finished_summaries/gradesaver/Tess of the D'Urbervilles/section_5_part_6.txt
Tess of the D'Urbervilles.chapter 50
chapter 50
{"name": "Chapter 50", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210410060617/https://www.gradesaver.com/tess-of-the-durbervilles/study-guide/summary-phase-6-chapters-45-52", "summary": "Tess returns home to find a neighbor who has been caring for Joan Durbeyfield. John tells Tess that he is thinking of asking local antiquarians to subscribe to a fund to maintain him as a part of local history. He says that such societies keep local bones, and living remains should be far more interesting. Alec finds Tess in Marlott. He asks Tess if her engagement at Flintcomb-Ash has ended, and mocks the idea that she might join her husband. Tess replies that she has no husband. Alec tells her that he has sent her something that should have arrived at her house, and insists that he will help her in spite of herself. When Tess returns home, she finds that her father has died.", "analysis": "The death of John Durbeyfield is an ironic reversal of fortune for the Durbeyfield family, for it is Joan, who makes a sudden recovery, whose health seemed most in danger. This plot point is particularly ironic when considered in reference to his final conversation with his daughter in which he notes that local antiquarians support old bones of d'Urbervilles, and might do so for living descendants from that family. Durbeyfield therefore holds his final hopes on his worth as a d'Urberville. Although he notes the discrepancy between antiquarians supporting artifacts but not living remains, he does not find the irony in this predicament; instead, he holds to the same system of values that prizes the antique and the established over the modern. It is John Durbeyfield's reliance on his history as a d'Urberville that proves his most significant flaw, one with tragic consequences for his family. Alec's attempts to help Tess appear more sinister in this chapter, for Alec uses them more explicitly as a means for domination. Alec approaches his efforts to aid Tess as if his kindness must be inflicted upon her; he essentially states that he will help her whether she likes her or not. This once again reinforces that, even when Alec appears ready to aid Tess, he in fact proves dangerous to her, a fact that Tess rightfully realizes"}


She plunged into the chilly equinoctial darkness as the clock struck
ten, for her fifteen miles' walk under the steely stars.  In lonely
districts night is a protection rather than a danger to a noiseless
pedestrian, and knowing this, Tess pursued the nearest course along
by-lanes that she would almost have feared in the day-time; but
marauders were wanting now, and spectral fears were driven out of
her mind by thoughts of her mother.  Thus she proceeded mile after
mile, ascending and descending till she came to Bulbarrow, and about
midnight looked from that height into the abyss of chaotic shade
which was all that revealed itself of the vale on whose further side
she was born.  Having already traversed about five miles on the
upland, she had now some ten or eleven in the lowland before her
journey would be finished.  The winding road downwards became just
visible to her under the wan starlight as she followed it, and
soon she paced a soil so contrasting with that above it that the
difference was perceptible to the tread and to the smell.  It was the
heavy clay land of Blackmoor Vale, and a part of the Vale to which
turnpike-roads had never penetrated.  Superstitions linger longest on
these heavy soils.  Having once been forest, at this shadowy time it
seemed to assert something of its old character, the far and the near
being blended, and every tree and tall hedge making the most of its
presence.  The harts that had been hunted here, the witches that had
been pricked and ducked, the green-spangled fairies that "whickered"
at you as you passed;--the place teemed with beliefs in them still,
and they formed an impish multitude now.

At Nuttlebury she passed the village inn, whose sign creaked in
response to the greeting of her footsteps, which not a human soul
heard but herself.  Under the thatched roofs her mind's eye beheld
relaxed tendons and flaccid muscles, spread out in the darkness
beneath coverlets made of little purple patchwork squares, and
undergoing a bracing process at the hands of sleep for renewed labour
on the morrow, as soon as a hint of pink nebulosity appeared on
Hambledon Hill.

At three she turned the last corner of the maze of lanes she had
threaded, and entered Marlott, passing the field in which as a
club-girl she had first seen Angel Clare, when he had not danced
with her; the sense of disappointment remained with her yet.  In the
direction of her mother's house she saw a light.  It came from the
bedroom window, and a branch waved in front of it and made it wink at
her.  As soon as she could discern the outline of the house--newly
thatched with her money--it had all its old effect upon Tess's
imagination.  Part of her body and life it ever seemed to be; the
slope of its dormers, the finish of its gables, the broken courses of
brick which topped the chimney, all had something in common with her
personal character.  A stupefaction had come into these features, to
her regard; it meant the illness of her mother.

