finished_summaries/cliffnotes/Tess of the d'Urbervilles/section_3_part_0.txt
Tess of the d'Urbervilles.chapters 12-15
chapters 12-15
{"name": "Chapters 12-15", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201219151046/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/t/tess-of-the-durbervilles/summary-and-analysis/phase-the-second-maiden-no-more-chapters-1215", "summary": "In October, four months after her arrival in Trantridge, Tess leaves the d'Urberville estate to return home. Alec pursues her, offers her a ride home, and she accepts. He admits to his mistake and begs Tess' forgiveness, but to no avail. She leaves Alec in the road near her home, walking the remainder of the way. Along the way, she encounters a sign painter whose signs preach against vice and sin. Tess' mother is the first to encounter Tess when she enters the family home, and the two talk about Tess' experiences. Here, Tess asks her mother, \"Why didn't you tell me there was danger in men-folk?\" Joan still believes that her daughter might have a chance to marry Alec d'Urberville and become a real lady, but she is too simple or ignorant to understand Tess' dilemma. Joan's response is to, \"make the best of it, I suppose. @'Tis nater, after all, and what do please God!\" Tess has visits from her village friends, but these visits are not enough to erase her impending depression. Even church affords no comfort to her as the churchgoers whisper and gossip about her. After suffering the fall and winter at home, Tess is next seen the following August working as a field laborer harvesting corn. We see for the first time that Tess has a baby and stops to breastfeed him during the lunch break the harvesting crew takes. Later that night, the infant falls ill. All sense that the child will die sometime in the next few days. Tess, realizing that her baby has not been baptized, gathers her siblings and baptizes the infant herself. During the ceremony, we learn that the child's name is \"Sorrow\" after the phrase in Genesis 3:16, \"in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.\" Sorrow is buried in a nearly forgotten part of the church graveyard, where the \"unbaptized infants, notorious drunkards, suicides, and others of the conjecturally damned are laid.\" The fall turns to winter and winter turns to spring. In May, Tess, now 20, sets out again, on her second excursion, to find work in a nearby town, at Talbothays Dairy. She wants solitude and time away from home where \"she might be happy in some nook which had no memories.\" Her journey takes her to a beautiful valley called Blackmoor on the river Froom/Frome where a new phase of her life begins.", "analysis": "Religion is a major theme in much of Hardy's writings. He is critical of the shallowness that man uses to perpetuate social norms or justify poor treatment of his fellow man. When Tess encounters the artisan, or sign painter, the conversation that ensues is telling of Hardy's views on man and religion. The artisan paints small signs of biblical verses to remind readers of the presence of organized religion. Hardy says, \"Some people might have cried 'Alas, poor Theology!' at the hideous defacement -- the last grotesque phase of a creed which had served mankind well in its time.\" Tess questions the painter further by asking, \"uppose your sin was not of your own seeking?\" The artisan, who has no real answer -- Hardy's suggestion that modern religion doesn't have any real answers -- says, \"I cannot split hairs on that burning query.\" Tess' reception in church offers Hardy another opportunity to voice his criticisms of modern religion. The church is supposed to be a comfort and to forgive Tess' sins, but the churchgoers, who whisper and gossip behind Tess' back, are not forgiving in their judgment of her. In addition, Tess must baptize Sorrow herself because her father will not allow the local parson into the house, afraid that he will find out the family's secrets. Still, it seems to be the hypocrisy of religious fervor and expression that incites Hardy's ire. The scene in which Tess baptizes her dying child is, arguably, the most beautiful and poignant in the novel. Tess becomes more than a mere woman/child in the key scene of Sorrow's baptism in Chapter 14. Hardy elevates Tess to heroine status as she takes the baptism of Sorrow into her own hands. She becomes \"a divine personage with whom they  had nothing in common.\" The scene begins when Tess realizes her infant's death is imminent: \"Her darling was about to die, and no salvation.\" Being a resourceful young lady, Tess has a revelation -- she will perform the baptism herself -- and gathers her brothers and sisters to begin the ceremony, based upon what she remembers from baptisms she witnessed while attending church, \"Tess then stood erect with the infant on her arm beside the basin, the next sister held the Prayer-Book open before her, as the clerk at church held it before the parson; and thus the girl set about baptizing her child.\" Hardy describes Tess as a \"child's child\" who barely had the title of \"mother.\" Yet in the ritual, Tess becomes more than either mother, woman, or child. She becomes, in effect, a divine person, \"her high enthusiasm having a transfiguring effect upon the face which had been her undoing, showing it as a thing of immaculate beauty, with a touch of dignity which was almost regal.\" Tess performs the baptism: \"The ecstasy of faith almost apotheosized her; it set upon her face a glowing irradiation, and brought a red spot into the middle of each cheek; while the miniature candle-flame inverted in her eye pupils shone like a diamond.\" The effect of this change strikes awe in Tess' siblings whom she has summoned to witness the baptism. \"The children gazed up at her with more and more reverence, and no longer had a will for questioning. She did not look like Sissy to them now, but as a being large, towering and awful.\" In this passage, Hardy does two things: First he avers the worth of the sincere application of faith. Second, he elevates Tess to a higher status, and in so doing, emphasizes her goodness and reveals her inner strength and independence. She may be a woman plagued by fate and unhappy circumstance, but she is a heroic character. Hardy uses this scene to comment on the application of sincere expressions of faith  and the application of faith as it is transmuted through the principles of social convention. Remember, social convention enabled Alec to rape Tess without consequence to himself. Social convention also shades what is and isn't permissible expressions of faith. Tess, for example, asks the parson to admit that Tess' baptism of the infant is the same as if the parson himself had conducted the ceremony. In answering, \"he man and the ecclesiastic fought within him, and the victory fell to the man,\" and thus he tells Tess that it was. Relieved, Tess then asks for confirmation that Sorrow can then receive a proper Christian burial. At this point, the parson hesitates. Tess presses her point, further challenging him on church doctrine that the unbaptized are not accorded a proper Christian burial, and he objects based on church doctrine, \"I would willingly do so if only we two are concerned. But I must not -- for certain reasons.\" Hardy is showing us the heavy handedness of the church, not found in any biblical text, on the burial of the dead. Tess finally tells him, \"Then I don't like you . . . and I'll never come to your church again.\" The parson has no answer and gives in to Tess' demands. Glossary Marble term a post that marks the boundary, often in the shape of a pillar topped with a head and torso. teave  work or struggle. \"Clogged like a dripping pan\" reference to a pan, used for roasting, in which the drippings of fat have been allowed to congeal. \"dust to ashes\" from Job 42:6. Hontish  haughty. Robert South English divine and minister . \"old double chant 'Langdon'\" a chant in the Anglican Church double the normal length, in this case named after the English composer, Robert Langdon . Heliolatries religions in which the sun is worshipped. \"a stranger in a strange land\" in Exodus 2:22, Moses in Egypt refers to himself as a stranger in a strange land. quadrille a square dance of French origin, consisting of several figures, performed by four couples. \"Tuscan saint\" a reference to the images typical of Florentine art during the Renaissance. Aholah and Aholibah two sisters who were prostitutes: Ezekiel predicts that not only they but their children will be punished . Stopt-diapason note suggests Tess' voice, which, like an organ with stops, or tuned sets of pipes, is characterized by a full range of harmonious sound. \"sin, the world and the devil\" a reference to \"the world, the flesh, and the devil,\" traditional temptations to sin mentioned in The Book of Common Prayer . Gnomic texts gnomic means wise and pithy; full of aphorisms; here, a reference to texts that express general truths in a wise manner. \"Jeremy Taylor's thought\" reference to The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying  by Jeremy Taylor, a seventeenth-century Anglican divine. Babylon ancient city noted for wealth, luxury, and wickedness. stile a vertical piece in a panel or frame, as of a door or window. texes  texts. Conjecturally being inferred, theorized, or predicted from incomplete or uncertain evidence. Deal box a fir or pine board of any of several sizes; fir or pinewood."}


The basket was heavy and the bundle was large, but she lugged them
along like a person who did not find her especial burden in material
things.  Occasionally she stopped to rest in a mechanical way by some
gate or post; and then, giving the baggage another hitch upon her
full round arm, went steadily on again.

