Tess of the d'Urbervilles

lare arose in the light of a dawn that was ashy and furtive, as though
associated with crime. The fireplace confronted him with its extinct
embers; the spread supper-table, whereon stood the two full glasses of
untasted wine, now flat and filmy; her vacated seat and his own; the
other articles of furniture, with their eternal look of not being able
to help it, their intolerable inquiry what was to be done? From above
there was no sound; but in a few minutes there came a knock at the
door. He remembered that it would be the neighbouring cottager’s wife,
who was to minister to their wants while they remained here.

The presence of a third person in the house would be extremely awkward
just now, and, being already dressed, he opened the window and informed
her that they could manage to shift for themselves that morning. She
had a milk-can in her hand, which he told her to leave at the door.
When the dame had gone away he searched in the back quarters of the
house for fuel, and speedily lit a fire. There was plenty of eggs,
butter, bread, and so on in the larder, and Clare soon had breakfast
laid, his experiences at the dairy having rendered him facile in
domestic preparations. The smoke of the kindled wood rose from the
chimney without like a lotus-headed column; local people who were
passing by saw it, and thought of the newly-married couple, and envied
their happiness.

Angel cast a final glance round, and then going to the foot of the
stairs, called in a conventional voice—

“Breakfast is ready!”

He opened the front door, and took a few steps in the morning air.
When, after a short space, he came back she was already in the
sitting-room mechanically readjusting the breakfast things. As she was
fully attired, and the interval since his calling her had been but two
or three minutes, she must have been dressed or nearly so before he
went to summon her. Her hair was twisted up in a large round mass at
the back of her head, and she had put on one of the new frocks—a pale
blue woollen garment with neck-frillings of white. Her hands and face
appeared to be cold, and she had possibly been sitting dressed in the
bedroom a long time without any fire. The marked civility of Clare’s
tone in calling her seemed to have inspired her, for the moment, with a
new glimmer of hope. But it soon died when she looked at him.

The pair were, in truth, but the ashes of their former fires. To the
hot sorrow of the previous night had succeeded heaviness; it seemed as
if nothing could kindle either of them to fervour of sensation any
more.

He spoke gently to her, and she replied with a like
undemonstrativeness. At last she came up to him, looking in his
sharply-defined face as one who had no consciousness that her own
formed a visible object also.

“Angel!” she said, and paused, touching him with her fingers lightly as
a breeze, as though she could hardly believe to be there in the flesh
the man who was once her lover. Her eyes were bright, her pale cheek
still showed its wonted roundness, though half-dried tears had left
glistening traces thereon; and the usually ripe red mouth was almost as
pale as her cheek. Throbbingly alive as she was still, under the stress
of her mental grief the life beat so brokenly that a little further
pull upon it would cause real illness, dull her characteristic eyes,
and make her mouth thin.

She looked absolutely pure. Nature, in her fantastic trickery, had set
such a seal of maidenhood upon Tess’s countenance that he gazed at her
with a stupefied air.

“Tess! Say it is not true! No, it is not true!”

“It is true.”

“Every word?”

“Every word.”

He looked at her imploringly, as if he would willingly have taken a lie
from her lips, knowing it to be one, and have made of it, by some sort
of sophistry, a valid denial. However, she only repeated—

“It is true.”

“Is he living?” Angel then asked.

“The baby died.”

“But the man?”

“He is alive.”

A last despair passed over Clare’s face.

“Is he in England?”

“Yes.”

He took a few vague steps.

“My position—is this,” he said abruptly. “I thought—any man would have
thought—that by giving up all ambition to win a wife with social
standing, with fortune, with knowledge of the world, I should secure
rustic innocence as surely as I should secure pink cheeks; but—However,
I am no man to reproach you, and I will not.”

Tess felt his position so entirely that the remainder had not been
needed. Therein lay just the distress of it; she saw that he had lost
all round.

“Angel—I should not have let it go on to marriage with you if I had not
known that, after all, there was a last way out of it for you; though I
hoped you would never—”

Her voice grew husky.

“A last way?”

“I mean, to get rid of me. You can get rid of me.”

“How?”

“By divorcing me.”

“Good heavens—how can you be so simple! How can I divorce you?”

“Can’t you—now I have told you? I thought my confession would give you
grounds for that.”

“O Tess—you are too, too—childish—unformed—crude, I suppose! I don’t
know what you are. You don’t understand the law—you don’t understand!”

