well then—I’ll give you a lesson or two.”
“Oh no, you won’t!” said Tess, withdrawing towards the door.
“Nonsense; I don’t want to touch you. See—I’ll stand on this side of the
wire-netting, and you can keep on the other; so you may feel quite safe.
Now, look here; you screw up your lips too harshly. There ’tis—so.”
He suited the action to the word, and whistled a line of “Take, O take
those lips away.”2 But the allusion was lost upon Tess.
“Now try,” said d’Urberville.
 She attempted to look reserved; her face put on a sculptural severity. But
he persisted in his demand, and at last, to get rid of him, she did put up her
lips as directed for producing a clear note; laughing distressfully, however,
and then blushing with vexation that she had laughed.
He encouraged her with “Try again!”
Tess was quite serious, painfully serious by this time; and she tried—
ultimately and unexpectedly emitting a real round sound. The momentary
pleasure of success got the better of her; her eyes enlarged, and she
involuntarily smiled in his face.
“That’s it! Now I have started you—you’ll go on beautifully. There—I
said I would not come near you; and, in spite of such temptation as never
before fell to mortal man, I’ll keep my word... Tess, do you think my
mother a queer old soul?”
“I don’t know much of her yet, sir.”
“You’ll find her so; she must be, to make you learn to whistle to her
bullfinches. I am rather out of her books just now, but you will be quite in
favour if you treat her live-stock well. Good morning. If you meet with any
difficulties and want help here, don’t go to the bailiff, come to me.”

It was in the economy of this regime that Tess Durbeyfield had undertaken
to fill a place. Her first day’s experiences were fairly typical of those which
followed through many succeeding days. A familiarity with Alec
d’Urberville’s presence—which that young man carefully cultivated in her
by playful dialogue, and by jestingly calling her his cousin when they were
alone—removed much of her original shyness of him, without, however,
implanting any feeling which could engender shyness of a new and tenderer
kind. But she was more pliable under his hands than a mere companionship
would have made her, owing to her unavoidable dependence upon his
mother, and, through that lady’s comparative helplessness, upon him.
She soon found that whistling to the bullfinches in Mrs d’Urberville’s
room was no such onerous business when she had regained the art, for she
had caught from her musical mother numerous airs that suited those
songsters admirably. A far more satisfactory time than when she practised
in the garden was this whistling by the cages each morning. Unrestrained by
the young man’s presence she threw up her mouth, put her lips near the
bars, and piped away in easeful grace to the attentive listeners.
Mrs d‘Urberville slept in a large four-post bedstead hung with heavy
damask curtains, and the bullfinches occupied the same apartment, where
they flitted about freely at certain hours, and made little white spots on the
furniture and upholstery. Once while Tess was at the window where the
cages were ranged, giving her lesson as usual, she thought she heard a
rustling behind the bed. The old lady was not present, and turning round the
girl had an impression that the toes of a pair of boots were visible below the
fringe of the curtains. Thereupon her whistling became so disjointed that the
listener, if such there were, must have discovered her suspicion of his
presence. She searched the curtains every morning after that, but never
found anybody within them. Alec d’Urberville had evidently thought better
of his freak to terrify her by an ambush of that kind.
 X
EVERY VILLAGE HAS ITS idiosyncrasy, its constitution, often its own
code of morality. The levity of some of the younger women in and about
Trantridge was marked, and was perhaps symptomatic of the choice spirit
who ruled The Slopes in that vicinity. The place had also a more abiding
defect; it drank hard. The staple conversation on the farms around was on
the uselessness of saving money; and smockfrocked arithmeticians, leaning
on their ploughs or hoes, would enter into calculations of great nicety to
prove that parish relief was a fuller provision for a man in his old age than
any which could result from savings out of their wages during a whole
lifetime.
The chief pleasure of these philosophers lay in going every Saturday
night, when work was done, to Chaseborough, a decayed market-town two
or three miles distant; and, returning in the small hours of the next morning,
to spend Sunday in sleeping off the dyspeptic effects of the curious
compounds sold to them as beer by the monopolizers of the once
independent inns.
For a long time Tess did not join in the weekly pilgrimages. But under
pressure from matrons not much older than herself—for a field-man’s
wages being as high at twenty-one as at forty; marriage was early here—
Tess at length consented to go. Her first experience of the journey afforded
her more enjoyment than she had expected, the hilariousness of the others
being quite contagious after her monotonous attention to the poultry-farm
all the week. She went again and again. Being graceful and interesting,
standing moreover on the momentary threshold of womanhood, her
appearance drew down upon her some sly regards from loungers in the
streets of Chaseborough; hence, though sometimes her journey to the town
was made independently, she always searched for her fellows at nightfall, to
have the protection of their companionship homeward.
This had gone on for a month or two when there came a Saturday in
September, on which a fair and a market coincided; and the pilgrims from
Trantridge sought double delights at the inns on that account. Tess’s
occupations made her late in setting out, so that her comrades reached the
town long before her. It was a fine September evening, just before sunset,
when yellow lights struggle with blue shades in hair-like lines, and the
atmosphere itself forms a prospect without aid from more solid objects,
except the innumerable winged insects that dance in it. Through this low-lit
mistiness Tess walked leisurely along.
She did not discover the coincidence of the market with the fair till she
had reached the place, by which time it was close upon dusk. Her limited
marketing was soon completed; and then as usual she began to look about
for some of the Trantridge cottagers.
At first she could not find them, and she was informed that most of them
had gone to what they called a private little jig at the house of a hay-trusser
and peat-dealer who had transactions with their farm. He lived in an out-of-
the-way nook of the townlet, and in trying to find her course thither her
eyes fell upon Mr d’Urberville standing at a street corner.
“What—my Beauty? You here so late?” he said.
She told him that she was simply waiting for company homeward.
“I’ll see you again,” said he over her shoulder as she went on down the
back lane.
Approaching the hay-trussers she could hear the fiddled notes of a reel
proceeding from some building in the rear; but no sound of dancing was
audible—an exceptional state of things for these parts, where as a rule the
stamping drowned the music. The front door being open she could see
straight through the house into the garden at the back as far as the shades of
night would allow; and nobody appearing to her knock she traversed the
dwelling and went up the path to the outhouse whence the sound had
attracted her.
It was a windowless erection used for storage, and from the open door
there floated into the obscurity a mist of yellow radiance, which at first Tess
thought to be illuminated smoke. But on drawing nearer she perceived that
it was a cloud of dust, lit by candles within the outhouse, whose beams
upon the haze carried forward the outline of the doorway into the wide
night of the garden.
When she came close and looked in she beheld indistinct forms racing up
and down to the figure of the dance, the silence of their footfalls arising
from their being overshoe in “scroff”—that is to say, the powdery residuum
from the storage of peat and other products, the stirring of which by their
turbulent feet created the nebulosity that involved the scene. Through this
floating, fusty debris of peat and hay, mixed with the perspirations and
warmth of the dancers, and forming together a sort of vegetohuman pollen,
the muted fiddles feebly pushed their notes, in marked contrast to the spirit
with which the measure was trodden out. They coughed as they danced, and
laughed as they coughed. Of the rushing couples there could barely be
discerned more than the high lights—the indistinctness shaping them to
satyrs clasping nymphs—a multiplicity of Pans whirling a multiplicity of
Syrinxes; Lotis attempting to elude Priapus,at and always failing.
At intervals a couple would approach the doorway for air, and the haze no
longer veiling their features, the demigods resolved themselves into the
homely personalities of her own next-door neighbours. Could Trantridge in
two or three short hours have metamorphosed itself thus madly!
Some Sileniau of the throng sat on benches and hay-trusses by the wall;
and one of them recognized her.
“The maids don’t think it respectable to dance at ‘The Flower-de-Luce,’ ”
he explained. “They don’t like to let everybody see which be their fancy-
men. Besides, the house sometimes shuts up just when their jints begin to
get greased. So we come here and send out for liquor.”
“But when be any of you going home?” asked Tess with some anxiety.
“Now—a’most directly. This is all but the last jig.”
She waited. The reel drew to a close, and some of the party were in the
mind for starting. But others would not, and another dance was formed.
This surely would end it, thought Tess. But it merged in yet another. She
became restless and uneasy; yet, having waited so long, it was necessary to
wait longer; on account of the fair the roads were dotted with roving
characters of possibly ill intent; and, though not fearful of measurable
dangers, she feared the unknown. Had she been near Marlott she would
have had less dread.
“Don’t ye be nervous, my dear good soul,” expostulated, between his
coughs, a young man with a wet face, and his straw hat so far back upon his
head that the brim encircled it like the nimbus of a saint. “What’s yer hurry?
To-morrow is Sunday, thank God, and we can sleep it off in church-time.
Now, have a turn with me?”
She did not abhor dancing, but she was not going to dance here. The
movement grew more passionate: the fiddlers behind the luminous pillar of
cloud now and then varied the air by playing on the wrong side of the
bridge or with the back of the bow. But it did not matter; the panting shapes
spun onwards.
They did not vary their partners if their inclination were to stick to
previous ones. Changing partners simply meant that a satisfactory choice
had not as yet been arrived at by one or other of the pair, and by this time
every couple had been suitably matched. It was then that the ecstasy and the
dream began, in which emotion was the matter of the universe, and matter
but an adventitious intrusion likely to hinder you from spinning where you
wanted to spin.
Suddenly there was a dull thump on the ground: a couple had fallen, and
lay in a mixed heap. The next couple, unable to check its progress, came
toppling over the obstacle. An inner cloud of dust rose around the prostrate
figures amid the general one of the room, in which a twitching
entanglement of arms and legs was discernible.
“You shall catch it for this, my gentleman, when you get home!” burst in
female accents from the human heap—those of the unhappy partner of the
man whose clumsiness had caused the mishap; she happened also to be his
recently married wife, in which assortment there was nothing unusual at
Trantridge as long as any affection remained between wedded couples; and,
indeed, it was not uncustomary in their later lives, to avoid making odd lots
of the single people between whom there might be a warm understanding.
A loud laugh from behind Tess’s back, in the shade of the garden, united
with the titter within the room. She looked round, and saw the red coal of a
cigar: Alec d’Urberville was standing there alone. He beckoned to her, and
she reluctantly retreated towards him.
“Well, my Beauty; what are you doing here?”
She was so tired after her long day and her walk that she confided her
trouble to him—that she had been waiting ever since he saw her to have
their company home, because the road at night was strange to her. “But it
seems they will never leave off, and I really think I will wait no longer.”
 “Certainly do not. I have only a saddle-horse here to-day; but come to
‘The Flower-de-Luce,’ and I’ll hire a trap, and drive you home with me.”
Tess, though flattered, had never quite got over her original mistrust of
him, and, despite their tardiness, she preferred to walk home with the work-
folk. So she answered that she was much obliged to him, but would not
trouble him. “I have said that I will wait for ’em, and they will expect me to
now.”
“Very well, Miss Independence. Please yourself... Then I shall not hurry...
My good Lord, what a kick-up they are having there!”
He had not put himself forward into the light, but some of them had
perceived him, and his presence led to a slight pause and a consideration of
how the time was flying. As soon as he had re-lit a cigar and walked away
the Trantridge people began to collect themselves from amid those who had
come in from other farms, and prepared to leave in a body. Their bundles
and baskets were gathered up, and half an hour later, when the clock-chime
sounded a quarter past eleven, they were straggling along the lane which led
up the hill towards their homes.

It was a three-mile walk, along a dry white road, made whiter tonight by the
light of the moon.
Tess soon perceived as she walked in the flock, sometimes with this one,
sometimes with that, that the fresh night air was producing staggerings and
serpentine courses among the men who had partaken too freely; some of the
more careless women also were wandering in their gait—to wit, a dark
virago, Car Darch, dubbed Queen of Spades, till lately a favourite of
d’Urberville’s; Nancy; her sister, nick-named the Queen of Diamonds; and
the young married woman who had already tumbled down. Yet however
terrestrial and lumpy their appearance just now to the mean unglamoured
eye, to themselves the case was different. They followed the road with a
sensation that they were soaring along in a supporting medium, possessed
of original and profound thoughts, themselves and surrounding nature
forming an organism of which all the parts harmoniously and joyously
interpenetrated each other. They were as sublime as the moon and stars
above them, and the moon and stars were as ardent as they.
 Tess, however, had undergone such painful experiences of this kind in her
father’s house, that the discovery of their condition spoilt the pleasure she
was beginning to feel in the moonlight journey. Yet she stuck in the party,
for reasons above given.
In the open highway they had progressed in scattered order; but now their
route was through a field-gate, and the foremost finding a difficulty in
opening it they closed up together.
This leading pedestrian was Car the Queen of Spades, who carried a
wicker-basket containing her mother’s groceries, her own draperies, and
other purchases for the week. The basket being large and heavy, Car had
placed it for convenience of porterage on the top of her head, where it rode
on in jeopardized balance as she walked with arms akimbo.
“Well—whatever is that a-creeping down thy back, Car Darch?” said one
of the group suddenly.
All looked at Car. Her gown was a light cotton print, and from the back of
her head a kind of rope could be seen descending to some distance below
her waist, like a Chinaman’s queue.
“‘Tis her hair falling down,” said another.
No; it was not her hair: it was a black stream of something oozing from
her basket, and it glistened like a slimy snake in the cold still rays of the
moon.
“‘Tis treacle,” said an observant matron.
Treacle it was. Car’s poor old grandmother had a weakness for the sweet
stuff. Honey she had in plenty out of her own hives, but treacle was what
her soul desired, and Car had been about to give her a treat of surprise.
Hastily lowering the basket the dark girl found that the vessel containing the
syrup had been smashed within.
By this time there had arisen a shout of laughter at the extraordinary
appearance of Car’s back, which irritated the dark queen into getting rid of
the disfigurement by the first sudden means available, and independently of
the help of the scoffers. She rushed excitedly into the field they were about
to cross, and flinging herself flat on her back upon the grass, began to wipe
her gown as well as she could by spinning horizontally on the herbage and
dragging herself over it up upon her elbows.
 The laughter rang louder; they clung to the gate, to the posts, rested on
their staves, in the weakness engendered by their convulsions at the
spectacle of Car. Our heroine, who had hitherto held her peace, at this wild
moment could not help joining in with the rest.
It was a misfortune—in more ways than one. No sooner did the dark
queen hear the soberer richer note of Tess among those of the other work-
people than a long smouldering sense of rivalry inflamed her to madness.
She sprang to her feet and closely faced the object of her dislike.
“How darest th’ laugh at me, hussy!” she cried.
“I couldn’t really help it when t’others did,” apologized Tess, still
tittering.
“Ah, th‘st think th’ beest everybody, dostn’t, because th’ beest first
favourite with He just now! But stop a bit, my lady, stop a bit! I’m as good
as two of such! Look here—here’s at ‘ee!”
To Tess’s horror the dark queen began stripping off the bodice of her
gown—which for the added reason of its ridiculed condition she was only
too glad to be free of—till she had bared her plump neck, shoulders, and
arms to the moonshine, under which they looked as luminous and beautiful
as some Praxiteleanav creation, in their possession of the faultless
rotundities of a lusty country girl. She closed her fists and squared up at
Tess.
“Indeed, then, I shall not fight!” said the latter majestically; “and if I had
known you was of that sort, I wouldn’t have so let myself down as to come
with such a whorage as this is!”
The rather too inclusive speech brought down a torrent of vituperation
from other quarters upon fair Tess’s unlucky head, particularly from the
Queen of Diamonds, who having stood in the relations to d’Urberville that
Car had also been suspected of, united with the latter against the common
enemy. Several other women also chimed in, with an animus which none of
them would have been so famous as to show but for the rollicking evening
they had passed. Thereupon, finding Tess unfairly browbeaten, the
husbands and lovers tried to make peace by defending her; but the result of
that attempt was directly to increase the war.
 Tess was indignant and ashamed. She no longer minded the loneliness of
the way and the lateness of the hour; her one object was to get away from
the whole crew as soon as possible. She knew well enough that the better
among them would repent of their passion next day. They were all now
inside the field, and she was edging back to rush off alone when a horseman
emerged almost silently from the corner of the hedge that screened the road,
and Alec d’Urberville looked round upon them.
“What the devil is all this row about, work-folk?” he asked.
The explanation was not readily forthcoming; and, in truth, he did not
require any. Having heard their voices while yet some way off he had
ridden creepingly forward, and learnt enough to satisfy himself
Tess was standing apart from the rest, near the gate. He bent over towards
her. “Jump up behind me,” he whispered, “and we’ll get shot of the
screaming cats in a jiffy!”
She felt almost ready to faint, so vivid was her sense of the crisis. At
almost any other moment of her life she would have refused such proffered
aid and company, as she had refused them several times before; and now the
loneliness would not of itself have forced her to do otherwise. But coming
as the invitation did at the particular juncture when fear and indignation at
these adversaries could be transformed by a spring of the foot into a
triumph over them, she abandoned herself to her impulse, climbed the gate,
put her toe upon his instep, and scrambled into the saddle behind him. The
pair were speeding away into the distant gray by the time that the
contentious revellers became aware of what had happened.
The Queen of Spades forgot the stain on her bodice, and stood beside the
Queen of Diamonds and the new-married, staggering young woman—all
with a gaze of fixity in the direction in which the horse’s tramp was
diminishing into silence on the road.
“What be ye looking at?” asked a man who had not observed the incident.
“Ho-ho-ho!” laughed dark Car.
“Hee-hee-hee!” laughed the tippling bride, as she steadied herself on the
arm of her fond husband.
“Heu-heu-heu!” laughed dark Car’s mother, stroking her moustache as
she explained laconically: “Out of the frying-pan into the fire!”
 Then these children of the open air, whom even excess of alcohol could
scarce injure permanently, betook themselves to the field-path; and as they
went there moved onward with them, around the shadow of each one’s
head, a circle of opalized light, formed by the moon’s rays upon the
glistening sheet of dew. Each pedestrian could see no halo but his or her
own, which never deserted the head-shadow, whatever its vulgar
unsteadiness might be; but adhered to it, and persistently beautified it, till
the erratic motions seemed an inherent part of the irradiation, and the fumes
of their breathing a component of the night’s mist, and the spirit of the
scene, and of the moonlight, and of Nature, seemed harmoniously to mingle
with the spirit of wine.
 XI
THE TWAIN CANTERED ALONG for some time without speech, Tess as
she clung to him still panting in her triumph, yet in other respects dubious.
She had perceived that the horse was not the spirited one he sometimes
rode, and felt no alarm on that score, though her seat was precarious enough
despite her tight hold of him. She begged him to slow the animal to a walk,
which Alec accordingly did.
“Neatly done, was it not, dear Tess?” he said by and by.
“Yes!” said she. “I am sure I ought to be much obliged to you.”
“And are you?”
She did not reply.
“Tess, why do you always dislike my kissing you?”
“I suppose—because I don’t love you.”
“You are quite sure?”
“I am angry with you sometimes!”
“Ah, I half feared as much.” Nevertheless, Alec did not object to that
confession. He knew that anything was better than frigidity. “Why haven’t
you told me when I have made you angry?”
“You know very well why. Because I cannot help myself here.”
“I haven’t offended you often by love-making?”
“You have sometimes.”
“How many times?”
“You know as well as I—too many times.”
“Every time I have tried?”
She was silent, and the horse ambled along for a considerable distance, till
a faint luminous fog, which had hung in the hollows all the evening,
became general and enveloped them. It seemed to hold the moonlight in
suspension, rendering it more pervasive than in clear air. Whether on this
account, or from absent-mindedness, or from sleepiness, she did not
perceive that they had long ago passed the point at which the lane to
Trantridge branched from the highway, and that her conductor had not taken
the Trantridge track.
She was inexpressibly weary. She had risen at five o‘clock every morning
of that week, had been on foot the whole of each day, and on this evening
had in addition walked the three miles to Chaseborough, waited three hours
for her neighbours without eating or drinking, her impatience to start them
preventing either; she had then walked a mile of the way home, and had
undergone the excitement of the quarrel, till, with the slow progress of their
steed, it was now nearly one o’clock. Only once, however, was she
overcome by actual drowsiness. In that moment of oblivion her head sank
gently against him.
D’Urberville stopped the horse, withdrew his feet from the stirrups,
turned sideways on the saddle, and enclosed her waist with his arm to
support her.
This immediately put her on the defensive, and with one of those sudden
impulses of reprisal to which she was liable she gave him a little push from
her. In his ticklish position he nearly lost his balance and only just avoided
rolling over into the road, the horse, though a powerful one, being
fortunately the quietest he rode.
“That is devilish unkind!” he said. “I mean no harm—only to keep you
from falling.”
She pondered suspiciously; till, thinking that this might after all be true,
she relented, and said quite humbly, “I beg your pardon, sir.”
“I won’t pardon you unless you show some confidence in me. Good
God!” he burst out, “what am I, to be repulsed so by a mere chitaw like you?
For near three mortal months have you trifled with my feelings, eluded me,
and snubbed me; and I won’t stand it!”
“I’ll leave you to-morrow, sir.”
“No, you will not leave me to-morrow! Will you, I ask once more, show
your belief in me by letting me clasp you with my arm? Come, between us
two and nobody else, now. We know each other well; and you know that I
love you, and think you the prettiest girl in the world, which you are.
Mayn’t I treat you as a lover?”
 She drew a quick pettish breath of objection, writhing uneasily on her
seat, looked far ahead, and murmured, “I don’t know—I wish—how can I
say yes or no when—”
He settled the matter by clasping his arm round her as he desired, and
Tess expressed no further negative. Thus they sidled slowly onward till it
struck her they had been advancing for an unconscionable time—far longer
than was usually occupied by the short journey from Chaseborough, even at
this walking pace, and that they were no longer on hard road, but in a mere
trackway.
“Why, where be we?” she exclaimed.
“Passing by a wood.”
“A wood—what wood? Surely we are quite out of the road?”
“A bit of The Chase—the oldest wood in England. It is a lovely night, and
why should we not prolong our ride a little?”
“How could you be so treacherous!” said Tess, between archness and real
dismay, and getting rid of his arm by pulling open his fingers one by one,
though at the risk of slipping off herself “Just when I’ve been putting such
trust in you, and obliging you to please you, because I thought I had
wronged you by that push! Please set me down, and let me walk home.”
“You cannot walk home, darling, even if the air were clear. We are miles
away from Trantridge, if I must tell you, and in this growing fog you might
wander for hours among these trees.”
“Never mind that,” she coaxed. “Put me down, I beg you. I don’t mind
where it is; only let me get down, sir, please!”
“Very well, then, I will—on one condition. Having brought you here to
this out-of-the-way place, I feel myself responsible for your safe-conduct
home, whatever you may yourself feel about it. As to your getting to
Trantridge without assistance, it is quite impossible; for, to tell the truth,
dear, owing to this fog, which so disguises everything, I don’t quite know
where we are myself Now, if you will promise to wait beside the horse
while I walk through the bushes till I come to some road or house, and
ascertain exactly our whereabouts, I’ll deposit you here willingly. When I
come back I’ll give you full directions, and if you insist upon walking you
may; or you may ride—at your pleasure.”
 She accepted these terms, and slid off on the near side, though not till he
had stolen a cursory kiss. He sprang down on the other side.
“I suppose I must hold the horse?” said she.
“Oh no; it’s not necessary,” replied Alec, patting the panting creature.
“He’s had enough of it for to-night.”
He turned the horse’s head into the bushes, hitched him on to a bough,
and made a sort of couch or nest for her in the deep mass of dead leaves.
“Now, you sit there,” he said. “The leaves have not got damp as yet. Just
give an eye to the horse—it will be quite sufficient.”
He took a few steps away from her, but, returning, said, “Bye the bye,
Tess, your father has a new cob to-day. Somebody gave it to him.”
“Somebody? You!”
D’Urberville nodded.
“O how very good of you that is!” she exclaimed, with a painful sense of
the awkwardness of having to thank him just then.
“And the children have some toys.”
“I didn’t know—you ever sent them anything!” she murmured, much
moved. “I almost wish you had not—yet, I almost wish it!”
“Why, dear?”
“It—hampers me so.”
“Tessy—don’t you love me ever so little now?”
“I’m grateful,” she reluctantly admitted. “But I fear I do not—” The
sudden vision of his passion for herself as a factor in this result so distressed
her that, beginning with one slow tear, and then following with another, she
wept outright.
“Don’t cry, dear, dear one! Now sit down here, and wait till I come.” She
passively sat down amid the leaves he had heaped, and shivered slightly.
“Are you cold?” he asked.
“Not very—a little.”
He touched her with his fingers, which sank into her as into down. “You
have only that puffy muslin dress on—how’s that?”
 “It’s my best summer one. ’Twas very warm when I started, and I didn’t
know I was going to ride, and that it would be night.”
“Nights grow chilly in September. Let me see.” He pulled off a light
overcoat that he had worn, and put it round her tenderly. “That’s it—now
you’ll feel warmer,” he continued. “Now, my pretty; rest there; I shall soon
be back again.”
Having buttoned the overcoat round her shoulders he plunged into the
webs of vapour which by this time formed veils between the trees. She
could hear the rustling of the branches as he ascended the adjoining slope,
till his movements were no louder than the hopping of a bird, and finally
died away. With the setting of the moon the pale light lessened, and Tess
became invisible as she felt into reverie upon the leaves where he had left
her.
In the meantime Alec d‘Urberville had pushed on up the slope to clear his
genuine doubt as to the quarter of The Chase they were in. He had, in fact,
ridden quite at random for over an hour, taking any turning that came to
hand in order to prolong companionship with her, and giving far more
attention to Tess’s moonlit person than to any wayside object. A little rest
for the jaded animal being desirable, he did not hasten his search for
landmarks. A clamber over the hill into the adjoining vale brought him to
the fence of a highway whose contours he recognized, which settled the
question of their whereabouts. D’Urberville thereupon turned back; but by
this time the moon had quite gone down, and partly on account of the fog
The Chase was wrapped in thick darkness, although morning was not far
off. He was obliged to advance with outstretched hands to avoid contact
with the boughs, and discovered that to hit the exact spot from which he had
started was at first entirely beyond him. Roaming up and down, round and
round, he at length heard a slight movement of the horse close at hand; and
the sleeve of his overcoat unexpectedly caught his foot.
“Tess!” said d’Urberville.
There was no answer. The obscurity was now so great that he could see
absolutely nothing but a pale nebulousness at his feet, which represented the
white muslin figure he had left upon the dead leaves. Everything else was
blackness alike. D’Urberville stooped; and heard a gentle regular breathing.
He knelt and bent lower, till her breath warmed his face, and in a moment
his cheek was in contact with hers. She was sleeping soundly, and upon her
eyelashes there lingered tears.
Darkness and silence ruled everywhere around. Above them rose the
primeval yews and oaks of The Chase, in which were poised gentle roosting
birds in their last nap; and about them stole the hopping rabbits and hares.
But, might some say, where was Tess’s guardian angel? where was the
providence of her simple faith? Perhaps, like that other god of whom the
ironical Tishbite spoke,1 he was talking, or he was pursuing, or he was in a
journey, or he was sleeping and not to be awaked.
Why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer,
and practically blank as snow as yet, there should have been traced such a
coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive; why so often the coarse
appropriates the finer thus, the wrong man the woman, the wrong woman
the man, many thousand years of analytical philosophy have failed to
explain to our sense of order. One may, indeed, admit the possibility of a
retribution lurking in the present catastrophe. Doubtless some of Tess
d’Urberville’s mailed ancestors rollicking home from a fray had dealt the
same measure even more ruthlessly towards peasant girls of their time. But
though to visit the sins of the fathers upon the children may be a morality
good enough for divinities,2 it is scorned by average human nature; and it
therefore does not mend the matter.
As Tess’s own people down in those retreats are never tired of saying
among each other in their fatalistic way: “It was to be.” There lay the pity of
it. An immeasurable social chasm was to divide our heroine’s personality
thereafter from that previous self of hers who stepped from her mother’s
door to try her fortune at Trantridge poultry-farm.

END OF PHASE THE FIRST

PHASE THE SECOND

MAIDEN NO MORE
 XII
THE BASKET WAS HEAVY and the bundle was large, but she lugged
them along like a person who did not find her especial burden in material
things. Occasionally she stopped to rest in a mechanical way by some gate
or post; and then, giving the baggage another hitch upon her full round arm,
went steadily on again.
It was a Sunday morning in late October, about four months after Tess
Durbeyfield’s arrival at Trantridge, and some few weeks subsequent to the
night ride in The Chase. The time was not long past daybreak, and the
yellow luminosity upon the horizon behind her back lighted the ridge
towards which her face was set—the barrier of the vale wherein she had of
late been a stranger—which she would have to climb over to reach her
birthplace. The ascent was gradual on this side, and the soil and scenery
differed much from those within Blakemore Vale. Even the character and
accent of the two peoples had shades of difference, despite the
amalgamating effects of a roundabout railway; so that, though less than
twenty miles from the place of her sojourn at Trantridge, her native village
had seemed a far-away spot. The field-folk shut in there traded northward
and westward, travelled, courted, and married northward and westward,
thought northward and westward; those on this side mainly directed their
energies and attention to the east and south.
The incline was the same down which d’Urberville had driven with her so
wildly on that day in June. Tess went up the remainder of its length without
stopping, and on reaching the edge of the escarpment gazed over the
familiar green world beyond, now half-veiled in mist. It was always
beautiful from here; it was terribly beautiful to Tess to-day, for since her
eyes last fell upon it she had learnt that the serpent hisses where the sweet
birds sing,1 and her views of life had been totally changed for her by the
lesson. Verily another girl than the simple one she had been at home was
she who, bowed by thought, stood still here, and turned to look behind her.
She could not bear to look forward into the Vale.
Ascending by the long white road that Tess herself had just laboured up,
she saw a two-wheeled vehicle, beside which walked a man, who held up
his hand to attract her attention.
She obeyed the signal to wait for him with unspeculative repose, and in a
few minutes man and horse stopped beside her.
“Why did you slip away by stealth like this?” said d’Urberville, with
upbraiding breathlessness; “on a Sunday morning, too, when people were
all in bed! I only discovered it by accident, and I have been driving like the
deuce to overtake you. Just look at the mare. Why go off like this? You
know that no-body wished to hinder your going. And how unnecessary it
has been for you to toil along on foot, and encumber yourself with this
heavy load! I have followed like a madman, simply to drive you the rest of
the distance, if you won’t come back.”
“I shan’t come back,” said she.
“I thought you wouldn’t—I said so! Well, then, put up your baskets, and
let me help you on.”
She listlessly placed her basket and bundle within the dog-cart, and
stepped up, and they sat side by side. She had no fear of him now, and in the
cause of her confidence her sorrow lay.
D’Urberville mechanically lit a cigar, and the journey was continued with
broken unemotional conversation on the commonplace objects by the
wayside. He had quite forgotten his struggle to kiss her when, in the early
summer, they had driven in the opposite direction along the same road. But
she had not, and she sat now, like a puppet, replying to his remarks in
monosyllables. After some miles they came in view of the clump of trees
beyond which the village of Marlott stood. It was only then that her still
face showed the least emotion, a tear or two beginning to trickle down.
“What are you crying for?” he coldly asked.
“I was thinking that I was born over there,” murmured Tess.
“Well—we must all be born somewhere.”
“I wish I had never been born—there or anywhere else!”
“Pooh! Well, if you didn’t wish to come to Trantridge why did you
come?”
She did not reply.
“You didn’t come for love of me, that I’ll swear.”
 “‘Tis quite true. If I had gone for love o’ you, if I had ever sincerely loved
you, if I loved you still, I should not so loathe and hate myself for my
weakness as I do now! ... My eyes were dazed by you for a little, and that
was all.”
He shrugged his shoulders. She resumed—
“I didn’t understand your meaning till it was too late.”
“That’s what every woman says.”
“How can you dare to use such words!” she cried, turning impetuously
upon him, her eyes flashing as the latent spirit (of which he was to see more
some day) awoke in her. “My God! I could knock you out of the gig! Did it
never strike your mind that what every woman says some women may
feel?”
“Very well,” he said, laughing; “I am sorry to wound you. I did wrong—I
admit it.” He dropped into some little bitterness as he continued: “Only you
needn’t be so everlastingly flinging it in my face. I am ready to pay to the
uttermost farthing. You know you need not work in the fields or the dairies
again. You know you may clothe yourself with the best, instead of in the
bald plain way you have lately affected, as if you couldn’t get a ribbon more
than you earn.”
Her lip lifted slightly, though there was little scorn, as a rule, in her large
and impulsive nature.
“I have said I will not take anything more from you, and I will not—I
cannot! I should be your creature to go on doing that, and I won’t!”
“One would think you were a princess from your manner, in addition to a
true and original d’Urberville—ha! ha! Well, Tess, dear, I can say no more.
I suppose I am a bad fellow—a damn bad fellow. I was born bad, and I have
lived bad, and I shall die bad in all probability. But, upon my lost soul, I
won’t be bad towards you again, Tess. And if certain circumstances should
arise—you understand—in which you are in the least need, the least
difficulty, send me one line, and you shall have by return whatever you
require. I may not be at Trantridge—I am going to London for a time—I
can’t stand the old woman. But all letters will be forwarded.”
She said that she did not wish him to drive her further, and they stopped
just under the clump of trees. D’Urberville alighted, and lifted her down
bodily in his arms, afterwards placing her articles on the ground beside her.
She bowed to him slightly, her eye just lingering in his; and then she turned
to take the parcels for departure.
Alec d’Urberville removed his cigar, bent towards her, and said—
“You are not going to turn away like that, dear? Come!”
“If you wish,” she answered indifferently. “See how you’ve mastered
me!”
She thereupon turned round and lifted her face to his, and remained like a
marble termax while he imprinted a kiss upon her cheek—half perfunctorily,
half as if zest had not yet quite died out. Her eyes vaguely rested upon the
remotest trees in the lane while the kiss was given, as though she were
nearly unconscious of what he did.
“Now the other side, for old acquaintance’ sake.”
She turned her head in the same passive way, as one might turn at the
request of a sketcher or hairdresser, and he kissed the other side, his lips
touching cheeks that were damp and smoothly chill as the skin of the
mushrooms in the fields around.
“You don’t give me your mouth and kiss me back. You never willingly do
that—you’ll never love me, I fear.”
“I have said so, often. It is true. I have never really and truly loved you,
and I think I never can.” She added mournfully, “Perhaps, of all things, a lie
on this thing would do the most good to me now; but I have honour enough
left, little as ’tis, not to tell that lie. If I did love you I may have the best o’
causes for letting you know it. But I don’t.”
He emitted a laboured breath, as if the scene were getting rather
oppressive to his heart, or to his conscience, or to his gentility.
“Well, you are absurdly melancholy, Tess. I have no reason for flattering
you now, and I can say plainly that you need not be so sad. You can hold
your own for beauty against any woman of these parts, gentle or simple; I
say it to you as a practical man and wellwisher. If you are wise you will
show it to the world more than you do before it fades... And yet, Tess, will
you come back to me? Upon my soul I don’t like to let you go like this!”
 “Never, never! I made up my mind as soon as I saw—what I ought to
have seen sooner; and I won’t come.”
“Then good morning, my four months’ cousin—good-bye!”
He leapt up lightly, arranged the reins, and was gone between the tall
redberried hedges.
Tess did not look after him, but slowly wound along the crooked lane. It
was still early, and though the sun’s lower limb was just free of the hill, his
rays, ungenial and peering, addressed the eye rather than the touch as yet.
There was not a human soul near. Sad October and her sadder self seemed
the only two existences haunting that lane.
As she walked however, some footsteps approached behind her, the
footsteps of a man; and owing to the briskness of his advance he was close
at her heels and had said “Good morning” before she had been long aware
of his propinquity. He appeared to be an artisan of some sort, and carried a
tin pot of red paint in his hand. He asked in a business-like manner if he
should take her basket, which she permitted him to do, walking beside him.
“It is early to be astir this Sabbath morn!” he said cheerfully.
“Yes,” said Tess.
“When most people are at rest from their week’s work.”
She also assented to this. “Though I do more real work to-day than all the
week besides.”
“Do you?”
“All the week I work for the glory of man, and on Sunday for the glory of
God. That’s more real than the other—hey? I have a little to do here at this
stile.” The man turned as he spoke to an opening at the roadside leading
into a pasture. “If you’ll wait a moment,” he added, “I shall not be long.”
As he had her basket she could not well do otherwise; and she waited,
observing him. He set down her basket and the tin pot, and stirring the paint
with the brush that was in it began painting large square letters on the
middle board of the three composing the stile, placing a comma after each
word, as if to give pause while that word was driven well home to the
reader’s heart—
 THY, DAMNATION, SLUMBERETH, NOT.
2 PET. ii. 3.2

Against the peaceful landscape, the pale, decaying tints of the copses, the
blue air of the horizon, and the lichened stileboards, these staring vermilion
words shone forth. They seemed to shout themselves out and make the
atmosphere ring. Some people might have cried “Alas, poor Theology!” at
the hideous defacement—the last grotesque phase of a creed which had
served mankind well in its time. But the words entered Tess with accusatory
horror. It was as if this man had known her recent history; yet he was a total
stranger.
Having finished his text he picked up her basket, and she mechanically
resumed her walk beside him.
“Do you believe what you paint?” she asked in low tones.
“Believe that tex? Do I believe in my own existence!”
“But,” said she tremulously, “suppose your sin was not of your own
seeking?”
He shook his head.
“I cannot split hairs on that burning query,” he said. “I have walked
hundreds of miles this past summer, painting these texes on every wall,
gate, and stile in the length and breadth of this district. I leave their
application to the hearts of the people who read ’em.”
“I think they are horrible,” said Tess. “Crushing! killing!”
“That’s what they are meant to be!” he replied in a trade voice. “But you
should read my hottest ones—them I kips for slums and seaports. They’d
make ye wriggle! Not but what this is a very good tex for rural districts...
Ah—there’s a nice bit of blank wall up by that barn standing to waste. I
must put one there—one that it will be good for dangerous young females
like yerself to heed. Will ye wait, missy?”
“No,” said she; and taking her basket Tess trudged on. A little way
forward she turned her head. The old gray wall began to advertise a similar
fiery lettering to the first, with a strange and unwonted mien, as if distressed
at duties it had never before been called upon to perform. It was with a
sudden flush that she read and realized what was to be the inscription he
was now half-way through—

THOU, SHALT, NOT, COMMIT—3

Her cheerful friend saw her looking, stopped his brush, and shouted—
“If you want to ask for edification on these things of moment, there’s a
very earnest good man going to preach a charity-sermon to-day in the parish
you are going to—Mr Clare of Emminster. I’m not of his persuasion now,
but he’s a good man, and he’ll expound as well as any parson I know. ’Twas
he began the work in me.”
But Tess did not answer; she throbbingly resumed her walk, her eyes
fixed on the ground. “Pooh—I don’t believe God said such things!” she
murmured contemptuously when her flush had died away.
A plume of smoke soared up suddenly from her father’s chimney, the
sight of which made her heart ache. The aspect of the interior, when she
reached it, made her heart ache more. Her mother, who had just come down
stairs, turned to greet her from the fireplace, where she was kindling
barked-oak twigs under the breakfast kettle. The young children were still
above, as was also her father, it being Sunday morning, when he felt
justified in lying an additional half-hour.
“Well!—my dear Tess!” exclaimed her surprised mother, jumping up and
kissing the girl. “How be ye? I didn’t see you till you was in upon me! Have
you come home to be married?”
“No, I have not come for that, mother.”
“Then for a holiday?”
“Yes—for a holiday; for a long holiday,” said Tess.
“What, isn’t your cousin going to do the handsome thing?”
“He’s not my cousin, and he’s not going to marry me.”
Her mother eyed her narrowly.
“Come, you have not told me all,” she said.
 Then Tess went up to her mother, put her face upon Joan’s neck, and told.
“And yet th‘st not got him to marry ’ee!” reiterated her mother. “Any
woman would have done it but you, after that!”
“Perhaps any woman would except me.”
“It would have been something like a story to come back with, if you
had!” continued Mrs Durbeyfield, ready to burst into tears of vexation.
“After all the talk about you and him which has reached us here, who would
have expected it to end like this! Why didn’t ye think of doing some good
for your family instead o’ thinking only of yourself? See how I’ve got to
teaveay and slave, and your poor weak father with his heart clogged like a
dripping-pan. I did hope for something to come out o’ this! To see what a
pretty pair you and he made that day when you drove away together four
months ago! See what he has given us—all, as we thought, because we
were his kin. But if he’s not, it must have been done because of his love for
’ee. And yet you’ve not got him to marry!”
Get Alec d’Urberville in the mind to marry her! He marry her! On
matrimony be had never once said a word. And what if he had? How a
convulsive snatching at social salvation might have impelled her to answer
him she could not say. But her poor foolish mother little knew her present
feeling towards this man. Perhaps it was unusual in the circumstances,
unlucky, unaccountable; but there it was; and this, as she had said, was what
made her detest herself She had never wholly cared for him, she did not at
all care for him now. She had dreaded him, winced before him, succumbed
to adroit advantages he took of her helplessness; then, temporarily blinded
by his ardent manners, had been stirred to confused surrender awhile: had
suddenly despised and disliked him, and had run away. That was all. Hate
him she did not quite; but he was dust and ashes4 to her, and even for her
name’s sake she scarcely wished to marry him.
“You ought to have been more careful if you didn’t mean to get him to
make you his wife!”
“O mother, my mother!” cried the agonized girl, turning passionately
upon her parent as if her poor heart would break. “How could I be expected
to know? I was a child when I left this house four months ago. Why didn’t
you tell me there was danger in men-folk? Why didn’t you warn me? Ladies
know what to fend hands against, because they read novels that tell them of
these tricks; but I never had the chance o’ learning in that way, and you did
not help me!”
Her mother was subdued.
“I thought if I spoke of his fond feelings and what they might lead to, you
would be hontishaz wi’ him and lose your chance,” she murmured, wiping
her eyes with her apron. “Well, we must make the best of it, I suppose. ’Tis
nater, after all, and what do please God!”
 XIII
THE EVENT OF TESS Durbeyfield’s return from the manor of her bogus
kinsfolk was rumoured abroad, if rumour be not too large a word for a space
of a square mile. In the afternoon several young girls of Marlott, former
schoolfellows and acquaintances of Tess, called to see her, arriving dressed
in their best starched and ironed, as became visitors to a person who had
made a transcendent conquest (as they supposed), and sat round the room
looking at her with great curiosity. For the fact that it was this said thirty-
first cousin, Mr d’Urberville, who had fallen in love with her, a gentleman
not altogether local, whose reputation as a reckless gallant and heart-
breaker was beginning to spread beyond the immediate boundaries
ofTrantridge, lent Tess’s supposed position, by its fearsomeness, a far
higher fascination than it would have exercised if unhazardous.
Their interest was so deep that the younger ones whispered when her back
was turned—
“How pretty she is; and how that best frock do set her off! I believe it cost
an immense deal, and that it was a gift from him.”
Tess, who was reaching up to get the tea-things from the corner-cupboard,
did not hear these commentaries. If she had heard them, she might soon
have set her friends right on the matter. But her mother heard, and Joan’s
simple vanity, having been denied the hope of a dashing marriage, fed itself
as well as it could upon the sensation of a dashing flirtation. Upon the
whole she felt gratified, even though such a limited and evanescent triumph
should involve her daughter’s reputation; it might end in marriage yet, and
in the warmth of her responsiveness to their admiration she invited her
visitors to stay to tea.
Their chatter, their laughter, their good-humoured innuendoes, above all,
their flashes and flickerings of envy, revived Tess’s spirits also; and, as the
evening wore on, she caught the infection of their excitement, and grew
almost gay. The marble hardness left her face, she moved with something of
her old bounding step, and flushed in all her young beauty.
 At moments, in spite of thought, she would reply to their inquiries with a
manner of superiority, as if recognizing that her experiences in the field of
courtship had, indeed, been slightly enviable. But so far was she from
being, in the words of Robert South,ba “in love with her own ruin,” that the
illusion was transient as lightning; cold reason came back to mock her
spasmodic weakness; the ghastliness of her momentary pride would convict
her, and recall her to reserved listlessness again.
And the despondency of the next morning’s dawn, when it was no longer
Sunday, but Monday; and no best clothes; and the laughing visitors were
gone, and she awoke alone in her old bed, the innocent younger children
breathing softly around her. In place of the excitement of her return, and the
interest it had inspired, she saw before her a long and stony highway which
she had to tread, without aid, and with little sympathy. Her depression was
then terrible, and she could have hidden herself in a tomb.
In the course of a few weeks Tess revived sufficiently to show herself so
far as was necessary to get to church one Sunday morning. She liked to hear
the chanting—such as it was—and the old Psalms, and to join in the
Morning Hymn.1 That innate love of melody, which she had inherited from
her ballad-singing mother, gave the simplest music a power over her which
could well-nigh drag her heart out of her bosom at times.
To be as much out of observation as possible for reasons of her own, and
to escape the gallantries of the young men, she set out before the chiming
began, and took a back seat under the gallery, close to the lumber, where
only old men and women came, and where the bier stood on end among the
churchyard tools.
Parishioners dropped in by twos and threes, deposited themselves in rows
before her, rested three-quarters of a minute on their foreheads as if they
were praying, though they were not; then sat up, and looked around. When
the chants came on one of her favourites happened to be chosen among the
rest—the old double chant “Langdon”2—but she did not know what it was
called, though she would much have liked to know. She thought, without
exactly wording the thought, how strange and godlike was a composer’s
power, who from the grave could lead through sequences of emotion, which
he alone had felt at first, a girl like her who had never heard of his name,
and never would have a clue to his personality.
 The people who had turned their heads turned them again as the service
proceeded; and at last observing her they whispered to each other. She knew
what their whispers were about, grew sick at heart, and felt that she could
come to church no more.
The bedroom which she shared with some of the children formed her
retreat more continually than ever. Here, under her few square yards of
thatch, she watched winds, and snows, and rains, gorgeous sunsets, and
successive moons at their full. So close kept she that at length almost
everybody thought she had gone away.
The only exercise that Tess took at this time was after dark; and it was
then, when out in the woods, that she seemed least solitary. She knew how
to hit to a hair’s-breadth that moment of evening when the light and the
darkness are so evenly balanced that the constraint of day and the suspense
of night neutralize each other, leaving absolute mental liberty. It is then that
the plight of being alive becomes attenuated to its least possible dimensions.
She had no fear of the shadows; her sole idea seemed to be to shun mankind
—or rather that cold accretion called the world, which, so terrible in the
mass, is so unformidable, even pitiable, in its units.
On these lonely hills and dales her quiescent glide was of a piece with the
element she moved in. Her flexuous and stealthy figure became an integral
part of the scene. At times her whimsical fancy would intensify natural
processes around her till they seemed a part of her own story. Rather they
became a part of it; for the world is only a psychological phenomenon, and
what they seemed they were. The midnight airs and gusts, moaning
amongst the tightly-wrapped buds and bark of the winter twigs, were
formulae of bitter reproach. A wet day was the expression of irremediable
grief at her weakness in the mind of some vague ethical being whom she
could not class definitely as the God of her childhood, and could not
comprehend as any other.
But this encompassment of her own characterization, based on shreds of
convention, peopled by phantoms and voices antipathetic to her, was a sorry
and mistaken creation of Tess’s fancy—a cloud of moral hobgoblins by
which she was terrified without reason. It was they that were out of
harmony with the actual world, not she. Walking among the sleeping birds
in the hedges, watching the skipping rabbits on a moonlit warren, or
standing under a pheasant-laden bough, she looked upon herself as a figure
of Guilt intruding into the haunts of Innocence. But all the while she was
making a distinction where there was no difference. Feeling herself in
antagonism she was quite in accord. She had been made to break an
accepted social law, but no law known to the environment in which she
fancied herself such an anomaly.
 XIV
IT WAS A HAZY sunrise in August. The denser nocturnal vapours,
attacked by the warm beams, were dividing and shrinking into isolated
fleeces within hollows and coverts, where they waited till they should be
dried away to nothing.
The sun, on account of the mist, had a curious sentient, personal look,
demanding the masculine pronoun for its adequate expression. His present
aspect, coupled with the lack of all human forms in the scene, explained the
old-time heliolatriesbb in a moment. One could feel that a saner religion had
never prevailed under the sky. The luminary was a golden-haired, beaming,
mild-eyed, God-like creature, gazing down in the vigour and intentness of
youth upon an earth that was brimming with interest for him.
His light, a little later, broke through chinks of cottage shutters, throwing
stripes like red-hot pokers upon cupboards, chests of drawers, and other
furniture within; and awakening harvesters who were not already astir.
But of all ruddy things that morning the brightest were two broad arms of
painted wood, which rose from the margin of a yellow cornfield hard by
Marlott village. They, with two others below, formed the revolving Maltese
cross of the reaping-machine, which had been brought to the field on the
previous evening to be ready for operations this day. The paint with which
they were smeared, intensified in hue by the sunlight, imparted to them a
look of having been dipped in liquid fire.
The field had already been “opened;” that is to say, a lane a few feet wide
had been hand-cut through the wheat along the whole circumference of the
field, for the first passage of the horses and machine.
Two groups, one of men and lads, the other of women, had come down
the lane just at the hour when the shadows of the eastern hedge-top struck
the west hedge midway, so that the heads of the groups were enjoying
sunrise while their feet were still in the dawn. They disappeared from the
lane between the two stone posts which flanked the nearest field-gate.
Presently there arose from within a ticking like the lovemaking of the
grasshopper. The machine had begun, and a moving concatenation of three
horses and the aforesaid long rickety machine was visible over the gate, a
driver sitting upon one of the hauling horses, and an attendant on the seat of
the implement. Along one side of the field the whole wainbc went, the arms
of the mechanical reaper revolving slowly, till it passed down the hilt quite
out of sight. In a minute it came up on the other side of the field at the same
equable pace; the glistening brass star in the forehead of the fore horse first
catching the eye as it rose into view over the stubble, then the bright arms,
and then the whole machine.
The narrow lane of stubble encompassing the field grew wider with each
circuit, and the standing corn was reduced to smaller area as the morning
wore on. Rabbits, hares, snakes, rats, mice, retreated inwards as into a
fastness, unaware of the ephemeral nature of their refuge, and of the doom
that awaited them later in the day when, their covert shrinking to a more
and more horrible narrowness, they were huddled together, friends and foes,
till the last few yards of upright wheat fell also under the teeth of the
unerring reaper, and they were every one put to death by the sticks and
stones of the harvesters.
The reaping-machine left the fallen corn behind it in little heaps, each
heap being of the quantity for a sheaf; and upon these the active binders in
the rear laid their hands—mainly women, but some of them men in print
shirts, and trousers supported round their waists by leather straps, rendering
useless the two buttons behind, which twinkled and bristled with sunbeams
at every movement of each wearer, as if they were a pair of eyes in the
small of his back.
But those of the other sex were the most interesting of this company of
binders, by reason of the charm which is acquired by woman when she
becomes part and parcel of outdoor nature, and is not merely an object set
down therein as at ordinary times. A field-man is a personality afield; a
field-woman is a portion of the field; she has somehow lost her own margin,
imbibed the essence of her surrounding, and assimilated herself with it.
The women—or rather girls, for they were mostly young—wore drawn
cottonbd bonnets with great flapping curtains to keep off the sun, and gloves
to prevent their hands being wounded by the stubble. There was one
wearing a pale pink jacket, another in a cream-coloured tight-sleeved gown,
another in a petticoat as red as the arms of the reaping-machine; and others,
older, in the brown-rough “wropper” or over-all-the old-established and
most appropriate dress of the field-woman, which the young ones were
abandoning. This morning the eye returns involuntarily to the girl in the
pink cotton jacket, she being the most flexuous and finely-drawn figure of
them all. But her bonnet is pulled so far over her brow that none of her face
is disclosed while she binds, though her complexion may be guessed from a
stray twine or two of dark brown hair which extends below the curtain of
her bonnet. Perhaps one reason why she seduces casual attention is that she
never courts it, though the other women often gaze around them.
Her binding proceeds with clock-like monotony. From the sheaf last
finished she draws a handful of ears, patting their tips with her left palm to
bring them even. Then stooping low she moves forward, gathering the corn
with both hands against her knees, and pushing her left gloved hand under
the bundle to meet the right on the other side, holding the corn in an
embrace like that of a lover. She brings the ends of the bond together, and
kneels on the sheaf while she ties it, beating back her skirts now and then
when lifted by the breeze. A bit of her naked arm is visible between the buff
leather of the gauntlet and the sleeve of her gown; and as the day wears on
its feminine smoothness becomes scarified by the stubble, and bleeds.
At intervals she stands up to rest, and to retie her disarranged apron, or to
pull her bonnet straight. Then one can see the oval face of a handsome
young woman with deep dark eyes and long heavy clinging tresses, which
seem to clasp in a beseeching way anything they fall against. The cheeks
are paler, the teeth more regular, the red lips thinner than is usual in a
country-bred girl.
It isTess Durbeyfield, otherwise d’Urberville, somewhat changed—the
same, but not the same; at the present stage of her existence living as a
stranger and an alien here, though it was no strange land that she was in.1
After a long seclusion she had come to a resolve to undertake outdoor work
in her native village, the busiest season of the year in the agricultural world
having arrived, and nothing that she could do within the house being so
remunerative for the time as harvesting in the fields.
The movements of the other women were more or less similar to Tess’s,
the whole bevy of them drawing together like dancers in a quadrille at the
completion of a sheaf by each, every one placing her sheaf on end against
those of the rest, till a shock, or “stitch” as it was here called, of ten or a
dozen was formed.
 They went to breakfast, and came again, and the work proceeded as
before. As the hour of eleven drew near a person watching her might have
noticed that every now and then Tess’s glance flitted wistfully to the brow
of the hill, though she did not pause in her sheafing. On the verge of the
hour the heads of a group of children, of ages ranging from six to fourteen,
rose above the stubbly convexity of the hill.
The face of Tess flushed slightly, but still she did not pause.
The eldest of the comers, a girl who wore a triangular shawl, its corner
draggling on the stubble, carried in her arms what at first sight seemed to be
a doll, but proved to be an infant in long clothes. Another brought some
lunch. The harvesters ceased work-i ng, took their provisions, and sat down
against one of the shocks.
Here they fell to, the men plying a stone jar freely, and passing round a cup.
Tess Durbeyfield had been one of the last to suspend her labours. She sat
down at the end of the shock, her face turned somewhat away from her
companions. When she had deposited herself a man in a rabbit-skin cap and
with a red handkerchief tucked into his belt, held the cup of ale over the top
of the shock for her to drink. But she did not accept his offer. As soon as her
lunch was spread she called up the big girl her sister, and took the baby off
her, who, glad to be relieved of the burden, went away to the next shock and
joined the other children playing there. Tess, with a curiously stealthy yet
courageous movement, and with a still rising colour, unfastened her frock
and began suckling the child.
The men who sat nearest considerately turned their faces towards the
other end of the field, some of them beginning to smoke; one, with absent-
minded fondness, regretfully stroking the jar that would no longer yield a
stream. All the women but Tess fell into animated talk, and adjusted the
disarranged knots of their hair.
When the infant had taken its fill the young mother sat it upright in her
lap, and looking into the far distance dandled it with a gloomy indifference
that was almost dislike; then all of a sudden she fell to violently kissing it
some dozens of times, as if she could never leave off, the child crying at the
vehemence of an onset which strangely combined passionateness with
contempt.
 “She’s fond of that there child, though she mid pretend to hate en, and say
she wishes the baby and her too were in the churchyard,” observed the
woman in the red petticoat.
“She’ll soon leave off saying that,” replied the one in buff “Lord, ’tis
wonderful what a body can get used to o’ that sort in time!”
“A little more than persuading had to do wi’ the coming o’t, I reckon.
There were they that heard a sobbing one night last year in The Chase; and
it mid ha’ gone hard wi’ a certain party if folks had come along.”
“Well, a little more, or a little less, ‘twas a thousand pities that it should
have happened to she, of all others. But ’tis always the comeliest! The plain
ones be as safe as churches—hey, Jenny?” The speaker turned to one of the
group who certainly was not ill-defined as plain.
It was a thousand pities, indeed; it was impossible for even an enemy to
feel otherwise on looking at Tess as she sat there, with her flower-like
mouth and large tender eyes, neither black nor blue nor gray nor violet;
rather all those shades together, and a hundred others, which could be seen
if one looked into their irises—shade behind shade—tint beyond tint—
around pupils that had no bottom; an almost standard woman, but for the
slight incautiousness of character inherited from her race.
A resolution which had surprised herself had brought her into the fields
this week for the first time during many months. After wearing and wasting
her palpitating heart with every engine of regret that lonely inexperience
could devise, commonsense had illumined her. She felt that she would do
well to be useful again—to taste anew sweet independence at any price. The
past was past; whatever it had been it was no more at hand. Whatever its
consequences, time would close over them; they would all in a few years be
as if they had never been, and she herself grassed down and forgotten.
Meanwhile the trees were just as green as before; the birds sang and the sun
shone as clearly now as ever. The familiar surroundings had not darkened
because of her grief, nor sickened because of her pain.
She might have seen that what had bowed her head so profoundly—the
thought of the world’s concern at her situation—was founded on an illusion.
She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of
sensations, to anybody but herself To all humankind besides Tess was only
a passing thought. Even to friends she was no more than a frequently
passing thought. If she made herself miserable the livelong night and day it
was only this much to them—“Ah, she makes herself unhappy.” If she tried
to be cheerful, to dismiss all care, to take pleasure in the daylight, the
flowers, the baby, she could only be this idea to them—“Ah, she bears it
very well.” Moreover, alone in a desert island would she have been
wretched at what had happened to her? Not greatly. If she could have been
but just created, to discover herself as a spouseless mother, with no
experience of life except as the parent of a nameless child, would the
position have caused her to despair? No, she would have taken it calmly,
and found pleasures therein. Most of the misery had been generated by her
conventional aspect, and not by her innate sensations.
Whatever Tess’s reasoning, some spirit had induced her to dress herself
up neatly as she had formerly done, and come out into the fields, harvest-
hands being greatly in demand just then. This was why she had borne
herself with dignity, and had looked people calmly in the face at times, even
when holding the baby in her arms.
The harvest-men rose from the shock of corn, and stretched their limbs,
and extinguished their pipes. The horses, which had been unharnessed and
fed, were again attached to the scarlet machine. Tess, having quickly eaten
her own meal, beckoned to her eldest sister to come and take away the baby,
fastened her dress, put on the buff gloves again, and stooped anew to draw a
bond from the last completed sheaf for the tying of the next.
In the afternoon and evening the proceedings of the morning were
continued, Tess staying on till dusk with the body of harvesters. Then they
all rode home in one of the largest waggons, in the company of a broad
tarnished moon that had risen from the ground to the eastwards, its face
resembling the outworn gold-leaf halo of some worm-eaten Tuscan saint.
Tess’s female companions sang songs, and showed themselves very
sympathetic and glad at her reappearance out of doors, though they could
not refrain from mischievously throwing in a few verses of the ballad about
the maid who went to the merry green wood and came back a changed state.
There are counterpoises and compensations in life; and the event which had
made of her a social warning had also for the moment made her the most
interesting personage in the village to many. Their friendliness won her still
farther away from herself, their lively spirits were contagious, and she
became almost gay.
 But now that her moral sorrows were passing away a fresh one arose on
the natural side of her which knew no social law. When she reached home it
was to learn to her grief that the baby had been suddenly taken ill since the
afternoon. Some such collapse had been probable, so tender and puny was
its frame; but the event came as a shock nevertheless.
The baby’s offence against society in coming into the world was forgotten
by the girl-mother; her soul’s desire was to continue that offence by
preserving the life of the child. However, it soon grew clear that the hour of
emancipation for that little prisoner of the flesh was to arrive earlier than
her worst misgivings had conjectured. And when she had discovered this
she was plunged into a misery which transcended that of the child’s simple
loss. Her baby had not been baptized.
Tess had drifted into a frame of mind which accepted passively the
consideration that if she should have to burn for what she had done, burn
she must, and there was an end of it. Like all village girls she was well
grounded in the Holy Scriptures, and had dutifully studied the histories of
Aholah and Aholibah2 and knew the inferences to be drawn therefrom. But
when the same question arose with regard to the baby, it had a very different
colour. Her darling was about to die, and no salvation.
It was nearly bedtime, but she rushed downstairs and asked if she might
send for the parson. The moment happened to be one at which her father’s
sense of the antique nobility of his family was highest, and his sensitiveness
to the smudge which Tess had set upon that nobility most pronounced, for
he had just returned from his weekly booze at Rolliver’s Inn. No parson
should come inside his door, he declared, prying into his affairs, just then,
when, by her shame, it had become more necessary than ever to hide them.
He locked the door and put the key in his pocket.
The household went to bed, and, distressed beyond measure, Tess retired
also. She was continually waking as she lay, and in the middle of the night
found that the baby was still worse. It was obviously dying—quietly and
painlessly, but none the less surely.
In her misery she rocked herself upon the bed. The clock struck the
solemn hour of one, that hour when fancy stalks outside reason, and
malignant possibilities stand rock-firm as facts. She thought of the child
consigned to the nethermost corner of hell, as its double doom for lack of
baptism and lack of legitimacy; saw the arch-fiend tossing it with his three-
pronged fork, like the one they used for heating the oven on baking days; to
which picture she added many other quaint and curious details of torment
sometimes taught the young in this Christian country. The lurid presentment
so powerfully affected her imagination in the silence of the sleeping house
that her nightgown became damp with perspiration, and the bedstead shook
with each throb of her heart.
The infant’s breathing grew more difficult, and the mother’s mental
tension increased. It was useless to devour the little thing with kisses; she
could stay in bed no longer, and walked feverishly about the room.
“O merciful God, have pity; have pity upon my poor baby!” she cried.
“Heap as much anger as you want to upon me, and welcome; but pity the
child!”
She leant against the chest of drawers, and murmured incoherent
supplications for a long while, till she suddenly started up.
“Ah! perhaps baby can be saved! Perhaps it will be just the same!”
She spoke so brightly that it seemed as though her face might have shone
in the gloom surrounding her.
She lit a candle, and went to a second and a third bed under the wall,
where she awoke her young sisters and brothers, all of whom occupied the
same room. Pulling out the washing-stand so that she could get behind it,
she poured some water from a jug, and made them kneel around, putting
their hands together with fingers exactly vertical. While the children,
scarcely awake, awe-stricken at her manner, their eyes growing larger and
larger, remained in this position, she took the baby from her bed—a child’s
child—so immature as scarce to seem a sufficient personality to endow its
producer with the maternal title. Tess then stood erect with the infant on her
arm beside the basin, the next sister held the Prayer-Book open before her,
as the clerk at church held it before the parson; and thus the girl set about
baptizing her child.
Her figure looked singularly tall and imposing as she stood in her long
white nightgown, a thick cable of twisted dark hair hanging straight down
her back to her waist. The kindly dimness of the weak candle abstracted
from her form and features the little blemishes which sunlight might have
revealed—the stubble scratches upon her wrists, and the weariness of her
eyes—her high enthusiasm having a transfiguring effect upon the face
which had been her undoing, showing it as a thing of immaculate beauty,
with a touch of dignity which was almost regal. The little ones kneeling
round, their sleepy eyes blinking and red, awaited her preparations full of a
suspended wonder which their physical heaviness at that hour would not
allow to become active.
The most impressed of them said:
“Be you really going to christen him, Tess?”
The girl-mother replied in a grave affirmative.
“What’s his name going to be?”
She had not thought of that, but a name suggested by a phrase in the book
of Genesis came into her head as she proceeded with the baptismal service,
and now she pronounced it:
“SORROW, I baptize thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and
of the Holy Ghost.”3
She sprinkled the water, and there was silence.
“Say ‘Amen,’ children.”
The tiny voices piped in obedient response “Amen!”
Tess went on:
“We receive this child”—and so forth—“and do sign him with the sign of
the Cross.”
Here she dipped her hand into the basin, and fervently drew an immense
cross upon the baby with her forefinger, continuing with the customary
sentences as to his manfully fighting against sin, the world, and the devil,
and being a faithful soldier and servant unto his life’s end. She duly went on
with the Lord’s Prayer, the children lisping it after her in a thin gnat-like
wail, till, at the conclusion, raising their voices to clerk’s pitch, they again
piped into the silence, “Amen!”
Then their sister, with much augmented confidence in the efficacy of this
sacrament, poured forth from the bottom of her heart the thanksgiving that
follows, uttering it boldly and triumphantly in the stopt-diapason note
which her voice acquired when her heart was in her speech, and which will
never be forgotten by those who knew her. The ecstasy of faith almost
apotheosized her; it set upon her face a glowing irradiation, and brought a
red spot into the middle of each cheek; while the miniature candle-flame
inverted in her eye-pupils shone like a diamond. The children gazed up at
her with more and more reverence, and no longer had a will for questioning.
She did not look like Sissy to them now, but as a being large, towering, and
awful—a divine personage with whom they had nothing in common.
Poor Sorrow’s campaign against sin, the world, and the devil was doomed
to be of limited brilliancy—luckily perhaps for himself, considering his
beginnings. In the blue of the morning that fragile soldier and servant
breathed his last, and when the other children awoke they cried bitterly, and
begged Sissy to have another pretty baby.
The calmness which had possessed Tess since the christening remained
with her in the infant’s loss. In the daylight, indeed, she felt her terrors
about his soul to have been somewhat exaggerated; whether well founded
or not she had no uneasiness now, reasoning that if Providence would not
ratify such an act of approximation she, for one, did not value the kind of
heaven lost by the irregularity—either for herself or for her child.
So passed away Sorrow the Undesired—that intrusive creature, that
bastard gift of shameless Nature who respects not the social law; a waif to
whom eternal Time had been a matter of days merely, who knew not that
such things as years and centuries ever were; to whom the cottage interior
was the universe, the week’s weather climate, new-born babyhood human
existence, and the instinct to suck human knowledge.
Tess, who mused on the christening a good deal, wondered if it were
doctrinally sufficient to secure a Christian burial for the child. Nobody
could tell this but the parson of the parish, and he was a new-comer, and did
not know her. She went to his house after dusk, and stood by the gate, but
could not summon courage to go in. The enterprise would have been
abandoned if she had not by accident met him coming homeward as she
turned away. In the gloom she did not mind speaking freely.
“I should like to ask you something, sir.”
He expressed his willingness to listen, and she told the story of the baby’s
illness and the extemporized ordinance.
“And now, sir,” she added earnestly, “can you tell me this—will it be just
the same for him as if you had baptized him?”
 Having the natural feelings of a tradesman at finding that a job he should
have been called in for had been unskilfully botched by his customers
among themselves, he was disposed to say no. Yet the dignity of the girl,
the strange tenderness in her voice, combined to affect his nobler impulses
—or rather those that he had left in him after ten years of endeavour to graft
technical belief on actual scepticism. The man and the ecclesiastic fought
within him, and the victory fell to the man.
“My dear girl,” he said, “it will be just the same.”
“Then will you give him a Christian burial?” she asked quickly.
The vicar felt himself cornered. Hearing of the baby’s illness, he had
conscientiously gone to the house after nightfall to perform the rite, and,
unaware that the refusal to admit him had come from Tess’s father and not
from Tess, he could not allow the plea of necessity for its irregular
administration.
“Ah—that’s another matter,” he said.
“Another matter—why?” asked Tess, rather warmly.
“Well—I would willingly do so if only we two were concerned. But I
must not—for certain reasons.”
“Just for once, sir!”
“Really I must not.”
“O sir!” She seized his hand as she spoke.
He withdrew it, shaking his head.
“Then I don’t like you!” she burst out, “and I’ll never come to your
church no more!”
“Don’t talk so rashly.”
“Perhaps it will be just the same to him if you don’t? ... Will it be just the
same? Don’t for God’s sake speak as saint to sinner, but as you yourself to
me myself—poor me!”
How the Vicar reconciled his answer with the strict notions he supposed
himself to hold on these subjects it is beyond a layman’s power to tell,
though not to excuse. Somewhat moved, he said in this case also—
“It will be just the same.”
 So the baby was carried in a small deal box, under an ancient woman’s
shawl, to the churchyard that night, and buried by lantern-light, at the cost
of a shilling and a pint of beer to the sexton, in that shabby corner of God’s
allotment where He lets the nettles grow, and where all unbaptized infants,
notorious drunkards, suicides, and others of the conjecturally damned are
laid. In spite of the untoward surroundings, however, Tess bravely made a
little cross of two laths and a piece of string, and having bound it with
flowers, she stuck it up at the head of the grave one evening when she could
enter the churchyard without being seen, putting at the foot also a bunch of
the same flowers in a little jar of water to keep them alive. What matter was
it that on the outside of the jar the eye of mere observation noted the words
“Keelwell’s Marmalade”? The eye of maternal affection did not see them in
its vision of higher things.
 XV
“BY EXPERIENCE,” SAYS ROGER ASCHAM, “we find out a short way
by a long wandering.”1 Not seldom that long wandering unfits us for further
travel, and of what use is our experience to us then? Tess Durbeyfield’s
experience was of this incapacitating kind. At last she had learned what to
do; but who would now accept her doing?
If before going to the d’Urbervilles’ she had vigorously moved under the
guidance of sundry gnomic texts and phrases known to her and to the world
in general, no doubt she would never have been imposed on. But it had not
been in Tess’s power—nor is it in anybody’s power—to feel the whole truth
of golden opinions while it is possible to profit by them. She—and how
many more—might have ironically said to God with Saint Augustine:
“Thou hast counselled a better course than Thou hast permitted.” 2
She remained in her father’s house during the winter months, plucking
fowls, or cramming turkeys and geese, or making clothes for her sisters and
brothers out of some finery which d’Urberville had given her, and she had
put by with contempt. Apply to him she would not. But she would often
clasp her hands behind her head and muse when she was supposed to be
working hard.
She philosophically noted dates as they came past in the revolution of the
year; the disastrous night of her undoing at Trantridge with its dark
background of The Chase; also the dates of the baby’s birth and death; also
her own birthday; and every other day individualized by incidents in which
she had taken some share. She suddenly thought one afternoon, when
looking in the glass at her fairness, that there was yet another date, of
greater importance to her than those; that of her own death, when all these
charms would have disappeared; a day which lay sly and unseen and among
all the other days of the year, giving no sign or sound when she annually
passed over it; but not the less surely there. When was it? Why did she not
feel the chill of each yearly encounter with such a cold relation? She had
Jeremy Taylor’s thoughtbe that some time in the future those who had
known her would say? “It is the—th, the day that poor Tess Durbeyfield
died”; and there would be nothing singular to their minds in the statement.
Of that day, doomed to be her terminus in time through all the ages, she did
not know the place in month, week, season, or year.
Almost at a leap Tess thus changed from simple girl to complex woman.
Symbols of reflectiveness passed into her face, and a note of tragedy at
times into her voice. Her eyes grew larger and more eloquent. She became
what would have been called a fine creature; her aspect was fair and
arresting; her soul that of a woman whom the turbulent experiences of the
last year or two had quite failed to demoralize. But for the world’s opinion
those experiences would have been simply a liberal education.
She had held so aloof of late that her trouble, never generally known, was
nearly forgotten in Marlott. But it became evident to her that she could
never be really comfortable again in a place which had seen the collapse of
her family’s attempt to “claim kin”—and, through her, even closer union—
with the rich d’Urbervilles. At least she could not be comfortable there till
long years should have obliterated her keen consciousness of it. Yet even
now Tess felt the pulse of hopeful life still warm within her; she might be
happy in some nook which had no memories. To escape the past and all that
appertained thereto was to annihilate it, and to do that she would have to get
away.
Was once lost always lost really true of chastity? she would ask herself
She might prove it false if she could veil bygones. The recuperative power
which pervaded organic nature was surely not denied to maidenhood alone.
She waited a long time without finding opportunity for a new departure. A
particularly fine spring came round, and the stir of germination was almost
audible in the buds; it moved her, as it moved the wild animals, and made
her passionate to go. At last, one day in early May, a letter reached her from
a former friend of her mother’s, to whom she had addressed inquiries long
before—a person whom she had never seen—that a skilful milkmaid was
required at a dairy-house many miles to the southward, and that the
dairyman would be glad to have her for the summer months.
It was not quite so far off as could have been wished; but it was probably
far enough, her radius of movement and repute having been so small. To
persons of limited spheres, miles are as geographical degrees, parishes as
counties, counties as provinces and kingdoms.
 On one point she was resolved: there should be no more d’Urberville air-
castles in the dreams and deeds of her new life. She would be the dairymaid
Tess, and nothing more. Her mother knew Tess’s feeling on this point so
well, though no words had passed between them on the subject, that she
never alluded to the knightly ancestry now.
Yet such is human inconsistency that one of the interests of the new place
to her was the accidental virtue of its lying near her forefathers’ country (for
they were not Blakemore men, though her mother was Blakemore to the
bone). The dairy called Talbothays, for which she was bound, stood not
remotely from some of the former estates of the d‘Urbervilles, near the
great family vaults of her granddames and their powerful husbands. She
would be able to look at them, and think not only that d’Urberville, like
Babylon, had fallen,3 but that the individual innocence of a humble
descendant could lapse as silently. All the while she wondered if any
strange good thing might come to her being in her ancestral land ; and some
spirit within her rose automatically as the sap in the twigs. It was
unexpended youth, surging up anew after its temporary check, and bringing
with it hope, and the invincible instinct towards self-delight.

