Tess of the d’Urbervilles quotes

On an evening in the latter part of May a middle-aged man was walking homeward from Shaston to the village of Marlott, in the adjoining Vale of Blakemore, or Blackmoor.

The pair of legs that carried him were rickety, and there was a bias in his gait which inclined him somewhat to the left of a straight line.

He occasionally gave a smart nod, as if in confirmation of some opinion, though he was not thinking of anything in particular.

The pair of legs that carried him were rickety, and there was a bias in his gait which inclined him somewhat to the left of a straight line.

He occasionally gave a smart nod, as if in confirmation of some opinion, though he was not thinking of anything in particular.

An empty egg-basket was slung upon his arm, the nap of his hat was ruffled, a patch being quite worn away at its brim where his thumb came in taking it off.

’Twas said that my gr’t-granfer had secrets, and didn’t care to talk of where he came from … And where do we raise our smoke, now, parson, if I may make so bold; I mean, where do we d’Urbervilles live?”

“You don’t live anywhere. You are extinct⁠—as a county family.”

“Yes—what the mendacious family chronicles call extinct in the male line—that is, gone down—gone under.”

Even now, traces of its earlier condition are to be found in the old oak copses and irregular belts of timber that yet survive upon its slopes, and the hollow-trunked trees that shade so many of its pastures.

The forests have departed, but some old customs of their shades remain.

Many, however, linger only in a metamorphosed or disguised form. The May-day dance, for instance, was to be discerned on the afternoon under notice, in the guise of the club revel, or “club-walking,” as it was there called.

A difficulty of arranging their lips in this crude exposure to public scrutiny, an inability to balance their heads, and to dissociate self-consciousness from their features, was apparent in them, and showed that they were genuine country girls, unaccustomed to many eyes.

And as each and all of them were warmed without by the sun, so each had a private little sun for her soul to bask in; some dream, some affection, some hobby, at least some remote and distant hope which, though perhaps starving to nothing, still lived on, as hopes will.

They were all cheerful, and many of them merry.

and thus she moved on with the whole body to the enclosure where there was to be dancing on the green. By the time the spot was reached she has recovered her equanimity, and tapped her neighbour with her wand and talked as usual.

Tess Durbeyfield at this time of her life was a mere vessel of emotion untinctured by experience.

The dialect was on her tongue to some extent, despite the village school: the characteristic intonation of that dialect for this district being the voicing approximately rendered by the syllable ur, probably as rich an utterance as any to be found in human speech.

nor did it happen to be Tess Durbeyfield. Pedigree, ancestral skeletons, monumental record, the d’Urberville lineaments, did not help Tess in her life’s battle as yet, even to the extent of attracting to her a dancing-partner over the heads of the commonest peasantry.

So much for Norman blood unaided by Victorian lucre.

The name of the eclipsing girl, whatever it was, has not been handed down; but she was envied by all as the first who enjoyed the luxury of a masculine partner that evening.

Between the mother, with her fast-perishing lumber of superstitions, folklore, dialect, and orally transmitted ballads, and the daughter, with her trained National teachings and Standard knowledge under an infinitely Revised Code, there was a gap of two hundred years as ordinarily understood.

When they were together the Jacobean and the Victorian ages were juxtaposed.

Returning along the garden path Tess mused on what the mother could have wished to ascertain from the book on this particular day. She guessed the recent ancestral discovery to bear upon it, but did not divine that it solely concerned herself.

“Yours is not the only family that was of ’count in wold days. Look at the Anktells, and Horseys, and the Tringhams themselves—gone to seed a’most as much as you—though you was bigger folks than they, that’s true.

Thank God, I was never of no family, and have nothing to be ashamed of in that way!

”

In the Durbeyfield countenances there was nothing of the red wrath that would have burnt upon the girl from parents more ambitious for her welfare.

Nobody blamed Tess as she blamed herself.

When it was discovered that the knacker and tanner would give only a very few shillings for Prince’s carcase because of his decrepitude, Durbeyfield rose to the occasion.

“No,” said he stoically, “I won’t sell his old body.

When we d’Urbervilles was knights in the land, we didn’t sell our chargers for cat’s meat.

Let ’em keep their shillings! He’ve served me well in his lifetime, and I won’t part from him now.”

As Tess grew older, and began to see how matters stood, she felt quite a Malthusian towards her mother for thoughtlessly giving her so many little sisters and brothers, when it was such a trouble to nurse and provide for them.

Her mother’s intelligence was that of a happy child: Joan Durbeyfield was simply an additional one, and that not the eldest, to her own long family of waiters on Providence.

However, Tess became humanely beneficent towards the small ones, and to help them as much as possible she used, as soon as she left school, to lend a hand at haymaking or harvesting on neighbouring farms;

In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving.

Nature does not often say “See!” to her poor creature at a time when seeing can lead to happy doing; or reply “Here!” to a body’s cry of “Where?” till the hide-and-seek has become an irksome, outworn game.

We may wonder whether at the acme and summit of the human progress these anachronisms will be corrected by a finer intuition, a closer interaction of the social machinery than that which now jolts us round and along;

Enough that in the present case, as in millions, it was not the two halves of a perfect whole that confronted each other at the perfect moment; a missing counterpart wandered independently about the earth waiting in crass obtuseness till the late time came.

Out of which maladroit delay sprang anxieties, disappointments, shocks, catastrophes, and passing-strange destinies.

When d’Urberville got back to the tent he sat down astride on a chair, reflecting, with a pleased gleam in his face. Then he broke into a loud laugh.