It was a Sunday morning in late October, about four months after Tess
Durbeyfield's arrival at Trantridge, and some few weeks subsequent to
the night ride in The Chase.  The time was not long past daybreak,
and the yellow luminosity upon the horizon behind her back lighted
the ridge towards which her face was set--the barrier of the vale
wherein she had of late been a stranger--which she would have to
climb over to reach her birthplace.  The ascent was gradual on this
side, and the soil and scenery differed much from those within
Blakemore Vale.  Even the character and accent of the two peoples
had shades of difference, despite the amalgamating effects of a
roundabout railway; so that, though less than twenty miles from the
place of her sojourn at Trantridge, her native village had seemed a
far-away spot.  The field-folk shut in there traded northward and
westward, travelled, courted, and married northward and westward,
thought northward and westward; those on this side mainly directed
their energies and attention to the east and south.

The incline was the same down which d'Urberville had driven her so
wildly on that day in June.  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
to-day, 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.

Ascending by the long white road that Tess herself had just laboured
up, she saw a two-wheeled vehicle, beside which walked a man, who
held up his hand to attract her attention.

She obeyed the signal to wait for him with unspeculative repose, and
in a few minutes man and horse stopped beside her.

"Why did you slip away by stealth like this?" said d'Urberville, with
upbraiding breathlessness; "on a Sunday morning, too, when people
were all in bed!  I only discovered it by accident, and I have been
driving like the deuce to overtake you.  Just look at the mare.  Why
go off like this?  You know that nobody wished to hinder your going.
And how unnecessary it has been for you to toil along on foot, and
encumber yourself with this heavy load!  I have followed like a
madman, simply to drive you the rest of the distance, if you won't
come back."

"I shan't come back," said she.

"I thought you wouldn't--I said so!  Well, then, put up your basket,
and let me help you on."

She listlessly placed her basket and bundle within the dog-cart, and
stepped up, and they sat side by side.  She had no fear of him now,
and in the cause of her confidence her sorrow lay.

D'Urberville mechanically lit a cigar, and the journey was continued
with broken unemotional conversation on the commonplace objects by
the wayside.  He had quite forgotten his struggle to kiss her when,
in the early summer, they had driven in the opposite direction along
the same road.  But she had not, and she sat now, like a puppet,
replying to his remarks in monosyllables.  After some miles they came
in view of the clump of trees beyond which the village of Marlott
stood.  It was only then that her still face showed the least
emotion, a tear or two beginning to trickle down.

"What are you crying for?" he coldly asked.

"I was only thinking that I was born over there," murmured Tess.

"Well--we must all be born somewhere."

"I wish I had never been born--there or anywhere else!"

"Pooh!  Well, if you didn't wish to come to Trantridge why did you
come?"

She did not reply.

"You didn't come for love of me, that I'll swear."

"'Tis quite true.  If I had gone for love o' you, if I had ever
sincerely loved you, if I loved you still, I should not so loathe and
hate myself for my weakness as I do now! ...  My eyes were dazed by
you for a little, and that was all."

He shrugged his shoulders.  She resumed--

"I didn't understand your meaning till it was too late."

"That's what every woman says."

"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.  You know you
need not work in the fields or the dairies again.  You know you may
clothe yourself with the best, instead of in the bald plain way you
have lately affected, as if you couldn't get a ribbon more than you
earn."

Her lip lifted slightly, though there was little scorn, as a rule,
in her large and impulsive nature.

"I have said I will not take anything more from you, and I will
not--I cannot!  I SHOULD be your creature to go on doing that, and
I won't!"

"One would think you were a princess from your manner, in addition
to a true and original d'Urberville--ha! ha!  Well, Tess, dear, I
can say no more.  I suppose I am a bad fellow--a damn bad fellow.
I was born bad, and I have lived bad, and I shall die bad in all
probability.  But, upon my lost soul, I won't be bad towards you
again, Tess.  And if certain circumstances should arise--you
understand--in which you are in the least need, the least difficulty,
send me one line, and you shall have by return whatever you require.
I may not be at Trantridge--I am going to London for a time--I can't
stand the old woman.  But all letters will be forwarded."

She said that she did not wish him to drive her further, and they
stopped just under the clump of trees.  D'Urberville alighted, and
lifted her down bodily in his arms, afterwards placing her articles
on the ground beside her.  She bowed to him slightly, her eye just
lingering in his; and then she turned to take the parcels for
departure.

Alec d'Urberville removed his cigar, bent towards her, and said--

"You are not going to turn away like that, dear!  Come!"

"If you wish," she answered indifferently.  "See how you've mastered
me!"

She thereupon turned round and lifted her face to his, and remained
like a marble term while he imprinted a kiss upon her cheek--half
perfunctorily, half as if zest had not yet quite died out.  Her eyes
vaguely rested upon the remotest trees in the lane while the kiss was
given, as though she were nearly unconscious of what he did.

"Now the other side, for old acquaintance' sake."

She turned her head in the same passive way, as one might turn at the
request of a sketcher or hairdresser, and he kissed the other side,
his lips touching cheeks that were damp and smoothly chill as the
skin of the mushrooms in the fields around.

"You don't give me your mouth and kiss me back.  You never willingly
do that--you'll never love me, I fear."

"I have said so, often.  It is true.  I have never really and truly
loved you, and I think I never can."  She added mournfully, "Perhaps,
of all things, a lie on this thing would do the most good to me now;
but I have honour enough left, little as 'tis, not to tell that lie.
If I did love you, I may have the best o' causes for letting you know
it.  But I don't."

He emitted a laboured breath, as if the scene were getting rather
oppressive to his heart, or to his conscience, or to his gentility.

"Well, you are absurdly melancholy, Tess.  I have no
reason for flattering you now, and I can say plainly
that you need not be so sad.  You can hold your own for
beauty against any woman of these parts, gentle or
simple; I say it to you as a practical man and
well-wisher.  If you are wise you will show it to the
world more than you do before it fades...  And yet,
Tess, will you come back to me!  Upon my soul, I don't
like to let you go like this!"

"Never, never!  I made up my mind as soon as I saw--what I ought to
have seen sooner; and I won't come."

"Then good morning, my four months' cousin--good-bye!"

He leapt up lightly, arranged the reins, and was gone between the
tall red-berried hedges.

