Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman
“Oh, he’s gone away for a time.”
“Gone away! When was you married, then? The day you said?”
“Yes, Tuesday, mother.”
“And now ’tis on’y Saturday, and he gone away?”
“Yes, he’s gone.”
“What’s the meaning o’ that? ’Nation seize such husbands as you seem to
get, say I!”
“Mother!” Tess went across to Joan Durbeyfield, laid her face upon the
matron’s bosom, and burst into sobs. “I don’t know how to tell ’ee,
mother! You said to me, and wrote to me, that I was not to tell him.
But I did tell him—I couldn’t help it—and he went away!”
“O you little fool—you little fool!” burst out Mrs Durbeyfield,
splashing Tess and herself in her agitation. “My good God! that ever I
should ha’ lived to say it, but I say it again, you little fool!”
Tess was convulsed with weeping, the tension of so many days having
relaxed at last.
“I know it—I know—I know!” she gasped through her sobs. “But, O my
mother, I could not help it! He was so good—and I felt the wickedness
of trying to blind him as to what had happened! If—if—it were to be
done again—I should do the same. I could not—I dared not—so sin—against
him!”
“But you sinned enough to marry him first!”
“Yes, yes; that’s where my misery do lie! But I thought he could get
rid o’ me by law if he were determined not to overlook it. And O, if
you knew—if you could only half know how I loved him—how anxious I was
to have him—and how wrung I was between caring so much for him and my
wish to be fair to him!”
Tess was so shaken that she could get no further, and sank, a helpless
thing, into a chair.
“Well, well; what’s done can’t be undone! I’m sure I don’t know why
children o’ my bringing forth should all be bigger simpletons than
other people’s—not to know better than to blab such a thing as that,
when he couldn’t ha’ found it out till too late!” Here Mrs Durbeyfield
began shedding tears on her own account as a mother to be pitied. “What
your father will say I don’t know,” she continued; “for he’s been
talking about the wedding up at Rolliver’s and The Pure Drop every day
since, and about his family getting back to their rightful position
through you—poor silly man!—and now you’ve made this mess of it! The
Lord-a-Lord!”
As if to bring matters to a focus, Tess’s father was heard approaching
at that moment. He did not, however, enter immediately, and Mrs
Durbeyfield said that she would break the bad news to him herself, Tess
keeping out of sight for the present. After her first burst of
disappointment Joan began to take the mishap as she had taken Tess’s
original trouble, as she would have taken a wet holiday or failure in
the potato-crop; as a thing which had come upon them irrespective of
desert or folly; a chance external impingement to be borne with; not a
lesson.
Tess retreated upstairs and beheld casually that the beds had been
shifted, and new arrangements made. Her old bed had been adapted for
two younger children. There was no place here for her now.
The room below being unceiled she could hear most of what went on
there. Presently her father entered, apparently carrying in a live hen.
He was a foot-haggler now, having been obliged to sell his second
horse, and he travelled with his basket on his arm. The hen had been
carried about this morning as it was often carried, to show people that
he was in his work, though it had lain, with its legs tied, under the
table at Rolliver’s for more than an hour.
“We’ve just had up a story about—” Durbeyfield began, and thereupon
related in detail to his wife a discussion which had arisen at the inn
about the clergy, originated by the fact of his daughter having married
into a clerical family. “They was formerly styled ‘sir’, like my own
ancestry,” he said, “though nowadays their true style, strictly
speaking, is ‘clerk’ only.” As Tess had wished that no great publicity
should be given to the event, he had mentioned no particulars. He hoped
she would remove that prohibition soon. He proposed that the couple
should take Tess’s own name, d’Urberville, as uncorrupted. It was
better than her husbands’s. He asked if any letter had come from her
that day.
Then Mrs Durbeyfield informed him that no letter had come, but Tess
unfortunately had come herself.
When at length the collapse was explained to him, a sullen
mortification, not usual with Durbeyfield, overpowered the influence of
the cheering glass. Yet the intrinsic quality of the event moved his
touchy sensitiveness less than its conjectured effect upon the minds of
others.
“To think, now, that this was to be the end o’t!” said Sir John. “And I
with a family vault under that there church of Kingsbere as big as
Squire Jollard’s ale-cellar, and my folk lying there in sixes and
sevens, as genuine county bones and marrow as any recorded in history.
And now to be sure what they fellers at Rolliver’s and The Pure Drop
will say to me! How they’ll squint and glane, and say, ‘This is yer
mighty match is it; this is yer getting back to the true level of yer
forefathers in King Norman’s time!’ I feel this is too much, Joan; I
shall put an end to myself, title and all—I can bear it no longer!...
But she can make him keep her if he’s married her?”
“Why, yes. But she won’t think o’ doing that.”
“D’ye think he really have married her?—or is it like the first—”
Poor Tess, who had heard as far as this, could not bear to hear more.
The perception that her word could be doubted even here, in her own
parental house, set her mind against the spot as nothing else could
have done. How unexpected were the attacks of destiny! And if her
father doubted her a little, would not neighbours and acquaintance
doubt her much? O, she could not live long at home!
