Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman
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.”
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 silence, “Amen!”
Then their sister, with much augmented confidence in the efficacy of
the 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.” 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.”
She remained at 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 among all the other days of the year, giving no sign