Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman
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 unaffectedly 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. He himself
knew that, in reality, the confused beliefs which she held, apparently
imbibed in childhood, were, if anything, Tractarian as to phraseology,
and Pantheistic 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.
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 had 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 with
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 point-blank, 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; 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 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 that in the fields and
pastures to “sigh gratis” is by no means deemed waste; love-making
being here more often accepted inconsiderately and for its own sweet
sake than in the carking, 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 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 handful, 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