A few days, accordingly, were all that she allowed herself here, at the
end of which time she received a short note from Clare, informing her
that he had gone to the North of England to look at a farm. In her
craving for the lustre of her true position as his wife, and to hide
from her parents the vast extent of the division between them, she made
use of this letter as her reason for again departing, leaving them
under the impression that she was setting out to join him. Still
further to screen her husband from any imputation of unkindness to her,
she took twenty-five of the fifty pounds Clare had given her, and
handed the sum over to her mother, as if the wife of a man like Angel
Clare could well afford it, saying that it was a slight return for the
trouble and humiliation she had brought upon them in years past. With
this assertion of her dignity she bade them farewell; and after that
there were lively doings in the Durbeyfield household for some time on
the strength of Tess’s bounty, her mother saying, and, indeed,
believing, that the rupture which had arisen between the young husband
and wife had adjusted itself under their strong feeling that they could
not live apart from each other.
XXXIX
It was three weeks after the marriage that Clare found himself
descending the hill which led to the well-known parsonage of his
father. With his downward course the tower of the church rose into the
evening sky in a manner of inquiry as to why he had come; and no living
person in the twilighted town seemed to notice him, still less to
expect him. He was arriving like a ghost, and the sound of his own
footsteps was almost an encumbrance to be got rid of.
The picture of life had changed for him. Before this time he had known
it but speculatively; now he thought he knew it as a practical man;
though perhaps he did not, even yet. Nevertheless humanity stood before
him no longer in the pensive sweetness of Italian art, but in the
staring and ghastly attitudes of a Wiertz Museum, and with the leer of
a study by Van Beers.
His conduct during these first weeks had been desultory beyond
description. After mechanically attempting to pursue his agricultural
plans as though nothing unusual had happened, in the manner recommended
by the great and wise men of all ages, he concluded that very few of
those great and wise men had ever gone so far outside themselves as to
test the feasibility of their counsel. “This is the chief thing: be not
perturbed,” said the Pagan moralist. That was just Clare’s own opinion.
But he was perturbed. “Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it
be afraid,” said the Nazarene. Clare chimed in cordially; but his heart
was troubled all the same. How he would have liked to confront those
two great thinkers, and earnestly appeal to them as fellow-man to
fellow-men, and ask them to tell him their method!
His mood transmuted itself into a dogged indifference till at length he
fancied he was looking on his own existence with the passive interest
of an outsider.
He was embittered by the conviction that all this desolation had been
brought about by the accident of her being a d’Urberville. When he
found that Tess came of that exhausted ancient line, and was not of the
new tribes from below, as he had fondly dreamed, why had he not
stoically abandoned her in fidelity to his principles? This was what he
had got by apostasy, and his punishment was deserved.
Then he became weary and anxious, and his anxiety increased. He
wondered if he had treated her unfairly. He ate without knowing that he
ate, and drank without tasting. As the hours dropped past, as the
motive of each act in the long series of bygone days presented itself
to his view, he perceived how intimately the notion of having Tess as a
dear possession was mixed up with all his schemes and words and ways.
In going hither and thither he observed in the outskirts of a small
town a red-and-blue placard setting forth the great advantages of the
Empire of Brazil as a field for the emigrating agriculturist. Land was
offered there on exceptionally advantageous terms. Brazil somewhat
attracted him as a new idea. Tess could eventually join him there, and
perhaps in that country of contrasting scenes and notions and habits
the conventions would not be so operative which made life with her seem
impracticable to him here. In brief he was strongly inclined to try
Brazil, especially as the season for going thither was just at hand.
With this view he was returning to Emminster to disclose his plan to
his parents, and to make the best explanation he could make of arriving
without Tess, short of revealing what had actually separated them. As
he reached the door the new moon shone upon his face, just as the old
one had done in the small hours of that morning when he had carried his
wife in his arms across the river to the graveyard of the monks; but
his face was thinner now.
Clare had given his parents no warning of his visit, and his arrival
stirred the atmosphere of the Vicarage as the dive of the kingfisher
stirs a quiet pool. His father and mother were both in the
drawing-room, but neither of his brothers was now at home. Angel
entered, and closed the door quietly behind him.
“But—where’s your wife, dear Angel?” cried his mother. “How you
surprise us!”
“She is at her mother’s—temporarily. I have come home rather in a hurry
because I’ve decided to go to Brazil.”
“Brazil! Why they are all Roman Catholics there surely!”
“Are they? I hadn’t thought of that.”
But even the novelty and painfulness of his going to a Papistical land
could not displace for long Mr and Mrs Clare’s natural interest in
their son’s marriage.
“We had your brief note three weeks ago announcing that it had taken
place,” said Mrs Clare, “and your father sent your godmother’s gift to
her, as you know. Of course it was best that none of us should be
present, especially as you preferred to marry her from the dairy, and
not at her home, wherever that may be. It would have embarrassed you,
and given us no pleasure. Your bothers felt that very strongly. Now it