Tess did not look after him, but slowly wound along the crooked lane.
It was still early, and though the sun's lower limb was just free of
the hill, his rays, ungenial and peering, addressed the eye rather
than the touch as yet.  There was not a human soul near.  Sad October
and her sadder self seemed the only two existences haunting that
lane.

As she walked, however, some footsteps approached behind her, the
footsteps of a man; and owing to the briskness of his advance he was
close at her heels and had said "Good morning" before she had been
long aware of his propinquity.  He appeared to be an artisan of some
sort, and carried a tin pot of red paint in his hand.  He asked
in a business-like manner if he should take her basket, which she
permitted him to do, walking beside him.

"It is early to be astir this Sabbath morn!" he said cheerfully.

"Yes," said Tess.

"When most people are at rest from their week's work."

She also assented to this.

"Though I do more real work to-day than all the week besides."

"Do you?"

"All the week I work for the glory of man, and on Sunday for the
glory of God.  That's more real than the other--hey?  I have a little
to do here at this stile."  The man turned, as he spoke, to an
opening at the roadside leading into a pasture.  "If you'll wait a
moment," he added, "I shall not be long."

As he had her basket she could not well do otherwise; and she waited,
observing him.  He set down her basket and the tin pot, and stirring
the paint with the brush that was in it began painting large square
letters on the middle board of the three composing the stile, placing
a comma after each word, as if to give pause while that word was
driven well home to the reader's heart--


      THY, DAMNATION, SLUMBERETH, NOT.
                         2 Pet. ii. 3.


Against the peaceful landscape, the pale, decaying tints of the
copses, the blue air of the horizon, and the lichened stile-boards,
these staring vermilion words shone forth.  They seemed to shout
themselves out and make the atmosphere ring.  Some people might have
cried "Alas, poor Theology!" at the hideous defacement--the last
grotesque phase of a creed which had served mankind well in its time.
But the words entered Tess with accusatory horror.  It was as if this
man had known her recent history; yet he was a total stranger.

Having finished his text he picked up her basket, and she
mechanically resumed her walk beside him.

"Do you believe what you paint?" she asked in low tones.

"Believe that tex?  Do I believe in my own existence!"

"But," said she tremulously, "suppose your sin was not of your own
seeking?"

He shook his head.

"I cannot split hairs on that burning query," he said.  "I have
walked hundreds of miles this past summer, painting these texes on
every wall, gate, and stile the length and breadth of this district.
I leave their application to the hearts of the people who read 'em."

"I think they are horrible," said Tess.  "Crushing!  Killing!"

"That's what they are meant to be!" he replied in a trade voice.
"But you should read my hottest ones--them I kips for slums and
seaports.  They'd make ye wriggle!  Not but what this is a very good
tex for rural districts. ...  Ah--there's a nice bit of blank wall up
by that barn standing to waste.  I must put one there--one that it
will be good for dangerous young females like yerself to heed.  Will
ye wait, missy?"

"No," said she; and taking her basket Tess trudged on. A little way
forward she turned her head.  The old gray wall began to advertise
a similar fiery lettering to the first, with a strange and unwonted
mien, as if distressed at duties it had never before been called upon
to perform.  It was with a sudden flush that she read and realized
what was to be the inscription he was now halfway through--


      THOU, SHALT, NOT, COMMIT--


Her cheerful friend saw her looking, stopped his brush, and shouted--

"If you want to ask for edification on these things of moment,
there's a very earnest good man going to preach a charity-sermon
to-day in the parish you are going to--Mr Clare of Emminster.  I'm
not of his persuasion now, but he's a good man, and he'll expound as
well as any parson I know.  'Twas he began the work in me."

But Tess did not answer; she throbbingly resumed her walk, her eyes
fixed on the ground.  "Pooh--I don't believe God said such things!"
she murmured contemptuously when her flush had died away.

A plume of smoke soared up suddenly from her father's chimney, the
sight of which made her heart ache.  The aspect of the interior, when
she reached it, made her heart ache more.  Her mother, who had just
come down stairs, turned to greet her from the fireplace, where she
was kindling barked-oak twigs under the breakfast kettle.  The young
children were still above, as was also her father, it being Sunday
morning, when he felt justified in lying an additional half-hour.

"Well!--my dear Tess!" exclaimed her surprised mother, jumping up and
kissing the girl. "How be ye?  I didn't see you till you was in upon
me!  Have you come home to be married?"

"No, I have not come for that, mother."

"Then for a holiday?"

"Yes--for a holiday; for a long holiday," said Tess.

"What, isn't your cousin going to do the handsome thing?"

"He's not my cousin, and he's not going to marry me."

Her mother eyed her narrowly.

"Come, you have not told me all," she said.

Then Tess went up to her mother, put her face upon Joan's neck, and
told.

"And yet th'st not got him to marry 'ee!" reiterated her mother. "Any
woman would have done it but you, after that!"

"Perhaps any woman would except me."

"It would have been something like a story to come back with, if
you had!" continued Mrs Durbeyfield, ready to burst into tears of
vexation.  "After all the talk about you and him which has reached
us here, who would have expected it to end like this!  Why didn't ye
think of doing some good for your family instead o' thinking only of
yourself?  See how I've got to teave and slave, and your poor weak
father with his heart clogged like a dripping-pan.  I did hope for
something to come out o' this!  To see what a pretty pair you and he
made that day when you drove away together four months ago!  See what
he has given us--all, as we thought, because we were his kin.  But if
he's not, it must have been done because of his love for 'ee.  And
yet you've not got him to marry!"

Get Alec d'Urberville in the mind to marry her!  He marry HER!  On
matrimony he had never once said a word.  And what if he had?  How a
convulsive snatching at social salvation might have impelled her to
answer him she could not say.  But her poor foolish mother little
knew her present feeling towards this man.  Perhaps it was unusual
in the circumstances, unlucky, unaccountable; but there it was; and
this, as she had said, was what made her detest herself.  She had
never wholly cared for him; she did not at all care for him now.  She
had dreaded him, winced before him, succumbed to adroit advantages
he took of her helplessness; then, temporarily blinded by his ardent
manners, had been stirred to confused surrender awhile: had suddenly
despised and disliked him, and had run away.  That was all.  Hate him
she did not quite; but he was dust and ashes to her, and even for her
name's sake she scarcely wished to marry him.

"You ought to have been more careful if you didn't mean to get him to
make you his wife!"

"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 men-folk?  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 mother was subdued.

"I thought if I spoke of his fond feelings and what they might lead
to, you would be hontish wi' him and lose your chance," she murmured,
wiping her eyes with her apron.  "Well, we must make the best of it,
I suppose.  'Tis nater, after all, and what do please God!"




The event of Tess Durbeyfield's return from the manor of her bogus
kinsfolk was rumoured abroad, if rumour be not too large a word for
a space of a square mile.  In the afternoon several young girls of
Marlott, former schoolfellows and acquaintances of Tess, called to
see her, arriving dressed in their best starched and ironed, as
became visitors to a person who had made a transcendent conquest (as
they supposed), and sat round the room looking at her with great
curiosity.  For the fact that it was this said thirty-first cousin,
Mr d'Urberville, who had fallen in love with her, a gentleman
not altogether local, whose reputation as a reckless gallant and
heartbreaker was beginning to spread beyond the immediate boundaries
of Trantridge, lent Tess's supposed position, by its fearsomeness, a
far higher fascination that it would have exercised if unhazardous.