END OF PHASE THE SECOND

PHASE THE THIRD

THE RALLY
 XVI
ON A THYME-SCENTED, bird-hatching morning in May, between two
and three years after the return from Trantridge—silent reconstructive years
for Tess Durbeyfield—she left her home for the second time.
Having packed up her luggage so that it could be sent to her later, she
started in a hired trap for the little town of Stourcastle, through which it was
necessary to pass on her journey, now in a direction almost opposite to that
of her first adventuring. On the curve of the nearest hill she looked back
regretfully at Marlott and her father’s house, although she had been so
anxious to get away.
Her kindred dwelling there would probably continue their daily lives as
heretofore, with no great diminution of pleasure in their consciousness,
although she would be far off, and they deprived of her smile. In a few days
the children would engage in their games as merrily as ever without the
sense of any gap left by her departure. This leaving of the younger children
she had decided to be for the best; were she to remain they would probably
gain less good by her precepts than harm by her example.
She went through Stourcastle without pausing, and onward to a junction
of highways, where she could await a carrier’s van that ran to the south-
west; for the railways which engirdled this interior tract of country had
never yet struck across it. While waiting, however, there came along a
farmer in his spring-cart, driving approximately in the direction that she
wished to pursue. Though he was a stranger to her she accepted his offer of
a seat beside him, ignoring that its motive was a mere tribute to her
countenance. He was going to Weatherbury, and by accompanying him
thither she could walk the remainder of the distance instead of travelling in
the van by way of Casterbridge.
Tess did not stop at Weatherbury, after this long drive, further than to
make a slight nondescript meal at noon at a cottage to which the farmer
recommended her. Thence she started on foot, basket in hand, to reach the
wide upland of heath dividing this district from the low-lying meads of a
further valley in which the dairy stood that was the aim and end of her day’s
pilgrimage.
 Tess had never before visited this part of the country, and yet she felt akin
to the landscape. Not so very far to the left of her she could discern a dark
patch in the scenery, which inquiry confirmed her in supposing to be trees
marking the environs of Kingsbere—in the church of which parish the
bones of her ancestors—her useless ancestors—lay entombed.
She had no admiration for them now; she almost hated them for the dance
they had led her; not a thing of all that had been theirs did she retain but the
old seal and spoon. “Pooh—I have as much of mother as father in me!” she
said. “All my prettiness comes from her, and she was only a dairymaid.”
The journey over the intervening uplands and lowlands of Egdon, when
she reached them, was a more troublesome walk than she had anticipated,
the distance being actually but a few miles. It was two hours, owing to
sundry wrong turnings, ere she found herself on a summit commanding the
long-sought-for vale, the Valley of the Great Dairies, the valley in which
milk and butter grew to rankness, and were produced more profusely, if less
delicately, than at her home—the verdant plain so well watered by the river
Var or Froom.
It was intrinsically different from the Vale of Little Dairies, Blackmoor
Vale, which, save during her disastrous sojourn at Trantridge, she had
exclusively known till now. The world was drawn to a larger pattern here.
The enclosures numbered fifty acres instead of ten, the farmsteads were
more extended, the groups of cattle formed tribes hereabout; there only
families. These myriads of cows stretching under her eyes from the far east
to the far west outnumbered any she had ever seen at one glance before.
The green lea was speckled as thickly with them as a canvas by Van Alsloot
or Sallaert with burghers.1 The ripe hue of the red and dun kine absorbed
the evening sunlight, which the white-coated animals returned to the eye in
rays almost dazzling, even at the distant elevation on which she stood.
The bird’s-eye perspective before her was not so luxuriantly beautiful,
perhaps, as that other one which she knew so well; yet it was more
cheering. It lacked the intensely blue atmosphere of the rival vale, and its
heavy soils and scents; the new air was clear, bracing, ethereal. The river
itself, which nourished the grass and cows of these renowned dairies,
flowed not like the streams in Blackmoor. Those were slow, silent, often
turbid; flowing over beds of mud into which the incautious wader might
sink and vanish unawares. The Froom waters were clear as the pure River
of Life shown to the Evangelist,2 rapid as the shadow of a cloud, with
pebbly shallows that prattled to the sky all day long. There the water-flower
was the lily; the crowfoot here.
Either the change in the quality of the air from heavy to light, or the sense
of being amid new scenes where there were no invidious eyes upon her,
sent up her spirits wonderfully. Her hopes mingled with the sunshine in an
ideal photosphere which surrounded her as she bounded along against the
soft south wind. She heard a pleasant voice in every breeze, and in every
bird’s note seemed to lurk a joy.
Her face had latterly changed with changing states of mind, continually
fluctuating between beauty and ordinariness, according as the thoughts were
gay or grave. One day she was pink and flawless; another pale and tragical.
When she was pink she was feeling less than when pale; her more perfect
beauty accorded with her less elevated mood; her more intense mood with
her less perfect beauty. It was her best face physically that was now set
against the south wind.
The irresistible, universal, automatic tendency to find sweet pleasure
somewhere, which pervades all life, from the meanest to the highest, had at
length mastered Tess. Being even now only a young woman of twenty, one
who mentally and sentimentally had not finished growing, it was impossible
that any event should have left upon her an impression that was not in time
capable of transmutation.
And thus her spirits, and her thankfulness, and her hopes, rose higher and
higher. She tried several ballads, but found them inadequate; till,
recollecting the psalter that her eyes had so often wandered over of a
Sunday morning before she had eaten of the tree of knowledge, she
chanted: “O ye Sun and Moon ... O ye Stars ... ye Green Things upon the
Earth ... ye Fowls of the Air ... Beasts and Cattle ... Children of Men ... bless
ye the Lord, praise Him and magnify Him for ever!”3
She suddenly stopped and murmured: “But perhaps I don’t quite know the
Lord as yet.”
And probably the half-unconscious rhapsody was a Fetichistic utterance
in a Monotheistic setting; women whose chief companions are the forms
and forces of outdoor Nature retain in their souls far more of the Pagan
fantasy of their remote forefathers than of the systematized religion taught
their race at later date. However, Tess found at least approximate expression
for her feelings in the old Benedicite that she had lisped from infancy; and it
was enough. Such high contentment with such a slight initial performance
as that of having started towards a means of independent living was a part
of the Durbeyfield temperament. Tess really wished to walk uprightly, while
her father did nothing of the kind; but she resembled him in being content
with immediate and small achievements, and in having no mind for
laborious effort towards such petty social advancement as could alone be
effected by a family so heavily handicapped as the once powerful
d’Urbervilles were now.
There was, it might be said, the energy of her mother’s unexpended
family, as well as the natural energy of Tess’s years, rekindled after the
experience which had so overwhelmed her for the time. Let the truth be told
—women do as a rule live through such humiliations, and regain their
spirits, and again look about them with an interested eye. While there’s life
there’s hope is a conviction not so entirely unknown to the “betrayed” as
some amiable theorists would have us believe.
Tess Durbeyfield, then, in good heart, and full of zest for life, descended
the Egdon slopes lower and lower towards the dairy of her pilgrimage.
The marked difference, in the final particular, between the rival vales now
showed itself. The secret of Blackmoor was best discovered from the
heights around; to read aright the valley before her it was necessary to
descend into its midst. When Tess had accomplished this feat she found
herself to be standing on a carpeted level, which stretched to the east and
west as far as the eye could reach.
The river had stolen from the higher tracts and brought in particles to the
vale all this horizontal land; and now, exhausted, aged, and attenuated, lay
serpentining along through the midst of its former spoils.
Not quite sure of her direction Tess stood still upon the hemmed expanse
of verdant flatness, like a fly on a billiard-table of indefinite length, and of
no more consequence to the surroundings than that fly. The sole effect of
her presence upon the placid valley so far had been to excite the mind of a
solitary heron, which, after descending to the ground not far from her path,
stood with neck erect, looking at her.
 Suddenly there arose from all parts of the lowland a prolonged and
repeated call—
“Waow! waow! waow!”
From the furthest east to the furthest west the cries spread as if by
contagion, accompanied in some cases by the barking of a dog. It was not
the expression of the valley’s consciousness that beautiful Tess had arrived,
but the ordinary announcement of milking-time—half-past four o’clock,
when the dairymen set about getting in the cows.
The red and white herd nearest at hand, which had been phlegmatically
waiting for the call, now trooped towards the steading in the background,
their great bags of milk swinging under them as they walked. Tess followed
slowly in their rear, and entered the bartonbf by the open gate through which
they had entered before her. Long thatched sheds stretched round the
enclosure, their slopes encrusted with vivid green moss, and their eaves
supported by wooden posts rubbed to a glossy smoothness by the flanks of
infinite cows and calves of bygone years, now passed to an oblivion almost
inconceivable in its profundity. Between the posts were ranged the milchers,
each exhibiting herself at the present moment to a whimsical eye in the rear
as a circle on two stalks, down the centre of which a switch moved
pendulum-wise; while the sun, lowering itself behind this patient row, threw
their shadows accurately inwards upon the wall. Thus it threw shadows of
these obscure and homely figures every evening with as much care over
each contour as if it had been the profile of a Court beauty on a palace wall;
copied them as diligently as it had copied Olympian shapes on marble
façades long ago, or the outline of Alexander, Caesar, and the Pharaohs.
They were the less restful cows that were stalled. Those that would stand
still of their own will were milked in the middle of the yard, where many of
such better behaved ones stood waiting now—all prime milchers, such as
were seldom seen out of this valley, and not always within it; nourished by
the succulent feed which the water-meads supplied at this prime season of
the year. Those of them that were spotted with white reflected the sunshine
in dazzling brilliancy, and the polished brass knobs on their horns glittered
with something of military display. Their large-veined udders hung
ponderous as sandbags, the teats sticking out like the legs of a gipsy’s
crock; and as each animal lingered for her turn to arrive the milk oozed
forth and fell in drops to the ground.4
 XVII
THE DAIRYMAIDS AND MEN had flocked down from their cottages and
out of the dairy-house with the arrival of the cows from the meads; the
maids walking in pattens, not on account of the weather, but to keep their
shoes above the mulch of the barton. Each girl sat down on her three-legged
stool, her face sideways, her right cheek resting against the cow; and looked
musingly along the animal’s flank at Tess as she approached. The male
milkers, with hat-brims turned down, resting flat on their foreheads and
gazing on the ground, did not observe her.
One of these was a sturdy middle-aged man—whose long white
“pinner”bg was somewhat finer and cleaner than the wraps of the others, and
whose jacket underneath had a presentable marketing aspect—the master-
dairyman, of whom she was in quest, his double character as a working
milker and buttermaker here during six days, and on the seventh as a man in
shining broad-cloth in his family pew at church, being so marked as to have
inspired a rhyme—Seeing Tess standing at gaze he went across to her.
Dairyman Dick
All the week:
On Sundays Mister Richard Crick.
The majority of dairymen have a cross manner at milking-time, but it
happened that Mr Crick was glad to get a new hand—for the days were
busy ones now—and he received her warmly; inquiring for her mother and
the rest of the family—(though this as a matter of form merely, for in reality
he had not been aware of Mrs Durbeyfield’s existence till apprised of the
fact by a brief business-letter about Tess) .
“Oh—ay, as a lad I knowed your part o’ the country very well,” he said
terminatively. “Though I’ve never been there since. And a aged woman of
ninety that used to live nigh here, but is dead and gone long ago, told me
that a family of some such name as yours in Blackmoor Vale came
originally from these parts, and that ’twere a old ancient race that had all but
perished off the earth—though the new generations didn’t know it. But,
Lord, I took no notice of the old woman’s ramblings, not I.”
 “Oh no—it is nothing,” said Tess.
Then the talk was of business only.
“You can milk ’em clean, my maidy? I don’t want my cows going azewbh
at this time o’ year.”
She reassured him on that point, and he surveyed her up and down. She
had been staying indoors a good deal, and her complexion had grown
delicate.
“Quite sure you can stand it? ’Tis comfortable enough here for rough folk;
but we don’t live in a cowcumber frame.”bi
She declared that she could stand it, and her zest and willingness seemed
to win him over.
“Well, I suppose you’ll want a dish o’ tay, or victuals of some sort, hey?
Not yet? Well, do as ye like about it. But faith, if ’twas I, I should be as dry
as a kexbj wi’ travelling so far.”
“I’ll begin milking now, to get my hand in,” said Tess.
She drank a little milk as temporary refreshment—to the surprise—
indeed, slight contempt—of Dairyman Crick, to whose mind it had
apparently never occurred that milk was good as a beverage.
“Oh, if ye can swaller that, be it so,” he said indifferently, while one held
up the pail that she sipped from. “‘Tis what I hain’t touched for years—not
I. Rot the stuff; it would lie in my innerds like lead. You can try your hand
upon she,” he pursued, nodding to the nearest cow. “Not but what she do
milk rather hard. We’ve hard ones and we’ve easy ones, like other folks.
However, you’ll find out that soon enough.”
When Tess had changed her bonnet for a hood, and was really on her stool
under the cow, and the milk was squirting from her fists into the pail, she
appeared to feel that she really had laid a new foundation for her future. The
conviction bred serenity, her pulse slowed, and she was able to look about
her.
The milkers formed quite a little battalion of men and maids, the men
operating on the hard-teated animals, the maids on the kindlier natures. It
was a large dairy. There were nearly a hundred milchers under Crick’s
management, all told; and of the herd the master-dairyman milked six or
eight with his own hands, unless away from home. These were the cows
that milked hardest of all; for his journey-milkmenbk being more or less
casually hired, he would not entrust this half-dozen to their treatment, lest,
from indifference, they should not milk them fully; nor to the maids, lest
they should fail in the same way for lack of finger-grip; with the result that
in course of time the cows would “go azew”—that is, dry up. It was not the
loss for the moment that made slack milking so serious, but that with the
decline of demand there came decline, and ultimately cessation, of supply.
After Tess had settled down to her cow there was for a time no talk in the
barton, and not a sound interfered with the purr of the milk-jets into the
numerous pails, except a momentary exclamation to one or other of the
beasts requesting her to turn round or stand still. The only movements were
those of the milkers’ hands up and down, and the swing of the cows’ tails.
Thus they all worked on, encompassed by the vast flat mead which
extended to either slope of the valley—a level landscape compounded of
old landscapes long forgotten, and, no doubt, differing in character very
greatly from the landscape they composed now.
“To my thinking,” said the dairyman, rising suddenly from a cow he had
just finished off, snatching up his three-legged stool in one hand and the
pail in the other, and moving on to the next hard-yielder in his vicinity; “to
my thinking, the cows don’t gie down their milk to-day as usual. Upon my
life, if Winker do begin keeping back like this, she’ll not be worth going
under by midsummer.”
“‘Tis because there’s a new hand come among us,” said Jonathan Kail.
“I’ve noticed such things afore.”
“To be sure. It may be so. I didn’t think o’t.”
“I’ve been told that it goes up into their horns at such times,” said a
dairymaid.
“Well, as to going up into their horns,” replied Dairyman Crick dubiously,
as though even witchcraft might be limited by anatomical possibilities, “I
couldn’t say; I certainly could not. But as nott cowsbl will keep it back as
well as the horned ones, I don’t quite agree to it. Do ye know that riddle
about the nott cows, Jonathan? Why do nott cows give less milk in a year
than horned?”
“I don’t!” interposed the milkmaid. “Why do they?”
 “Because there bain’t so many of ‘em,” said the dairyman. “Howsomever,
these gam’sters do certainly keep back their milk today. Folks, we must lift
up a stave or two—that’s the only cure for’t.”
Songs were often resorted to in dairies hereabout as an enticement to the
cows when they showed signs of withholding their usual yield; and the band
of milkers at this request burst into melody—in purely business-like tones,
it is true, and with no great spontaneity; the result, according to their own
belief, being a decided improvement during the song’s continuance. When
they had gone through fourteen or fifteen verses of a cheerful ballad about a
murderer who was afraid to go to bed in the dark because he saw certain
brimstone flames around him, one of the male milkers said—
“I wish singing on the stoop didn’t use up so much of a man’s wind! You
should get your harp, sir; not but what a fiddle is best.”
Tess, who had given ear to this, thought the words were addressed to the
dairyman, but she was wrong. A reply, in the shape of “Why?” came as it
were out of the belly of a dun cow in the stalls; it had been spoken by a
milker behind the animal, whom she had not hitherto perceived.
“Oh yes; there’s nothing like a fiddle,” said the dairyman. “Though I do
think that bulls are more moved by a tune than cows—at least that’s my
experience. Once there was a old aged man over at Mellstock—William
Dewy by name—one of the family that used to do a good deal of business
as trantersbm over there, Jonathan, do ye mind?—I knowed the man by sight
as well as I know my own brother, in a manner of speaking. Well, this man
was a coming home-along from a wedding where he had been playing his
fiddle, one fine moonlight night, and for shortness’ sake he took a cut
across Forty-acres, a field lying that way, where a bull was out to grass. The
bull seed William, and took after him, horns aground, begad; and though
William runned his best, and hadn’t much drink in him (considering ‘twas a
wedding, and the folks well off), he found he’d never reach the fence and
get over in time to save himself Well, as a last thought, he pulled out his
fiddle as he runned, and struck up a jig, turning to the bull, and backing
towards the corner. The bull softened down, and stood still, looking hard at
William Dewy, who fiddled on and on; till a sort of a smile stole over the
bull’s face. But no sooner did William stop his playing and turn to get over
hedge than the bull would stop his smiling and lower his horns towards the
seat of William’s breeches. Well, William had to turn about and play on,
willy-nilly; and ’twas only three o‘clock in the world, and ’a knowed that
nobody would come that way for hours, and he so leerybn and tired that ‘a
didn’t know what to do. When he had scraped till about four o’clock he felt
that he verily would have to give over soon, and he said to himself, ”There’s
only this last tune between me and eternal welfare! Heaven save me, or I’m
a done man.” Well, then he called to mind how he’d seen the cattle kneel o’
Christmas Eves in the dead o’ night. It was not Christmas Eve then, but it
came into his head to play a trick upon the bull. So he broke into the ‘Tivity
Hymn, just as at Christmas carol-singing; when, lo and behold, down went
the bull on his bended knees, in his ignorance, just as if ’twere the true
‘Tivity night and hour. As soon as his horned friend were down, William
turned, clinked off like a long-dog,bo and jumped safe over hedge, before
the praying bull had got on his feet again to take after him. William used to
say that he’d seen a man look a fool a good many times, but never such a
fool as that bull looked when he found his pious feelings had been played
upon, and ’twas not Christmas Eve ... Yes, William Dewy, that was the
man’s name; and I can tell you to a foot where’s he a-lying in Mellstock
Churchyard at this very moment—just between the second yew-tree and the
north aisle.”
“It’s a curious story; it carries us back to mediaeval times, when faith was
a living thing!”
The remark, singular for a dairy-yard, was murmured by the voice behind
the dun cow; but as nobody understood the reference no notice was taken,
except that the narrator seemed to think it might imply scepticism as to his
tale.
“Well, ’tis quite true, sir, whether or no. I knowed the man well.”
“Oh yes; I have no doubt of it,” said the person behind the dun cow.
Tess’s attention was thus attracted to the dairyman’s interlocutor, of whom
she could see but the merest patch, owing to his burying his head so
persistently in the flank of the milcher. She could not understand why he
should be addressed as “sir” even by the dairyman himself. But no
explanation was discernible; he remained under the cow long enough to
have milked three, uttering a private ejaculation now and then, as if he
could not get on.
 “Take it gentle, sir; take it gentle,” said the dairyman. “’Tis knack, not
strength that does it.”
“So I find,” said the other, standing up at last and stretching his arms. “I
think I have finished her, however, though she made my fingers ache.”
Tess could then see him at full length. He wore the ordinary white pinner
and leather leggings of a dairy-farmer when milking, and his boots were
clogged with the mulch of the yard; but this was all his local livery. Beneath
it was something educated, reserved, subtle, sad, differing.
But the details of his aspect were temporarily thrust aside by the
discovery that he was one whom she had seen before. Such vicissitudes had
Tess passed through since that time that for a moment she could not
remember where she had met him; and then it flashed upon her that he was
the pedestrian who had joined in the club-dance at Marlott—the passing
stranger who had come she knew not whence, had danced with others but
not with her, had slightingly left her, and gone on his way with his friends.
The flood of memories brought back by this revival of an incident anterior
to her troubles produced a momentary dismay lest, recognizing her also, he
should by some means discover her story. But it passed away when she
found no sign of remembrance in him. She saw by degrees that since their
first and only encounter his mobile face had grown more thoughtful, and
had acquired a young man’s shapely moustache and beard—the latter of the
palest straw colour where it began upon his cheeks, and deepening to a
warm brown farther from its root. Under his linen milking-pinner he wore a
dark velveteen jacket, cord breeches and gaiters, and a starched white shirt.
Without the milking-gear nobody could have guessed what he was. He
might with equal probability have been an eccentric landowner or a
gentlemanly ploughman. That he was but a novice at dairywork she had
realized in a moment, from the time he had spent upon the milking of one
cow.
Meanwhile many of the milkmaids had said to one another of the new-
comer, “How pretty she is!” with something of real generosity and
admiration, though with a half hope that the auditors would qualify the
assertion—which, strictly speaking, they might have done, prettiness being
an inexact definition of what struck the eye in Tess. When the milking was
finished for the evening they straggled indoors, where Mrs Crick, the
dairyman’s wife—who was too respectable to go out milking herself, and
wore a hot stuff gown in warm weather because the dairymaids wore prints
—was giving an eye to the leadsbp and things.
Only two or three of the maids, Tess learnt, slept in the dairyhouse besides
herself; most of the helpers going to their homes. She saw nothing at
supper-time of the superior milker who had commented on the story, and
asked no questions about him, the remainder of the evening being occupied
in arranging her place in the bed-chamber. It was a large room over the
milk-house, some thirty feet long; the sleeping-cots of the other three indoor
milkmaids being in the same apartment. They were blooming young
women, and, except one, rather older than herself. By bedtime Tess was
thoroughly tired, and fell asleep immediately.
But one of the girls who occupied an adjoining bed was more wakeful
than Tess, and would insist upon relating to the latter various particulars of
the homestead into which she had just entered. The girl’s whispered words
mingled with the shades, and, to Tess’s drowsy mind, they seemed to be
generated by the darkness in which they floated.
“Mr Angel Clare—he that is learning milking, and that plays the harp—
never says much to us. He is a pa’son’s son, and is too much taken up wi’
his own thoughts to notice girls. He is the dairyman’s pupil—learning
farming in all its branches. He has learnt sheep-farming at another place,
and he’s now mastering dairy-work ... Yes, he is quite the gentleman-born.
His father is the Reverent Mr Clare at Emminster—a good many miles from
here.”
“Oh—I have heard of him,” said her companion, now awake. “A very
earnest clergyman, is he not?”
“Yes—that he is—the earnestest man in all Wessex, they say—the last of
the old Low Church sort, they tell me—for all about here be what they call
High.1 All his sons, except our Mr Clare, be made pa’sons too.”
Tess had not at this hour the curiosity to ask why the present Mr Clare
was not made a parson like his brethren, and gradually fell asleep again, the
words of her informant coming to her along with the smell of the cheeses in
the adjoining cheese-loft, and the measured dripping of the whey from the
wringsbq downstairs.
 XVIII
ANGEL CLARE RISES OUT of the past not altogether as a distinct figure,
but as an appreciative voice, a long regard of fixed, abstracted eyes, and a
mobility of mouth somewhat too small and delicately lined for a man’s,
though with an unexpectedly firm close of the lower lip now and then;
enough to do away with any inference of indecision. Nevertheless,
something nebulous, preoccupied, vague, in his bearing and regard, marked
him as one who probably had no very definite aim or concern about his
material future. Yet as a lad people had said of him that he was one who
might do anything if he tried.
He was the youngest son of his father, a poor parson at the other end of
the county, and had arrived at Talbothays Dairy as a six months’ pupil, after
going the round of some other farms, his object being to acquire a practical
skill in the various processes of farming, with a view either to the
Colonies,1 or the tenure of a home-farm, as circumstances might decide.
His entry into the ranks of the agriculturists and breeders was a step in the
young man’s career which had been anticipated neither by himself nor by
others.
Mr Clare the elder, whose first wife had died and left him a daughter,
married a second late in life. This lady had somewhat unexpectedly brought
him three sons, so that between Angel, the youngest, and his father the vicar
there seemed to be almost a missing generation. Of these boys the aforesaid
Angel, the child of his old age, was the only son who had not taken a
University degree, though he was the single one of them whose early
promise might have done full justice to an academical training.
Some two or three years before Angel’s appearance at the Marlott dance,
on a day when he had left school and was pursuing his studies at home, a
parcel came to the vicarage from the local bookseller’s, directed to the
Reverend James Clare. The Vicar having opened it and found it to contain a
book, read a few pages; whereupon he jumped up from his seat and went
straight to the shop with the book under his arm.
 “Why has this been sent to my house?” he asked peremptorily, holding up
the volume.
“It was ordered, sir.”
“Not by me, or any one belonging to me, I am happy to say.”
The shopkeeper looked into his order-book.
“Oh, it has been misdirected, sir,” he said. “It was ordered by Mr Angel
Clare, and should have been sent to him.”
Mr Clare winced as if he had been struck. He went home pale and
dejected, and called Angel into his study.
“Look into this book, my boy,” he said. “What do you know about it?”
“I ordered it,” said Angel simply.
“What for?”
“To read.”
“How can you think of reading it?”
“How can I? Why—it is a system of philosophy. There is no more moral,
or even religious, work published.”
“Yes—moral enough; I don’t deny that. But religious!—and for you, who
intend to be a minister of the Gospel!”
“Since you have alluded to the matter, father,” said the son, with anxious
thought upon his face, “I should like to say, once for all, that I should prefer
not to take Orders.br I fear I could not conscientiously do so. I love the
Church as one loves a parent. I shall always have the warmest affection for
her. There is no institution for whose history I have a deeper admiration; but
I cannot honestly be ordained her minister, as my brothers are, while she
refuses to liberate her mind from an untenable redemptive theolatry.”
It had never occurred to the straightforward and simple-minded Vicar that
one of his own flesh and blood could come to this! He was stultified,
shocked, paralyzed. And if Angel were not going to enter the Church, what
was the use of sending him to Cambridge? The University as a step to
anything but ordination seemed, to this man of fixed ideas, a preface
without a volume. He was a man not merely religious, but devout; a firm
believer—not as the phrase is now elusively construed by theological
thimble-riggers bs in the Church and out of it, but in the old and ardent sense
of the Evangelical school: one who could
Indeed opine
That the Eternal and Divine
Did, eighteen centuries ago
In very truth ...2
Angel’s father tried argument, persuasion, entreaty.
“No, father; I cannot underwrite Article Four3 (leave alone the rest),
taking it ‘in the literal and grammatical sense’ as required by the
Declaration; and, therefore, I can’t be a parson in the present state of
affairs,” said Angel. “My whole instinct in matters of religion is towards
reconstruction: to quote your favourite Epistle to the Hebrews, ’the
removing of those things that are shaken, as of things that are made, that
those things which cannot be shaken may remain.’”4
His father grieved so deeply that it made Angel quite ill to see him.
“What is the good of your mother and me economizing and stinting
ourselves to give you a University education, if it is not to be used for the
honour and glory of God?” his father repeated.
“Why, that it may be used for the honour and glory of man, father.”
Perhaps if Angel had persevered he might have gone to Cambridge like
his brothers. But the Vicar’s view of that seat of learning as a stepping-stone
to Orders alone was quite a family tradition; and so rooted was the idea in
his mind that perseverance began to appear to the sensitive son akin to an
intent to misappropriate a trust, and wrong the pious heads of the
household, who had been and were, as his father had hinted, compelled to
exercisemuch thrift to carry out this uniform plan of education for the three
young men.
“I will do without Cambridge,” said Angel at last. “I feel that I have no
right to go there in the circumstances.”
The effects of this decisive debate were not long in showing themselves.
He spent years and years in desultory studies, undertakings, and
meditations; he began to evince considerable indifference to social forms
and observances. The material distinctions of rank and wealth he
increasingly despised. Even the “good old family” (to use a favourite phrase
of a late local worthy) had no aroma for him unless there were good new
resolutions in its representatives. As a balance to these austerities, when he
went to live in London to see what the world was like, and with a view to
practising a profession or business there, he was carried off his head, and
nearly entrapped by a woman much older than himself, though luckily he
escaped not greatly the worse for the experience.
Early association with country solitudes had bred in him an
unconquerable, and almost unreasonable, aversion to modern town life, and
shut him out from such success as he might have aspired to by following a
mundane calling in the impracticability of the spiritual one. But something
had to be done; he had wasted many valuable years; and having an
acquaintance who was starting on a thriving life as a Colonial farmer, it
occurred to Angel that this might be a lead in the right direction. Farming,
either in the Colonies, America, or at home—farming at any rate, after
becoming well qualified for the business by a careful apprenticeship—that
was a vocation which would probably afford an independence without the
sacrifice of what he valued even more than a competency—intellectual
liberty.
So we find Angel Clare at six-and-twenty here at Talbothays as a student
of kine, and, as there were no houses near at hand in which he could get a
comfortable lodging, a boarder at the dairyman’s.
His room was an immense attic which ran the whole length of the dairy-
house. It could only be reached by a ladder from the cheese-loft, and had
been closed up for a long time till he arrived and selected it as his retreat.
Here Clare had plenty of space, and could often be heard by the dairy-folk
pacing up and down when the household had gone to rest. A portion was
divided off at one end by a curtain, behind which was his bed, the outer part
being furnished as a homely sitting-room.
At first he lived up above entirely, reading a good deal, and strumming
upon an old harp which he had bought at a sale, saying when in a bitter
humour that he might have to get his living by it in the streets some day.
But he soon preferred to read human nature by taking his meals downstairs
in the general dining-kitchen, with the dairyman and his wife, and the maids
and men, who all together formed a lively assembly; for though but few
milking hands slept in the house, several joined the family at meals. The
longer Clare resided here the less objection had he to his company, and the
more did he like to share quarters with them in common.
Much to his surprise he took, indeed, a real delight in their
companionship. The conventional farm-folk of his imagination—
personified by the pitiable dummy known as Hodge5—were obliterated
after a few days’ residence. At close quarters no Hodge was to be seen. At
first, it is true, when Clare’s intelligence was fresh from a contrasting
society, these friends with whom he now hobnobbed seemed a little strange.
Sitting down as a level member of the dairyman’s household seemed at the
outset an undignified proceeding. The ideas, the modes, the surroundings,
appeared retrogressive and unmeaning. But with living on there, day after
day, the acute sojourner became conscious of a new aspect in the spectacle.
Without any objective change whatever, variety had taken the place of
monotonousness. His host and his host’s household, his men and his maids,
as they became intimately known to Clare, began to differentiate themselves
as in a chemical process. The thought of Pascal’s was brought borne to him:
“A mesure qu‘on a plus d’esprit, on trouve qu’il y a plus d’hommes
originaux. Les gens du commun ne trouvent pas de difference entre les
hommes.”6 The typical and unvarying Hodge ceased to exist. He had been
disintegrated into a number of varied fellow-creatures-beings of many
minds, beings infinite in difference; some happy, many serene, a few
depressed, one here and there bright even to genius, some stupid, others
wanton, others austere; some mutely Miltonic, some potentially
Cromwellian;7 into men who had private views of each other, as he had of
his friends; who could applaud or condemn each other, amuse or sadden
themselves by the contemplation of each other’s foibles or vices; men every
one of whom walked in his own individual way the road to dusty death.8
Unexpectedly he began to like the outdoor life for its own sake, and for
what it brought, apart from its bearing on his own proposed career.
Considering his position he became wonderfully free from the chronic
melancholy which is taking hold of the civilized races with the decline of
belief in a beneficent Power. For the first time of late years he could read as
his musings inclined him, without any eye to cramming for a profession,
since the few farming handbooks which he deemed it desirable to master
occupied him but little time.
 He grew away from old associations, and saw something new in life and
humanity. Secondarily, he made close acquaintance with phenomena which
he had before known but darkly—the seasons in their moods, morning and
evening, night and noon, winds in their different tempers, trees, waters and
mists, shades and silences, and the voices of inanimate things.

The early mornings were still sufficiently cool to render a fire acceptable in
the large room wherein they breakfasted; and, by Mrs Crick’s orders, who
held that he was too genteel to mess at their table, it was Angel Clare’s
custom to sit in the yawning chimney-corner during the meal, his cup-and-
saucer and plate being placed on a hinged flap at his elbow. The light from
the long, wide, mullioned window opposite shone in upon his nook, and,
assisted by a secondary light of cold blue quality which shone down the
chimney, enabled him to read there easily whenever disposed to do so.
Between Clare and the window was the table at which his companions sat,
their munching profiles rising sharp against the panes; while to the side was
the milk-house door, through which were visible the rectangular leads in
rows, full to the brim with the morning’s milk. At the further end the great
churn could be seen revolving, and its slip-slopping heard—the moving
power being discernible through the window in the form of a spiritless
horse walking in a circle and driven by a boy.
For several days after Tess’s arrival Clare, sitting abstractedly reading
from some book, periodical, or piece of music just come by post, hardly
noticed that she was present at table. She talked so little, and the other
maids talked so much, that the babble did not strike him as possessing a
new note, and he was ever in the habit of neglecting the particulars of an
outward scene for the general impression. One day, however, when he had
been conning one of his music-scores, and by force of imagination was
hearing the tune in his head, he lapsed into listlessness, and the music-sheet
rolled to the hearth. He looked at the fire of logs, with its one flame
pirouetting on the top in a dying dance after the breakfast-cooking and
boiling, and it seemed to jig to his inward tune; also at the two chimney
crooksbt dangling down from the cotterel or cross-bar, plumed with soot
which quivered to the same melody; also at the half-empty kettle whining
an accompaniment. The conversation at the table mixed in with his
phantasmal orchestra till he thought: “What a fluty voice one of those
milkmaids has! I suppose it is the new one.”
Clare looked round upon her, seated with the others.
She was not looking towards him. Indeed, owing to his long silence, his
presence in the room was almost forgotten.
“I don’t know about ghosts,” she was saying; “but I do know that our
souls can be made to go outside our bodies when we are alive.”
The dairyman turned to her with his mouth full, his eyes charged with
serious inquiry; and his great knife and fork (breakfasts were breakfasts
here) planted erect on the table, like the beginning of a gallows.
“What—really now? And is it so, maidy?” he said.
“A very easy way to feel ’em go,” continued Tess, “is to lie on the grass at
night and look straight up at some big bright star; and, by fixing your mind
upon it, you will soon find that you are hundreds and hundreds o’ miles
away from your body, which you don’t seem to want at all.”
The dairyman removed his hard gaze from Tess, and fixed it on his wife.
“Now that’s a rum thing, Christianner—hey? To think o’ the miles I’ve
vamped o’ starlight nights these last thirty year, courting, or trading, or for
doctor, or for nurse, and yet never had the least notion o’ that till now, or
feeled my soul rise so much as an inch above my shirt-collar.”
The general attention being drawn to her, including that of the dairyman’s
pupil, Tess flushed and remarking evasively that it was only a fancy,
resumed her breakfast.
Clare continued to observe her. She soon finished her eating, and having a
consciousness that Clare was regarding her, began to trace imaginary
patterns on the tablecloth with her forefinger with the constraint of a
domestic animal that perceives itself to be watched.
“What a fresh and virginal daughter of Nature that milkmaid is!” he said
to himself.
And then he seemed to discern in her something that was familiar,
something which carried him back into a joyous and unforeseeing past,
before the necessity of taking thought had made the heavens gray. He
concluded that he had beheld her before; where he could not tell. A casual
encounter during some country ramble it certainly had been, and he was not
greatly curious about it. But the circumstance was sufficient to lead him to
select Tess in preference to the other pretty milkmaids when he wished to
contemplate contiguous womankind.
 XIX
IN GENERAL THE cows were milked as they presented themselves,
without fancy or choice. But certain cows will show a fondness for a
particular pair of hands, sometimes carrying this predilection so far as to
refuse to stand at all except to their favourite, the pail of a stranger being
unceremoniously kicked over.
It was Dairyman Crick’s rule to insist on breaking down these partialities
and aversions by constant interchange, since otherwise, in the event of a
milkman or maid going away from the dairy, he was placed in a difficulty.
The maids’ private aims, however, were the reverse of the dairyman’s rule,
the daily selection by each damsel of the eight or ten cows to which she had
grown accustomed rendering the operation on their willing udders
surprisingly easy and effortless.
Tess, like her compeers, soon discovered which of the cows had a
preference for her style of manipulation, and her fingers having become
delicate from the long domiciliary imprisonments to which she had
subjected herself at intervals during the last two or three years, she would
have been glad to meet the milchers’ views in this respect. Out of the whole
ninety-five there were eight in particular—Dumpling, Fancy, Lofty, Mist,
Old Pretty, Young Pretty, Tidy, and Loud—who, though the teats of one or
two were as hard as carrots, gave down to her with a readiness that made
her work on them a mere touch of the fingers. Knowing, however, the
dairyman’s wish, she endeavoured conscientiously to take the animals just
as they came, excepting the very hard yielders which she could not yet
manage.
But she soon found a curious correspondence between the ostensibly
chance position of the cows and her wishes in this matter, till she felt that
their order could not be the result of accident. The dairyman’s pupil had lent
a hand in getting the cows together of late, and at the fifth or sixth time she
turned her eyes, as she rested against the cow, full of sly inquiry upon him.
“Mr Clare, you have ranged the cows!” she said, blushing; and in making
the accusation symptoms of a smile gently lifted her upper hp in spite of
her, so as to show the tips of her teeth, the lower lip remaining severely still.
 “Well, it makes no difference,” said he. “You will always be here to milk
them.”
“Do you think so? I hope I shall! But I don’t know.”
She was angry with herself afterwards, thinking that he, unaware of her
grave reasons for liking this seclusion, might have mistaken her meaning.
She had spoken so earnestly to him, as if his presence were somehow a
factor in her wish. Her misgiving was such that at dusk, when the milking
was over, she walked in the garden alone, to continue her regrets that she
had disclosed to him her discovery of his considerateness.
It was a typical summer evening in June, the atmosphere being in such
delicate equilibrium and so transmissive that inanimate objects seemed
endowed with two or three senses, if not five. There was no distinction
between the near and the far, and an auditor felt close to everything within
the horizon. The soundlessness impressed her as a positive entity rather than
as the mere negation of noise. It was broken by the strumming of strings.
Tess had heard those notes in the attic above her head. Dim, flattened,
constrained by their confinement, they had never appealed to her as now,
when they wandered in the still air with a stark quality like that of nudity.
To speak absolutely, both instrument and execution were poor; but the
relative is all, and as she listened Tess, like a fascinated bird, could not
leave the spot. Far from leaving she drew up towards the performer,
keeping behind the hedge that he might not guess her presence.
The outskirt of the garden in which Tess found herself had been left
uncultivated for some years, and was now damp and rank with juicy grass
which sent up mists of pollen at a touch; and with tall blooming weeds
emitting offensive smells—weeds whose red and yellow and purple hues
formed a polychrome as dazzling as that of cultivated flowers. She went
stealthily as a cat through this profusion of growth, gathering cuckoo-spittle
on her skirts, cracking snails that were underfoot, staining her hands with
thistle-milk and slug-slime, and rubbing off upon her naked arms sticky
blights which, though snow-white on the apple-tree trunks, made madder
stains on her skin; thus she drew quite near to Clare, still unobserved of
him.
Tess was conscious of neither time nor space. The exaltation which she
had described as being producible at will by gazing at a star, came now
without any determination of hers; she undulated upon the thin notes of the
second-hand harp, and their harmonies passed like breezes through her,
bringing tears into her eyes. The floating pollen seemed to be his notes
made visible, and the dampness of the garden the weeping of the garden’s
sensibility. Though near nightfall, the rank-smelling weed-flowers glowed
as if they would not close for intentness, and the waves of colour mixed
with the waves of sound.
The light which still shone was derived mainly from a large hole in the
western bank of cloud; it was like a piece of day left behind by accident,
dusk having closed in elsewhere. He concluded his plaintive melody, a very
simple performance, demanding no great skill; and she waited, thinking
another might be begun. But, tired of playing, he had desultorily come
round the fence, and was rambling up behind her. Tess, her cheeks on fire,
moved away furtively, as if hardly moving at all.
Angel, however, saw her light summer gown, and he spoke; his low tones
reaching her, though he was some distance off.
“What makes you draw off in that way, Tess?” said he. “Are you afraid?”
“Oh no, sir ... not of outdoor things; especially just now when the apple-
bloothbu is falling, and everything so green.”
“But you have your indoor fears—eh?”
“Well—yes, sir.”
“What of?”
“I couldn’t quite say.”
“The milk turning sour?”
“No.”
“Life in general?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Ah—so have I, very often. This hobble of being alive is rather serious,
don’t you think so?”
“It is—now you put it that way.”
“All the same, I shouldn’t have expected a young girl like you to see it so
just yet. How is it you do?”
 She maintained a hesitating silence.
“Come, Tess, tell me in confidence.”
She thought that he meant what were the aspects of things to her, and
replied shyly—
“The trees have inquisitive eyes, haven’t they?—that is, seem as if they
had. And the river says,—‘Why do ye trouble me with your looks?’ And
you seem to see numbers of tomorrows just all in a line, the first of them the
biggest and clearest, the others getting smaller and smaller as they stand
farther away; but they all seem very fierce and cruel and as if they said,
”I’m coming! Beware of me! Beware of me!’ ... But you, sir, can raise up
dreams with your music, and drive all such horrid fancies away!”
He was surprised to find this young woman—who though but a milkmaid
had just that touch of rarity about her which might make her the envied of
her housemates—shaping such sad imaginings. She was expressing in her
own native phrases—assisted a little by her Sixth Standard training—
feelings which might almost have been called those of the age—the ache of
modernism. The perception arrested him less when he reflected that what
are called advanced ideas are really in great part but the latest fashion in
definition—a more accurate expression, by words in logy and ism, of
sensations which men and women have vaguely grasped for centuries.
Still, it was strange that they should have come to her while yet so young;
more than strange; it was impressive, interesting, pathetic. Not guessing the
cause, there was nothing to remind him that experience is as to intensity,
and not as to duration. Tess’s passing corporeal blight had been her mental
harvest.
Tess, on her part, could not understand why a man of clerical family and
good education, and above physical want, should look upon it as a mishap
to be alive. For the unhappy pilgrim herself there was very good reason. But
how could this admirable and poetic man ever have descended into the
Valley of Humiliation,1 have felt with the man of Uz—as she herself had
felt two or three years ago—“My soul chooseth strangling and death rather
than my life. I loathe it; I would not live alway.”2
It was true that he was at present out of his class. But she knew that was
only because, like Peter the Great in a shipwright’s yard, he was studying
what he wanted to know. He did not milk cows because he was obliged to
milk cows, but because he was learning how to be a rich and prosperous
dairyman, landowner, agriculturist, and breeder of cattle. He would become
an American or Australian Abraham, commanding like a monarch his
flocks and his herds, his spotted and his ring-straked, his men-servants and
his maids. At times, nevertheless, it did seem unaccountable to her that a
decidedly bookish, musical, thinking young man should have chosen
deliberately to be a farmer, and not a clergyman, like his father and
brothers.
Thus, neither having the clue to the other’s secret, they were respectively
puzzled at what each revealed, and awaited new knowledge of each other’s
character and moods without attempting to pry into each other’s history.

