Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman
“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 had 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 ‘exclaim against their own
succession,’ as Hamlet puts it; 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!” 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 offscouring of all things unto this day.’ 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.”
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-hill 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 home-life, 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 brim-fulness 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.
“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 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’ 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