He’ll adorn it better than a poor lammicken feller like myself can. Tell’n he shall hae it for a hundred. But I won’t stand upon trifles—tell’n he shall hae it for fifty—for twenty pound! Yes, twenty pound—that’s the lowest.

Dammy, family honour is family honour, and I won’t take a penny less!

”

possibly the thought that she had killed Prince. She suddenly stepped up; he mounted beside her, and immediately whipped on the horse. In a moment they had passed the slow cart with the box, and disappeared behind the shoulder of the hill.

Directly Tess was out of sight, and the interest of the matter as a drama was at an end, the little ones’ eyes filled with tears.

The youngest child said, “I wish poor, poor Tess wasn’t gone away to be a lady!” and, lowering the corners of his lips, burst out crying.

Every village has its idiosyncrasy, its constitution, often its own code of morality.

The levity of some of the younger women in and about Trantridge was marked, and was perhaps symptomatic of the choice spirit who ruled The Slopes in that vicinity. The place had also a more abiding defect; it drank hard.

One may, indeed, admit the possibility of a retribution lurking in the present catastrophe. Doubtless some of Tess d’Urberville’s mailed ancestors rollicking home from a fray had dealt the same measure even more ruthlessly towards peasant girls of their time.

But though to visit the sins of the fathers upon the children may be a morality good enough for divinities, it is scorned by average human nature; and it therefore does not mend the matter.

As Tess’s own people down in those retreats are never tired of saying among each other in their fatalistic way: “It was to be.” There lay the pity of it.

As Tess’s own people down in those retreats are never tired of saying among each other in their fatalistic way:

“It was to be.” There lay the pity of it.

An immeasurable social chasm was to divide our heroine’s personality thereafter from that previous self of hers who stepped from her mother’s door to try her fortune at Trantridge poultry-farm.

Tess went up the remainder of its length without stopping, and on reaching the edge of the escarpment gazed over the familiar green world beyond, now half-veiled in mist.

It was always beautiful from here; it was terribly beautiful to Tess today, for since her eyes last fell upon it she had learnt that the serpent hisses where the sweet birds sing, and her views of life had been totally changed for her by the lesson.

Verily another girl than the simple one she had been at home was she who, bowed by thought, stood still here, and turned to look behind her. She could not bear to look forward into the Vale.

“How can you dare to use such words!” she cried, turning impetuously upon him, her eyes flashing as the latent spirit (of which he was to see more some day) awoke in her.

“My God! I could knock you out of the gig! Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says some women may feel?”

“Very well,” he said, laughing; “I am sorry to wound you. I did wrong—I admit it.” He dropped into some little bitterness as he continued: “Only you needn’t be so everlastingly flinging it in my face. I am ready to pay to the uttermost farthing.

“O mother, my mother!” cried the agonized girl, turning passionately upon her parent as if her poor heart would break. “How could I be expected to know? I was a child when I left this house four months ago.

Why didn’t you tell me there was danger in menfolk? Why didn’t you warn me?

Ladies know what to fend hands against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks; but I never had the chance o’ learning in that way, and you did not help me!”

Her flexuous and stealthy figure became an integral part of the scene. At times her whimsical fancy would intensify natural processes around her till they seemed a part of her own story.

Rather they became a part of it; for the world is only a psychological phenomenon, and what they seemed they were.

The midnight airs and gusts, moaning amongst the tightly-wrapped buds and bark of the winter twigs, were formulae of bitter reproach.

But all the while she was making a distinction where there was no difference.

Feeling herself in antagonism, she was quite in accord.

She had been made to break an accepted social law, but no law known to the environment in which she fancied herself such an anomaly.

… of the other sex were the most interesting of this company of binders, by reason of the charm which is acquired by woman when she becomes part and parcel of outdoor nature, and is not merely an object set down therein as at ordinary times.

A field-man is a personality afield; a field-woman is a portion of the field; she had somehow lost her own margin, imbibed the essence of her surrounding, and assimilated herself with it.

The women—or rather girls, for they were mostly young—wore drawn cotton bonnets with great flapping curtains to keep off the sun, and gloves to prevent their hands being wounded by the stubble.

No, she would have taken it calmly, and found pleasure therein.

Most of the misery had been generated by her conventional aspect, and not by her innate sensations.

Whatever Tess’s reasoning, some spirit had induced her to dress herself up neatly as she had formerly done, and come out into the fields, harvest-hands being greatly in demand just then.

She might have seen that what had bowed her head so profoundly—the thought of the world’s concern at her situation—was founded on an illusion.

She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to anybody but herself. To all humankind besides, Tess was only a passing thought.

Even to friends she was no more than a frequently passing thought. If she made herself miserable the livelong night and day it was only this much to them—“Ah, she makes herself unhappy.”

“Perhaps it will be just the same to him if you don’t? … Will it be just the same?

Don’t for God’s sake speak as saint to sinner, but as you yourself to me myself⁠—poor me!

”

… it with flowers, she stuck it up at the head of the grave one evening when she could enter the churchyard without being seen, putting at the foot also a bunch of the same flowers in a little jar of water to keep them alive.

What matter was it that on the outside of the jar the eye of mere observation noted the words “Keelwell’s Marmalade”? The eye of maternal affection did not see them in its vision of higher things.

“By experience,” says Roger Ascham, “we find out a short way by a long wandering.” Not seldom that long wandering unfits us for further travel, and of what use is our experience to us then?

Tess Durbeyfield’s experience was of this incapacitating kind. At last she had learned what to do; but who would now accept her doing?

and there would be nothing singular to their minds in the statement. Of that day, doomed to be her terminus in time through all the ages, she did not know the place in month, week, season or year.

