Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman
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 tablecloth, 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 ecstasy in his society—of “pleasure
girdled about with pain”. 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-puddings and a bottle of mead, 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 Antinomianism 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-patched 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 the
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 well nigh dropped out of contemporary life. A spiritual
descendant in the direct line from Wycliff, Huss, Luther, Calvin; an
Evangelical of the Evangelicals, a Conversionist, a man of Apostolic
simplicity in life and thought, he had in his raw youth made up his
mind once for all in 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. The New Testament was less a Christiad then 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. He despised the
Canons and Rubric, swore by the Articles, 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 to-day 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 Shelley was belittled they allowed
him 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, 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 Visitations were the mainsprings of
the world to the one; Cambridge to the other. Each brother candidly
recognized that there were a few unimportant score 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.”
“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