Every day, every hour, brought to him one more little stroke of her nature,
and to her one more of his. Tess was trying to lead a repressed life, but she
little divined the strength of her own vitality.
At first Tess seemed to regard Angel Clare as an intelligence rather than
as a man. As such she compared him with herself; and at every discovery of
the abundance of his illuminations, of the distance between her own modest
mental standpoint and the unmeasurable, Andean altitude of his, she
became quite dejected, disheartened from all further effort on her own part
whatever.
He observed her dejection one day, when he had casually mentioned
something to her about pastoral life in ancient Greece. She was gathering
the buds called “lords and ladies”bv from the bank while he spoke.
“Why do you look so woebegone all of a sudden?” he asked.
“Oh ’tis only—about my own self,” she said, with a frail laugh of sadness,
fitfully beginning to peel “a lady” meanwhile. “Just a sense of what might
have been with me! My life looks as if it had been wasted for want of
chances! When I see what you know, what you have read, and seen, and
thought, I feel what a nothing I am! I’m like the poor Queen of Sheba who
lived in the Bible. There is no more spirit in me.” 3
“Bless my soul, don’t go troubling about that! Why,” he said with some
enthusiasm, “I should be only too glad, my dear Tess, to help you do
anything in the way of history, or any line of reading you would like to take
up—”
“It is a lady again,” interrupted she, holding out the bud she had peeled.
“What?”
“I meant that there are always more ladies than lords when you come to
peel them.”
“Never mind about the lords and ladies. Would you like to take up any
course of study—history, for example?”
“Sometimes I feel I don’t want to know anything more about it than I
know already.”
“Why not?”
“Because what’s the use of learning that I am one of a long row only—
finding out that there is set down in some old book somebody just like me,
and to know that I shall only act her part; making me sad, that’s all. The
best is not to remember that your nature and past doings have been just like
thousands’ and thousands‘, and that your coming life and doings ’ll be like
thousands’ and thousands’.”
“What, really, then, you don’t want to learn anything?”
“I shouldn’t mind learning why—why the sun do shine on the just and the
unjust alike,”4 she answered, with a slight quaver in her voice. “But that’s
what books will not tell me.”
“Tess, fie for such bitterness!” Of course he spoke with a conventional
sense of duty only, for that sort of wondering had not been unknown to
himself in bygone days. And as he looked at the unpractised mouth and lips,
he thought that such a daughter of the soil could only have caught up the
sentiment by rote. She went on peeling the lords and ladies till Clare,
regarding for a moment the wave-like curl of her lashes as they drooped
with her bent gaze on her soft cheek, lingeringly went away. When he was
gone she stood awhile, thoughtfully peeling the last bud; and then,
awakening from her reverie, flung it and all the crowd of floral nobility
impatiently on the ground, in an ebullition of displeasure with herself for
her niaiseries, bw and with a quickening warmth in her heart of hearts.
 How stupid he must think her! In an access of hunger for his good opinion
she bethought herself of what she had latterly endeavoured to forget, so
unpleasant had been its issues—the identity of her family with that of the
knightly d‘Urbervilles. Barren attribute as it was, disastrous as its discovery
had been in many ways to her, perhaps Mr Clare, as a gentleman and a
student of history, would respect her sufficiently to forget her childish
conduct with the lords and ladies if he knew that those Purbeck-marble and
alabaster people in Kingsbere Church really represented her own lineal
forefathers; that she was no spurious d’Urberville, compounded of money
and ambition like those at Trantridge, but true d’Urberville to the bone.
But, before venturing to make the revelation, dubious Tess indirectly
sounded the dairyman as to its possible effect upon Mr Clare, by asking the
former if Mr Clare had any great respect for old county families when they
had lost all their money and land.
“Mr Clare,” said the dairyman emphatically, “is one of the most rebellest
rozumsbx you ever knowed—not a bit like the rest of his family; and if
there’s one thing that he do hate more than another ‘tis the notion of what’s
called a’ old family. He says that it stands to reason that old families have
done their spurt of work in past days, and can’t have anything left in ’em
now. There’s the Billetts and the Drenkhards and the Greys and the St
Quintins and the Hardys and the Goulds, who used to own the lands for
miles down this valley; you could buy ‘em all up now for an old song
a’most. Why, our little Retty Priddle here, you know, is one of the Paridelles
—the old family that used to own lots o’ the lands out by King‘s-Hintock
now owned by the Earl o’ Wessex, afore even he or his was heard of Well,
Mr Clare found this out, and spoke quite scornful to the poor girl for days.
‘Ah!’ he says to her, ‘you’ll never make a good dairymaid! All your skill
was used up ages ago in Palestine, and you must lie fallow for a thousand
years to git strength for more deeds!’ A boy came here t’other day asking
for a job, and said his name was Matt, and when we asked him his surname
he said he’d never heard that ‘a had any surname, and when we asked why,
he said he supposed his folks hadn’t been ’stablished long enough. ‘Ah!
you’re the very boy I want!’ says Mr Clare, jumping up and shaking hands
wi‘en; ‘I’ve great hopes of you’; and gave him half-a-crown. O no! he can’t
stomach old families!”
 After hearing this caricature of Clare’s opinions poor Tess was glad that
she had not said a word in a weak moment about her family—even though
it was so unusually old as almost to have gone round the circle and become
a new one. Besides, another dairy-girl was as good as she, it seemed, in that
respect. She held her tongue about the d’Urberville vault, and the Knight of
the Conqueror whose name she bore. The insight afforded into Clare’s
character suggested to her that it was largely owing to her supposed
untraditional newness that she had won interest in his eyes.
 XX
THE SEASON DEVELOPED AND matured. Another year’s instalment of
flowers, leaves, nightingales, thrushes, finches, and such ephemeral
creatures, took up their positions where only a year ago others had stood in
their place when these were nothing more than germs and inorganic
particles. Rays from the sunrise drew forth the buds and stretched them into
long stalks, lifted up sap in noiseless streams, opened petals, and sucked out
scents in invisible jets and breathings.
Dairyman Crick’s household of maids and men lived on comfortably,
placidly, even merrily. Their position was perhaps the happiest of all
positions in the social scale, being above the line at which neediness ends,
and below the line at which the convenancesby begin to cramp natural
feeling, and the stress of threadbare modishness makes too little of enough.
Thus passed the leafy time when arborescence seems to be the one thing
aimed at out of doors. Tess and Clare unconsciously studied each other, ever
balanced on the edge of a passion, yet apparently keeping out of it. All the
while they were converging, under an irresistible law, as surely as two
streams in one vale.
Tess had never in her recent life been so happy as she was now, possibly
never would be so happy again. She was, for one thing, physically and
mentally suited among these new surroundings. The sapling which had
rooted down to a poisonous stratum on the spot of its sowing had been
transplanted to a deeper soil. Moreover she, and Clare also, stood as yet on
the debatable land between predilection and love; where no profundities
have been reached; no reflections have set in, awkwardly inquiring,
“Whither does this new current tend to carry me? What does it mean to my
future? How does it stand towards my past?”
Tess was the merest stray phenomenon to Angel Clare as yet—a rosy
warming apparition which had only just acquired the attribute of persistence
in his consciousness. So he allowed his mind to be occupied with her,
deeming his preoccupation to be no more than a philosopher’s regard of an
exceedingly novel, fresh, and interesting specimen of womankind.
 They met continually; they could not help it. They met daily in that
strange and solemn interval, the twilight of the morning, in the violet or
pink dawn; for it was necessary to rise early, so very early, here. Milking
was done betimes; and before the milking came the skimming, which began
at a little past three. It usually fell to the lot of some one or other of them to
wake the rest, the first being aroused by an alarm-clock; and, as Tess was
the latest arrival, and they soon discovered that she could be depended upon
not to sleep through the alarm as the others did, this task was thrust most
frequently upon her. No sooner had the hour of three struck and whizzed,
than she left her room and ran to the dairyman’s door; then up the ladder to
Angel’s, calling him in a loud whisper; then woke her fellow-milkmaids. By
the time that Tess was dressed Clare was downstairs and out in the humid
air. The remaining maids and the dairyman usually gave themselves another
turn on the pillow, and did not appear till a quarter of an hour later.
The gray half-tones of daybreak are not the gray half-tones of the day’s
close, though the degree of their shade may be the same. In the twilight of
the morning light seems active, darkness passive; in the twilight of evening
it is the darkness which is active and crescent, and the light which is the
drowsy reverse.
Being so often—possibly not always by chance—the first two persons to
get up at the dairy-house, they seemed to themselves the first persons up of
all the world. In these early days of her residence here Tess did not skim,
but went out of doors at once after rising, where he was generally awaiting
her. The spectral, half-compounded, aqueous light which pervaded the open
mead, impressed them with a feeling of isolation, as if they were Adam and
Eve. At this dim inceptive stage of the day Tess seemed to Clare to exhibit a
dignified largeness both of disposition and physique, an almost regnant
power, possibly because he knew that at that preternatural time hardly any
woman so well endowed in person as she was likely to be walking in the
open air within the boundaries of his horizon; very few in all England. Fair
women are usually asleep at midsummer dawns. She was close at hand, and
the rest were nowhere.
The mixed, singular, luminous gloom in which they walked along
together to the spot where the cows lay, often made him think of the
Resurrection hour. He little thought that the Magdalen might be at his side.1
Whilst all the landscape was in neutral shade his companion’s face, which
was the focus of his eyes, rising above the mist stratum, seemed to have a
sort of phosphorescence upon it. She looked ghostly, as if she were merely a
soul at large. In reality her face, without appearing to do so, had caught the
cold gleam of day from the north-east; his own face, though he did not think
of it, wore the same aspect to her.
It was then, as has been said, that she impressed him most deeply. She
was no longer the milkmaid, but a visionary essence of woman—a whole
sex condensed into one typical form. He called her Artemis, Demeter,bz and
other fanciful names half teasingly, which she did not like because she did
not understand them.
“Call me Tess,” she would say askance; and he did.
Then it would grow lighter, and her features would become simply
feminine; they had changed from those of a divinity who could confer bliss
to those of a being who craved it.
At these non-human hours they could get quite close to the waterfowl.
Herons came, with a great bold noise as of opening doors and shutters, out
of the boughs of a plantation which they frequented at the side of the mead;
or, if already on the spot, hardily maintained their standing in the water as
the pair walked by, watching them by moving their heads round in a slow,
horizontal, passionless wheel, like the turn of puppets by clockwork.
They could then see the faint summer fogs in layers, woolly, level, and
apparently no thicker than counterpanes, spread about the meadows in
detached remnants of small extent. On the gray moisture of the grass were
marks where the cows had lain through the night—dark-green islands of dry
herbage the size of their carcases, in the general sea of dew. From each
island proceeded a serpentine trail, by which the cow had rambled away to
feed after getting up, at the end of which trail they found her; the snoring
puff from her nostrils, when she recognized them, making an intenser little
fog of her own amid the prevailing one. Then they drove the animals back
to the barton, or sat down to milk them on the spot, as the case might
require.
Or perhaps the summer fog was more general, and the meadows lay like a
white sea, out of which the scattered trees rose like dangerous rocks. Birds
would soar through it into the upper radiance, and hang on the wing sunning
themselves, or alight on the wet rails subdividing the mead, which now
shone like glass rods. Minute diamonds of moisture from the mist hung,
too, upon Tess’s eyelashes, and drops upon her hair, like seed pearls. When
the day grew quite strong and commonplace these dried off her; moreover,
Tess then lost her strange and ethereal beauty; her teeth, lips, and eyes
scintillated in the sunbeams, and she was again the dazzlingly fair
dairymaid only, who had to hold her own against the other women of the
world.
About this time they would hear Dairyman Crick’s voice, lecturing the
non-resident milkers for arriving late, and speaking sharply to old Deborah
Fyander for not washing her hands.
“For Heaven’s sake, pop thy hands under the pump, Deb! Upon my soul,
if the London folk only knowed of thee and thy slovenly ways, they’d
swaller their milk and butter more mincing than they do a’ready; and that’s
saying a good deal.”
The milking progressed, till towards the end Tess and Clare, in common
with the rest, could hear the heavy breakfast table dragged out from the wall
in the kitchen by Mrs Crick, this being the invariable preliminary to each
meal; the same horrible scrape accompanying its return journey when the
table had been cleared.
 XXI
THERE WAS A GREAT stir in the milk-house just after breakfast. The
churn revolved as usual, but the butter would not come. Whenever this
happened the dairy was paralyzed. Squish, squash, echoed the milk in the
great cylinder, but never arose the sound they waited for.
Dairyman Crick and his wife, the milkmaids Tess, Marian, Retty Priddle,
Izz Huett, and the married ones from the cottages; also Mr Clare, Jonathan
Kail, old Deborah, and the rest, stood gazing hopelessly at the churn; and
the boy who kept the horse going outside put on moon-like eyes to show his
sense of the situation. Even the melancholy horse himself seemed to look in
at the window in inquiring despair at each walk round.
“‘Tis years since I went to Conjuror Trendle’s son in Egdon—years! said
the dairyman bitterly. ”And he was nothing to what his father had been. I
have said fifty times, if I have said once, that I don’t believe in en. And I
don’t believe in en. But I shall have to go to ’n if he’s alive. O yes, I shall
have to go to ’n, if this sort of thing continnys!”
Even Mr Clare began to feel tragical at the dairyman’s desperation.
“Conjuror Fall, t‘other side of Casterbridge, that they used to call ‘Wide-
O,’ was a very good man when I was a boy,” said Jonathan Kail. “But he’s
rotten as touchwoodca by now.”
“My grandfather used to go to Conjuror Mynterne, out at Owlscombe, and
a clever man a’ were, so I’ve heard grandf’er say,” continued Mr Crick.
“But there’s no such genuine folk about nowadays!”
Mrs Crick’s mind kept nearer to the matter in hand.
“Perhaps somebody in the house is in love,” she said tentatively.“I’ve
heard tell in my younger days that that will cause it. Why, Crick—that maid
we had years ago, do ye mind, and how the butter didn’t come then—”
“Ah yes, yes!—but that isn’t the rights o’t. It had nothing to do with the
lovemaking. I can mind all about it—’twas the damage to the churn.”
He turned to Clare.
 “Jack Dollop, a ‘hore’s-birdcb of a fellow we had here as milker at one
time, sir, courted a young woman over at Mellstock, and deceived her as he
had deceived many afore. But he had another sort o’ woman to reckon wi’
this time, and it was not the girl herself. One HolyThursday,cc of all days in
the almanack, we was here as we mid be now, only there was no churning
in hand, when we zidcd the girl’s mother coming up to the door, wi’ a great
brass-mounted umbrella in her hand that would ha’ felled an ox, and saying
‘Do Jack Dollop work here?—because I want him! I have a big bone to pick
with he, I can assure ’n!’ And some way behind her mother walked Jack’s
young woman, crying bitterly into her handkercher. ‘O Lard, here’s a time!’
said Jack, looking out o’ winder at ’em. ‘She’ll murder me! Where shall I
get—where shall I—? Don’t tell her where I be!’ And with that he
scrambled into the churn through the trap-door, and shut himself inside, just
as the young woman’s mother busted into the milk-house. ‘The villain—
where is he?’ says she, ‘I’ll claw his face for’n, let me only catch him!’
Well, she hunted about everywhere, ballyraggingce Jack by side and by
seam, Jack lying a’most stifled inside the churn, and the poor maid—or
young woman rather—standing at the door crying her eyes out. I shall never
forget it, never! ‘Twould have melted a marble stone! But she couldn’t find
him nowhere at all.”
The dairyman paused, and one or two words of comment came from the
listeners.
Dairyman Crick’s stories often seemed to be ended when they were not
really so, and strangers were betrayed into premature interjections of
finality; though old friends knew better. The narrator went on—
“Well, how the old woman should have had the wit to guess it I could
never tell, but she found out that he was inside that there churn. Without
saying a word she took hold of the winch (it was turned by handpower
then), and round she swung him, and Jack began to flop about inside. ‘O
Lard! stop the churn! let me out!’ says he, popping out his head, ‘I shall be
churned into a pummy!’cf (he was a cowardly chap in his heart, as such men
mostly be). ‘Not till ye make amends for ravaging her virgin innocence!’
says the old woman. ‘Stop the churn, you old witch!’ screams he. ‘You call
me old witch, do ye, you deceiver!’ says she, ‘when ye ought to ha’ been
calling me mother-law these last five months!’ And on went the churn, and
Jack’s bones raffled round again. Well, none of us ventured to interfere; and
at last ‘a promised to make it right wi’ her. ‘Yes—I’ll be as good as my
word!’ he said. And so it ended that day.”
While the listeners were smiling their comments there was a quick
movement behind their backs, and they looked round. Tess, pale-faced, had
gone to the door.
“How warm ’tis to-day!” she said, almost inaudibly.
It was warm, and none of them connected her withdrawal with the
reminiscences of the dairyman. He went forward, and opened the door for
her, saying with tender raillery—
“Why, maidy” (he frequently, with unconscious irony, gave her this pet
name), “the prettiest milker I’ve got in my dairy; you mustn’t get so fagged
as this at the first breath of summer weather, or we shall be finely put to for
want of ’ee by dogdays, shan’t we, Mr Clare?”
“I was faint—and—I think I am better out o’ doors,” she said
mechanically; and disappeared outside.
Fortunately for her the milk in the revolving churn at that moment
changed its squashing for a decided flick-flack.
“‘Tis coming!” cried Mrs Crick, and the attention of all was called off
from Tess.
That fair sufferer soon recovered herself externally; but she remained
much depressed all the afternoon. When the evening milking was done she
did not care to be with the rest of them, and went out of doors wandering
along she knew not whither. She was wretched—0 so wretched—at the
perception that to her companions the dairyman’s story had been rather a
humorous narration than otherwise; none of them but herself seemed to see
the sorrow of it; to a certainty, not one knew how cruelly it touched the
tender place in her experience. The evening sun was now ugly to her, like a
great inflamed wound in the sky. Only a solitary cracked-voiced reed-
sparrow greeted her from the bushes by the river, in a sad, machine-made
tone, resembling that of a past friend whose friendship she had outworn.
In these long June days the milkmaids, and, indeed, most of the
household, went to bed at sunset or sooner, the morning work before
milking being so early and heavy at a time of full pails. Tess usually
accompanied her fellows upstairs. To-night, however, she was the first to go
to their common chamber; and she had dozed when the other girls came in.
She saw them undressing in the orange light of the vanished sun, which
flushed their forms with its colour; she dozed again, but she was
reawakened by their voices, and quietly turned her eyes towards them.
Neither of her three chamber-companions had got into bed. They were
standing in a group, in their nightgowns, barefooted, at the window, the last
red rays of the west still warming their faces and necks, and the walls
around them. All were watching somebody in the garden with deep interest,
their three faces close together: a jovial and round one, a pale one with dark
hair, and a fair one whose tresses were auburn.
“Don’t push! You can see as well as I,” said Retty, the auburn-haired and
youngest girl, without removing her eyes from the window.
“’Tis no use for you to be in love with him any more than me, Retty
Priddle,” said jolly-faced Marian, the eldest, slily. “His thoughts be of other
cheeks than thine!”
Retty Priddle still looked, and the others looked again.
“There he is again!” cried Izz Huett, the pale girl with dark damp hair and
keenly cut lips.
“You needn’t say anything, Izz,” answered Retty. “For I zid you kissing
his shade.”
“What did you see her doing?” asked Marian.
“Why—he was standing over the whey-tub to let off the whey, and the
shade of his face came upon the wall behind, close to Izz, who was standing
there filling a vat. She put her mouth against the wall and kissed the shade
of his mouth; I zid her, though he didn’t.”
“O Izz Huett!” said Marian.
A rosy spot came into the middle of Izz Huett’s cheek.
“Well, there was no harm in it,” she declared, with attempted coolness.
“And if I be in love wi’ en, so is Retty, too; and so be you, Marian, come to
that.”
Marian’s full face could not blush past its chronic pinkness.
“I!” she said. “What a tale! Ah, there he is again! Dear eyes—dear face—
dear Mr Clare!”
 “There—you’ve owned it!”
“So have you—so have we all,” said Marian, with the dry frankness of
complete indifference to opinion. “It is silly to pretend otherwise amongst
ourselves, though we need not own it to other folks. I would just marry ’n
tomorrow!”
“So would I—and more,” murmured Izz Huett.
“And I too,” whispered the more timid Retty.
The listener grew warm.
“We can’t all marry him,” said Izz.
“We shan’t, either of us; which is worse still,” said the eldest. “There he is
again!”
They all three blew him a silent kiss.
“Why?” asked Retty quickly.
“Because he likes Tess Durbeyfield best,” said Marian, lowering her
voice. “I have watched him every day, and have found it out.”
There was a reflective silence.
“But she don’t care anything for ’n?” at length breathed Retty.
“Well—I sometimes think that too.’
“But how silly all this is!” said Izz Huett impatiently. “Of course he won’t
marry any one of us, or Tess either—a gentleman’s son, who’s going to be a
great landowner and farmer abroad! More likely to ask us to come wi’en as
farm-hands at so much a year!”
One sighed, and another sighed, and Marian’s plump figure sighed biggest
of all. Somebody in bed hard by sighed too. Tears came into the eyes of
Retty Priddle, the pretty red-haired youngest—the last bud of the Paridelles,
so important in the county annals. They watched silently a little longer, their
three faces still close together as before, and the triple hues of their hair
mingling. But the unconscious Mr Clare had gone indoors, and they saw
him no more; and, the shades beginning to deepen, they crept into their
beds. In a few minutes they heard him ascend the ladder to his own room.
Marian was soon snoring, but Izz did not drop into forgetfulness for a long
time. Retty Priddle cried herself to sleep.
 The deeper-passioned Tess was very far from sleeping even then. This
conversation was another of the bitter pills she had been obliged to swallow
that day. Scarce the least feeling of jealousy arose in her breast. For that
matter she knew herself to have the preference. Being more finely formed,
better educated, and, though the youngest except Retty, more woman than
either, she perceived that only the slightest ordinary care was necessary for
holding her own in Angel Clare’s heart against these her candid friends. But
the grave question was, ought she to do this? There was, to be sure, hardly a
ghost of a chance for either of them, in a serious sense; but there was, or
had been, a chance of one or the other inspiring him with a passing fancy
for her, and enjoying the pleasure of his attentions while he stayed here.
Such unequal attachments had led to marriage; and she had heard from Mrs
Crick that Mr Clare had one day asked, in a laughing way, what would be
the use of his marrying a fine lady, and all the while ten thousand acres of
Colonial pasture to feed, and cattle to rear, and corn to reap. A farm-woman
would be the only sensible kind of wife for him. But whether Mr Clare had
spoken seriously or not, why should she, who could never conscientiously
allow any man to marry her now, and who had religiously determined that
she never would be tempted to do so, draw off Mr Clare’s attention from
other women, for the brief happiness of sunning herself in his eyes while he
remained at Talbothays?
 XXII
THEY CAME DOWNSTAIRS YAWNING next morning; but skimming
and milking were proceeded with as usual, and they went indoors to
breakfast. Dairyman Crick was discovered stamping about the house. He
had received a letter, in which a customer had complained that the butter
had a twang.cg
“And begad, so ’t have!” said the dairyman, who held in his left hand a
wooden slice on which a lump of butter was stuck. “Yes—taste for yourself!
”
Several of them gathered round him; and Mr Clare tasted, Tess tasted,
also the other indoor milkmaids, one or two of the milking-men, and last of
all Mrs Crick, who came out from the waiting breakfast-table. There
certainly was a twang.
The dairyman, who had thrown himself into abstraction to better realize
the taste, and so divine the particular species of noxious weed to which it
appertained, suddenly exclaimed—
“’Tis garlic! and I thought there wasn’t a blade left in that mead! ”
Then all the old hands remembered that a certain dry mead, into which a
few of the cows had been admitted of late, had, in years gone by, spoilt the
butter in the same way. The dairyman had not recognized the taste at that
time, and thought the butter bewitched.
“We must overhaul that mead,” he resumed; “this mustn’t continny! ”
All having armed themselves with old pointed knives they went out
together. As the inimical plant could only be present in very microscopic
dimensions to have escaped ordinary observation, to find it seemed rather a
hopeless attempt in the stretch of rich grass before them. However, they
formed themselves into line, all assisting, owing to the importance of the
search; the dairyman at the upper end with Mr Clare, who had volunteered
to help; then Tess, Marian, Izz Huett, and Retty; then Bill Lewell, Jonathan,
and the married dairywomen—Beck Knibbs, with her woolly black hair and
rolling eyes; and flaxen Frances, consumptive from the winter damps of the
watermeadsch—who lived in their respective cottages.
 With eyes fixed upon the ground they crept slowly across a strip of the
field, returning a little further down in such a manner that, when they
should have finished, not a single inch of pasture but would have fallen
under the eye of some one of them. It was a most tedious business, not more
than half a dozen shoots of garlic being discoverable in the whole field; yet
such was the herb’s pungency that probably one bite of it by one cow had
been sufficient to season the whole dairy’s produce for the day.
Differing one from another in natures and mood so greatly as they did,
they yet formed, bending, a curiously uniform row—automatic, noiseless;
and an alien observer passing down the neighbouring lane might well have
been excused for massing them as “Hodge.” As they crept along, stooping
low to discern the plant, a soft yellow gleam was reflected from the
buttercups into their shaded faces, giving them an elfish, moonlit aspect,
though the sun was pouring upon their backs in all the strength of noon.
Angel Clare, who communistically stuck to his rule of taking part with the
rest in everything, glanced up now and then. It was not, of course, by
accident that he walked next to Tess.
“Well, how are you?” he murmured.
“Very well, thank you, sir,” she replied demurely.
As they had been discussing a score of personal matters only half-an-hour
before, the introductory style seemed a little superfluous. But they got no
further in speech just then. They crept and crept, the hem of her petticoat
just touching his gaiter, and his elbow sometimes brushing hers. At last the
dairyman, who came next, could stand it no longer.
“Upon my soul and body, this here stooping do fairly make my back open
and shut!” he exclaimed, straightening himself slowly with an excruciated
look till quite upright. “And you, maidy Tess, you wasn’t well a day or two
ago—this will make your head ache finely! Don’t do any more, if you feel
fainty; leave the rest to finish it.”
Dairyman Crick withdrew, and Tess dropped behind. Mr Clare also
stepped out of line, and began privateering about for the weed. When she
found him near her, her very tension at what she had heard the night before
made her the first to speak.
“Don’t they look pretty?” she said.
 “Who?”
“Izzy Huett and Retty.”
Tess had moodily decided that either of these maidens would make a good
farmer’s wife, and that she ought to recommend them, and obscure her own
wretched charms.
“Pretty? Well, yes—they are pretty girls—fresh looking. I have often
thought so.”
“Though, poor dears, prettiness won’t last long!”
“O no, unfortunately.”
“They are excellent dairywomen.”
“Yes: though not better than you.”
“They skim better than I.”
“Do they?”
Clare remained observing them—not without their observing him.
“She is colouring up,” continued Tess heroically.
“Who?
“Retty Priddle.”
“Oh! Why is that?”
“Because you are looking at her.”
Self-sacrificing as her mood might be Tess could not well go further and
cry, “Marry one of them, if you really do want a dairywoman and not a
lady; and don’t think of marrying me!” She followed Dairyman Crick, and
had the mournful satisfaction of seeing that Clare remained behind.
From this day she forced herself to take pains to avoid him— never
allowing herself, as formerly, to remain long in his company, even if their
juxtaposition were purely accidental. She gave the other three every chance.
Tess was woman enough to realize from their avowals to herself that
Angel Clare had the honour of all the dairymaids in his keeping, and her
perception of his care to avoid compromising the happiness of either in the
least degree bred a tender respect in Tess for what she deemed, rightly or
wrongly, the self-controlling sense of duty shown by him, a quality which
she had never expected to find in one of the opposite sex, and in the absence
of which more than one of the simple hearts who were his housemates
might have gone weeping on her pilgrimage.
 XXIII
THE HOT WEATHER OF July had crept upon them unawares, and the
atmosphere of the flat vale hung heavy as an opiate over the dairy-folk, the
cows, and the trees. Hot steaming rains fell frequently, making the grass
where the cows fed yet more rank, and hindering the late hay-making in the
other meads.
It was Sunday morning; the milking was done; the outdoor milkers had
gone home. Tess and the other three were dressing themselves rapidly, the
whole bevy having agreed to go together to Mellstock Church, which lay
some three or four miles distant from the dairy-house. She had now been
two months at Talbothays, and this was her first excursion.
All the preceding afternoon and night heavy thunderstorms had hissed
down upon the meads, and washed some of the hay into the river; but this
morning the sun shone out all the more brilliantly for the deluge, and the air
was balmy and clear.
The crooked lane leading from their own parish to Mellstock ran along
the lowest levels in a portion of its length, and when the girls reached the
most depressed spot they found that the result of the rain had been to flood
the lane over-shoe to a distance of some fifty yards. This would have been
no serious hindrance on a week-day ; they would have clicked through it in
their high pattens and boots quite unconcerned; but on this day of vanity,
this Sun’s-day, when flesh went forth to coquet with flesh while
hypocritically affecting business with spiritual things; on this occasion for
wearing their white stockings and thin shoes, and their pink, white, and lilac
gowns, on which every mud spot would be visible, the pool was an
awkward impediment. They could hear the church-bell calling—as yet
nearly a mile off
“Who would have expected such a rise in the river in summertime!” said
Marian, from the top of the roadside-bank on which they had climbed, and
were maintaining a precarious footing in the hope of creeping along its
slope till they were past the pool.
 “We can’t get there anyhow, without walking right through it, or else
going round the Turnpike way; and that would make us so very late!” said
Retty; pausing hopelessly.
“And I do colour up so hot, walking into church late, and all the people
staring round,” said Marian, “that I hardly cool down again till we get into
theThat-it-may-please-Thees.”ci
While they stood clinging to the bank they heard a splashing round the
bend of the road, and presently appeared Angel Clare, advancing along the
lane towards them through the water.
Four hearts gave a big throb simultaneously.
His aspect was probably as un-Sabbatariancj a one as a dogmatic parson’s
son often presented; his attire being his dairy clothes, long wading boots, a
cabbage-leaf inside his hat to keep his head cool, with a thistlespudck to
finish him off.
“He’s not going to church,” said Marian.
“No—I wish he was!” murmured Tess.
Angel, in fact, rightly or wrongly (to adopt the safe phrase of evasive
controversialists), preferred sermons in stones1 to sermons in churches and
chapels on fine summer days. This morning, moreover, he had gone out to
see if the damage to the hay by the flood was considerable or not. On his
walk he observed the girls from a long distance, though they had been so
occupied with their difficulties of passage as not to notice him. He knew
that the water had risen at that spot, and that it would quite check their
progress. So he had hastened on, with a dim idea of how he could help them
—one of them in particular.
The rosy-cheeked, bright-eyed quartet looked so charming in their light
summer attire, clinging to the roadside bank like pigeons on a roof-slope,
that he stopped a moment to regard them before coming close. Their gauzy
skirts had brushed up from the grass innumerable flies and butterflies
which, unable to escape, remained caged in the transparent tissue as in an
aviary. Angel’s eye at last fell upon Tess, the hindmost of the four; she,
being full of suppressed laughter at their dilemma, could not help meeting
his glance radiantly.
 He came beneath them in the water, which did not rise over his long
boots; and stood looking at the entrapped flies and butterflies.
“Are you trying to get to church?” he said to Marian, who was in front,
including the next two in his remark, but avoiding Tess.
“Yes, sir; and ’tis getting late; and my colour do come up so—”
“I’ll carry you through the pool—every Jill of you.”
The whole four flushed as if one heart beat through them.
“I think you can’t, sir,” said Marian.
“It is the only way for you to get past. Stand still. Nonsense—you are not
too heavy! I’d carry you all four together. Now, Marian, attend,” he
continued, “and put your arms round my shoulders, so. Now! Hold on.
That’s well done.”
Marian had lowered herself upon his arm and shoulder as directed, and
Angel strode off with her, his slim figure, as viewed from behind, looking
like the mere stem to the great nosegay suggested by hers. They
disappeared round the curve of the road, and only his sousing footsteps and
the top ribbon of Marian’s bonnet told where they were. In a few minutes he
reappeared. Izz Huett was the next in order upon the bank.
“Here he comes,” she murmured, and they could hear that her lips were
dry with emotion. “And I have to put my arms round his neck and look into
his face as Marian did.”
“There’s nothing in that,” said Tess quickly.
“There’s a time for everything,” continued Izz, unheeding. “A time to
embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;2 the first is now going to be
mine.”
“Fie—it is Scripture, Izz!”
“Yes,” said Izz, “I’ve always a’ ear at church for pretty verses.”
Angel Clare, to whom three-quarters of this performance was a
commonplace act of kindness, now approached Izz. She quietly and
dreamily lowered herself into his arms, and Angel methodically marched
off with her. When he was heard returning for the third time Retty’s
throbbing heart could be almost seen to shake her. He went up to the red-
haired girl, and while he was seizing her he glanced at Tess. His lips could
not have pronounced more plainly, “It will soon be you and I.” Her
comprehension appeared in her face; she could not help it. There was an
understanding between them.
Poor little Retty; though by far the lightest weight, was the most
troublesome of Clare’s burdens. Marian had been like a sack of meal, a
dead weight of plumpness under which he had literally staggered. Izz had
ridden sensibly and calmly. Retty was a bunch of hysterics.
However, he got through with the disquieted creature, deposited her, and
returned. Tess could see over the hedge the distant three in a group, standing
as he had placed them on the next rising ground. It was now her turn. She
was embarrassed to discover that excitement at the proximity of Mr Clare’s
breath and eyes, which she had contemned in her companions, was
intensified in herself; and as if fearful of betraying her secret she paltered
with him at the last moment.
“I may be able to clim’ along the bank perhaps—I can clim’ better than
they. You must be so tired, Mr Clare!”
“No, no, Tess,” said he quickly. And almost before she was aware she was
seated in his arms and resting against his shoulder.
“Three Leahs to get one Rachel,” he whispered.3
“They are better women than I,” she replied, magnanimously sticking to
her resolve.
“Not to me,” said Angel.
He saw her grow warm at this; and they went some steps in silence.
“I hope I am not too heavy?” she said timidly.
“O no.You should lift Marian! Such a lump.You are like an undulating
billow warmed by the sun. And all this fluff of muslin about you is the
froth.”
“It is very pretty—if I seem like that to you.”
“Do you know that I have undergone three-quarters of this labour entirely
for the sake of the fourth quarter?”
“No.”
“I did not expect such an event to-day.”
 “Nor I ... The water came up so sudden.”
That the rise in the water was what she understood him to refer to, the
state of her breathing belied. Clare stood still and inclined his face towards
hers.
“O Tessy!” he exclaimed.
The girl’s cheeks burned to the breeze, and she could not look into his
eyes for her emotion. It reminded Angel that he was somewhat unfairly
taking advantage of an accidental position; and he went no further with it.
No definite words of love had crossed their lips as yet, and suspension at
this point was desirable now. However, he walked slowly, to make the
remainder of the distance as long as possible; but at last they came to the
bend, and the rest of their progress was in full view of the other three. The
dry land was reached, and he set her down.
Her friends were looking with round thoughtful eyes at her and him, and
she could see that they had been talking of her. He hastily bade them
farewell, and splashed back along the stretch of submerged road.
The four moved on together as before, till Marian broke the silence by
saying—
“No—in all truth; we have no chance against her!” She looked joylessly
at Tess.
“What do you mean?” asked the latter.
“He likes ‘ee best—the very best! We could see it as he brought ’ee. He
would have kissed ’ee, if you had encouraged him to do it, ever so little.”
“No, no,” said she.
The gaiety with which they had set out had somehow vanished ; and yet
there was no enmity or malice between them. They were generous young
souls; they had been reared in the lonely country nooks where fatalism is a
strong sentiment, and they did not blame her. Such supplanting was to be.
Tess’s heart ached. There was no concealing from herself the fact that she
loved Angel Clare, perhaps all the more passionately from knowing that the
others had also lost their hearts to him. There is contagion in this sentiment,
especially among women. And yet that same hungry heart of hers
compassionated her friends. Tess’s honest nature had fought against this,
but too feebly, and the natural result had followed.
“I will never stand in your way, nor in the way of either of you!” she
declared to Retty that night in the bedroom (her tears running down) . “I
can’t help this, my dear! I don’t think marrying is in his mind at all; but if
he were even to ask me I should refuse him, as I should refuse any man.”
“Oh! would you? Why?” said wondering Retty.
“It cannot be! But I will be plain. Putting myself quite on one side, I don’t
think he will choose either of you.”
“I have never expected it—thought of it!” moaned Retty. “But O! I wish I
was dead!”
The poor child, torn by a feeling which she hardly understood, turned to
the other two girls who came upstairs just then.
“We be friends with her again,” she said to them. “She thinks no more of
his choosing her than we do.”
So the reserve went off, and they were confiding and warm.
“I don’t seem to care what I do now,” said Marian, whose mood was
tuned to its lowest bass. “I was going to marry a dairyman at Stickleford,
who’s asked me twice; but—my soul—I would put an end to myself
rather’n be his wife now! Why don’t ye speak, Izz?”
“To confess, then,” murmured Izz, “I made sure to-day that he was going
to kiss me as he held me; and I lay still against his breast, hoping the
hoping, and never moved at all. But he did not. I don’t like biding here at
Talbothays any longer! I shall go hwome.”
The air of the sleeping-chamber seemed to palpitate with the hopeless
passion of the girls. They writhed feverishly under the oppressiveness of an
emotion thrust on them by cruel Nature’s law—an emotion which they had
neither expected nor desired. The incident of the day had fanned the flame
that was burning the inside of their hearts out, and the torture was almost
more than they could endure. The differences which distinguished them as
individuals were abstracted by this passion, and each was but portion of one
organism called sex. There was much frankness and so little jealousy
because there was no hope. Each one was a girl of fair common sense, and
she did not delude herself with any vain conceits, or deny her love, or give
herself airs, in the idea of outshining the others. The full recognition of the
futility of their infatuation, from a social point of view; its purposeless
beginning; its selfbounded outlook; its lack of everything to justify its
existence in the eye of civilization (while lacking nothing in the eye of
Nature); the one fact that it did exist, ecstasizing them to a killing joy; all
this imparted to them a resignation, a dignity which a practical and sordid
expectation of winning him as a husband would have destroyed.
They tossed and turned on their little beds, and the cheese-wring dripped
monotonously downstairs.
“B’ you awake, Tess?” whispered one, half-an-hour later.
It was Izz Huett’s voice.
Tess replied in the affirmative, whereupon also Retty and Marian
suddenly flung the bedclothes off them, and sighed—
“So be we!”
“I wonder what she is like—the lady they say his family have looked out
for.”
“I wonder,” said Izz.
“Some lady looked out for him?” gasped Tess, starting. “I have never
heard o’ that!”
“O yes—’tis whispered; a young lady of his own rank, chosen by his
family; a Doctor of Divinity’s daughter near his father’s parish of
Emminster; he don’t care for her, they say. But he is sure to marry her.”
They had heard so very little of this; yet it was enough to build up
wretched dolorous dreams upon, there in the shade of the night. They
pictured all the details of his being won round to consent, of the wedding
preparations, of the bride’s happiness, of her dress and veil, of her blissful
home with him, when oblivion would have fallen upon themselves as far as
he and their love were concerned. Thus they talked, and ached, and wept till
sleep charmed their sorrow away.
After this disclosure Tess nourished no further foolish thought that there
lurked any grave and deliberate import in Clare’s attentions to her. It was a
passing summer love of her face, for love’s own temporary sake—nothing
more. And the thorny crown of this sad conception was that she whom he
really did prefer in a cursory way to the rest, she who knew herself to be
more impassioned in nature, cleverer, more beautiful than they, was in the
eyes of propriety far less worthy of him than the homelier ones whom he
ignored.
 XXIV
AMID THE OOZING FATNESS and warm ferments of the Var Vale, at a
season when the rush of juices could almost be heard below the hiss of
fertilization, it was impossible that the most fanciful love should not grow
passionate. The ready bosoms existing there were impregnated by their
surroundings.
July passed over their heads, and the Thermidorean weathercl which came
in its wake seemed an effort on the part of Nature to match the state of
hearts at Talbothays Dairy. The air of the place, so fresh in the spring and
early summer, was stagnant and enervating now. Its heavy scents weighed
upon them, and at mid-day the landscape seemed lying in a swoon. Ethiopic
scorchings browned the upper slopes of the pastures, but there was still
bright green herbage here where the watercourses purled. And as Clare was
oppressed by the outward heats, so was he burdened inwardly by waxing
fervour of passion for the soft and silent Tess.
The rains having passed the uplands were dry. The wheels of the
dairyman’s spring cart, as he sped home from market, licked up the
pulverized surface of the highway, and were followed by white ribands of
dust, as if they had set a thin powder-train on fire. The cows jumped wildly
over the five-barred barton-gate, maddened by the gad-fly; Dairyman Crick
kept his shirt-sleeves permanently rolled up from Monday to Saturday: open
windows had no effect in ventilation without open doors, and in the dairy-
garden the blackbirds and thrushes crept about under the current-bushes,
rather in the manner of quadrupeds than of winged creatures. The flies in
the kitchen were lazy, teasing, and familiar, crawling about in unwonted
places, on the floor, into drawers, and over the backs of the milkmaids’
hands. Conversations were concerning sunstroke; while butter-making, and
still more butter-keeping, was a despair.
They milked entirely in the meads for coolness and convenience, without
driving in the cows. During the day the animals obsequiously followed the
shadow of the smallest tree as it moved round the stem with the diurnal roll;
and when the milkers came they could hardly stand still for the flies.
 On one of these afternoons four or five unmilked cows chanced to stand
apart from the general herd, behind the corner of a hedge, among them
being Dumpling and Old Pretty, who loved Tess’s hands above those of any
other maid. When she rose from her stool under a finished cow Angel
Clare, who had been observing her for some time, asked her if she would
take the aforesaid creatures next. She silently assented, and with her stool at
arm’s length, and the pail against her knee, went round to where they stood.
Soon the sound of Old Pretty’s milk fizzing into the pail came through the
hedge, and then Angel felt inclined to go round the corner also, to finish off
a hard-yielding milcher who had strayed there, he being now as capable of
this as the dairyman himself.
All the men, and some of the women, when milking, dug their foreheads
into the cows and gazed into the pail. But a few—mainly the younger ones
—rested their heads sideways. This was Tess Durbeyfield’s habit, her
temple pressing the milcher’s flank, her eyes fixed on the far end of the
meadow with the quiet of one lost in meditation. She was milking Old
Pretty thus, and the sun chancing to be on the milking-side it shone flat
upon her pinkgowned form and her white curtain-bonnet, and upon her
profile, rendering it keen as a cameo cut from the dun background of the
cow.
She did not know that Clare had followed her round, and that he sat under
his cow watching her. The stillness of her head and features was
remarkable: she might have been in a trance, her eyes open, yet unseeing.
Nothing in the picture moved but Old Pretty’s tail and Tess’s pink hands,
the latter so gently as to be a rhythmic pulsation only, as if they were
obeying a reflex stimulus, like a beating heart.
How very lovable her face was to him. Yet there was nothing ethereal
about it; all was real vitality, real warmth, real incarnation. And it was in
her mouth that this culminated. Eyes almost as deep and speaking he had
seen before, and cheeks perhaps as fair; brows as arched, a chin and throat
almost as shapely; her mouth he had seen nothing to equal on the face of the
earth. To a young man with the least fire in him that little upward lift in the
middle of her red top lip was distracting, infatuating, maddening. He had
never before seen a woman’s lips and teeth which forced upon his mind
with such persistent iteration the old Elizabethan simile of roses filled with
snow.1 Perfect, he, as a lover, might have called them off-hand. But no—
they were not perfect. And it was the touch of the imperfect upon the
would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave
the humanity.
Clare had studied the curves of those lips so many times that he could
reproduce them mentally with ease: and now, as they again confronted him,
clothed with colour and life, they sent an aura over his flesh, a breeze
through his nerves, which wellnigh produced a qualm; and actually
produced, by some mysterious physiological process, a prosaic sneeze.
She then became conscious that he was observing her; but she would not
show it by any change in position, though the curious dream-like fixity
disappeared, and a close eye might easily have discerned that the rosiness of
her face deepened, and then faded till only a tinge of it was left.
The influence that had passed into Clare like an excitation from the sky
did not die down. Resolutions, reticences, prudences, fears, fell back like a
defeated battalion. He jumped up from his seat, and, leaving his pail to be
kicked over if the milcher had such a mind, went quickly towards the desire
of his eyes, and, kneeling down beside her, clasped her in his arms.
Tess was taken completely by surprise, and she yielded to his embrace
with unreflecting inevitableness. Having seen that it was really her lover
who had advanced, and no one else, her lips parted, and she sank upon him
in her momentary joy, with something very like an ecstatic cry.
He had been on the point of kissing that too tempting mouth, but he
checked himself, for tender conscience’ sake.
“Forgive me,Tess dear!” he whispered. “I ought to have asked. I—did not
know what I was doing. I do not mean it as a liberty. I am devoted to you,
Tessy, dearest, in all sincerity!”
Old Pretty by this time had looked round, puzzled; and seeing two people
crouching under her where, by immemorial custom, there should have been
only one, lifted her hind leg crossly.
“She is angry—she doesn’t know what we mean—she’ll kick over the
milk!” cried Tess, gently striving to free herself, her eyes concerned with
the quadruped’s actions, her heart more deeply concerned with herself and
Clare.
 She slipped up from her seat, and they stood together, his arm still
encircling her. Tess’s eyes, fixed on distance, began to fill.
“Why do you cry, my darling?” he said.
“O—I don’t know!” she murmured.
As she saw and felt more clearly the position she was in she became
agitated and tried to withdraw.
“Well, I have betrayed my feeling, Tess, at last,” said he, with a curious
sigh of desperation, signifying unconsciously that his heart had outrun his
judgment. “That I—love you dearly and truly I need not say. But I—it shall
go no further now—it distresses you—I am as surprised as you are. You
will not think I have presumed upon your defencelessness—been too quick
and unreflecting, will you?”
“N’—I can’t tell.”
He had allowed her to free herself; and in a minute or two the milking of
each was resumed. Nobody had beheld the gravitation of the two into one;
and when the dairyman came round by that screened nook a few minutes
later there was not a sign to reveal that the markedly sundered pair were
more to each other than mere acquaintance. Yet in the interval since Crick’s
last view of them something had occurred which changed the pivot of the
universe for their two natures, something which, had he known its quality,
the dairyman would have despised, as a practical man; yet which was based
upon a more stubborn and resistless tendency than a whole heap of so-
called practicalities. A veil had been whisked aside; the tract of each one’s
outlook was to have a new horizon thenceforward—for a short time or for a
long.