Almost at a leap Tess thus changed from simple girl to complex woman.

Symbols of reflectiveness passed into her face, and a note of tragedy at times into her voice. Her eyes grew larger and more eloquent. She became what would have been called a fine creature; her aspect was fair and arresting;

Her eyes grew larger and more eloquent. She became what would have been called a fine creature; her aspect was fair and arresting; her soul that of a woman whom the turbulent experiences of the last year or two had quite failed to demoralize.

But for the world’s opinion those experiences would have been simply a liberal education.

She had held so aloof of late that her trouble, never generally known, was nearly forgotten in Marlott.

It was not quite so far off as could have been wished; but it was probably far enough, her radius of movement and repute having been so small.

To persons of limited spheres, miles are as geographical degrees, parishes as counties, counties as provinces and kingdoms.

On one point she was resolved: there should be no more d’Urberville air-castles in the dreams and deeds of her new life. She would be the dairymaid Tess, and nothing more.

O ye Sun and Moon … O ye Stars … ye Green Things upon the Earth … ye Fowls of the Air … Beasts and Cattle … Children of Men … bless ye the Lord, praise Him and magnify Him forever!

She suddenly stopped and murmured: “But perhaps I don’t quite know the Lord as yet.”

And probably the half-unconscious rhapsody was a Fetishistic utterance in a Monotheistic setting;

There was, it might be said, the energy of her mother’s unexpended family, as well as the natural energy of Tess’s years, rekindled after the experience which had so overwhelmed her for the time.

Let the truth be told⁠—women do as a rule live through such humiliations, and regain their spirits, and again look about them with an interested eye.

While there’s life there’s hope is a conviction not so entirely unknown to the “betrayed” as some amiable theorists would have us believe.

Tess could then see him at full length. He wore the ordinary white pinner and leather leggings of a dairy-farmer when milking, and his boots were clogged with the mulch of the yard; but this was all his local livery.

Beneath it was something educated, reserved, subtle, sad, differing.

But the details of his aspect were temporarily thrust aside by the discovery that he was one whom she had seen before. Such vicissitudes had Tess passed through since that time that for a moment she could not remember where she had met him;

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 …

“

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

”

There was no distinction between the near and the far, and an auditor felt close to everything within the horizon.

The soundlessness impressed her as a positive entity rather than as the mere negation of noise.

It was broken by the strumming of strings.

she undulated upon the thin notes of the secondhand harp, and their harmonies passed like breezes through her, bringing tears into her eyes.

The floating pollen seemed to be his notes made visible, and the dampness of the garden the weeping of the garden’s sensibility.

Though near nightfall, the rank-smelling weed-flowers glowed as if they would not close for intentness, and the waves of colour mixed with the waves of sound.

“Ah—so have I, very often.

This hobble of being alive is rather serious, don’t you think so?

”

“The trees have inquisitive eyes, haven’t they?—that is, seem as if they had. And the river says—‘Why do ye trouble me with your looks?’

And you seem to see numbers of tomorrows just all in a line, the first of them the biggest and clearest, the others getting smaller and smaller as they stand farther away; but they all seem very fierce and cruel and as if they said, ‘I’m coming! Beware of me! Beware of me!’

… But you, sir, can raise up dreams with your music, and drive all such horrid fancies away!”

Still, it was strange that they should have come to her while yet so young; more than strange; it was impressive, interesting, pathetic.

Not guessing the cause, there was nothing to remind him that experience is as to intensity, and not as to duration. Tess’s passing corporeal blight had been her mental harvest.

Tess, on her part, could not understand why a man of clerical family and good education, and above physical want, should look upon it as a mishap to be alive. For the unhappy pilgrim herself there was very good reason.

Every day, every hour, brought to him one more little stroke of her nature, and to her one more of his.

Tess was trying to lead a repressed life, but she little divined the strength of her own vitality.

At first Tess seemed to regard Angel Clare as an intelligence rather than as a man. As such she compared him with herself;

“Because what’s the use of learning that I am one of a long row only—finding out that there is set down in some old book somebody just like me, and to know that I shall only act her part; making me sad, that’s all.

The best is not to remember that your nature and your past doings have been just like thousands’ and thousands’, and that your coming life and doings’ll be like thousands’ and thousands’.

”

Well, Mr. Clare found this out, and spoke quite scornful to the poor girl for days. ‘Ah!’ he says to her, ‘you’ll never make a good dairymaid!

All your skill was used up ages ago in Palestine, and you must lie fallow for a thousand years to git strength for more deeds!

’ A boy came here t’other day asking for a job, and said his name was Matt, and when we asked him his surname he said he’d never heard that ’a had any surname, and when we asked why, he said he supposed his folks …

Thus passed the leafy time when arborescence seems to be the one thing aimed at out of doors. Tess and Clare unconsciously studied each other, ever balanced on the edge of a passion, yet apparently keeping out of it.

All the while they were converging, under an irresistible law, as surely as two streams in one vale.

Tess had never in her recent life been so happy as she was now, possibly never would be so happy again. She was, for one thing, physically and mentally suited among these new surroundings.

Tess had never in her recent life been so happy as she was now, possibly never would be so happy again. She was, for one thing, physically and mentally suited among these new surroundings.

The sapling which had rooted down to a poisonous stratum on the spot of its sowing had been transplanted to a deeper soil.

Moreover she, and Clare also, stood as yet on the debatable land between predilection and love; where no profundities have been reached; no reflections have set in, awkwardly inquiring, “Whither does this new current tend to carry me? What does it mean to my future?

