Tess of the d'Urbervilles

n up-hill and down-hill ride of twenty-odd miles through a garish
mid-day atmosphere brought him in the afternoon to a detached knoll a
mile or two west of Talbothays, whence he again looked into that green
trough of sappiness and humidity, the valley of the Var or Froom.
Immediately he began to descend from the upland to the fat alluvial
soil below, the atmosphere grew heavier; the languid perfume of the
summer fruits, the mists, the hay, the flowers, formed therein a vast
pool of odour which at this hour seemed to make the animals, the very
bees and butterflies drowsy. Clare was now so familiar with the spot
that he knew the individual cows by their names when, a long distance
off, he saw them dotted about the meads. It was with a sense of luxury
that he recognized his power of viewing life here from its inner side,
in a way that had been quite foreign to him in his student-days; and,
much as he loved his parents, he could not help being aware that to
come here, as now, after an experience of home-life, affected him like
throwing off splints and bandages; even the one customary curb on the
humours of English rural societies being absent in this place,
Talbothays having no resident landlord.

Not a human being was out of doors at the dairy. The denizens were all
enjoying the usual afternoon nap of an hour or so which the exceedingly
early hours kept in summer-time rendered a necessity. At the door the
wood-hooped pails, sodden and bleached by infinite scrubbings, hung
like hats on a stand upon the forked and peeled limb of an oak fixed
there for that purpose; all of them ready and dry for the evening
milking. Angel entered, and went through the silent passages of the
house to the back quarters, where he listened for a moment. Sustained
snores came from the cart-house, where some of the men were lying down;
the grunt and squeal of sweltering pigs arose from the still further
distance. The large-leaved rhubarb and cabbage plants slept too, their
broad limp surfaces hanging in the sun like half-closed umbrellas.

He unbridled and fed his horse, and as he re-entered the house the
clock struck three. Three was the afternoon skimming-hour; and, with
the stroke, Clare heard the creaking of the floor-boards above, and
then the touch of a descending foot on the stairs. It was Tess’s, who
in another moment came down before his eyes.

She had not heard him enter, and hardly realized his presence there.
She was yawning, and he saw the red interior of her mouth as if it had
been a snake’s. She had stretched one arm so high above her coiled-up
cable of hair that he could see its satin delicacy above the sunburn;
her face was flushed with sleep, and her eyelids hung heavy over their
pupils. The brim-fulness of her nature breathed from her. It was a
moment when a woman’s soul is more incarnate than at any other time;
when the most spiritual beauty bespeaks itself flesh; and sex takes the
outside place in the presentation.

Then those eyes flashed brightly through their filmy heaviness, before
the remainder of her face was well awake. With an oddly compounded look
of gladness, shyness, and surprise, she exclaimed—“O Mr Clare! How you
frightened me—I—”

There had not at first been time for her to think of the changed
relations which his declaration had introduced; but the full sense of
the matter rose up in her face when she encountered Clare’s tender look
as he stepped forward to the bottom stair.

“Dear, darling Tessy!” he whispered, putting his arm round her, and his
face to her flushed cheek. “Don’t, for Heaven’s sake, Mister me any
more. I have hastened back so soon because of you!”

Tess’s excitable heart beat against his by way of reply; and there they
stood upon the red-brick floor of the entry, the sun slanting in by the
window upon his back, as he held her tightly to his breast; upon her
inclining face, upon the blue veins of her temple, upon her naked arm,
and her neck, and into the depths of her hair. Having been lying down
in her clothes she was warm as a sunned cat. At first she would not
look straight up at him, but her eyes soon lifted, and his plumbed the
deepness of the ever-varying pupils, with their radiating fibrils of
blue, and black, and gray, and violet, while she regarded him as Eve at
her second waking might have regarded Adam.

“I’ve got to go a-skimming,” she pleaded, “and I have on’y old Deb to
help me to-day. Mrs Crick is gone to market with Mr Crick, and Retty is
not well, and the others are gone out somewhere, and won’t be home till
milking.”

As they retreated to the milk-house Deborah Fyander appeared on the
stairs.

“I have come back, Deborah,” said Mr Clare, upwards. “So I can help
Tess with the skimming; and, as you are very tired, I am sure, you
needn’t come down till milking-time.”

Possibly the Talbothays milk was not very thoroughly skimmed that
afternoon. Tess was in a dream wherein familiar objects appeared as
having light and shade and position, but no particular outline. Every
time she held the skimmer under the pump to cool it for the work her
hand trembled, the ardour of his affection being so palpable that she
seemed to flinch under it like a plant in too burning a sun.

Then he pressed her again to his side, and when she had done running
her forefinger round the leads to cut off the cream-edge, he cleaned it
in nature’s way; for the unconstrained manners of Talbothays dairy came
convenient now.

“I may as well say it now as later, dearest,” he resumed gently. “I
wish to ask you something of a very practical nature, which I have been
thinking of ever since that day last week in the meads. I shall soon
want to marry, and, being a farmer, you see I shall require for my wife
a woman who knows all about the management of farms. Will you be that
woman, Tessy?”

He put it that way that she might not think he had yielded to an
impulse of which his head would disapprove.

She turned quite careworn. She had bowed to the inevitable result of
proximity, the necessity of loving him; but she had not calculated upon
this sudden corollary, which, indeed, Clare had put before her without
quite meaning himself to do it so soon. With pain that was like the
bitterness of dissolution she murmured the words of her indispensable
and sworn answer as an honourable woman.

“O Mr Clare—I cannot be your wife—I cannot be!”

The sound of her own decision seemed to break Tess’s very heart, and
she bowed her face in her grief.

“But, Tess!” he said, amazed at her reply, and holding her still more
greedily close. “Do you say no? Surely you love me?”

“O yes, yes! And I would rather be yours than anybody’s in the world,”
returned the sweet and honest voice of the distressed girl. “But I
cannot marry you!”

“Tess,” he said, holding her at arm’s length, “you are engaged to marry
some one else!”

“No, no!”

“Then why do you refuse me?”

“I don’t want to marry! I have not thought of doing it. I cannot! I
only want to love you.”

“But why?”

Driven to subterfuge, she stammered—

“Your father is a parson, and your mother wouldn’ like you to marry
such as me. She will want you to marry a lady.”

“Nonsense—I have spoken to them both. That was partly why I went home.”

“I feel I cannot—never, never!” she echoed.

“Is it too sudden to be asked thus, my Pretty?”

“Yes—I did not expect it.”

“If you will let it pass, please, Tessy, I will give you time,” he
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.