finished_summaries/novelguide/Tess of the d'Urbervilles/section_5_part_7.txt
Tess of the d'Urbervilles.chapter xli
chapter xli
{"name": "Chapter XLI", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210213065711/https://www.novelguide.com/tess-of-the-durbervilles/summaries/phase5-chapter35-44", "summary": "Despite a variety of agricultural jobs, Tess runs short of money but sends her parents the money Angel gave her to repair their roof. She doesn't know that Angel is ill in Brazil. Marian, another milkmaid from Talbothays, has written telling Tess about a job, and Tess travels to join her. She meets the man whom Angel attacked for insulting her. She runs to hide and takes refuge for the night in a thicket of bushes. In the morning she discovers a flock of dying pheasants who sought refuge in the bushes during a hunt. Tearfully, she breaks their necks to put them out of their misery. She feels a personal affinity for the tortured birds and \"in the sight of such misery,\" realizes that comparatively she is not so bad off", "analysis": ""}


From the foregoing events of the winter-time let us press on to
an October day, more than eight months subsequent to the parting
of Clare and Tess.  We discover the latter in changed conditions;
instead of a bride with boxes and trunks which others bore, we see
her a lonely woman with a basket and a bundle in her own porterage,
as at an earlier time when she was no bride; instead of the ample
means that were projected by her husband for her comfort through
this probationary period, she can produce only a flattened purse.

After again leaving Marlott, her home, she had got through the
spring and summer without any great stress upon her physical powers,
the time being mainly spent in rendering light irregular service
at dairy-work near Port-Bredy to the west of the Blackmoor Valley,
equally remote from her native place and from Talbothays.  She
preferred this to living on his allowance.  Mentally she remained in
utter stagnation, a condition which the mechanical occupation rather
fostered than checked.  Her consciousness was at that other dairy,
at that other season, in the presence of the tender lover who had
confronted her there--he who, the moment she had grasped him to keep
for her own, had disappeared like a shape in a vision.

The dairy-work lasted only till the milk began to lessen, for she
had not met with a second regular engagement as at Talbothays, but
had done duty as a supernumerary only.  However, as harvest was now
beginning, she had simply to remove from the pasture to the stubble
to find plenty of further occupation, and this continued till harvest
was done.

Of the five-and-twenty pounds which had remained to her of Clare's
allowance, after deducting the other half of the fifty as a
contribution to her parents for the trouble and expense to which
she had put them, she had as yet spent but little.  But there now
followed an unfortunate interval of wet weather, during which she was
obliged to fall back upon her sovereigns.

She could not bear to let them go.  Angel had put them into her hand,
had obtained them bright and new from his bank for her; his touch had
consecrated them to souvenirs of himself--they appeared to have had
as yet no other history than such as was created by his and her own
experiences--and to disperse them was like giving away relics.  But
she had to do it, and one by one they left her hands.

She had been compelled to send her mother her address from time to
time, but she concealed her circumstances.  When her money had almost
gone a letter from her mother reached her.  Joan stated that they
were in dreadful difficulty; the autumn rains had gone through the
thatch of the house, which required entire renewal; but this could
not be done because the previous thatching had never been paid for.
New rafters and a new ceiling upstairs also were required, which,
with the previous bill, would amount to a sum of twenty pounds.  As
her husband was a man of means, and had doubtless returned by this
time, could she not send them the money?

Tess had thirty pounds coming to her almost immediately from Angel's
bankers, and, the case being so deplorable, as soon as the sum was
received she sent the twenty as requested.  Part of the remainder
she was obliged to expend in winter clothing, leaving only a nominal
sum for the whole inclement season at hand.  When the last pound
had gone, a remark of Angel's that whenever she required further
resources she was to apply to his father, remained to be considered.

But the more Tess thought of the step, the more reluctant was she to
take it.  The same delicacy, pride, false shame, whatever it may be
called, on Clare's account, which had led her to hide from her own
parents the prolongation of the estrangement, hindered her owning to
his that she was in want after the fair allowance he had left her.
They probably despised her already; how much more they would despise
her in the character of a mendicant!  The consequence was that by no
effort could the parson's daughter-in-law bring herself to let him
know her state.

Her reluctance to communicate with her husband's parents might,
she thought, lessen with the lapse of time; but with her own the
reverse obtained.  On her leaving their house after the short visit
subsequent to her marriage they were under the impression that she
was ultimately going to join her husband; and from that time to the
present she had done nothing to disturb their belief that she was
awaiting his return in comfort, hoping against hope that his journey
to Brazil would result in a short stay only, after which he would
come to fetch her, or that he would write for her to join him; in any
case that they would soon present a united front to their families
and the world.  This hope she still fostered.  To let her parents
know that she was a deserted wife, dependent, now that she had
relieved their necessities, on her own hands for a living, after the
_eclat_ of a marriage which was to nullify the collapse of the first
attempt, would be too much indeed.