The gray halftones of daybreak are not the gray halftones of the day’s close, though the degree of their shade may be the same.

In the twilight of the morning, light seems active, darkness passive; in the twilight of evening it is the darkness which is active and crescent, and the light which is the drowsy reverse.

Being so often—possibly not always by chance—the first two persons to get up at the dairy-house, they seemed to themselves the first persons up of all the world.

very few in all England.

Fair women are usually asleep at midsummer dawns. She was close at hand, and the rest were nowhere.

The mixed, singular, luminous gloom in which they walked along together to the spot where the cows lay often made him think of the Resurrection hour. He little thought that the Magdalen might be at his side.

The dairyman paused, and one or two words of comment came from the listeners.

Dairyman Crick’s stories often seemed to be ended when they were not really so, and strangers were betrayed into premature interjections of finality; though old friends knew better.

The narrator went on—

none of them but herself seemed to see the sorrow of it; to a certainty, not one knew how cruelly it touched the tender place in her experience.

The evening sun was now ugly to her, like a great inflamed wound in the sky.

Only a solitary cracked-voice reed-sparrow greeted her from the bushes by the river, in a sad, machine-made tone, resembling that of a past friend whose friendship she had outworn.

The hot weather of July had crept upon them unawares, and the atmosphere of the flat vale hung heavy as an opiate over the dairy-folk, the cows, and the trees.

Hot steaming rains fell frequently, making the grass where the cows fed yet more rank, and hindering the late haymaking in the other meads.

While they stood clinging to the bank they heard a splashing round the bend of the road, and presently appeared Angel Clare, advancing along the lane towards them through the water.

Four hearts gave a big throb simultaneously.

His aspect was probably as un-Sabbatarian a one as a dogmatic parson’s son often presented; his attire being his dairy clothes, long wading boots, a cabbage-leaf inside his hat to keep his head cool, with a thistle-spud to finish him off.

He knew that the water had risen at that spot, and that it would quite check their progress. So he had hastened on, with a dim idea of how he could help them—one of them in particular.

The rosy-cheeked, bright-eyed quartet looked so charming in their light summer attire, clinging to the roadside bank like pigeons on a roof-slope, that he stopped a moment to regard them before coming close.

Their gauzy skirts had brushed up from the grass innumerable flies and butterflies which, unable to escape, remained caged in the transparent tissue as in an aviary. Angel’s eye at last fell upon Tess, the hindmost of the four;

The rosy-cheeked, bright-eyed quartet looked so charming in their light summer attire, clinging to the roadside bank like pigeons on a roof-slope, that he stopped a moment to regard them before coming close.

Their gauzy skirts had brushed up from the grass innumerable flies and butterflies which, unable to escape, remained caged in the transparent tissue as in an aviary.

Angel’s eye at last fell upon Tess, the hindmost of the four; she, being full of suppressed laughter at their dilemma, could not help meeting his glance radiantly.

“Yes,” said Izz, “

I’ve always a’ ear at church for pretty verses.

”

Poor little Retty, though by far the lightest weight, was the most troublesome of Clare’s burdens. Marian had been like a sack of meal, a dead weight of plumpness under which he has literally staggered. Izz had ridden sensibly and calmly.

Retty was a bunch of hysterics.

However, he got through with the disquieted creature, deposited her, and returned. Tess could see over the hedge the distant three in a group, standing as he had placed them on the next rising ground. It was now her turn.

“O no. You should lift Marian! Such a lump.

You are like an undulating billow warmed by the sun. And all this fluff of muslin about you is the froth.

”

“

Do you know that I have undergone three-quarters of this labour entirely for the sake of the fourth quarter?

”

Tess’s heart ached. There was no concealing from herself the fact that she loved Angel Clare, perhaps all the more passionately from knowing that the others had also lost their hearts to him.

There is contagion in this sentiment, especially among women.

And yet that same hungry nature had fought against this, but too feebly, and the natural result had followed.

and I lay still against his breast, hoping and hoping, and never moved at all. But he did not. I don’t like biding here at Talbothays any longer! I shall go hwome.”

The air of the sleeping-chamber seemed to palpitate with the hopeless passion of the girls.

They writhed feverishly under the oppressiveness of an emotion thrust on them by cruel Nature’s law—an emotion which they had neither expected nor desired.

The differences which distinguished them as individuals were abstracted by this passion, and each was but portion of one organism called sex.

There was so much frankness and so little jealousy because there was no hope.

Each one was a girl of fair common sense, and she did not delude herself with any vain conceits, or deny her love, or give herself airs, in the idea of outshining the others.

He had never before seen a woman’s lips and teeth which forced upon his mind with such persistent iteration the old Elizabethan simile of roses filled with snow. Perfect, he, as a lover, might have called them offhand. But no—they were not perfect.

And it was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity.

Clare had studied the curves of those lips so many times that he could reproduce them mentally with ease:

The influence that had passed into Clare like an excitation from the sky did not die down.

Resolutions, reticences, prudences, fears, fell back like a defeated battalion.

He jumped up from his seat, and, leaving his pail to be kicked over if the milcher had such a mind, went quickly towards the desire of his eyes, and, kneeling down beside her, clasped her in his arms.

“Forgive me, Tess dear!” he whispered. “I ought to have asked. I—did not know what I was doing. I do not mean it as a liberty. I am devoted to you, Tessy, dearest, in all sincerity!”

Old Pretty by this time had looked round, puzzled; and seeing two people crouching under her where, by immemorial custom, there should have been only one, lifted her hind leg crossly.

