Tess of the d'Urbervilles

ngel Clare rises out of the past not altogether as a distinct figure,
but as an appreciative voice, a long regard of fixed, abstracted eyes,
and a mobility of mouth somewhat too small and delicately lined for a
man’s, though with an unexpectedly firm close of the lower lip now and
then; enough to do away with any inference of indecision. Nevertheless,
something nebulous, preoccupied, vague, in his bearing and regard,
marked him as one who probably had no very definite aim or concern
about his material future. Yet as a lad people had said of him that he
was one who might do anything if he tried.

He was the youngest son of his father, a poor parson at the other end
of the county, and had arrived at Talbothays Dairy as a six months’
pupil, after going the round of some other farms, his object being to
acquire a practical skill in the various processes of farming, with a
view either to the Colonies or the tenure of a home-farm, as
circumstances might decide.

His entry into the ranks of the agriculturists and breeders was a step
in the young man’s career which had been anticipated neither by himself
nor by others.

Mr Clare the elder, whose first wife had died and left him a daughter,
married a second late in life. This lady had somewhat unexpectedly
brought him three sons, so that between Angel, the youngest, and his
father the Vicar there seemed to be almost a missing generation. Of
these boys the aforesaid Angel, the child of his old age, was the only
son who had not taken a University degree, though he was the single one
of them whose early promise might have done full justice to an
academical training.

Some two or three years before Angel’s appearance at the Marlott dance,
on a day when he had left school and was pursuing his studies at home,
a parcel came to the Vicarage from the local bookseller’s, directed to
the Reverend James Clare. The Vicar having opened it and found it to
contain a book, read a few pages; whereupon he jumped up from his seat
and went straight to the shop with the book under his arm.

“Why has this been sent to my house?” he asked peremptorily, holding up
the volume.

“It was ordered, sir.”

“Not by me, or any one belonging to me, I am happy to say.”

The shopkeeper looked into his order-book.

“Oh, it has been misdirected, sir,” he said. “It was ordered by Mr
Angel Clare, and should have been sent to him.”

Mr Clare winced as if he had been struck. He went home pale and
dejected, and called Angel into his study.

“Look into this book, my boy,” he said. “What do you know about it?”

“I ordered it,” said Angel simply.

“What for?”

“To read.”

“How can you think of reading it?”

“How can I? Why—it is a system of philosophy. There is no more moral,
or even religious, work published.”

“Yes—moral enough; I don’t deny that. But religious!—and for you, who
intend to be a minister of the Gospel!”

“Since you have alluded to the matter, father,” said the son, with
anxious thought upon his face, “I should like to say, once for all,
that I should prefer not to take Orders. I fear I could not
conscientiously do so. I love the Church as one loves a parent. I shall
always have the warmest affection for her. There is no institution for
whose history I have a deeper admiration; but I cannot honestly be
ordained her minister, as my brothers are, while she refuses to
liberate her mind from an untenable redemptive theolatry.”

It had never occurred to the straightforward and simple-minded Vicar
that one of his own flesh and blood could come to this! He was
stultified, shocked, paralysed. And if Angel were not going to enter
the Church, what was the use of sending him to Cambridge? The
University as a step to anything but ordination seemed, to this man of
fixed ideas, a preface without a volume. He was a man not merely
religious, but devout; a firm believer—not as the phrase is now
elusively construed by theological thimble-riggers in the Church and
out of it, but in the old and ardent sense of the Evangelical school:
one who could

Indeed opine
That the Eternal and Divine
Did, eighteen centuries ago
In very truth...

Angel’s father tried argument, persuasion, entreaty.

“No, father; I cannot underwrite Article Four (leave alone the rest),
taking it ‘in the literal and grammatical sense’ as required by the
Declaration; and, therefore, I can’t be a parson in the present state
of affairs,” said Angel. “My whole instinct in matters of religion is
towards reconstruction; to quote your favorite Epistle to the Hebrews,
‘the removing of those things that are shaken, as of things that are
made, that those things which cannot be shaken may remain.’”

His father grieved so deeply that it made Angel quite ill to see him.

“What is the good of your mother and me economizing and stinting
ourselves to give you a University education, if it is not to be used
for the honour and glory of God?” his father repeated.

“Why, that it may be used for the honour and glory of man, father.”