The set of brilliants returned to her mind.  Where Clare had
deposited them she did not know, and it mattered little, if it were
true that she could only use and not sell them.  Even were they
absolutely hers it would be passing mean to enrich herself by a legal
title to them which was not essentially hers at all.

Meanwhile her husband's days had been by no means free from trial.
At this moment he was lying ill of fever in the clay lands near
Curitiba in Brazil, having been drenched with thunder-storms and
persecuted by other hardships, in common with all the English farmers
and farm-labourers who, just at this time, were deluded into going
thither by the promises of the Brazilian Government, and by the
baseless assumption that those frames which, ploughing and sowing on
English uplands, had resisted all the weathers to whose moods they
had been born, could resist equally well all the weathers by which
they were surprised on Brazilian plains.

To return.  Thus it happened that when the last of Tess's sovereigns
had been spent she was unprovided with others to take their place,
while on account of the season she found it increasingly difficult
to get employment.  Not being aware of the rarity of intelligence,
energy, health, and willingness in any sphere of life, she refrained
from seeking an indoor occupation; fearing towns, large houses,
people of means and social sophistication, and of manners other
than rural.  From that direction of gentility Black Care had come.
Society might be better than she supposed from her slight experience
of it.  But she had no proof of this, and her instinct in the
circumstances was to avoid its purlieus.

The small dairies to the west, beyond Port-Bredy, in which she
had served as supernumerary milkmaid during the spring and summer
required no further aid.  Room would probably have been made for her
at Talbothays, if only out of sheer compassion; but comfortable as
her life had been there, she could not go back.  The anti-climax
would be too intolerable; and her return might bring reproach upon
her idolized husband.  She could not have borne their pity, and their
whispered remarks to one another upon her strange situation; though
she would almost have faced a knowledge of her circumstances by every
individual there, so long as her story had remained isolated in the
mind of each.  It was the interchange of ideas about her that made
her sensitiveness wince.  Tess could not account for this
distinction; she simply knew that she felt it.

She was now on her way to an upland farm in the centre of the county,
to which she had been recommended by a wandering letter which had
reached her from Marian.  Marian had somehow heard that Tess was
separated from her husband--probably through Izz Huett--and the
good-natured and now tippling girl, deeming Tess in trouble, had
hastened to notify to her former friend that she herself had gone to
this upland spot after leaving the dairy, and would like to see her
there, where there was room for other hands, if it was really true
that she worked again as of old.

With the shortening of the days all hope of obtaining her husband's
forgiveness began to leave her; and there was something of the
habitude of the wild animal in the unreflecting instinct with which
she rambled on--disconnecting herself by littles from her eventful
past at every step, obliterating her identity, giving no thought to
accidents or contingencies which might make a quick discovery of her
whereabouts by others of importance to her own happiness, if not to
theirs.

Among the difficulties of her lonely position not the least was
the attention she excited by her appearance, a certain bearing of
distinction, which she had caught from Clare, being superadded to her
natural attractiveness.  Whilst the clothes lasted which had been
prepared for her marriage, these casual glances of interest caused
her no inconvenience, but as soon as she was compelled to don the
wrapper of a fieldwoman, rude words were addressed to her more than
once; but nothing occurred to cause her bodily fear till a particular
November afternoon.

She had preferred the country west of the River Brit to the upland
farm for which she was now bound, because, for one thing, it was
nearer to the home of her husband's father; and to hover about that
region unrecognized, with the notion that she might decide to call at
the Vicarage some day, gave her pleasure.  But having once decided to
try the higher and drier levels, she pressed back eastward, marching
afoot towards the village of Chalk-Newton, where she meant to pass
the night.

The lane was long and unvaried, and, owing to the rapid shortening of
the days, dusk came upon her before she was aware.  She had reached
the top of a hill down which the lane stretched its serpentine length
in glimpses, when she heard footsteps behind her back, and in a few
moments she was overtaken by a man.  He stepped up alongside Tess and
said--

"Good night, my pretty maid": to which she civilly replied.

The light still remaining in the sky lit up her face, though the
landscape was nearly dark.  The man turned and stared hard at her.

"Why, surely, it is the young wench who was at Trantridge awhile--
young Squire d'Urberville's friend?  I was there at that time, though
I don't live there now."

She recognized in him the well-to-do boor whom Angel had knocked down
at the inn for addressing her coarsely.  A spasm of anguish shot
through her, and she returned him no answer.

"Be honest enough to own it, and that what I said in the town was
true, though your fancy-man was so up about it--hey, my sly one?  You
ought to beg my pardon for that blow of his, considering."