Their interest was so deep that the younger ones whispered when her
back was turned--

"How pretty she is; and how that best frock do set her off!  I
believe it cost an immense deal, and that it was a gift from him."

Tess, who was reaching up to get the tea-things from the
corner-cupboard, did not hear these commentaries.  If she had heard
them, she might soon have set her friends right on the matter.  But
her mother heard, and Joan's simple vanity, having been denied the
hope of a dashing marriage, fed itself as well as it could upon
the sensation of a dashing flirtation.  Upon the whole she felt
gratified, even though such a limited and evanescent triumph should
involve her daughter's reputation; it might end in marriage yet, and
in the warmth of her responsiveness to their admiration she invited
her visitors to stay to tea.

Their chatter, their laughter, their good-humoured innuendoes, above
all, their flashes and flickerings of envy, revived Tess's spirits
also; and, as the evening wore on, she caught the infection of their
excitement, and grew almost gay.  The marble hardness left her face,
she moved with something of her old bounding step, and flushed in all
her young beauty.

At moments, in spite of thought, she would reply to their inquiries
with a manner of superiority, as if recognizing that her experiences
in the field of courtship had, indeed, been slightly enviable.  But
so far was she from being, in the words of Robert South, "in love
with her own ruin," that the illusion was transient as lightning;
cold reason came back to mock her spasmodic weakness; the ghastliness
of her momentary pride would convict her, and recall her to reserved
listlessness again.

And the despondency of the next morning's dawn, when it was no longer
Sunday, but Monday; and no best clothes; and the laughing visitors
were gone, and she awoke alone in her old bed, the innocent younger
children breathing softly around her.  In place of the excitement of
her return, and the interest it had inspired, she saw before her a
long and stony highway which she had to tread, without aid, and with
little sympathy.  Her depression was then terrible, and she could
have hidden herself in a tomb.

In the course of a few weeks Tess revived sufficiently to show
herself so far as was necessary to get to church one Sunday morning.
She liked to hear the chanting--such as it was--and the old Psalms,
and to join in the Morning Hymn.  That innate love of melody, which
she had inherited from her ballad-singing mother, gave the simplest
music a power over her which could well-nigh drag her heart out of
her bosom at times.

To be as much out of observation as possible for reasons of her own,
and to escape the gallantries of the young men, she set out before
the chiming began, and took a back seat under the gallery, close to
the lumber, where only old men and women came, and where the bier
stood on end among the churchyard tools.

Parishioners dropped in by twos and threes, deposited themselves
in rows before her, rested three-quarters of a minute on their
foreheads as if they were praying, though they were not; then sat up,
and looked around. When the chants came on, one of her favourites
happened to be chosen among the rest--the old double chant
"Langdon"--but she did not know what it was called, though she would
much have liked to know.  She thought, without exactly wording the
thought, how strange and god-like was a composer's power, who from
the grave could lead through sequences of emotion, which he alone had
felt at first, a girl like her who had never heard of his name, and
never would have a clue to his personality.

The people who had turned their heads turned them again as the
service proceeded; and at last observing her, they whispered to each
other.  She knew what their whispers were about, grew sick at heart,
and felt that she could come to church no more.

The bedroom which she shared with some of the children formed her
retreat more continually than ever.  Here, under her few square yards
of thatch, she watched winds, and snows, and rains, gorgeous sunsets,
and successive moons at their full.  So close kept she that at length
almost everybody thought she had gone away.

The only exercise that Tess took at this time was after dark; and it
was then, when out in the woods, that she seemed least solitary.  She
knew how to hit to a hair's-breadth that moment of evening when the
light and the darkness are so evenly balanced that the constraint of
day and the suspense of night neutralize each other, leaving absolute
mental liberty.  It is then that the plight of being alive becomes
attenuated to its least possible dimensions.  She had no fear of the
shadows; her sole idea seemed to be to shun mankind--or rather that
cold accretion called the world, which, so terrible in the mass, is
so unformidable, even pitiable, in its units.

On these lonely hills and dales her quiescent glide was of a piece
with the element she moved in.  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.  A wet
day was the expression of irremediable grief at her weakness in the
mind of some vague ethical being whom she could not class definitely
as the God of her childhood, and could not comprehend as any other.

But this encompassment of her own characterization, based on shreds
of convention, peopled by phantoms and voices antipathetic to her,
was a sorry and mistaken creation of Tess's fancy--a cloud of moral
hobgoblins by which she was terrified without reason.  It was they
that were out of harmony with the actual world, not she.  Walking
among the sleeping birds in the hedges, watching the skipping rabbits
on a moonlit warren, or standing under a pheasant-laden bough, she
looked upon herself as a figure of Guilt intruding into the haunts
of Innocence.  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.




It was a hazy sunrise in August.  The denser nocturnal vapours,
attacked by the warm beams, were dividing and shrinking into isolated
fleeces within hollows and coverts, where they waited till they
should be dried away to nothing.

The sun, on account of the mist, had a curious sentient, personal
look, demanding the masculine pronoun for its adequate expression.
His present aspect, coupled with the lack of all human forms in the
scene, explained the old-time heliolatries in a moment.  One could
feel that a saner religion had never prevailed under the sky.  The
luminary was a golden-haired, beaming, mild-eyed, God-like creature,
gazing down in the vigour and intentness of youth upon an earth that
was brimming with interest for him.

His light, a little later, broke though chinks of cottage shutters,
throwing stripes like red-hot pokers upon cupboards, chests of
drawers, and other furniture within; and awakening harvesters who
were not already astir.

But of all ruddy things that morning the brightest were two broad
arms of painted wood, which rose from the margin of yellow cornfield
hard by Marlott village.  They, with two others below, formed the
revolving Maltese cross of the reaping-machine, which had been
brought to the field on the previous evening to be ready for
operations this day.  The paint with which they were smeared,
intensified in hue by the sunlight, imparted to them a look of
having been dipped in liquid fire.

The field had already been "opened"; that is to say, a lane a few
feet wide had been hand-cut through the wheat along the whole
circumference of the field for the first passage of the horses and
machine.

Two groups, one of men and lads, the other of women, had come down
the lane just at the hour when the shadows of the eastern hedge-top
struck the west hedge midway, so that the heads of the groups were
enjoying sunrise while their feet were still in the dawn.  They
disappeared from the lane between the two stone posts which flanked
the nearest field-gate.

Presently there arose from within a ticking like the love-making of
the grasshopper.  The machine had begun, and a moving concatenation
of three horses and the aforesaid long rickety machine was visible
over the gate, a driver sitting  upon one of the hauling horses,
and an attendant on the seat of the implement.  Along one side of
the field the whole wain went, the arms of the mechanical reaper
revolving slowly, till it passed down the hill quite out of sight.
In a minute it came up on the other side of the field at the same
equable pace; the glistening brass star in the forehead of the fore
horse first catching the eye as it rose into view over the stubble,
then the bright arms, and then the whole machine.