Perhaps if Angel had persevered he might have gone to Cambridge like
his brothers. But the Vicar’s view of that seat of learning as a
stepping-stone to Orders alone was quite a family tradition; and so
rooted was the idea in his mind that perseverance began to appear to
the sensitive son akin to an intent to misappropriate a trust, and
wrong the pious heads of the household, who had been and were, as his
father had hinted, compelled to exercise much thrift to carry out this
uniform plan of education for the three young men.

“I will do without Cambridge,” said Angel at last. “I feel that I have
no right to go there in the circumstances.”

The effects of this decisive debate were not long in showing
themselves. He spent years and years in desultory studies,
undertakings, and meditations; he began to evince considerable
indifference to social forms and observances. The material distinctions
of rank and wealth he increasingly despised. Even the “good old family”
(to use a favourite phrase of a late local worthy) had no aroma for him
unless there were good new resolutions in its representatives. As a
balance to these austerities, when he went to live in London to see
what the world was like, and with a view to practising a profession or
business there, he was carried off his head, and nearly entrapped by a
woman much older than himself, though luckily he escaped not greatly
the worse for the experience.

Early association with country solitudes had bred in him an
unconquerable, and almost unreasonable, aversion to modern town life,
and shut him out from such success as he might have aspired to by
following a mundane calling in the impracticability of the spiritual
one. But something had to be done; he had wasted many valuable years;
and having an acquaintance who was starting on a thriving life as a
Colonial farmer, it occurred to Angel that this might be a lead in the
right direction. Farming, either in the Colonies, America, or at
home—farming, at any rate, after becoming well qualified for the
business by a careful apprenticeship—that was a vocation which would
probably afford an independence without the sacrifice of what he valued
even more than a competency—intellectual liberty.

So we find Angel Clare at six-and-twenty here at Talbothays as a
student of kine, and, as there were no houses near at hand in which he
could get a comfortable lodging, a boarder at the dairyman’s.

His room was an immense attic which ran the whole length of the
dairy-house. It could only be reached by a ladder from the cheese-loft,
and had been closed up for a long time till he arrived and selected it
as his retreat. Here Clare had plenty of space, and could often be
heard by the dairy-folk pacing up and down when the household had gone
to rest. A portion was divided off at one end by a curtain, behind
which was his bed, the outer part being furnished as a homely
sitting-room.

At first he lived up above entirely, reading a good deal, and strumming
upon an old harp which he had bought at a sale, saying when in a bitter
humour that he might have to get his living by it in the streets some
day. But he soon preferred to read human nature by taking his meals
downstairs in the general dining-kitchen, with the dairyman and his
wife, and the maids and men, who all together formed a lively assembly;
for though but few milking hands slept in the house, several joined the
family at meals. The longer Clare resided here the less objection had
he to his company, and the more did he like to share quarters with them
in common.

Much to his surprise he took, indeed, a real delight in their
companionship. The conventional farm-folk of his
imagination—personified in the newspaper-press by the pitiable dummy
known as Hodge—were obliterated after a few days’ residence. At close
quarters no Hodge was to be seen. At first, it is true, when Clare’s
intelligence was fresh from a contrasting society, these friends with
whom he now hobnobbed seemed a little strange. Sitting down as a level
member of the dairyman’s household seemed at the outset an undignified
proceeding. The ideas, the modes, the surroundings, appeared
retrogressive and unmeaning. But with living on there, day after day,
the acute sojourner became conscious of a new aspect in the spectacle.
Without any objective change whatever, variety had taken the place of
monotonousness. His host and his host’s household, his men and his
maids, as they became intimately known to Clare, began to differentiate
themselves as in a chemical process. The thought of Pascal’s was
brought home to him: “A mesure qu’on a plus d’esprit, on trouve qu’il
y a plus d’hommes originaux. Les gens du commun ne trouvent pas de
différence entre les hommes.” The typical and unvarying Hodge ceased
to exist. He had been disintegrated into a number of varied
fellow-creatures—beings of many minds, beings infinite in difference;
some happy, many serene, a few depressed, one here and there bright
even to genius, some stupid, others wanton, others austere; some mutely
Miltonic, some potentially Cromwellian—into men who had private views
of each other, as he had of his friends; who could applaud or condemn
each other, amuse or sadden themselves by the contemplation of each
other’s foibles or vices; men every one of whom walked in his own
individual way the road to dusty death.