Still no answer came from Tess.  There seemed only one escape for her
hunted soul.  She suddenly took to her heels with the speed of the
wind, and, without looking behind her, ran along the road till she
came to a gate which opened directly into a plantation.  Into this
she plunged, and did not pause till she was deep enough in its shade
to be safe against any possibility of discovery.

Under foot the leaves were dry, and the foliage of some holly bushes
which grew among the deciduous trees was dense enough to keep off
draughts.  She scraped together the dead leaves till she had formed
them into a large heap, making a sort of nest in the middle.  Into
this Tess crept.

Such sleep as she got was naturally fitful; she fancied she heard
strange noises, but persuaded herself that they were caused by the
breeze.  She thought of her husband in some vague warm clime on the
other side of the globe, while she was here in the cold.  Was there
another such a wretched being as she in the world?  Tess asked
herself; and, thinking of her wasted life, said, "All is vanity."
She repeated the words mechanically, till she reflected that this
was a most inadequate thought for modern days.  Solomon had thought
as far as that more than two thousand years ago; she herself,
though not in the van of thinkers, had got much further.  If all
were only vanity, who would mind it?  All was, alas, worse than
vanity--injustice, punishment, exaction, death.  The wife of Angel
Clare put her hand to her brow, and felt its curve, and the edges of
her eye-sockets perceptible under the soft skin, and thought as she
did so that a time would come when that bone would be bare.  "I wish
it were now," she said.

In the midst of these whimsical fancies she heard a new strange sound
among the leaves.  It might be the wind; yet there was scarcely any
wind.  Sometimes it was a palpitation, sometimes a flutter; sometimes
it was a sort of gasp or gurgle.  Soon she was certain that the
noises came from wild creatures of some kind, the more so when,
originating in the boughs overhead, they were followed by the fall
of a heavy body upon the ground.  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 plantation wherein she had taken shelter ran down
at this spot into a peak, which ended it hitherward, outside the
hedge being arable ground.  Under the trees several pheasants lay
about, their rich plumage dabbled with blood; some were dead, some
feebly twitching a wing, some staring up at the sky, some pulsating
quickly, some contorted, some stretched out--all of them writhing in
agony, except the fortunate ones whose tortures had ended during the
night by the inability of nature to bear more.

Tess guessed at once the meaning of this.  The birds had been driven
down into this corner the day before by some shooting-party; and
while those that had dropped dead under the shot, or had died before
nightfall, had been searched for and carried off, many badly wounded
birds had escaped and hidden themselves away, or risen among the
thick boughs, where they had maintained their position till they grew
weaker with loss of blood in the night-time, when they had fallen one
by one as she had heard them.

She had occasionally caught glimpses of these men in girlhood,
looking over hedges, or peeping through bushes, and pointing their
guns, strangely accoutred, a bloodthirsty light in their eyes.  She
had been told that, rough and brutal as they seemed just then, they
were not like this all the year round, but were, in fact, quite civil
persons save during certain weeks of autumn and winter, when, like
the inhabitants of the Malay Peninsula, they ran amuck, and made
it their purpose to destroy life--in this case harmless feathered
creatures, brought into being by artificial means solely to gratify
these propensities--at once so unmannerly and so unchivalrous towards
their weaker fellows in Nature's teeming family.

With the impulse of a soul who could feel for kindred sufferers as
much as for herself, Tess's first thought was to put the still living
birds out of their torture, and to this end with her own hands she
broke the necks of as many as she could find, leaving them to lie
where she had found them till the game-keepers should come--as they
probably would come--to look for them a second time.

"Poor darlings--to suppose myself the most miserable being on earth
in the sight o' such misery as yours!" she exclaimed, her tears
running down as she killed the birds tenderly.  "And not a twinge of
bodily pain about me!  I be not mangled, and I be not bleeding, and
I have two hands to feed and clothe me."  She was ashamed of herself
for her gloom of the night, based on nothing more tangible than a
sense of condemnation under an arbitrary law of society which had no
foundation in Nature.



Chapter XLI
Despite a variety of agricultural jobs, Tess runs short of money but sends her parents the money Angel gave her to repair their roof. She doesn't know that Angel is ill in Brazil. Marian, another milkmaid from Talbothays, has written telling Tess about a job, and Tess travels to join her. She meets the man whom Angel attacked for insulting her. She runs to hide and takes refuge for the night in a thicket of bushes. In the morning she discovers a flock of dying pheasants who sought refuge in the bushes during a hunt. Tearfully, she breaks their necks to put them out of their misery. She feels a personal affinity for the tortured birds and "in the sight of such misery," realizes that comparatively she is not so bad off