The narrow lane of stubble encompassing the field grew wider with
each circuit, and the standing corn was reduced to a smaller area as
the morning wore on.  Rabbits, hares, snakes, rats, mice, retreated
inwards as into a fastness, unaware of the ephemeral nature of their
refuge, and of the doom that awaited them later in the day when,
their covert shrinking to a more and more horrible narrowness, they
were huddled together, friends and foes, till the last few yards of
upright wheat fell also under the teeth of the unerring reaper, and
they were every one put to death by the sticks and stones of the
harvesters.

The reaping-machine left the fallen corn behind it in little heaps,
each heap being of the quantity for a sheaf; and upon these the
active binders in the rear laid their hands--mainly women, but some
of them men in print shirts, and trousers supported round their
waists by leather straps, rendering useless the two buttons behind,
which twinkled and bristled with sunbeams at every movement of each
wearer, as if they were a pair of eyes in the small of his back.

But those 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.  There
was one wearing a pale pink jacket, another in a cream-coloured
tight-sleeved gown, another in a petticoat as red as the arms of the
reaping-machine; and others, older, in the brown-rough "wropper"
or over-all--the old-established and most appropriate dress of the
field-woman, which the young ones were abandoning.  This morning the
eye returns involuntarily to the girl in the pink cotton jacket, she
being the most flexuous and finely-drawn figure of them all.  But
her bonnet is pulled so far over her brow that none of her face is
disclosed while she binds, though her complexion may be guessed from
a stray twine or two of dark brown hair which extends below the
curtain of her bonnet.  Perhaps one reason why she seduces casual
attention is that she never courts it, though the other women often
gaze around them.

Her binding proceeds with clock-like monotony.  From the sheaf last
finished she draws a handful of ears, patting their tips with her
left palm to bring them even.  Then, stooping low, she moves forward,
gathering the corn with both hands against her knees, and pushing
her left gloved hand under the bundle to meet the right on the other
side, holding the corn in an embrace like that of a lover.  She
brings the ends of the bond together, and kneels on the sheaf while
she ties it, beating back her skirts now and then when lifted by the
breeze.  A bit of her naked arm is visible between the buff leather
of the gauntlet and the sleeve of her gown; and as the day wears on
its feminine smoothness becomes scarified by the stubble and bleeds.

At intervals she stands up to rest, and to retie her disarranged
apron, or to pull her bonnet straight.  Then one can see the oval
face of a handsome young woman with deep dark eyes and long heavy
clinging tresses, which seem to clasp in a beseeching way anything
they fall against.  The cheeks are paler, the teeth more regular,
the red lips thinner than is usual in a country-bred girl.

It is Tess Durbeyfield, otherwise d'Urberville, somewhat changed--the
same, but not the same; at the present stage of her existence living
as a stranger and an alien here, though it was no strange land that
she was in.  After a long seclusion she had come to a resolve to
undertake outdoor work in her native village, the busiest season of
the year in the agricultural world having arrived, and nothing that
she could do within the house being so remunerative for the time as
harvesting in the fields.

The movements of the other women were more or less similar to Tess's,
the whole bevy of them drawing together like dancers in a quadrille
at the completion of a sheaf by each, every one placing her sheaf on
end against those of the rest, till a shock, or "stitch" as it was
here called, of ten or a dozen was formed.

They went to breakfast, and came again, and the work proceeded as
before.  As the hour of eleven drew near a person watching her might
have noticed that every now and then Tess's glance flitted wistfully
to the brow of the hill, though she did not pause in her sheafing.
On the verge of the hour the heads of a group of children, of ages
ranging from six to fourteen, rose over the stubbly convexity of the
hill.

The face of Tess flushed slightly, but still she did not pause.

The eldest of the comers, a girl who wore a triangular shawl, its
corner draggling on the stubble, carried in her arms what at first
sight seemed to be a doll, but proved to be an infant in long
clothes.  Another brought some lunch.  The harvesters ceased working,
took their provisions, and sat down against one of the shocks.  Here
they fell to, the men plying a stone jar freely, and passing round a
cup.

Tess Durbeyfield had been one of the last to suspend her labours.
She sat down at the end of the shock, her face turned somewhat away
from her companions.  When she had deposited herself a man in a
rabbit-skin cap, and with a red handkerchief tucked into his belt,
held the cup of ale over the top of the shock for her to drink.  But
she did not accept his offer.  As soon as her lunch was spread she
called up the big girl, her sister, and took the baby of her, who,
glad to be relieved of the burden, went away to the next shock and
joined the other children playing there.  Tess, with a curiously
stealthy yet courageous movement, and with a still rising colour,
unfastened her frock and began suckling the child.

The men who sat nearest considerately turned their faces towards the
other end of the field, some of them beginning to smoke; one, with
absent-minded fondness, regretfully stroking the jar that would no
longer yield a stream.  All the women but Tess fell into animated
talk, and adjusted the disarranged knots of their hair.

When the infant had taken its fill, the young mother sat it upright
in her lap, and looking into the far distance, dandled it with a
gloomy indifference that was almost dislike; then all of a sudden she
fell to violently kissing it some dozens of times, as if she could
never leave off, the child crying at the vehemence of an onset which
strangely combined passionateness with contempt.

"She's fond of that there child, though she mid pretend to hate en,
and say she wishes the baby and her too were in the churchyard,"
observed the woman in the red petticoat.

"She'll soon leave off saying that," replied the one in buff. "Lord,
'tis wonderful what a body can get used to o' that sort in time!"

"A little more than persuading had to do wi' the coming o't, I
reckon.  There were they that heard a sobbing one night last year in
The Chase; and it mid ha' gone hard wi' a certain party if folks had
come along."

"Well, a little more, or a little less, 'twas a thousand pities that
it should have happened to she, of all others.  But 'tis always the
comeliest!  The plain ones be as safe as churches--hey, Jenny?"  The
speaker turned to one of the group who certainly was not ill-defined
as plain.

It was a thousand pities, indeed; it was impossible for even an enemy
to feel otherwise on looking at Tess as she sat there, with her
flower-like mouth and large tender eyes, neither black nor blue nor
grey nor violet; rather all those shades together, and a hundred
others, which could be seen if one looked into their irises--shade
behind shade--tint beyond tint--around pupils that had no bottom; an
almost standard woman, but for the slight incautiousness of character
inherited from her race.

A resolution which had surprised herself had brought her into the
fields this week for the first time during many months.  After
wearing and wasting her palpitating heart with every engine of regret
that lonely inexperience could devise, common sense had illuminated
her.  She felt that she would do well to be useful again--to taste
anew sweet independence at any price.  The past was past; whatever
it had been, it was no more at hand.  Whatever its consequences,
time would close over them; they would all in a few years be as if
they had never been, and she herself grassed down and forgotten.
Meanwhile the trees were just as green as before; the birds sang and
the sun shone as clearly now as ever.  The familiar surroundings had
not darkened because of her grief, nor sickened because of her pain.

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."  If she tried to be cheerful,
to dismiss all care, to take pleasure in the daylight, the flowers,
the baby, she could only be this idea to them--"Ah, she bears it
very well."  Moreover, alone in a desert island would she have been
wretched at what had happened to her?  Not greatly.  If she could
have been but just created, to discover herself as a spouseless
mother, with no experience of life except as the parent of a nameless
child, would the position have caused her to despair?  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.  This was
why she had borne herself with dignity, and had looked people calmly
in the face at times, even when holding the baby in her arms.