END OF PHASE THE THIRD

PHASE THE FOURTH

THE CONSEQUENCE
 XXV
CLARE, RESTLESS, WENT OUT into the dusk when evening drew on,
she who had won him having retired to her chamber.
The night was as sultry as the day. There was no coolness after dark
unless on the grass. Roads, garden-paths, the house-fronts, the barton-walls
were warm as hearths, and reflected the noontide temperature into the
noctambulist’s face.
He sat on the east gate of the dairy-yard, and knew not what to think of
himself. Feeling had indeed smothered judgment that day.
Since the sudden embrace, three hours before, the twain had kept apart.
She seemed stilled, almost alarmed, at what had occurred, while the
novelty, unpremeditation, mastery of circumstance disquieted him—
palpitating, contemplative being that he was. He could hardly realize their
true relations to each other as yet, and what their mutual bearing should be
before third parties thenceforward.
Angel had come as pupil to this dairy in the idea that his temporary
existence here was to be the merest episode in his life, soon passed through
and early forgotten; he had come as to a place from which as from a
screened alcove he could calmly view the absorbing world without, and,
apostrophizing it with Walt Whitman—resolve upon a plan for plunging
into that world anew. But, behold, the absorbing scene had been imported
hither. What had been the engrossing world had dissolved into an
uninteresting outer dumb-show; while here, in this apparently dim and
unimpassioned place, novelty had volcanically started up, as it had never,
for him, started up elsewhere.
Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes,
How curious you are to me!—1
Every window of the house being open Clare could hear across the yard
each trivial sound of the retiring household. That dairy-house, so humble, so
insignificant, so purely to him a place of constrained sojourn that he had
never hitherto deemed it of sufficient importance to be reconnoitred as an
object of any quality whatever in the landscape; what was it now? The aged
and lichened brick gables breathed forth “Stay! ” The windows smiled, the
door coaxed and beckoned, the creeper blushed confederacy. A personality
within it was so far-reaching in her influence as to spread into and make the
bricks, mortar, and whole overhanging sky throb with a burning sensibility.
Whose was this mighty personality ? A milkmaid’s.
It was amazing, indeed, to find how great a matter the life of the obscure
dairy had become to him. And though new love was to be held partly
responsible for this it was not solely so. Many besides Angel have learnt
that the magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements, but as
to their subjective experiences. The impressionable peasant leads a larger,
fuller, more dramatic life than the pachydermatous king. Looking at it thus
he found that life was to be seen of the same magnitude here as elsewhere.
Despite his heterodoxy, faults, and weaknesses, Clare was a man with a
conscience. Tess was no insignificant creature to toy with and dismiss; but a
woman living her precious life—a life which, to herself who endured or
enjoyed it, possessed as great a dimension as the life of the mightiest to
himself Upon her sensations the whole world depended to Tess; through her
existence all her fellow-creatures existed, to her. The universe itself only
came into being for Tess on the particular day in the particular year in
which she was born.
This consciousness upon which he had intruded was the single
opportunity of existence ever vouchsafed to Tess by an unsympathetic First
Cause—her all; her every and only chance. How then should he look upon
her as of less consequence than himself ; as a pretty trifle to caress and
grow weary of; and not deal in the greatest seriousness with the affection
which he knew that he had awakened in her—so fervid and so
impressionable as she was under her reserve; in order that it might not
agonize and wreck her?
To encounter her daily in the accustomed manner would be to develop
what had begun. Living in such close relations, to meet meant to fall into
endearment; flesh and blood could not resist it; and, having arrived at no
conclusion as to the issue of such a tendency, he decided to hold aloof for
the present from occupations in which they would be mutually engaged. As
yet the harm done was small.
 But it was not easy to carry out the resolution never to approach her. He
was driven towards her by every heave of his pulse.
He thought he would go and see his friends. It might be possible to sound
them upon this. In less than five months his term here would have ended,
and after a few additional months spent upon other farms he would be fully
equipped in agricultural knowledge, and in a position to start on his own
account. Would not a farmer want a wife, and should a farmer’s wife be a
drawing-room wax-figure, or a woman who understood farming?
Notwithstanding the pleasing answer returned to him by the silence he
resolved to go his journey.
One morning when they sat down to breakfast at Talbothays Dairy some
maid observed that she had not seen anything of Mr Clare that day.
“O no,” said Dairyman Crick. “Mr Clare has gone hwome to Emminster
to spend a few days wi’ his kinsfolk.”
For four impassioned ones around the table the sunshine of the morning
went out at a stroke, and the birds muffled their song. But neither girl by
word or gesture revealed her blankness.
“He’s getting on towards the end of his time wi’ me,” added the dairyman,
with a phlegm which unconsciously was brutal; “and so I suppose he is
beginning to see about his plans elsewhere.”
“How much longer is he to bide here?” asked Izz Huett, the only one of
the gloom-stricken bevy who could trust her voice with the question.
The others waited for the dairyman’s answer as if their lives hung upon it;
Retty with parted lips, gazing on the table-cloth, Marian with heat added to
her redness, Tess throbbing and looking out at the meads.
“Well, I can’t mind the exact day without looking at my memorandum-
book,” replied Crick, with the same intolerable unconcern. “And even that
may be altered a bit. He’ll bide to get a little practice in the calving out at
the straw-yard, for certain. He’ll hang on till the end of the year I should
say.”
Four months or so of torturing ecstacy in his society—of “pleasure girdled
about with pain.”2 After that the blackness of unutterable night.
At this moment of the morning Angel Clare was riding along a narrow lane
ten miles distant from the breakfasters, in the direction of his father’s
vicarage at Emminster, carrying, as well as he could, a little basket which
contained some black-puddingscm and a bottle of mead,cn sent by Mrs
Crick, with her kind respects, to his parents. The white lane stretched before
him, and his eyes were upon it; but they were staring into next year, and not
at the lane. He loved her; ought he to marry her? Dared he to marry her?
What would his mother and his brothers say? What would he himself say a
couple of years after the event? That would depend upon whether the germs
of staunch comradeship underlay the temporary emotion, or whether it were
a sensuous joy in her form only, with no substratum of everlastingness.
His father’s hill-surrounded little town, the Tudor church-tower of red
stone, the clump of trees near the vicarage, came at last into view beneath
him, and he rode down towards the well-known gate. Casting a glance in
the direction of the church before entering his home, he beheld standing by
the vestry-door a group of girls, of ages between twelve and sixteen,
apparently awaiting the arrival of some other one, who in a moment became
visible; a figure somewhat older than the school-girls, wearing a broad-
brimmed hat and highly-starched cambric morning-gown, with a couple of
books in her hand.
Clare knew her well. He could not be sure that she observed him; he
hoped she did not, so as to render it unnecessary that he should go and
speak to her, blameless creature that she was. An overpowering reluctance
to greet her made him decide that she had not seen him. The young lady
was Miss Mercy Chant, the only daughter of his father’s neighbour and
friend, whom it was his parents’ quiet hope that he might wed some day.
She was great at Antinomianismco and Bible-classes, and was plainly going
to hold a class now. Clare’s mind flew to the impassioned, summer-steeped
heathens in the Var Vale, their rosy faces court-patchedcp with cow-
droppings ; and to one the most impassioned of them all.
It was on the impulse of the moment that he had resolved to trot over to
Emminster, and hence had not written to apprise his mother and father,
aiming, however, to arrive about the breakfast hour, before they should have
gone out to their parish duties. He was a little late, and they had already sat
down to the morning meal. The group at table jumped up to welcome him
as soon as he entered. They were his father and mother, his brother the
Reverend Felix—curate at a town in the adjoining county, home for the
inside of a fortnight—and his other brother, the Reverend Cuthbert, the
classical scholar, and Fellow and Dean of his College, down from
Cambridge for the long vacation. His mother appeared in a cap and silver
spectacles, and his father looked what in fact he was—an earnest, God-
fearing man, somewhat gaunt, in years about sixty-five, his pale face lined
with thought and purpose. Over their heads hung the picture of Angel’s
sister, the eldest of the family, sixteen years his senior, who had married a
missionary and gone out to Africa.
Old Mr Clare was a clergyman of a type which, within the last twenty
years, has wellnigh dropped out of contemporary life. A spiritual
descendant in the direct line of Wycliff, Huss, Luther, Calvin;3 an
Evangelical of the Evangelicals,cq a Conversionist,cr a man of Apostolic
simplicity in life and thought, he had in his raw youth made up his mind
once for all on the deeper questions of existence, and admitted no further
reasoning on them thenceforward. He was regarded even by those of his
own date and school of thinking as extreme; while, on the other hand, those
totally opposed to him were unwillingly won to admiration for his
thoroughness, and for the remarkable power he showed in dismissing all
question as to principles in his energy for applying them. He loved Paul of
Tarsus, liked St John, hated St James as much as he dared, and regarded
with mixed feelings Timothy, Titus, and Philemon. 4 The New Testament
was less a Christiad than a Pauliad to his intelligence—less an argument
than an intoxication. His creed of determinism was such that it almost
amounted to a vice, and quite amounted, on its negative side, to a
renunciative philosophy which had cousinship with that of Schopenhauer
and Leopardi.cs He despised the Canons and Rubric, swore by the Articles,5
and deemed himself consistent through the whole category—which in a
way he might have been. One thing he certainly was—sincere.
To the aesthetic, sensuous, pagan pleasure in natural life and lush
womanhood which his son Angel had lately been experiencing in Var Vale,
his temper would have been antipathetic in a high degree, had he either by
inquiry or imagination been able to apprehend it. Once upon a time Angel
had been so unlucky as to say to his father, in a moment of irritation, that it
might have resulted far better for mankind if Greece had been the source of
the religion of modern civilization, and not Palestine; and his father’s grief
was of that blank description which could not realize that there might lurk a
thousandth part of a truth, much less a half truth or a whole truth, in such a
proposition. He had simply preached austerely at Angel for some time after.
But the kindness of his heart was such that he never resented anything for
long, and welcomed his son today with a smile which was as candidly sweet
as a child’s.
Angel sat down, and the place felt like home; yet he did not so much as
formerly feel himself one of the family gathered there. Every time that he
returned hither he was conscious of this divergence, and since he had last
shared in the Vicarage life it had grown even more distinctly foreign to his
own than usual. Its transcendental aspirations—still unconsciously based on
the geocentric view of things, a zenithal paradise, a nadiral hell—were as
foreign to his own as if they had been the dreams of people on another
planet. Latterly he had seen only Life, felt only the great passionate pulse of
existence, unwarped, uncontorted, untrammelled by those creeds which
futilely attempt to check what wisdom would be content to regulate.
On their part they saw a great difference in him, a growing divergence
from the Angel Clare of former times. It was chiefly a difference in his
manner that they noticed just now, particularly his brothers. He was getting
to behave like a farmer; he flung his legs about; the muscles of his face had
grown more expressive; his eyes looked as much information as his tongue
spoke, and more. The manner of the scholar had nearly disappeared; still
more the manner of the drawing-room young man. A prig would have said
that he had lost culture, and a prude that he had become coarse. Such was
the contagion of domiciliary fellowship with the Talbothays nymphs and
swains.
After breakfast he walked with his two brothers, non-evangelical, well-
educated, hall-marked young men, correct to their remotest fibre; such
unimpeachable models as are turned out yearly by the lathe of a systematic
tuition. They were both somewhat short-sighted, and when it was the
custom to wear a single eyeglass and string they wore a single eyeglass and
string; when it was the custom to wear a double glass they wore a double
glass; when it was the custom to wear spectacles they wore spectacles
straightway, all without reference to the particular variety of defect in their
own vision. When Wordsworth was enthroned they carried pocket copies;
and when Shellyct was belittled they allowedhim to grow dusty on their
shelves. When Correggio’s Holy Families were admired, they admired
Correggio’s Holy Families; when he was decried in favour of Velasquez, cu
they sedulously followed suit without any personal objection.
If these two noticed Angel’s growing social ineptness, he noticed their
growing mental limitations. Felix seemed to him all Church; Cuthbert all
College. His Diocesan Synod and Visitationscv were the mainsprings of the
world to the one; Cambridge to the other. Each brother candidly recognized
that there were a few unimportant scores of millions of outsiders in civilized
society, persons who were neither University men nor churchmen; but they
were to be tolerated rather than reckoned with and respected.
They were both dutiful and attentive sons, and were regular in their visits
to their parents. Felix, though an offshoot from a far more recent point in
the devolution of theology than his father, was less self-sacrificing and
disinterested. More tolerant than his father of a contradictory opinion, in its
aspect as a danger to its holder, he was less ready than his father to pardon it
as a slight to his own teaching. Cuthbert was, upon the whole, the more
liberal-minded, though, with greater subtlety, he had not so much heart.
As they walked along the hillside Angel’s former feeling revived in him—
that whatever their advantages by comparison with himself, neither saw or
set forth life as it really was lived. Perhaps, as with many men, their
opportunities of observation were not so good as their opportunities of
expression. Neither had an adequate conception of the complicated forces at
work outside the smooth and gentle current in which they and their
associates floated. Neither saw the difference between local truth and
universal truth; that what the inner world said in their clerical and academic
hearing was quite a different thing from what the outer world was thinking.
“I suppose it is farming or nothing for you now, my dear fellow ,” Felix
was saying, among other things, to his youngest brother, as he looked
through his spectacles at the distant fields with sad austerity. ”And,
therefore, we must make the best of it. But I do entreat you to endeavour to
keep as much as possible in touch with moral ideals. Farming, of course,
means roughing it externally; but high thinking may go with plain living,
nevertheless.“6
“Of course it may,” said Angel. “Was it not proved nineteen hundred
years ago—if I may trespass upon your domain a little? Why should you
think, Felix, that I am likely to drop my high thinking and my moral
ideals?”
“Well, I fancied, from the tone of your letters and our conversation—it
may be fancy only—that you were somehow losing intellectual grasp.
Hasn’t it struck you, Cuthbert?”
“Now, Felix,” said Angel drily, “we are very good friends, you know;
each of us treading our allotted circles; but if it comes to intellectual grasp, I
think you, as a contented dogmatist, had better leave mine alone, and
inquire what has become of yours.”
They returned down the hill to dinner, which was fixed at any time at
which their father’s and mother’s morning work in the parish usually
concluded. Convenience as regarded afternoon callers was the last thing to
enter into the consideration of unselfish Mr and Mrs Clare; though the three
sons were sufficiently in unison on this matter to wish that their parents
would conform a little to modern notions.
The walk had made them hungry, Angel in particular, who was now an
outdoor man, accustomed to the profuse dapes inemptae cw of the
dairyman’s somewhat coarsely-laden table. But neither of the old people
had arrived, and it was not till the sons were almost tired of waiting that
their parents entered. The self-denying pair had been occupied in coaxing
the appetites of some of their sick parishioners, whom they, somewhat
inconsistently, tried to keep imprisoned in the flesh, their own appetites
being quite forgotten.
The family sat down to table, and a frugal meal of cold viands was
deposited before them. Angel looked round for Mrs Crick’s black-puddings,
which he had directed to be nicely grilled, as they did them at the dairy, and
of which he wished his father and mother to appreciate the marvellous
herbal savours as highly as he did himself.
“Ah! you are looking for the black-puddings, my dear boy,” observed
Clare’s mother. “But I am sure you will not mind doing without them, as I
am sure your father and I shall not, when you know the reason. I suggested
to him that we should take Mrs Crick’s kind present to the children of the
man who can earn nothing just now because of his attacks of delirium
tremens; and he agreed that it would be a great pleasure to them; so we
did.”
 “Of course,” said Angel cheerfully, looking round for the mead.
“I found the mead so extremely alcoholic,” continued his mother, “that it
was quite unfit for use as a beverage, but as valuable as rum or brandy in an
emergency; so I have put it in my medicine-closet.”
“We never drink spirits at this table, on principle,” added his father.
“But what shall I tell the dairyman’s wife?” said Angel.
“The truth, of course,” said his father.
“I rather wanted to say we enjoyed the mead and the black-puddings very
much. She is a kind, jolly sort of body, and is sure to ask me directly I
return.”
“You cannot, if we did not,” Mr Clare answered lucidly.
“Ah—no; though the mead was a drop of pretty tipple.”cx
“A what?” said Cuthbert and Felix both.
“Oh—’tis an expression they use down at Talbothays,” replied Angel,
blushing. He felt that his parents were right in their practice if wrong in
their want of sentiment, and said no more.
 XXVI
IT WAS NOT TILL the evening, after family prayers, that Angel found
opportunity of broaching to his father one or two subjects near his heart. He
had strung himself up to the purpose while kneeling behind his brothers on
the carpet, studying the little nails in the heels of their walking boots. When
the service was over they went out of the room with their mother, and Mr
Clare and himself were left alone.
The young man first discussed with the elder his plans for the attainment
of his position as a farmer on an extensive scale—either in England or in
the Colonies. His father then told him that, as he had not been put to the
expense of sending Angel up to Cambridge, he had felt it his duty to set by
a sum of money every year towards the purchase or lease of land for him
some day, that he might not feel himself unduly slighted.
“As far as worldly wealth goes,” continued his father, “you will no doubt
stand far superior to your brothers in a few years.”
This considerateness on old Mr Clare’s part led Angel onward to the other
and dearer subject. He observed to his father that he was then six-and-
twenty, and that when he should start in the farming business he would
require eyes in the back of his head to see to all matters—some one would
be necessary to superintend the domestic labours of his establishment whilst
he was afield. Would it not be well, therefore, for him to marry?
His father seemed to think this idea not unreasonable; and then Angel put
the question—
“What kind of wife do you think would be best for me as a thrifty hard-
working farmer?”
“A truly Christian woman, who will be a help and a comfort to you in
your goings-out and your comings-in.1 Beyond that, it really matters little.
Such an one can be found; indeed, my earnest-minded friend and neighbour,
Dr Chant—”
“But ought she not primarily to be able to milk cows, churn good butter,
make immense cheeses; know how to sit hens and turkeys, and rear
chickens, to direct a field of labourers in an emergency, and estimate the
value of sheep and calves?”
“Yes; a farmer’s wife; yes, certainly. It would be desirable.” Mr Clare, the
elder, had plainly never thought of these points before. “I was going to
add,” he said, “that for a pure and saintly woman you will not find one more
to your true advantage, and certainly not more to your mother’s mind and
my own, than your friend Mercy, whom you used to show a certain interest
in. It is true that my neighbour Chant’s daughter has lately caught up the
fashion of the younger clergy round about us for decorating the
Communion-table—altar, cy as I was shocked to hear her call it one day—
with flowers and other stuff on festival occasions. But her father, who is
quite as opposed to such flummerycz as I, says that can be cured. It is a mere
girlish outbreak which, I am sure, will not be permanent.”
“Yes, yes; Mercy is good and devout, I know. But, father, don’t you think
that a young woman equally pure and virtuous as Miss Chant, but one who,
in place of that lady’s ecclesiastical accomplishments, understands the
duties of farm life as well as a farmer himself, would suit me infinitely
better?”
His father persisted in his conviction that a knowledge of a farmer’s
wife’s duties came second to a Pauline view of humanity; and the impulsive
Angel, wishing to honour his father’s feelings and to advance the cause of
his heart at the same time, grew specious. He said that fate or Providence
had thrown in his way a woman who possessed every qualification to be the
helpmate of an agriculturist, and was decidedly of a serious turn of mind.
He would not say whether or not she had attached herself to the sound Low
Church School of his father; but she would probably be open to conviction
on that point; she was a regular churchgoer of simple faith; honest-hearted,
receptive, intelligent, graceful to a degree, chaste as a vestal, and, in
personal appearance, exceptionally beautiful.
“Is she of a family such as you would care to marry into—a lady, in
short?” asked his startled mother, who had come softly into the study during
the conversation.
“She is not what in common parlance is called a lady,” said Angel,
unflinchingly, “for she is a cottager’s daughter, as I am proud to say. But she
is a lady, nevertheless—in feeling and nature.”
 “Mercy Chant is of a very good family.”
“Pooh!—what’s the advantage of that, mother?” said Angel quickly.
“How is family to avail the wife of a man who has to rough it as I have, and
shall have to do?”
“Mercy is accomplished. And accomplishments have their charm,”
returned his mother, looking at him through her silver spectacles.
“As to external accomplishments, what will be the use of them in the life I
am going to lead?—while as to her reading, I can take that in hand. She’ll
be apt pupil enough, as you would say if you knew her. She’s brim full of
poetry—actualized poetry, if I may use the expression. She lives what
paper-poets only write ... And she is an unimpeachable Christian, I am sure;
perhaps of the very tribe, genus, and species you desire to propagate.”
“O Angel, you are mocking!”
“Mother, I beg pardon. But as she really does attend Church almost every
Sunday morning, and is a good Christian girl, I am sure you will tolerate
any social shortcomings for the sake of that quality, and feel that I may do
worse than choose her.” Angel waxed quite earnest on that rather automatic
orthodoxy in his beloved Tess which (never dreaming that it might stand
him in such good stead) he had been prone to slight when observing it
practised by her and the other milkmaids, because of its obvious unreality
amid beliefs essentially naturalistic.
In their sad doubts as to whether their son had himself any right whatever
to the title he claimed for the unknown young woman, Mr and Mrs Clare
began to feel it as an advantage not to be overlooked that she at least was
sound in her views; especially as the conjunction of the pair must have
arisen by an act of Providence ; for Angel never would have made
orthodoxy a condition of his choice. They said finally that it was better not
to act in a hurry but that they would not object to see her.
Angel therefore refrained from declaring more particulars now. He felt
that, single-minded and self-sacrificing as his parents were, there yet existed
certain latent prejudices of theirs, as middle-class people, which it would
require some tact to overcome. For though legally at liberty to do as he
chose, and though their daughter-in-law’s qualifications could make no
practical difference to their lives, in the probability of her living far away
from them, he wished for affection’s sake not to wound their sentiment in
the most important decision of his life.
He observed his own inconsistencies in dwelling upon accidents in Tess’s
life as if they were vital features. It was for herself that he loved Tess; her
soul, her heart, her substance—not for her skill in the dairy, her aptness as
his scholar, and certainly not for her simple formal faith-professions. Her
unsophisticated open-air existence required no varnish of conventionality to
make it palatable to him. He held that education had as yet but little affected
the beats of emotion and impulse on which domestic happiness depends. It
was probable that, in the lapse of ages, improved systems of moral and
intellectual training would appreciably, perhaps considerably, elevate the
involuntary and even the unconscious instincts of human nature; but up to
the present day culture, as far as he could see, might be said to have affected
only the mental epiderm of those lives which had been brought under its
influence. This belief was confirmed by his experience of women, which,
having latterly been extended from the cultivated middle-class into the rural
community, had taught him how much less was the intrinsic difference
between the good and wise woman of one social stratum and the good and
wise woman of another social stratum, than between the good and bad, the
wise and the foolish, of the same stratum or class.
It was the morning of his departure. His brothers had already left the
vicarage to proceed on a walking tour in the north, whence one was to
return to his college, and the other to his curacy. Angel might have
accompanied them, but preferred to rejoin his sweetheart at Talbothays. He
would have been an awkward member of the party; for, though the most
appreciative humanist, the most ideal religionist, even the best-versed
Christologist of the three, there was alienation in the standing consciousness
that his squareness would not fit the round hole that had been prepared for
him. To neither Felix nor Cuthbert had he ventured to mention Tess.
His mother made him sandwiches, and his father accompanied him, on his
own mare, a little way along the road. Having fairly well advanced his own
affairs Angel listened in a willing silence, as they jogged on together
through the shady lanes, to his father’s account of his parish difficulties, and
the coldness of brother clergymen whom he loved, because of his strict
interpretations of the New Testament by the light of what they deemed a
pernicious Calvinistic doctrine.da
 “Pernicious!” said Mr Clare, with genial scorn; and he proceeded to
recount experiences which would show the absurdity of that idea. He told of
wondrous conversions of evil livers of which he had been the instrument,
not only amongst the poor, but amongst the rich and well-to-do; and he also
candidly admitted many failures.
As an instance of the latter, he mentioned the case of a young upstart
squire named d’Urberville, living some forty miles off, in the
neighbourhood of Trantridge.
“Not one of the ancient d’Urbervilles of Kingsbere and other places?”
asked his son. “That curiously historic worn-out family with its ghostly
legend of the coach-and-four?”
“O no. The original d’Urbervilles decayed and disappeared sixty or eighty
years ago—at least, I believe so. This seems to be a new family which has
taken the name; for the credit of the former knightly line I hope they are
spurious, I’m sure. But it is odd to hear you express interest in old families.
I thought you set less store by them even than I.”
“You misapprehend me, father; you often do,” said Angel with a little
impatience. “Politically I am sceptical as to the virtue of their being old.
Some of the wise even among themselves ‘exclaimagainst their own
succession,’ as Hamlet puts it2 but lyrically, dramatically, and even
historically, I am tenderly attached to them.”
This distinction, though by no means a subtle one, was yet too subtle for
Mr Clare the elder, and he went on with the story he had been about to
relate; which was that after the death of the senior so-called d’Urberville the
young man developed the most culpable passions, though he had a blind
mother, whose condition should have made him know better. A knowledge
of his career having come to the ears of Mr Clare, when he was in that part
of the country preaching missionary sermons, he boldly took occasion to
speak to the delinquent on his spiritual state. Though he was a stranger,
occupying another’s pulpit, he had felt this to be his duty, and took for his
text the words from St Luke: “Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be
required of thee! ”3 The young man much resented this directness of attack,
and in the war of words which followed when they met he did not scruple
publicly to insult Mr Clare, without respect for his gray hairs.
Angel flushed with distress.
 “Dear father,” he said sadly, “I wish you would not expose yourself to
such gratuitous pain from scoundrels!”
“Pain?” said his father, his rugged face shining in the ardour of self-
abnegation. “The only pain to me was pain on his account, poor, foolish
young man. Do you suppose his incensed words could give me any pain, or
even his blows? ‘Being reviled we bless; being persecuted we suffer it,
being defamed we entreat; we are made as the filth of the world, and as the
off-scouring of all things unto this day.’4 Those ancient and noble words to
the Corinthians are strictly true at this present hour.”
“Not blows, father? He did not proceed to blows?”
“No, he did not. Though I have borne blows from men in a mad state of
intoxication.”
“No!
“A dozen times, my boy. What then? I have saved them from the guilt of
murdering their own flesh and blood thereby; and they have lived to thank
me, and praise God.”
“May this young man do the same!” said Angel fervently. “But I fear
otherwise, from what you say.”
“We’ll hope, nevertheless,” said Mr Clare. “And I continue to pray for
him, though on this side of the grave we shall probably never meet again.
But, after all, one of those poor words of mine may spring up in his heart as
a good seed some day”5
Now, as always, Clare’s father was sanguine as a child; and though the
younger could not accept his parent’s narrow dogma he revered his practice,
and recognized the hero under the pietist. Perhaps he revered his father’s
practice even more now than ever, seeing that, in the question of making
Tessy his wife, his father had not once thought of inquiring whether she
were well provided or penniless. The same unworldliness was what had
necessitated Angel’s getting a living as a farmer, and would probably keep
his brothers in the position of poor parsons for the term of their activities;
yet Angel admired it none the less. Indeed, despite his own heterodoxy
Angel often felt that he was nearer to his father on the human side than was
either of his brethren.
 XXVII
AN UP-HILL AND DOWN-DALE ride of twenty-odd miles through a
garish mid-day atmosphere brought him in the afternoon to a detached knoll
a mile or two west of Talbothays, whence he again looked into that green
trough of sappiness and humidity, the valley of the Var or Froom.
Immediately he began to descend from the upland to the fat alluvial soil
below, the atmosphere grew heavier; the languid perfume of the summer
fruits, the mists, the hay, the flowers, formed therein a vast pool of odour
which at this hour seemed to make the animals, the very bees and
butterflies, drowsy. Clare was now so familiar with the spot that he knew
the individual cows by their names when, a long distance off, he saw them
dotted about the meads. It was with a sense of luxury that he recognized his
power of viewing life here from its inner side, in a way that had been quite
foreign to him in his student-days; and, much as he loved his parents, he
could not help being aware that to come here, as now, after an experience of
homelife, affected him like throwing off splints and bandages; even the one
customary curb on the humours of English rural societies being absent in
this place, Talbothays having no resident landlord.
Not a human being was out of doors at the dairy. The denizens were all
enjoying the usual afternoon nap of an hour or so which the exceedingly
early hours kept in summer-time rendered a necessity. At the door the
wood-hooped pails, sodden and bleached by infinite scrubbings, hung like
hats on a stand upon the forked and peeled limb of an oak fixed there for
that purpose; all of them ready and dry for the evening milking. Angel
entered, and went through the silent passages of the house to the back
quarters, where he listened for a moment. Sustained snores came from the
cart-house, where some of the men were lying down; the grunt and squeal
of sweltering pigs arose from the still further distance. The large-leaved
rhubarb and cabbage plants slept too, their broad limp surfaces hanging in
the sun like half-closed umbrellas.
He unbridled and fed his horse, and as he re-entered the house the clock
struck three. Three was the afternoon skimming-hour; and, with the stroke,
Clare heard the creaking of the floor-boards above, and then the touch of a
descending foot on the stairs. It was Tess’s, who in another moment came
down before his eyes.
She had not heard him enter, and hardly realized his presence there. She
was yawning, and he saw the red interior of her mouth as if it had been a
snake’s. She had stretched one arm so high above her coiled-up cable of
hair that he could see its satin delicacy above the sunburn; her face was
flushed with sleep, and her eyelids hung heavy over their pupils. The
brimfulness of her nature breathed from her. It was a moment when a
woman’s soul is more incarnate than at any other time; when the most
spiritual beauty bespeaks itself flesh; and sex takes the outside place in the
presentation.
Then those eyes flashed brightly through their filmy heaviness, before the
remainder of her face was well awake. With an oddly compounded look of
gladness, shyness, and surprise, she exclaimed—
“O Mr Clare! How you frightened me—I—”
There had not at first been time for her to think of the changed relations
which his declaration had introduced; but the full sense of the matter rose
up in her face when she encountered Clare’s tender look as he stepped
forward to the bottom stair.
“Dear, darling Tessy!” he whispered, putting his arm round her and his
face to her flushed cheek. “Don’t, for Heaven’s sake, Mister me any more. I
have hastened back so soon because of you!”
Tess’s excitable heart beat against his by way of reply; and there they
stood upon the red-brick floor of the entry, the sun slanting in by the
window upon his back, as he held her tightly to his breast; upon her
inclining face, upon the blue veins of her temple, upon her naked arm, and
her neck, and into the depths of her hair. Having been lying down in her
clothes she was warm as a sunned cat. At first she would not look straight
up at him, but her eyes soon lifted, and his plumbed the deepness of the
ever-varying pupils, with their radiating fibrils of blue, and black, and gray,
and violet, while she regarded him as Eve at her second waking might have
regarded Adam.1
“I’ve got to go a-skimming,” she pleaded, “and I have on’y old Deb to
help me to-day. Mrs Crick is gone to market with Mr Crick, and Retty is not
well, and the others are gone out somewhere, and won’t be home till
milking.”
As they retreated to the milk-house Deborah Fyander appeared on the
stairs.
“I have come back, Deborah,” said Mr Clare, upwards. “So I can help
Tess with the skimming; and, as you are very tired, I am sure, you needn’t
come down till milking-time.”
Possibly the Talbothays milk was not very thoroughly skimmed that
afternoon. Tess was in a dream wherein familiar objects appeared as having
light and shade and position, but no particular outline. Every time she held
the skimmer under the pump to cool it for the work her hand trembled, the
ardour of his affection being so palpable that she seemed to flinch under it
like a plant in too burning a sun.
Then he pressed her again to his side, and when she had done running her
forefinger round the leads to cut off the cream-edge, he cleaned it in
nature’s way; for the unconstrained manners of Talbothays dairy came
convenient now.
“I may as well say it now as later, dearest,” he resumed gently. “I wish to
ask you something of a very practical nature, which I have been thinking of
ever since that day last week in the meads. I shall soon want to marry, and,
being a farmer, you see I shall require for my wife a woman who knows all
about the management of farms. Will you be that woman, Tessy?”
He put it in that way that she might not think he had yielded to an impulse
of which his head would disapprove.
She turned quite careworn. She had bowed to the inevitable result of
proximity, the necessity of loving him; but she had not calculated upon this
sudden corollary, which, indeed, Clare had put before her without quite
meaning himself to do it so soon. With pain that was like the bitterness of
dissolution she murmured the words of her indispensable and sworn answer
as an honourable woman.
“O Mr Clare—I cannot be your wife—I cannot be!”
The sound of her own decision seemed to break Tess’s very heart, and she
bowed her face in her grief.
 “But, Tess!” he said, amazed at her reply, and holding her still more
greedily close. “Do you say no? Surely you love me?”
“O yes, yes! And I would rather be yours than anybody’s in the world,”
returned the sweet and honest voice of the distressed girl. “But I cannot
marry you!”
“Tess,” he said, holding her at arm’s length, “you are engaged to marry
some one else!”
“No, no ! ”
“Then why do you refuse me?”
“I don’t want to marry! I have not thought of doing it. I cannot ! I only
want to love you.”
“But why?”
Driven to subterfuge, she stammered—
“Your father is a parson, and your mother wouldn’t like you to marry such
as me. She will want you to marry a lady.”
“Nonsense—I have spoken to them both. That was partly why I went
home.”
“I feel I cannot—never, never!” she echoed.
“Is it too sudden to be asked thus, my Pretty?”
“Yes—I did not expect it.”
“If you will let it pass, please, Tessy, I will give you time,” he said. “It
was very abrupt to come home and speak to you all at once. I’ll not allude
to it again for a while.”
She again took up the shining skimmer, held it beneath the pump, and
began anew. But she could not, as at other times, hit the exact under-surface
of the cream with the delicate dexterity required, try as she might:
sometimes she was cutting down into the milk, sometimes in the air. She
could hardly see, her eyes having filled with two blurring tears drawn forth
by a grief which, to this her best friend and dear advocate, she could never
explain.
“I can’t skim—I can’t!” she said, turning away from him.
 Not to agitate and hinder her longer the considerate Clare began talking in
a more general way:
“You quite misapprehend my parents. They are the most simple-mannered
people alive, and quite unambitious. They are two of the few remaining
Evangelical school. Tessy. are you an Evangelical?”
“I don’t know.”
“You go to church very regularly, and our parson here is not very High,
they tell me.”
Tess’s ideas on the views of the parish clergyman, whom she heard every
week, seemed to be rather more vague than Clare’s, who had never heard
him at all.
“I wish I could fix my mind on what I hear there more firmly than I do,”
she remarked as a safe generality. “It is often a great sorrow to me.”
She spoke so unaffected that Angel was sure in his heart that his father
could not object to her on religious grounds, even though she did not know
whether her principles were High, Low, or Broad.db He himself knew that,
in reality, the confused beliefs which she held, apparently imbibed in
childhood, were, if any thing, Tractariandc as to phraseology, and
Pantheisticdd as to essence. Confused or otherwise, to disturb them was his
last desire:
Leave thou thy sister, when she prays,
Her early Heaven, her happy views;
Nor thou with shadow’d hint confuse
A life that leads melodious days.2
He had occasionally thought the counsel less honest than musical; but he
gladly conformed to it now.
He spoke further of the incidents of his visit, of his father’s mode of life,
of his zeal for his principles; she grew serener, and the undulations
disappeared from her skimming; as she finished one lead after another he
followed her, and drew the plugs for letting down the milk.
“I fancied you looked a little downcast when you came in,” she ventured
to observe, anxious to keep away from the subject of herself
 “Yes—well, my father has been talking a good deal to me of his troubles
and difficulties, and the subject always tends to depress me. He is so
zealous that he gets many snubs and buffetings from people of a different
way of thinking from himself, and I don’t like to hear of such humiliations
to a man of his age, the more particularly as I don’t think earnestness does
any good when carried so far. He has been telling me of a very unpleasant
scene in which he took part quite recently. He went as the deputy of some
missionary society to preach in the neighbourhood of Trantridge, a place
forty miles from here, and made it his business to expostulate with a lax
young cynic he met somewhere about there—son of some landowner up
that way—and who has a mother afflicted with blindness. My father
addressed himself to the gentleman pointblank, and there was quite a
disturbance. It was very foolish of my father, I must say, to intrude his
conversation upon a stranger when the probabilities were so obvious that it
would be useless. But whatever he thinks to be his duty, that he’ll do, in
season or out of season;3 and, of course, he makes many enemies, not only
among the absolutely vicious, but among the easy-going, who hate being
bothered. He says he glories in what happened, and that good may be done
indirectly; but I wish he would not so wear himself out now he is getting
old, and would leave such pigs to their wallowing.”
Tess’s look had grown hard and worn, and her ripe mouth tragical; but she
no longer showed any tremulousness. Clare’s revived thoughts of his father
prevented his noticing her particularly ; and so they went on down the white
row of liquid rectangles till they had finished and drained them off, when
the other maids returned, and took their pails, and Deb came to scald out the
leads for the new milk. As Tess withdrew to go afield to the cows he said to
her softly—
“And my question, Tessy?”
“O no—no!” replied she with grave hopelessness, as one who had heard
anew the turmoil of her own past in the allusion to Alec d’Urberville. “It
can’t be!”
She went out towards the mead, joining the other milkmaids with a
bound, as if trying to make the open air drive away her sad constraint. All
the girls drew onward to the spot where the cows were grazing in the farther
mead, the bevy advancing with the bold grace of wild animals—the reckless
unchastened motion of women accustomed to unlimited space—in which
they abandoned themselves to the air as a swimmer to the wave. It seemed
natural enough to him now that Tess was again in sight to choose a mate
from unconstrained Nature, and not from the abodes of Art.
 XXVIII
HER REFUSAL, THOUGH UNEXPECTED, did not permanently daunt
Clare. His experience of women was great enough for him to be aware that
the negative often meant nothing more than the preface to the affirmative;
and it was little enough for him not to know that in the manner of the
present negative there lay a great exception to the dallyings of coyness.
That she had already permitted him to make love to her he read as an
additional assurance, not fully trowing de that in the fields and pastures to
“sigh gratis”1 is by no means deemed waste; love-making being here more
often accepted in-considerately and for its own sweet sake than in the
carkingdf anxious homes of the ambitious, where a girl’s craving for an
establishment paralyzes her healthy thought of a passion as an end.
“Tess, why did you say ‘no’ in such a positive way?” he asked her in the
course of a few days.
She started.
“Don’t ask me. I told you why—partly I am not good enough—not
worthy enough.”
“How? Not fine lady enough?”
“Yes—something like that,” murmured she. “Your friends would scorn
me.”
“Indeed, you mistake them—my father and mother. As for my brothers, I
don’t care—” He clasped his fingers behind her back to keep her from
slipping away. “Now—you did not mean it, sweet?—I am sure you did not!
You have made me so restless that I cannot read, or play, or do anything. I
am in no hurry, Tess, but I want to know—to hear from your own warm lips
—that you will some day be mine—any time you may choose; but some
day?”
She could only shake her head and look away from him.
Clare regarded her attentively, conned the characters of her face as if they
had been hieroglyphics. The denial seemed real.
 “Then I ought not to hold you in this way—ought I? I have no right to you
—no right to seek out where you are, or to walk with you! Honestly, Tess,
do you love any other man?”
“How can you ask?” she said, with continued self-suppression.
“I almost know that you do not. But then, why do you repulse me?”
“I don’t repulse you. I like you to—tell me you love me; and you may
always tell me so as you go about with me—and never offend me.”
“But you will not accept me as a husband?”
“Ah—that’s different—it is for your good, indeed my dearest! O, believe
me, it is only for your sake! I don’t like to give myself the great happiness
o’ promising to be yours in that way—because—because I am sure I ought
not to do it.”
“But you will make me happy!”
“Ah—you think so, but you don’t know!”
At such times as this, apprehending the grounds of her refusal to be her
modest sense of incompetence in matters social and polite, he would say
that she was wonderfully well-informed and versatile—which was certainly
true, her natural quickness, and her admiration for him, having led her to
pick up his vocabulary, his accent, and fragments of his knowledge, to a
surprising extent. After these tender contests and her victory she would go
away by herself under the remotest cow, if at milking-time, or into the
sedge, or into her room, if at a leisure interval, and mourn silently, not a
minute after an apparently phlegmatic negative.
The struggle was so fearful; her own heart was so strongly on the side of
his—two ardent hearts against one poor little conscience—that she tried to
fortify her resolution by every means in her power. She had come to
Talbothays with a made-up mind. On no account could she agree to a step
which might afterwards cause bitter rueing to her husband for his blindness
in wedding her. And she held that what her conscience had decided for her
when her mind was unbiassed ought not to be overruled now.
“Why don’t somebody tell him all about me?” she said. “It was only forty
miles off—why hasn’t it reached here? Somebody must know!”
Yet nobody seemed to know; nobody told him.
 For two or three days no more was said. She guessed from the sad
countenances of her chamber companions that they regarded her not only as
the favourite, but as the chosen; but they could see for themselves that she
did not put herself in his way.
Tess had never before known a time in which the thread of her life was so
distinctly twisted of two strands, positive pleasure and positive pain. At the
next cheese-making the pair were again left alone together. The dairyman
himself had been lending a hand; but Mr Crick, as well as his wife, seemed
latterly to have acquired a suspicion of mutual interest between these two;
though they walked so circumspectly that suspicion was but of the faintest.
Anyhow, the dairyman left them to themselves.
They were breaking up the masses of curd before putting them into the
vats. The operation resembled the act of crumbling bread on a large scale;
and amid the immaculate whiteness of the curds Tess Durbeyfield’s hands
showed themselves of the pinkness of the rose. Angel, who was filling the
vats with his handfuls, suddenly ceased, and laid his hands flat upon hers.
Her sleeves were rolled far above the elbow, and bending lower he kissed
the inside vein of her soft arm.
Although the early September weather was sultry, her arm, from her
dabbling in the curds, was as cold and damp to his mouth as a new-gathered
mushroom, and tasted of the whey. But she was such a sheaf of
susceptibilities that her pulse was accelerated by the touch, her blood driven
to her finger-ends, and the cool arms flushed hot. Then, as though her heart
had said, “Is coyness longer necessary? Truth is truth between man and
woman, as between man and man,” she lifted her eyes, and they beamed
devotedly into his, as her lip rose in a tender half-smile.
“Do you know why I did that, Tess?” he said.
“Because you love me very much!”
“Yes, and as a preliminary to a new entreaty.”
“Not again!”
She looked a sudden fear that her resistance might break down under her
own desire.
“O, Tessy! ” he went on, “I cannot think why you are so tantalizing. Why
do you disappoint me so? You seem almost like a coquette, upon my life
you do—a coquette of the first urban water! They blow hot and blow cold,
just as you do; and it is the very last sort of thing to expect to find in a
retreat like Talbothays ... And yet, dearest,” he quickly added, observing
how the remark had cut her, “I know you to be the most honest, spotless
creature that ever lived. So how can I suppose you a flirt? Tess, why don’t
you like the idea of being my wife, if you love me as you seem to do?”
“I have never said I don’t like the idea, and I never could say it; because
—it isn’t true!”
The stress now getting beyond endurance her lip quivered, and she was
obliged to go away. Clare was so pained and perplexed that he ran after and
caught her in the passage.
“Tell me, tell me!” he said, passionately clasping her, in forgetfulness of
his curdy hands: “do tell me that you won’t belong to anybody but me!”
“I will, I will tell you!” she exclaimed. “And I will give you a complete
answer, if you will let me go now. I will tell you my experiences—all about
myself—all!”
“Your experiences, dear; yes, certainly; any number.” He expressed assent
in loving satire, looking into her face. “My Tess has, no doubt, almost as
many experiences as that wild convolvulus out there on the garden hedge,
that opened itself this morning for the first time. Tell me anything, but don’t
use that wretched expression any more about not being worthy of me.”
“I will try—not! And I’ll give you my reasons to-morrow-next week.”
“Say on Sunday?”
“Yes, on Sunday.”
At last she got away, and did not stop in her retreat till she was in the
thicket of pollard willows at the lower side of the barton, where she could
be quite unseen. Here Tess flung herself down upon the rustling
undergrowth of speargrass, as upon a bed, and remained crouching in
palpitating misery broken by momentary shoots of joy, which her fears
about the ending could not altogether suppress.
In reality, she was drifting into acquiescence. Every see-saw of her breath,
every wave of her blood, every pulse singing in her ears, was a voice that
joined with nature in revolt against her scrupulousness. Reckless,
inconsiderate acceptance of him; to close with him at the altar, revealing
nothing, and chancing discovery; to snatch ripe pleasure before the iron
teeth of pain could have time to shut upon her: that was what love
counselled; and in almost a tenor of ecstasy Tess divined that, despite her
many months of lonely self-chastisement, wrestlings, communings,
schemes to lead a future of austere isolation, love’s counsel would prevail.
The afternoon advanced, and still she remained among the willows. She
heard the rattle of taking down the pails from the forked stands; the “waow-
waow!” which accompanied the getting together of the cows. But she did
not go to the milking. They would see her agitation ; and the dairyman,
thinking the cause to be love alone, would good-naturedly tease her; and
that harassment could not be borne.
Her lover must have guessed her overwrought state, and invented some
excuse for her non-appearance, for no inquiries were made or calls given.
At half-past six the sun settled down upon the levels, with the aspect of a
great forge in the heavens, and presently a monstrous pumpkin-like moon
arose on the other hand. The pollard willows, tortured out of their natural
shape by incessant choppings, became spiny-haired monsters as they stood
up against it. She went in, and upstairs without a light.
It was now Wednesday. Thursday came, and Angel looked thoughtfully at
her from a distance, but intruded in no way upon her. The indoor
milkmaids, Marian and the rest, seemed to guess that something definite
was afoot, for they did not force any remarks upon her in the bedchamber.
Friday passed; Saturday. Tomorrow was the day.
“I shall give way—I shall say yes—I shall let myself marry him—I
cannot help it!” she jealously panted, with her hot face to the pillow that
night, on hearing one of the other girls sigh his name in her sleep. “I can’t
bear to let anybody have him but me! Yet it is a wrong to him, and may kill
him when he knows! O my heart—O—O—O!”
 XXIX
“Now, WHO MID YE think I’ve heard news o’ this morning?” said
Dairyman Crick, as he sat down to breakfast next day, with a riddling gaze
round upon the munching men and maids. “Now just who mid ye think?”
One guessed, and another guessed. Mrs Crick did not guess, because she
knew already.
“Well,” said the dairyman, “’tis that slack-twisted ’hore’s-bird of a fellar,
Jack Dollop. He’s lately got married to a widow-woman.”
“Not Jack Dollop? A villain—to think o’ that!” said a milker.
The name entered quickly into Tess Durbeyfield’s consciousness, for it
was the name of the lover who had wronged his sweetheart, and had
afterwards been so roughly used by the young woman’s mother in the
butter-churn.
“And has he married the valiant matron’s daughter, as he promised?”
asked Angel Clare absently, as he turned over the newspaper he was reading
at the little table to which he was always banished by Mrs Crick, in her
sense of his gentility.
“Not he, sir. Never meant to,” replied the dairyman. “As I say, ’tis a
widow-woman, and she had money, it seems—fifty poun’ a year or so; and
that was all he was after. They were married in a great hurry; and then she
told him that by marrying she had lost her fifty poun’ a year. Just fancy the
state o’ my gentleman’s mind at that news! Never such a cat-and-dog life as
they’ve been leading ever since! Serves him well beright. But onluckily the
poor woman gets the worst o’t.”
“Well, the silly body should have told en sooner that the ghost of her first
man would trouble him,” said Mrs Crick.
“Ay; ay,” responded the dairyman indecisively. “Still, you can see exactly
how t’was. She wanted a home, and didn’t like to run the risk of losing him.
Don’t ye think that was something like it, maidens?”
He glanced towards the row of girls.
 “She ought to ha’ told him just before they went to church, when he could
hardly have backed out,” exclaimed Marian.
“Yes, she ought,” agreed Izz.
“She must have seen what he was after, and should ha’ refused him,”
cried Retty spasmodically.
“And what do you say, my dear?” asked the dairyman of Tess.
“I think she ought—to have told him the true state of things—or else
refused him—I don’t know,” replied Tess, the bread-and-butter choking her.
“But cust if I’d have done either o’t,” said Beck Knibbs, a married helper
from one of the cottages. “All’s fair in love and war. I’d ha’ married en just
as she did, and if he’d said two words to me about not telling him
beforehand anything whatsomdever about my first chap that I hadn’t chose
to tell, I’d ha’ knocked him down wi’ the rolling-pin—a scramdg little feller
like he! Any woman could do it.”
The laughter which followed this sally was supplemented only by a sorry
smile, for form’s sake, from Tess. What was comedy to them was tragedy to
her; and she could hardly bear their mirth. She soon rose from table, and,
with an impression that Clare would follow her, went along a little
wriggling path, now stepping to one side of the irrigating channels, and now
to the other, till she stood by the main stream of the Var. Men had been
cutting the water-weeds higher up the river, and masses of them were
floating past her—moving islands of green crow-foot, whereon she might
almost have ridden; long locks of which weed had lodged against the piles
driven to keep the cows from crossing.
Yes, there was the pain of it. This question of a woman telling her story—
the heaviest of crosses to herself—seemed but amusement to others. It was
as if people should laugh at martyrdom.
“Tessy!” came from behind her, and Clare sprang across the gully,
alighting beside her feet. “My wife—soon!”
“No, no; I cannot. For your sake, O Mr Clare; for your sake, I say no!”
“Tess!”
“Still I say no!” she repeated.
 Not expecting this he had put his arm lightly round her waist the moment
after speaking, beneath her hanging tail of hair. (The younger dairymaids,
including Tess, breakfasted with their hair loose on Sunday mornings before
building it up extra high for attending church, a style they could not adopt
when milking with their heads against the cows.) If she had said “Yes”
instead of “No” he would have kissed her; it had evidently been his
intention; but her determined negative deterred his scrupulous heart. Their
condition of domiciliary comradeship put her, as the woman, to such
disadvantage by its enforced intercourse, that he felt it unfair to her to
exercise any pressure of blandishment which he might have honestly
employed had she been better able to avoid him. He released her
momentarily-imprisoned waist, and withheld the kiss.
It all turned on that release. What had given her strength to refuse him this
time was solely the tale of the widow told by the dairyman; and that would
have been overcome in another moment. But Angel said no more; his face
was perplexed; he went away.
Day after day they met—somewhat less constantly than before; and thus
two or three weeks went by. The end of September drew near, and she could
see in his eye that he might ask her again.
His plan of procedure was different now—as though he had made up his
mind that her negatives were, after all, only coyness and youth startled by
the novelty of the proposal. The fitful evasiveness of her manner when the
subject was under discussion countenanced the idea. So he played a more
coaxing game; and while never going beyond words, or attempting the
renewal of caresses, he did his utmost orally.
In this way Clare persistently wooed her in undertones like that of the
purling milk—at the cow’s side, at skimmings, at butter-makings, at cheese-
makings, among broody poultry, and among farrowing pigs—as no
milkmaid was ever wooed before by such a man.
Tess knew that she must break down. Neither a religious sense of a certain
moral validity in the previous union nor a conscientious wish for candour
could hold out against it much longer. She loved him so passionately, and
he was so godlike in her eyes; and being, though untrained, instinctively
refined, her nature cried for his tutelary guidance. And thus, though Tess
kept repeating to herself, “I can never be his wife,” the words were vain. A
proof of her weakness lay in the very utterance of what calm strength would
not have taken the trouble to formulate. Every sound of his voice beginning
on the old subject stirred her with a terrifying bliss, and she coveted the
recantation she feared.
His manner was—what man’s is not?—so much that of one who would
love and cherish and defend her under any conditions, changes, charges, or
revelations, that her gloom lessened as she basked in it. The season
meanwhile was drawing onward to the equinox, and though it was still fine,
the days were much shorter. The dairy had again worked by morning
candle-light for a long time; and a fresh renewal of Clare’s pleading
occurred one morning between three and four.
She had run up in her bedgown to his door to call him as usual; then had
gone back to dress and call the others; and in ten minutes was walking to
the head of the stairs with the candle in her hand. At the same moment he
came down his steps from above in his shirt-sleeves and put his arm across
the stairway.
“Now, Miss Flirt, before you go down,” he said peremptorily. “It is a
fortnight since I spoke, and this won’t do any longer. You must tell me what
you mean, or I shall have to leave this house. My door was ajar just now,
and I saw you. For your own safety I must go. You don’t know. Well? Is it
to be yes at last?”
“I am only just up, Mr Clare, and it is too early to take me to task!” she
pouted. “You need not call me Flirt. ’Tis cruel and untrue. Wait till by and
by. Please wait till by and by! I will really think seriously about it between
now and then. Let me go downstairs!”
She looked a little like what he said she was as, holding the candle
sideways, she tried to smile away the seriousness of her words.
“Call me Angel, then, and not Mr Clare.”
“Angel.”
“Angel dearest—why not?”
“’Twould mean that I agree, wouldn’t it?”
“It would only mean that you love me, even if you cannot marry me, and
you were so good as to own that long ago.”
 “Very well, then, ‘Angel dearest,’ if I must,” she murmured, looking at
her candle, a roguish curl coming upon her mouth, notwithstanding her
suspense.
Clare had resolved never to kiss her until he had obtained her promise; but
somehow, as Tess stood there in her prettily tucked-up milking gown, her
hair carelessly heaped upon her head till there should be leisure to arrange it
when skimming and milking were done, he broke his resolve, and brought
his lips to her cheek for one moment. She passed downstairs very quickly,
never looking back at him or saying another word. The other maids were
already down, and the subject was not pursued. Except Marian they all
looked wistfully and suspiciously at the pair, in the sad yellow rays which
the morning candles emitted in contrast with the first cold signals of the
dawn without.
When skimming was done—which, as the milk diminished with the
approach of autumn, was a lessening process day by day—Retty and the
rest went out. The lovers followed them.
“Our tremulous lives are so different from theirs, are they not?” he
musingly observed to her, as he regarded the three figures tripping before
him through the frigid pallor of opening day.
“Not so very different, I think,” she said.
“Why do you think that?”
“There are very few women’s lives that are not—tremulous,” Tess replied,
pausing over the new word as if it impressed her. “There’s more in those
three than you think.”
“What is in them?”
“Almost either of ’em,” she began, “would make—perhaps would make
—a properer wife than I. And perhaps they love you as well as I—almost.”
“O, Tessy!”
There were signs that it was an exquisite relief to her to hear the impatient
exclamation, though she had resolved so intrepidly to let generosity make
one bid against herself. That was now done, and she had not the power to
attempt self-immolation a second time then. They were joined by a milker
from one of the cottages, and no more was said on that which concerned
them so deeply. But Tess knew that this day would decide it.
 In the afternoon several of the dairyman’s household and assistants went
down to the meads as usual, a long way from the dairy, where many of the
cows were milked without being driven home. The supply was getting less
as the animals advanced in calf, and the supernumerary milkers of the lush
green season had been dismissed.
The work progressed leisurely. Each pailful was poured into tall cans that
stood in a large spring-waggon which had been brought upon the scene; and
when they were milked the cows trailed away.
Dairyman Crick, who was there with the rest, his wrapper gleaming
miraculously white against a leaden evening sky, suddenly looked at his
heavy watch.
“Why, ’tis later than I thought,” he said. “Begad! We shan’t be soon
enough with this milk at the station, if we don’t mind. There’s no time to-
day to take it home and mix it with the bulk afore sending off. It must go to
station straight from here. Who’ll drive it across?”
Mr Clare volunteered to do so, though it was none of his business, asking
Tess to accompany him. The evening, though sunless, had been warm and
muggy for the season, and Tess had come out with her milking-hood only,
naked-armed and jacketless; certainly not dressed for a drive. She therefore
replied by glancing over her scant habiliments; but Clare gently urged her.
She assented by relinquishing her pail and stool to the dairyman to take
home; and mounted the spring-waggon beside Clare.
 XXX
IN THE DIMINISHING DAYLIGHT they went along the level roadway
through the meads, which stretched away into gray miles, and were backed
in the extreme edge of distance by the swarthy and abrupt slopes of Egdon
Heath. On its summit stood clumps and stretches of fir-trees, whose notched
tips appeared like battlemented towers crowning black-fronted castles of
enchantment.
They were so absorbed in the sense of being close to each other that they
did not begin talking for a long while, the silence being broken only by the
clucking of the milk in the tall cans behind them. The lane they followed
was so solitary that the hazel nuts had remained on the boughs till they
slipped from their shells, and the blackberries hung in heavy clusters. Every
now and then Angel would fling the lash of his whip round one of these,
pluck it off, and give it to his companion.
The dull sky soon began to tell its meaning by sending down herald-drops
of rain, and the stagnant air of the day changed into a fitful breeze which
played about their faces. The quick-silvery glaze on the rivers and pools
vanished; from broad mirrors of light they changed to lustreless sheets of
lead, with a surface like a rasp. But that spectacle did not affect her
preoccupation. Her countenance, a natural carnation slightly embrowned by
the season, had deepened its tinge with the beating of the rain-drops; and
her hair, which the pressure of the cows’ flanks had, as usual, caused to
tumble down from its fastenings and stray beyond the curtain of her calico
bonnet, was made clammy by the moisture, till it hardly was better than
seaweed.
“I ought not to have come, I suppose,” she murmured, looking at the sky.
“I am sorry for the rain,” said he. “But how glad I am to have you here!”
Remote Egdon disappeared by degrees behind the liquid gauze. The
evening grew darker, and the roads being crossed by gates it was not safe to
drive faster than at a walking pace. The air was rather chill.
“I am so afraid you will get cold, with nothing upon your arms and
shoulders,” he said. “Creep close to me, and perhaps the drizzle won’t hurt
you much. I should be sorrier still if I did not think that the rain might be
helping me.”
She imperceptibly crept closer, and he wrapped round them both a large
piece of sail-cloth, which was sometimes used to keep the sun off the milk-
cans. Tess held it from slipping off him as well as herself, Clare’s hands
being occupied.
“Now we are all right again. Ah—no we are not! It runs down into my
neck a little, and it must still more into yours. That’s better. Your arms are
like wet marble, Tess. Wipe them in the cloth. Now, if you stay quiet, you
will not get another drop. Well, dear—about that question of mine—that
long-standing question?”
The only reply that he could hear for a little while was the smack of the
horse’s hoofs on the moistening road, and the cluck of the milk in the cans
behind them.
“Do you remember what you said?”
“I do,” she replied.
“Before we get home, mind.”
“I’ll try.”
He said no more then. As they drove on the fragment of an old manor
house of Caroline datedh rose against the sky, and was in due course passed
and left behind.
“That,” he observed, to entertain her, “is an interesting old place—one of
the several seats which belonged to an ancient Norman family formerly of
great influence in this county, the d’Urbervilles. I never pass one of their
residences without thinking of them. There is something very sad in the
extinction of a family of renown, even if it was fierce, domineering, feudal
renown.”
“Yes,” said Tess.
They crept along towards a point in the expanse of shade just at hand at
which a feeble light was beginning to assert its presence,a spot where, by
day, a fitful white streak of steam at intervals upon the dark green
background denoted intermittent moments of contact between their
secluded world and modern life. Modern life stretched out its steam feeler
to this point three or four times a day, touched the native existences, and
quickly withdrew its feeler again, as if what it touched had been
uncongenial.
They reached the feeble light, which came from the smoky lamp of a little
railway station; a poor enough terrestrial star, yet in one sense of more
importance to Talbothays Dairy and mankind than the celestial ones to
which it stood in such humiliating contrast. The cans of new milk were
unladen in the rain, Tess getting a little shelter from a neighbouring holly
tree.
Then there was the hissing of a train, which drew up almost silently upon
the wet rails, and the milk was rapidly swung can by can into the truck. The
light of the engine flashed for a second upon Tess Durbeyfield’s figure,
motionless under the great holly tree. No object could have looked more
foreign to the gleaming cranks and wheels than this unsophisticated girl,
with the round bare arms, the rainy face and hair, the suspended attitude of
a friendly leopard at pause, the print gown of no date or fashion, and the
cotton bonnet drooping on her brow.
She mounted again beside her lover, with a mute obedience characteristic
of impassioned natures at times, and when they had wrapped themselves up
over head and ears in the sail-cloth again, they plunged back into the now
thick night. Tess was so receptive that the few minutes of contact with the
whirl of material progress lingered in her thought.
“Londoners will drink it at their breakfasts to-morrow, won’t they?” she
asked. “Strange people that we have never seen.”
“Yes—I suppose they will. Though not as we send it. When its strength
has been lowered, so that it may not get up into their heads.”
“Noble men and noble women, ambassadors and centurions, ladies and
tradeswomen, and babies who have never seen a cow.”
“Well, yes; perhaps; particularly centurions.”
“Who don’t know anything of us, and where it comes from; or think how
we two drove miles across the moor to-night in the rain that it might reach
’em in time?”
“We did not drive entirely on account of these precious Londoners; we
drove a little on our own—on account of that anxious matter which you
will, I am sure, set at rest, dear Tess. Now, permit me to put it in this way.
You belong to me already, you know; your heart, I mean. Does it not?”
“You know as well as I. O yes—yes!”
“Then, if your heart does, why not your hand?”
“My only reason was on account of you—on account of a question. I have
something to tell you—”
“But suppose it to be entirely for my happiness, and my worldly
convenience also?”
“O yes; if it is for your happiness and worldly convenience. But my life
before I came here—I want—”
“Well, it is for my convenience as well as my happiness. If I have a very
large farm, either English or colonial, you will be invaluable as a wife to
me; better than a woman out of the largest mansion in the country. So please
—please, dear Tessy, disabuse your mind of the feeling that you will stand
in my way.”
“But my history. I want you to know it—you must let me tell you—you
will not like me so well!”
“Tell it if you wish to, dearest. This previous history then. Yes, I was born
at so and so, Anno Domini—”
“I was born at Marlott,” she said, catching at his words as a help, lightly
as they were spoken. “And I grew up there. And I was in the Sixth Standard
when I left school, and they said I had great aptness, and should make a
good teacher, so it was settled that I should be one. But there was trouble in
my family; father was not very industrious, and he drank a little.”
“Yes, yes. Poor child! Nothing new.” He pressed her more closely to his
side.
“And then—there is something very unusual about it—about me. I—I was
—” Tess’s breath quickened.
“Yes, dearest. Never mind.”
“I—I am not a Durbeyfield, but a d’Urberville—a descendant of the same
family as those that owned the old house we passed. And—we are all gone
to nothing!”
“A d’Urberville!—Indeed! And is that all the trouble, dear Tess?”
 “Yes,” she answered faintly.
“Well—why should I love you less after knowing this?”
“I was told by the dairyman that you hated old families.”
He laughed.
“Well, it is true, in one sense. I do hate the aristocratic principle of blood
before everything, and do think that as reasoners the only pedigrees we
ought to respect are those spiritual ones of the wise and virtuous, without
regard to corporeal paternity. But I am extremely interested in this news—
you can have no idea how interested I am! Are not you interested yourself
in being one of that well-known line?”
“No. I have thought it sad—especially since coming here, and knowing
that many of the hills and fields I see once belonged to my father’s people.
But other hills and fields belonged to Retty’s people, and perhaps others to
Marian’s, so that I don’t value it particularly.”
“Yes—it is surprising how many of the present tillers of the soil were
once owners of it, and I sometimes wonder that a certain school of
politicians don’t make capital of the circumstance; but they don’t seem to
know it ... I wonder that I did not see the resemblance of your name to
d’Urberville, and trace the manifest corruption. And this was the carking
secret!”
She had not told. At the last moment her courage had failed her, she
feared his blame for not telling him sooner; and her instinct of self-
preservation was stronger than her candour.
“Of course,” continued the unwitting Clare, “I should have been glad to
know you to be descended exclusively from the long-suffering, dumb,
unrecorded rank and file of the English nation, and not from the self-
seeking few who made themselves powerful at the expense of the rest. But I
am corrupted away from that by my affection for you, Tess [he laughed as
he spoke], and made selfish likewise. For your own sake I rejoice in your
descent. Society is hopelessly snobbish, and this fact of your extraction may
make an appreciable difference to its acceptance of you as my wife, after I
have made you the well-read woman that I mean to make you. My mother
too, poor soul, will think so much better of you on account of it. Tess, you
must spell your name correctly—d’ Urberville—from this very day”
 “I like the other way rather best.”
“But you must, dearest! Good heavens, why dozens of mushroom
millionaires would jump at such a possession! By the bye, there’s one of
that kidney who has taken the name—where have I heard of him?—Up in
the neighbourhood of The Chase, I think. Why, he is the very man who had
that rumpus with my father I told you of. What an odd coincidence!”
“Angel, I think I would rather not take the name! It is unlucky, perhaps!”
She was agitated.
“Now then, Mistress Teresa d’Urberville, I have you. Take my name, and
so you will escape yours! The secret is out, so why should you any longer
refuse me?”
“If it is sure to make you happy to have me as your wife, and you feel that
you do wish to marry me, very, very much—”
“I do, dearest, of course!”
“I mean, that it is only your wanting me very much, and being hardly able
to keep alive without me, whatever my offences, that would make me feel I
ought to say I will.”
“You will—you do say it, I know! You will be mine for ever and ever.”
He clasped her close and kissed her.
“Yes!”
She had no sooner said it than she burst into a dry hard sobbing, so violent
that it seemed to rend her. Tess was not a hysterical girl by any means, and
he was surprised.
“Why do you cry, dearest?”
“I can’t tell—quite!—I am so glad to think—of being yours, and making
you happy!”
“But this does not seem very much like gladness, my Tessy!”
“I mean—I cry because I have broken down in my vow! I said I would die
unmarried!”
“But, if you love me you would like me to be your husband?”
“Yes, yes, yes! But O, I sometimes wish I had never been born!”
 “Now, my dear Tess, if I did not know that you are very much excited,
and very inexperienced, I should say that remark was not very
complimentary. How came you to wish that if you care for me? Do you care
for me? I wish you would prove it in some way.”
“How can I prove it more than I have done?” she cried, in a distraction of
tenderness. “Will this prove it more?”
She clasped his neck, and for the first time Clare learnt what an
impassioned woman’s kisses were like upon the lips of one whom she loved
with all her heart and soul, as Tess loved him.
“There—now do you believe?” she asked, flushed, and wiping her eyes.
“Yes. I never really doubted—never, never!”
So they drove on through the gloom, forming one bundle inside the sail-
cloth, the horse going as he would, and the rain driving against them. She
had consented. She might as well have agreed at first. The “appetite for joy”
which pervades all creation,1 that tremendous force which sways humanity
to its purpose, as the tide sways the helpless weed, was not to be controlled
by vague lucubrations over the social rubric.
“I must write to my mother,” she said. “You don’t mind my doing that?”
“Of course not, dear child. You are a child to me, Tess, not to know how
very proper it is to write to your mother at such a time, and how wrong it
would be in me to object. Where does she live?”
“At the same place—Marlott. On the further side of Blackmoor Vale.”
“Ah, then I have seen you before this summer—”
“Yes; at that dance on the green; but you would not dance with me. O, I
hope that is of no ill-omen for us now!”
 XXXI
TESS WROTE A MOST touching and urgent letter to her mother the very
next day, and by the end of the week a response to her communication had
arrived in Joan Durbeyfield’s wandering last-century hand.
Dear Tess,

J1 write these few lines Hoping they will find you well, as they leave me at
Present, thank God for it. Dear Tess, we are all glad to Hear that you are
going really to be married soon. But with respect to your question, Tess, J
say between ourselves, quite private but very strong, that on no account do
you say a word of your Bygone Trouble to him. I did not tell everything to
your Father, he being so Proud on account of his Respectability, which,
perhaps, your Intended is the same. Many a woman—some of the Highest in
the Land—have had a Trouble in their time; and why should you Trumpet
yours when others don’t Trumpet theirs? No girl would be such a Fool,
specially as it is so long ago, and not your Fault at all. I shall answer the
same if you ask me fifty times. Besides, you must bear in mind that, knowing
it to be your Childish Nature to tell all that’s in your eart—so simple!—J
made you promise me never to let it out by Word or Deed, having your
Welfare in my Mind; and you most solemnly did promise it going from this
Door. I have not named either that Question or your coming marriage to
your Father, as he would blab it everywhere, poor Simple Man.
Dear Tess, keep up your Spirits, and we mean to send you a Hogshead of
Cyder for your Wedding, knowing there is not much in your parts, and thin
Sour Stuff what there is. So no more at present, and with kind love to your
Young Man.—From your affectte. Mother,
J. Durbeyfield
“O mother, mother!” murmured Tess.
She was recognizing how light was the touch of events the most
oppressive upon Mrs Durbeyfield’s elastic spirit. Her mother did not see life
as Tess saw it. That haunting episode of bygone days was to her mother but
a passing accident. But perhaps her mother was right as to the course to be
followed, whatever she might be in her reasons. Silence seemed, on the face
of it, best for her adored one’s happiness: silence it should be.
Thus steadied by a command from the only person in the world who had
any shadow of right to control her action, Tess grew calmer. The
responsibility was shifted, and her heart was lighter than it had been for
weeks. The days of declining autumn which followed her assent, beginning
with the month of October, formed a season through which she lived in
spiritual altitudes more nearly approaching ecstasy than any other period of
her life.
There was hardly a touch of earth in her love for Clare.2 To her sublime
trustfulness he was all that goodness could be—knew all that a guide,
philosopher, and friend should know.3 She thought every line in the contour
of his person the perfection of masculine beauty, his soul the soul of a saint,
his intellect that of a seer. The wisdom of her love for him, as love,
sustained her dignity; she seemed to be wearing a crown. The compassion
of his love for her, as she saw it, made her lift up her heart to him in
devotion. He would sometimes catch her large, worshipful eyes, that had no
bottom to them, looking at him from their depths, as if she saw something
immortal before her.
She dismissed the past—trod upon it and put it out, as one treads on a coal
that is smouldering and dangerous.
She had not known that men could be so disinterested, chivalrous,
protective, in their love for women as he. Angel Clare was far from all that
she thought him in this respect; absurdly far, indeed; but he was, in truth,
more spiritual than animal; he had himself well in hand, and was singularly
free from grossness. Though not cold-natured, he was rather bright than hot
—less Byronic than Shelleyan;di could love desperately, but with a love
more especially inclined to the imaginative and ethereal; it was a fastidious
emotion which could jealously guard the loved one against his very self.
This amazed and enraptured Tess, whose slight experiences had been so
infelicitous till now; and in her reaction from indignation against the male
sex she swerved to excess of honour for Clare.
They unaffectedly sought each other’s company; in her honest faith she
did not disguise her desire to be with him. The sum of her instincts on this
matter, if clearly stated, would have been that the elusive quality in her sex
which attracts men in general might be distasteful to so perfect a man after
an avowal of love, since it must in its very nature carry with it a suspicion
of art.
The country custom of unreserved comradeship out of doors during
betrothal was the only custom she knew, and to her it had no strangeness;
though it seemed oddly anticipative to Clare till he saw how normal a thing
she, in common with all the other dairy-folk, regarded it. Thus, during this
October month of wonderful afternoons they roved along the meads by
creeping paths which followed the brinks of trickling tributary brooks,
hopping across by little wooden bridges to the other side, and back again.
They were never out of the sound of some purling weir, whose buzz
accompanied their own murmuring, while the beams of the sun, almost as
horizontal as the mead itself, formed a pollen of radiance over the
landscape. They saw tiny blue fogs in the shadows of trees and hedges, all
the time that there was bright sunshine elsewhere. The sun was so near the
ground, and the sward so flat, that the shadows of Clare and Tess would
stretch a quarter of a mile ahead of them, like two long fingers pointing afar
to where the green alluvial reaches abutted against the sloping sides of the
vale.
Men were at work here and there—for it was the season for “taking up”
the meadows, or digging the little waterways clear for the winter irrigation,
and mending their banks where trodden down by the cows. The shovelfuls
of loam, black as jet, brought there by the river when it was as wide as the
whole valley, were an essence of soils, pounded champaignsdj of the past,
steeped, refined, and subtilized to extraordinary richness, out of which came
all the fertility of the mead, and of the cattle grazing there.
Clare hardily kept his arm round her waist in sight of these watermen,
with the air of a man who was accustomed to public dalliance, though
actually as shy as she who, with lips parted and eyes askance on the
labourers, wore the look of a wary animal the while.
“You are not ashamed of owning me as yours before them!” she said
gladly.
“O no!”
“But if it should reach the ears of your friends at Emminster that you are
walking about like this with me, a milkmaid—”
 “The most bewitching milkmaid ever seen.”
“They might feel it a hurt to their dignity.”
“My dear girl—a d’Urberville hurt the dignity of a Clare! It is a grand
card to play—that of your belonging to such a family, and I am reserving it
for a grand effect when we are married, and have the proofs of your descent
from Parson Tringham. Apart from that, my future is to be totally foreign to
my family—it will not affect even the surface of their lives. We shall leave
this part of England—perhaps England itself—and what does it matter how
people regard us here? You will like going, will you not?”
She could answer no more than a bare affirmative, so great was the
emotion aroused in her at the thought of going through the world with him
as his own familiar friend. Her feelings almost filled her ears like a babble
of waves, and surged up to her eyes. She put her hand in his, and thus they
went on, to a place where the reflected sun glared up from the river, under a
bridge, with a molten-metallic glow that dazzled their eyes, though the sun
itself was hidden by the bridge. They stood still, whereupon little furred and
feathered heads popped up from the smooth surface of the water; but,
finding that the disturbing presences had paused, and not passed by, they
disappeared again. Upon this river-brink they lingered till the fog began to
close round them—which was very early in the evening at this time of the
year—settling on the lashes of her eyes, where it rested like crystals, and on
his brows and hair.
They walked later on Sundays, when it was quite dark. Some of the dairy-
people, who were also out of doors on the first Sunday evening after their
engagement, heard her impulsive speeches, ecstasized to fragments, though
they were too far off to hear the words discoursed; noted the spasmodic
catch in her remarks, broken into syllables by the leapings of her heart, as
she walked leaning on his arm; her contented pauses, the occasional little
laugh upon which her soul seemed to ride—the laugh of a woman in
company with the man she loves and has won from all other women—
unlike anything else in nature. They marked the buoyancy of her tread, like
the skim of a bird which has not quite alighted.
Her affection for him was now the breath and life of Tess’s being; it
enveloped her as a photosphere, irradiated her into forgetfulness of her past
sorrows, keeping back the gloomy spectres that would persist in their
attempts to touch her—doubt, fear, moodiness, care, shame. She knew that
they were waiting like wolves just outside the circumscribing light, but she
had long spells of power to keep them in hungry subjection there.
A spiritual forgetfulness co-existed with an intellectual remembrance. She
walked in brightness, but she knew that in the background those shapes of
darkness were always spread. They might be receding, or they might be
approaching, one or the other, a little every day.

One evening Tess and Clare were obliged to sit indoors keeping house, all
the other occupants of the domicile being away. As they talked she looked
thoughtfully up at him, and met his two appreciative eyes.
“I am not worthy of you—no, I am not!” she burst out, jumping up from
her low stool as though appalled at his homage, and the fulness of her own
joy thereat.
Clare, deeming the whole basis of her excitement to be that which was
only the smaller part of it, said—
“I won’t have you speak like it, dear Tess! Distinction does not consist in
the facile use of a contemptible set of conventions, but in being numbered
among those who are true, and honest, and just, and pure, and lovely, and of
good report4—as you are, my Tess.”
She struggled with the sob in her throat. How often had that string of
excellences made her young heart ache in church of late years, and how
strange that he should have cited them now.
“Why didn’t you stay and love me when I—was sixteen; living with my
little sisters and brothers, and you danced on the green? O, why didn’t you,
why didn’t you!” she said, impetuously clasping her hands.
Angel began to comfort and reassure her, thinking to himself, truly
enough, what a creature of moods she was, and how careful he would have
to be of her when she depended for her happiness entirely on him.
“Ah—why didn’t I stay!” he said. “That is just what I feel. If I had only
known! But you must not be so bitter in your regret—why should you be?”
With the woman’s instinct to hide she diverged hastily—
 “I should have had four years more of your heart than I can ever have
now. Then I should not have wasted my time as I have done—I should have
had so much longer happiness!”
It was no mature woman with a long dark vista of intrigue behind her who
was tormented thus; but a girl of simple life, not yet one-and-twenty, who
had been caught during her days of immaturity like a bird in a springe. To
calm herself the more completely she rose from her little stool and left the
room, overturning the stool with her skirts as she went.
He sat on by the cheerful firelight thrown from a bundle of green ash-
sticks laid across the dogs; the sticks snapped pleasantly, and hissed out
bubbles of sap from their ends. When she came back she was herself again.
“Do you not think you are just a wee bit capricious, fitful, Tess?” he said,
good humouredly, as he spread a cushion for her on the stool, and seated
himself in the settle beside her. “I wanted to ask you something, and just
then you ran away.”
“Yes, perhaps I am capricious,” she murmured. She suddenly approached
him, and put a hand upon each of his arms. “No, Angel, I am not really so—
by Nature, I mean!” The more particularly to assure him that she was not,
she placed herself close to him in the settle, and allowed her head to find a
resting place against Clare’s shoulder. “What did you want to ask me—I am
sure I will answer it,” she continued humbly.
“Well, you love me, and have agreed to marry me, and hence there
follows a thirdly ‘When shall the day be?’ ”
“I like living like this.”
“But I must think of starting in business on my own hook with the new
year, or a little later. And before I get involved in the multifarious details of
my new position, I should like to have secured my partner.”
“But,” she timidly answered, “to talk quite practically, wouldn’t it be best
not to marry till after all that?—Though I can’t bear the thought o’ your
going away and leaving me here!”
“Of course you cannot—and it is not best in this case. I want you to help
me in many ways in making my start. When shall it be? Why not a fortnight
from now?”
“No,” she said, becoming grave; “I have so many things to think of first.”
 “But—”
He drew her gently nearer to him.
The reality of marriage was startling when it loomed so near. Before
discussion of the question had proceeded further there walked round the
comer of the settle into the full firelight of the apartment Mr Dairyman
Crick, Mrs Crick, and two of the milkmaids.
Tess sprang like an elastic ball from his side to her feet, while her face
flushed and her eyes shone in the firelight.
“I knew how it would be if I sat so close to him!” she cried, with
vexation. “I said to myself, they are sure to come and catch us! But I wasn’t
really sitting on his knee, though it might ha’ seemed as if I was almost!”
“Well—if so be you hadn’t told us, I am sure we shouldn’t ha’ noticed
that ye had been sitting anywhere at all in this light,” replied the dairyman.
He continued to his wife, with the stolid mien of a man who understood
nothing of the emotions relating to matrimony—“Now, Christianer, that
shows that folks should never fancy other folks be supposing things when
they bain’t. O no, I should never ha’ thought a word of where she was a
sitting to, if she hadn’t told me—not I.”
“We are going to be married soon,” said Clare, with improvised phlegm.
“Ah—and be ye! Well, I am truly glad to hear it, sir. I’ve thought you mid
do such a thing for some time. She’s too good for a dairymaid—I said so the
very first day I zid her—and a prize, for any man; and what’s more, a
wonderful woman for a gentleman-farmer’s wife; he won’t be at the mercy
of his bailydk wi’ her at his side.”
Somehow Tess disappeared. She had been even more struck with the look
of the girls who followed Crick than abashed by Crick’s blunt praise.
After supper, when she reached her bedroom, they were all present. A
light was burning, and each damsel was sitting up whitely in her bed,
awaiting Tess, the whole like a row of avenging ghosts.
But she saw in a few moments that there was no malice in their mood.
They could scarcely feel as a loss what they had never expected to have.
Their condition was objective, contemplative.
 “He’s going to marry her!” murmured Retty, never taking eyes off Tess.
“How her face do show it!”
“You be going to marry him?” asked Marian.
“Yes,” said Tess.
“When?”
“Some day.”
They thought that this was evasiveness only.
“Yes—going to marry him—a gentleman!” repeated Izz Huett.
And by a sort of fascination the three girls, one after another, crept out of
their beds, and came and stood barefooted round Tess. Retty put her hands
upon Tess’s shoulders, as if to realize her friend’s corporeality after such a
miracle, and the other two laid their arms round her waist, all looking into
her face.
“How it do seem! Almost more than I can think of!” said Izz Huett.
Marian kissed Tess. “Yes,” she murmured as she withdrew her lips.
“Was that because of love for her, or because other lips have touched
there by now?” continued Izz drily to Marian.
“I wasn’t thinking o’ that,” said Marian simply. “I was on‘y feeling all the
strangeness o’t—that she is to be his wife, and nobody else. I don’t say nay
to it, nor either of us, because we did not think of it—only loved him. Still,
nobody else is to marry’n in the world—no fine lady, nobody in silks and
satins; but she who do live like we.”
“Are you sure you don’t dislike me for it?” said Tess in a low voice.
They hung about her in their white nightgowns before replying, as if they
considered their answer might lie in her look.
“I don’t know—I don’t know,” murmured Retty Priddle. “I want to hate
’ee; but I cannot!”
“That’s how I feel,” echoed Izz and Marian. “I can’t hate her. Somehow
she hinders me!”
“He ought to marry one of you,” murmured Tess.
“Why?”
 “You are all better than I.”
“We better than you?” said the girls in a low, slow whisper. “No, no, dear
Tess!”
“You are!” she contradicted impetuously. And suddenly tearing away
from their clinging arms she burst into a hysterical fit of tears, bowing
herself on the chest of drawers and repeating incessantly, “O yes, yes, yes!”
Having once given way she could not stop her weeping.
“He ought to have had one of you!” she cried. “I think I ought to make
him even now! You would be better for him than—I don’t know what I’m
saying! O! O!”
They went up to her and clasped her round, but still her sobs tore her.
“Get some water,” said Marian. “She’s upset by us, poor thing, poor
thing!”
They gently led her back to the side of her bed, where they kissed her
warmly.
“You are best for‘n,” said Marian. “More ladylike, and a better scholar
than we, especially since he has taught ’ee so much. But even you ought to
be proud. You be proud, I’m sure!”
“Yes, I am,” said she; “and I am ashamed at so breaking down!”
When they were all in bed, and the light was out, Marian whispered
across to her—
“You will think of us when you be his wife, Tess, and of how we told ’ee
that we loved him, and how we tried not to hate you, and did not hate you,
and could not hate you, because you were his choice, and we never hoped to
be chose by him.”
They were not aware that, at these words, salt, stinging tears trickled
down upon Tess’s pillow anew, and how she resolved, with a bursting heart,
to tell all her history to Angel Clare, despite her mother’s command—to let
him for whom she lived and breathed despise her if he would, and her
mother regard her as a fool, rather than preserve a silence which might be
deemed a treachery to him, and which somehow seemed a wrong to these.
 XXXII
THIS PENITENTIAL MOOD KEPT her from naming the wedding-day.
The beginning of November found its date still in abeyance, though he
asked her at the most tempting times. But Tess’s desire seemed to be for a
perpetual betrothal in which everything should remain as it was then.
The meads were changing now; but it was still warm enough in early
afternoons before milking to idle there awhile, and the state of dairy-work
at this time of year allowed a spare hour for idling. Looking over the damp
sod in the direction of the sun, a glistening ripple of gossamer webs was
visible to their eyes under the luminary, like the track of moonlight on the
sea. Gnats, knowing nothing of their brief glorification, wandered across the
shimmer of this pathway, irradiated as if they bore fire within them, then
passed out of its line, and were quite extinct. In the presence of these things
he would remind her that the date was still the question.
Or he would ask her at night, when he accompanied her on some mission
invented by Mrs Crick to give him the opportunity. This was mostly a
journey to the farmhouse on the slopes above the vale, to inquire how the
advanced cows were getting on in the straw-barton to which they were
relegated. For it was a time of the year that brought great changes to the
world of kine. Batches of the animals were sent away daily to their lying-in
hospital, where they lived on straw till their calves were born, after which
event, and as soon as the calf could walk, mother and offspring were driven
back to the dairy. In the interval which elapsed before the calves were sold
there was, of course, little milking to be done, but as soon as the calf had
been taken away the milkmaids would have to set to work as usual.
Returning from one of these dark walks they reached a great gravel-cliff
immediately over the levels, where they stood still and listened. The water
was now high in the streams, squirting through the weirs, and tinkling under
culverts; the smallest gullies were all full; there was no taking short cuts
anywhere, and foot-passengers were compelled to follow the permanent
ways. From the whole extent of the invisible vale came a multitudinous
intonation; it forced upon their fancy that a great city lay below them, and
that the murmur was the vociferation of its populace.
 “It seems like tens of thousands of them,” said Tess; “holding public-
meetings in their market-places, arguing, preaching, quarrelling, sobbing,
groaning, praying, and cursing.”
Clare was not particularly heeding.
“Did Crick speak to you to-day, dear, about his not wanting much
assistance during the winter months?”
“No.”
“The cows are going dry rapidly.”
“Yes. Six or seven went to the straw-barton yesterday, and three the day
before, making nearly twenty in the straw already. Ah—is it that the farmer
don’t want my help for the calving? O, I am not wanted here any more! And
I have tried so hard to—”
“Crick didn’t exactly say that he would no longer require you. But,
knowing what our relations were, he said in the most good-natured and
respectful manner possible that he supposed on my leaving at Christmas I
should take you with me, and on my asking what he would do without you
he merely observed that, as a matter of fact, it was a time of year when he
could do with a very little female help. I am afraid I was sinner enough to
feel rather glad that he was in this way forcing your hand.”
“I don’t think you ought to have felt glad, Angel. Because ‘tis always
mournful not to be wanted, even if at the same time ’tis convenient.”
“Well, it is convenient—you have admitted that.” He put his finger upon
her cheek. “Ah!” he said.
“What?”
“I feel the red rising up at her having been caught! But why should I trifle
so! We will not trifle—life is too serious.”
“It is. Perhaps I saw that before you did.”
She was seeing it then. To decline to marry him after all—in obedience to
her emotion of last night—and leave the dairy, meant to go to some strange
place, not a dairy; for milkmaids were not in request now calving-time was
coming on; to go to some arable farm where no divine being like Angel
Clare was. She hated the thought, and she hated more the thought of going
home.
 “So that, seriously, dearest Tess,” he continued, “since you will probably
have to leave at Christmas, it is in every way desirable and convenient that I
should carry you off then as my property. Besides, if you were not the most
uncalculating girl in the world you would know that we could not go on like
this for ever.”
“I wish we could. That it would always be summer and autumn, and you
always courting me, and always thinking as much of me as you have done
through the past summer-time!”
“I always shall.”
“I, I know you will!” she cried, with a sudden fervour of faith in him.
“Angel, I will fix the day when I will become yours for always!”
Thus at last it was arranged between them, during that dark walk home,
amid the myriads of liquid voices on the right and left.
When they reached the dairy Mr and Mrs Crick were promptly told—with
injunctions to secrecy; for each of the lovers was desirous that the marriage
should be kept as private as possible. The dairyman, though he had thought
of dismissing her soon, now made a great concern about losing her. What
should he do about his skimming? Who would make the ornamental butter-
pats for the Anglebury and Sandbourne ladies? Mrs Crick congratulated
Tess on the shilly-shallying having at last come to an end, and said that
directly she set eyes on Tess she divined that she was to be the chosen one
of somebody who was no common outdoor man; Tess had looked so
superior as she walked across the barton on that afternoon of her arrival;
that she was of a good family she could have sworn. In point of fact Mrs
Crick did remember thinking that Tess was graceful and good-looking as
she approached; but the superiority might have been a growth of the
imagination aided by subsequent knowledge.
Tess was now carried along upon the wings of the hours, without the
sense of a will. The word had been given; the number of the day written
down. Her naturally bright intelligence had begun to admit the fatalistic
convictions common to field-folk and those who associate more extensively
with natural phenomena than with their fellow-creatures; and she
accordingly drifted into that passive responsiveness to all things her lover
suggested, characteristic of the frame of mind.
 But she wrote anew to her mother, ostensibly to notify the wedding-day;
really to again implore her advice. It was a gentleman who had chosen her,
which perhaps her mother had not sufficiently considered. A post-nuptial
explanation, which might be accepted with a light heart by a rougher man,
might not be received with the same feeling by him. But this
communication brought no reply from Mrs Durbeyfield.
Despite Angel Clare’s plausible representations to himself and to Tess of
the practical need for their immediate marriage, there was in truth an
element of precipitancy in the step, as became apparent at a later date. He
loved her dearly, though perhaps rather ideally and fancifully than with the
impassioned thoroughness of her feeling for him. He had entertained no
notion, when doomed as he had thought to an unintellectual bucolic life,
that such charms as he beheld in this idyllic creature would be found behind
the scenes. Unsophistication was a thing to talk of; but he had not known
how it really struck one until he came here. Yet he was very far from seeing
his future track clearly, and it might be a year or two before he would be
able to consider himself fairly started in life. The secret lay in the tinge of
recklessness imparted to his career and character by the sense that he had
been made to miss his true destiny through the prejudices of his family.
“Don’t you think ’twould have been better for us to wait till you were
quite settled in your midland farm?” she once asked timidly. (A midland
farm was the idea just then.)
“To tell the truth, my Tess, I don’t like you to be left anywhere away from
my protection and sympathy.”
The reason was a good one, so far as it went. His influence over her had
been so marked that she had caught his manner and habits, his speech and
phrases, his likings and his aversions. And to leave her in farmland would
be to let her slip back again out of accord with him. He wished to have her
under his charge for another reason. His parents had naturally desired to see
her once at least before he carried her off to a distant settlement, English or
colonial; and as no opinion of theirs was to be allowed to change his
intention, he judged that a couple of months’ life with him in lodgings
whilst seeking for an advantageous opening would be of some social
assistance to her at what she might feel to be a trying ordeal—her
presentation to his mother at the Vicarage.
 Next, he wished to see a little of the working of a flour-mill, having an
idea that he might combine the use of one with corn-growing. The
proprietor of a large old water-mill at Wellbridge—once the mill of an
Abbey—had offered him the inspection of his time-honoured mode of
procedure, and a hand in the operations for a few days, whenever he should
choose to come. Clare paid a visit to the place, some few miles distant, one
day at this time, to inquire particulars, and returned to Talbothays in the
evening. She found him determined to spend a short time at the Wellbridge
flour-mills. And what had determined him? Less the opportunity of an
insight into grinding and boltingdl than the casual fact that lodgings were to
be obtained in that very farmhouse which, before its mutilation, had been
the mansion of a branch of the d’Urberville family. This was always how
Clare settled practical questions; by a sentiment which had nothing to do
with them. They decided to go immediately after the wedding, and remain
for a fortnight, instead of journeying to towns and inns.
“Then we will start off to examine some farms on the other side of
London that I have heard of,” he said, “and by March or April we will pay a
visit to my father and mother.”
Questions of procedure such as these arose and passed, and the day, the
incredible day, on which she was to become his, loomed large in the near
future. The thirty-first of December, New Year’s Eve, was the date. His
wife, she said to herself Could it ever be? Their two selves together, nothing
to divide them, every incident shared by them; why not? And yet why?
One Sunday morning Izz Huett returned from church, and spoke privately
to Tess.
“You was not called homedm this morning.”
“What?”
“It should ha’ been the first time of asking to-day,” she answered, looking
quietly at Tess. “You meant to be married New Year’s Eve, deary?”
The other returned a quick affirmative.
“And there must be three times of asking. And now there be only two
Sundays left between.”
Tess felt her cheek paling; Izz was right; of course there must be three.
Perhaps he had forgotten! If so, there must be a week’s postponement, and
that was unlucky. How could she remind her lover? She who had been so
backward, was suddenly fired with impatience and alarm lest she should
lose her dear prize.
A natural incident relieved her anxiety. Izz mentioned the omission of the
banns to Mrs Crick, and Mrs Crick assumed a matron’s privilege of
speaking to Angel on the point.
“Have ye forgot ’em, Mr Clare? The banns, I mean.”
“No, I have not forgot ’em,” says Clare.
As soon as he caught Tess alone he assured her:
“Don’t let them tease you about the banns. A licencedn will be quieter for
us, and I have decided on a licence without consulting you. So if you go to
church on Sunday morning you will not hear your own name, if you wished
to.”
“I didn’t wish to hear it, dearest,” she said proudly.
But to know that things were in train was an immense relief to Tess
notwithstanding, who had well-nigh feared that somebody would stand up
and forbid the banns on the ground of her history. How events were
favouring her!
“I don’t quite feel easy,” she said to herself. “All this good fortune may be
scourged out of me afterwards by a lot of ill. That’s how Heaven mostly
does. I wish I could have had common banns!”
But everything went smoothly. She wondered whether he would like her
to be married in her present best white frock, or if she ought to buy a new
one. The question was set at rest by his forethought, disclosed by the arrival
of some large packages addressed to her. Inside them she found a whole
stock of clothing, from bonnet to shoes, including a perfect morning
costume, such as would well suit the simple wedding they planned. He
entered the house shortly after the arrival of the packages, and heard her
upstairs undoing them.
A minute later she came down with a flush on her face and tears in her
eyes.
“How thoughtful you’ve been!” she murmured, her cheek upon his
shoulder. “Even to the gloves and handkerchief! My own love—how good,
how kind!”
“No, no, Tess; just an order to a tradeswoman in London—nothing more.”
And to divert her from thinking too highly of him he told her to go
upstairs, and take her time, and see if it all fitted; and, if not, to get the
village sempstress to make a few alterations.
She did return upstairs, and put on the gown. Alone, she stood for a
moment before the glass looking at the effect of her silk attire; and then
there came into her head her mother’s ballad of the mystic robe—which
Mrs Durbeyfield had used to sing to her as a child, so blithely and so archly,
her foot on the cradle, which she rocked to the tune. Suppose this robe
should betray her by changing colour, as her robe had betrayed Queen
Guénever.2 Since she had been at the dairy she had not thought of the lines
till now.
That never would become that wife
That had once done amiss,1
 XXXIII
ANGEL FELT THAT HE would like to spend a day with her before the
wedding, somewhere away from the dairy; as a last jaunt in her company
while they were yet mere lover and mistress; a romantic day, in
circumstances that would never be repeated; with that other and greater day
beaming close ahead of them. During the preceding week, therefore, he
suggested making a few purchases in the nearest town, and they started
together.
Clare’s life at the dairy had been that of a recluse in respect to the world
of his own class. For months he had never gone near a town, and, requiring
no vehicle, had never kept one, hiring the dairyman’s cob or gig if he rode
or drove. They went in the gig that day.
And then for the first time in their lives they shopped as partners in one
concern. It was Christmas Eve, with its loads of holly and mistletoe, and the
town was very full of strangers who had come in from all parts of the
country on account of the day. Tess paid the penalty of walking about with
happiness superadded to beauty on her countenance by being much stared at
as she moved amid them on his arm.
In the evening they returned to the inn at which they had put up, and Tess
waited in the entry while Angel went to see the horse and gig brought to the
door. The general sitting-room was full of guests, who were continually
going in and out. As the door opened and shut each time for the passage of
these, the light within the parlour fell full upon Tess’s face. Two men came
out and passed by her among the rest. One of them had stared her up and
down in surprise, and she fancied he was a Trantridge man, though that
village lay so many miles off that Trantridge folk were rarities here.
“A comely maid that,” said the other.
“True, comely enough. But unless I make a great mistake—” And he
negatived the remainder of the definition forthwith.
Clare had just returned from the stable-yard, and, confronting the man on
the threshold, heard the words, and saw the shrinking of Tess. The insult to
her stung him to the quick, and before he had considered anything at all he
struck the man on the chin with the full force of his fist, sending him
staggering backwards into the passage.
The man recovered himself, and seemed inclined to come on, and Clare,
stepping outside the door, put himself in a posture of defence. But his
opponent began to think better of the matter. He looked anew at Tess as he
passed her, and said to Clare—
“I beg pardon, sir; ’twas a complete mistake. I thought she was another
woman, forty miles from here.”
Clare, feeling then that he had been too hasty, and that he was, moreover,
to blame for leaving her standing in an inn-passage, did what he usually did
in such cases, gave the man five shillings to plaster the blow; and thus they
parted, bidding each other a pacific good-night. As soon as Clare had taken
the reins from the ostler, and the young couple had driven off, the two men
went in the other direction.
“And was it a mistake?” said the second one.
“Not a bit of it. But I didn’t want to hurt the gentleman’s feelings—not I.”
In the meantime the lovers were driving onward.
“Could we put off our wedding till a little later?” Tess asked in a dry dull
voice. “I mean if we wished?”
“No, my love. Calm yourself. Do you mean that the fellow may have time
to summon me for assault?” he asked good-humouredly.
“No—I only meant—if it should have to be put off.”
What she meant was not very clear, and he directed her to dismiss such
fancies from her mind, which she obediently did as well as she could. But
she was grave, very grave, all the way home; till she thought, “We shall go
away, a very long distance, hundreds of miles from these parts, and such as
this can never happen again, and no ghost of the past reach there.”
They parted tenderly that night on the landing, and Clare ascended to his
attic. Tess sat up getting on with some little requisites, lest the few
remaining days should not afford sufficient time. While she sat she heard a
noise in Angel’s room overhead, a sound of thumping and struggling.
Everybody else in the house was asleep, and in her anxiety lest Clare should
be ill she ran up and knocked at his door, and asked him what was the
matter.
“Oh, nothing dear,” he said from within. “I am so sorry I disturbed you!
But the reason is rather an amusing one: I fell asleep and dreamt that I was
fighting that fellow again who insulted you and the noise you heard was my
pummelling away with my fists at my portmanteau, which I pulled out to-
day for packing. I am occasionally liable to these freaks in my sleep. Go to
bed and think of it no more.”
This was the last drachm required to turn the scale of her indecision.
Declare the past to him by word of mouth she could not; but there was
another way. She sat down and wrote on the four pages of a note-sheet a
succinct narrative of those events of three or four years ago, put it into an
envelope, and directed it to Clare. Then, lest the flesh should again be weak,
she crept upstairs without any shoes and slipped the note under his door.
Her night was a broken one, as it well might be, and she listened for the
first faint noise overhead. It came, as usual; he descended, as usual. She
descended. He met her at the bottom of the stairs and kissed her. Surely it
was as warmly as ever!
He looked a little disturbed and worn, she thought. But he said not a word
to her about her revelation, even when they were alone. Could he have had
it? Unless he began the subject she felt that she could say nothing. So the
day passed, and it was evident that whatever he thought he meant to keep to
himself Yet he was frank and affectionate as before. Could it be that her
doubts were childish? that he forgave her; that he loved her for what she
was, just as she was, and smiled at her disquiet as at a foolish nightmare?
Had he really received her note? She glanced into his room, and could see
nothing of it. It might be that he forgave her. But even if he had not received
it she had a sudden enthusiastic trust that he surely would forgive her.
Every morning and night he was the same, and thus New Year’s Eve
broke—the wedding-day.
The lovers did not rise at milking-time, having through the whole of this
last week of their sojourn at the dairy been accorded something of the
position of guests, Tess being honoured with a room of her own. When they
arrived downstairs at breakfast-time they were surprised to see what effects
had been produced in the large kitchen for their glory since they had last
beheld it. At some unnatural hour of the morning the dairyman had caused
the yawning chimney-corner to be whitened, and the brick hearth reddened,
and a blazing yellow damask blowerdo to be hung across the arch in place of
the old grimy blue cotton one with a black sprig pattern which had formerly
done duty here. This renovated aspect of what was the focus indeed of the
room on a dull winter morning, threw a smiling demeanour over the whole
apartment.
“I was determined to do summat in honour o’t,” said the dairyman. “And
as you wouldn’t hear of my gieing a rattling good randydp wi’ fiddles and
bass-viols complete, as we should ha’ done in old times, this was all I could
think o’ as a noiseless thing.”
Tess’s friends lived so far off that none could conveniently have been
present at the ceremony, even had any been asked; but as a fact nobody was
invited from Marlott. As for Angel’s family, he had written and duly
informed them of the time, and assured them that he would be glad to see
one at least of them there for the day if he would like to come. His brothers
had not replied at all, seeming to be indignant with him; while his father
and mother had written a rather sad letter, deploring his precipitancy in
rushing into marriage, but making the best of the matter by saying that,
though a dairywoman was the last daughter-in-law they could have
expected, their son had arrived at an age at which he might be supposed to
be the best judge.
This coolness in his relations distressed Clare less than it would have
done had he been without the grand card with which he meant to surprise
them ere long. To produce Tess, fresh from the dairy as a d’Urberville and a
lady, he had felt to be temerarious and risky; hence he had concealed her
lineage till such time as, familiarized with worldly ways by a few months’
travel and reading with him, he could take her on a visit to his parents, and
impart the knowledge while triumphantly producing her as worthy of such
an ancient line. It was a pretty lover’s dream, if no more. Perhaps Tess’s
lineage had more value for himself than for anybody in the world besides.
Her perception that Angel’s bearing towards her still remained in no whit
altered by her own communication rendered Tess guiltily doubtful if he
could have received it. She rose from breakfast before he had finished, and
hastened upstairs. It had occurred to her to look once more into the queer
gaunt room which had been Clare’s den, or rather eyrie, for so long, and
climbing the ladder she stood at the open door of the apartment, regarding
and pondering. She stooped to the threshold of the doorway, where she had
pushed in the note two or three days earlier in such excitement. The carpet
reached close to the sill, and under the edge of the carpet she discerned the
faint white margin of the envelope containing her letter to him, which he
obviously had never seen, owing to her having in her haste thrust it beneath
the carpet as well as beneath the door.
With a feeling of faintness she withdrew the letter. There it was—sealed
up, just as it had left her hands. The mountain had not yet been removed.
She could not let him read it now, the house being in full bustle of
preparation; and descending to her own room she destroyed the letter there.
She was so pale when he saw her again that he felt quite anxious. The
incident of the misplaced letter she had jumped at as if it prevented a
confession; but she knew in her conscience that it need not; there was still
time. Yet everything was in a stir; there was coming and going; all had to
dress, the dairyman and Mrs Crick having been asked to accompany them
as witnesses; and reflection or deliberate talk was well-nigh impossible. The
only minute Tess could get to be alone with Clare was when they met upon
the landing.
“I am so anxious to talk to you—I want to confess all my faults and
blunders!” she said with attempted lightness.
“No, no—we can’t have faults talked of—you must be deemed perfect to-
day at least, my Sweet!” he cried. “We shall have plenty of time, hereafter, I
hope, to talk over our failings. I will confess mine at the same time.”
“But it would be better for me to do it now, I think, so that you could not
say—”
“Well, my quixotic one, you shall tell me anything—say, as soon as we
are settled in our lodging; not now. I, too, will tell you my faults then. But
do not let us spoil the day with them; they will be excellent matter for a dull
time.”
“Then you don’t wish me to, dearest?”
“I do not, Tessy, really.”
The hurry of dressing and starting left no time for more than this. Those
words of his seemed to reassure her on further reflection. She was whirled
onward through the next couple of critical hours by the mastering tide of
her devotion to him, which closed up further meditation. Her one desire, so
long resisted, to make herself his, to call him her lord, her own—then, if
necessary, to die—had at last lifted her up from her plodding reflective
pathway. In dressing, she moved about in a mental cloud of many-coloured
idealities, which eclipsed all sinister contingencies by its brightness.
The church was a long way off, and they were obliged to drive,
particularly as it was winter. A close carriage was ordered from a roadside
inn, a vehicle which had been kept there ever since the old days of post-
chaise travelling. It had stout wheel-spokes, and heavy felloes,dq a great
curved bed, immense straps and springs, and a pole like a battering-ram.
The postiliondr was a venerable “boy” of sixty—a martyr to rheumatic gout,
the result of excessive exposure in youth, counteracted by strong liquors—
who had stood at inn-doors doing nothing for the whole five-and-twenty
years that had elapsed since he had no longer been required to ride
professionally, as if expecting the old times to come back again. He had a
permanent running wound on the outside of his right leg, originated by the
constant bruisings of aristocratic carriage-poles during the many years that
he had been in regular employ at the King’s Arms, Casterbridge.
Inside this cumbrous and creaking structure, and behind this decayed
conductor, the partie carréeds took their seats—the bride and bridegroom
and Mr and Mrs Crick. Angel would have liked one at least of his brothers
to be present as groomsman, but their silence after his gentle hint to that
effect by letter had signified that they did not care to come. They
disapproved of the marriage, and could not be expected to countenance it.
Perhaps it was as well that they could not be present. They were not worldly
young fellows, but fraternizing with dairy-folk would have struck
unpleasantly upon their biassed niceness, apart from their views of the
match.
Upheld by the momentum of the time Tess knew nothing of this; did not
see anything; did not know the road they were taking to the church. She
knew that Angel was close to her; all the rest was a luminous mist. She was
a sort of celestial person, who owed her being to poetry—one of those
classical divinities Clare was accustomed to talk to her about when they
took their walks together.
 The marriage being by licence there were only a dozen or so of people in
the church; had there been a thousand they would have produced no more
effect upon her. They were at stellar distances from her present world. In the
ecstatic solemnity with which she swore her faith to him the ordinary
sensibilities of sex seemed a flippancy. At a pause in the service, while they
were kneeling together, she unconsciously inclined herself towards him, so
that her shoulder touched his arm; she had been frightened by a passing
thought, and the movement had been automatic, to assure herself that he
was really there, and to fortify her belief that his fidelity would be proof
against all things.
Clare knew that she loved him—every curve of her form showed that—
but he did not know at that time the full depth of her devotion, its single-
mindedness, its meekness; what longsufferingit guaranteed, what honesty,
what endurance, what good faith.
As they came out of church the ringers swung the bells off their rests, and
a modest peal of three notes broke forth—that limited amount of expression
having been deemed sufficient by the church builders for the joys of such a
small parish. Passing by the tower with her husband on the path to the gate
she could feel the vibrant air humming round them from the louvred belfry
in a circle of sound, and it matched the highly-charged mental atmosphere
in which she was living.
This condition of mind, wherein she felt glorified by an irradiation not her
own, like the angel whom St John saw in the sun,1 lasted till the sound of
the church bells had died away, and the emotions of the wedding-service
had calmed down. Her eyes could dwell upon details more clearly now, and
Mr and Mrs Crick having directed their own gig to be sent for them, to
leave the carriage to the young couple, she observed the build and character
of that conveyance for the first time. Sitting in silence she regarded it long.
“I fancy you seem oppressed, Tessy,” said Clare.
“Yes,” she answered, putting her hand to her brow. “I tremble at many
things. It is all so serious, Angel. Among other things I seem to have seen
this carriage before, to be very well acquainted with it. It is very odd—I
must have seen it in a dream.”
“Oh—you have heard the legend of the d’Urberville Coach—that well-
known superstition of this county about your family when they were very
popular here; and this lumbering old thing reminds you of it.”
“I have never heard of it to my knowledge,” said she. “What is the legend
—may I know it?”
“Well—I would rather not tell it in detail just now. A certain d’Urberville
of the sixteenth or seventeenth century committed a dreadful crime in his
family coach; and since that time members of the family see or hear the old
coach whenever—But I’ll tell you another day—it is rather gloomy.
Evidently some dim knowledge of it has been brought back to your mind by
the sight of this venerable caravan.”
“I don’t remember hearing it before,” she murmured. “Is it when we are
going to die, Angel, that members of my family see it, or is it when we have
committed a crime?”
“Now, Tess!”
He silenced her by a kiss.
By the time they reached home she was contrite and spiritless. She was
Mrs Angel Clare, indeed, but had she any moral right to the name? Was she
not more truly Mrs Alexander d’Urberville? Could intensity of love justify
what might be considered in upright souls as culpable reticence? She knew
not what was expected of women in such cases; and she had no counsellor.
However, when she found herself alone in her room for a few minutes—
the last day this on which she was ever to enter it—she knelt down and
prayed. She tried to pray to God, but it was her husband who really had her
supplication. Her idolatry of this man was such that she herself almost
feared it to be ill-omened. She was conscious of the notion expressed by
Friar Laurence: “These violent delights have violent ends.”2 It might be too
desperate for human conditions—too rank, too wild, too deadly.
“O my love, my love, why do I love you so!” she whispered there alone;
“for she you love is not my real self, but one in my image; the one I might
have been!”
Afternoon came, and with it the hour for departure. They had decided to
fulfil the plan of going for a few days to the lodgings in the old farmhouse
near Wellbridge Mill, at which he meant to reside during his investigation
of flour processes. At two o’clock there was nothing left to do but to start.
All the servantry of the dairy were standing in the red-brick entry to see
them go out, the dairyman and his wife following to the door. Tess saw her
three chamber mates in a row against the wall, pensively inclining their
heads. She had much questioned if they would appear at the parting
moment, but there they were, stoical and staunch to the last. She knew why
the delicate Retty looked so fragile, and Izz so tragically sorrowful, and
Marian so blank, and she forgot her own dogging shadow for a moment in
contemplating theirs.
She impulsively whispered to him—
“Will you kiss ’em all, once, poor things, for the first and last time?”
Clare had not the least objection to such a farewell formality—which was
all that it was to him—and as he passed them he kissed them in succession
where they stood, saying “Goodbye” to each as he did so. When they
reached the door Tess femininely glanced back to discern the effect of that
kiss of charity; there was no triumph in her glance, as there might have
been. If there had it would have disappeared when she saw how moved the
girls all were. The kiss had obviously done harm by awakening feelings
they were trying to subdue.
Of all this Clare was unconscious. Passing on to the wicket-gate he shook
hands with the dairyman and his wife, and expressed his last thanks to them
for their attentions; after which there was a moment of silence before they
had moved off. It was interrupted by the crowing of a cock. The white one
with the rose comb had come and settled on the palings in front of the
house, within a few yards of them, and his notes thrilled their ears through,
dwindling away like echoes down a valley of rocks.
“Oh?” said Mrs Crick. “An afternoon crow!”
Two men were standing by the yard gate, holding it open.
“That’s bad,” one murmured to the other, not thinking that the words
could be heard by the group at the door-wicket.
The cock crew again—straight towards Clare.
“Well!” said the dairyman.
“I don’t like to hear him!” said Tess to her husband. “Tell the man to drive
on. Good-bye, good-bye!”
The cock crew again.
 “Hoosh! Just you be off, sir, or I’ll twist your neck!” said the dairyman
with some irritation, turning to the bird and driving him away. And to his
wife as they went indoors: “Now, to think o’ that just to-day! I’ve not heard
his crow of an afternoon all the year afore.”
“It only means a change in the weather,” said she; “not what you think:
’tis impossible!”
 XXXIV
THEY DROVE BY THE level road along the valley to a distance of a few
miles, and, reaching Wellbridge, turned away from the village to the left,
and over the great Elizabethan bridge which gives the place half its name.
Immediately behind it stood the house wherein they had engaged lodgings,
whose exterior features are so well known to all travellers through the
Froom Valley; once portion of a fine manorial residence, and the property
and seat of a d’Urberville, but since its partial demolition a farmhouse.
“Welcome to one of your ancestral mansions!” said Clare as he handed
her down. But he regretted the pleasantry; it was too near a satire.
On entering they found that, though they had only engaged a couple of
rooms, the farmer had taken advantage of their proposed presence during
the coming days to pay a New Year’s visit to some friends, leaving a
woman from a neighbouring cottage to minister to their few wants. The
absoluteness of possession pleased them, and they realized it as the first
moment of their experience under their own exclusive rooftree.
But he found that the mouldy old habitation somewhat depressed his
bride. When the carriage was gone they ascended the stairs to wash their
hands, the charwoman showing the way. On the landing Tess stopped and
started.
“What’s the matter?” said he.
“Those horrid women!” she answered, with a smile. “How they frightened
me.”
He looked up, and perceived two life-size portraits on panels built into the
masonry. As all visitors to the mansion are aware, these paintings represent
women of middle age, of a date some two hundred years ago, whose
lineaments once seen can never be forgotten. The long pointed features,
narrow eye, and smirk of the one, so suggestive of merciless treachery; the
bill-hook nose, large teeth, and bold eye of the other, suggesting arrogance
to the point of ferocity, haunt the beholder afterwards in his dreams.
“Whose portraits are those?” asked Clare of the charwoman.
 “I have been told by old folk that they were ladies of the d’Urberville
family, the ancient lords of this manor,” she said. “Owing to their being
builded into the wall they can’t be moved away.”
The unpleasantness of the matter was that, in addition to their effect upon
Tess, her fine features were unquestionably traceable in these exaggerated
forms. He said nothing of this, however, and, regretting that he had gone out
of his way to choose the house for their bridal time, went on into the
adjoining room. The place having been rather hastily prepared for them they
washed their hands in one basin. Clare touched hers under the water.
“Which are my fingers and which are yours?” he said, looking up. “They
are very much mixed.”
“They are all yours,” said she, very prettily, and endeavoured to be gayer
than she was. He had not been displeased with her thoughtfulness on such
an occasion; it was what every sensible woman would show: but Tess knew
that she had been thoughtful to excess, and struggled against it.
The sun was so low on that short last afternoon of the year that it shone in
through a small opening and formed a golden staff which stretched across to
her skirt, where it made a spot like a paint-mark set upon her. They went
into the ancient parlour to tea, and here they shared their first common meal
alone. Such was their childishness, or rather his, that he found it interesting
to use the same bread-and-butter plate as herself, and to brush crumbs from
her lips with his own. He wondered a little that she did not enter into these
frivolities with his own zest.
Looking at her silently for a long time; “She is a dear dear Tess,” he
thought to himself, as one deciding on the true construction of a difficult
passage. “Do I realize solemnly enough how utterly and irretrievably this
little womanly thing is the creature of my good or bad faith and fortune? I
think not. I think I could not, unless I were a woman myself. What I am in
worldly estate, she is. What I become, she must become. What I cannot be,
she cannot be. And shall I ever neglect her, or hurt her, or even forget to
consider her? God forbid such a crime!”
They sat on over the tea-table waiting for their luggage, which the
dairyman had promised to send before it grew dark. But evening began to
close in, and the luggage did not arrive, and they had brought nothing more
than they stood in. With the departure of the sun the calm mood of the
winter day changed. Out of doors there began noises as of silk smartly
rubbed; the restful dead leaves of the preceding autumn were stirred to
irritated resurrection, and whirled about unwillingly, and tapped against the
shutters. It soon began to rain.
“That cock knew the weather was going to change,” said Clare.
The woman who had attended upon them had gone home for the night,
but she had placed candles upon the table, and now they lit them. Each
candle-flame drew towards the fireplace.
“These old houses are so draughty,” continued Angel, looking at the
flames, and at the grease guttering down the sides. “I wonder where that
luggage is. We haven’t even a brush and comb.”
“I don’t know,” she answered, absent-minded.
“Tess, you are not a bit cheerful this evening—not at all as you used to be.
Those harridans on the panels upstairs have unsettled you. I am sorry I
brought you here. I wonder if you really love me, after all?”
He knew that she did, and the words had no serious intent, but she was
surcharged with emotion, and winced like a wounded animal. Though she
tried not to shed tears she could not help showing one or two.
“I did not mean it!” said he, sorry. “You are worried at not having your
things, I know. I cannot think why old Jonathan has not come with them.
Why, it is seven o’clock? Ah, there he is!”
A knock had come to the door, and, there being nobody else to answer it,
Clare went out. He returned to the room with a small package in his hand.
“It is not Jonathan, after all,” he said.
“How vexing!” said Tess.
The packet had been brought by a special messenger, who had arrived at
Talbothays from Emminster Vicarage immediately after the departure of the
married couple, and had followed them hither, being under injunction to
deliver it into nobody’s hands but theirs. Clare brought it to the light. It was
less than a foot long, sewed up in canvas, sealed in red wax with his father’s
seal, and directed in his father’s hand to “Mrs Angel Clare.”
“It is a little wedding-present for you, Tess,” said he, handing it to her.
“How thoughtful they are!”
 Tess looked a little flustered as she took it.
“I think I would rather have you open it, dearest,” said she, turning over
the parcel. “I don’t like to break those great seals; they look so serious.
Please open it for me!”
He undid the parcel. Inside was a case of morocco leather, on the top of
which lay a note and a key.
The note was for Clare, in the following words:
My Dear Son,