She opened the door so softly as to disturb nobody; the lower room
was vacant, but the neighbour who was sitting up with her mother came
to the top of the stairs, and whispered that Mrs Durbeyfield was no
better, though she was sleeping just then.  Tess prepared herself a
breakfast, and then took her place as nurse in her mother's chamber.

In the morning, when she contemplated the children, they had all a
curiously elongated look; although she had been away little more than
a year, their growth was astounding; and the necessity of applying
herself heart and soul to their needs took her out of her own cares.

Her father's ill-health was the same indefinite kind, and he sat in
his chair as usual.  But the day after her arrival he was unusually
bright.  He had a rational scheme for living, and Tess asked him what
it was.

"I'm thinking of sending round to all the old antiqueerians in this
part of England," he said, "asking them to subscribe to a fund to
maintain me.  I'm sure they'd see it as a romantical, artistical,
and proper thing to do.  They spend lots o' money in keeping up old
ruins, and finding the bones o' things, and such like; and living
remains must be more interesting to 'em still, if they only knowed
of me.  Would that somebody would go round and tell 'em what there
is living among 'em, and they thinking nothing of him!  If Pa'son
Tringham, who discovered me, had lived, he'd ha' done it, I'm sure."

Tess postponed her arguments on this high project till she had
grappled with pressing matters in hand, which seemed little improved
by her remittances.  When indoor necessities had been eased, she
turned her attention to external things.  It was now the season for
planting and sowing; many gardens and allotments of the villagers
had already received their spring tillage; but the garden and the
allotment of the Durbeyfields were behindhand.  She found, to her
dismay, that this was owing to their having eaten all the seed
potatoes,--that last lapse of the improvident.  At the earliest
moment she obtained what others she could procure, and in a few
days her father was well enough to see to the garden, under Tess's
persuasive efforts: while she herself undertook the allotment-plot
which they rented in a field a couple of hundred yards out of the
village.

She liked doing it after the confinement of the sick chamber, where
she was not now required by reason of her mother's improvement.
Violent motion relieved thought.  The plot of ground was in a high,
dry, open enclosure, where there were forty or fifty such pieces,
and where labour was at its briskest when the hired labour of the
day had ended.  Digging began usually at six o'clock and extended
indefinitely into the dusk or moonlight.  Just now heaps of dead
weeds and refuse were burning on many of the plots, the dry weather
favouring their combustion.

One fine day Tess and 'Liza-Lu worked on here with their neighbours
till the last rays of the sun smote flat upon the white pegs that
divided the plots.  As soon as twilight succeeded to sunset the flare
of the couch-grass and cabbage-stalk fires began to light up the
allotments fitfully, their outlines appearing and disappearing under
the dense smoke as wafted by the wind.  When a fire glowed, banks
of smoke, blown level along the ground, would themselves become
illuminated to an opaque lustre, screening the workpeople from one
another; and the meaning of the "pillar of a cloud", which was a wall
by day and a light by night, could be understood.

As evening thickened, some of the gardening men and women gave over
for the night, but the greater number remained to get their planting
done, Tess being among them, though she sent her sister home.  It was
on one of the couch-burning plots that she laboured with her fork,
its four shining prongs resounding against the stones and dry clods
in little clicks.  Sometimes she was completely involved in the smoke
of her fire; then it would leave her figure free, irradiated by the
brassy glare from the heap.  She was oddly dressed to-night, and
presented a somewhat staring aspect, her attire being a gown bleached
by many washings, with a short black jacket over it, the effect of
the whole being that of a wedding and funeral guest in one.  The
women further back wore white aprons, which, with their pale faces,
were all that could be seen of them in the gloom, except when at
moments they caught a flash from the flames.

Westward, the wiry boughs of the bare thorn hedge which formed the
boundary of the field rose against the pale opalescence of the lower
sky.  Above, Jupiter hung like a full-blown jonquil, so bright
as almost to throw a shade.  A few small nondescript stars were
appearing elsewhere.  In the distance a dog barked, and wheels
occasionally rattled along the dry road.

Still the prongs continued to click assiduously, for it was not late;
and though the air was fresh and keen there was a whisper of spring
in it that cheered the workers on.  Something in the place, the
hours, the crackling fires, the fantastic mysteries of light and
shade, made others as well as Tess enjoy being there. Nightfall,
which in the frost of winter comes as a fiend and in the warmth of
summer as a lover, came as a tranquillizer on this March day.

Nobody looked at his or her companions.  The eyes of all were on the
soil as its turned surface was revealed by the fires.  Hence as Tess
stirred the clods and sang her foolish little songs with scarce
now a hope that Clare would ever hear them, she did not for a long
time notice the person who worked nearest to her--a man in a long
smockfrock who, she found, was forking the same plot as herself, and
whom she supposed her father had sent there to advance the work.
She became more conscious of him when the direction of his digging
brought him closer.  Sometimes the smoke divided them; then it
swerved, and the two were visible to each other but divided from all
the rest.