The harvest-men rose from the shock of corn, and stretched their
limbs, and extinguished their pipes.  The horses, which had been
unharnessed and fed, were again attached to the scarlet machine.
Tess, having quickly eaten her own meal, beckoned to her eldest
sister to come and take away the baby, fastened her dress, put on
the buff gloves again, and stooped anew to draw a bond from the last
completed sheaf for the tying of the next.

In the afternoon and evening the proceedings of the morning were
continued, Tess staying on till dusk with the body of harvesters.
Then they all rode home in one of the largest wagons, in the company
of a broad tarnished moon that had risen from the ground to the
eastwards, its face resembling the outworn gold-leaf halo of some
worm-eaten Tuscan saint.  Tess's female companions sang songs, and
showed themselves very sympathetic and glad at her reappearance out
of doors, though they could not refrain from mischievously throwing
in a few verses of the ballad about the maid who went to the merry
green wood and came back a changed state.  There are counterpoises
and compensations in life; and the event which had made of her a
social warning had also for the moment made her the most interesting
personage in the village to many.  Their friendliness won her still
farther away from herself, their lively spirits were contagious, and
she became almost gay.

But now that her moral sorrows were passing away a fresh one arose on
the natural side of her which knew no social law.  When she reached
home it was to learn to her grief that the baby had been suddenly
taken ill since the afternoon.  Some such collapse had been probable,
so tender and puny was its frame; but the event came as a shock
nevertheless.

The baby's offence against society in coming into the world was
forgotten by the girl-mother; her soul's desire was to continue that
offence by preserving the life of the child.  However, it soon grew
clear that the hour of emancipation for that little prisoner of the
flesh was to arrive earlier than her worst misgiving had conjectured.
And when she had discovered this she was plunged into a misery which
transcended that of the child's simple loss.  Her baby had not been
baptized.

Tess had drifted into a frame of mind which accepted passively the
consideration that if she should have to burn for what she had done,
burn she must, and there was an end of it.  Like all village girls,
she was well grounded in the Holy Scriptures, and had dutifully
studied the histories of Aholah and Aholibah, and knew the inferences
to be drawn therefrom.  But when the same question arose with regard
to the baby, it had a very different colour.  Her darling was about
to die, and no salvation.

It was nearly bedtime, but she rushed downstairs and asked if she
might send for the parson.  The moment happened to be one at which
her father's sense of the antique nobility of his family was highest,
and his sensitiveness to the smudge which Tess had set upon that
nobility most pronounced, for he had just returned from his weekly
booze at Rolliver's Inn.  No parson should come inside his door, he
declared, prying into his affairs, just then, when, by her shame, it
had become more necessary than ever to hide them.  He locked the door
and put the key in his pocket.

The household went to bed, and, distressed beyond measure, Tess
retired also.  She was continually waking as she lay, and in the
middle of the night found that the baby was still worse.  It was
obviously dying--quietly and painlessly, but none the less surely.

In her misery she rocked herself upon the bed.  The clock struck the
solemn hour of one, that hour when fancy stalks outside reason, and
malignant possibilities stand rock-firm as facts.  She thought of
the child consigned to the nethermost corner of hell, as its double
doom for lack of baptism and lack of legitimacy; saw the arch-fiend
tossing it with his three-pronged fork, like the one they used for
heating the oven on baking days; to which picture she added many
other quaint and curious details of torment sometimes taught the
young in this Christian country.  The lurid presentment so powerfully
affected her imagination in the silence of the sleeping house that
her nightgown became damp with perspiration, and the bedstead shook
with each throb of her heart.

The infant's breathing grew more difficult, and the mother's mental
tension increased.  It was useless to devour the little thing with
kisses; she could stay in bed no longer, and walked feverishly about
the room.

"O merciful God, have pity; have pity upon my poor baby!" she cried.
"Heap as much anger as you want to upon me, and welcome; but pity the
child!"

She leant against the chest of drawers, and murmured incoherent
supplications for a long while, till she suddenly started up.

"Ah! perhaps baby can be saved!  Perhaps it will be just the same!"

She spoke so brightly that it seemed as though her face might have
shone in the gloom surrounding her.  She lit a candle, and went to
a second and a third bed under the wall, where she awoke her young
sisters and brothers, all of whom occupied the same room.  Pulling
out the washing-stand so that she could get behind it, she poured
some water from a jug, and made them kneel around, putting their
hands together with fingers exactly vertical.  While the children,
scarcely awake, awe-stricken at her manner, their eyes growing larger
and larger, remained in this position, she took the baby from her
bed--a child's child--so immature as scarce to seem a sufficient
personality to endow its producer with the maternal title.  Tess then
stood erect with the infant on her arm beside the basin; the next
sister held the Prayer-Book open before her, as the clerk at church
held it before the parson; and thus the girl set about baptizing her
child.

Her figure looked singularly tall and imposing as she stood in her
long white nightgown, a thick cable of twisted dark hair hanging
straight down her back to her waist.  The kindly dimness of the weak
candle abstracted from her form and features the little blemishes
which sunlight might have revealed--the stubble scratches upon her
wrists, and the weariness of her eyes--her high enthusiasm having
a transfiguring effect upon the face which had been her undoing,
showing it as a thing of immaculate beauty, with a touch of dignity
which was almost regal.  The little ones kneeling round, their sleepy
eyes blinking and red, awaited her preparations full of a suspended
wonder which their physical heaviness at that hour would not allow to
become active.

The most impressed of them said:

"Be you really going to christen him, Tess?"

The girl-mother replied in a grave affirmative.

"What's his name going to be?"

She had not thought of that, but a name suggested by a phrase in
the book of Genesis came into her head as she proceeded with the
baptismal service, and now she pronounced it:

"SORROW, I baptize thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son,
and of the Holy Ghost."

She sprinkled the water, and there was silence.

"Say 'Amen,' children."

The tiny voices piped in obedient response, "Amen!"

Tess went on:

"We receive this child"--and so forth--"and do sign him with the sign
of the Cross."

Here she dipped her hand into the basin, and fervently drew an
immense cross upon the baby with her forefinger, continuing with
the customary sentences as to his manfully fighting against sin,
the world, and the devil, and being a faithful soldier and servant
unto his life's end.  She duly went on with the Lord's Prayer, the
children lisping it after her in a thin gnat-like wail, till, at the
conclusion, raising their voices to clerk's pitch, they again piped
into silence, "Amen!"

Then their sister, with much augmented confidence in the efficacy
of the sacrament, poured forth from the bottom of her heart the
thanksgiving that follows, uttering it boldly and triumphantly in the
stopt-diapason note which her voice acquired when her heart was in
her speech, and which will never be forgotten by those who knew her.
The ecstasy of faith almost apotheosized her; it set upon her face a
glowing irradiation, and brought a red spot into the middle of each
cheek; while the miniature candle-flame inverted in her eye-pupils
shone like a diamond.  The children gazed up at her with more and
more reverence, and no longer had a will for questioning.  She did
not look like Sissy to them now, but as a being large, towering, and
awful--a divine personage with whom they had nothing in common.