Possibly you have forgotten that on the death of your godmother, Mrs
Pitney, when you were a lad, she—vain kind woman that she was—left to
me a portion of the contents of her jewel-case in trust for your wife, if you
should ever have one, as a mark of her affection for you and whomsoever
you should choose. This trust I have fulfilled, and the diamonds have been
locked up at my banker’s ever since. Though I feel it to be a somewhat
incongruous act in the circumstances, I am, as you will see, bound to hand
over the articles to the woman to whom the use of them for her lifetime will
now rightly belong, and they are therefore promptly sent. They become, I
believe, heirlooms, strictly speaking, according to the terms of your
godmother’s will. The precise words of the clause that refers to this matter
are enclosed.
“I do remember,” said Clare; “but I had quite forgotten.”
Unlocking the case, they found it to contain a necklace, with pendant,
bracelets, and ear-rings; and also some other small ornaments. Tess seemed
afraid to touch them at first, but her eyes sparkled for a moment as much as
the stones when Clare spread out the set.
“Are they mine?” she asked incredulously.
“They are, certainly,” said he.
He looked into the fire. He remembered how, when he was a lad of
fifteen, his godmother, the Squire’s wife—the only rich person with whom
he had ever come in contact—had pinned her faith to his success; had
prophesied a wondrous career for him. There had seemed nothing at all out
of keeping with such a conjectured career in the storing up of these showy
ornaments for his wife and the wives of her descendants. They gleamed
somewhat ironically now. “Yet why?” he asked himself It was but a
question of vanity throughout; and if that were admitted into one side of the
equation it should be admitted into the other. His wife was a d’Urberville:
whom could they become better than her?
Suddenly he said with enthusiasm—
“Tess, put them on—put them on!” And he turned from the fire to help
her.
But as if by magic she had already donned them—necklace, earrings,
bracelets, and all.
“But the gown isn’t right, Tess,” said Clare. “It ought to be a low one for a
set of brilliants like that.”
“Ought it?” said Tess.
“Yes,” said he.
He suggested to her how to tuck in the upper edge of her bodice, so as to
make it roughly approximate to the cut for evening wear; and when she had
done this, and the pendant to the necklace hung isolated amid the whiteness
of her throat, as it was designed to do, he stepped back to survey her.
“My heavens,” said Clare, “how beautiful you are!”
As everybody knows, fine feathers make fine birds; a peasant girl but very
moderately prepossessing to the casual observer in her simple condition and
attire, will bloom as an amazing beauty if clothed as a woman of fashion
with the aids that Art can render; while the beauty of the midnight crushdt
would often cut but a sorry figure if placed inside the fieldwoman’s wrapper
upon a monotonous acreage of turnips on a dull day. He had never till now
estimated the artistic excellence of Tess’s limbs and features.
“If you were only to appear in a ball-room!” he said. “But no—no,
dearest; I think I love you best in the wing-bonnet and cotton-frock—yes,
better than in this, well as you support these dignities.”
Tess’s sense of her striking appearance had given her a flush of
excitement, which was yet not happiness.
“I’ll take them off,” she said, “in case Jonathan should see me. They are
not fit for me, are they? They must be sold, I suppose?”
 “Let them stay a few minutes longer. Sell them? Never. It would be a
breach of faith.”
Influenced by a second thought she readily obeyed. She had something to
tell, and there might be help in these. She sat down with the jewels upon
her; and they again indulged in conjectures as to where Jonathan could
possibly be with their baggage. The ale they had poured out for his
consumption when he came had gone flat with long standing.
Shortly after this they began supper, which was already laid on a side-
table. Ere they had finished there was a jerk in the fire-smoke, the rising
skein of which bulged out into the room, as if some giant had laid his hand
on the chimney-top for a moment. It had been caused by the opening of the
outer door. A heavy step was now heard in the passage, and Angel went out.
“I couldn’ make nobody hear at all by knocking,” apologized Jonathan
Kail, for it was he at last; “and as’t was raining out I opened the door. I’ve
brought the things, sir.”
“I am very glad to see them. But you are very late.”
“Well, yes, sir.”
There was something subdued in Jonathan Kail’s tone which had not been
there in the day, and lines of concern were ploughed upon his forehead in
addition to the lines of years. He continued—
“We’ve all been gallieddu at the dairy at what might ha’ been a most
terrible affliction since you and your Mis‘ess—so to name her now—left us
this a’ternoon. Perhaps you ha’nt forgot the cock’s afternoon crow?”
“Dear me;—what—”
“Well, some says it do mane one thing, and some another; but what’s
happened is that poor little Retty Priddle hev tried to drown herself.”
“No! Really! Why, she bade us good-bye with the rest—”
“Yes. Well, sir, when you and your Mis‘ess—so to name what she lawful
is—when you two drove away, as I say, Retty and Marian put on their
bonnets and went out; and as there is not much doing now, being New
Year’s Eve, and folks mops and broomsdv from what’s inside ’em, nobody
took much notice. They went on to Lew-Everard, where they had summut
to drink, and then on they vamped to Dree-armed Cross, and there they
seemed to have parted, Retty striking across the water-meads as if for home,
and Marian going on to the next village, where there’s another public-
house. Nothing more was zeed or heard o’ Retty till the waterman, dw on his
way home, noticed something by the Great Pool; ’twas her bonnet and
shawl packed up. In the water he found her.
He and another man brought her home, thinking ’a was dead; but she
fetched round by degrees.”
Angel, suddenly recollecting that Tess was overhearing this gloomy tale,
went to shut the door between the passage and the ante-room to the inner
parlour where she was; but his wife, flinging a shawl round her, had come
to the outer room and was listening to the man’s narrative, her eyes resting
absently on the luggage and the drops of rain glistening upon it.
“And, more than this, there’s Marian; she’s been found dead drunk by the
withy-beddx—a girl who hev never been known to touch anything before
except shilling ale; though, to be sure, a was always a good trencher-
woman, as her face showed. It seems as if the maids had all gone out o’
their minds!”
“And Izz?” asked Tess.
“Izz is about house as usual; but ‘a do say ’a can guess how it happened;
and she seems to be very low in mind about it, poor maid, as well she mid
be. And so you see, sir, as all this happened just when we was packing your
few traps and your Mis’ess’s nightraildy and dressing things into the cart,
why, it belated me.”
“Yes. Well, Jonathan, will you get the trunks upstairs, and drink a cup of
ale, and hasten back as soon as you can, in case you should be wanted?”
Tess had gone back to the inner parlour, and sat down by the fire, looking
wistfully into it. She heard Jonathan Kail’s heavy footsteps up and down the
stairs till he had done placing the luggage, and heard him express his thanks
for the ale her husband took out to him, and for the gratuity he received.
Jonathan’s footsteps then died from the door, and his cart creaked away.
Angel slid forward the massive oak bar which secured the door, and
coming in to where she sat over the hearth, pressed her cheeks between his
hands from behind. He expected her to jump up gaily and unpack the toilet-
gear that she had been so anxious about, but as she did not rise he sat down
with her in the firelight, the candles on the supper-table being too thin and
glimmering to interfere with its glow.
“I am so sorry you should have heard this sad story about the girls,” he
said. “Still, don’t let it depress you. Retty was naturally morbid, you know.”
“Without the least cause,” said Tess. “While they who have cause to be,
hide it, and pretend they are not.”
This incident had turned the scale for her. They were simple and innocent
girls on whom the unhappiness of unrequited love had fallen; they had
deserved better at the hands of Fate. She had deserved worse—yet she was
the chosen one. It was wicked of her to take all without paying. She would
pay to the uttermost farthing; she would tell, there and then. This final
determination she came to when she looked into the fire, he holding her
hand.
A steady glare from the now flameless embers painted the sides and back
of the fireplace with its colour, and the well-polished andirons, and the old
brass tongs that would not meet. The underside of the mantel-shelf was
flushed with the high-coloured light, and the legs of the table nearest the
fire. Tess’s face and neck reflected the same warmth, which each gem
turned into an Aldebaran or a Siriusdz—a constellation of white, red and
green flashes, that interchanged their hues with her every pulsation.
“Do you remember what we said to each other this morning about telling
our faults?” he asked abruptly, finding that she still remained immovable.
“We spoke lightly perhaps, and you may well have done so. But for me it
was no light promise. I want to make a confession to you, Love.”
This, from him, so unexpectedly apposite, had the effect upon her of a
Providential interposition.
“You have to confess something?” she said quickly, and even with
gladness and relief
“You did not expect it? Ah—you thought too highly of me. Now listen.
Put your head there, because I want you to forgive me, and not to be
indignant with me for not telling you before, as perhaps I ought to have
done.”
How strange it was! He seemed to be her double. She did not speak, and
Clare went on—
 “I did not mention it because I was afraid of endangering my chance of
you, darling, the great prize of my life—my Fellowship I call you. My
brother’s Fellowship was won at his college, mine at Talbothays Dairy.
Well, I would not risk it. I was going to tell you a month ago—at the time
you agreed to be mine, but I could not; I thought it might frighten you away
from me. I put it off; then I thought I would tell you yesterday, to give you a
chance at least of escaping me. But I did not. And I did not this morning,
when you proposed our confessing our faults on the landing—the sinner
that I was! But I must, now I see you sitting there so solemnly. I wonder if
you will forgive me?”
“O yes! I am sure that—”
“Well, I hope so. But wait a minute. You don’t know. To begin at the
beginning. Though I imagine my poor father fears that I am one of the
eternally lost for my doctrines, I am of course, a believer in good morals,
Tess, as much as you. I used to wish to be a teacher of men, and it was a
great disappointment to me when I found I could not enter the Church. I
admired spotlessness, even though I could lay no claim to it, and hated
impurity, as I hope I do now. Whatever one may think of plenary
inspiration,ea one must heartily subscribe to these words of Paul: ‘Be thou
an example—in word, in conversation, in charity, in spirit, in faith, in
purity.’ 1 It is the only safeguard for us poor human beings. ‘Integer vitae,’
says a Roman poet, who is strange company for St Paul—
The man of upright life, from frailties free,
Stands not in need of Moorish spear or bow.2
Well, a certain place is paved with good intentions, and having felt all that
so strongly, you will see what a terrible remorse it bred in me when, in the
midst of my fine aims for other people, I myself fell.”
He then told her of that time of his life to which allusion has been made
when, tossed about by doubts and difficulties in London, like a cork on the
waves, he plunged into eight-and-forty hours’ dissipation with a stranger.
“Happily I awoke almost immediately to a sense of my folly,” he
continued. “I would have no more to say to her, and I came home. I have
never repeated the offence. But I felt I should like to treat you with perfect
frankness and honour, and I could not do so without telling this. Do you
forgive me?”
 She pressed his hand tightly for an answer.
“Then we will dismiss it at once and for ever!—too painful as it is for the
occasion—and talk of something lighter.”
“O, Angel—I am almost glad—because now you can forgive me! I have
not made my confession. I have a confession, too—remember, I said so.”
“Ah, to be sure! Now then for it, wicked little one.”
“Perhaps, although you smile, it is as serious as yours, or more so.”
“It can hardly be more serious, dearest.”
“It cannot—O no, it cannot!” She jumped up joyfully at the hope. “No, it
cannot be more serious, certainly,” she cried, “because ’tis just the same! I
will tell you now.”
She sat down again.
Their hands were still joined. The ashes under the grate were lit by the fire
vertically, like a torrid waste. Imagination might have beheld a Last Day
luridness in this red-coaled glow, which fell on his face and hand, and on
hers, peering into the loose hair about her brow, and firing the delicate skin
underneath. A large shadow of her shape rose upon the wall and ceiling.
She bent forward, at which each diamond on her neck gave a sinister wink
like a toad’s; and pressing her forehead against his temple she entered on
her story of her acquaintance with Alec d’Urberville and its results,
murmuring the words without flinching, and with her eyelids drooping
down.

END OF PHASE THE FOURTH

PHASE THE FIFTH

THE WOMAN PAYS

 XXXV
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 phase 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 treadledeb 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 anymore, 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 married, as I said I
would do; and I shan’t finish the good-hussifec 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—re—mained on the table
untasted. This was what their Agapeed 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.1
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,2 that I admit.”
“Then you will 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 abbey3 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;ee 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 stillness 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 shoe-less 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,4 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!5
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.
 XXXVI
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
neckfrillings 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 sharplydefmed 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.1
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?” 2
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 pre-visioned by
suffering, she could, in the words of M. Sully-Prudhomme, hear a penal
sentence in the fiat, “You shall be born,”3 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,4 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 as 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.
 XXXVII
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 meadowland, 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,1 is trying its strength, be 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 effort 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 dairyhouse, 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 flyef 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 midwaypoint, 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 goodbye, 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!2
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.
 XXXVIII
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,eg 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 Rolliver’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,eh 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 pounds 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.
 XXXIX
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 to 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, ei and with the leer of a study by Van Beers.ej
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,”1 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,” said the
Nazarene.2 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 agriculturalist. Land was offered there on
exceptionally advantageous terms. Brazil somewhat attracted him as a new
idea. Tess could eventually join 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 king-fisher 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 godmother’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 Nazareth3—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”4 (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.’ ”5
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 good-night to these sincere
simple souls whom he loved so well; who knew neither the world, the flesh,
nor the devil in their own hearts;6 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,” he said.
“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 manner 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 his 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.
 XL
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,1 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 bain’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?“2
“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
rodek 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 Peor 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.3
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 leather-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.
 XLI
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 Blackmoor 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
yet 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 eclatel 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 uplands, 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.1 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-manem 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.”2 She repeated the words mechanically, till she
reflected that this was a most inadequate thought for modern days.
Solomonen 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 eyesockets
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 followedby 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 this 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
nighttime, 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 life3—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.
 XLII
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.1
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-
breastedeo 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 quicksetep 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 in 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 dairywoman 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 swede-hacking. eq 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 workfolk
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.2 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.
 XLIII
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-owners 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 livestock, 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. Each 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.er
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 hurdlees 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 a’most, 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-
drawinget 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,1 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 ‘pon 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 today, 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 crossbeam, 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-door 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 highroad, 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 in
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, lackadayeu 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?
 XLIV
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 hard 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 meatbuyer’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 fail 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 guindéeev 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 said 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 son 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; 1 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 eight 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 ranterew 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
from 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?”2
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.

END OF PHASE THE FIFTH

PHASE THE SIXTH

THE CONVERT
 XLV
TILL THIS MOMENT SHE had never seen or heard from d’Urberville
since her departure from Trantridge.
The rencounter came at a heavy moment, one of all moments calculated to
permit its impact with the least emotional shock. But such was unreasoning
memory that, though he stood there openly and palpably a converted man,
who was sorrowing for his past irregularities, a fear overcame her,
paralyzing her movement so that she neither retreated nor advanced.
To think of what emanated from that countenance when she saw it last,
and to behold it now! ... There was the same handsome unpleasantness of
mien, but now he wore neatly trimmed, old-fashioned whiskers, the sable
moustache having disappeared; and his dress was half-clerical, a
modification which had changed his expression sufficiently to abstract the
dandyism from his features, and to hinder for a second her belief in his
identity.
To Tess’s sense there was, just at first, a ghastly bizarrerie,ex a grim
incongruity, in the march of these solemn words of Scripture out of such a
mouth. This too familiar intonation, less than four years earlier, had brought
to her ears expressions of such divergent purpose that her heart became
quite sick at the irony of the contrast.
It was less a reform than a transfiguration. The former curves of
sensuousness were now modulated to lines of devotional passion. The lip-
shapes that had meant seductiveness were now made to express
supplication; the glow on the cheek that yesterday could be translated as
riotousness was evangelized to-day into the splendour of pious rhetoric;
animalism had become fanaticism; Paganism Paulinism; the bold rolling
eye that had flashed upon her form in the old time with such mastery now
beamed with the rude energy of a theolatry that was almost ferocious. Those
black angularities which his face had used to put on when his wishes were
thwarted now did duty in picturing the incorrigible back-slider who would
insist upon turning again to his wallowing in the mire.
 The lineaments, as such, seemed to complain. They had been diverted
from their hereditary connotation to signify impressions for which nature
did not intend them. Strange that their very elevation was a misapplication,
that to raise seemed to falsify.
Yet could it be so? She would admit the ungenerous sentiment no longer.
D’Urberville was not the first wicked man who had turned away from his
wickedness to save his soul alive, and why should she deem it unnatural in
him? It was but the usage of thought which had been jarred in her at hearing
good new words in bad old notes. The greater the sinner the greater the
saint; it was not necessary to dive far into Christian history to discover that.
Such impressions as these moved her vaguely, and without strict
definiteness. As soon as the nerveless pause of her surprise would allow her
to stir, her impulse was to pass on out of his sight. He had obviously not
discerned her yet in her position against the sun.
But the moment that she moved again he recognized her. The effect upon
her old lover was electric, far stronger than the effect of his presence upon
her. His fire, the tumultuous ring of his eloquence, seemed to go out of him.
His lip struggled and trembled under the words that lay upon it; but deliver
them it could not as long as she faced him. His eyes, after their first glance
upon her face, hung confusedly in every other direction but hers, but came
back in a desperate leap every few seconds. This paralysis lasted, however,
but a short time; for Tess’s energies returned with the atrophy of his, and
she walked as fast as she was able past the barn and onward.
As soon as she could reflect it appalled her, this change in their relative
platforms. He who had wrought her undoing was now on the side of the
Spirit, while she remained unregenerate.
And, as in the legend, it had resulted that her Cyprianey image had suddenly
appeared upon his altar, whereby the fire of the priest has been wellnigh
extinguished.
She went on without turning her head. Her back seemed to be endowed
with a sensitiveness to ocular beams—even her clothing—so alive was she
to a fancied gaze which might be resting upon her from the outside of that
barn. All the way along to this point her heart had been heavy with an
inactive sorrow; now there was a change in the quality of its trouble. That
hunger for affection too long withheld was for the time displaced by an
almost physical sense of an implacable past which still engirdled her. It
intensified her consciousness of error to a practical despair; the break of
continuity between her earlier and present existence, which she had hoped
for, had not, after all, taken place. Bygones would never be complete
bygones till she was a bygone herself
Thus absorbed she recrossed the northern part of Long-Ash Lane at right
angles, and presently saw before her the road ascending whitely to the
upland along whose margin the remainder of her journey lay. Its dry pale
surface stretched severely onward, unbroken by a single figure, vehicle, or
mark, save some occasional brown horse-droppings which dotted its cold
aridity here and there. While slowly breasting this ascent Tess became
conscious of footsteps behind her, and turning she saw approaching that
well-known form—so strangely accoutred as the Methodist—the one
personage in all the world she wished not to encounter alone on this side of
the grave.
There was not much time, however, for thought or elusion, and she
yielded as calmly as she could to the necessity of letting him overtake her.
She saw that he was excited, less by the speed of his walk than by the
feelings within him.
“Tess!” he said.
She slackened speed without looking round.
“Tess!” he repeated. “It is I—Alec d’Urberville.”
She then looked back at him, and he came up.
“I see it is,” she answered coldly.
“Well—is that all? Yet I deserve no more! Of course,” he added, with a
slight laugh, “there is something of the ridiculous to your eyes in seeing me
like this. But—I must put up with that ... I heard you had gone away,
nobody knew where. Tess, you wonder why I have followed you?”
“I do, rather; and I would that you had not, with all my heart! ”
“Yes—you may well say it,” he returned grimly, as they moved onward
together, she with unwilling tread. “But don’t mistake me; I beg this
because you may have been led to do so in noticing—if you did notice it—
how your sudden appearance unnerved me down there. It was but a
momentary faltering; and considering what you had been to me, it was
natural enough. But will helped me through it—though perhaps you think
me a humbug for saying it—and immediately afterwards I felt that, of all
persons in the world whom it was my duty and desire to save from the
wrath to come1—sneer if you like—the woman whom I had so grievously
wronged was that person. I have come with that sole purpose in view—
nothing more.”
There was the smallest vein of scorn in her words of rejoinder: “Have you
saved yourself? Charity begins at home, they say.”
“I have done nothing!” said he indifferently. “Heaven, as I have been
telling my hearers, has done all. No amount of contempt that you can pour
on me, Tess, will equal what I have poured upon myself—the old Adam of
my former years! Well, it is a strange story; believe it or not; but I can tell
you the means by which my conversion was brought about, and I hope you
will be interested enough at least to listen. Have you ever heard the name of
the parson of Emminster—you must have done so?—old Mr Clare; one of
the most earnest of his school; one of the few intense men left in the
Church; not so intense as the extreme wing of Christian believers with
which I have thrown in my lot, but quite an exception among the
Established clergy, the younger of whom are gradually attenuating the true
doctrines by their sophistries, till they are but the shadow of what they
were. I only differ from him on the question of Church and State—the
interpretation of the text, ‘Come out from among them and be ye separate,
saith the Lord’2—that’s all. He is one who, I firmly believe, has been the
humble means of saving more souls in this country than any other man you
can name. You have heard of him?”
“I have,” she said.
“He came to Trantridge two or three years ago to preach on behalf of
some missionary society; and I, wretched fellow that I was, insulted him
when, in his disinterestedness, he tried to reason with me and show me the
way. He did not resent my conduct, he simply said that some day I should
receive the first-fruits of the Spirit3—that those who came to scoff
sometimes remained to pray.4 There was a strange magic in his words. They
sank into my mind. But the loss of my mother hit me most; and by degrees I
was brought to see daylight. Since then my one desire has been to hand on
the true view to others, and that is what I was trying to do today; though it is
only lately that I have preached hereabout. The first months of my ministry
have been spent in the North of England among strangers, where I preferred
to make my earliest clumsy attempts, so as to acquire courage before
undergoing that severest of all tests of one’s sincerity; addressing those who
have known one, and have been one’s companions in the days of darkness.
If you could only know, Tess, the pleasure of having a good slap at yourself,
I am sure—”
“Don’t go on with it!” she cried passionately, as she turned away from
him to a stile by the wayside, on which she bent herself. “I can’t believe in
such sudden things! I feel indignant with you for talking to me like this,
when you know—when you know what harm you’ve done me! You, and
those like you, take your fill of pleasure on earth by making the life of such
as me bitter and black with sorrow; and then it is a fine thing, when you
have had enough of that, to think of securing your pleasure in heaven by
becoming converted! Out upon such—I don’t believe in you—I hate it!”
“Tess,” he insisted; “don’t speak so! It came to me like a jolly new idea!
And you don’t believe me? What don’t you believe?”
“Your conversion. Your scheme of religion.”
“Why?”
She dropped her voice. “Because a better man than you does not believe
in such.”
“What a woman’s reason! Who is this better man?”
“I cannot tell you.”
“Well,” he declared, a resentment beneath his words seeming ready to
spring out at a moment’s notice. “God forbid that I should say I am a good
man—and you know I don’t say any such thing. I am new to goodness,
truly; but new comers see furthest sometimes.”
“Yes,” she replied sadly. “But I cannot believe in your conversion to a
new spirit. Such flashes as you feel, Alec, I fear don’t last!”
Thus speaking she turned from the stile over which she had been leaning,
and faced him; whereupon his eyes, falling casually upon the familiar
countenance and form, remained contemplating her. The inferior man was
quiet in him now; but it was surely not extracted, nor even entirely subdued.
 “Don’t look at me like that!” he said abruptly.
Tess, who had been quite unconscious of her action and mien, instantly
withdrew the large dark gaze of her eyes, stammering with a flush, “I beg
your pardon!” And there was revived in her the wretched sentiment which
had often come to her before, that in inhabiting the fleshly tabernacle with
which nature had endowed her she was somehow doing wrong.
“No, no! Don’t beg my pardon. But since you wear a veil to hide your
good looks, why don’t you keep it down?”
She pulled down the veil, saying hastily, “It was mostly to keep off the
wind.”
“It may seem harsh of me to dictate like this,” he went on; “but it is better
that I should not look too often on you. It might be dangerous.”
“Ssh!” said Tess.
“Well, women’s faces have had too much power over me already for me
not to fear them! An evangelist has nothing to do with such as they; and it
reminds me of the old times that I would forget!”
After this their conversation dwindled to a casual remark now and then as
they rambled onward, Tess inwardly wondering how far he was going with
her, and not liking to send him back by positive mandate. Frequently when
they came to a gate or stile they found painted thereon in red or blue letters
some text of Scripture, and she asked him if he knew who had been at the
pains to blazon these announcements. He told her that the man was
employed by himself and others who were working with him in that district,
to paint these reminders that no means might be left untried which might
move the hearts of a wicked generation.
At length the road touched the spot called “Cross-in-Hand.” Of all spots
on the bleached and desolate upland this was the most forlorn. It was so far
removed from the charm which is sought in landscape by artists and view-
lovers as to reach a new kind of beauty, a negative beauty of tragic tone.
The place took its name from a stone pillar which stood there, a strange
rude monolith, from a stratum unknown in any local quarry, on which was
roughly carved a human hand. Differing accounts were given of its history
and purport. Some authorities stated that a devotional cross had once
formed the complete erection thereon, of which the present relic was but the
stump; others that the stone as it stood was entire, and that it had been fixed
there to mark a boundary or place of meeting. Anyhow, whatever the origin
of the relic, there was and is something sinister, or solemn, according to
mood, in the scene amid which it stands; something tending to impress the
most phlegmatic passer-by.
“I think I must leave you now,” he remarked, as they drew near to this
spot. “I have to preach at Abbot’s-Cernel at six this evening, and my way
lies across to the right from here. And you upset me somewhat too, Tessy—
I cannot, will not, say why. I must go away and get strength ... How is it that
you speak so fluently now? Who has taught you such good English?”
“I have learnt things in my troubles,” she said evasively.
“What troubles have you had?”
She told him of the first one—the only one that related to him.
D’Urberville was struck mute. “I knew nothing of this till now!” he next
murmured. “Why didn’t you write to me when you felt your trouble coming
on?”
She did not reply; and he broke the silence by adding: “Well—you will
see me again.”
“No,” she answered. “Do not again come near me!”
“I will think. But before we part come here.” He stepped up to the pillar.
“This was once a Holy Cross. Relics are not in my creed; but I fear you at
moments—far more than you need fear me at present; and to lessen my
fear, put your hand upon that stone hand, and swear that you will never
tempt me—by your charms or ways.”
“Good God—how can you ask what is so unnecessary! All that is furthest
from my thought!”
“Yes—but swear it.”
Tess, half frightened, gave way to his importunity; placed her hand upon
the stone and swore.
“I am sorry you are not a believer,” he continued; “that some unbeliever
should have got hold of you and unsettled your mind. But no more now. At
home at least I can pray for you; and I will; and who knows what may not
happen? I’m off Good-bye!”
 He turned to a hunting-gate in the hedge, and without letting his eyes
again rest upon her leapt over, and struck out across the down in the
direction of Abbot‘s-Cernel. As he walked his pace showed perturbation,
and by-and-by, as if instigated by a former thought, he drew from his pocket
a small book, between the leaves of which was folded a letter, worn and
soiled, as from much rereading. D’Urberville opened the letter. It was dated
several months before this time, and was signed by Parson Clare.
The letter began by expressing the writer’s unfeigned joy at d‘Urberville’s
conversion, and thanked him for his kindness in communicating with the
parson on the subject. It expressed Mr Clare’s warm assurance of
forgiveness for d’Urberville’s former conduct, and his interest in the young
man’s plans for the future. He, Mr Clare, would much have liked to see
d’Urberville in the Church to whose ministry he had devoted so many years
of his own life, and would have helped him to enter a theological college to
that end; but since his correspondent had possibly not cared to do this on
account of the delay it would have entailed, he was not the man to insist
upon its paramount importance. Every man must work as he could best
work, and in the method towards which he felt impelled by the Spirit.
D’Urberville read and re-read this letter, and seemed to quiz himself
cynically. He also read some passages from memoranda as he walked till
his face assumed a calm, and apparently the image of Tess no longer
troubled his mind.
She meanwhile had kept along the edge of the hill by which lay her
nearest way home. Within the distance of a mile she met a solitary
shepherd.
“What is the meaning of that old stone I have passed?” she asked of him.
“Was it ever a Holy Cross?”
“Cross—no; ‘twer not a cross! ’Tis a thing of ill-omen, Miss. It was put
up in wuld times by the relations of a malefactor who was tortured there by
nailing his hand to a post and afterwards hung. The bones lie underneath.
They say he sold his soul to the devil, and that he walks at times.”
She felt the petite mortez at this unexpectedly gruesome information, and
left the solitary man behind her. It was dusk when she drew near to
Flintcomb-Ash, and in the lane at the entrance to the hamlet she approached
a girl and her lover without their observing her. They were talking no
secrets, and the clear unconcerned voice of the young woman, in response
to the warmer accents of the man, spread into the chilly air as the one
soothing thing within the dusky horizon, full of a stagnant obscurity upon
which nothing else intruded. For a moment the voices cheered the heart of
Tess, till she reasoned that this interview had its origin, on one side or the
other, in the same attraction which had been the prelude to her own
tribulation. When she came close the girl turned serenely and recognized
her, the young man walking on in embarrassment. The woman was Izz
Huett, whose interest in Tess’s excursion immediately superseded her own
proceedings. Tess did not explain very clearly its results, and Izz, who was a
girl of tact, began to speak of her own little affair, a phase of which Tess
had just witnessed.
“He is Amby Seedling, the chap who used to sometimes come and help at
Talbothays,” she explained indifferently. “He actually inquired and found
out that I had come here, and has followed me. He says he’s been in love
wi’ me these two years. But I’ve hardly answered him.”
 XLVI
SEVERAL DAYS HAD PASSED since her futile journey, and Tess was
afield. The dry winter wind still blew, but a screen of thatched hurdles
erected in the eye of the blast kept its force away from her. On the sheltered
side was a turnip-slicing machine, whose bright blue hue of new paint
seemed almost vocal in the otherwise subdued scene. Opposite its front was
a long mound or “grave,” in which the roots had been preserved since early
winter. Tess was standing at the uncovered end, chopping off with a bill-
hook the fibres and earth from each root, and throwing it after the operation
into the slicer. A man was turning the handle of the machine, and from its
trough came the newly-cut swedes, the fresh smell of whose yellow chips
was accompanied by the sounds of the snuffling wind, the smart swish of
the slicing-blades, and the choppings of the hook in Tess’s leather-gloved
hand.
The wide acreage of blank agricultural brownness, apparent where the
swedes had been pulled, was beginning to be striped in wales of darker
brown, gradually broadening to ribands. Along the edge of each of these
something crept upon ten legs, moving without haste and without rest up
and down the whole length of the field; it was two horses and a man, the
plough going between them, turning up the cleared ground for a spring
sowing.
For hours nothing relieved the joyless monotony of things. Then, far
beyond the ploughing-teams, a black speck was seen. It had come from the
corner of a fence, where there was a gap, and its tendency was up the
incline, towards the swede-cutters. From the proportions of a mere point it
advanced to the shape of a ninepin, and was soon perceived to be a man in
black, arriving from the direction of Flintcomb-Ash. The man at the slicer,
having nothing else to do with his eyes, continually observed the comer, but
Tess, who was occupied, did not perceive him till her companion directed
her attention to his approach.
It was not her hard taskmaster, Farmer Groby; it was one in a semi-
clerical costume, who now represented what had once been the free-and-
easy Alec d’Urberville. Not being hot at his preaching there was less
enthusiasm about him now, and the presence of the grinder seemed to
embarrass him. A pale distress was already on Tess’s face, and she pulled
her curtained hood further over it.
D’Urberville came up and said quietly—
“I want to speak to you, Tess.”
“You have refused my last request, not to come near me! ” said she.
“Yes, but I have a good reason.”
“Well, tell it.”
“It is more serious than you may think.”
He glanced round to see if he were overheard. They were at some distance
from the man who turned the slicer, and the movement of the machine, too,
sufficiently prevented Alec’s words reaching other ears. D’Urberville
placed himself so as to screen Tess from the labourer, turning his back to
the latter.
“It is this,” he continued, with capricious compunction. “In thinking of
your soul and mine when we last met, I neglected to inquire as to your
worldly condition. You were well dressed, and I did not think of it. But I see
now that it is hard—harder than it used to be when I—knew you—harder
than you deserve. Perhaps a good deal of it is owing to me!”
She did not answer, and he watched her inquiringly, as, with bent head,
her face completely screened by the hood, she resumed her trimming of the
swedes. By going on with her work she felt better able to keep him outside
her emotions.
“Tess,” he added, with a sigh of discontent,—“yours was the very worst
case I ever was concerned in! I had no idea of what had resulted till you told
me. Scamp that I was to foul that innocent life! The whole blame was mine
—the whole unconventional business of our time at Trantridge. You, too,
the real blood of which I am but the base imitation, what a blind young
thing you were as to possibilities! I say in all earnestness that it is a shame
for parents to bring up their girls in such dangerous ignorance of the gins
and nets that the wicked may set for them, whether their motive be a good
one or the result of simple indifference.”
 Tess still did no more than listen, throwing down one globular root and
taking up another with automatic regularity, the pensive contour of the mere
fieldwoman alone marking her.
“But it is not that I came to say,” d’Urberville went on. “My
circumstances are these. I have lost my mother since you were at
Trantridge, and the place is my own. But I intend to sell it, and devote
myself to missionary work in Africa. A devil of a poor hand I shall make at
the trade, no doubt. However, what I want to ask you is, will you put it in
my power to do my duty—to make the only reparation I can make for the
trick played you: that is, will you be my wife, and go with me? ... I have
already obtained this precious document. It was my mother’s dying wish.”
He drew a piece of parchment from his pocket, with a slight fumbling of
embarrassment.
“What is it?” said she.
“A marriage licence.”
“O no, sir—no!” she said quickly, starting back.
“You will not? Why is that?”
And as he asked the question a disappointment which was not entirely the
disappointment of thwarted duty crossed d’Urberville’s s face. It was
unmistakably a symptom that something of his old passion for her had been
revived; duty and desire ran hand-in-hand.
“Surely,” he began again, in more impetuous tones, and then looked round
at the labourer who turned the slicer.
Tess, too, felt that the argument could not be ended there. Informing the
man that a gentleman had come to see her, with whom she wished to walk a
little way, she moved off with d’Urberville across the zebra-striped field.
When they reached the first newly-ploughed section he held out his hand to
help her over it; but she stepped forward on the summits of the earth-rolls as
if she did not see him.
“You will not marry me, Tess, and make me a self-respecting man?” he
repeated, as soon as they were over the furrows.
“I cannot.”
“But why?”
 “You know I have no affection for you.”
“But you would get to feel that in time, perhaps—as soon as you really
could forgive me?”
“Never!”
“Why so positive?”
“I love somebody else.”
The words seemed to astonish him.
“You do?” he cried. “Somebody else? But has not a sense of what is
morally right and proper any weight with you?”
“No, no, no—don’t say that!”
“Anyhow, then, your love for this other man may be only a passing
feeling which you will overcome—”
No—no.”
“Yes, yes! Why not?”
“I cannot tell you.”
“You must in honour!”
“Well then... I have married him.”
“Ah!” he exclaimed; and he stopped dead and gazed at her.
“I did not wish to tell—I did not mean to!” she pleaded. “It is a secret
here, or at any rate but dimly known. So will you, please will you, keep,
from questioning me? You must remember that we are now strangers.”
“Strangers—are we? Strangers!”
For a moment a flash of his old irony marked his face; but he
determinedly chastened it down.
“Is that man your husband?” he asked mechanically, denoting by a sign
the labourer who turned the machine.
“That man!” she said proudly. “I should think not!”
“Who, then?”
“Do not ask what I do not wish to tell!” she begged, and flashed her
appeal to him from her upturned face and lash-shadowed eyes.
 D’Urberville was disturbed.
“But I only asked for your sake!” he retorted hotly. “Angels of heaven!—
God forgive me for such an expression—I came here, I swear, as I thought
for your good. Tess—don’t look at me so—I cannot stand your looks! There
never were such eyes, surely, before Christianity or since! There—I won’t
lose my head; I dare not. I own that the sight of you has waked up my love
for you, which, I believed, was extinguished with all such feelings. But I
thought that our marriage might be a sanctification for us both. ‘The
unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife, and the unbelieving wife is
sanctified by the husband,’1 I said to myself But my plan is dashed from
me; and I must bear the disappointment!”
He moodily reflected with his eyes on the ground.
“Married. Married! ... Well, that being so,” he added, quite calmly, tearing
the licence slowly into halves and putting them in his pocket; “that being
prevented, I should like to do some good to you and your husband, whoever
he may be. There are many questions that I am tempted to ask but I will not
do so, of course, in opposition to your wishes. Though, if I could know your
husband, I might more easily benefit him and you. Is he on this farm?”
“No,” she murmured. “He is far away.”
“Far away? From you? What sort of husband can he be?”
“O, do not speak against him! It was through you! He found out—”
“Ah, is it so! ... That’s sad, Tess!”
“Yes.”
“But to stay away from you—to leave you to work like this!”
“He does not leave me to work!” she cried, springing to the defence of the
absent one with all her fervour. “He don’t know it! It is by my own
arrangement.”
“Then, does he write?”
“I—I cannot tell you. There are things which are private to ourselves.”
“Of course that means that he does not. You are a deserted wife, my fair
Tess!”
 In an impulse he turned suddenly to take her hand; the buff-glove was on
it, and he seized only the rough leather fingers which did not express the
life or shape of those within.
“You must not—you must not!” she cried fearfully, slipping her hand
from the glove as from a pocket, and leaving it in his grasp. “O, will you go
away—for the sake of me and my husband—go, in the name of your own
Christianity!”
“Yes, yes; I will,” he said abruptly, and thrusting the glove back to her
turned to leave. Facing round, however, he said “Tess, as God is my judge, I
meant no humbug in taking your hand!”
A pattering of hoofs on the soil of the field, which they had not noticed in
their preoccupation, ceased close behind them; and a voice reached her ear:
“What the devil are you doing away from your work at this time o’day?”
Farmer Groby had espied the two figures from the distance, and had
inquisitively ridden across, to learn what was their business in his field.
“Don’t speak like that to her!” said d’Urberville, his face blackening with
something that was not Christianity.
“Indeed, Mister! And what mid Methodist pa’sons have to do with she?”
“Who is the fellow?” asked d’Urberville, turning to Tess.
She went close up to him.
“Go—I do beg you!” she said.
“What! And leave you to that tyrant? I can see in his face what a churl he
is.”
“He won’t hurt me. He’s not in love with me. I can leave at Lady-Day.”
“Well, I have no right but to obey, I suppose. But—well, goodbye! ”
Her defender, whom she dreaded more than her assailant, having
reluctantly disappeared, the farmer continued his reprimand, which Tess
took with the greatest coolness, that sort of attack being independent of sex.
To have as a master this man of stone, who would have cuffed her if he had
dared, was almost a relief after her former experiences. She silently walked
back towards the summit of the field that was the scene of her labour, so
absorbed in the interview which had just taken place that she was hardly
aware that the nose of Groby’s horse almost touched her shoulders.
 “If so be you make an agreement to work for me till Lady-Day, I’ll see
that you carry it out,” he growled. “’Od rot the women—now ’tis one thing,
and then ’tis another. But I’ll put up with it no longer!”
Knowing very well that he did not harass the other women of the farm as
he harassed her out of spite for the flooring he had once received, she did
for one moment picture what might have been the result if she had been free
to accept the offer just made her of being the monied Alec’s wife. It would
have lifted her completely out of subjection, not only to her present
oppressive employer, but to a whole world who seemed to despise her. “But
no, no!” she said breathlessly; “I could not have married him now! He is so
unpleasant to me.”
That very night she began an appealing letter to Clare, concealing from
him her hardships, and assuring him of her undying affection. Any one who
had been in a position to read between the lines would have seen that at the
back of her great love was some monstrous fear—almost a desperation—as
to some secret contingencies which were not disclosed. But again she did
not finish her effusion; he had asked Izz to go with him, and perhaps he did
not care for her at all. She put the letter in her box, and wondered if it would
ever reach Angel’s hands.
After this her daily tasks were gone through heavily enough, and brought
on the day which was of great import to agriculturists—the day of the
Candlemas Fair. It was at this fair that new engagements were entered into
for the twelve months following the ensuing Lady-Day, and those of the
farming population who thought of changing their places duly attended at
the county-town where the fair was held. Nearly all the labourers on
Flintcomb-Ash Farm intended flight, and early in the morning there was a
general exodus in the direction of the town, which lay at a distance of from
ten to a dozen miles over hilly country. Though Tess also meant to leave at
the quarter-day she was one of the few who did not go to the fair, having a
vaguely-shaped hope that something would happen to render another
outdoor engagement unnecessary.
It was a peaceful February day, of wonderful softness for the time, and
one would almost have thought that winter was over. She had hardly
finished her dinner when d’Urberville’s figure darkened the window of the
cottage wherein she was a lodger, which she had all to herself to-day.
 Tess jumped up, but her visitor had knocked at the door, and she could
hardly in reason run away. D’Urberville’s knock, his walk up to the door,
had some indescribable quality of difference from his air when she last saw
him. They seemed to be acts of which the doer was ashamed. She thought
that she would not open the door; but, as there was no sense in that either,
she arose, and having lifted the latch stepped back quickly. He came in, saw
her, and flung himself down into a chair before speaking.
“Tess—I couldn’t help it!” he began desperately, as he wiped his heated
face, which had also a superimposed flush of excitement. “I felt that I must
call at least to ask how you are. I assure you I had not been thinking of you
at all till I saw you that Sunday ; now I cannot get rid of your image, try
how I may! It is hard that a good woman should do harm to a bad man; yet
so it is. If you would only pray for me, Tess!”
The suppressed discontent of his manner was almost pitiable, and yet Tess
did not pity him.
“How can I pray for you,” she said, “when I am forbidden to believe that
the great Power who moves the world would alter His plans on my
account?”
“You really think that?”
“Yes. I have been cured of the presumption of thinking otherwise.”
“Cured? By whom?”
“By my husband, if I must tell.”
“Ah—your husband—your husband! How strange it seems! I remember
you hinted something of the sort the other day. What do you really believe
in these matters, Tess?” he asked. “You seem to have no religion—perhaps
owing to me.”
“But I have. Though I don’t believe in anything supernatural.”
D’Urberville looked at her with misgiving.
“Then do you think that the line I take is all wrong?”
“A good deal of it.”
“H’m—and yet I’ve felt so sure about it,” he said uneasily.
 “I believe in the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount,2 and so did my dear
husband... But I don’t believe—”
Here she gave her negations.
“The fact is,” said d’Urberville drily, “whatever your dear husband
believed you accept, and whatever he rejected you reject, without the least
inquiry or reasoning on your own part. That’s just like you women. Your
mind is enslaved to his.”
“Ah, because he knew everything!” said she, with a triumphant simplicity
of faith in Angel Clare that the most perfect man could hardly have
deserved, much less her husband.
“Yes, but you should not take negative opinions wholesale from another
person like that. A pretty fellow he must be to teach you such scepticism!”
“He never forced my judgment! He would never argue on the subject with
me! But I looked at it in this way; what he believed, after inquiring deep
into doctrines, was much more likely to be right than what I might believe,
who hadn’t looked into doctrines at all.”
“What used he to say? He must have said something?”
She reflected; and with her acute memory for the letter of Angel Clare’s
remarks, even when she did not comprehend their spirit, she recalled a
merciless polemical syllogism that she had heard him use when, as it
occasionally happened, he indulged in a species of thinking aloud with her
at his side. In delivering it she gave also Clare’s accent and manner with
reverential faithfulness.
“Say that again,” asked d’Urberville, who had listened with the greatest
attention.
She repeated the argument, and d’Urberville thoughtfully murmured the
words after her.
“Anything else?” he presently asked.
“He said at another time something like this;” and she gave another,
which might possibly have been paralleled in many a work of the pedigree
ranging from the Dictionnaire Philosophique to Huxley’s Essays.3
“Ah—ha! How do you remember them?”
 “I wanted to believe what he believed, though he didn’t wish me to; and I
managed to coax him to tell me a few of his thoughts. I can’t say I quite
understand that one; but I know it is right.”
“H’m. Fancy your being able to teach me what you don’t know yourself!”
He fell into thought.
“And so I threw in my spiritual lot with his,” she resumed. “I didn’t wish
it to be different. What’s good enough for him is good enough for me.”
“Does he know that you are as big an infidel as he?”
“No—I never told him—if I am an infidel.”
“Well—you are better off to-day than I am, Tess, after all! You don’t
believe that you ought to preach my doctrine, and, therefore, do no despite
to your conscience in abstaining. I do believe I ought to preach it, but like
the devils I believe and tremble,4 for I suddenly leave off preaching it, and
give way to my passion for you.”
“How?”
“Why,” he said aridly; “I have come all the way here to see you to-day!
But I started from home to go to Casterbridge Fair, where I have undertaken
to preach the Word from a waggon at half-past two this afternoon, and
where all the brethren are expecting me this minute. Here’s the
announcement.”
He drew from his breast-pocket a poster whereon was printed the day,
hour, and the place of meeting, at which he, d’Urberville, would preach the
Gospel as aforesaid.
“But how can you get there?” said Tess, looking at the clock.
“I cannot get there! I have come here.”
“What, you have really arranged to preach, and—”
“I have arranged to preach, and I shall not be there—by reason of my
burning desire to see a woman whom I once despised! —No, by my word
and truth, I never despised you; if I had I should not love you now! Why I
did not despise you was on account of your being unsmirched in spite of all;
you withdrew yourself from me so quickly and resolutely when you saw the
situation; you did not remain at my pleasure; so there was one petticoat in
the world for whom I had no contempt, and you are she. But you may well
despise me now! I thought I worshipped on the mountains, but I find I still
serve in the groves!5 Ha! ha!”
“O Alec d’Urberville! what does this mean? What have I done!”
“Done?” he said, with a soulless sneer in the word. “Nothing
intentionally. But you have been the means—the innocent means—of my
backsliding, as they call it. I ask myself, am I, indeed, one of those ‘servants
of corruption’ who, ‘after they have escaped the pollutions of the world, are
again entangled therein and overcome‘—whose latter end is worse than
their beginning?” 6 He laid his hand on her shoulder. “Tess, my girl, I was
on the way to, at least, social salvation till I saw you again! ” he said
freakishly shaking her, as if she were a child. “And why then have you
tempted me? I was firm as a man could be till I saw those eyes and that
mouth again—surely there never was such a maddening mouth since
Eve’s!” His voice sank, and a hot archness shot from his own black eyes.
“You temptress, Tess; you dear damned witch of Babylon7—I could not
resist you as soon as I met you again!”
“I couldn’t help your seeing me again!” said Tess, recoiling.
“I know it—I repeat that I do not blame you. But the fact remains. When I
saw you ill-used on the farm that day I was nearly mad to think that I had
no legal right to protect you—that I could not have it; whilst he who has it
seems to neglect you utterly!”
“Don’t speak against him—he is absent!” she cried in much excitement.
“Treat him honourably—he has never wronged you! O leave his wife before
any scandal spreads that may do harm to his honest name!”
“I will—I will,” he said, like a man awakening from a luring dream. “I
have broken my engagement to preach to those poor drunken boobies at the
fair—it is the first time I have played such a practical joke. A month ago I
should have been horrified at such a possibility. I’ll go away—to swear—
and—ah, can I! to keep away.” Then, suddenly: “One clasp, Tessy—one!
Only for old friendship—”
“I am without defence, Alec! A good man’s honour is in my keeping—
think—be ashamed!”
“Pooh! Well yes—yes!”
 He clenched his lips, mortified with himself for his weakness. His eyes
were equally barren of worldly and religious faith. The corpses of those old
fitful passions which had lain inanimate amid the lines of his face ever since
his reformation seemed to wake and come together as in a resurrection. He
went out indeterminately.
Though d’Urberville had declared that this breach of his engagement to-
day was the simple backsliding of a believer, Tess’s words, as echoed from
Angel Clare, had made a deep impression upon him, and continued to do so
after he had left her. He moved on in silence, as if his energies were
benumbed by the hitherto undreamt-of possibility that his position was
untenable. Reason had had nothing to do with his whimsical conversion,
which was perhaps the mere freak of a careless man in search of a new
sensation, and temporarily impressed by his mother’s death.
The drops of logic Tess had let fall into the sea of his enthusiasm served
to chill its effervescence to stagnation. He said to himself, as he pondered
again and again over the crystallized phrases that she had handed on to him,
“That clever fellow little thought that, by telling her those things, he might
be paving my way back to her!”
 XLVII
IT IS THE THRESHING of the last wheat-rick at Flintcomb-Ash Farm.
The dawn of the March morning is singularly inexpressive, and there is
nothing to show where the eastern horizon lies. Against the twilight rises
the trapezoidal top of the stack, which has stood forlornly here through the
washing and bleaching of the wintry weather.
When Izz Huett and Tess arrived at the scene of operations only a rustling
denoted that others had preceded them; to which, as the light increased,
there were presently added the silhouettes of two men on the summit. They
were busily “unhaling” the rick, that is, stripping off the thatch before
beginning to throw down the sheaves; and while this was in progress Izz
and Tess, with the other women-workers, in their whitey-brown pinners,
stood waiting and shivering, Farmer Groby having insisted upon their being
on the spot thus early to get the job over if possible by the end of the day.
Close under the eaves of the stack, and as yet barely visible, was the red
tyrant that the women had come to serve—a timber-framed construction,
with straps and wheels appertaining—the threshing-machine which, whilst
it was going, kept up a despotic demand upon the endurance of their
muscles and nerves.
A little way off there was another indistinct figure; this one black, with a
sustained hiss that spoke of strength very much in reserve. The long
chimney running up beside an ash-tree, and the warmth which radiated from
the spot, explained without the necessity of much daylight that here was the
engine which was to act as the primum mobilefa of this little world. By the
engine stood a dark motionless being, a sooty and grimy embodiment of
tallness, in a sort of trance, with a heap of coals by his side: it was the
engineman. The isolation of his manner and colour lent him the
appearanceof a creature from Tophet,1 who had strayed into the pellucid
smokelessness of this region of yellow grain and pale soil, with which he
had nothing in common, to amaze and to discompose its aborigines.
What he looked he felt. He was in the agricultural world, but not of it. He
served fire and smoke; these denizens of the fields served weather,
vegetation, frost, and sun. He travelled with his engine from farm to farm,
from county to county, for as yet the steam threshing-machine was itinerant
in this part of Wessex. He spoke in a strange northern accent; his thoughts
being turned inwards upon himself, his eye on his iron charge, hardly
perceiving the scenes around him, and caring for them not at all: holding
only strictly necessary intercourse with the natives, as if some ancient doom
compelled him to wander here against his will in the service of his Plutonic
master.fb The long strap which ran from the driving-wheel of his engine to
the red thresher under the rick was the sole tie-line between agriculture and
him.
While they uncovered the sheaves he stood apathetic beside his portable
repository of force, round whose hot blackness the morning air quivered.
He had nothing to do with preparatory labour. His fire was waiting
incandescent, his steam was at high pressure, in a few seconds he could
make the long strap move at an invisible velocity. Beyond its extent the
environment might be corn, straw, or chaos; it was all the same to him. If
any of the autochthonous idlers asked him what he called himself, he
replied shortly, “an engineer.”
The rick was unhaled by full daylight; the men then took their places, the
women mounted, and the work began. Farmer Groby—or, as they called
him, “he”—had arrived ere this, and by his orders Tess was placed on the
platform of the machine, close to the man who fed it, her business being to
untie every sheaf of corn handed on to her by Izz Huett, who stood next, but
on the rick; so that the feeder could seize it and spread it over the revolving
drum, which whisked out every grain in one moment.
They were soon in full progress, after a preparatory hitch or two, which
rejoiced the hearts of those who hated machinery. The work sped on till
breakfast-time, when the thresher was stopped for half an hour; and on
starting again after the meal the whole supplementary strength of the farm
was thrown into the labour of constructing the straw-rick, which began to
grow beside the stack of corn. A hasty lunch was eaten as they stood,
without leaving their positions, and then another couple of hours brought
them near to dinner-time; the inexorable wheels continuing to spin, and the
penetrating hum of the thresher to thrill to the very marrow all who were
near the revolving wire-cage.
The old men on the rising straw-rick talked of the past days when they
had been accustomed to thresh with flails on the oaken barn-floor; when
everything, even to winnowing, was effected by hand-labour, which, to their
thinking, though slow, produced better results. Those, too, on the corn-rick
talked a little; but the perspiring ones at the machine, including Tess, could
not lighten their duties by the exchange of many words. It was the
ceaseless-ness of the work which tried her so severely, and began to make
her wish that she had never come to Flintcomb-Ash. The women on the
corn-rick—Marian, who was one of them, in particular—could stop to drink
ale or cold tea from the flagon now and then, or to exchange a few
gossiping remarks while they wiped their faces or cleared the fragments of
straw and husk from their clothing; but for Tess there was no respite; for, as
the drum never stopped, the man who fed it could not stop, and she, who
had to supply the man with untied sheaves, could not stop either, unless
Marian changed places with her, which she sometimes did for half an hour
in spite of Groby’s objection that she was too slow-handed for a feeder.
For some probably economical reason it was usually a woman who was
chosen for this particular duty, and Groby gave as his motive in selecting
Tess that she was one of those who best combined strength with quickness
in untying, and both with staying power, and this may have been true. The
hum of the thresher, which prevented speech, increased to a raving
whenever the supply of corn fell short of the regular quantity. As Tess and
the man who fed could never turn their heads she did not know that just
before the dinner-hour a person had come silently into the field by the gate,
and had been standing under a second rick watching the scene, and Tess in
particular. He was dressed in a tweed suit of fashionable pattern, and he
twirled a gay walking-cane.
“Who is that?” said Izz Huett to Marian. She had at first addressed the
inquiry to Tess, but the latter could not hear it.
“Somebody’s fancy-man, I s’pose,” said Marian laconically.
“I’ll lay a guinea he’s after Tess.”
“O no. ‘Tis a ranter pa’son who’s been sniffing after her lately; not a
dandy like this.”
“Well—this is the same man.”
“The same man as the preacher? But he’s quite different!”
 “He hev left off his black coat and white neckercher, and hev cut off his
whiskers; but he’s the same man for all that.”
“D’ye really think so? Then I’ll tell her,” said Marian.
“Don’t. She’ll see him soon enough, good-now.”
“Well, I don’t think it at all right for him to join his preaching to courting
a married woman, even though her husband mid be abroad, and she, in a
sense, a widow.”
“Oh—he can do her no harm,” said Izz drily. “Her mind can no more be
heaved from that one place where it do bide than a stoodedfc waggon from
the hole he’s in. Lord love ‘ee, neither court-paying, nor preaching, nor the
seven thunders2 themselves, can wean a woman when ’twould be better for
her that she should be weaned.”
Dinner-time came, and the whirling ceased; whereupon Tess left her post,
her knees trembling so wretchedly with the shaking of the machine that she
could scarcely walk.
“You ought to het a quart o’ drink into ’ee, as I’ve done,” said Marian.
“You wouldn’t look so white then. Why, souls above us, your face is as if
you’d been hagrode!”fd
It occurred to the good-natured Marian that, as Tess was so tired, her
discovery of her visitor’s presence might have the bad effect of taking away
her appetite; and Marian was thinking of inducing Tess to descend by a
ladder on the further side of the stack when the gentleman came forward
and looked up.
Tess uttered a short little “Oh! ” And a moment after she said, quickly, “I
shall eat my dinner here—right on the rick.”
Sometimes, when they were so far from their cottages, they all did this;
but as there was rather a keen wind going to-day, Marian and the rest
descended, and sat under the straw-stack.
The new-comer was, indeed, Alec d’Urberville, the late Evangelist,
despite his changed attire and aspect. It was obvious at a glance that the
original Weltlustfe had come back; that he had restored himself, as nearly as
a man could do who had grown three or four years older, to the old jaunty,
slap-dash guise under which Tess had first known her admirer, and cousin
so-called. Having decided to remain where she was, Tess sat down among
the bundles, out of sight of the ground, and began her meal; till, by-and-by,
she heard footsteps on the ladder, and immediately after Alec appeared
upon the stack—now an oblong and level platform of sheaves. He strode
across them, and sat down opposite to her without a word.
Tess continued to eat her modest dinner, a slice of thick pancake which
she had brought with her. The other workfolk were by this time all gathered
under the rick, where the loose straw formed a comfortable retreat.
“I am here again, as you see,” said d’Urberville. “Why do you trouble me
so!” she cried, reproach flashing from her very finger-ends.
“I trouble you? I think I may ask, why do you trouble me?”
“Sure, I don’t trouble you any-when!”
“You say you don’t? But you do! You haunt me. Those very eyes that you
turned upon me with such a bitter flash a moment ago, they come to me just
as you showed them then, in the night and in the day! Tess, ever since you
told me of that child of ours, it is just as if my feelings, which have been
flowing in a strong puritanicalstream, had suddenly found a way open in the
direction of you, and had all at once gushed through. The religious channel
is left dry forthwith; and it is you who have done it!”
She gazed in silence.
“What—you have given up your preaching entirely?” she asked.
She had gathered from Angel sufficient of the incredulity of modern
thought to despise flash enthusiasms; but, as a woman, she was somewhat
appalled.
In affected severity d’Urberville continued—
“Entirely. I have broken every engagement since that afternoon I was to
address the drunkards at Casterbridge Fair. The deuce only knows what I
am thought of by the brethren. Ah-ha! The brethren! No doubt they pray for
me—weep for me; for they are kind people in their way. But what do I
care? How could I go on with the thing when I had lost my faith in it?—it
would have been hypocrisy of the basest kind! Among them I should have
stood like Hymenaeus and Alexander, who were delivered over to Satan
that they might learn not to blaspheme.3 What a grand revenge you have
taken! I saw you innocent, and I deceived you. Four years after, you find me
a Christian enthusiast; you then work upon me, perhaps to my complete
perdition! But Tess, my coz, as I used to call you, this is only my way of
talking, and you must not look so horribly concerned. Of course you have
done nothing except retain your pretty face and shapely figure. I saw it on
the rick before you saw me—that tight pinafore-thing sets it off, and that
wing-bonnet—you field-girls should never wear those bonnets if you wish
to keep out of danger.” He regarded her silently for a few moments, and
with a short cynical laugh resumed: “I believe that if the bachelor-apostle,
whose deputy I thought I was, had been tempted by such a pretty face, he
would have let go the plough for her sake as I do!”4
Tess attempted to expostulate, but at this juncture all her fluency failed
her, and without heeding he added:
“Well, this paradise that you supply is perhaps as good as any other, after
all. But to speak seriously, Tess.” D’Urberville rose and came nearer,
reclining sideways amid the sheaves, and resting upon his elbow. “Since I
last saw you, I have been thinking of what you said that he said. I have
come to the conclusion that there does seem rather a want of common-sense
in these threadbare old propositions ; how I could have been so fired by
poor Parson Clare’s enthusiasm, and have gone so madly to work,
transcending even him, I cannot make out! As for what you said last time,
on the strength of your wonderful husband’s intelligence—whose name you
have never told me—about having what they call an ethical system without
any dogma, I don’t see my way to that at all.”
“Why, you have the religion of loving-kindness and purity at least, if you
can’t have—what do you call it—dogma.”
“O no! I’m a different sort of fellow from that! If there’s nobody to say,
‘Do this, and it will be a good thing for you after you are dead; do that, and
it will be a bad thing for you,’ I can’t warm up. Hang it, I am not going to
feel responsible for my deeds and passions if there’s nobody to be
responsible to; and if I were you, my dear, I wouldn’t either!”
She tried to argue, and tell him that he had mixed in his dull brain two
matters, theology and morals, which in the primitive days of mankind had
been quite distinct. But owing to Angel Clare’s reticence, to her absolute
want of training, and to her being a vessel of emotions rather than reasons,
she could not get on.
 “Well, never mind,” he resumed. “Here I am, my love, as in the old
times!”
“Not as then—never as then—’tis different!” she entreated. “And there
was never warmth with me! O why didn’t you keep your faith, if the loss of
it has brought you to speak to me like this!”
“Because you’ve knocked it out of me; so the evil be upon your sweet
head! Your husband little thought how his teaching would recoil upon him!
Ha-ha—I’m awfully glad you have made an apostate of me all the same!
Tess, I am more taken with you than ever, and I pity you too. For all your
closeness, I see you are in a bad way—neglected by one who ought to
cherish you.”
She could not get her morsels of food down her throat; her lips were dry,
and she was ready to choke. The voices and laughs of the workfolk eating
and drinking under the rick came to her as if they were a quarter of a mile
off
“It is cruelty to me!” she said. “How—how can you treat me to this talk, if
you care ever so little for me?”
“True, true,” he said, wincing a little. “I did not come to reproach you for
my deeds. I came, Tess, to say that I don’t like you to be working like this,
and I have come on purpose for you. You say you have a husband who is
not I. Well, perhaps you have; but I’ve never seen him, and you’ve not told
me his name; and altogether he seems rather a mythological personage.
However, even if you have one, I think I am nearer to you than he is. I, at
any rate, try to help you out of trouble, but he does not, bless his invisible
face! The words of the stern prophet Hosea that I used to read come back to
me. Don’t you know them, Tess?—‘And she shall follow after her lover, but
she shall not overtake him; and she shall seek him, but shall not find him;
then shall she say, I will go and return to my first husband; for then was it
better with me than now!’ ...5 Tess, my trap is waiting just under the hill,
and—darling mine, not his!—you know the rest.”
Her face had been rising to a dull crimson fire while he spoke; but she did
not answer.
“You have been the cause of my backsliding,” he continued, stretching his
arm towards her waist; “you should be willing to share it, and leave that
mule you call husband for ever.”
 One of her leather gloves, which she had taken off to eat her skimmer-
cake,ff lay in her lap, and without the slightest warning she passionately
swung the glove by the gauntlet directly in his face. It was heavy and thick
as a warrior’s, and it struck him flat on the mouth. Fancy might have
regarded the act as the recrudescence of a trick in which her armed
progenitors were not unpractised. Alec fiercely started up from his reclining
position. A scarlet oozing appeared where her blow had alighted, and in a
moment the blood began dropping from his mouth upon the straw. But he
soon controlled himself, calmly drew his handkerchief from his pocket, and
mopped his bleeding lips.
She too had sprung up, but she sank down again.
“Now, punish me!” she said, turning up her eyes to him with the hopeless
defiance of the sparrow’s gaze before its captor twists its neck. “Whip me,
crush me; you need not mind those people under the rick! I shall not cry
out. Once victim, always victim—that’s the law!”
“O no, no, Tess,” he said blandly. “I can make full allowance for this. Yet
you most unjustly forget one thing, that I would have married you if you
had not put it out of my power to do so. Did I not ask you flatly to be my
wife—hey? Answer me.”
“You did.”
“And you cannot be. But remember one thing!” His voice hardened as his
temper got the better of him with the recollection of his sincerity in asking
her and her present ingratitude, and he stepped across to her side and held
her by the shoulders, so that she shook under his grasp. “Remember, my
lady, I was your master once! I will be your master again. If you are any
man’s wife you are mine!”
The threshers now began to stir below.
“So much for our quarrel,” he said, letting her go. “Now I shall leave you,
and shall come again for your answer during the afternoon. You don’t know
me yet! But I know you.”
She had not spoken again, remaining as if stunned. D’Urberville retreated
over the sheaves, and descended the ladder, while the workers below rose
and stretched their arms, and shook down the beer they had drunk. Then the
threshing-machine started afresh; and amid the renewed rustle of the straw
Tess resumed her position by the buzzing drum as one in a dream, untying
sheaf after sheaf in endless succession.
 XLVIII
IN THE AFTERNOON THE farmer made it known that the rick was to be
finished that night, since there was a moon by which they could see to
work, and the man with the engine was engaged for another farm on the
morrow. Hence the twanging and humming and rustling proceeded with
even less intermission than usual.
It was not till “nammet”-time,fg about three o‘clock, that Tess raised her
eyes and gave a momentary glance round. She felt but little surprise at
seeing that Alec d’Urberville had come back, and was standing under the
hedge by the gate. He had seen her lift her eyes, and waved his hand
urbanely to her, while he blew her a kiss. It meant that their quarrel was
over. Tess looked down again, and carefully abstained from gazing in that
direction.
Thus the afternoon dragged on. The wheat-rick shrank lower, and the
straw-rick grew higher, and the corn-sacks were carted away. At six o’clock
the wheat-rick was about shoulder-high from the ground. But the
unthreshed sheaves remaining untouched seemed countless still,
notwithstanding the enormous numbers that had been gulped down by the
insatiable swallower, fed by the man and Tess, through whose two young
hands the greater part of them had passed. And the immense stack of straw
where in the morning there had been nothing, appeared as the faeces of the
same buzzing red glutton. From the west sky a wrathful shine—all that wild
March could afford in the way of sunset—had burst forth after the cloudy
day, flooding the tired and sticky faces of the threshers, and dyeing them
with a coppery light, as also the flapping garments of the women, which
clung to them like dull flames.
A panting ache ran through the rick. The man who fed was weary, and
Tess could see that the red nape of his neck was encrusted with dirt and
husks. She still stood at her post, her flushed and perspiring face coated
with the corn-dust, and her white bonnet embrowned by it. She was the only
woman whose place was upon the machine so as to be shaken bodily by its
spinning, and the decrease of the stack now separated her from Marian and
Izz, and prevented their changing duties with her as they had done. The
incessant quivering, in which every fibre of her frame participated, had
thrown her into a stupefied reverie in which her arms worked on
independently of her consciousness. She hardly knew where she was, and
did not hear Izz Huett tell her from below that her hair was tumbling down.
By degrees the freshest among them began to grow cadaverous and
saucer-eyed. Whenever Tess lifted her head she beheld always the great
upgrown strawstack, with the men in shirtsleeves upon it, against the gray
north sky; in front of it the long red elevator like a Jacob’s ladder, on which
a perpetual stream of threshed straw ascended,1 a yellow river running up-
hill, and spouting out on the top of the rick.
She knew that Alec d’Urberville was still on the scene, observing her
from some point or other, though she could not say where. There was an
excuse for his remaining, for when the threshed rick drew near its final
sheaves a little ratting was always done, and men unconnected with the
threshing sometimes dropped in for that performance—sporting characters
of all descriptions, gents with terriers and facetious pipes, roughs with
sticks and stones.
But there was another hour’s work before the layer of live rats at the base
of the stack would be reached; and as the evening light in the direction of
the Giant’s Hill by Abbot‘s-Cernel dissolved away, the white-faced moon of
the season arose from the horizon that lay towards Middleton Abbey and
Shottsford on the other side. For the last hour or two Marian had felt uneasy
about Tess, whom she could not get near enough to speak to, the other
women having kept up their strength by drinking ale, and Tess having done
without it through traditionary dread, owing to its results at her home in
childhood. But Tess still kept going: if she could not fill her part she would
have to leave; and this contingency, which she would have regarded with
equanimity and even with relief a month or two earlier, had become a terror
since d’Urberville had begun to hover round her.
The sheaf-pitchers and feeders had now worked the rick so low that
people on the ground could talk to them. To Tess’s surprise Farmer Groby
came up on the machine to her, and said that if she desired to join her friend
he did not wish her to keep on any longer, and would send somebody else to
take her place. The “friend” was d’Urberville, she knew, and also that this
concession had been granted in obedience to the request of that friend, or
enemy. She shook her head and toiled on.
 The time for the rat-catching arrived at last, and the hunt began. The
creatures had crept downwards with the subsidence of the rick till they were
all together at the bottom, and being now uncovered from their last refuge
they ran across the open ground in all directions, a loud shriek from the by-
this-time half-tipsy Marian informing her companions that one of the rats
had invaded her person—a terror which the rest of the women had guarded
against by various schemes of skirt-tucking and self-elevation. The rat was
at last dislodged, and, amid the barking of dogs, masculine shouts, feminine
screams, oaths, stampings, and confusion as of Pandemonium,fh Tess untied
her last sheaf; the drum slowed, the whizzing ceased, and she stepped from
the machine to the ground.
Her lover, who had only looked on at the rat-catching, was promptly at
her side.
“What—after all—my insulting slap too!” said she in an underbreath. She
was so utterly exhausted that she had not strength to speak louder.
“I should indeed be foolish to feel offended at anything you say or do,” he
answered, in the seductive voice of the Trantridge time. “How the little
limbs tremble! You are as weak as a bled calf, you know you are; and yet
you need have done nothing since I arrived. How could you be so obstinate?
However, I have told the farmer that he has no right to employ women at
steam-threshing. It is not proper work for them; and on all the better class of
farms it has been given up, as he knows very well. I will walk with you as
far as your home.”
“O yes,” she answered with a jaded gait. “Walk wi’ me if you will! I do
bear in mind that you came to marry me before you knew o’ my state.
Perhaps—perhaps you are a little better and kinder than I have been
thinking you were. Whatever is meant as kindness I am grateful for;
whatever is meant in any other way I am angered at. I cannot sense your
meaning sometimes.”
“If I cannot legitimize our former relations at least I can assist you. And I
will do it with much more regard for your feelings than I formerly showed.
My religious mania, or whatever it was, is over. But I retain a little good
nature; I hope I do. Now Tess, by all that’s tender and strong between man
and woman, trust me! I have enough and more than enough to put you out
of anxiety, both for yourself and your parents and sisters. I can make them
all comfortable if you will only show confidence in me.”
“Have you seen ’em lately?” she quickly inquired.
“Yes. They didn’t know where you were. It was only by chance that I
found you here.”
The cold moon looked aslant upon Tess’s fagged face between the twigs
of the garden-hedge as she paused outside the cottage which was her
temporary home, d’Urberville pausing beside her.
“Don’t mention my little brothers and sisters—don’t make me break down
quite!” she said. “If you want to help them—God knows they need it—do it
without telling me. But no, no!” she cried. “I will take nothing from you,
either for them or for me!”
He did not accompany her further, since, as she lived with the household,
all was public indoors. No sooner had she herself entered, laved herself in a
washing-tub, and shared supper with the family than she fell into thought,
and withdrawing to the table under the wall, by the light of her own little
lamp wrote in a passionate mood—
My own Husband,
Let me call you so—I must—even if it makes you angry to think of such an
unworthy wife as I. I must cry to you in my trouble—I have no one else! I
am so exposed to temptation, Angel. I fear to say who it is, and I do not like
to write about it at all. But I cling to you in a way you cannot think! Can you
not come to me now, at once, before anything terrible happens? O, I know
you cannot, because you are so far away! I think I must die if you do not
come soon, or tell me to come to you. The punishment you have measured
out to me is deserved—I do know that—well deserved— and you are right
and just to be angry with me. But, Angel, please, please, not to be just—
only a little kind to me, even if I do not deserve it, and come to me! If you
would come, I could die in your arms! I would be well content to do that if
so be you had forgiven me!
Angel, I live entirely for you. I love you too much to blame you for going
away, and I know it was necessary you should find a farm. Do not think I
shall say a word of sting or bitterness. Only come back to me. I am desolate
without you, my darling, O, so desolate! I do not mind having to work: but
if you will send me one little line and say, “I am coming soon,” I will bide
on, Angel—O, so cheerfully!
It has been so much my religion ever since we were married to be faithful
to you in every thought and look, that even when a man speaks a
compliment to me before I am aware, it seems wronging you. Have you
never felt one little bit of what you used to feel when we were at the dairy?
If you have, how can you keep away from me? I am the same woman,
Angel, as you fell in love with; yes, the very same!—not the one you
disliked but never saw. What was the past to me as soon as I met you? It
was a dead thing altogether. I became another woman, filled full of new life
from you. How could I be the early one? Why do you not see this? Dear, if
you would only be a little more conceited, and believe in yourself so far as
to see that you were strong enough to work this change in me, you would
perhaps be in a mind to come to me, your poor wife.
How silly I was in my happiness when I thought I could trust you always
to love me! I ought to have known that such as that was not for poor me.
But I am sick at heart, not only for old times, but for the present. Think—
think how it do hurt my heart not to see you ever—ever! Ah, if I could only
make your dear heart ache one little minute of each day as mine does every
day and all day long, it might lead you to show pity to your poor lonely one.
People still say that I am rather pretty, Angel (handsome is the word they
use, since I wish to be truthful). Perhaps I am what they say. But I do not
value my good looks; I only like to have them because they belong to you,
my dear, and that there may be at least one thing about me worth your
having. So much have I felt this, that when I met with annoyance on account
of the same I tied up my face in a bandage as long as people would believe
in it. O Angel, I tell you all this not from vanity—you will certainly know I
do not—but only that you may come to me!
If you really cannot come to me will you let me come to you! I am, as I
say, worried, pressed to do what I will not do. It cannot be that I shall yield
one inch, yet I am in terror as to what an accident might lead to, and I so
defenceless on account of my first error. I cannot say more about this—it
makes me too miserable. But if I break down by falling into some fearful
snare, my last state will be worse than my first.2 O God, I cannot think of it!
Let me come at once, or at once come to me!
 I would be content, ay, glad, to live with you as your servant, if I may not
as your wife; so that I could only be near you, and get glimpses of you, and
think of you as mine.
The daylight has nothing to show me, since you are not here, and I don’t
like to see the rooks and starlings in the fields, because I grieve and grieve
to miss you who used to see them with me. I long for only one thing in
heaven or earth or under the earth, to meet you, my own dear! Come to me
—come to me, and save me from what threatens me!—Your faithful
heartbroken

