Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman
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, 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 spear-grass, 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 terror 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. To-morrow 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
feller, 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 had 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 ’twas. 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.
“Be 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
scram 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 soon 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
candlelight 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.