“She is angry—she doesn’t know what we mean—she’ll kick over the milk!” exclaimed Tess, gently striving to free herself, her eyes concerned with the quadruped’s actions, her heart more deeply concerned with herself and Clare.

The dairy-house, so humble, so insignificant, so purely to him a place of constrained sojourn that he had never hitherto deemed it of sufficient importance to be reconnoitred as an object of any quality whatever in the landscape; what was it now?

The aged and lichened brick gables breathed forth “Stay!” The windows smiled, the door coaxed and beckoned, the creeper blushed confederacy.

A personality within it was so far-reaching in her influence as to spread into and make the bricks, mortar, and whole overhanging sky throb with a burning sensibility. Whose was this mighty personality? A milkmaid’s.

The windows smiled, the door coaxed and beckoned, the creeper blushed confederacy. A personality within it was so far-reaching in her influence as to spread into and make the bricks, mortar, and whole overhanging sky throb with a burning sensibility.

Whose was this mighty personality? A milkmaid’s.

It was amazing, indeed, to find how great a matter the life of the obscure dairy had become to him. And though new love was to be held partly responsible for this, it was not solely so.

It was amazing, indeed, to find how great a matter the life of the obscure dairy had become to him. And though new love was to be held partly responsible for this, it was not solely so.

Many besides Angel have learnt that the magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements, but as to their subjective experiences.

The impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life than the pachydermatous king. Looking at it thus, he found that life was to be seen of the same magnitude here as elsewhere.

And though new love was to be held partly responsible for this, it was not solely so. Many besides Angel have learnt that the magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements, but as to their subjective experiences.

The impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life than the pachydermatous king.

Looking at it thus, he found that life was to be seen of the same magnitude here as elsewhere.

Upon her sensations the whole world depended to Tess; through her existence all her fellow-creatures existed, to her.

The universe itself only came into being for Tess on the particular day in the particular year in which she was born.

This consciousness upon which he had intruded was the single opportunity of existence ever vouchsafed to Tess by an unsympathetic First Cause—her all; her every and only chance. How then should he look upon her as of less consequence than himself;

he flung his legs about; the muscles of his face had grown more expressive; his eyes looked as much information as his tongue spoke, and more. The manner of the scholar had nearly disappeared; still more the manner of the drawing-room young man.

A prig would have said that he had lost culture, and a prude that he had become coarse.

Such was the contagion of domiciliary fellowship with the Talbothays nymphs and swains.

If these two noticed Angel’s growing social ineptness, he noticed their growing mental limitations.

Felix seemed to him all Church; Cuthbert all College.

His Diocesan Synod and Visitations were the mainsprings of the world to the one; Cambridge to the other. Each brother candidly recognized that there were a few unimportant score of millions of outsiders in civilized society, persons who were neither University men nor churchmen;

As they walked along the hillside Angel’s former feeling revived in him—that whatever their advantages by comparison with himself, neither saw or set forth life as it really was lived.

Perhaps, as with many men, their opportunities of observation were not so good as their opportunities of expression.

Neither had an adequate conception of the complicated forces at work outside the smooth and gentle current in which they and their associates floated. Neither saw the difference between local truth and universal truth;

“Now, Felix,” said Angel drily, “we are very good friends, you know; each of us treading our allotted circles; but if it comes to intellectual grasp,

I think you, as a contented dogmatist, had better leave mine alone, and inquire what has become of yours.

”

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 …

She guessed from the sad countenances of her chamber companions that they regarded her not only as the favourite, but as the chosen; but they could see for themselves that she did not put herself in his way.

Tess had never before known a time in which the thread of her life was so distinctly twisted of two strands, positive pleasure and positive pain.

At the next cheese-making the pair were again left alone together. The dairyman himself had been lending a hand; but Mr. Crick, as well as his wife, seemed latterly to have acquired a suspicion of mutual interest between these two;

Her lover must have guessed her overwrought state, and invented some excuse for her nonappearance, for no inquiries were made or calls given.

At half-past six the sun settled down upon the levels with the aspect of a great forge in the heavens; and presently a monstrous pumpkin-like moon arose on the other hand.

The pollard willows, tortured out of their natural shape by incessant choppings, became spiny-haired monsters as they stood up against it. She went in and upstairs without a light.

The laughter which followed this sally was supplemented only by a sorry smile, for form’s sake, from Tess.

What was comedy to them was tragedy to her; and she could hardly bear their mirth.

She soon rose from table, and, with an impression that Clare would soon follow her, went along a little wriggling path, now stepping to one side of the irrigating channels, and now to the other, till she stood by the main stream of the Var.

Yes, there was the pain of it. This question of a woman telling her story—the heaviest of crosses to herself—seemed but amusement to others.

It was as if people should laugh at martyrdom.

“Tessy!” came from behind her, and Clare sprang across the gully, alighting beside her feet. “My wife—soon!”

… shade just at hand at which a feeble light was beginning to assert its presence, a spot where, by day, a fitful white streak of steam at intervals upon the dark green background denoted intermittent moments of contact between their secluded world and modern life.

Modern life stretched out its steam feeler to this point three or four times a day, touched the native existences, and quickly withdrew its feeler again, as if what it touched had been uncongenial.

They reached the feeble light, which came from the smoky lamp of a little railway station; a poor enough terrestrial star, yet in one sense of more importance to Talbothays Dairy and mankind than the celestial ones to which it stood in such humiliating contrast.

“Yes—I suppose they will. Though not as we send it.

When its strength has been lowered, so that it may not get up into their heads.

”

“

Noble men and noble women, ambassadors and centurions, ladies and tradeswomen, and babies who have never seen a cow.