Tess.
 XLIX
THE APPEAL DULY FOUND its way to the breakfast-table of the quiet
Vicarage to the westward, in that valley where the air is so soft and the soil
so rich that the effort of growth requires but superficial aid by comparison
with the tillage at Flintcomb-Ash, and where to Tess the human world
seemed so different (though it was much the same). It was purely for
security that she had been requested by Angel to send her communications
through his father, whom he kept pretty well informed of his changing
addresses in the country he had gone to exploit for himself with a heavy
heart.
“Now,” said old Mr Clare to his wife, when he had read the envelope, “if
Angel proposes leaving Rio for a visit home at the end of next month, as he
told us that he hoped to do, I think this may hasten his plans; for I believe it
to be from his wife.” He breathed deeply at the thought of her; and the letter
was redirected to be promptly sent on to Angel.
“Dear fellow, I hope he will get home safely,” murmured Mrs Clare. “To
my dying day I shall feel that he has been ill-used. You should have sent
him to Cambridge in spite of his want of faith, and given him the same
chance as the other boys had. He would have grown out of it under proper
influence, and perhaps would have taken Orders after all. Church or no
Church, it would have been fairer to him.”
This was the only wail with which Mrs Clare ever disturbed her husband’s
peace in respect of their sons. And she did not vent this often; for she was
as considerate as she was devout, and knew that his mind too was troubled
by doubts as to his justice in this matter. Only too often had she heard him
lying awake at night, stifling sighs for Angel with prayers. But the
uncompromising Evangelical did not even now hold that he would have
been justified in giving his son, an unbeliever, the same academic
advantages that he had given to the two others, when it was possible, if not
probable, that those very advantages might have been used to decry the
doctrines which he had made it his life’s mission and desire to propagate,
and the mission of his ordained sons likewise. To put with one hand a
pedestal under the feet of the two faithful ones, and with the other to exalt
the unfaithful by the same artificial means, he deemed to be alike
inconsistent with his convictions, his position, and his hopes. Nevertheless,
he loved his misnamed Angel, and in secret mourned over this treatment of
him as Abraham might have mourned over the doomed Isaac while they
went up the hill together.1 His silent self-generated regrets were far bitterer
than the reproaches which his wife rendered audible.
They blamed themselves for this unlucky marriage. If Angel had never
been destined for a farmer he would never have been thrown with
agricultural girls. They did not distinctly know what had separated him and
his wife, nor the date on which the separation had taken place. At first they
had supposed it must be something of the nature of a serious aversion. But
in his later letters he occasionally alluded to the intention of coming home
to fetch her; from which expressions they hoped the division might not owe
its origin to anything so hopelessly permanent as that. He had told them that
she was with her relatives, and in their doubts they had decided not to
intrude into a situation which they knew no way of bettering.
The eyes for which Tess’s letter was intended were gazing at this time on
a limitless expanse of country from the back of a mule which was bearing
him from the interior of the South-American Continent towards the coast.
His experiences of this strange land had been sad. The severe illness from
which he had suffered shortly after his arrival had never wholly left him,
and he had by degrees almost decided to relinquish his hope of farming
here, though, as long as the bare possibility existed of his remaining, he
kept this change of view a secret from his parents.
The crowds of agricultural labourers who had come out to the country in
his wake, dazzled by representations of easy independence, had suffered,
died, and wasted away. He would see mothers from English farms trudging
along with their infants in their arms, when the child would be stricken with
fever and would die; the mother would pause to dig a hole in the loose earth
with her bare hands, would bury the babe therein with the same natural
grave-tools, shed one tear, and again trudge on.
Angel’s original intention had not been emigration to Brazil, but a
northern or eastern farm in his own country. He had come to this place in a
fit of desperation, the Brazil movement among the English agriculturists
having by chance coincided with his desire to escape from his past
existence.
 During this time of absence he had mentally aged a dozen years. What
arrested him now as of value in life was less its beauty than its pathos.
Having long discredited the old systems of mysticism, he now began to
discredit the old appraisements of morality. He thought they wanted
readjusting. Who was the moral man? Still more pertinently, who was the
moral woman? The beauty or ugliness of a character lay not only in its
achievements, but in its aims and impulses; its true history lay, not among
things done, but among things willed.
How, then, about Tess?
Viewing her in these lights, a regret for his hasty judgment began to
oppress him. Did he reject her eternally, or did he not? He could no longer
say that he would always reject her, and not to say that was in spirit to
accept her now.
This growing fondness of her memory coincided in point of time with her
residence at Flintcomb-Ash, but it was before she had felt herself at liberty
to trouble him with a word about her circumstances or her feelings. He was
greatly perplexed; and in his perplexity as to her motives in withholding
intelligence he did not inquire. Thus her silence of docility was
misinterpreted. How much it really said if he had understood!—that she
adhered with literal exactness to orders which he had given and forgotten;
that despite her natural fearlessness she asserted no rights, admitted his
judgment to be in every respect the true one, and bent her head dumbly
thereto.
In the before-mentioned journey by mules through the interior of the
country, another man rode beside him. Angel’s companion was also an
Englishman, bent on the same errand, though he came from another part of
the island. They were both in a state of mental depression, and they spoke
of home affairs. Confidence begat confidence. With that curious tendency
evinced by men, more especially when in distant lands, to entrust to
strangers details of their lives which they would on no account mention to
friends, Angel admitted to this man as they rode along the sorrowful facts of
his marriage.
The stranger had sojourned in many more lands and among many more
peoples than Angel; to his cosmopolitan mind such deviations from the
social norm, so immense to domesticity, were no more than are the
irregularities of vale and mountain-chain to the whole terrestrial curve. He
viewed the matter in quite a different light from Angel; thought that what
Tess had been was of no importance beside what she would be, and plainly
told Clare that he was wrong in coming away from her.
The next day they were drenched in a thunderstorm. Angel’s companion
was struck down with fever, and died by the week’s end. Clare waited a few
hours to bury him, and then went on his way.
The cursory remarks of the large-minded stranger, of whom he knew
absolutely nothing beyond a commonplace name, were sublimed by his
death, and influenced Clare more than all the reasoned ethics of the
philosophers. His own parochialism made him ashamed by its contrast. His
inconsistencies rushed upon him in a flood. He had persistently elevated
Hellenic Paganismfi at the expense of Christianity; yet in that civilization an
illegal surrender was not certain disesteem. Surely then he might have
regarded that abhorrence of the un-intact state, which he had inherited with
the creed of mysticism, as at least open to correction when the result was
due to treachery. A remorse struck into him. The words of Izz Huett, never
quite stilled in his memory, came back to him. He had asked Izz if she loved
him, and she had replied in the affirmative. Did she love him more than
Tess did? No, she had replied; Tess would lay down her life for him, and
she herself could do no more.
He thought of Tess as she had appeared on the day of the wedding. How
her eyes had lingered upon him; how she had hung upon his words as if
they were a god’s! And during the terrible evening over the hearth, when
her simple soul uncovered itself to his, how pitiful her face had looked by
the rays of the fire, in her inability to realize that his love and protection
could possibly be withdrawn.
Thus from being her critic he grew to be her advocate. Cynical things he
had uttered to himself about her; but no man can be always a cynic and live;
and he withdrew them. The mistake of expressing them had arisen from his
allowing himself to be influenced by general principles to the disregard of
the particular instance.
But the reasoning is somewhat musty;2 lovers and husbands have gone
over the ground before to-day. Clare had been harsh towards her; there is no
doubt of it. Men are too often harsh with women they love or have loved;
women with men. And yet these harshnesses are tenderness itself when
compared with the universal harshness out of which they grow; the
harshness of the position towards the temperament, of the means towards
the aims, of today towards yesterday, of hereafter towards to-day.
The historic interest of her family—the masterful line of d‘Urbervilles—
whom he had despised as a spent force, touched his sentiments now. Why
had he not known the difference between the political value and the
imaginative value of these things? In the latter aspect her d’Urberville
descent was a fact of great dimensions; worthless to economies, it was a
most useful ingredient to the dreamer, to the moralizer on declines and falls.
It was a fact that would soon be forgotten—that bit of distinction in poor
Tess’s blood and name, and oblivion would fall upon her hereditary link
with the marble monuments and leaded skeletons at Kingsbere. So does
Time ruthlessly destroy his own romances. In recalling her face again and
again, he thought now that he could see therein a flash of the dignity which
must have graced her grand-dames; and the vision sent that aura through his
veins which he had formerly felt, and which left behind it a sense of
sickness.
Despite her not inviolate past, what still abode in such a woman as Tess
outvalued the freshness of her fellows. Was not the gleaning of the grapes
of Ephraim better than the vintage of Abiezer? 3
So spoke love renascent, preparing the way for Tess’s devoted outpouring,
which was then just being forwarded to him by his father; though owing to
his distance inland it was to be a long time in reaching him.
Meanwhile the writer’s expectation that Angel would come in response to
the entreaty was alternately great and small. What lessened it was that the
facts of her life which had led to the parting had not changed—could never
change; and that, if her presence had not attenuated them, her absence could
not. Nevertheless she addressed her mind to the tender question of what she
could do to please him best if he should arrive. Sighs were expended on the
wish that she had taken more notice of the tunes he played on his harp, that
she had inquired more curiously of him which were his favourite ballads
among those the country-girls sang. She indirectly inquired of Amby
Seedling, who had followed Izz from Talbothays, and by chance Amby
remembered that, amongst the snatches of melody in which they had
indulged at the dairyman’s, to induce the cows to let down their milk, Clare
had seemed to like “Cupid’s Gardens,” “I have parks, I have hounds,” and
“The break o’ the day;” and had seemed not to care for “The Tailor’s
Breeches,” and “Such a beauty I did grow,” excellent ditties as they were.4
To perfect the ballads was now her whimsical desire. She practised them
privately at odd moments, especially “The break o’ the day:”
Arise, arise, arise!
And pick your love a posy,
All o’ the sweetest flowers
That in the garden grow.
The turtle doves and sma’ birds
In every bough a-building,
So early in the May-time,
At the break o’ the day!5
It would have melted the heart of a stone to hear her singing these ditties,
whenever she worked apart from the rest of the girls in this cold dry time;
the tears running down her cheeks all the while at the thought that perhaps
he would not, after all, come to hear her, and the simple silly words of the
songs resounding in painful mockery of the aching heart of the singer.
Tess was so wrapt up in this fanciful dream that she seemed not to know
how the season was advancing; that the days had lengthened, that Lady-Day
was at hand, and would soon be followed by Old Lady-Day, the end of her
term here.
But before the quarter-day had quite come something happened which
made Tess think of far different matters. She was at her lodging as usual one
evening, sitting in the downstairs room with the rest of the family, when
somebody knocked at the door and inquired for Tess. Through the doorway
she saw against the declining light a figure with the height of a woman and
the breadth of a child, a tall, thin, girlish creature whom she did not
recognize in the twilight till the girl said “Tess!”
“What—is it ‘Liza-Lu?” asked Tess, in startled accents. Her sister, whom
a little over a year ago she had left at home as a child, had sprung up by a
sudden shoot to a form of this presentation, of which as yet Lu seemed
herself scarce able to understand the meaning. Her thin legs, visible below
her once long frock, now short by her growing, and her uncomfortable
hands and arms, revealed her youth and inexperience.
 “Yes, I have been traipsing about all day, Tess,” said Lu, with
unemotional gravity, “a-trying to find ’ee; and I’m very tired.”
“What is the matter at home?”
“Mother is took very bad, and the doctor says she’s dying, and as father is
not very well neither, and says ’tis wrong for a man of such a high family as
his to slave and dravefj at common labouring work, we don’t know what to
do.”
Tess stood in reverie a long time before she thought of asking ’Liza-Lu to
come in and sit down. When she had done so, and ’Liza-Lu was having
some tea, she came to a decision. It was imperative that she should go
home. Her agreement did not end till Old LadyDay, the sixth of April, but
as the interval thereto was not a long one she resolved to run the risk of
starting at once.
To go that night would be a gain of twelve hours; but her sister was too
tired to undertake such a distance till the morrow. Tess ran down to where
Marian and Izz lived, informed them of what had happened, and begged
them to make the best of her case to the farmer. Returning, she got Lu a
supper, and after that, having tucked the younger into her own bed, packed
up as many of her belongings as would go into a withy basket,fk and started,
directing Lu to follow her next morning.
 L
SHE PLUNGED INTO THE chilly equinoctial darkness as the clock struck
ten, for her fifteen miles’ walk under the steely stars. In lonely districts
night is a protection rather than a danger to a noiseless pedestrian, and
knowing this Tess pursued the nearest course along by-lanes that she would
almost have feared in the day time; but marauders were wanting now, and
spectral fears were driven out of her mind by thoughts of her mother. Thus
she proceeded mile after mile, ascending and descending till she came to
Bulbarrow, and about midnight looked from that height into the abyss of
chaotic shade which was all that revealed itself of the vale on whose further
side she was born. Having already traversed about five miles on the upland
she had now some ten or eleven in the lowland before her journey would be
finished. The winding road downwards became just visible to her under the
wan starlight as she followed it, and soon she paced a soil so contrasting
with that above it that the difference was perceptible to the tread and to the
smell. It was the heavy clay land of Blackmoor Vale, and a part of the Vale
to which turnpike-roads had never penetrated. Superstitions linger longest
on these heavy soils. Having once been forest, at this shadowy time it
seemed to assert something of its old character, the far and the near being
blended, and every tree and tall hedge making the most of its presence. The
harts that had been hunted here, the witches that had been pricked and
ducked,1 the green-spangled fairies that “whickered” fl at you as you
passed;—the place teemed with beliefs in them still, and they formed an
impish multitude now.
At Nuttlebury she passed the village inn, whose sign creaked in response
to the greeting of her footsteps, which not a human soul heard but herself.
Under the thatched roofs her mind’s eye beheld relaxed tendons and flaccid
muscles, spread out in the darkness beneath coverlets made of little purple
patchwork squares, and undergoing a bracing process at the hands of sleep
for renewed labour on the morrow, as soon as a hint of pink nebulosity
appeared on Hambledon Hill.
At three she turned the last corner of the maze of lanes she had threaded,
and entered Marlott, passing the field in which, as a club-girl, she had first
seen Angel Clare, when he had not danced with her; the sense of
disappointment remained with her yet. In the direction of her mother’s
house she saw a light. It came from the bedroom window, and a branch
waved in front of it and made it wink at her. As soon as she could discern
the outline of the house—newly thatched with her money—it had all its old
effect upon Tess’s imagination. Part of her body and life it ever seemed to
be; the slope of its dormers, the finish of its gables, the broken courses of
brick which topped the chimney, all had something in common with her
personal character. A stupefaction had come into these features, to her
regard; it meant the illness of her mother.
She opened the door so softly as to disturb nobody; the lower room was
vacant, but the neighbour who was sitting up with her mother came to the
top of the stairs, and whispered that Mrs Durbeyfield was no better, though
she was sleeping just then. Tess prepared herself a breakfast, and then took
her place as nurse in her mother’s chamber.
In the morning, when she contemplated the children, they had all a
curiously elongated look; although she had been away little more than a
year their growth was astounding; and the necessity of applying herself
heart and soul to their needs took her out of her own cares.
Her father’s ill-health was of the same indefinite kind, and he sat in his
chair as usual. But the day after her arrival he was unusually bright. He had
a rational scheme for living, and Tess asked him what it was.
“I’m thinking of sending round to all the old antiqueerians in this part of
England,” he said, “asking them to subscribe to a fund to maintain me. I’m
sure they’d see it as a romantical, artistical, and proper thing to do. They
spend lots o’ money in keeping up old ruins, and finding the bones o’
things, and such like; and living remains must be more interesting to ‘em
still, if they only knowed of me. Would that somebody would go round and
tell ’em what there is living among ‘em, and they thinking nothing of him!
If Pa’son Tringham, who discovered me, had lived, he’d ha’ done it, I’m
sure.”
Tess postponed her arguments on this high project till she had grappled
with pressing matters in hand, which seemed little improved by her
remittances. When indoor necessities had been eased she turned her
attention to external things. It was now the season for planting and sowing;
many gardens and allotments of the villagers had already received their
spring tillage; but the garden and the allotment of the Durbeyfields were
behindhand. She found, to her dismay, that this was owing to their having
eaten all the seed potatoes, —that last lapse of the improvident. At the
earliest moment she obtained what others she could procure, and in a few
days her father was well enough to see to the garden, under Tess’s
persuasive efforts: while she herself undertook the allotment-plot which
they rented in a field a couple of hundred yards out of the village.
She liked doing it after the confinement of the sick chamber, where she
was not now required by reason of her mother’s improvement. Violent
motion relieved thought. The plot of ground was in a high, dry, open
enclosure, where there were forty or fifty such pieces, and where labour was
at its briskest when the hired labour of the day had ended. Digging began
usually at six o’clock, and extended indefinitely into the dusk or moonlight.
Just now heaps of dead weeds and refuse were burning on many of the
plots, the dry weather favouring their combustion.
One fine day Tess and ‘Liza-Lu worked on here with their neighbours till
the last rays of the sun smote flat upon the white pegs that divided the plots.
As soon as twilight succeeded to sunset the flare of the couch-grass and
cabbage-stalk fires began to light up the allotments fitfully, their outlines
appearing and disappearing under the dense smoke as wafted by the wind.
When a fire glowed, banks of smoke, blown level along the ground, would
themselves become illuminated to an opaque lustre, screening the
workpeople from one another; and the meaning of the “pillar of a cloud,”
which was a wall by day and a light by night, could be understood.
As evening thickened some of the gardening men and women gave over
for the night, but the greater number remained to get their planting done,
Tess being among them, though she sent her sister home. It was on one of
the couch-burning plots that she laboured with her fork, its four shining
prongs resounding against the stones and dry clods in little clicks.
Sometimes she was completely involved in the smoke of her fire; then it
would leave her figure free, irradiated by the brassy glare from the heap.
She was oddly dressed to-night, and presented a somewhat staring aspect,
her attire being a gown bleached by many washings, with a short black
jacket over it, the effect of the whole being that of a wedding and funeral
guest in one. The women further back wore white aprons, which, with their
pale faces, were all that could be seen of them in the gloom, except when at
moments they caught a flash from the flames.
Westward, the wiry boughs of the bare thorn hedge which formed the
boundary of the field rose against the pale opalescence of the lower sky.
Above, Jupiter hung like a full-blown jonquil, so bright as almost to throw a
shade. A few small nondescript stars were appearing elsewhere. In the
distance a dog barked, and wheels occasionally rattled along the dry road.
Still the prongs continued to click assiduously, for it was not late; and
though the air was fresh and keen there was a whisper of spring in it that
cheered the workers on. Something in the place, the hour, the crackling
fires, the fantastic mysteries of light and shade, made others as well as Tess
enjoy being there. Nightfall, which in the frost of winter comes as a fiend
and in the warmth of summer as a lover, came as a tranquillizer on this
March day.
Nobody looked at his or her companions. The eyes of all were on the soil
as its turned surface was revealed by the fires. Hence as Tess stirred the
clods, and sang her foolish little songs with scarce now a hope that Clare
would ever hear them, she did not for a long time notice the person who
worked nearest to her—a man in a long smockfrock who, she found, was
forking the same plot as herself, and whom she supposed her father had sent
there to advance the work. She became more conscious of him when the
direction of his digging brought him closer. Sometimes the smoke divided
them; then it swerved, and the two were visible to each other but divided
from all the rest.
Tess did not speak to her fellow-worker, nor did he speak to her. Nor did
she think of him further than to recollect that he had not been there when it
was broad daylight, and that she did not know him as any one of the Marlott
labourers, which was no wonder, her absences having been so long and
frequent of late years. By-and-by he dug so close to her that the fire-beams
were reflected as distinctly from the steel prongs of his fork as from her
own. On going up to the fire to throw a pitch of dead weeds upon it, she
found that he did the same on the other side. The fire flared up, and she
beheld the face of d’Urberville.
The unexpectedness of his presence, the grotesqueness of his appearance
in a gathered smockfrock, such as was now worn only by the most old-
fashioned of the labourers, had a ghastly comicality that chilled her as to its
bearing. D’Urberville emitted a low long laugh.
“If I were inclined to joke I should say, How much this seems like
Paradise!” he remarked whimsically, looking at her with an inclined head.
“What do you say?” she weakly asked.
“A jester might say this is just like Paradise.You are Eve, and I am the old
Other Onefm come to tempt you in the disguise of an inferior animal. I used
to be quite up in that scene of Milton’s when I was theological. Some of it
goes—
‘Empress, the way is ready, and not long,
Beyond a row of myrtles ...
... If thou accept
My conduct, I can bring thee thither soon.’
‘Lead then,’ said Eve.2
And so on. My dear, dear Tess, I am only putting this to you as a thing that
you might have supposed or said quite untruly, because you think so badly
of me.”
“I never said you were Satan, or thought it. I don’t think of you in that
way at all. My thoughts of you are quite cold, except when you affront me.
What, did you come digging here entirely because of me?”
“Entirely. To see you; nothing more. The smockfrock, which I saw
hanging for sale as I came along, was an after-thought, that I mightn’t be
noticed. I come to protest against your working like this.”
“But I like doing it—it is for my father.”
“Your engagement at the other place is ended?”
“Yes.”
“Where are you going to next? To join your dear husband?”
She could not bear the humiliating reminder.
“O—I don’t know!” she said bitterly. “I have no husband!”
“It is quite true—in the sense you mean. But you have a friend, and I have
determined that you shall be comfortable in spite of yourself When you get
down to your house you will see what I have sent there for you.”
 “O, Alec, I wish you wouldn’t give me anything at all! I cannot take it
from you! I don’t like—it is not right!”
“It is right!” he cried lightly “I am not going to see a woman whom I feel
so tenderly for as I do for you, in trouble without trying to help her.”
“But I am very well off! I am only in trouble about—about—not about
living at all!”
She turned, and desperately resumed her digging, tears dripping upon the
fork-handle and upon the clods.
“About the children—your brothers and sisters,” he resumed. “I’ve been
thinking of them.”
Tess’s heart quivered—he was touching her in a weak place. He had
divined her chief anxiety. Since returning home her soul had gone out to
those children with an affection that was passionate.
“If your mother does not recover, somebody ought to do something for
them; since your father will not be able to do much, I suppose?”
“He can with my assistance. He must!”
“And with mine.”
“No, sir!”
No, sir!
“How damned foolish this is!” burst out d’Urberville. “Why, he thinks we
are the same family; and will be quite satisfied!”
“He don’t. I’ve undeceived him.”
“The more fool you!”
D’Urberville in anger retreated from her to the hedge, where he pulled off
the long smockfrock which had disguised him; and rolling it up and pushing
it into the couch-fire, went away.
Tess could not get on with her digging after this; she felt restless; she
wondered if he had gone back to her father’s house; and taking the fork in
her hand proceeded homewards.
Some twenty yards from the house she was met by one of her sisters.
“O.Tessy—what do you think! ’Liza-Lu is a-crying, and there’s a lot of
folk in the house, and mother is a good deal better, but they think father is
dead!”
The child realized the grandeur of the news; but not as yet its sadness; and
stood looking at Tess with round-eyed importance, till, beholding the effect
produced upon her, she said—
“What, Tess, shan’t we talk to father never no more?”
“But father was only a little bit ill!” exclaimed Tess distractedly.
’Liza-Lu came up.
“He dropped down just now, and the doctor who was there for mother
said there was no chance for him, because his heart was growed in.”
Yes; the Durbeyfield couple had changed places; the dying one was out of
danger, and the indisposed one was dead. The news meant even more than it
sounded. Her father’s life had a value apart from his personal achievements,
or perhaps it would not have had much. It was the last of the three lives for
whose duration the house and premises were held under a lease; and it had
long been coveted by the tenant-farmer for his regular labourers, who were
stinted in cottage accommodation. Moreover, “liviers”fn were disapproved
of in villages almost as much as little freeholders,because of their
independence of manner, and when a lease determined it was never
renewed.
Thus the Durbeyfields, once d’Urbervilles, saw descending upon them the
destiny which, no doubt, when they were among the Olympiansfo of the
county they had caused to descend many a time, and severely enough, upon
the heads of such landless ones as they themselves were now. So do flux
and reflux—the rhythm of change—alternate and persist in everything
under the sky.
 LI
AT LENGTH IT WAS the eve of Old Lady-Day, and the agricultural world
was in a fever of mobility such as only occurs at that particular date of the
year. It is a day of fulfilment; agreements for outdoor service during the
ensuing year, entered into at Candlemas, are to be now carried out. The
labourers—or “work-folk,” as they used to call themselves immemorially
till the other word was introduced from without—who wish to remain no
longer in old places are removing to the new farms.
These annual migrations from farm to farm were on the increase here.
When Tess’s mother was a child the majority of the field-folk about Marlott
had remained all their lives on one farm, which had been the home also of
their fathers and grandfathers; but latterly the desire for yearly removal had
risen to a high pitch. With the younger families it was a pleasant excitement
which might possibly be an advantage. The Egypt of one family was the
Land of Promisefp to the family who saw it from a distance, till by residence
there it became in turn their Egypt also; and so they changed and changed.
However, all the mutations so increasingly discernible in village life did
not originate entirely in the agricultural unrest. A depopulation was also
going on. The village had formerly contained, side by side with the
agricultural labourers, an interesting and better-informed class, ranking
distinctly above the former—the class to which Tess’s father and mother
had belonged—and including the carpenter, the smith, the shoemaker, the
huckster, together with nondescript workers other than farm-labourers; a set
of people who owed a certain stability of aim and conduct to the fact of
their being life-holders like Tess’s father, or copyholders, or, occasionally,
small freeholders. But as the long holdings fell in they were seldom again
let to similar tenants, and were mostly pulled down, if not absolutely
required by the farmer for his hands. Cottagers who were not directly
employed on the land were looked upon with disfavour, and the banishment
of some starved the trade of others, who were thus obliged to follow. These
families, who had formed the backbone of the village life in the past, who
were the depositaries of the village traditions, had to seek refuge in the large
centres; the process, humorously designated by statisticians as “the
tendency of the rural population towards the large towns,” being really the
tendency of water to flow uphill when forced by machinery.
The cottage accommodation at Marlott having been in this manner
considerably curtailed by demolitions, every house which remained
standing was required by the agriculturist for his workpeople. Ever since the
occurrence of the event which had cast such a shadow over Tess’s life, the
Durbeyfield family (whose descent was not credited) had been tacitly
looked on as one which would have to go when their lease ended, if only in
the interests of morality. It was, indeed, quite true that the household had
not been shining examples either of temperance, soberness, or chastity. The
father, and even the mother, had got drunk at times, the younger children
seldom had gone to church, and the eldest daughter had made queer unions.
By some means the village had to be kept pure. So on this, the first Lady-
Day on which the Durbeyfields were expellable, the house, being roomy,
was required for a carterfq with a large family; and Widow Joan, her
daughters Tess and ’Liza-Lu, the boy Abraham and the younger children,
had to go elsewhere.
On the evening preceding their removal it was getting dark betimes by
reason of a drizzling rain which blurred the sky. As it was the last night they
would spend in the village which had been their home and birthplace, Mrs
Durbeyfield, ’Liza-Lu, and Abraham had gone out to bid some friends
good-bye, and Tess was keeping house till they should return.
She was kneeling in the window-bench, her face close to the casement,
where an outer pane of rain-water was sliding down the inner pane of glass.
Her eyes rested on the web of a spider, probably starved long ago, which
had been mistakenly placed in a corner where no flies ever came, and
shivered in the slight draught through the casement. Tess was reflecting on
the position of the household, in which she perceived her own evil
influence. Had she not come home her mother and the children might
probably have been allowed to stay on as weekly tenants. But she had been
observed almost immediately on her return by some people of scrupulous
character and great influence: they had seen her idling in the churchyard,
restoring as well as she could with a little trowel a baby’s obliterated grave.
By this means they had found that she was living here again; her mother
was scolded for “harbouring” her; sharp retorts had ensued from Joan who
had independently offered to leave at once; she had been taken at her word;
and here was the result.
“I ought never to have come home,” said Tess to herself, bitterly.
She was so intent upon these thoughts that she hardly at first took note of
a man in a white mackintosh whom she saw riding down the street. Possibly
it was owing to her face being near to the pane that he saw her so quickly,
and directed his horse so close to the cottage-front that his hoofs were
almost upon the narrow border for plants growing under the wall. It was not
till he touched the window with his riding-crop that she observed him. The
rain had nearly ceased, and she opened the casement in obedience to his
gesture.
“Didn’t you see me?” asked d’Urberville.
“I was not attending,” she said. “I heard you, I believe, though I fancied it
was a carriage and horses. I was in a sort of dream.”
“Ah! you heard the d’Urberville Coach, perhaps. You know the legend, I
suppose?”
“No. My—somebody was going to tell it me once, but didn’t.”
“If you are a genuine d‘Urberville I ought not to tell you either, I suppose.
As for me, I’m a sham one, so it doesn’t matter. It is rather dismal. It is that
this sound of a non-existent coach can only be heard by one of d’Urberville
blood, and it is held to be of ill-omen to the one who hears it. It has to do
with a murder, committed by one of the family, centuries ago.”
“Now you have begun it, finish it.”
“Very well. One of the family is said to have abducted some beautiful
woman, who tried to escape from the coach in which he was carrying her
off, and in the struggle he killed her—or she killed him—I forget which.
Such is one version of the tale... I see that your tubs and buckets are packed.
Going away, aren’t you?”
“Yes, to-morrow—Old Lady-Day”
“I heard you were, but could hardly believe it; it seems so sudden. Why is
it?”
“Father’s was the last life on the property, and when that dropped we had
no further right to stay. Though we might, perhaps, have stayed as weekly
tenants—if it had not been for me.”
“What about you?”
“I am not a—proper woman.”
D’Urberville’s face flushed.
“What a blasted shame! Miserable snobs! May their dirty souls be burnt
to cinders!” he exclaimed in tones of ironic resentment. “That’s why you
are going, is it? Turned out?”
“We are not turned out exactly; but as they said we should have to go
soon, it was best to go now everybody was moving, because there are better
chances.”
“Where are you going to?”
“Kingsbere. We have taken rooms there. Mother is so foolish about
father’s people that she will go there.”
“But your mother’s family are not fit for lodgings, and in a litde hole of a
town like that. Now why not come to my garden-house at Trantridge? There
are hardly any poultry now, since my mother’s death; but there’s the house,
as you know it, and the garden. It can be whitewashed in a day, and your
mother can live there quite comfortably; and I will put the children to a
good school. Really I ought to do something for you!”
“But we have already taken the rooms at Kingsbere!” she declared. “And
we can wait there—”
“Wait—what for? For that nice husband, no doubt. Now look here, Tess, I
know what men are, and, bearing in mind the grounds of your separation, I
am quite positive he will never make it up with you. Now, though I have
been your enemy, I am your friend, even if you won’t believe it. Come to
this cottage of mine. We’ll get up a regular colony of fowls, and your
mother can attend to them excellently; and the children can go to school.”
Tess breathed more and more quickly, and at length she said—
“How do I know that you would do all this? Your views may change—
and then—we should be—my mother would be—homeless again.”
“Oh no—no. I would guarantee you against such as that in writing, if
necessary. Think it over.”
 Tess shook her head. But d’Urberville persisted; she had seldom seen him
so determined; he would not take a negative.
“Please just tell your mother,” he said, in emphatic tones. “It is her
business to judge—not yours. I shall get the house swept out and whitened
to-morrow morning, and fires lit; and it will be dry by the evening, so that
you can come straight there. Now mind, I shall expect you.”
Tess again shook her head; her throat swelling with complicated emotion.
She could not look up at d’Urberville.
“I owe you something for the past, you know,” he resumed. “And you
cured me, too, of that craze; so I am glad—”
“I would rather you had kept the craze, so that you had kept the practice
which went with it!”
“I am glad of this opportunity of repaying you a little. Tomorrow I shall
expect to hear your mother’s goods unloading ... Give me your hand on it
now—dear, beautiful Tess!”
With the last sentence be had dropped his voice to a murmur, and put his
hand in at the half-open casement. With stormy eyes she pulled the stay-bar
quickly, and, in doing so, caught his arm between the casement and the
stone mullion.
“Damnation—you are very cruel!” he said, snatching out his arm. “No,
no!—I know you didn’t do it on purpose. Well, I shall expect you, or your
mother and the children at least.”
“I shall not come—I have plenty of money!” she cried.
“Where?”
“At my father-in-law’s, if I ask for it.”
“If you ask for it. But you won’t, Tess; I know you; you’ll never ask for it
—you’ll starve first!”
With these words he rode off. Just at the corner of the street he met the
man with the paint-pot, who asked him if he had deserted the brethren.
“You go to the devil!” said d’Urberville.
Tess remained where she was a long while, till a sudden rebellious sense
of injustice caused the region of her eyes to swell with the rush of hot tears
thither. Her husband, Angel Clare himself, had, like others, dealt out hard
measure to her, surely he had! She had never before admitted such a
thought; but he had surely! Never in her life—she could swear it from the
bottom of her soul—had she ever intended to do wrong; yet these hard
judgments had come. Whatever her sins, they were not sins of intention, but
of inadvertence, and why should she have been punished so persistently?
She passionately seized the first piece of paper that came to hand, and
scribbled the following lines:
O why have you treated me so monstrously, Angel! I do not deserve it. I
have thought it all over carefully, and I can never, never forgive you! You
know that I did not intend to wrong you—why have you so wronged me?
You are cruel, cruel indeed! I will try to forget you. It is all injustice I have
received at your hands!
T.
She watched till the postman passed by, ran out to him with her epistle, and
then again took her listless place inside the window-panes.
It was just as well to write like that as to write tenderly. How could he
give way to entreaty? The facts had not changed: there was no new event to
alter his opinion.
It grew darker, the fire-light shining over the room. The two biggest of the
younger children had gone out with their mother; the four smallest, their
ages ranging from three-and-a-half years to eleven, all in black frocks, were
gathered round the hearth babbling their own little subjects. Tess at length
joined them, without lighting a candle.
“This is the last night that we shall sleep here, dears, in the house where
we were born,” she said quickly. “We ought to think of it, oughtn’t we?”
They all became silent; with the impressibility of their age they were
ready to burst into tears at the picture of finality she had conjured up,
though all the day hitherto they had been rejoicing in the idea of a new
place. Tess changed the subject.
“Sing to me, dears,” she said.
“What shall we sing?”
“Anything you know; I don’t mind.”
 There was a momentary pause; it was broken, first, by one little tentative
note; then a second voice strengthened it, and a third and a fourth chimed in
in unison, with words they had learnt at the Sunday-school—
Here we suffer grief and pain,
Here we meet to part again;
In Heaven we part no more.1
The four sang on with the phlegmatic passivity of persons who had long
ago settled the question, and there being no mistake about it, felt that further
thought was not required. With features strained hard to enunciate the
syllables they continued to regard the centre of the flickering fire, the notes
of the youngest straying over into the pauses of the rest.
Tess turned from them, and went to the window again. Darkness had now
fallen without, but she put her face to the pane as though to peer into the
gloom. It was really to hide her tears. If she could only believe what the
children were singing; if she were only sure, how different all would now
be; how confidently she would leave them to Providence and their future
kingdom! But, in default of that, it behoved her to do something; to be their
Providence; for to Tess, as to not a few millions of others, there was ghastly
satire in the poet’s lines—
Not in utter nakedness
But trailing clouds of glory do we come.2
To her and her like, birth itself was an ordeal of degrading personal
compulsion, whose gratuitousness nothing in the result seemed to justify,
and at best could only palliate.
In the shades of the wet road she soon discerned her mother with tall
’Liza-Lu and Abraham. Mrs Durbeyfield’s pattensfr clicked up to the door,
and Tess opened it.
“I see the tracks of a horse outside the window,” said Joan. “Hev
somebody called?”
“No,” said Tess.
The children by the fire looked gravely at her, and one murmured—
“Why, Tess, the gentleman a-horseback!”
“He didn’t call,” said Tess. “He spoke to me in passing.”
 “Who was the gentleman?” asked her mother. “Your husband?”
“No. He’ll never, never come,” answered Tess in stony hopelessness.
“Then who was it?”
“Oh, you needn’t ask. You’ve seen him before, and so have I.”
“Ah! What did he say?” said Joan curiously.
“I will tell you when we are settled in our lodgings at Kingsbere to-
morrow—every word.”
It was not her husband, she had said. Yet a consciousness that in a
physical sense this man alone was her husband seemed to weigh on her
more and more.
 LII
DURING THE SMALL HOURS of the next morning, while it was still
dark, dwellers near the highways were conscious of a disturbance of their
night’s rest by rumbling noises, intermittently continuing till daylight—
noises as certain to recur in this particular first week of the month as the
voice of the cuckoo in the third week of the same. They were the
preliminaries of the general removal, the passing of the empty waggons and
teams to fetch the goods of the migrating families; for it was always by the
vehicle of the farmer who required his services that the hired man was
conveyed to his destination. That this might be accomplished within the day
was the explanation of the reverberation occurring so soon after midnight,
the aim of the carters being to reach the door of the outgoing households by
six o’clock, when the loading of their movables at once began.
But to Tess and her mother’s household no such anxious farmer sent his
team. They were only women; they were not regular labourers; they were
not particularly required anywhere; hence they had to hire a waggon at their
own expense, and got nothing sent gratuitously.
It was a relief to Tess, when she looked out of the window that morning,
to find that though the weather was windy and louring, fs it did not rain, and
that the waggon had come. A wet LadyDay was a spectre which removing
families never forgot; damp furniture, damp bedding, damp clothing
accompanied it, and left a train of ills.
Her mother, ’Liza-Lu, and Abraham were also awake, but the younger
children were let sleep on. The four breakfasted by the thin light, and the
“house-ridding” was taken in hand.
It proceeded with some cheerfulness, a friendly neighbour or two
assisting. When the large articles of furniture had been packed in position a
circular nest was made of the beds and bedding, in which Joan Durbeyfield
and the young children were to sit through the journey. After loading there
was a long delay before the horses were brought, these having been
unharnessed during the ridding; but at length, about two o’clock, the whole
was under way, the cooking-pot swinging from the axle of the waggon, Mrs
Durbeyfield and family at the top, the matron having in her lap, to prevent
injury to its works, the head of the clock, which, at any exceptional lurch of
the waggon, struck one, or one-and-a-half, in hurt tones. Tess and the next
eldest girl walked alongside till they were out of the village.
They had called on a few neighbours that morning and the previous
evening, and some came to see them off, all wishing them well, though, in
their secret hearts, hardly expecting welfare possible to such a family,
harmless as the Durbeyfields were to all except themselves. Soon the
equipage began to ascend to higher ground, and the wind grew keener with
the change of level and soil.
The day being the sixth of April, the Durbeyfield waggon met many other
waggons with families on the summit of the load, which was built on a
wellnigh unvarying principle, as peculiar, probably, to the rural labourer as
the hexagon to the bee. The groundwork of the arrangement was the family
dresser, which, with its shining handles, and finger-marks, and domestic
evidences thick upon it, stood importantly in front, over the tails of the
shaft-horses, in its erect and natural position, like some Ark of the
Covenant1 that they were bound to carry reverently.
Some of the households were lively, some mournful; some were stopping
at the doors of wayside inns; where, in due time, the Durbeyfield menagerie
also drew up to bait horses and refresh the travellers.
During the halt Tess’s eyes fell upon a three-pint blue mug, which was
ascending and descending through the air to and from the feminine section
of a household, sitting on the summit of a load that had also drawn up at a
little distance from the same inn. She followed one of the mug’s journeys
upward, and perceived it to be clasped by hands whose owner she well
knew. Tess went towards the waggon.
“Marian and Izz!” she cried to the girls, for it was they, sitting with the
moving family at whose house they had lodged. “Are you house-ridding to-
day, like everybody else?”
They were, they said. It had been too rough a life for them at Flintcomb-
Ash, and they had come away, almost without notice, leaving Groby to
prosecute them if he chose. They told Tess their destination, and Tess told
them hers.
Marian leant over the load, and lowered her voice. “Do you know that the
gentleman who follows ’ee—you’ll guess who I mean—came to ask for ee
at Flintcomb after you had gone? We didn’t tell’n where you was, knowing
you wouldn’t wish to see him.”
“Ah—but I did see him!” Tess murmured. “He found me.”
“And do he know where you be going?”
“I think so.”
“Husband come back?”
“No.”
She bade her acquaintance good-bye—for the respective carters had now
come out from the inn—and the two waggons resumed their journey in
opposite directions; the vehicle whereon sat Marian, Izz, and the
ploughman’s family with whom they had thrown in their lot, being brightly
painted, and drawn by three powerful horses with shining brass ornaments
on their harness; while the waggon on which Mrs Durbeyfield and her
family rode was a creaking erection that would scarcely bear the weight of
the superincumbent load; one which had known no paint since it was made,
and drawn by two horses only. The contrast well marked the difference
between being fetched by a thriving farmer and conveying oneself whither
no hirer waited one’s coming.
The distance was great—too great for a day’s journey—and it was with
the utmost difficulty that the horses performed it. Though they had started
so early it was quite late in the afternoon when they turned the flank of an
eminence which formed part of the upland called Greenhill. While the
horses stood to stale and breathe themselves Tess looked around. Under the
hill, and just ahead of them, was the half-dead townlet of their pilgrimage,
Kingsbere, where lay those ancestors of whom her father had spoken and
sung to painfulness: Kingsbere, the spot of all spots in the world which
could be considered the d’Urbervilles’ home, since they had resided there
for full five hundred years.
A man could be seen advancing from the outskirts towards them, and
when he beheld the nature of their waggon-load he quickened his steps.
“You be the woman they call Mrs Durbeyfield, I reckon?” he said to
Tess’s mother, who had descended to walk the remainder of the way.
She nodded. “Though widow of the late Sir John d’Urberville, poor
nobleman, if I cared for my rights; and returning to the domain of his
forefathers.”
“Oh? Well, I know nothing about that; but if you be Mrs Durbeyfield, I
am sent to tell ‘ee that the rooms you wanted be let. We didn’t know you
was coming till we got your letter this morning—when ’twas too late. But
no doubt you can get other lodgings somewhere.”
The man had noticed the face of Tess, which had become ash-pale at his
intelligence. Her mother looked hopelessly at fault. “What shall we do now,
Tess?” she said bitterly. “Here’s a welcome to your ancestors’ lands!
However, let’s try further.”
They moved on into the town, and tried with all their might, Tess
remaining with the waggon to take care of the children whilst her mother
and ’Liza-Lu made inquiries. At the last return of Joan to the vehicle, an
hour later, when her search for accommodation had still been fruitless, the
driver of the waggon said the goods must be unloaded, as the horses were
half-dead, and he was bound to return part of the way at least that night.
“Very well—unload it here,” said Joan recklessly. “I’ll get shelter
somewhere.”
The waggon had drawn up under the churchyard wall, in a spot screened
from view, and the driver, nothing loth, soon hauled down the poor heap of
household goods. This done she paid him, reducing herself to almost her
last shilling thereby, and he moved off and left them, only too glad to get
out of further dealings with such a family. It was a dry night, and he
guessed that they would come to no harm.
Tess gazed desperately at the pile of furniture. The cold sunlight of this
spring evening peered invidiously upon the crocks and kettles, upon the
bunches of dried herbs shivering in the breeze, upon the brass handles of the
dresser, upon the wicker-cradle they had all been rocked in, and upon the
well-rubbed clock-case, all of which gave out the reproachful gleam of
indoor articles abandoned to the vicissitudes of a roofless exposure for
which they were never made. Round about were deparkedft hills and slopes
—now cut up into little paddocks—and the green foundations that showed
where the d‘Urberville mansion once had stood; also an outlying stretch of
Egdon Heath that had always belonged to the estate. Hard by, the aisle of
the church called the d’Urberville Aisle looked on imperturbably.
 “Isn’t your family vault your own freehold?” said Tess’s mother, as she
returned from a reconnoitre of the church and graveyard. “Why of course
‘tis, and that’s where we will camp, girls, till the place of your ancestors
finds us a roof! Now Tess and ’Liza and Abraham, you help me. We’ll
make a nest for these children, and then we’ll have another look round.”
Tess listlessly lent a hand, and in a quarter of an hour the old four-post
bedstead was dissociated from the heap of goods, and erected under the
south wall of the church, the part of the building known as the d‘Urberville
Aisle, beneath which the huge vaults lay. Over the tester of the bedstead
was a beautifully traceried window, of many lights, its date being the
fifteenth century. It was called the d’Urberville Window, and in the upper
part could be discerned heraldic emblems like those on Durbeyfield’s old
seal and spoon.
Joan drew the curtains round the bed so as to make an excellent tent of it,
and put the smaller children inside. “If it comes to the worst we can sleep
there too, for one night,” she said. “But let us try further on, and get
something for the dears to eat! O, Tess, what’s the use of your playing at
marrying gentlemen, if it leaves us like this!”
Accompanied by ’Liza-Lu and the boy she again ascended the little lane
which secluded the church from the townlet. As soon as they got into the
street they beheld a man on horseback gazing up and down. “Ah—I’m
looking for you!” he said, riding up to them. “This is indeed a family
gathering on the historic spot!”
It was Alec d’Urberville. “Where is Tess?” he asked.
Personally Joan had no liking for Alec. She cursorily signified that
direction of the church, and went on, d‘Urberville saying that he would see
them again, in case they should be still unsuccessful in their search for
shelter, of which he had just heard. When they had gone d’Urberville rode
to the inn, and shortly after came out on foot.
In the interim Tess, left with the children inside the bedstead, remained
talking with them awhile, till, seeing that no more could be done to make
them comfortable just then, she walked about the churchyard, now
beginning to be embrowned by the shades of nightfall. The door of the
church was unfastened, and she entered it for the first time in her life.
 Within the window under which the bedstead stood were the tombs of the
family, covering in their dates several centuries. They were canopied, altar-
shaped, and plain; their carvings being defaced and broken; their brasses
torn from the matrices, the rivet-holes remaining like marten-holes in a
sand-cliff. Of all the reminders that she had ever received that her people
were socially extinct there was none so forcible as this spoliation.
She drew near to a dark stone on which was inscribed:

Ostium sepulchri antiquae familiae d’Urbervillefu

Tess did not read Church-Latin like a Cardinal, but she knew that this was
the door of her ancestral sepulchre, and that the tall knights of whom her
father had chanted in his cups lay inside.
She musingly turned to withdraw, passing near an altar-tomb, the oldest of
them all, on which was a recumbent figure. In the dusk she had not noticed
it before, and would hardly have noticed it now but for an odd fancy that the
effigy moved. As soon as she drew close to it she discovered all in a
moment that the figure was a living person; and the shock to her sense of
not having been alone was so violent that she was quite overcome, and sank
down nigh to fainting, not however till she had recognized Alec
d’Urberville in the form.
He leapt off the slab and supported her.
“I saw you come in,” he said smiling, “and got up there not to interrupt
your meditations. A family gathering, is it not, with these old fellows under
us here? Listen.”
He stamped with his heel heavily on the floor; whereupon there arose a
hollow echo from below.
“That shook them a bit, I’ll warrant!” he continued. “And you thought I
was the mere stone reproduction of one of them. But no. The old order
changeth.2 The little finger of the sham d’Urberville can do more for you
than the whole dynasty of the real underneath ... Now command me. What
shall I do?”
 “Go away!” she murmured.
“I will—I’ll look for your mother,” said he blandly. But in passing her he
whispered: “Mind this; you’ll be civil yet!”
When he was gone she bent down upon the entrance to the vaults, and
said—
“Why am I on the wrong side of this door!”