Poor Sorrow's campaign against sin, the world, and the devil was
doomed to be of limited brilliancy--luckily perhaps for himself,
considering his beginnings.  In the blue of the morning that fragile
soldier and servant breathed his last, and when the other children
awoke they cried bitterly, and begged Sissy to have another pretty
baby.

The calmness which had possessed Tess since the christening remained
with her in the infant's loss.  In the daylight, indeed, she felt her
terrors about his soul to have been somewhat exaggerated; whether
well founded or not, she had no uneasiness now, reasoning that
if Providence would not ratify such an act of approximation
she, for one, did not value the kind of heaven lost by the
irregularity--either for herself or for her child.

So passed away Sorrow the Undesired--that intrusive creature, that
bastard gift of shameless Nature, who respects not the social law;
a waif to whom eternal Time had been a matter of days merely, who
knew not that such things as years and centuries ever were; to whom
the cottage interior was the universe, the week's weather climate,
new-born babyhood human existence, and the instinct to suck human
knowledge.

Tess, who mused on the christening a good deal, wondered if it were
doctrinally sufficient to secure a Christian burial for the child.
Nobody could tell this but the parson of the parish, and he was a
new-comer, and did not know her.  She went to his house after dusk,
and stood by the gate, but could not summon courage to go in.  The
enterprise would have been abandoned if she had not by accident met
him coming homeward as she turned away.  In the gloom she did not
mind speaking freely.

"I should like to ask you something, sir."

He expressed his willingness to listen, and she told the story of the
baby's illness and the extemporized ordinance.  "And now, sir," she
added earnestly, "can you tell me this--will it be just the same for
him as if you had baptized him?"

Having the natural feelings of a tradesman at finding that a job he
should have been called in for had been unskilfully botched by his
customers among themselves, he was disposed to say no.  Yet the
dignity of the girl, the strange tenderness in her voice, combined
to affect his nobler impulses--or rather those that he had left in
him after ten years of endeavour to graft technical belief on actual
scepticism.  The man and the ecclesiastic fought within him, and the
victory fell to the man.

"My dear girl," he said, "it will be just the same."

"Then will you give him a Christian burial?" she asked quickly.

The Vicar felt himself cornered. Hearing of the baby's illness, he
had conscientiously gone to the house after nightfall to perform the
rite, and, unaware that the refusal to admit him had come from Tess's
father and not from Tess, he could not allow the plea of necessity
for its irregular administration.

"Ah--that's another matter," he said.

"Another matter--why?" asked Tess, rather warmly.

"Well--I would willingly do so if only we two were concerned.  But I
must not--for certain reasons."

"Just for once, sir!"

"Really I must not."

"O sir!"  She seized his hand as she spoke.

He withdrew it, shaking his head.

"Then I don't like you!" she burst out, "and I'll never come to your
church no more!"

"Don't talk so rashly."

"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!"

How the Vicar reconciled his answer with the strict notions he
supposed himself to hold on these subjects it is beyond a layman's
power to tell, though not to excuse.  Somewhat moved, he said in
this case also--

"It will be just the same."

So the baby was carried in a small deal box, under an ancient woman's
shawl, to the churchyard that night, and buried by lantern-light,
at the cost of a shilling and a pint of beer to the sexton, in that
shabby corner of God's allotment where He lets the nettles grow,
and where all unbaptized infants, notorious drunkards, suicides,
and others of the conjecturally damned are laid.  In spite of the
untoward surroundings, however, Tess bravely made a little cross of
two laths and a piece of string, and having bound 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?

If before going to the d'Urbervilles' she had vigorously moved under
the guidance of sundry gnomic texts and phrases known to her and to
the world in general, no doubt she would never have been imposed on.
But it had not been in Tess's power--nor is it in anybody's power--to
feel the whole truth of golden opinions while it is possible to
profit by them.  She--and how many more--might have ironically said
to God with Saint Augustine: "Thou hast counselled a better course
than Thou hast permitted."

She remained at her father's house during the winter months, plucking
fowls, or cramming turkeys and geese, or making clothes for her
sisters and brothers out of some finery which d'Urberville had given
her, and she had put by with contempt.  Apply to him she would not.
But she would often clasp her hands behind her head and muse when she
was supposed to be working hard.

She philosophically noted dates as they came past in the revolution
of the year; the disastrous night of her undoing at Trantridge with
its dark background of The Chase; also the dates of the baby's birth
and death; also her own birthday; and every other day individualized
by incidents in which she had taken some share.  She suddenly thought
one afternoon, when looking in the glass at her fairness, that there
was yet another date, of greater importance to her than those; that
of her own death, when all these charms would have disappeared; a day
which lay sly and unseen among all the other days of the year, giving
no sign or sound when she annually passed over it; but not the less
surely there.  When was it?  Why did she not feel the chill of each
yearly encounter with such a cold relation?  She had Jeremy Taylor's
thought that some time in the future those who had known her would
say: "It is the ----th, the day that poor Tess Durbeyfield died"; 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 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.  But it became evident to her
that she could never be really comfortable again in a place which
had seen the collapse of her family's attempt to "claim kin"--and,
through her, even closer union--with the rich d'Urbervilles.  At
least she could not be comfortable there till long years should have
obliterated her keen consciousness of it.  Yet even now Tess felt the
pulse of hopeful life still warm within her; she might be happy in
some nook which had no memories.  To escape the past and all that
appertained thereto was to annihilate it, and to do that she would
have to get away.

Was once lost always lost really true of chastity? she would ask
herself.  She might prove it false if she could veil bygones.  The
recuperative power which pervaded organic nature was surely not
denied to maidenhood alone.

She waited a long time without finding opportunity for a new
departure.  A particularly fine spring came round, and the stir of
germination was almost audible in the buds; it moved her, as it moved
the wild animals, and made her passionate to go.  At last, one day in
early May, a letter reached her from a former friend of her mother's,
to whom she had addressed inquiries long before--a person whom she
had never seen--that a skilful milkmaid was required at a dairy-house
many miles to the southward, and that the dairyman would be glad to
have her for the summer months.

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.  Her mother knew Tess's feeling
on this point so well, though no words had passed between them on the
subject, that she never alluded to the knightly ancestry now.

Yet such is human inconsistency that one of the interests of the
new place to her was the accidental virtues of its lying near her
forefathers' country (for they were not Blakemore men, though her
mother was Blakemore to the bone).  The dairy called Talbothays,
for which she was bound, stood not remotely from some of the former
estates of the d'Urbervilles, near the great family vaults of her
granddames and their powerful husbands.  She would be able to look at
them, and think not only that d'Urberville, like Babylon, had fallen,
but that the individual innocence of a humble descendant could lapse
as silently.  All the while she wondered if any strange good thing
might come of her being in her ancestral land; and some spirit within
her rose  automatically as the sap in the twigs.  It was unexpected
youth, surging up anew after its temporary check, and bringing with
it hope, and the invincible instinct towards self-delight.