”

“

Now then, Mistress Teresa d’Urberville, I have you. Take my name, and so you will escape yours!

The secret is out, so why should you any longer refuse me?”

So they drove on through the gloom, forming one bundle inside the sailcloth, the horse going as he would, and the rain driving against them. She had consented. She might as well have agreed at first.

The “appetite for joy” which pervades all creation, that tremendous force which sways humanity to its purpose, as the tide sways the helpless weed, was not to be controlled by vague lucubrations over the social rubric.

“I must write to my mother,” she said. “You don’t mind my doing that?”

She was recognizing how light was the touch of events the most oppressive upon Mrs. Durbeyfield’s elastic spirit.

Her mother did not see life as Tess saw it.

That haunting episode of bygone days was to her mother but a passing accident. But perhaps her mother was right as to the course to be followed, whatever she might be in her reasons.

Her affection for him was now the breath and life of Tess’s being; it enveloped her as a photosphere, irradiated her into forgetfulness of her past sorrows, keeping back the gloomy spectres that would persist in their attempts to touch her—doubt, fear, moodiness, care, shame.

She knew that they were waiting like wolves just outside the circumscribing light, but she had long spells of power to keep them in hungry subjection there.

A spiritual forgetfulness coexisted with an intellectual remembrance. She walked in brightness, but she knew that in the background those shapes of darkness were always spread. They might be receding, or they might be approaching, one or the other, a little every day.

A spiritual forgetfulness coexisted with an intellectual remembrance.

She walked in brightness, but she knew that in the background those shapes of darkness were always spread.

They might be receding, or they might be approaching, one or the other, a little every day.

Looking over the damp sod in the direction of the sun, a glistening ripple of gossamer webs was visible to their eyes under the luminary, like the track of moonlight on the sea.

Gnats, knowing nothing of their brief glorification, wandered across the shimmer of this pathway, irradiated as if they bore fire within them, then passed out of its line, and were quite extinct.

In the presence of these things he would remind her that the date was still the question.

“I don’t think you ought to have felt glad, Angel.

Because ’tis always mournful not to be wanted, even if at the same time ’tis convenient.

”

“

I wish we could. That it would always be summer and autumn, and you always courting me, and always thinking as much of me as you have done through the past summertime!

”

that she was of a good family she could have sworn. In point of fact Mrs. Crick did remember thinking that Tess was graceful and good-looking as she approached; but the superiority might have been a growth of the imagination aided by subsequent knowledge.

Tess was now carried along upon the wings of the hours, without the sense of a will.

The word had been given; the number of the day written down. Her naturally bright intelligence had begun to admit the fatalistic convictions common to field-folk and those who associate more extensively with natural phenomena than with their fellow-creatures;

And what had determined him? Less the opportunity of an insight into grinding and bolting than the casual fact that lodgings were to be obtained in that very farmhouse which, before its mutilation, had been the mansion of a branch of the d’Urberville family.

This was always how Clare settled practical questions; by a sentiment which had nothing to do with them.

They decided to go immediately after the wedding, and remain for a fortnight, instead of journeying to towns and inns.

With a feeling of faintness she withdrew the letter. There it was—sealed up, just as it had left her hands.

The mountain had not yet been removed.

She could not let him read it now, the house being in full bustle of preparation; and descending to her own room she destroyed the letter there.

Her idolatry of this man was such that she herself almost feared it to be ill-omened. She was conscious of the notion expressed by Friar Laurence: “These violent delights have violent ends.” It might be too desperate for human conditions—too rank, to wild, too deadly.

“O my love, why do I love you so!” she whispered there alone; “for she you love is not my real self, but one in my image; the one I might have been!”

Afternoon came, and with it the hour for departure. They had decided to fulfil the plan of going for a few days to the lodgings in the old farmhouse near Wellbridge Mill, at which he meant to reside during his investigation of flour processes.

The fender grinned idly, as if it too did not care. The light from the water-bottle was merely engaged in a chromatic problem. All material objects around announced their irresponsibility with terrible iteration.

And yet nothing had changed since the moments when he had been kissing her; or rather, nothing in the substance of things. But the essence of things had changed.

When she ceased, the auricular impressions from their previous endearments seemed to hustle away into the corner of their brains, repeating themselves as echoes from a time of supremely purblind foolishness.

He quietly left the room, and the two glasses of wine that he had poured out for their supper—one for her, one for him—remained on the table untasted.

This was what their agape had come to. At tea, two or three hours earlier, they had, in the freakishness of affection, drunk from one cup.

The closing of the door behind him, gently as it had been pulled to, roused Tess from her stupor. He was gone; she could not stay.

At last, however, her listless walk brought her up alongside him, and still he said nothing.

The cruelty of fooled honesty is often great after enlightenment, and it was mighty in Clare now.

The outdoor air had apparently taken away from him all tendency to act on impulse; she knew that he saw her without irradiation—in all her bareness; that Time was chanting his satiric psalm at her then—

“

I am only a peasant by position, not by nature!

”

whose contents he would not explain to her, saying that time would soon show her the purpose thereof. In his zest and his gaiety he had hung it there.

How foolish and inopportune that mistletoe looked now.

Having nothing more to fear, having scarce anything to hope, for that he would relent there seemed no promise whatever, she lay down dully. When sorrow ceases to be speculative, sleep sees her opportunity.

They had rambled round by a road which led to the well-known ruins of the Cistercian abbey behind the mill, the latter having, in centuries past, been attached to the monastic establishment.

The mill still worked on, food being a perennial necessity; the abbey had perished, creeds being transient. One continually sees the ministration of the temporary outlasting the ministration of the eternal.

