Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman
The charwoman soon came. Her presence was at first a strain upon Tess,
but afterwards an alleviation. At half-past twelve she left her
assistant alone in the kitchen, and, returning to the sitting-room,
waited for the reappearance of Angel’s form behind the bridge.
About one he showed himself. Her face flushed, although he was a
quarter of a mile off. She ran to the kitchen to get the dinner served
by the time he should enter. He went first to the room where they had
washed their hands together the day before, and as he entered the
sitting-room the dish-covers rose from the dishes as if by his own
motion.
“How punctual!” he said.
“Yes. I saw you coming over the bridge,” said she.
The meal was passed in commonplace talk of what he had been doing
during the morning at the Abbey Mill, of the methods of bolting and the
old-fashioned machinery, which he feared would not enlighten him
greatly on modern improved methods, some of it seeming to have been in
use ever since the days it ground for the monks in the adjoining
conventual buildings—now a heap of ruins. He left the house again in
the course of an hour, coming home at dusk, and occupying himself
through the evening with his papers. She feared she was in the way and,
when the old woman was gone, retired to the kitchen, where she made
herself busy as well as she could for more than an hour.
Clare’s shape appeared at the door. “You must not work like this,” he
said. “You are not my servant; you are my wife.”
She raised her eyes, and brightened somewhat. “I may think myself
that—indeed?” she murmured, in piteous raillery. “You mean in name!
Well, I don’t want to be anything more.”
“You _may_ think so, Tess! You are. What do you mean?”
“I don’t know,” she said hastily, with tears in her accents. “I thought
I—because I am not respectable, I mean. I told you I thought I was not
respectable enough long ago—and on that account I didn’t want to marry
you, only—only you urged me!”
She broke into sobs, and turned her back to him. It would almost have
won round any man but Angel Clare. Within the remote depths of his
constitution, so gentle and affectionate as he was in general, there
lay hidden a hard logical deposit, like a vein of metal in a soft loam,
which turned the edge of everything that attempted to traverse it. It
had blocked his acceptance of the Church; it blocked his acceptance of
Tess. Moreover, his affection itself was less fire than radiance, and,
with regard to the other sex, when he ceased to believe he ceased to
follow: contrasting in this with many impressionable natures, who
remain sensuously infatuated with what they intellectually despise. He
waited till her sobbing ceased.
“I wish half the women in England were as respectable as you,” he said,
in an ebullition of bitterness against womankind in general. “It isn’t
a question of respectability, but one of principle!”
He spoke such things as these and more of a kindred sort to her, being
still swayed by the antipathetic wave which warps direct souls with
such persistence when once their vision finds itself mocked by
appearances. There was, it is true, underneath, a back current of
sympathy through which a woman of the world might have conquered him.
But Tess did not think of this; she took everything as her deserts, and
hardly opened her mouth. The firmness of her devotion to him was indeed
almost pitiful; quick-tempered as she naturally was, nothing that he
could say made her unseemly; she sought not her own; was not provoked;
thought no evil of his treatment of her. She might just now have been
Apostolic Charity herself returned to a self-seeking modern world.
This evening, night, and morning were passed precisely as the preceding
ones had been passed. On one, and only one, occasion did she—the
formerly free and independent Tess—venture to make any advances. It was
on the third occasion of his starting after a meal to go out to the
flour-mill. As he was leaving the table he said “Goodbye,” and she
replied in the same words, at the same time inclining her mouth in the
way of his. He did not avail himself of the invitation, saying, as he
turned hastily aside—
“I shall be home punctually.”
Tess shrank into herself as if she had been struck. Often enough had he
tried to reach those lips against her consent—often had he said gaily
that her mouth and breath tasted of the butter and eggs and milk and
honey on which she mainly lived, that he drew sustenance from them, and
other follies of that sort. But he did not care for them now. He
observed her sudden shrinking, and said gently—
“You know, I have to think of a course. It was imperative that we
should stay together a little while, to avoid the scandal to you that
would have resulted from our immediate parting. But you must see it is
only for form’s sake.”
“Yes,” said Tess absently.
He went out, and on his way to the mill stood still, and wished for a
moment that he had responded yet more kindly, and kissed her once at
least.
Thus they lived through this despairing day or two; in the same house,
truly; but more widely apart than before they were lovers. It was
evident to her that he was, as he had said, living with paralyzed
activities in his endeavour to think of a plan of procedure. She was
awe-stricken to discover such determination under such apparent
flexibility. His consistency was, indeed, too cruel. She no longer
expected forgiveness now. More than once she thought of going away from
him during his absence at the mill; but she feared that this, instead
of benefiting him, might be the means of hampering and humiliating him
yet more if it should become known.
Meanwhile Clare was meditating, verily. His thought had been
unsuspended; he was becoming ill with thinking; eaten out with
thinking, withered by thinking; scourged out of all his former
pulsating, flexuous domesticity. He walked about saying to himself,
“What’s to be done—what’s to be done?” and by chance she overheard him.