In the meantime Marian and Izz Huett had journeyed onward with the
chattels of the ploughman in the direction of their land of Canaanfv—the
Egypt of some other family who had left it only that morning. But the girls
did not for a long time think of where they were going. Their talk was of
Angel Clare and Tess, and Tess’s persistent lover, whose connection with
her previous history they had partly heard and partly guessed ere this.
“’Tisn’t as though she had never known him afore,” said Marian. “His
having won her once makes all the difference in the world. ’Twould be a
thousand pities if he were to tolefw her away again. Mr Clare can never be
anything to us, Izz; and why should we grudge him to her, and not try to
mend this quarrel? If he could on’y know what straits she’s put to, and
what’s hovering round, he might come to take care of his own.”
“Could we let him know?”
They thought of this all the way to their destination; but the bustle of re-
establishment in their new place took up all their attention then. But when
they were settled, a month later, they heard of Clare’s approaching return,
though they had learnt nothing more of Tess. Upon that, agitated anew by
their attachment to him, yet honourably disposed to her, Marian uncorked
the penny ink-bottle they shared, and a few lines were concocted between
the two girls.
Honour’d Sir

Look to your Wife if you do love her as much as she do love you. For she is
sore put to by an Enemy in the shape of a Friend. Sir, there is one near her
who ought to be Away. A woman should not be try’d beyond her Strength,
and continual dropping will wear away a Stone—ay, more—a Diamond.
From Two Well-Wishers.
This they addressed to Angel Clare at the only place they had ever heard
him to be connected with, Emminster Vicarage; after which they continued
in a mood of emotional exaltation at their own generosity which made them
sing in hysterical snatches and weep at the same time.

END OF PHASE THE SIXTH

PHASE THE SEVENTH

FULFILMENT
 LIII
IT WAS EVENING AT Emminster Vicarage. The two customary candles
were burning under their green shades in the Vicar’s study, but he had not
been sitting there. Occasionally he came in, stirred the small fire which
sufficed for the increasing mildness of the spring, and went out again;
sometimes pausing at the front door, going on to the drawing-room, then
returning again to the front door.
It faced westward, and though gloom prevailed inside, there was still light
enough without to see with distinctness. Mrs Clare, who had been sitting in
the drawing-room, followed him hither.
“Plenty of time yet,” said the Vicar. “He doesn’t reach Chalk-Newton till
six, even if the train should be punctual, and ten miles of country-road, five
of them in Crimmercrock Lane, are not jogged over in a hurry by our old
horse.”
“But he has done it in an hour with us, my dear.”
“Years ago.”
Thus they passed the minutes, each well knowing that this was only waste
of breath, the one essential being simply to wait.
At length there was a slight noise in the lane, and the old pony-chaise
appeared indeed outside the railings. They saw alight therefrom a form
which they affected to recognize, but would actually have passed by in the
street without identifying had he not got out of their carriage at the
particular moment when a particular person was due.
Mrs Clare rushed through the dark passage to the door, and her husband
came more slowly after her.
The new arrival, who was just about to enter, saw their anxious faces in
the doorway and the gleam of the west in their spectacles because they
confronted the last rays of day; but they could only see his shape against the
light.
“O, my boy, my boy—home again at last!” cried Mrs Clare, who cared no
more at that moment for the stains of heterodoxy which had caused all this
separation than for the dust upon his clothes. What woman, indeed, among
the most faithful adherents of the truth, believes the promises and threats of
the Word in the sense in which she believes in her own children, or would
not throw her theology to the wind if weighed against their happiness? As
soon as they reached the room where the candles were lighted she looked at
his face.
“O, it is not Angel—not my son—the Angel who went away!” she cried
in all the irony of sorrow, as she turned herself aside.
His father, too, was shocked to see him, so reduced was that figure from
its former contours by worry and the bad season that Clare had experienced,
in the climate to which he had so rashly hurried in his first aversion to the
mockery of events at home. You could see the skeleton behind the man, and
almost the ghost behind the skeleton. He matched Crivelli’s dead Christus.fx
His sunken eye-pits were of morbid hue, and the light in his eyes had
waned. The angular hollows and lines of his aged ancestors had succeeded
to their reign in his face twenty years before their time.
“I was ill over there, you know,” he said. “I am all right now.”
As if, however, to falsify this assertion, his legs seemed to give way, and
he suddenly sat down to save himself from falling. It was only a slight
attack of faintness, resulting from the tedious day’s journey, and the
excitement of arrival.
“Has any letter come for me lately?” he asked. “I received the last you
sent on by the merest chance, and after considerable delay through being
inland; or I might have come sooner.”
“It was from your wife, we supposed?”
“It was.”
Only one other had recently come. They had not sent it on to him,
knowing he would start for home so soon.
He hastily opened the letter produced, and was much disturbedto read in
Tess’s handwriting the sentiments expressed in her last hurried scrawl to
him.
O why have you treated me so monstrously, Angel! I do not deserve it. I
have thought it all over carefully, and I can never, never forgive you! You
know that I did not intend to wrong you—why have you so wronged me?
You are cruel, cruel indeed! I will try to forget you. It is all injustice I have
received at your hands! T.
“It is quite true!” said Angel, throwing down the letter. “Perhaps she will
never be reconciled to me!”
“Don’t, Angel, be so anxious about a mere child of the soil!” said his
mother.
“Child of the soil! Well, we all are children of the soil. I wish she were so
in the sense you mean; but let me now explain to you what I have never
explained before, that her father is a descendant in the male line of one of
the oldest Norman houses, like a good many others who lead obscure
agricultural lives in our villages, and are dubbed ‘sons of the soil!’ ”1
He soon retired to bed; and the next morning, feeling exceedingly unwell,
he remained in his room pondering. The circumstances amid which he had
left Tess were such that though, while on the south of the Equator and just
in receipt of her loving epistle, it had seemed the easiest thing in the world
to rush back to her arms the moment he chose to forgive her, now that he
had arrived it was not so easy as it had seemed. She was passionate, and her
present letter, showing that her estimate of him had changed under his delay
—too justly changed, he sadly owned,—made him ask himself if it would
be wise to confront her unannounced in the presence of her parents.
Supposing that her love had indeed turned to dislike during the last weeks
of separation, a sudden meeting might lead to bitter words.
Clare therefore thought it would be best to prepare Tess and her family by
sending a line to Marlott announcing his return, and his hope that she was
still living with them there, as he had arranged for her to do when he left
England. He despatched the inquiry that very day, and before the week was
out there came a short reply from Mrs Durbeyfield which did not remove
his embarrassment, for it bore no address, though to his surprise it was not
written from Marlott.
Sir

J write these few lines to say that my Daughter is away from me at present,
and J am not sure when she will return, but J will let you know as Soon as
she do. J do not feel at liberty to tell you Where she is temperly biding. J
should say that me and my Family have left Marlott for some Time.—
Yours,

J. Durbeyfield
It was such a relief to Clare to learn that Tess was at least apparently well
that her mother’s stiff reticence as to her whereabouts did not long distress
him. They were all angry with him, evidently. He would wait till Mrs
Durbeyfield could inform him of Tess’s return, which her letter implied to
be soon. He deserved no more. His had been a love “which alters when it
alteration finds.”2 He had undergone some strange experiences in his
absence; he had seen the virtual Faustina in the literal Cornelia, a spiritual
Lucretia in a corporeal Phryne;3 he had thought of the woman taken and set
in the midst as one deserving to be stoned,4 and the wife of Uriah being
made a queen;5 and he had asked himself why he had not judged Tess
constructively rather than biographically, by the will rather than by the
deed?
A day or two passed while he waited at his father’s house for the
promised second note from Joan Durbeyfield, and indirectly to recover a
little more strength. The strength showed signs of coming back, but there
was no sign of Joan’s letter. Then he hunted up the old letter sent to him in
Brazil, which Tess had written from Flintcomb-Ash, and re-read it. The
sentences touched him now as much as when he had first perused them.
I must cry to you in my trouble—I have no one else ... I think I must die if
you do not come soon, or tell me to come to you ... Please, please not to be
just; only a little kind to me! ... If you would come I could die in your arms!
I would be well content to do that if so be you had forgiven me! ... If you
will send me one little line and say, I am coming soon, I will bide on,
Angel, O so cheerfully! ... Think how it do hurt my heart not to see you
ever, ever! Ah, if I could only make your dear heart ache one little minute
of each day as mine does every day and all day long, it might lead you to
show pity to your poor lonely one ... I would be content, ay, glad, to live
with you as your servant, if I may not as your wife; so that I could only be
near you, and get glimpses of you, and think of you as mine ... I long for
only one thing in heaven, or earth, or under the earth, to meet you, my own
dear! Come to me, come to me, and save me from what threatens me.
Clare determined that he would no longer believe in her more recent and
severer regard of him; but would go and find her immediately. He asked his
father if she had applied for any money during his absence. His father
returned a negative, and then for the first time it occurred to Angel that her
pride had stood in her way, and that she had suffered privation. From his
remarks his parents now gathered the real reason of the separation; and their
Christianity was such that, reprobates being their especial care, the
tenderness towards Tess which her blood, her simplicity, even her poverty,
had not engendered, was instantly excited by her sin.
Whilst he was hastily packing together a few articles for his journey he
glanced over a poor plain missive also lately come to hand—the one from
Marian and Izz Huett, beginning—
“HONOUR’D SIR—Look to your wife if you do love her as much as she
do you,” and signed, “FROM Two WELL-WISHERS.”
 LIV
IN A QUARTER OF an hour Clare was leaving the house, whence his
mother watched his thin figure as it disappeared into the street. He had
declined to borrow his father’s old mare, well knowing of its necessity to
the household. He went to the inn, where he hired a trap, and could hardly
wait during the harnessing. In a very few minutes after he was driving up
the hill out of the town which, three or four months earlier in the year, Tess
had descended with such hopes and ascended with such shattered purposes.
Benvill Lane soon stretched before him, its hedges and trees purple with
buds; but he was looking at other things, and only recalled himself to the
scene sufficiently to enable him to keep the way. In something less than an
hour-and-a-half he had skirted the south of the King’s Hintock estates and
ascended to the untoward solitude of Cross-in-Hand, the unholy stone
whereon Tess had been compelled by Alec d’Urberville, in his whim of
reformation, to swear the strange oath that she would never wilfully tempt
him again. The pale and blasted nettle-stems of the preceding year even
now lingered nakedly in the banks, young green nettles of the present spring
growing from their roots.
Thence he went along the verge of the upland overhanging the other
Hintocks, and, turning to the right, plunged into the bracing calcareous
region of Flintcomb-Ash, the address from which she had written to him in
one of the letters, and which he supposed to be the place of sojourn referred
to by her mother. Here, of course, he did not find her; and what added to his
depression was the discovery that no “Mrs Clare” had ever been heard of by
the cottagers or by the farmer himself, though Tess was remembered well
enough by her Christian name. His name she had obviously never used
during their separation, and her dignified sense of their total severance was
shown not much less by this abstention than by the hardships she had
chosen to undergo (of which he now learnt for the first time) rather than
apply to his father for more funds.
From this place they told him Tess Durbeyfield had gone, without due
notice, to the home of her parents on the other side of Blackmoor, and it
therefore became necessary to find Mrs Durbeyfield. She had told him she
was not now at Marlott, but had been curiously reticent as to her actual
address, and the only course was to go to Marlott and inquire for it. The
farmer who had been so churlish with Tess was quite smooth-tongued to
Clare, and lent him a horse and man to drive him towards Marlott, the gig
he had arrived in being sent back to Emminster; for the limit of a day’s
journey with that horse was reached.
Clare would not accept the loan of the farmer’s vehicle for a further
distance than to the outskirts of the Vale, and, sending it back with the man
who had driven him, he put up at an inn, and next day entered on foot the
region wherein was the spot of his dear Tess’s birth. It was as yet too early
in the year for much colour to appear in the gardens and foliage; the so-
called spring was but winter overlaid with a thin coat of greenness, and it
was of a parcel with his expectations.
The house in which Tess had passed the years of her childhood was now
inhabited by another family who had never known her. The new residents
were in the garden, taking as much interest in their own doings as if the
homestead had never passed its primal time in conjunction with the
histories of others, beside which the histories of these were but as a tale told
by an idiot.1 They walked about the garden paths with thoughts of their own
concerns entirely uppermost, bringing their actions at every moment into
jarring collision with the dim ghosts behind them, talking as though the
time when Tess lived there were not one whit intenser in story than now.
Even the spring birds sang over their heads as if they thought there was
nobody missing in particular.
On inquiry of these precious innocents, to whom even the name of their
predecessors was a failing memory, Clare learned that John Durbeyfield
was dead; that his widow and children had left Marlott, declaring that they
were going to live at Kingsbere, but instead of doing so had gone on to
another place they mentioned. By this time Clare abhorred the house for
ceasing to contain Tess, and hastened away from its hated presence without
once looking back.
His way was by the field in which he had first beheld her at the dance. It
was as bad as the house—even worse. He passed on through the
churchyard, where, amongst the new headstones, he saw one of a somewhat
superior design to the rest. The inscription ran thus:
In memory of John Durbeyfield, rightly d‘Urberville, of the once powerful
family of that Name, and Direct Descendant through an Illustrious Line
from Sir Pagan d’Urberville, one of the Knights of the Conqueror. Died
March 10th, 18—
HOW ARE THE MIGHTY FALLEN.2
Some man, apparently the sexton, had observed Clare standing there, and
drew nigh. “Ah, sir, now that’s a man who didn’t want to lie here, but
wished to be carried to Kingsbere, where his ancestors be.”
“And why didn’t they respect his wish?”
“Oh—no money. Bless your soul, sir, why—there, I wouldn’t wish to say
it everywhere, but—even this headstone, for all the flourish wrote upon en,
is not paid for.”
“Ah, who put it up?”
The man told the name of a mason in the village, and, on leaving the
churchyard, Clare called at the mason’s house. He found that the statement
was true, and paid the bill. This done he turned in the direction of the
migrants.
The distance was too long for a walk, but Clare felt such a strong desire
for isolation that at first he would neither hire a conveyance nor go to a
circuitous line of railway by which he might eventually reach the place. At
Shaston, however, he found he must hire; but the way was such that he did
not enter Joan’s place till about seven o’clock in the evening, having
traversed a distance of over twenty miles since leaving Marlott.
The village being small he had little difficulty in finding Mrs
Durbeyfield’s tenement, which was a house in a walled garden, remote from
the main road, where she had stowed away her clumsy old furniture as best
she could. It was plain that for some reason or other she had not wished him
to visit her, and he felt his call to be somewhat of an intrusion. She came to
the door herself, and the light from the evening sky fell upon her face.
This was the first time that Clare had ever met her, but he was too
preoccupied to observe more than that she was still a handsome woman, in
the garb of a respectable widow. He was obliged to explain that he was
Tess’s husband, and his object in coming there, and he did it awkwardly
enough. “I want to see her at once,” he added. “You said you would write to
me again, but you have not done so.”
“Because she’ve not come home,” said Joan.
“Do you know if she is well?”
“I don’t. But you ought to, sir,” said she.
“I admit it. Where is she staying?”
From the beginning of the interview Joan had disclosed her
embarrassment by keeping her hand to the side of her cheek.
“I—don’t know exactly where she is staying,” she answered. “She was—
but—”
“Where was she?”
“Well, she is not there now.”
In her evasiveness she paused again, and the younger children had by this
time crept to the door, where, pulling at his mother’s skirts, the youngest
murmured—
“Is this the gentleman who is going to marry Tess?”
“He has married her,” Joan whispered. “Go inside.”
Clare saw her efforts for reticence, and asked—
“Do you think Tess would wish me to try and find her? If not, of course
—”
“I don’t think she would.”
“Are you sure?”
“I am sure she wouldn’t.”
He was turning away; and then he thought of Tess’s tender letter.
“I am sure she would!” he retorted passionately. “I know her better than
you do.”
“That’s very likely, sir; for I have never really known her.”
“Please tell me her address, Mrs Durbeyfield, in kindness to a lonely
wretched man!”
 Tess’s mother again restlessly swept her cheek with her vertical hand, and
seeing that he suffered, she at last said, in a low voice—
“She is at Sandbourne.”
“Ah—where there? Sandbourne has become a large place, they say.”
“I don’t know more particularly than I have said—Sand—bourne. For
myself, I was never there.”
It was apparent that Joan spoke the truth in this, and he pressed her no
further.
“Are you in want of anything?” he said gently.
“No, sir,” she replied. “We are fairly well provided for.”
Without entering the house Clare turned away. There was a station three
miles ahead, and paying off his coachman, he walked thither. The last train
to Sandbourne left shortly after, and it bore Clare on its wheels.
 LV
AT ELEVEN O’CLOCK THAT night, having secured a bed at one of the
hotels and telegraphed his address to his father immediately on his arrival,
he walked out into the streets of Sandbourne. It was too late to call on or
inquire for any one, and he reluctantly postponed his purpose till the
morning. But he could not retire to rest just yet.
This fashionable watering-place, with its eastern and its western stations,
its piers, its groves of pines, its promenades, and its covered gardens, was,
to Angel Clare, like a fairy place suddenly created by the stroke of a wand,
and allowed to get a littly dusty. An outlying eastern tract of the enormous
Egdon Waste was close at hand, yet on the very verge of that tawny piece of
antiquity such a glittering novelty as this pleasure city had chosen to spring
up. Within the space of a mile from its outskirts every irregularity of the soil
was prehistoric, every channel an undisturbed British trackway; not a sod
having been turned there since the days of the Caesars.fy Yet the exotic had
grown here, suddenly as the prophet’s gourd;1 and had drawn hither Tess.
By the midnight lamps he went up and down the winding ways of this
new world in an old one, and could discern between the trees and against
the stars the lofty roofs, chimneys, gazebos, and towers of the numerous
fanciful residences of which the place was composed. It was a city of
detached mansions; a Mediterranean lounging-place on the English
Channel; and as seen now by night it seemed even more imposing than it
was.
The sea was near at hand, but not intrusive; it murmured, and he thought
it was the pines; the pines murmured in precisely the same tones, and he
thought they were the sea.
Where could Tess possibly be, a cottage-girl, his young wife, amidst all
this wealth and fashion? The more he pondered the more was he puzzled.
Were there any cows to milk here? There certainly were no fields to till. She
was most probably engaged to do something in one of these large houses;
and he sauntered along, looking at the chamber-windows and their lights
going out one by one; and wondered which of them might be hers.
 Conjecture was useless, and just after twelve o’clock he entered and went
to bed. Before putting out his light he re-read Tess’s impassioned letter.
Sleep, however, he could not,—so near her, yet so far from her—and he
continually lifted the window-blind and regarded the backs of the opposite
houses, and wondered behind which of the sashes she reposed at that
moment.
He might almost as well have sat up all night. In the morning he arose at
seven, and shortly after went out, taking the direction of the chief post-
office. At the door he met an intelligent postman coming out with letters for
the morning delivery.
“Do you know the address of a Mrs Clare?” asked Angel.
The postman shook his head. Then, remembering that she would have
been likely to continue the use of her name, Clare said—
“Or a Miss Durbeyfield?”
“Durbeyfield?”
This also was strange to the postman addressed.
“There’s visitors coming and going every day, as you know, sir,” he said;
“and without the name of the house ‘tis impossible to find ’em.”
One of his comrades hastening out at that moment, the name was repeated
to him.
“I know no name of Durbeyfield; but there is the name of d’Urberville at
The Herons,” said the second.
“That’s it!” cried Clare, pleased to think that she had reverted to the real
pronunciation. “What place is The Herons?”
“A stylish lodging-house. ‘Tis all lodging-houses here, bless ’ee.”
Clare received directions how to find the house, and hastened thither,
arriving with the milkman. The Herons, though an ordinary villa, stood in
its own grounds, and was certainly the last place in which one would have
expected to find lodgings, so private was its appearance. If poor Tess was a
servant here, as he feared, she would go to the back-door to that milkman,
and he was inclined to go thither also. However, in his doubts he turned to
the front, and rang.
 The hour being early the landlady herself opened the door. Clare inquired
for Teresa d’Urberville or Durbeyfield.
“Mrs d’Urberville?”
“Yes.”
Tess, then, passed as a married woman, and he felt glad even though she
had not adopted his name.
“Will you kindly tell her that a relative is anxious to see her?”
“It is rather early. What name shall I give, sir?”
“Angel.”
“Mr Angel?”
“No; Angel. It is my Christian name. She’ll understand.”
“I’ll see if she is awake.”
He was shown into the front room—the dining-room—and looked out
through the spring curtains at the little lawn, and the rhododendrons and
other shrubs upon it. Obviously her position was by no means so bad as he
had feared, and it crossed his mind that she must somehow have claimed
and sold the jewels to attain it. He did not blame her for one moment. Soon
his sharpened ear detected footsteps upon the stairs, at which his heart
thumped so painfully that he could hardly stand firm. “Dear me! what will
she think of me, so altered as I am!” he said to himself; and the door
opened.
Tess appeared on the threshold—not at all as he had expected to see her—
bewilderingly otherwise, indeed. Her great natural beauty was, if not
heightened, rendered more obvious by her attire. She was loosely wrapped
in a cashmere dressing-gown of gray-white, embroidered in half-mourning
tints,fz and she wore slippers of the same hue. Her neck rose out of a frill of
down, and her well-remembered cable of dark-brown hair was partially
coiled up in a mass at the back of her head and partly hanging on her
shoulder—the evident result of haste.
He had held out his arms, but they had fallen again to his side; for she had
not come forward, remaining still in the opening of the doorway. Mere
yellow skeleton that he was now he felt the contrast between them, and
thought his appearance distasteful to her.
 “Tess!” he said huskily, “can you forgive me for going away? Can’t you—
come to me? How do you get to be—like this?”
“It is too late,” said she, her voice sounding hard through the room, her
eyes shining unnaturally.
“I did not think rightly of you—I did not see you as you were!” he
continued to plead. “I have learnt to since, dearest Tessy mine! ”
“Too late, too late!” she said, waving her hand in the impatience of a
person whose tortures cause every instant to seem an hour. “Don’t come
close to me, Angel! No—you must not. Keep away.”
“But don’t you love me, my dear wife, because I have been so pulled
down by illness? You are not so fickle—I am come on purpose for you—
my mother and father will welcome you now!”
“Yes—O, yes, yes! But I say, I say it is too late.”
She seemed to feel like a fugitive in a dream, who tries to move away, but
cannot. “Don’t you know all—don’t you know it? Yet how do you come
here if you do not know?”
“I inquired here and there, and I found the way.”
“I waited and waited for you,” she went on, her tones suddenly resuming
their old fluty pathos. “But you did not come! And I wrote to you, and you
did not come! He kept on saying you would never come any more, and that
I was a foolish woman. He was very kind to me, and to mother, and to all of
us after father’s death. He—”
“I don’t understand.”
“He has won me back to him.”
Clare looked at her keenly, then, gathering her meaning, flagged like one
plague-stricken, and his glance sank; it fell on her hands, which, once rosy,
were now white and more delicate.
She continued—
“He is upstairs. I hate him now, because he told me a lie—that you would
not come again; and you have come! These clothes are what he’s put upon
me: I didn’t care what he did wi’ me! But—will you go away, Angel,
please, and never come any more?”
 They stood fixed, their baffled hearts looking out of their eyes with a
joylessness pitiful to see. Both seemed to implore something to shelter them
from reality.
“Ah—it is my fault!” said Clare.
But he could not get on. Speech was as inexpressive as silence. But he
had a vague consciousness of one thing, though it was not clear to him till
later; that his original Tess had spiritually ceased to recognize the body
before him as hers—allowing it to drift, like a corpse upon the current, in a
direction dissociated from its living will.
A few instants passed, and he found that Tess was gone. His face grew
colder and more shrunken as he stood concentrated on the moment, and a
minute or two after he found himself in the street, walking along he did not
know whither.
 LVI
MRS BROOKS, THE LADY who was the householder at The Herons, and
owner of all the handsome furniture, was not a person of an unusually
curious turn of mind. She was too deeply materialized, poor woman, by her
long and enforced bondage to that arithmetical demon Profit-and-Loss, to
retain much curiosity for its own sake, and apart from possible lodgers’
pockets. Nevertheless, the visit of Angel Clare to her well-paying tenants,
Mr and Mrs d’Urberville, as she deemed them, was sufficiently exceptional
in point of time and manner to reinvigorate the feminine proclivity which
had been stifled down as useless save in its bearings on the letting trade.
Tess had spoken to her husband from the doorway, without entering the
dining-room, and Mrs Brooks, who stood with the partly-closed door of her
own sitting-room at the back of the passage, could hear fragments of the
conversation—if conversation it could be called—between those two
wretched souls. She heard Tess re-ascend the stairs to the first floor, and the
departure of Clare, and the closing of the front door behind him. Then the
door of the room above was shut, and Mrs Brooks knew that Tess had
reentered her apartment. As the young lady was not fully dressed Mrs
Brooks knew that she would not emerge again for some time.
She accordingly ascended the stairs softly, and stood at the door of the
front room—a drawing-room, connected with the room immediately behind
it (which was a bedroom) by folding-doors in the common manner. This
first floor, containing Mrs Brooks’s best apartments, had been taken by the
week by the d’Urbervilles. The back room was now in silence; but from the
drawing-room there came sounds.
All that she could at first distinguish of them was one syllable, continually
repeated in a low note of moaning, as if it came from a soul bound to some
Ixionian wheel—ga
“O—O—O!”
Then a silence, then a heavy sigh, and again—
“O—O—O!”
 The landlady looked through the keyhole. Only a small space of the room
inside was visible, but within that space came a corner of the breakfast
table, which was already spread for the meal, and also a chair beside. Over
the seat of the chair Tess’s face was bowed, her posture being a kneeling
one in front of it; her hands were clasped over her head, the skirts of her
dressing-gown and the embroidery of her night-gown flowed upon the floor
behind her, and her stockingless feet, from which the slippers had fallen,
protruded upon the carpet. It was from her lips that came the murmur of
unspeakable despair.
Then a man’s voice from the adjoining bedroom—
“What’s the matter?”
She did not answer, but went on, in a tone which was a soliloquy rather
than an exclamation, and a dirge rather than a soliloquy. Mrs Brooks could
only catch a portion:
“And then my dear, dear husband came home to me ... and I did not know
it! ... And you had used your cruel persuasion upon me ... you did not stop
using it—no—you did not stop! My little sisters and brothers and my
mother’s needs—they were the things you moved me by ... and you said my
husband would never come back—never; and you taunted me, and said
what a simpleton I was to expect him! ... And at last I believed you and
gave way! ... And then he came back! Now he is gone. Gone a second time,
and I have lost him now for ever ... and he will not love me the littlest bit
ever any more—only hate me! ... O yes, I have lost him now—again
because of—you!” In writhing, with her head on the chair, she turned her
face towards the door, and Mrs Brooks could see the pain upon it; and that
her lips were bleeding from the clench of her teeth upon them, and that the
long lashes of her closed eyes stuck in wet tags to her cheeks. She
continued: “And he is dying—he looks as if he is dying! ... And my sin will
kill him and not kill me! ... O, you have torn my life all to pieces ... made
me be what I prayed you in pity not to make me be again! ... My own true
husband will never, never—O God—I can’t bear this!—I cannot!”
There were more and sharper words from the man; then a sudden rustle;
she had sprung to her feet. Mrs Brooks, thinking that the speaker was
coming to rush out of the door, hastily retreated down the stairs.
 She need not have done so, however, for the door of the sitting-room was
not opened. But Mrs Brooks felt it unsafe to watch on the landing again,
and entered her own parlour below.
She could hear nothing through the floor, although she listened intently,
and thereupon went to the kitchen to finish her interrupted breakfast.
Coming up presently to the front room on the ground floor she took up
some sewing, waiting for her lodgers to ring that she might take away the
breakfast, which she meant to do herself, to discover what was the matter if
possible. Overhead, as she sat, she could now hear the floorboards slightly
creak, as if some one were walking about, and presently the movement was
explained by the rustle of garments against the banisters, the opening and
the closing of the front door, and the form of Tess passing to the gate on her
way into the street. She was fully dressed now in the walking costume of a
well-to-do young lady in which she had arrived, with the sole addition that
over her hat and black feathers a veil was drawn.
Mrs Brooks had not been able to catch any word of farewell, temporary or
otherwise, between her tenants at the door above. They might have
quarrelled, or Mr d’Urberville might still be asleep, for he was not an early
riser.
She went into the back room which was more especially her own
apartment, and continued her sewing there. The lady lodger did not return,
nor did the gentleman ring his bell. Mrs Brooks pondered on the delay, and
on what probable relation the visitor who had called so early bore to the
couple upstairs. In reflecting she leant back in her chair.
As she did so her eyes glanced casually over the ceiling till they were
arrested by a spot in the middle of its white surface which she had never
noticed there before. It was about the size of a wafer when she first
observed it, but it speedily grew as large as the palm of her hand, and then
she could perceive that it was red.
The oblong white ceiling, with this scarlet blot in the midst, had the
appearance of a gigantic ace of hearts.
Mrs Brooks had strange qualms of misgiving. She got upon the table, and
touched the spot in the ceiling with her fingers. It was damp, and she
fancied that it was a blood stain.
 Descending from the table, she left the parlour, and went upstairs,
intending to enter the room overhead, which was the bedchamber at the
back of the drawing-room. But, nerveless woman as she had now become,
she could not bring herself to attempt the handle. She listened. The dead
silence within was broken only by a regular beat.
Drip, drip, drip.
Mrs Brooks hastened downstairs, opened the front door, and ran into the
street. A man she knew, one of the workmen employed at an adjoining villa,
was passing by, and she begged him to come in and go upstairs with her;
she feared something had happened to one of her lodgers. The workman
assented, and followed her to the landing.
She opened the door of the drawing-room, and stood back for him to pass
in, entering herself behind him. The room was empty; the breakfast—a
substantial repast of coffee, eggs, and a cold ham—lay spread upon the
table untouched, as when she had taken it up, excepting that the carving
knife was missing. She asked the man to go through the folding-doors into
the adjoining room.
He opened the doors, entered a step or two, and came back almost
instantly with a rigid face. “My good God, the gentleman in bed is dead! I
think he has been hurt with a knife—a lot of blood has run down upon the
floor!”
The alarm was soon given, and the house which had lately been so quiet
resounded with the tramp of many footsteps, a surgeon among the rest. The
wound was small, but the point of the blade had touched the heart of the
victim, who lay on his back, pale, fixed, dead, as if he had scarcely moved
after the infliction of the blow. In a quarter of an hour the news that a
gentleman who was a temporary visitor to the town had been stabbed in his
bed, spread through every street and villa of the popular watering-place.
 LVII
MEANWHILE ANGEL CLARE HAD walked automatically along the way
by which he had come, and, entering his hotel, sat down over the breakfast,
staring at nothingness. He went on eating and drinking unconsciously till on
a sudden he demanded his bill; having paid which he took his dressing-bag
in his hand, the only luggage he had brought with him, and went out.
At the moment of his departure a telegram was handed to him—a few
words from his mother, stating that they were glad to know his address, and
informing him that his brother Cuthbert had proposed to and been accepted
by Mercy Chant.
Clare crumpled up the paper, and followed the route to the station;
reaching it, he found that there would be no train leaving for an hour and
more. He sat down to wait, and having waited a quarter of an hour felt that
he could wait there no longer. Broken in heart and numbed, he had nothing
to hurry for; but he wished to get out of a town which had been the scene of
such an experience, and turned to walk to the first station onward, and let
the train pick him up there.
The highway that he followed was open, and at a little distance dipped
into a valley, across which it could be seen running from edge to edge. He
had traversed the greater part of this depression, and was climbing the
western acclivity when, pausing for breath, he unconsciously looked back.
Why he did so he could not say, but something seemed to impel him to the
act. The tape-like surface of the road diminished in his rear as far as he
could see, and as he gazed a moving spot intruded on the white vacuity of
its perspective.
It was a human figure running. Clare waited with a dim sense that
somebody was trying to overtake him.
The form descending the incline was a woman’s, yet so entirely was his
mind blinded to the idea of his wife’s following him that even when she
came nearer he did not recognize her under the totally changed attire in
which he now beheld her. It was not till she was quite close that he could
believe her to be Tess.
 “I saw you—turn away from the station—just before I got there—and I
have been following you all this way!”
She was so pale, so breathless, so quivering in every muscle, that he did
not ask her a single question, but seizing her hand, and pulling it within his
arm, he led her along. To avoid meeting any possible wayfarers he left the
high road, and took a footpath under some fir-trees. When they were deep
among the moaning boughs he stopped and looked at her inquiringly.
“Angel,” she said, as if waiting for this, “do you know what I have been
running after you for? To tell you that I have killed him!” A pitiful white
smile lit her face as she spoke.
“What!” said he, thinking from the strangeness of her manner that she was
in some delirium.
“I have done it—I don’t know how,” she continued. “Still, I owed it to
you, and to myself, Angel. I feared long ago, when I struck him on the
mouth with my glove, that I might do it some day for the trap he set for me
in my simple youth, and his wrong to you through me. He has come
between us and ruined us, and now he can never do it any more. I never
loved him at all, Angel, as I loved you. You know it, don’t you? You believe
it? You didn’t come back to me, and I was obliged to go back to him. Why
did you go away—why did you—when I loved you so? I can’t think why
you did it. But I don’t blame you; only, Angel, will you forgive me my sin
against you, now I have killed him? I thought as I ran along that you would
be sure to forgive me now I have done that. It came to me as a shining light
that I should get you back that way. I could not bear the loss of you any
longer—you don’t know how entirely I was unable to bear your not loving
me! Say you do now, dear, dear husband; say you do, now I have killed
him!”
“I do love you, Tess—O, I do—it is all come back!” he said, tightening
his arms round her with fervid pressure. “But how do you mean—you have
killed him?”
“I mean that I have,” she murmured in a reverie.
“What, bodily? Is he dead?”
“Yes. He heard me crying about you, and he bitterly taunted me; and
called you by a foul name; and then I did it. My heart could not bear it. He
had nagged me about you before. And then I dressed myself and came away
to find you.”
By degrees he was inclined to believe that she had faintly attempted, at
least, what she said she had done; and his horror at her impulse was mixed
with amazement at the strength of her affection for himself, and at the
strangeness of its quality, which had apparently extinguished her moral
sense altogether. Unable to realize the gravity of her conduct she seemed at
last content; and he looked at her as she lay upon his shoulder, weeping
with happiness, and wondered what obscure strain in the d‘Urberville blood
had led to this aberration—if it were an aberration. There momentarily
flashed through his mind that the family tradition of the coach and murder
might have arisen because the d’Urbervilles had been known to do these
things. As well as his confused and excited ideas could reason, he supposed
that in the moment of mad grief of which she spoke her mind had lost its
balance, and plunged her into this abyss.
It was very terrible if true; if a temporary hallucination, sad. But, anyhow,
here was this deserted wife of his, this passionately-fond woman, clinging
to him without a suspicion that he would be anything to her but a protector.
He saw that for him to be otherwise was not, in her mind, within the region
of the possible. Tenderness was absolutely dominant in Clare at last. He
kissed her endlessly with his white lips, and held her hand, and said—
“I will not desert you! I will protect you by every means in my power,
dearest love, whatever you may have done or not have done!”
They then walked on under the trees, Tess turning her head every now and
then to look at him. Worn and unhandsome as he had become, it was plain
that she did not discern the least fault in his appearance. To her he was, as
of old, all that was perfection, personally and mentally. He was still her
Antinous, her Apollogb even; his sickly face was beautiful as the morning to
her affectionate regard on this day no less than when she first beheld him;
for was it not the face of the one man on earth who had loved her purely,
and who had believed in her as pure.
With an instinct as to possibilities he did not now, as he had intended,
make for the first station beyond the town, but plunged still farther under
the firs, which here abounded for miles. Each clasping the other round the
waist they promenaded over the dry bed of fir-needles, thrown into a vague
intoxicating atmosphere at the consciousness of being together at last, with
no living soul between them; ignoring that there was a corpse. Thus they
proceeded for several miles till Tess, arousing herself, looked about her, and
said, timidly—
“Are we going anywhere in particular?”
“I don’t know, dearest. Why?”
“I don’t know”
“Well, we might walk a few miles further, and when it is evening find
lodgings somewhere or other—in a lonely cottage, perhaps. Can you walk
well, Tessy?”
“O yes! I could walk for ever and ever with your arm round me!”
Upon the whole it seemed a good thing to do. Thereupon they quickened
their pace, avoiding high roads, and following obscure paths tending more
or less northward. But there was an impractical vagueness in their
movements throughout the day; neither one of them seemed to consider any
question of effectual escape, disguise, or long concealment. Their every
idea was temporary and unforefending, like the plans of two children.
At mid-day they drew near to a roadside inn, and Tess would have entered
it with him to get something to eat, but he persuaded her to remain among
the trees and bushes of this halfwoodland, half-moorland part of the
country, till he should come back. Her clothes were of recent fashion; even
the ivory-handled parasol that she carried was of a shape unknown in the
retired spot to which they had now wandered; and the cut of such articles
would have attracted attention in the settle of a tavern. He soon returned,
with food enough for half-a-dozen people and two bottles of wine—enough
to last them for a day or more, should any emergency arise.
They sat down upon some dead boughs and shared their meal. Between
one and two o’clock they packed up the remainder and went on again.
“I feel strong enough to walk any distance,” said she.
“I think we may as well steer in a general way towards the interior of the
country; where we can hide for a time, and are less likely to be looked for
than anywhere near the coast,” Clare remarked. “Later on, when they have
forgotten us, we can make for some port.”
 She made no reply to this beyond that of grasping him more tightly, and
straight inland they went. Though the season was an English May the
weather was serenely bright, and during the afternoon it was quite warm.
Through the latter miles of their walk their footpath had taken them into the
depths of the New Forest, and towards evening, turning the corner of a lane,
they perceived behind a brook and bridge a large board on which was
painted in white letters, “This desirable Mansion to be Let Furnished;”
particulars following, with directions to apply to some London agents.
Passing through the gate they could see the house, an old brick building of
regular design and large accommodation.
“I know it,” said Clare. “It is Bramshurst Court. You can see that it is shut
up, and grass is growing on the drive.”
“Some of the windows are open,” said Tess.
“Just to air the rooms, I suppose.”
“All these rooms empty; and we without a roof to our heads!”
“You are getting tired, my Tess!” he said. “We’ll stop soon.” And kissing
her sad mouth he again led her onwards.
He was growing weary likewise, for they had wandered a dozen or fifteen
miles, and it became necessary to consider what they should do for rest.
They looked from afar at isolated cottages and little inns, and were inclined
to approach one of the latter, when their hearts failed them, and they
sheered off. At length their gait dragged, and they stood still.
“Could we sleep under the trees?” she asked.
He thought the season insufficiently advanced.
“I have been thinking of that empty mansion we passed,” he said. “Let us
go back towards it again.”
They retraced their steps, but it was half an hour before they stood
without the entrance-gate as earlier. He then requested her to stay where she
was, whilst he went to see who was within.
She sat down among the bushes within the gate, and Clare crept towards
the house. His absence lasted some considerable time, and when he returned
Tess was wildly anxious, not for herself, but for him. He had found out
from a boy that there was only an old woman in charge as caretaker, and she
only came there on fine days, from the hamlet near, to open and shut the
windows. She would come to shut them at sunset. “Now, we can get in
through one of the lower windows, and rest there,” said he.
Under his escort she went tardily forward to the main front, whose
shuttered windows, like sightless eyeballs, excluded the possibility of
watchers. The door was reached a few steps further, and one of the windows
beside it was open. Clare clambered in, and pulled Tess in after him.
Except the hall the rooms were all in darkness, and they ascended the
staircase. Up here also the shutters were tightly closed, the ventilation being
perfunctorily done, for this day at least, by opening the hall-window in front
and an upper window behind. Clare unlatched the door of a large chamber,
felt his way across it, and parted the shutters to the width of two or three
inches. A shaft of dazzling sunlight glanced into the room, revealing heavy,
old-fashioned furniture, crimson damask hangings, and an enormous four-
post bedstead, along the head of which were carved running figures,
apparently Atalanta’s race.gc
“Rest at last!” said he, setting down his bag and the parcel of viands.
They remained in great quietness till the caretaker should have come to
shut the windows: as a precaution, putting themselves in total darkness by
barring the shutters as before, lest the woman should open the door of their
chamber for any casual reason. Betweensix and seven o’clock she came, but
did not approach the wing they were in. The heard her close the windows,
fasten them, lock the door, and go away. Then Clare again stole a chink of
light from the window, and they shared another meal, till by-and-by they
were enveloped in the shades of night which they had no candle to disperse.
 LVIII
THE NIGHT WAS STRANGELY solemn and still. In the small hours she
whispered to him the whole story of how he had walked in his sleep with
her in his arms across the Froom stream, at the imminent risk of both their
lives, and laid her down in the stone coffin at the ruined abbey. He had
never known of that till now.
“Why didn’t you tell me next day?” he said. “It might have prevented
much misunderstanding and woe.”
“Don’t think of what’s past!” said she. “I am not going to think outside of
now. Why should we! Who knows what tomorrow has in store?”
But it apparently had no sorrow. The morning was wet and foggy, and
Clare, rightly informed that the caretaker only opened the windows on fine
days, ventured to creep out of their chamber, and explore the house, leaving
Tess asleep. There was no food on the premises, but there was water, and he
took advantage of the fog to emerge from the mansion, and fetch tea, bread,
and butter from a shop in a little place two miles beyond, as also a small tin
kettle and spirit-lamp, that they might get fire without smoke. His re-entry
awoke her; and they breakfasted on what he had brought.
They were indisposed to stir abroad, and the day passed, and the night
following, and the next, and next till, almost without their being aware, five
days had slipped by in absolute seclusion, not a sight or sound of a human
being disturbing their peacefulness, such as it was. The changes of the
weather were their only events, the birds of the New Forest their only
company. By tacit consent they hardly once spoke of any incident of the
past subsequent to their wedding-day. The gloomy intervening time seemed
to sink into chaos, over which the present and prior times closed as if it
never had been. Whenever he suggested that they should leave their shelter,
and go forwards towards Southampton or London, she showed a strange
unwillingness to move.
“Why should we put an end to all that’s sweet and lovely!” she
deprecated. “What must come will come.” And, looking through the
shutter-chink: “All is trouble outside there; inside here content.”
 He peeped out also. It was quite true; within was affection, union, error
forgiven; outside was the inexorable.
“And—and,” she said, pressing her cheek against his; “I fear that what
you think of me now may not last. I do not wish to outlive your present
feeling for me. I would rather not. I would rather be dead and buried when
the times comes for you to despise me, so that it may never be known to me
that you despised me.”
“I cannot ever despise you.”
“I also hope that. But considering what my life has been I cannot see why
any man should, sooner or later, be able to help despising me ... How
wickedly mad I was! Yet formerly I never could bear to hurt a fly or a
worm, and the sight of a bird in a cage used often to make me cry”
They remained yet another day. In the night the dull sky cleared, and the
result was that the old caretaker at the cottage awoke early. The brilliant
sunrise made her unusually brisk; she decided to open the contiguous
mansion immediately, and to air it thoroughly on such a day. Thus it
occurred that, having arrived and opened the lower rooms before six
o’clock, she ascended to the bedchambers, and was about to turn the handle
of the one wherein they lay. At that moment she fancied she could hear the
breathing of persons within. Her slippers and her antiquity had rendered her
progress a noiseless one so far, and she made for instant retreat; then,
deeming that her hearing might have deceived her, she turned anew to the
door and softly tried the handle. The lock was out of order, but a piece of
furniture had been moved forward on the inside, which prevented her
opening the door more than an inch or two. A stream of morning light
through the shutter-chink fell upon the faces of the pair, wrapped in
profound slumber, Tess’s lips being parted like a half-opened flower near
his cheek. The caretaker was so struck with their innocent appearance, and
with the elegance of Tess’s gown hanging across a chair, her silk stockings
beside it, the pretty parasol, and the other habits in which she had arrived
because she had none else, that her first indignation at the effrontery of
tramps and vagabonds gave way to a momentary sentimentality over this
genteel elopement, as it seemed. She closed the door, and withdrew as
softly as she had come, to go and consult with her neighbours on the odd
discovery.
 Not more than a minute had elapsed after her withdrawal when Tess
woke, and then Clare. Both had a sense that something had disturbed them,
though they could not say what, and the uneasy feeling which it engendered
grew stronger. As soon as he was dressed he narrowly scanned the lawn
through the two or three inches of shutter-chink.
“I think we will leave at once,” said he. “It is a fine day. And I cannot
help fancying somebody is about the house. At any rate, the woman will be
sure to come to-day.”
She passively assented, and putting the room in order they took up the
few articles that belonged to them, and departed noiselessly. When they had
got into the Forest she turned to take a last look at the house.
“Ah, happy house—good-bye!” she said. “My life can only be a question
of a few weeks. Why should we not have stayed there?”
“Don’t say it, Tess! We shall soon get out of this district altogether. We’ll
continue our course as we’ve begun it, and keep straight north. Nobody will
think of looking for us there. We shall be looked for at the Wessex ports if
we are sought at all. When we are in the north we will get to a port and
away.”
Having thus persuaded her the plan was pursued, and they kept a bee line
northward. Their long repose at the manor-house lent them walking power
now; and towards mid-day they found that they were approaching the
steepled city of Melchester, which lay directly in their way. He decided to
rest her in a clump of trees during the afternoon, and push onward under
cover of darkness. At dusk Clare purchased food as usual, and their night
march began, the boundary between Upper and Mid-Wessex being crossed
about eight o’clock.
To walk across country without much regard to roads was not new to
Tess, and she showed her old agility in the performance. The intercepting
city, ancient Melchester, they were obliged to pass through in order to take
advantage of the town bridge for crossing a large river that obstructed them.
It was about midnight when they went along the deserted streets, lighted
fitfully by the few lamps, keeping off the pavement that it might not echo
their footsteps. The graceful pile of cathedral architecture rose dimly on
their left hand, but it was lost upon them now. Once out of the town they
followed the turnpike-road, which after a few miles plunged across an open
plain.
Though the sky was dense with cloud a diffused light from some fragment
of a moon had hitherto helped them a little. But the moon had now sunk, the
clouds seemed to settle almost on their heads, and the night grew as dark as
a cave. However, they found their way along, keeping as much on the turf
as possible that their tread might not resound, which it was easy to do, there
being no hedge or fence of any kind. All around was open loneliness and
black solitude, over which a stiff breeze blew.
They had proceeded thus gropingly two or three miles further when on a
sudden Clare became conscious of some vast erection close in his front,
rising sheer from the grass. They had almost struck themselves against it.
“What monstrous place is this?” said Angel.
“It hums,” said she. “Hearken!”
He listened. The wind, playing upon the edifice, produced a booming
tune, like the note of some gigantic one-stringed harp. No other sound came
from it, and lifting his hand and advancing a step or two, Clare felt the
vertical surface of the structure. It seemed to be of solid stone, without joint
or moulding. Carrying his fingers onward he found that what he had come
in contact with was a colossal rectangular pillar; by stretching out his left
hand he could feel a similar one adjoining. At an indefinite height overhead
something made the black sky blacker, which had the semblance of a vast
architrave uniting the pillars horizontally. They carefully entered beneath
and between; the surfaces echoed their soft rustle; but they seemed to be
still out of doors. The place was roofless. Tess drew her breath fearfully,
and Angel, perplexed, said—
“What can it be?”
Feeling sideways they encountered another tower-like pillar, square and
uncompromising as the first; beyond it another and another. The place was
all doors and pillars, some connected above by continuous architraves.
“A very Temple of the Winds,”gd he said.
The next pillar was isolated; others composed a trilithon; others were
prostrate, their flanks forming a causeway wide enough for a carriage; and
it was soon obvious that they made up a forest of monolithsge grouped upon
the grassy expanse of the plain. The couple advanced further into this
pavilion of the night till they stood in its midst.
“It is Stonehenge!”gf said Clare.
“The heathen temple, you mean?”
“Yes. Older than the centuries; older than the d’Urbervilles! Well, what
shall we do, darling? We may find shelter further on.”
But Tess, really tired by this time, flung herself upon an oblong slab that
lay close at hand, and was sheltered from the wind by a pillar. Owing to the
action of the sun during the preceding day the stone was warm and dry, in
comforting contrast to the rough and chill grass around, which had damped
her skirts and shoes.
“I don’t want to go any further, Angel,” she said stretching out her hand
for his. “Can’t we bide here?”
“I fear not. This spot is visible for miles by day, although it does not seem
so now.”
“One of my mother’s people was a shepherd hereabouts, now I think of it.
And you used to say at Talbothays that I was a heathen. So now I am at
home.”
He knelt down beside her outstretched form, and put his lips upon hers.
“Sleepy are you, dear? I think you are lying on an altar.”
“I like very much to be here,” she murmured. “It is so solemn and lonely
—after my great happiness—with nothing but the sky above my face. It
seems as if there were no folk in the world but we two; and I wish there
were not—except ’Liza-Lu.”
Clare thought she might as well rest here till it should get a little lighter,
and he flung his overcoat upon her, and sat down by her side.
“Angel, if anything happens to me, will you watch over ’Liza-Lu for my
sake?” she asked, when they had listened a long time to the wind among the
pillars.
“I will.”
“She is so good and simple and pure. O, Angel—I wish you would marry
her if you lose me, as you will do shortly. O, if you would!”
 “If I lose you I lose all! And she is my sister-in-law”
“That’s nothing, dearest. People marry sister-laws continually about
Marlott; and ’Liza-Lu is so gentle and sweet, and she is growing so
beautiful. O I could share you with her willingly when we are spirits! If you
would train her and teach her, Angel, and bring her up for your own self! ...
She has all the best of me without the bad of me; and if she were to become
yours it would almost seem as if death had not divided us ... Well, I have
said it: I won’t mention it again.”
She ceased, and he fell into thought. In the far north-east sky he could see
between the pillars a level streak of light. The uniform concavity of black
cloud was lifting bodily like the lid of a pot, letting in at the earth’s edge the
coming day, against which the towering monoliths and trilithons began to
be blackly defined.
“Did they sacrifice to God here?” asked she.
“No,” said he.
“Who to?” .
“I believe to the sun. That lofty stone set away by itself is in the direction
of the sun, which will presently rise behind it.”
“This reminds me, dear,” she said. “You remember you never would
interfere with any belief of mine before we were married? But I knew your
mind all the same, and I thought as you thought—not from any reasons of
my own, but because you thought so. Tell me now, Angel, do you think we
shall meet again after we are dead? I want to know.”
He kissed her to avoid a reply at such a time.
“O, Angel—I fear that means no!” said she, with a suppressed sob. “And I
wanted so to see you again—so much, so much! What—not even you and I,
Angel, who love each other so well?”
Like a greater than himself, to the critical question at the critical time he
did not answer;1 and they were again silent. In a minute or two her
breathing became more regular, her clasp of his hand relaxed, and she fell
asleep. The band of silver paleness along the east horizon made even the
distant parts of the Great Plain appear dark and near; and the whole
enormous landscape bore that impress of reserve, taciturnity, and hesitation
which is usual just before day. The eastward pillars and their architraves
stood up blackly against the light, and the great flame-shaped Sun-stone
beyond them; and the Stone of Sacrifice midway. Presently the night wind
died out, and the quivering little pools in the cup-like hollows of the stones
lay still. At the same time something seemed to move on the verge of the
dip eastward—a mere dot. It was the head of a man approaching them from
the hollow beyond the Sun-stone. Clare wished they had gone onward, but
in the circumstances decided to remain quiet. The figure came straight
towards the circle of pillars in which they were.
He heard something behind him, the brush of feet. Turning, he saw over
the prostrate columns another figure; then before he was aware, another was
at hand on the right, under a trilithon, and another on the left. The dawn
shone full on the front of the man westward, and Clare could discern from
this that he was tall, and walked as if trained. They all closed in with
evident purpose. Her story then was true! Springing to his feet, he looked
around for a weapon, loose stone, means of escape, anything. By this time
the nearest man was upon him.
“It is no use, sir,” he said. “There are sixteen of us on the Plain, and the
whole country is reared.”
“Let her finish her sleep!” he implored in a whisper of the men as they
gathered round.
When they saw where she lay, which they had not done till then, they
showed no objection, and stood watching her, as still as the pillars around.
He went to the stone and bent over her, holding one poor little hand; her
breathing now was quick and small, like that of a lesser creature than a
woman. All waited in the growing light, their faces and hands as if they
were silvered, the remainder of their figures dark, the stones glistening
green-gray, the Plain still a mass of shade. Soon the light was strong, and a
ray shone upon her unconscious form, peering under her eyelids and waking
her.
“What is it, Angel?” she said, starting up. “Have they come for me?”
“Yes, dearest,” he said. “They have come.”
“It is as it should be,” she murmured. “Angel, I am almost glad—yes,
glad! This happiness could not have lasted. It was too much. I have had
enough; and now I shall not live for you to despise me!”
 She stood up, shook herself, and went forward, neither of the men having
moved.
“I am ready,” she said quietly.
 LIX
THE CITY OF WINTONCESTER, that fine old city, aforetime capital of
Wessex, lay amidst its convex and concave downlands in all the brightness
and warmth of a July morning. The gabled brick, tile, and freestone houses
had almost dried off for the season their integument of lichen, the streams in
the meadows were low, and in the sloping High Street, from the West
Gateway to the mediaeval cross, and from the mediaeval cross to the bridge,
that leisurely dusting and sweeping was in progress which usually ushers in
an old-fashioned market-day.
From the western gate aforesaid the highway, as every Wintoncestrian
knows, ascends a long and regular incline of the exact length of a measured
mile, leaving the houses gradually behind. Up this road from the precincts
of the city two persons were walking rapidly, as if unconscious of the trying
ascent—unconscious through preoccupation and not through buoyancy.
They had emerged upon this road through a narrow barred wicket in a high
wall a little lower down. They seemed anxious to get out of the sight of the
houses and of their kind, and this road appeared to offer the quickest means
of doing so. Though they were young they walked with bowed heads, which
gait of grief the sun’s rays smiled on pitilessly.
One of the pair was Angel Clare, the other a tall budding creature—half
girl, half woman—a spiritualized image of Tess, slighter than she, but with
the same beautiful eyes—Clare’s sister-in-law, ’Liza-Lu. Their pale faces
seemed to have shrunk to half their natural size. They moved on hand in
hand, and never spoke a word, the drooping of their heads being that of
Giotto’s “Two Apostles.”gg
When they had nearly reached the top of the great West Hill the clocks in
the town struck eight. Each gave a start at the notes, and, walking onward
yet a few steps, they reached the first mile-stone, standing whitely on the
green margin of the grass, and backed by the down, which here was open to
the road. They entered upon the turf, and, impelled by a force that seemed
to overrule their will, suddenly stood still, turned, and waited in paralyzed
suspense beside the stone.
 The prospect from this summit was almost unlimited. In the valley
beneath lay the city they had just left, its more prominent buildings showing
as in an isometric drawing—among them the broad cathedral tower, with its
Norman windowsgh and immense length of aisle and nave, the spires of St.
Thomas’s, the pinnacled tower of the College, and, more to the right, the
tower and gables of the ancient hospice, where to this day the pilgrim may
receive his dole of bread and ale. Behind the city swept the rotund upland of
St. Catherine’s Hill; further off, landscape beyond landscape, till the horizon
was lost in the radiance of the sun hanging above it.
Against these far stretches of country rose, in front of the other city
edifices, a large red-brick building, with level gray roofs, and rows of short
barred windows bespeaking captivity, the whole contrasting greatly by its
formalism with the quaint irregularities of the Gothic erections. It was
somewhat disguised from the road in passing it by yews and evergreen
oaks, but it was visible enough up here. The wicket from which the pair had
lately emerged was in the wall of this structure. From the middle of the
building an ugly flat-topped octagonal tower ascended against the east
horizon, and viewed from this spot, on its shady side and against the light, it
seemed the one blot in the city’s beauty. Yet it was with this blot, and not
with the beauty, that the two gazers were concerned.
Upon the cornice of the tower a tall staff was fixed. Their eyes were
riveted on it. A few minutes after the hour had struck somethingmoved
slowly up the staff, and extended itself upon the breeze. It was a black flag.
“Justice” was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean
phrase, had ended his sport with Tess.1 And the d’Urberville knights and
dames slept on in their tombs unknowing. The two speechless gazers bent
themselves down to the earth, as if in prayer, and remained thus a long time,
absolutely motionless: the flag continued to wave silently. As soon as they
had strength they arose, joined hands again, and went on.2
 ENDNOTES
Tess of the d’Urbervilles is a novel that many critics have explicated over
the years. Preparing the notes, I have drawn upon these sources in addition
to my own scholarship.

Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the D’Urbervilles. 1998. Edited by Tim Dolin. New
York: Penguin, 2003.
______. Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Edited by John Paul Riqueline. Case
Studies in Contemporary Criticism. Boston: Bedford Books, 1998.
______. Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Norton Critical Edition. Third edition.
Edited by Scott Elledge. New York: W W Norton, 1991.
______. Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Oxford World’s Classics. Edited by Juliet
Grindle and Simon Gatrell. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.
______. Tess of the d’Urbervilles. New Wessex edition. Introduction by P.
N. Furbank. London: Macmillan, 1974.
______. Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Edited by Carl Jefferson Weber. New
York: Harper and Brothers, 1935.
Pinion, F. B. A Thomas Hardy Dictionary. New York: New York University
Press, 1989.
Oxford English Dictionary. Second edition. 20 vols. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1989.

Where Hardy uses dialect that requires an explanation, the note supplies
only the definition in context rather than the full range of meanings it may
contain.

All quotations from the Bible are from the King James Version. All
quotations from Shakespeare are from The Complete Signet Classic
Shakespeare, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972.
 Title Page
1 (p. 1) Poor wounded name! My bosom as a bed / Shall lodge thee: In this
quotation from Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona (1.2.114-115),
Julia speaks of a letter from Proteus that she has ripped up in front of her
maid, Lucetta, only to cosset the pieces that bear Proteus’ name after
Lucetta leaves.

Explanatory Note to the First Edition

1 . (p. 3) to remember a well-worn sentence of St Jerome’s: If an offence
come out of the truth, better it is that the offence come than that the truth be
concealed: Though no one has been able to trace this quotation exactly, it
likely concerns the views of the Christian scholar Saint Jerome (c.347—
c.420) on celibacy versus marriage.