Their walk having been circuitous, they were still not far from the house, and in obeying his direction she only had to reach the large stone bridge across the main river and follow the road for a few yards.

Having nothing more to fear, having scarce anything to hope, for that he would relent there seemed no promise whatever, she lay down dully.

When sorrow ceases to be speculative, sleep sees her opportunity.

Among so many happier moods which forbid repose this was a mood which welcomed it, and in a few minutes the lonely Tess forgot existence, surrounded by the aromatic stillness of the chamber that had once, possibly, been the bride-chamber of her own ancestry.

He reclined on his couch in the sitting-room, and extinguished the light.

The night came in, and took up its place there, unconcerned and indifferent; the night which had already swallowed up his happiness, and was now digesting it listlessly; and was ready to swallow up the happiness of a thousand other people with as little disturbance or change of mien.

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.

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!”

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.

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.

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 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.

God’s not in his heaven: All’s wrong with the world!

When Tess had passed over the crest of the hill he turned to go his own way, and hardly knew that he loved her still.

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.

Moreover, the figure near at hand suffers on such occasion, because it shows up its sorriness without shade; while vague figures afar off are honoured, in that their distance makes artistic virtues of their stains.

In considering what Tess was not, he overlooked what she was, and forgot that the defective can be more than the entire.

I send this message to them as a dying man to the dying; for I shall never see them again. And you, Izzy, you have saved me by your honest words about my wife from an incredible impulse towards folly and treachery.

Women may be bad, but they are not so bad as men in these things!

On that one account I can never forget you. Be always the good and sincere girl you have hitherto been; and think of me as a worthless lover, but a faithful friend. Promise.”

Had she been ensconced here under other and more pleasant conditions she would have become alarmed; but, outside humanity, she had at present no fear.

Day at length broke in the sky. When it had been day aloft for some little while it became day in the wood.

Directly the assuring and prosaic light of the world’s active hours had grown strong, she crept from under her hillock of leaves, and looked around boldly. Then she perceived what had been going on to disturb her.

The maiden’s mouth is cold ⋮ Fold over simple fold Binding her head.

Inside this exterior, over which the eye might have roved as over a thing scarcely percipient, almost inorganic, there was the record of a pulsing life which had learnt too well, for its years, of the dust and ashes of things, of the cruelty of lust and the fragility of love.

Next day the weather was bad, but she trudged on, the honesty, directness, and impartiality of elemental enmity disconcerting her but little. Her object being a winter’s occupation and a winter’s home, there was no time to lose.

She warmed her hands upon them, and also put her cheek—red and moist with the drizzle—against their comforting surface.

The wall seemed to be the only friend she had.

She had so little wish to leave it that she could have stayed there all night.

But Tess set to work.

Patience, that blending of moral courage with physical timidity, was now no longer a minor feature in Mrs. Angel Clare; and it sustained her.

The swede-field in which she and her companion were set hacking was a stretch of a hundred odd acres in one patch, on the highest ground of the farm, rising above stony lanchets or lynchets—the outcrop of siliceous veins in the chalk formation, composed of …

… upper half of each turnip had been eaten off by the livestock, and it was the business of the two women to grub up the lower or earthy half of the root with a hooked fork called a hacker, that it might be eaten also.

Every leaf of the vegetable having already been consumed, the whole field was in colour a desolate drab; it was a complexion without features, as if a face, from chin to brow, should be only an expanse of skin.

The sky wore, in another colour, the same likeness; a white vacuity of countenance with the lineaments gone.

They worked on hour after hour, unconscious of the forlorn aspect they bore in the landscape, not thinking of the justice or injustice of their lot.

Even in such a position as theirs it was possible to exist in a dream.

In the afternoon the rain came on again, and Marian said that they need not work any more. But if they did not work they would not be paid; so they worked on.

“Ah! Can you?” said Tess, awake to the new value of this locality.

So the two forces were at work here as everywhere, the inherent will to enjoy, and the circumstantial will against enjoyment.

Marian’s will had a method of assisting itself by taking from her pocket as the afternoon wore on a pint bottle corked with white rag, from which she invited Tess to drink.

… had nothing to say against the proposal, and the next she heard of this plan for importing old Talbothays’ joys was two or three days later, when Marian informed her that Izz had replied to her inquiry, and had promised to come if she could.

There had not been such a winter for years. It came on in stealthy and measured glides, like the moves of a chess-player.

One morning the few lonely trees and the thorns of the hedgerows appeared as if they had put off a vegetable for an animal integument.

Here the landscape was whitey-brown; down there, as in Froom Valley, it was always green. Yet it was in that vale that her sorrow had taken shape, and she did not love it as formerly.

Beauty to her, as to all who have felt, lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.

Keeping the Vale on her right, she steered steadily westward; passing above the Hintocks, crossing at right-angles the high road from Sherton-Abbas to Casterbridge, and skirting Dogbury Hill and High-Stoy, with the dell between them called “The Devil’s Kitchen.”

But it was done with a sorry shake of the head. “It is nothing—it is nothing!” she said. “Nobody loves it; nobody sees it. Who cares about the looks of a castaway like me!”

Her journey back was rather a meander than a march. It had no sprightliness, no purpose; only a tendency.

Along the tedious length of Benvill Lane she began to grow tired, and she leant upon gates and paused by milestones.

This too familiar intonation, less than four years earlier, had brought to her ears expressions of such divergent purpose that her heart became quite sick at the irony of the contrast.

It was less a reform than a transfiguration.