END OF PHASE THE SECOND





Phase the Third: The Rally



Chapters 12-15
In October, four months after her arrival in Trantridge, Tess leaves the d'Urberville estate to return home. Alec pursues her, offers her a ride home, and she accepts. He admits to his mistake and begs Tess' forgiveness, but to no avail. She leaves Alec in the road near her home, walking the remainder of the way. Along the way, she encounters a sign painter whose signs preach against vice and sin. Tess' mother is the first to encounter Tess when she enters the family home, and the two talk about Tess' experiences. Here, Tess asks her mother, "Why didn't you tell me there was danger in men-folk?" Joan still believes that her daughter might have a chance to marry Alec d'Urberville and become a real lady, but she is too simple or ignorant to understand Tess' dilemma. Joan's response is to, "make the best of it, I suppose. @'Tis nater, after all, and what do please God!" Tess has visits from her village friends, but these visits are not enough to erase her impending depression. Even church affords no comfort to her as the churchgoers whisper and gossip about her. After suffering the fall and winter at home, Tess is next seen the following August working as a field laborer harvesting corn. We see for the first time that Tess has a baby and stops to breastfeed him during the lunch break the harvesting crew takes. Later that night, the infant falls ill. All sense that the child will die sometime in the next few days. Tess, realizing that her baby has not been baptized, gathers her siblings and baptizes the infant herself. During the ceremony, we learn that the child's name is "Sorrow" after the phrase in Genesis 3:16, "in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children." Sorrow is buried in a nearly forgotten part of the church graveyard, where the "unbaptized infants, notorious drunkards, suicides, and others of the conjecturally damned are laid." The fall turns to winter and winter turns to spring. In May, Tess, now 20, sets out again, on her second excursion, to find work in a nearby town, at Talbothays Dairy. She wants solitude and time away from home where "she might be happy in some nook which had no memories." Her journey takes her to a beautiful valley called Blackmoor on the river Froom/Frome where a new phase of her life begins.
Religion is a major theme in much of Hardy's writings. He is critical of the shallowness that man uses to perpetuate social norms or justify poor treatment of his fellow man. When Tess encounters the artisan, or sign painter, the conversation that ensues is telling of Hardy's views on man and religion. The artisan paints small signs of biblical verses to remind readers of the presence of organized religion. Hardy says, "Some people might have cried 'Alas, poor Theology!' at the hideous defacement -- the last grotesque phase of a creed which had served mankind well in its time." Tess questions the painter further by asking, "uppose your sin was not of your own seeking?" The artisan, who has no real answer -- Hardy's suggestion that modern religion doesn't have any real answers -- says, "I cannot split hairs on that burning query." Tess' reception in church offers Hardy another opportunity to voice his criticisms of modern religion. The church is supposed to be a comfort and to forgive Tess' sins, but the churchgoers, who whisper and gossip behind Tess' back, are not forgiving in their judgment of her. In addition, Tess must baptize Sorrow herself because her father will not allow the local parson into the house, afraid that he will find out the family's secrets. Still, it seems to be the hypocrisy of religious fervor and expression that incites Hardy's ire. The scene in which Tess baptizes her dying child is, arguably, the most beautiful and poignant in the novel. Tess becomes more than a mere woman/child in the key scene of Sorrow's baptism in Chapter 14. Hardy elevates Tess to heroine status as she takes the baptism of Sorrow into her own hands. She becomes "a divine personage with whom they  had nothing in common." The scene begins when Tess realizes her infant's death is imminent: "Her darling was about to die, and no salvation." Being a resourceful young lady, Tess has a revelation -- she will perform the baptism herself -- and gathers her brothers and sisters to begin the ceremony, based upon what she remembers from baptisms she witnessed while attending church, "Tess then stood erect with the infant on her arm beside the basin, the next sister held the Prayer-Book open before her, as the clerk at church held it before the parson; and thus the girl set about baptizing her child." Hardy describes Tess as a "child's child" who barely had the title of "mother." Yet in the ritual, Tess becomes more than either mother, woman, or child. She becomes, in effect, a divine person, "her high enthusiasm having a transfiguring effect upon the face which had been her undoing, showing it as a thing of immaculate beauty, with a touch of dignity which was almost regal." Tess performs the baptism: "The ecstasy of faith almost apotheosized her; it set upon her face a glowing irradiation, and brought a red spot into the middle of each cheek; while the miniature candle-flame inverted in her eye pupils shone like a diamond." The effect of this change strikes awe in Tess' siblings whom she has summoned to witness the baptism. "The children gazed up at her with more and more reverence, and no longer had a will for questioning. She did not look like Sissy to them now, but as a being large, towering and awful." In this passage, Hardy does two things: First he avers the worth of the sincere application of faith. Second, he elevates Tess to a higher status, and in so doing, emphasizes her goodness and reveals her inner strength and independence. She may be a woman plagued by fate and unhappy circumstance, but she is a heroic character. Hardy uses this scene to comment on the application of sincere expressions of faith  and the application of faith as it is transmuted through the principles of social convention. Remember, social convention enabled Alec to rape Tess without consequence to himself. Social convention also shades what is and isn't permissible expressions of faith. Tess, for example, asks the parson to admit that Tess' baptism of the infant is the same as if the parson himself had conducted the ceremony. In answering, "he man and the ecclesiastic fought within him, and the victory fell to the man," and thus he tells Tess that it was. Relieved, Tess then asks for confirmation that Sorrow can then receive a proper Christian burial. At this point, the parson hesitates. Tess presses her point, further challenging him on church doctrine that the unbaptized are not accorded a proper Christian burial, and he objects based on church doctrine, "I would willingly do so if only we two are concerned. But I must not -- for certain reasons." Hardy is showing us the heavy handedness of the church, not found in any biblical text, on the burial of the dead. Tess finally tells him, "Then I don't like you . . . and I'll never come to your church again." The parson has no answer and gives in to Tess' demands. Glossary Marble term a post that marks the boundary, often in the shape of a pillar topped with a head and torso. teave  work or struggle. "Clogged like a dripping pan" reference to a pan, used for roasting, in which the drippings of fat have been allowed to congeal. "dust to ashes" from Job 42:6. Hontish  haughty. Robert South English divine and minister . "old double chant 'Langdon'" a chant in the Anglican Church double the normal length, in this case named after the English composer, Robert Langdon . Heliolatries religions in which the sun is worshipped. "a stranger in a strange land" in Exodus 2:22, Moses in Egypt refers to himself as a stranger in a strange land. quadrille a square dance of French origin, consisting of several figures, performed by four couples. "Tuscan saint" a reference to the images typical of Florentine art during the Renaissance. Aholah and Aholibah two sisters who were prostitutes: Ezekiel predicts that not only they but their children will be punished . Stopt-diapason note suggests Tess' voice, which, like an organ with stops, or tuned sets of pipes, is characterized by a full range of harmonious sound. "sin, the world and the devil" a reference to "the world, the flesh, and the devil," traditional temptations to sin mentioned in The Book of Common Prayer . Gnomic texts gnomic means wise and pithy; full of aphorisms; here, a reference to texts that express general truths in a wise manner. "Jeremy Taylor's thought" reference to The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying  by Jeremy Taylor, a seventeenth-century Anglican divine. Babylon ancient city noted for wealth, luxury, and wickedness. stile a vertical piece in a panel or frame, as of a door or window. texes  texts. Conjecturally being inferred, theorized, or predicted from incomplete or uncertain evidence. Deal box a fir or pine board of any of several sizes; fir or pinewood.