Preface to the Fifth and Later Editions

1 (p. 6) “As soon as I observe that any one, when judging of poetical
representations, considers anything more important than the inner
Necessity and Truth, I have done with him”: See the letter dated March 1,
1795, from Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805) to Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe (1749-1832), in Correspondence between Schiller and Goethe, from
1794 to 1805, translated from the third edition of the German, with notes,
by L. Dora Schmitz, London: Bell, 1877; vol. 1, p. 58.
2 (p. 6) Gentility compelled him to excuse the author in words of pity that
one cannot be too thankful for: “He does but give us of his best”: This
phrase is from a review by Andrew Lang in Longman’s Magazine,
November 1892.
3 (p. 7) As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; / They kill us for their
sport: This is a quotation from Shakespeare’s King Lear (4.1.36-37).
4 (p. 8) since the book was first published, some of the critics who provoked
the reply have “gone down into silence”: See the Bible, Psalms 115 :17:
“The dead praise not the Lord, / neither any that go down into silence.”
5 (p. 8) these pages were overlooked, though they were in the original
manuscript. They occur in Chapter X: Those pages were reinserted into
chapter X, pp. 77-85, regarding Tess’s near fight with Car, the Queen of
Spades.
 Chapter I
1 (p. 12) “Don’t you really know, Durbeyfield, that you are the lineal
representative of the ancient and knightly family of the d‘Urbervilles . . .
who came from Normandy with William the Conqueror, as appears by
Battle Abbey Roll?”: The Battle Abbey Roll is supposedly a roster of those
who fought with the Norman duke known as William the Conqueror, who
invaded England in 1066. However, it is really a list of family names,
compiled three centuries later, of those who crossed the Channel with
William.
2 (p. 12) “Their names appear in the Pipe Rolls in the time of King Stephen.
In the reign of King John one of them was rich enough to give a manor to
the Knights Hospitallers; and in Edward the Second’s time . . . in Charles
the Second’s reign you were made Knights of the Royal Oak for your
loyalty”: The Pipe Rolls, or Great Rolls of the Exchequer, were yearly
financial accounts begun under King Stephen, who reigned from 1135 to
1154. King John ruled from 1199 to 1216. The Knights Hospitallers, or
Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem, were a powerful religious military
force during the Crusades. Edward II ruled from 1307 to 1327, during
which the Westminster Council pushed for the regular meeting of
Parliament. Oliver Cromwell was interregnum ruler of England from 1653
to 1658. Charles II ruled from 1660 to 1685; Hardy invented the Knights of
the Royal Oak, mocking the fact that Charles hid in an oak tree after his
defeat by Cromwell at the 1651 battle of Worcester.
3 (p. 14) “chasten yourself with the thought of ‘how are the mighty fallen’”:
See the Bible, 2 Samuel 1:19: “The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high
places: how are the mighty fallen!”
 Chapter II
1 (p. 19) told of each anxious and experienced one, to whom the years were
drawing nigh when she should say, “I have no pleasure in them”: See the
Bible, Ecclesiastes 12:1: “Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy
youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou
shalt say, I have no pleasure in them.”
2 (p. 22) the appearance of the third and youngest would hardly have been
sufficient to characterize him; there was an uncribbed, uncabined aspect:
Compare this line to the language in Shakespeare’s Macbeth (3.4.24—25):
“But now I am cabined, cribbed, confined, bound in to saucy doubts and
fears.”
3 (p. 22) “besides, we must get through another chapter of A Counterblast
to Agnosticism”: In Hardy’s original manuscript, the title used was that of a
real book, Essays and Reviews, by F. Temple et al. (1860), an ecclesiastical
document that urged Bible study from a historical perspective.
 Chapter III
1 (p. 25) she saw “the soft torments, the bitter sweets, the pleasing pains,
and the agreeable distresses”: The source for this line is unknown, but it is
possibly a paraphrase of a line by English poet Algernon Charles
Swinburne (1837-1909).
2 (p. 25) a feminine voice kept time by singing, in a vigorous gallopade, the
favourite ditty of “The Spotted Cow”: This song is about a man who says
he’ll help a woman find her cow but instead leads her to a woods, where
they become lovers.
3 (p. 31) Some people would like to know whence the poet whose
philosophy is in these days deemed as profound and trustworthy as his song
is breezy and pure, gets his authority for speaking of “Nature’s holy plan”:
See the poem “Lines Written in Early Spring” (lines 21-24), by William
Wordsworth (1770-1850): “If this belief from heaven be sent, / If such be
Nature’s holy plan, / Have I not reason to lament / What man has made of
man?”
 Chapter IV
1 (p. 33) better to drink with Rolliver in a corner of the housetop than with
the other landlord in a wide house: See the Bible, Proverbs 21:9: “It is
better to dwell in a corner of the housetop, than with a brawling woman in a
wide house.”
 Chapter V
1 (p. 49) the very possibility of such annexations was unknown to them; who
supposed that, though to be well-favoured might be the gift of fortune, a
family name came by nature: See Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing
(3.3.14—15): “To be a well-favored man is the gift of fortune; but to write
and read comes by nature.”
 Chapter IX
1 (p. 74) “I have been watching you from over the wall—sitting like Im-
patience on a monument”: Compare Hardy’s line to that of Shakespeare in
Twelfth Night (2.4.98-101): “She pined in thought, / And, with a green and
yellow melancholy, / She sat like Patience on a monument, / Smiling at
grief.”
2 (p. 75) He suited the action to the word, and whistled a line of “Take, O
take those lips away”: See Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (4.1.1-2):
“Take, O, take those lips away, / That so sweetly were forsworn.”
 Chapter XI
1 (p. 91) where was Tess’s guardian angel? Where was the providence of
her simple faith? Perhaps, like that other god of whom the ironical Tishbite
spoke: See the Bible, 1 Kings 18:8, where Obadiah prostrates himself
before Elijah (the Tishbite), who responds archly: “Go, tell thy lord,
Behold, Elijah is here”; that is, the lord is absent or asleep.
2 . (p. 91) But though to visit the sins of the fathers upon the children may
be a morality good enough for divinities: See the Bible, Exodus 20:5: “For I
the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon
the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.”
 Chapter XII
1 (p. 95) she had learnt that the serpent hisses where the sweet birds sing:
See Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece (lines 871-872): “The adder hisses
where the sweet birds sing; / What virtue breeds iniquity devours.”
2 (p. 100) THY, DAMNATION, SLUMBERETH NOT: See the Bible, 2
Peter 2:3: “And through covetousness shall they with feigned words make
merchandise of you: whose judgment now of a long time lingereth not, and
their damnation slumbereth not.”
3 (p. 101) THOU, SHALT, NOT, COMMIT—: This invocation starts the
seventh of the Ten Commandments; see the Bible, Exodus 20:14: “Thou
shalt not commit adultery.”
4 (p. 103) dust and ashes: In the Bible, Genesis 18:27, Abraham states,
“Behold now, I have taken upon me to speak unto the Lord, which am but
dust and ashes.” See also Job 42:6: “Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent
in dust and ashes.”
 Chapter XIII
1 (p. 105) She liked to hear the chanting . . . and to join in the Morning
Hymn: Written by Anglican bishop Thomas Ken (1637-1711), this hymn is
also known by its first line, “Awake, My Soul, and with the Sun.”
2 (p. 106) When the chants came on one of her favourites happened to be
chosen among the rest—the old double chant “Langdon”: Richard Langdon
(1730-1803) was an English musician and composer. The chant here called
“Langdon” is Psalm 102 from the Bible set to music. It begins, “Hear my
prayer, O Lord, and let my cry come unto thee.”
 Chapter XIV
1 (p. 111) at the present stage of her existence living as a stranger ... though
it was no strange land that she was in: See the Bible, Exodus 2:22: “I have
been a stranger in a strange land.”
2 (p. 115) Like all village girls she was well grounded in the Holy
Scriptures, and had dutifully studied the histories of Aholah and Aholibah:
See the Bible, Ezekiel 23:2-35, for the tale of the prostitutes Aholah and
Aholibah, who were punished by God for consorting with the Assyrians.
3 (p. 117) “Sorrow, I baptize thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son,
and of the Holy Ghost”: In the Bible, Genesis 35:18, Rachel christens her
son Benoni, which means “Son of Sorrow”; see also Genesis 3:16, where
God decrees, “In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.”
 Chapter XV
1 (p. 121) “By experience,” says Roger Ascham, “we find out a short way
by a long wandering”: Ascham (1515-1568) was a British scholar known
for his educational theory and lucid prose. Here Hardy paraphrases a line
from Ascham’s posthumously published and best-known book, The
Scholemaster: “We know by experience itself that it is a marvelous pain to
find out but a short way by long wandering.”
2 (p. 121) She—and how many more—might have ironically said to God
with Saint Augustine: “Thou hast counselled a better course than Thou hast
permitted”: Compare this with the line from Saint Augustine’s Confessions
(written at the end of the fourth century; book X, chapter 30): “You
commanded me not to commit fornication, and though you did not forbid
me to marry, you counselled me to take a better course.
3 (p. 123) She would be able to look at them, and think not only that
d‘Urberville, like Babylon, had fallen: See the Bible, Isaiah 21:9: ”Babylon
is fallen, is fallen.” The refrain is echoed elsewhere in the Bible, in
Revelation 14:8.
 Chapter XVI
1 (p. 128) The green lea was speckled as thickly with them as a canvas by
Van Alsloot or Sallaert with burghers: Denis Van Alsloot (1570-1628) and
Anthonis Sallaert (c. 1590-1658) were Flemish naturalistic painters who
often depicted village scenes.
2 (p. 129) The Froom waters were clear as the pure River of Life shown to
the Evangelist: See the passage concerning Saint John in the Bible,
Revelation 22:1: ”And he shewed me a pure river of water of life, clear as
crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb.”
3 (p. 130) she chanted: ”O ye Sun and Moon ... bless ye the Lord, praise
Him and magnify Him for ever!”: See ”Benedicite,” part of the daily
Morning Prayer in The Book of Common Prayer.
4 (p. 141) ”the last of the old Low Church sort, they tell me—for all about
here be what they call High”: This is a reference to the divisions within the
Church of England. The High Church tradition, also known as Anglo-
Catholicism, emphasizes ceremony and ecclesiastical authority. The
Evangelical, or Low Church, division is concerned more with personal
conversion and less with churchly ornamentation. See also p. 210.
 Chapter XVIII
1 (p. 142) his object being to acquire a practical skill in the various
processes of farming, with a view either to the Colonies: The British custom
at this time was for the elder son to inherit the family estate, while any
younger sons were often sent off to one of Britain’s colonies to make their
way in the world.
2 (p. 144) Indeed opine / That the Eternal and Divine / Did, eighteen
centuries ago / In very truth . . . : These lines are from a poem by Robert
Browning (1812-1889), ”Easter-Day,” about faith and doubt.
3 (p. 144) ”No, father; I cannot underwrite Article Four”: This reference is
to the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, concerning the beliefs and practices
within the Church of England. Article Four contends that Christ rose from
the dead, reassumed bodily form, and ascended to heaven.
4 (p. 144) ”to quote your favourite Epistle to the Hebrews, ‘the removing of
those things that are shaken . . . which cannot be shaken may remain”’: In
the Bible, Hebrews 12:27, Saint Paul says: ”And this word, yet once more,
signifieth the removing of those things that are shaken, as of things that are
made, that those things which cannot be shaken may remain.”
5 (p. 146) The conventional farm-folk of his imagination—personified by
the pitiable dummy known as Hodge: Hodge is a typical name for a rural
worker, as John Doe is for a member of the American public; see Hardy’s
essay ”The Dorsetshire Labourer” (1883), reprinted in Thomas Hardy’s
Public Voice, listed in ”For Further Reading.”
6 (p. 146) The thought of Pascal’s was brought home to him: ”A mesure
qu’on a plus d‘esprit . . . pas de différence entre les hommes”: This
sentiment is from ”Préface Générale” in Pensées, by French mathematician
and philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-1662): ”The more perceptive one is,
the more one finds men original. Ordinary people find no difference among
men.”
7 (p. 147) some mutely Miltonic, some potentially Cromwellian: This phrase
echoes lines 59-60 of ”Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” by Thomas Gray
(1716-1771): ”Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest, / Some
Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood.”
8 (p. 147) men every one of whom walked in his own individual way the
road to dusty death: See Shakespeare’s Macbeth (5.5.22-23): ”And all our
yesterdays have lighted fools / The way to dusty death.”
 Chapter XIX
1 (p. 154) But how could this admirable and poetic man ever have
descended into the Valley of Humiliation: This phrase is from Pilgrim’s
Progress, part one, by Puritan preacher John Bunyan (1628-1688).
2 . (p. 154) have felt with the man of Uz—as she herself had felt two or
three years ago—”My soul chooseth strangling and death rather than my
life. I loathe it; I would not live alway”: See the Bible, Job 7:15-16: ”So that
my soul chooseth strangling, and death rather than my life. I loathe it; I
would not live alway: let me alone; for my days are vanity.”
3 (p. 155) ”I’m like the poor Queen of Sheba who lived in the Bible. There
is no more spirit in me”: See the Bible, 1 Kings 10:4-5: ”And when the
queen of Sheba had seen all Solomon’s wisdom, and the house that he had
built, and the meat of his table, and the sitting of his servants, and the
attendance of his ministers, and their apparel, and his cupbearers, and his
ascent by which he went up unto the house of the Lord; there was no more
spirit in her.”
4 (p. 155) ”I shouldn’t mind learning why—why the sun do shine on the
just and the unjust alike”: See, in the Bible, Christ’s Sermon on the Mount
(Matthew 5:44—45): ”But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them
that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which
despitefully use you, and persecute you; that ye may be the children of your
Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on
the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.”
 Chapter XX
1 (p. 160) made him think of the Resurrection hour. He little thought that
the Magdalen might be at his side: Christ appeared to Mary Magdalene
after his resurrection; see the Bible, Mark 16:9: ”Now when Jesus was risen
early the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, out of
whom he had cast seven devils.” See also Matthew 28:1 and John 20:1.
 Chapter XXIII
1 (p. 174) Angel, in fact, rightly or wrongly . . . preferred sermons in
stones: See Shakespeare’s As You Like It (2.1.15-17): ”This our life,
exempt from public haunt, / Finds tongues in trees, books in the running
brooks, / Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.”
2 (p. 175) ”A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing”: See
the Bible, Ecclesiastes 3:5: ”A time to cast away stones, and a time to
gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from
embracing.”
3 (p. 176) ”Three Leahs to get one Rachel,” he whispered: See the Bible,
Genesis 29, in which Jacob works seven years to gain the hand of Rachel,
only to be given her sister Leah instead. He then pledges to serve another
seven years in order to marry Rachel.
 Chapter XXIV
1 (p. 183) He had never before seen a woman’s lips and teeth which forced
upon his mind with such persistent iteration the old Elizabethan simile of
roses filled with snow: See ”Cherry-Ripe” (also known as ”There Is a
Garden in Her Face”), by Thomas Campion (1567-1620), lines 7—10:
”Those cherries fairly do enclose / Of orient pearl a double row, / Which
when her lovely laughter shows, / They look like rose-buds filled with
snow.”
 Chapter XXV
1 (p. 189) ”Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, / How
curious you are to me!”: Here Hardy quotes from ”Crossing Brooklyn
Ferry” (line 3), a poem by Walt Whitman (1819-1892).
2 (p. 192) Four months or so of torturing ecstacy in his society—of
”pleasure girdled about with pain”: See Atalanta in Calydon (lines 1067-
1072), by Charles Algernon Swinburne: ”Put moans into the bridal measure
/ And on the bridal wools a stain: / And circled pain about with pleasure /
And girdled pleasure about with pain; / And strewn one marriage-bed with
tears and fire / For extreme loathing and supreme desire.”
3 (p. 193) A spiritual descendant in the direct line of Wycliff, Huss, Luther,
Calvin: These men were all church reformers. John Wycliff, also spelled
Wycliffe, (c. 1330—1384) was a British theologian who attacked
materialism and produced a translation of the Bible known as the Wycliff
edition. Jan Huss (c.1370-1415) was a Czech influenced by Wycliff who
became an advocate of separation between church and state. Accused of
heresy, he was burned at the stake. Martin Luther (1483-1546), a German,
authored the famous ninety-five theses that challenged the Roman church
and led to the Reformation. John Calvin (1509-1564) was a French
Protestant who preached salvation through grace.
4 (p. 194) He loved Paul of Tarsus, liked St John, hated St James as much as
he dared, and regarded with mixed feelings Timothy, Titus, and Philemon:
Angel’s father believes in spiritual salvation through grace, as espoused by
Saint John, rather than through religious doctrine, as Saint James counsels.
Timothy, Titus, and Philemon have mixed opinions about this matter.
5 (p. 194) He despised the Canons and Rubric, swore by the Articles: The
Anglican Constitutions and Canons Ecclesiastical were put into law by
King James I in 1603. In the Anglican Church, the term Rubric refers to
guidelines for the conduct of church services. The Articles refers to the
Thirty-Nine Articles to which all Church of England clergy must adhere.
6 (p. 197) ”Farming, of course, means roughing it externally; but high
thinking may go with plain living, nevertheless”: See Wordsworth’s sonnet
”Written in London, September, 1802” (lines 9-13): “Rapine, avarice,
expense, / This is idolatry; and these we adore: / Plain living and high
thinking are no more: / The homely beauty of the good old cause / Is gone.”
 Chapter XXVI
1 (p. 199) “A truly Christian woman, who will be a help and a comfort to
you in your goings-out and your comings-in”: See the Bible, Psalm 121:8:
“The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time
forth, and even for evermore.”
2 (p. 204) “exclaim against their own succession,” as Hamlet puts it: See
Shakespeare’s Hamlet (2.2.354-358), in which Hamlet describes child
actors so popular that they jeopardize the livelihood of older actors, and
thus their own professional future: “Will they not say afterwards, if they
should grow themselves to common players,—as it is most like, if their
means are no better,—their writers do them wrong, to make them exclaim
against their own succession?”
3 (p. 204) Took for his text the words from St Luke: “Thou fool, this night
thy soul shall be required of thee!”: See the Bible, Luke 12:20, which is
part of a tale told by Christ warning against covetousness: “But God said
unto him, Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then
whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided?”
4 (p. 204) “Being reviled we bless; being persecuted we suffer it; being
defamed we entreat; we are made as the filth of the world, and as the off-
scouring of all things unto this day”: See the Bible, 1 Corinthians 4:12-13:
“And labour, working with our own hands: being reviled, we bless; being
persecuted, we suffer it: Being defamed, we intreat: we are made as the filth
of the world, and are the offscouring of all things unto this day.”
5 (p. 205) “But, after all, one of those poor words of mine may spring up in
his heart as a good seed some day”: See the Bible, Luke 8:5-8, for the
parable of the sower. Some of the sower’s seed falls on barren ground, and
some on good ground; the seed that falls on good ground springs up and
bears fruit.
 Chapter XXVII
1 (p. 208) she regarded him as Eve at her second waking might have
regarded Adam: See book 5, lines 26ff. of Paradise Lost, by John Milton
(1608-1674).
2 (p. 210) “Leave thou thy sister . . . A life that leads melodious days”: See
the poem In Memoriam (stanza 33, lines 5-8), by Alfred Lord Tennyson
(1809-1892), in which the speaker addresses his dead friend Arthur Henry
Hallam.
3 (p. 211) “But whatever he thinks to be his duty, that he’ll do, in season or
out of season”: See the Bible, 2 Timothy 4:2: “Preach the word; be instant
in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all long suffering and
doctrine.”
 Chapter XXVIII
1 (p. 213) not fully trowing that in the fields and pastures to “sigh gratis”:
In Hamlet (2.2.330), Hamlet talks of recompense for the traveling actors in
their roles: “The lover shall not sigh gratis.”
 Chapter XXX
1 (p. 230) She might as well have agreed at first. The “appetite for joy”
which pervades all creation: This phrase may be a link to the poem
Paracelsus (lines 89-94), by Robert Browning: “When Festus learns / That
every common pleasure of the world / Affects me as himself; that I have
just / As varied appetite for joy derived / From common things; a stake in
life, in short / Like his; a stake which rash pursuit of aims / That life affords
not, would as soon destroy.”
 Chapter XXXI
1 (p. 231) “Dear Tess,—J”: The letters “J” and “I” were indistinguishable
in Britain until the seventeenth century. The appearance of the pronoun I as
J persisted for another century after that.
2 (p. 232) There was hardly a touch of earth in her love for Clare: See
Tennyson’s poem “Lancelot and Elaine” (lines 132—133), where Elaine
tells Lancelot: “For who loves me must have a touch of earth; / The low sun
makes the colour.”
3 (p. 232) he was all that goodness could be—knew all that a guide,
philosopher, and friend should know: See epistle IV, lines 387-90, in An
Essay on Man, by Alexander Pope (1688-1744): “When statesmen, heroes,
kings, in dust repose, / Whose sons shall blush their fathers were thy foes, /
Shall then this verse to future age pretend / Thou wert my guide,
philosopher, and friend?”
4 (p. 235) “Distinction does not consist in the facile use of a contemptible
set of conventions, but in being numbered among those who are true, and
honest, and just, and pure, and lovely, and of good report”: See the Bible,
Philippians 4:8, for Paul’s list of virtues: “Finally, brethren, whatsoever
things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just,
whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things
are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on
these things.”
 Chapter XXXII
1 (p. 247) “That never would become that wife / That had once done amiss:
This is a near-quotation of lines from ”The Boy and the Mantle: A Ballad of
King Arthur’s Court,” in Francis James Child’s English and Scottish
Popular Ballads (1882-1898).
2 (p. 247) Suppose this robe should betray her by changing colour, as her
robe had betrayed Queen Guénever: In the Arthurian legends, Queen
Guinevere betrays her husband, King Arthur. ”The Boy and the Mantle”
tells of how Guinevere’s mantle, or robe, gives away her deception because
only an honest person can wear it.
 Chapter XXXIII
1 (p. 255) she felt glorified by an irradiation not her own, like the angel
whom St John saw in the sun: See the Bible, Revelation 19:17: ”And I saw
an angel standing in the sun; and he cried with a loud voice, saying to all
the fowls that fly in the midst of heaven, Come and gather yourselves
together unto the supper of the great God.”
2 (p. 256) She was conscious of the notion expressed by Friar Laurence:
”These violent delights have violent ends”: See Shakespeare’s Romeo and
Juliet (2.6.9-11), where Friar Laurence warns against intemperate love:
”These violent delights have violent ends, / And in their triumph die, like
fire and powder, / Which as they kiss consume.”
 Chapter XXXIV
1 . (p. 267) ”one must heartily subscribe to these words of Paul: ‘Be thou an
example—in word, in conversation, in charity, in spirit, in faith, in purity’
”: See the Bible, 1 Timothy 4:12: ”Let no man despise thy youth; but be
thou an example of the believers, in word, in conversation, in charity, in
spirit, in faith, in purity.”
2 (p. 267) ”‘Integer vitae’, says a Roman poet, who is strange company for
St Paul—‘The man of upright life, from frailties free, / Stands not in need of
Moorish spear or bow’”: The Latin phrase integer vitae means ”wholeness
of life.” It comes from book 1, ode 22, line 1, by lyric poet Horace (65-8
B.C.), though here it is translated as ”upright life” to incorporate the idea of
”integrity.”
 Chapter XXXV
1 (p. 275) ”Behold, when thy face is made bare. . . . And the veil of thine
head shall be grief, and the crown shall be pain”: See Atalanta in Calydon,
the chorus to Althaea (lines 1852-1855), by Charles Algernon Swinburne.
2 (p. 276) ”You were more sinned against than sinning”: In Shakespeare’s
King Lear (3.2.59-60), Lear states: ”I am a man / More sinned against than
sinning.”
3 (p. 278) They had rambled round by a road which led to the well-known
ruins of the Cistercian abbey: This reference is to the Cistercian Abbey of
Bindon, built in 1172 in the parish of Wool in Dorset. The Cistercian order
was a branch of the Benedictine order, founded in the eleventh century.
4 (p. 279) It was the face of a man who was no longer passion’s slave: See
Hamlet (3.2.71-73), where Hamlet says, ”Give me that man / That is not
passion’s slave, and I will wear him / In my heart’s core.”
5 (p. 279) ”The little less, and what worlds away!”: This comes from
Browning’s ”By the Fire-Side” (stanza 39, line 192).
 Chapter XXXVI
1 (p. 287) nothing that he could say made her unseemly; she sought not her
own; was not provoked.... She might just now have been Apostolic Charity
herself returned to a self-seeking modern world: Compare Hardy’s words
with Saint Paul’s description of charity in the Bible, 1 Corinthians 13:4—7:
”Charity ... doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own; is not
easily provoked, thinketh no evil; Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in
the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth
all things.”
2 (p. 288) ”Don’t you think we had better endure the ills we have than fly to
others?”: See Hamlet’s soliloquy (3.1.76-82): ”Who would fardels bear, /To
grunt and sweat under a weary life, / But that the dread of something after
death, / The undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveller returns,
puzzles the will, / And makes us rather bear those ills we have / Than fly to
others that we know not of?”
3 (p. 289) in the words of M. Sully-Prudhomme, hear a penal sentence in
the fiat, ”You shall be born”: Sully Prudhomme (pen name of Rene-
Francois-Armand Prudhomme, 1839-1907) was a French poet who won the
first Nobel Prize for Literature in 1901. ”You shall be born” is a phrase
from his poem ”La voeu” (”The Vow,” 1865), with the message that any
offspring will be ”condemned by Nature.”
4 (p. 289) The intuitive heart of woman knoweth not only its own bitterness:
See the Bible, Proverbs 14:10: ”The heart knoweth his own bitterness; and a
stranger doth not intermeddle with his joy.”
 Chapter XXXVII
1 (p. 296) during those first few moments in which the brain, like a Samson
shaking himself: See the Bible, Judges 16:20, where Samson wakes after
Delilah has cuts his hair: ”And he awoke out of his sleep, and said, I will go
out as at other times before, and shake myself.”
2 (p. 300) ”God’s not in his heaven: all’s wrong with the world!”: Compare
this to lines 7-8 in ”Morning,” part of Browning’s narrative poem Pippa
Passes: ”God’s in his heaven—/ All’s right with the world!”
 Chapter XXXIX
1 (p. 306) ”This is the chief thing: be not perturbed”: This is the message
that underlies Meditations, by Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher
Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 121-180).
2 (p. 306) ”Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid,” said the
Nazarene: See Jesus’ words in the Bible, John 14:27: ”Let not your heart be
troubled, neither let it be afraid.”
3 (p. 309) Tess had infected her through her maternal sympathies, till she
had almost fancied that a good thing could come out of Nazareth: See the
Bible, John 1:46: ”Can there be any good thing come out of Nazareth?”
4 (p. 310) ”Yes, certainly,” said Mrs. Clare. ”The words of King Lemuel”:
In the Bible, Proverbs 31:1-31, King Lemuel passes on the advice of his
mother, focusing mainly on the value of a good woman.
5 (p. 310) “‘Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above
rubies.... Many daughters have done virtuously, but thou excellest them ah’
”: See the Bible, Proverbs 31:10, 15, 17-18, and 27-29. Significantly, verse
11, referring to a husband’s trust in his wife, is omitted.
6 (p. 311) these sincere simple souls whom he loved so well; who knew
neither the world, the flesh, nor the devil in their own hearts: The phrase
”the world, the flesh, and the devil” occurs in The Litany of The Book of
Common Prayer.
 Chapter XL
1 (p. 312) ”And Roman Catholicism sin, and sin damnation. Thou art in a
parlous state”: See Touchstone’s speech in Shakespeare’s As You Like It
(3.2): ”Why, if thou never wast at court, thou never sawest good manners; if
thou never sawest good manners, then thy manners must be wicked; and
wickedness is sin, and sin is damnation. Thou art in a parlous state,
shepherd.”
2 (p. 316) ”Do you remember how neatly you used to turn “‘Twas down in
Cupid’s Gardens’ and ”The Tailor’s Breeches’ at morning milking?”: ”
‘Twas down in Cupid’s Gardens” is a song about Cupid’s Gardens, where a
sailor goes to look for a lover. ”The Tailor’s Breeches” is a ballad about a
tailor who gets drunk and, to win a woman, trades his breeches for her
petticoat, though he is cheated in the end.
3 (p. 318) Like the prophet on the top of Peor . . . Tess’s character
compelled her to grace: See the Bible, Numbers 23-24, for an account of
how King Balak of Moab tried to bribe the prophet Balaam to curse the
Israelites, but Balaam could not, despite himself, because of God’s will.
 Chapter XLI
1 (p. 323) From that direction of gentility Black Care had come: See
Horace’s Odes (book 3, ode 1, lines 37-39): Neque / decedit aerata triremi et
/ post equitem sedet atra Cura (”nor does black Care quit the brass-bound
galley and even takes her seat behind the horseman”).
2 (p. 325) Tess asked herself; and, thinking of her wasted life, said, ”All is
vanity”: See the Bible, Ecclesiastes 1:2: ”Vanity of vanities, saith the
Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.”
3 (p. 326) like the inhabitants of the Malay Peninsula, they ran amuck, and
made it their purpose to destroy life: Among the Malays, to run amuck (or
amok) is to be overwhelmed by passion and take up arms against everyone.
Nineteenth-century British colonials saw such behavior as a form of semi-
voluntary insanity.
 Chapter XLII
1 (p. 329) ”The maiden’s mouth is cold / ..... / Fold over simple fold /
Binding her head”: See ”Fragoletta” (lines 41—45), by Charles Algernon
Swinburne: ”Ah sweet, the maiden’s mouth is cold, / Her breast-blossoms
are simply red, / Her hair mere brown or gold, / Fold over simple fold /
Binding her head.”
2 (p. 333) his wife . . . made no objection to hiring Tess, on her agreeing to
remain till Old Lady-Day: Lady-Day, or the Feast of the Annunciation
(celebrating Jesus’ conception), is on March 25, but Old LadyDay refers to
April 6, the date on which the Annunciation was celebrated under the Julian
calendar, used in Britain until 1752.
 Chapter XLIII
1 (p. 338) The snow had followed the birds from the polar basin as a white
pillar of a cloud: See the Bible, Exodus 13:21: ”And the Lord went before
them by day in a pillar of a cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a
pillar of fire, to give them light; to go by day and night.”
 Chapter XLIV
1 (p. 352) In jumping at Publicans and Sinners they would forget that a
word might be said for the worries of Scribes and Pharisees: See the Bible,
Mark 2:16: ”And when the scribes and Pharisees saw him eat with
publicans and sinners, they said unto his disciples, How is it that he eateth
and drinketh with publicans and sinners?” The scribes and Pharisees
adhered self-righteously to the law and are therefore less in need of
attention than are the publicans and sinners, but are in fact worthier.
Similarly, Mr. and Mrs. Clare would have paid more attention to Tess if she
had been more obviously dissolute.
2 (p. 353) ”O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you”: See the Bible,
Galatians 3:1.
 Chapter XLV
1 (p. 360) ”I felt that, of all persons in the world whom it was my duty and
desire to save from the wrath to come”: See the Bible, Matthew 3:7: ”O
generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?”
2 (p. 361) ”I only differ from him on the question of Church and State—the
interpretation of the text, ‘Come out from among them and be ye separate,
saith the Lord’ ”: See the Bible, 2 Corinthians 6:17: ”Wherefore come out
from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the
unclean thing, and I will receive you.”
3 (p. 361) ”I should receive the first-fruits of the Spirit”: See the Bible,
Romans 8:23: ”And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the
firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting
for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.”
4 (p. 361) ”that those who came to scoff sometimes remained to pray”: See
lines 179-80 in ”The Deserted Village,” by Oliver Goldsmith (1730?-
1774), describing the village preacher: ”Truth from his lips prevail’ d with
double sway, / And fools who came to scoff remain’d to pray.”
 Chapter XLVI
1 (p. 371) ”But I thought that our marriage might be a sanctification for us
both. ‘The unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife, and the
unbelieving wife is sanctified by the husband’ ”: See the Bible, 1
Corinthians 7:13-14: ”And the woman which hath an husband that believeth
not, and if he be pleased to dwell with her, let her not leave him. For the
unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife, and the unbelieving wife is
sanctified by the husband: else were your children unclean; but now are
they holy.” Though the counsel is for wives not to abandon faithless
husbands, the next verse mentions departing, as Angel has.
2 (p. 374) ”I believe in the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount”: See the
Bible, Matthew 5:7, where Christ addresses his followers from the top of a
mountain and tells them, ”Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain
mercy.”
3 (p. 375) she gave another, which might possibly have been paralleled in
many a work of the pedigree ranging from the Dictionnaire Philosophique
to Huxley’s Essays: Voltaire (1694-1778), a French writer and critic of
Christianity, wrote the Dictionnaire. T. H. Huxley (1825-1895) was an
English scientist who popularized Charles Darwin’s theories and coined the
word agnosticism. Hardy’s reference here to Huxley was added in a later
edition: Tess was first published in 1891, but Huxley’s nine-volume
Collected Essays did not begin to appear until 1893.
4 (p. 376) ”I do believe I ought to preach it, but like the devils I believe and
tremble”: See the Bible, James 2:19: ”Thou believest that there is one God;
thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble.”
5 (p. 376) ”I thought I worshipped on the mountains, but I find I still serve
in the groves: Jehovah is linked to mountains, Baal to groves. See the Bible,
2 Kings 17:9-10, which describes how the Israelites “did secretly those
things that were not right against the Lord their God,” setting up graven
images in the groves.
6 (p. 377) “am I, indeed, one of those ‘servants of corruption’ who, ‘after
they have escaped the pollutions of the world, are again entangled therein
and overcome‘—whose latter end is worse than their beginning?”: See the
Bible, 2 Peter 2:19-20: “While they promise them liberty, they themselves
are the servants of corruption: for of whom a man is overcome, of the same
is he brought in bondage. For if after they have escaped the pollutions of the
world through the knowledge of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, they are
again entangled therein, and overcome, the latter end is worse with them
than the beginning.”
7 (p. 377) “You temptress, Tess; you dear damned witch of Babylon”: This
reference is to the Whore of Babylon, the evil city in the Bible; see the
Bible, Revelation 17:5: “And upon her forehead was a name written,
MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS
AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.”
 Chapter XLVII
1 (p. 380) The isolation of his manner and colour lent him the appearance
of a creature from Tophet: See the Bible, Jeremiah 7:31: “And they have
built the high places of Tophet, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom,
to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire.” Tophet is therefore linked
to hell.
2 (p. 382) “Lord love ’ee, neither court-paying, nor preaching, nor the
seven thunders”: See the reference to a mighty angel in the Bible,
Revelation 10:3: “And cried with a loud voice, as when a lion roareth: and
when he had cried, seven thunders uttered their voices.”
3 (p. 384) “Among them I should have stood like Hymenaeus and
Alexander, who were delivered over to Satan that they might learn not to
blaspheme”: See the Bible, 1 Timothy 1:19-20, where Paul mentions to
Timothy the importance of “holding faith, and a good conscience; which
some having put away concerning faith have made shipwreck: Of whom is
Hymenaeus and Alexander; whom I have delivered unto Satan, that they
may learn not to blaspheme.”
4 . (p. 384) “I believe that if the bachelor apostle, whose deputy I thought I
was, had been tempted by such a pretty face, he would have let go the
plough for her sake as I do!”: The apostle Paul was unmarried. In the Bible,
Luke 9:62, Jesus declares: “No man, having put his hand to the plough, and
looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.”
5 (p. 386) “The words of the stem prophet Hosea that I used to read.... ‘And
she shall follow after her lover . . . for then was it better with me than now!’
”: See the Bible, Hosea 2:7.
 Chapter XLVIII
1 (p. 389) the long red elevator like a Jacob’s ladder, on which a perpetual
stream of threshed straw ascended: See Jacob’s dream in the Bible, Genesis
28:12: “And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the
top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and
descending on it.”
2 (p. 393) “But if I break down by falling into some fearful snare, my last
state will be worse than my first”: See the Bible, Matthew 12:45, 2 Peter
2:20, and Luke 11:26: All concern sinners who mistakenly believe they are
now beyond temptation.
 Chapter XLIX
1 (p. 395) mourned over this treatment of him as Abraham might have
mourned over the doomed Isaac while they went up the hill together: See
the Bible, Genesis 22:1-14, in which God directs Abraham to sacrifice his
son on an altar as a test of faith.
2 (p. 398) But the reasoning is somewhat musty: See Hamlet (act 3, scene
2): “Ay, sir, but ‘While the grass grows’—the proverb is something musty.”
3 (p. 399) what still abode in such a woman as Tess outvalued the freshness
of her fellows. Was not the gleaning of the grapes of Ephraim better than
the vintage of Abiezer: See the Bible, Judges 8:2. The Israelites score a
military victory over the Midianites, and the Ephraimites want to be a part
of that victory, but the general of the Israelites, Gideon, tells them that
taking care of the remains is no less a part of the battle—that is, that the
gleaning, or after-pickings, is no less important than the vintage, or wine,
itself.
4 (p. 399) Clare had seemed to like “Cupid’s Gardens,” “I have parks, I
have hounds,” and “The break o’ the day”; and had seemed not to care for
“The Tailor’s Breeches,” and “Such a beauty I did grow,” excellent ditties
as they were: For “Cupid’s Gardens” and “The Tailor’s Breeches,” see note
2 to chapter XL. The lyric “I have parks ...” is from “The Farmer’s Toast.”
For “The break o’ the day,” see note 5, directly below The source of “Such
a beauty I did grow” is unknown.
5 (p. 399) “Arise, arise, arise! / And pick your love a posy . . . So early in
the May-time / At the break o’ the day!”: These lines are from “The break
o’ the day,” a traditional ballad.
 Chapter L
1 (p. 402) The harts that had been hunted here, the witches that had been
pricked and ducked: During this era, testing a witch involved pricking any
boil found, in case it proved to be an extra nipple for nursing imps, and
ducking the suspect in water. It was believed that witches float, presumably
because they have rejected baptism and therefore water rejects them.
2 (p. 406) “‘Empress, the way is ready, and not long, / . . . ‘Lead then,’ said
Eve”: See the lines Eve speaks to Satan, the serpent, in Milton’s Paradise
Lost (book 9, lines 625-631): “To whom the wily Adder, blithe and glad. /
Empress, the way is ready, and not long, / Beyond a row of myrtles, on a
flat, / Fast by a fountain, one small thicket past / Of blowing myrrh and
balm. If thou accept / My conduct, I can bring thee thither soon.’ / ‘Lead,
then,’ said Eve. He, leading, swiftly rowled / In tangles, and made intricate
seem straight, / To mischief swift.”
 Chapter LI
1 (p. 416) “Here we suffer grief and pain: / Here we meet to part again; / In
Heaven we part no more”: These lines are from a hymn called “Joyful,”
also known as “Heaven Anticipated,” by Thomas Bilby, from The Infant
Teachers’ Assistant (1832).
2 (p. 417) “Not in utter nakedness / But trailing clouds of glory do we
come”: See Wordsworth’s poem “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from
Recollections of Early Childhood” (lines 59-66): “Our birth is but a sleep
and a forgetting: / The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, / Hath had
elsewhere its setting, / And cometh from afar: / Not in entire forgetfulness, /
And not in utter nakedness, / But trailing clouds of glory do we come /
From God, who is our home.”
 Chapter LII
1 (p. 419) The groundwork of the arrangement was the family dresser,
which . . . stood importantly in front, over the tails of the shaft-horses, in its
erect and natural position, like some Ark of the Covenant: The Ark of the
Covenant is the gold-plated sacred wooden box in which the Israelites kept
the two stone tablets listing the Ten Commandments, among other items.
See the Bible, Exodus 25:10-22.
2 (p. 424) The old order changeth: See Morte d‘Arthur (lines 240-243), by
Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892), where King Arthur says: “The old
order changeth, yielding place to new, / And God fulfils Himself in many
ways, / Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.” Significantly, the
next line reads, “Comfort thyself: what comfort is in me?”
 Chapter LIII
1 (p. 431) “like a good many others who lead obscure agricultural lives in
our villages, and are dubbed ‘sons of the soil!’ ”: This is the English title of
the novel Les Paysans, by French author Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850).
2 (p. 432) His had been a love “which alters when it alteration finds”: See
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 (lines 1-4): “Let me not to the marriage of true
minds / Admit impediments. Love is not love / Which alters when it
alteration finds, / Or bends with the remover to remove.”
3 (p. 432) he had seen the virtual Faustina in the literal Cornelia, a
spiritual Lucretia in a corporeal Phryne: The contrasts are between sexual
license and restraint: Annia Galeria Faustina (died A.D. 140?), wife and
cousin of the Roman emperor Antoninus Pius, was notorious for her sexual
promiscuity, and her daughter, known as Annia Galeria Faustina the
Younger (A.D. 125?-176), married to Marcus Aurelius, had an equally
licentious reputation. On the other hand, Cornelia Africana, the daughter of
Scipio Africanus the Younger, born in the second century B.C., became a
maternal ideal in Rome by marrying Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, raising
twelve children, and refusing to remarry after her husband died. Ancient
Roman heroine Lucretia (Lucrece), the wife of Lucius Tarquinius
Collatinus, known for her chastity, killed herself after being raped by Sextus
Tarquinius. Phryne was a famous prostitute in ancient Athens, as well as a
model for artists, including Praxiteles.
4 (p. 432) the woman taken and set in the midst as one deserving to be
stoned: Stoning was the biblical penalty for adultery; see, for instance, John
8:3.
5 (p. 432) the wife of Uriah being made a queen: See the Bible, 2 Samuel
11, for the account of how Bathsheba, Uriah’s wife, committed adultery
with King David, who then had Uriah killed.
 Chapter LIV
1 (p. 435) the histories of these were but as a tale told by an idiot: See
Shakespeare’s Macbeth (5.5.24—28): “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor
player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / And then is heard no
more: it is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying
nothing.”
2 (p. 436) HOW ARE THE MIGHTY FALLEN: See the Bible, 2 Samuel
1:19 : “The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places: how are the
mighty fallen!”
 Chapter LV
1 (p. 439) Yet the exotic had grown here, suddenly as the prophet’s gourd:
See the Bible, Jonah 4:6: “And the Lord God prepared a gourd, and made it
to come up over Jonah, that it might be a shadow over his head, to deliver
him from his grief.” The gourd sprang up to give shade as Jonah sat outside
Nineveh, displeased that God had passed over the city when he had said he
would destroy it.
 Chapter LVIII
1 (p. 461) Like a greater than himself, to the critical question at the critical
time he did not answer: Compare this sentence to the passage found in the
Bible, Matthew 26:62-63: “And the high priest arose, and said unto him,
Answerest thou nothing? what is it which these witness against thee? But
Jesus held his peace.” See also Matthew 27:11-14.
 Chapter LIX
1 (p. 465) “Justice” was done, and the President of the Immortals, in
Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess: See the play Prometheus
Bound (1.169), by classical Greek dramatist Aeschylus (c.525—c.456
B.C.): “The president / Of heaven’s high parliament / Shall need me yet to
show / What new conspiracy with privy blow / Attempts his sceptre and his
kingly seat.”
2 (p. 465) As soon as they had strength they arose, joined hands again, and
went on: Compare this line to that in Paradise Lost (book 12, lines 648-
649), by John Milton (1608-1674): “They hand in hand with wandering
steps and slow / Through Eden took their solitary way.”
 INDEX OF PLACES

Fictional Name Real Name

Abbot’s Cernel Cerne-Abbas

Anglebury Wareham

Bramhurst Moyle’s Bridport

Casterbridge Dorchester

Chalk-Newton Maiden-Newton

Chase Cranborne Chase

Chaseborough Cranborne

Crimmercrock Kingcombe

Egdon Puddletown Heath

Emminster Beaminster

Evershead Evershot

Flintcomb Ash farm near Barcombe Down

Greenhill Woodbury Hill

Hintock Minterne

Kingsbere Bere Regis

Lullstead Lulworth

Marlott Marnhull
Melchester Salisbury

Mellstock Stinsford

Middleton Abbey Milton

Millpond Milbourne

Nuttlebury Hazlebury Bryan

Port-Bredy Bridport

Sandbourne Bournemouth

Shaston Shaftesbury

Sherton Sherborne

Shottsford Blandford Forum

Stagfoot Lane Hartfoot Lane

Stickleford Tincleton

Stourcastle Sturminster-Newton

Talbothays dairy in Froom Valley

Trantridge Pentridge

Weatherbury Puddletown

Wellbridge Wool

Wintoncester Winchester
INSPIRED BY TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES
In 1979 director Roman Polanski released Tess, the most successful film
adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s masterwork to date. Polanski’s movie
conveys the bleak atmosphere of the Wessex countryside with the help of a
score by Philippe Sarde, subtle lighting, and memorable rural vistas. The
screenplay, which Polanski co-wrote, unfolds the drama slowly and
deliberately, focusing on the isolation and confusion of the characters.
Nastassja Kinski plays Tess with a quiet melancholy, Leigh Lawson is the
controlling Alec d’Urberville, and Peter Firth is the idealistic Angel Clare.
The tone of Tess is restrained, particularly in the two major death scenes,
and is a stark contrast to Polanski’s earlier films, like Rosemary’s Baby
(1968), The Tragedy of Macbeth (1971), and Chinatown (1974).
In the November 2004 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, American author
Lorrie Moore identified Polanski’s Tess as one of the only successful
adaptations of Hardy’s novel for the screen. In fact, Moore argues that
Polanski improved on Hardy’s work: In the novel, Hardy paired Tess’s
sister and Angel Clare “heartlessly soon after Tess’s death,” but Polanski
“eliminated that, and also the weird religious period of Alec d’Urberville,
and through these abridgements managed to make several dramatic
elements of the novel more emotionally convincing.”
Polanski’s Tess won many international, Golden Globe, and regional film
critic awards, as well as Academy Awards for Best Cinematography, Best
Costume Design, and Best Art Direction, plus nominations for Best
Director, Best Picture, and Best Score. Polanski dedicated the film to his
wife Sharon Tate, who was killed in 1969 by members of the Charles
Manson family. Tess of the d’Urbervilles was Tate’s favorite novel.
 COMMENTS & QUESTIONS
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives
on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The
commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews
contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the au thor , literary
criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the
work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to
filter Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles through a variety of points
of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.

Comments
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
I do not know that I am exaggerative in criticism; but I will say that Tess is
one of the worst, weakest, least sane, most voulu books I have yet read.... I
should tell you in fairness I could never finish it; there may be the treasures
of the Indies further on; but so far as I read, James, it was (in one word)
damnable. Not alive, not true, was my continual comment as I read; and at
last—not even honest! was the verdict with which I spewed it from my
mouth.
—from a letter to Henry James (December 5, 1892)

LIONEL JOHNSON
[Mr. Hardy] chooses to present the play of life, tragic and comic, first of all,
in a definite tract or province of England; in the Kingdom of Wessex:
whither new influences penetrate but slowly. Secondly, he takes for his
chief characters, men of powerful natures, men of the country, men of little
acquired virtue in mind and soul: but men disciplined by the facts and by
the necessities of life, as a primitive experience manifests them. Thirdly, he
surrounds them with men of the same origin and class, but men of less
strongly marked a power, of less finely touched a spirit: the rank and file of
country labour. Fourthly, he brings his few men of that stronger and finer
nature, his rustic heroes, into contact and into contrast with a few men,
commonly their superiors in education, and sometimes in position, but their
inferiors in strength and fineness of nature: men, whom more modern
experiences have redeemed from being clowns, at the risk of becoming
curs. Fifthly, he makes this contact and this contrast most effective, through
the passion of love: to which end, he brings upon the scene women of
various natures; less plainly marked in character than the men; for the most
part, nearer to the flashy prigs and pretty fellows in outward sentiment,
fashion, and culture; but nearer to the stronger and finer men, in the depths
of their souls. Sixthly, the narratives are conducted slowly at the first, and
great pains are given to make dear the spirit of the country, with its works
and ways: when that has been made clear, the play quickens into passion,
the actors come into conflict, there is strong attraction and strong repulsion,
‘spirits are finely touched’: then, there is a period of waiting, a breathing
space, an ominous stillness and a pause; till, at the last, with increased force
and motion, the play goes forward to its ‘fine issues’; all the inherent
necessities of things cause their effects, tragic or comic, triumphs of the
right or of the wrong; and the end of all is told with a soft solemnity, a sense
of pity striving against a sense of fate.
I do not say that any one novel presents those features, in precisely that
way: it is but an attempt to construct a mechanical type, to which all Mr.
Hardy’s novels tend to conform. At the least, it is true of them all, that they
present, either the resolution of a discord into a harmony, or the breaking of
a harmony by a discord: always the contrast, and the various issue,
according to the worth of the performers with that strange organ, the human
mind. Tess was changing from peasant ignorance and convention, when she
met Clare, changing from the conventional culture and belief of a higher
station; the woman struggling up from superstition, the man struggling free
from prejudice: the two natures, breaking with the past, came together, she
straining towards his level of thought, he stooping to her level of life: the
result was a tragic discord. It might be interpreted in many ways. Perhaps
the superstitious faith of the Durbeyfield household, and the Calvinist faith
of the Clare household, were more nearly in accord with the essential
verities of life, than the new aims and impulses of their offspring: perhaps
Tess and Clare carried right theories into wrong practice: perhaps one alone
did so: certainly, we have in this story a singular presentation of the struggle
between old and new, in various ranks of life and ranges of thought; of the
contact of the new in one rank and range with the new in another; of the
curious reversion, in each case, of the new to the old. Tess acts, on several
occasions, from impulses and in ways, which derive, so her maker hints,
from her knightly ancestors: Clare, at the crisis of her life and of his own,
falls back in cruel cowardice to the conventional standards of that society,
which he so greatly scorns. Tess, again, having learned by ear and heart
Clare’s arguments against Christian theology, repeats them to her old
betrayer, Alec d’Urberville, then a fanatical convert to the Calvinism of
Clare’s father: and she enables him thereby to become a second time her
betrayer. Finally, this tangled play of new things upon old comes to its
wretched end at Stonehenge, the most ancient of religious monuments in
England, and at Winchester, the ancient capital of England: religion,
however stern, society, however cruel, are vindicated in the presence of
their august memorials. The old, we are meant to feel, was wrong, and the
new was right: but the inhuman irony of fate turned all to misunderstanding
and to despair: the new devil quoted the new scriptures in the ears of the
new believers; and they went to the old destruction.
—from The Art of Thomas Hardy (1894)

PROSSER HALL FRYE

Tess of the d’Urbervilles, that obsession of hopeless misery, with the grim,
sardonic humour licking under its title like a scurrilous tongue—Tess,
which has long disputed a characteristic pre-eminence—suners incurably,
among other drawbacks, from its incongruous clutter of erotico-
psychological sentiment.
—from Literary Reviews and Criticisms (1908)

F MANNING
In Tess of the d‘Urbervilles the whole of the reader’s attention is focused
upon a single aspect of life, and that aspect is reflected in a single person.
Considered apart from Tess, Alec d’Urberville and Angel Clare are purely
superficial characters. It is only in their relation to her, only when we see
them bathed in the light of her own consciousness, only in so far as she
turns from one to the other of them, that they interest us. On the other hand,
Tess herself is an almost entirely passive character. She interests us, not by
what she does or says, but entirely by what she feels, entirely by her
capacity for suffering. To understand such a nature il faut s’abêtir, as Pascal
said; it is spontaneous, instinctive, moody; it lacks both the control of will
and the control of reason. It is one of the simplest organisms, in which the
nerve-centres are not localized, but spread over the whole surface of the
body, and in which thought is practically identical with sensation. It is
essentially feminine. The passivity of her character is so firmly insisted
upon by her author, in his eagerness to retain our sympathy, as in some
measure to defeat his end, for in order that our sympathy with her should be
complete we must realize her own responsibility....
If ... the tendency of Mr. Hardy’s mind has been towards the expression of
one particular aspect of life, the tendency is only discernible when we view
the novels in their chronological order, and that is not a proper way to
criticize his work. Tess is a great work of subjectivity, a masterpiece of its
kind, but of a very special kind. No other writer, we think, of the Victorian
age has shown such emotional power or so intuitive a vision. Considered,
however, from another point of view, we prefer The Return of the Native.
Tess, perhaps, is more complete as an expression of the peculiar qualities of
Mr. Hardy’s genius, but The Return of the Native is more complete as a
representation of life.
—from The Spectator (September 7, 1912)

THOMAS HARDY
Read review of Tess in The Quarterly. A smart and amusing article; but it is
easy to be smart and amusing if a man will forgo veracity and sincerity....
How strange that one may write a book without knowing what one puts into
it—or rather, the reader reads into it. Well, if this sort of thing continues no
more novel-writing for me. A man must be a fool to deliberately stand up to
be shot at.
—from The Later Years of Thomas Hardy (1930)

VIRGINIA WOOLF
It is no mere transcript of life at a certain time and place that Hardy has
given us. It is a vision of the world and of man’s lot as they revealed
themselves to a powerful imagination, a profound and poetic genius, a
gentle and humane soul.
—from The Common Reader: Second Series (1932)

Questions
1. If you were Tess’s friend and knew the details of her traumatic
encounter with Alec, what advice would you give her?
2. From the endnotes, you can see how many allusions to the Bible are
in this novel. What would you say is the status of Christianity in Tess?
Does Hardy believe in it—totally or partially or not at all? Is its effect
on believers good or bad? Does human behavior support or refute it?
Is God dead—or dying?
3. What is Hardy’s view of human sexuality? Is it just a force
programmed into us by evolution? Is it different in men and women?
4. What is the relation of nature to humanity in this novel? Is nature
hostile or supportive? Does it exist in its own right, or is it always
presented as an emblem of something in humanity? Is it simply
indifferent to human concerns?
5. How would you feel if you were one of the Durbeyfield children ?
What is Hardy’s view on the family—does he see it as a support
system, a prison, or something in between?
6. Much of the plot seems almost preordained. Do the events in the
novel depend on fate or free will? Where does character fit in?
 FOR FURTHER READING
Biographies

Millgate, Michael. Thomas Hardy:A Biography. New York: Random House,

1982.
Turner, Paul. The Life of Thomas Hardy: A Critical Biography. Oxford:
Black-well, 1998.

Primary Materials

Collins, Vere H. Talks with Thomas Hardy at Max Gate, 1920-1922. Garden
City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1928.
Hardy, Thomas. The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy. Edited by James
Gibson. New York: Macmillan, 1976.
. Thomas Hardy: Selected Letters. Edited by Michael Millgate. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1990.
. Thomas Hardy’s Public voice: The Essays, Speeches, and Miscellaneous
Prose. Edited by Michael Millgate. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001.
. The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy. Edited by Michael Millgate. London:
Macmillan, 1984.
————The Literary Notebooks of Thomas Hardy. Edited by Lennart A.
Björk. New York: New York University Press, 1985.
. Personal Writings: Prefaces, Literary Opinions, Reminiscences. Edited by
Harold Orel. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1966.
Roberts, Marguerite, ed. Tess in the Theatre: Two Dramatizations of Tess of
the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy, One by Lorimer Stoddard. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1950.
 Background

Hopkins, Robert Thurston. Thomas Hardy’s Dorset. Illustrated by E.

Harries. London: C. Palmer, 1922.
Kay-Robinson, Denys. The Landscape of Thomas Hardy. With photographs
by Simon McBride. Salem, NH: Salem House, 1984.
Pinion, F. B. A Thomas Hardy Dictionary: With Maps and a Chronology.
New York: New York University Press, 1989.

Critical Studies

Bayley, John. An Essay on Hardy. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge

University Press, 1978.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. New York:
Chelsea House, 1987
Higonnet, Margaret R., ed. The Sense of Sex: Feminist Perspectives on
Hardy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.
Laird, J.T. The Shaping of Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1975.
Miller, J. Hillis. Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1970.
Murphy, Patricia. Time Is of the Essence: Temporality, Gender, and the New
Woman. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001.
Pettit, Charles P. C., ed. Reading Thomas Hardy. Basingstoke: Macmillan,
1998.
Wright,T. R. Hardy and His Readers. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2003.
 a
Hypothetical union of seven Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in England during the
seventh and eighth centuries.
b
Injures someone’s sore spot; see Shakespeare’s Hamlet (act 5, scene 1):
“The toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier, he galls his
kibe.”
c
Better had it been not to write (Latin).
d
Peddler.
e
Old (dialect).
f
Limestone from the Dorset peninsula of Purbeck.
g
Lamb’s fry: dish made from a lamb’s internal organs; black-pot: type of
fatty blood sausage; chitterlings: cooked pig intestines.
h
Procession of local club members through town.
i
Trudge.
j
Interlocking.
k
Henry III reigned from 1216 to 1272.
l
Holiday on the first of May.
m
Celebration of Ceres, ancient Roman goddess of agriculture.
n
Before the imposition of the Gregorian calendar in 1752.
o
Late-eighteenth-century.
p
Amount of ale drunk after a day at the market.
q
Festival celebrated on the seventh Sunday after Easter.
r
Hugging about the waist and neck.
s
Lively dance.
t
Diamond (dialect).
u
Cupid’s (dialect).
v
“You’ll be pleased enough, my doll” (dialect).
w
Top level of schooling in the state-aided primary school system.
x
Clown (dialect).
y
Commotion (dialect).
z
Swell.
aa
One-horse carriage (dialect).
ab
Crowd (dialect).
ac
Unsettled (dialect).
ad
Reference to national educational system regulations revised in 1862 and
1867. which based funding on school size and performance.
ae
Coffer (dialect).
af
Official (dialect).
ag
That is, the time following the invasion by the Norman duke more
commonly known as William the Conqueror, or William I, who ruled
England from 1066 until 1087.
ah
Supple (dialect).
ai
Corruption of the expression “get green malt in flower,” meaning an
illegitimate pregnancy.
aj
A lean toward the altar.
ak
Nature (dialect).
al
Type of apple tree whose elongated fruit is usually used for cooking.
am
One who believes the theory of British economist Thomas Robert Malthus
(1766-1834), who warned population growth would outpace the food
supply.
an
Attractive.
ao
Something that alleviates sorrow.
ap
Gifts sold at a fair.
aq
Ungainly; clumsy.
ar
Holly berry.
as
Tenants on manorial estates.
at
References to Greek mythology: Pan, a deity—part goat, part man—
associated with wild living; Syrinx, a nymph who turned into water reeds to
escape Pan; Lotis, a nymph who turned into a lotus tree to elude the god
Priapus.
au
Plural of Silenus, a satyr.
av
In the style of Praxiteles, ancient Greek sculptor of graceful, sensual statues.
aw
Shoot (dialect); that is, a mere child.
ax
Figure sculpted at the top of a marble pillar.
ay
Struggle and toil.
az
Haughty (dialect).
ba
English preacher who lived from 1634 to 1716; renowned for his sermons.
bb
Sun worship.
bc
Open wagon.
bd
Cloth whose warp and woof threads are stretched to create patterns.
be
Ideas of the seventeenth-century Anglican bishop who authored The Rule
and Exercises of Holy Dying ( 1651 ) .
bf
Farmyard.
bg
Pinafore (dialect).
bh
Dry up (dialect).
bi
Cucumber frame or hothouse (dialect).
bj
Dry stalk of cow-parsley (dialect).
bk
Journeymen are day-workers, as opposed to apprentices or masters.
bl
Cows with no horns (dialect).
 bm
Merchandise carriers (dialect).
bn
Hungry (dialect).
bo
Greyhound (dialect).
bp
Leaden milk pans.
bq
Cheese presses.
br
To be ordained as a clergyman.
bs
Shell-game hucksters.
bt
Hooks or notches from which pots hang.
bu
Apple blossom.
bv
Jack-in-the-pulpit flowers.
bw
Silliness (French) .
bx
Eccentrics (dialect).
by
Propriety (French).
bz
Greek deities associated with chastity; Artemis, a goddess of hunters and
wildlife; Demeter, goddess of agriculture and fertility.
ca
Decayed wood that burns easily—as if at a touch.
cb
Whore’s offspring.
cc
Christian holy day that commemorates Christ’s ascension into heaven.
cd
Saw (dialect).
ce
Scolding; abusing.
cf
Apple pulp from making cider.
cg
Sharp taste.
ch
Short for water-meadows, meadows that are kept fertile by flooding.
ci
Litany responses in a church service.
cj
One who doesn’t keep the Sabbath.
ck
Thistle root, used for stomach upset and other medicinal purposes.
cl
Hot summer weather; reference to the period July 19-August 17, known as
the month ofThermidor in the French republican calendar in use from 1793
until 1806.
cm
Sausages containing pigs’ blood and suet.
cn
Drink fermented from honey.
co
Doctrine that teaches salvation through faith alone, without good works or
the church.
cp
Splotched; at one time a fashionable look.
cq
Member of a church that considers the four Gospels the sole religious
authority.
cr
Member of an Evangelical sect in which personal conversion is deemed
necessary for salvation.
cs
German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) and Italian poet
Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) both Romantics.
ct
William Wordsworth (1770-1850) and Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822),
English Romantic poets.
cu
Antonio Allegri (1494-1534), known as Correggio, an Italian Renaissance
painter of religious-themed works; Diego Velasquez ( 1599-1660), also
spelled Velazquez, a Spanish painter famed for his naturalistic style.
cv
Assemblies of district church officials to discuss church matters.
cw
Unbought food (Latin).
cx
Drink.
 cy
Reference to High Church ornamentation.
cz
Nonsense.
da
Belief in personal salvation apart from the authority of the church.
db
See endnote 4 to chapter XVI; Broad Church moderates preferred a liberal
interpretation of Scripture.
dc
High Church; specifically, in favor of a return to early Catholic elements of
the Church of England.
dd
Referring to the belief that defines God as the laws and forces of the
universe.
de
Believing.
df
Burdensome.
dg
Scrawny; puny (dialect).
dh
Built during the reign of Charles I (1625-1649) or Charles II (1660-1685).
di
Less darkly romantic and more cerebrally inclined; reference to,
respectively, Romantic poets Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley.
dj
Plains.
dk
Bailiff; farm manager (slang).
dl
Refining flour with a sieve.
dm
Local phrase for publication of banns [Hardy’s note]. Banns are the public
notice of a proposed marriage.
dn
Permission from the bishop, making banns unnecessary.
do
Fireplace curtain to increase circulation of hot air.
dp
Party; celebration.
dq
Post chaise: a four-wheeled carriage used for long-distance travel; the term
felloes refers to rims of a spoked wheel.
dr
Person who rides one of a carriage’s lead horses.
ds
Party of four (French).
dt
Crowded gathering.
du
Worried; upset.
dv
Drunk (slang).
dw
One who irrigates crops.
dx
Stand of willow trees.
 dy
Nightgown.
dz
Aldebaran: red-hued star in the constellation Taurus; Sirius: the brightest
star in the night sky.
ea
Belief that the words of the Bible were divinely inspired.
eb
Trod over.
ec
A sewing kit, often called a “good housewife” (dialect).
ed
Love-feast; in this sense, a common meal, shared as a symbol of mutual
commitment.
ee
Bed canopy made of cotton with a raised texture.
ef
Light carriage.
eg
Barrel.
eh
Sneer.
ei
Brussels museum dedicated to Flemish painter Antoine-Joseph Wiertz
(1806-1865).
ej
Flemish painter Jan Van Beers (1852-1927), often compared to Wiertz.
ek
To kiss the rod is to swear allegiance to Christ by kissing the cross; by
extension, acting submissively.
el
Brightness (French).
em
Pimp (slang).
en
Wise tenth-century B.C. king of Israel; in the Bible; the speaker at the start
of the biblical book of Ecclesiastes.
eo
Ancient Asian fertility goddess.
ep
Cuttings planted to grow shrubs.
eq
Cutting rutabagas.
er
Italian Renaissance paintings of Mary Magdalene, and Mary, the mother of
Jesus, after his crucifixion.
es
Movable frame of laced twigs usually used as a movable fence.
et
Preparing straw to make thatch.
eu
Thirtover: that is, thwart-over, meaning perverse or contrary (dialect);
lackaday: lackadaisical or careless.
ev
Stuffy (French).
ew
Bombastic preacher.
 ex
Curiosity (French).
ey
Bawdy, or harlot-like; from Cyprus, said to be the birthplace of Aphrodite,
the goddess of love.
ez
Literally, little death (French); a twinge or shudder.
fa
Prime mover (Latin); in the theory of the second century A.D. astronomer
Ptolemy, the astral body that causes all heavenly movement.
fb
After Pluto, Greek god of the underworld.
fc
Stuck (dialect).
fd
Hag-ridden, or afflicted by nightmares.
fe
Literally love of the world (German); desire for worldly pleasures.
ff
Cake baked on a milk-skimming ladle.
fg
Snack time; in this case, mid-afternoon.
fh
Chaos; derived from the name of the Greek god Pan, who caused uproar
and confusion.
fi
Ancient Greek religion.
fj
Drive away at (dialect).
 fk
Basket of plaited willow branches.
fl
Sniggered.
fm
Satan.
fn
Lifeholders; that is, tenants with a term limited to their lives and some
descendants, as opposed to freeholders, whose land-lease rights could be
passed on in perpetuity.
fo
Greek gods who dwelt on Mount Olympus.
fp
Reference to the book of Exodus in the Bible that tells of the Israelites’
escape from slavery in Egypt and deliverance to the Promised Land.
fq
Worker who transports goods with a cart; a mover.
fr
High, wooden-soled overshoes on iron frames, to keep above the mud.
fs
Gloomy; threatening.
ft
No longer preserved by royal decree for hunting.
fu
Door of the tomb of the ancient family of d’Urberville (Latin).
fv
The Promised Land.
fw
Entice; draw.
 fx
Lamentation Over the Dead Christ, by Venetian painter Carlo Crivelli
(c.1430—c.1495).
fy
When Britain was under Roman rule, approximately A.D. 43-450.
fz
Mourning clothes livened with white, gray, or purple; worn during the
period after full mourning ends.
ga
In Greek myth, Zeus bound the king Ixion to a revolving wheel of fire for
trying to seduce Hera, Zeus’s wife.
gb
Antinous, a favorite of Roman emperor Hadrian; Apollo, the Greek god of
sun and music. Both were known for their beauty.
gc
In Greek mythology, Atalanta was a huntress who refused to wed any man
who could not outrun her; she speared the losers.
gd
Eight-sided tower in ancient Athens used to tell time.
ge
Trilithon: Stone Age structure composed of two stone posts supporting a
stone crosspiecel; monoliths: large stone blocks.
gf
Ancient archaeological site northwest of Salisbury in southern England. The
purpose of the remaining large standing stones, which are grouped in a
circle, is unknown; various theories suggest the original structure was used
as a primitive calendar, a temple, or a burial ground.
gg
Two Hallowed Mourners, a fresco now attributed to Italian painter Spinello
Aretino (c.1346-1410).
gh
Windows with heavy, arched frames.