The former curves of sensuousness were now modulated to lines of devotional passion. The lip-shapes that had meant seductiveness were now made to express supplication;

It intensified her consciousness of error to a practical despair; the break of continuity between her earlier and present existence, which she had hoped for, had not, after all, taken place.

Bygones would never be complete bygones till she was a bygone herself.

Thus absorbed, she recrossed the northern part of Long-Ash Lane at right angles, and presently saw before her the road ascending whitely to the upland along whose margin the remainder of her journey lay.

“Well,” he declared, a resentment beneath his words seeming ready to spring out at a moment’s notice, “God forbid that I should say I am a good man—and you know I don’t say any such thing.

I am new to goodness, truly; but newcomers see furthest sometimes.

”

Having long discredited the old systems of mysticism, he now began to discredit the old appraisements of morality. He thought they wanted readjusting. Who was the moral man? Still more pertinently, who was the moral woman?

The beauty or ugliness of a character lay not only in its achievements, but in its aims and impulses; its true history lay, not among things done, but among things willed.

Viewing her in these lights, a regret for his hasty judgement began to oppress him. Did he reject her eternally, or did he not?

Thus from being her critic he grew to be her advocate.

Cynical things he had uttered to himself about her; but no man can be always a cynic and live; and he withdrew them.

The mistake of expressing them had arisen from his allowing himself to be influenced by general principles to the disregard of the particular instance.

But the reasoning is somewhat musty; lovers and husbands have gone over the ground before today. Clare had been harsh towards her; there is no doubt of it.

Men are too often harsh with women they love or have loved; women with men.

And yet these harshnesses are tenderness itself when compared with the universal harshness out of which they grow; the harshness of the position towards the temperament, of the means towards the aims, of today towards yesterday, of hereafter towards today.

It was a fact that would soon be forgotten—that bit of distinction in poor Tess’s blood and name, and oblivion would fall upon her hereditary link with the marble monuments and leaded skeletons at Kingsbere.

So does Time ruthlessly destroy his own romances.

In recalling her face again and again, he thought now that he could see therein a flash of the dignity which must have graced her grand-dames;

She liked doing it after the confinement of the sick chamber, where she was not now required by reason of her mother’s improvement.

Violent motion relieved thought.

The plot of ground was in a high, dry, open enclosure, where there were forty or fifty such pieces, and where labour was at its briskest when the hired labour of the day had ended.

Something in the place, the hours, the crackling fires, the fantastic mysteries of light and shade, made others as well as Tess enjoy being there.

Nightfall, which in the frost of winter comes as a fiend and in the warmth of summer as a lover, came as a tranquillizer on this March day.

Nobody looked at his or her companions. The eyes of all were on the soil as its turned surface was revealed by the fires.

“I owe you something for the past, you know,” he resumed. “And you cured me, too, of that craze; so I am glad—”

“I would rather you had kept the craze, so that you had kept the practice which went with it!”

“I am glad of this opportunity of repaying you a little. Tomorrow I shall expect to hear your mother’s goods unloading … Give me your hand on it now—dear, beautiful Tess!”

surely he had! She had never before admitted such a thought; but he had surely! Never in her life—she could swear it from the bottom of her soul—had she ever intended to do wrong; yet these hard judgements had come.

Whatever her sins, they were not sins of intention, but of inadvertence, and why should she have been punished so persistently?

She passionately seized the first piece of paper that came to hand, and scribbled the following lines:

Not in utter nakedness But trailing clouds of glory do we come.

To her and her like, birth itself was an ordeal of degrading personal compulsion, whose gratuitousness nothing in the result seemed to justify, and at best could only palliate.

In the shades of the wet road she soon discerned her mother with tall ’Liza-Lu and Abraham. Mrs. Durbeyfield’s pattens clicked up to the door, and Tess opened it.

“

Why am I on the wrong side of this door!

”

“O, my boy, my boy—home again at last!” cried Mrs. Clare, who cared no more at that moment for the stains of heterodoxy which had caused all this separation than for the dust upon his clothes.

What woman, indeed, among the most faithful adherents of the truth, believes the promises and threats of the Word in the sense in which she believes in her own children, or would not throw her theology to the wind if weighed against their happiness?

As soon as they reached the room where the candles were lighted she looked at his face.

… was shocked to see him, so reduced was that figure from its former contours by worry and the bad season that Clare had experienced, in the climate to which he had so rashly hurried in his first aversion to the mockery of events at home.

You could see the skeleton behind the man, and almost the ghost behind the skeleton.

He matched Crivelli’s Dead Christus. His sunken eye-pits were of morbid hue, and the light in his eyes had waned. The angular hollows and lines of his aged ancestors had succeeded to their reign in his face twenty years before their time.

… about the garden paths with thoughts of their own concerns entirely uppermost, bringing their actions at every moment in jarring collision with the dim ghosts behind them, talking as though the time when Tess lived there were not one whit intenser in story than now.

Even the spring birds sang over their heads as if they thought there was nobody missing in particular.

On inquiry of these precious innocents, to whom even the name of their predecessors was a failing memory, Clare learned that John Durbeyfield was dead;

It was a city of detached mansions; a Mediterranean lounging-place on the English Channel; and as seen now by night it seemed even more imposing than it was.

The sea was near at hand, but not intrusive; it murmured, and he thought it was the pines; the pines murmured in precisely the same tones, and he thought they were the sea.

Where could Tess possibly be, a cottage-girl, his young wife, amidst all this wealth and fashion? The more he pondered, the more was he puzzled. Were there any cows to milk here? There certainly were no fields to till.

But he could not get on.

Speech was as inexpressive as silence.

But he had a vague consciousness of one thing, though it was not clear to him till later;