“What—you cannot?”

“Indeed I cannot.”

A quick shame mixed with the misery upon his listener’s face.

“I thought—I thought,” she whispered. “O, now I see how wicked I seem
to you! Believe me—believe me, on my soul, I never thought but that you
could! I hoped you would not; yet I believed, without a doubt, that you
could cast me off if you were determined, and didn’t love me
at—at—all!”

“You were mistaken,” he said.

“O, then I ought to have done it, to have done it last night! But I
hadn’t the courage. That’s just like me!”

“The courage to do what?”

As she did not answer he took her by the hand.

“What were you thinking of doing?” he inquired.

“Of putting an end to myself.”

“When?”

She writhed under this inquisitorial manner of his. “Last night,” she
answered.

“Where?”

“Under your mistletoe.”

“My good—! How?” he asked sternly.

“I’ll tell you, if you won’t be angry with me!” she said, shrinking.
“It was with the cord of my box. But I could not—do the last thing! I
was afraid that it might cause a scandal to your name.”

The unexpected quality of this confession, wrung from her, and not
volunteered, shook him perceptibly. But he still held her, and, letting
his glance fall from her face downwards, he said, “Now, listen to this.
You must not dare to think of such a horrible thing! How could you! You
will promise me as your husband to attempt that no more.”

“I am ready to promise. I saw how wicked it was.”

“Wicked! The idea was unworthy of you beyond description.”

“But, Angel,” she pleaded, enlarging her eyes in calm unconcern upon
him, “it was thought of entirely on your account—to set you free
without the scandal of the divorce that I thought you would have to
get. I should never have dreamt of doing it on mine. However, to do it
with my own hand is too good for me, after all. It is you, my ruined
husband, who ought to strike the blow. I think I should love you more,
if that were possible, if you could bring yourself to do it, since
there’s no other way of escape for ’ee. I feel I am so utterly
worthless! So very greatly in the way!”

“Ssh!”

“Well, since you say no, I won’t. I have no wish opposed to yours.”

He knew this to be true enough. Since the desperation of the night her
activities had dropped to zero, and there was no further rashness to be
feared.

Tess tried to busy herself again over the breakfast-table with more or
less success, and they sat down both on the same side, so that their
glances did not meet. There was at first something awkward in hearing
each other eat and drink, but this could not be escaped; moreover, the
amount of eating done was small on both sides. Breakfast over, he rose,
and telling her the hour at which he might be expected to dinner, went
off to the miller’s in a mechanical pursuance of the plan of studying
that business, which had been his only practical reason for coming
here.

When he was gone Tess stood at the window, and presently saw his form
crossing the great stone bridge which conducted to the mill premises.
He sank behind it, crossed the railway beyond, and disappeared. Then,
without a sigh, she turned her attention to the room, and began
clearing the table and setting it in order.

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,
you yourself might be tempted to say words, and they might be
overheard, perhaps by my own children. O, what only hurts me now would
torture and kill me then! I will go—to-morrow.”

“And I shall not stay here. Though I didn’t like to initiate it, I have
seen that it was advisable we should part—at least for a while, till I
can better see the shape that things have taken, and can write to you.”

Tess stole a glance at her husband. He was pale, even tremulous; but,
as before, she was appalled by the determination revealed in the depths
of this gentle being she had married—the will to subdue the grosser to
the subtler emotion, the substance to the conception, the flesh to the
spirit. Propensities, tendencies, habits, were as dead leaves upon the
tyrannous wind of his imaginative ascendency.

He may have observed her look, for he explained—

“I think of people more kindly when I am away from them”; adding
cynically, “God knows; perhaps we will shake down together some day,
for weariness; thousands have done it!”

That day he began to pack up, and she went upstairs and began to pack
also. Both knew that it was in their two minds that they might part the
next morning for ever, despite the gloss of assuaging conjectures
thrown over their proceeding because they were of the sort to whom any
parting which has an air of finality is a torture. He knew, and she
knew, that, though the fascination which each had exercised over the
other—on her part independently of accomplishments—would probably in
the first days of their separation be even more potent than ever, time
must attenuate that effect; the practical arguments against accepting
her as a housemate might pronounce themselves more strongly in the
boreal light of a remoter view. Moreover, when two people are once
parted—have abandoned a common domicile and a common environment—new
growths insensibly bud upward to fill each vacated place; unforeseen
accidents hinder intentions, and old plans are forgotten.