Unexpectedly he began to like the outdoor life for its own sake, and
for what it brought, apart from its bearing on his own proposed career.
Considering his position he became wonderfully free from the chronic
melancholy which is taking hold of the civilized races with the decline
of belief in a beneficent Power. For the first time of late years he
could read as his musings inclined him, without any eye to cramming for
a profession, since the few farming handbooks which he deemed it
desirable to master occupied him but little time.

He grew away from old associations, and saw something new in life and
humanity. Secondarily, he made close acquaintance with phenomena which
he had before known but darkly—the seasons in their moods, morning and
evening, night and noon, winds in their different tempers, trees,
waters and mists, shades and silences, and the voices of inanimate
things.

The early mornings were still sufficiently cool to render a fire
acceptable in the large room wherein they breakfasted; and, by Mrs
Crick’s orders, who held that he was too genteel to mess at their
table, it was Angel Clare’s custom to sit in the yawning chimney-corner
during the meal, his cup-and-saucer and plate being placed on a hinged
flap at his elbow. The light from the long, wide, mullioned window
opposite shone in upon his nook, and, assisted by a secondary light of
cold blue quality which shone down the chimney, enabled him to read
there easily whenever disposed to do so. Between Clare and the window
was the table at which his companions sat, their munching profiles
rising sharp against the panes; while to the side was the milk-house
door, through which were visible the rectangular leads in rows, full to
the brim with the morning’s milk. At the further end the great churn
could be seen revolving, and its slip-slopping heard—the moving power
being discernible through the window in the form of a spiritless horse
walking in a circle and driven by a boy.

For several days after Tess’s arrival Clare, sitting abstractedly
reading from some book, periodical, or piece of music just come by
post, hardly noticed that she was present at table. She talked so
little, and the other maids talked so much, that the babble did not
strike him as possessing a new note, and he was ever in the habit of
neglecting the particulars of an outward scene for the general
impression. One day, however, when he had been conning one of his
music-scores, and by force of imagination was hearing the tune in his
head, he lapsed into listlessness, and the music-sheet rolled to the
hearth. He looked at the fire of logs, with its one flame pirouetting
on the top in a dying dance after the breakfast-cooking and boiling,
and it seemed to jig to his inward tune; also at the two chimney crooks
dangling down from the cotterel, or cross-bar, plumed with soot, which
quivered to the same melody; also at the half-empty kettle whining an
accompaniment. The conversation at the table mixed in with his
phantasmal orchestra till he thought: “What a fluty voice one of those
milkmaids has! I suppose it is the new one.”

Clare looked round upon her, seated with the others.

She was not looking towards him. Indeed, owing to his long silence, his
presence in the room was almost forgotten.

“I don’t know about ghosts,” she was saying; “but I do know that our
souls can be made to go outside our bodies when we are alive.”

The dairyman turned to her with his mouth full, his eyes charged with
serious inquiry, and his great knife and fork (breakfasts were
breakfasts here) planted erect on the table, like the beginning of a
gallows.

“What—really now? And is it so, maidy?” he said.

“A very easy way to feel ’em go,” continued Tess, “is to lie on the
grass at night and look straight up at some big bright star; and, by
fixing your mind upon it, you will soon find that you are hundreds and
hundreds o’ miles away from your body, which you don’t seem to want at
all.”

The dairyman removed his hard gaze from Tess, and fixed it on his wife.

“Now that’s a rum thing, Christianer—hey? To think o’ the miles I’ve
vamped o’ starlight nights these last thirty year, courting, or
trading, or for doctor, or for nurse, and yet never had the least
notion o’ that till now, or feeled my soul rise so much as an inch
above my shirt-collar.”

The general attention being drawn to her, including that of the
dairyman’s pupil, Tess flushed, and remarking evasively that it was
only a fancy, resumed her breakfast.

Clare continued to observe her. She soon finished her eating, and
having a consciousness that Clare was regarding her, began to trace
imaginary patterns on the tablecloth with her forefinger with the
constraint of a domestic animal that perceives itself to be watched.

“What a fresh and virginal daughter of Nature that milkmaid is!” he
said to himself.

And then he seemed to discern in her something that was familiar,
something which carried him back into a joyous and unforeseeing past,
before the necessity of taking thought had made the heavens gray. He
concluded that he had beheld her before; where he could not tell. A
casual encounter during some country ramble it certainly had been, and
he was not greatly curious about it. But the circumstance was
sufficient to lead him to select Tess in preference to the other pretty
milkmaids when he wished to contemplate contiguous womankind.