It caused her to break the reserve about their future which had
hitherto prevailed.
“I suppose—you are not going to live with me—long, are you, Angel?” she
asked, the sunk corners of her mouth betraying how purely mechanical
were the means by which she retained that expression of chastened calm
upon her face.
“I cannot” he said, “without despising myself, and what is worse,
perhaps, despising you. I mean, of course, cannot live with you in the
ordinary sense. At present, whatever I feel, I do not despise you. And,
let me speak plainly, or you may not see all my difficulties. How can
we live together while that man lives?—he being your husband in nature,
and not I. If he were dead it might be different... Besides, that’s not
all the difficulty; it lies in another consideration—one bearing upon
the future of other people than ourselves. Think of years to come, and
children being born to us, and this past matter getting known—for it
must get known. There is not an uttermost part of the earth but
somebody comes from it or goes to it from elsewhere. Well, think of
wretches of our flesh and blood growing up under a taunt which they
will gradually get to feel the full force of with their expanding
years. What an awakening for them! What a prospect! Can you honestly
say ‘Remain’ after contemplating this contingency? Don’t you think we
had better endure the ills we have than fly to others?”
Her eyelids, weighted with trouble, continued drooping as before.
“I cannot say ‘Remain,’” she answered, “I cannot; I had not thought so
far.”
Tess’s feminine hope—shall we confess it?—had been so obstinately
recuperative as to revive in her surreptitious visions of a domiciliary
intimacy continued long enough to break down his coldness even against
his judgement. Though unsophisticated in the usual sense, she was not
incomplete; and it would have denoted deficiency of womanhood if she
had not instinctively known what an argument lies in propinquity.
Nothing else would serve her, she knew, if this failed. It was wrong to
hope in what was of the nature of strategy, she said to herself: yet
that sort of hope she could not extinguish. His last representation had
now been made, and it was, as she said, a new view. She had truly never
thought so far as that, and his lucid picture of possible offspring who
would scorn her was one that brought deadly convictions to an honest
heart which was humanitarian to its centre. Sheer experience had
already taught her that in some circumstances there was one thing
better than to lead a good life, and that was to be saved from leading
any life whatever. Like all who have been previsioned by suffering, she
could, in the words of M. Sully-Prudhomme, hear a penal sentence in the
fiat, “You shall be born,” particularly if addressed to potential issue
of hers.
Yet such is the vulpine slyness of Dame Nature, that, till now, Tess
had been hoodwinked by her love for Clare into forgetting it might
result in vitalizations that would inflict upon others what she had
bewailed as misfortune to herself.
She therefore could not withstand his argument. But with the
self-combating proclivity of the supersensitive, an answer thereto
arose in Clare’s own mind, and he almost feared it. It was based on her
exceptional physical nature; and she might have used it promisingly.
She might have added besides: “On an Australian upland or Texan plain,
who is to know or care about my misfortunes, or to reproach me or you?”
Yet, like the majority of women, she accepted the momentary presentment
as if it were the inevitable. And she may have been right. The
intuitive heart of woman knoweth not only its own bitterness, but its
husband’s, and even if these assumed reproaches were not likely to be
addressed to him or to his by strangers, they might have reached his
ears from his own fastidious brain.
It was the third day of the estrangement. Some might risk the odd
paradox that with more animalism he would have been the nobler man. We
do not say it. Yet Clare’s love was doubtless ethereal to a fault,
imaginative to impracticability. With these natures, corporal presence
is something less appealing than corporal absence; the latter creating
an ideal presence that conveniently drops the defects of the real. She
found that her personality did not plead her cause so forcibly as she
had anticipated. The figurative phrase was true: she was another woman
than the one who had excited his desire.
“I have thought over what you say,” she remarked to him, moving her
forefinger over the tablecloth, her other hand, which bore the ring
that mocked them both, supporting her forehead. “It is quite true, all
of it; it must be. You must go away from me.”
“But what can you do?”
“I can go home.”
Clare had not thought of that.
“Are you sure?” he inquired.
“Quite sure. We ought to part, and we may as well get it past and done.
You once said that I was apt to win men against their better judgement;
and if I am constantly before your eyes I may cause you to change your
plans in opposition to your reason and wish; and afterwards your
repentance and my sorrow will be terrible.”
“And you would like to go home?” he asked.
“I want to leave you, and go home.”
“Then it shall be so.”
Though she did not look up at him, she started. There was a difference
between the proposition and the covenant, which she had felt only too
quickly.
“I feared it would come to this,” she murmured, her countenance meekly
fixed. “I don’t complain, Angel, I—I think it best. What you said has
quite convinced me. Yes, though nobody else should reproach me if we
should stay together, yet somewhen, years hence, you might get angry
with me for any ordinary matter, and knowing what you do of my bygones,