Tess did not speak to her fellow-worker, nor did he speak to her.
Nor did she think of him further than to recollect that he had not
been there when it was broad daylight, and that she did not know
him as any one of the Marlott labourers, which was no wonder, her
absences having been so long and frequent of late years.  By-and-by
he dug so close to her that the fire-beams were reflected as
distinctly from the steel prongs of his fork as from her own.  On
going up to the fire to throw a pitch of dead weeds upon it, she
found that he did the same on the other side. The fire flared up,
and she beheld the face of d'Urberville.

The unexpectedness of his presence, the grotesqueness of his
appearance in a gathered smockfrock, such as was now worn only by the
most old-fashioned of the labourers, had a ghastly comicality that
chilled her as to its bearing.  D'Urberville emitted a low, long
laugh.

"If I were inclined to joke, I should say, How much this seems like
Paradise!" he remarked whimsically, looking at her with an inclined
head.

"What do you say?" she weakly asked.

"A jester might say this is just like Paradise.  You are Eve, and I
am the old Other One come to tempt you in the disguise of an inferior
animal.  I used to be quite up in that scene of Milton's when I was
theological.  Some of it goes--


   "'Empress, the way is ready, and not long,
   Beyond a row of myrtles...
   ... If thou accept
   My conduct, I can bring thee thither soon.'
   'Lead then,' said Eve.


"And so on.  My dear Tess, I am only putting this to you as a thing
that you might have supposed or said quite untruly, because you think
so badly of me."

"I never said you were Satan, or thought it.  I don't think of you in
that way at all.  My thoughts of you are quite cold, except when you
affront me.  What, did you come digging here entirely because of me?"

"Entirely.  To see you; nothing more.  The smockfrock, which I
saw hanging for sale as I came along, was an afterthought, that I
mightn't be noticed.  I come to protest against your working like
this."

"But I like doing it--it is for my father."

"Your engagement at the other place is ended?"

"Yes."

"Where are you going to next?  To join your dear husband?"

She could not bear the humiliating reminder.

"O--I don't know!" she said bitterly.  "I have no husband!"

"It is quite true--in the sense you mean.  But you have a friend, and
I have determined that you shall be comfortable in spite of yourself.
When you get down to your house you will see what I have sent there
for you."

"O, Alec, I wish you wouldn't give me anything at all!  I cannot take
it from you!  I don't like--it is not right!"

"It IS right!" he cried lightly.  "I am not going to see a woman whom
I feel so tenderly for as I do for you in trouble without trying to
help her."

"But I am very well off!  I am only in trouble about--about--not
about living at all!"

She turned, and desperately resumed her digging, tears dripping upon
the fork-handle and upon the clods.

"About the children--your brothers and sisters," he resumed. "I've
been thinking of them."

Tess's heart quivered--he was touching her in a weak place.  He had
divined her chief anxiety.  Since returning home her soul had gone
out to those children with an affection that was passionate.

"If your mother does not recover, somebody ought to do something for
them; since your father will not be able to do much, I suppose?"

"He can with my assistance.  He must!"

"And with mine."

"No, sir!"

"How damned foolish this is!" burst out d'Urberville.  "Why, he
thinks we are the same family; and will be quite satisfied!"

"He don't.  I've undeceived him."

"The more fool you!"

D'Urberville in anger retreated from her to the hedge, where he
pulled off the long smockfrock which had disguised him; and rolling
it up and pushing it into the couch-fire, went away.

Tess could not get on with her digging after this; she felt restless;
she wondered if he had gone back to her father's house; and taking
the fork in her hand proceeded homewards.

Some twenty yards from the house she was met by one of her sisters.

"O, Tessy--what do you think!  'Liza-Lu is a-crying, and there's a
lot of folk in the house, and mother is a good deal better, but they
think father is dead!"

The child realized the grandeur of the news; but not as yet its
sadness, and stood looking at Tess with round-eyed importance till,
beholding the effect produced upon her, she said--

"What, Tess, shan't we talk to father never no more?"

"But father was only a little bit ill!" exclaimed Tess distractedly.

'Liza-Lu came up.

"He dropped down just now, and the doctor who was there for mother
said there was no chance for him, because his heart was growed in."

Yes; the Durbeyfield couple had changed places; the dying one was
out of danger, and the indisposed one was dead.  The news meant even
more than it sounded.  Her father's life had a value apart from his
personal achievements, or perhaps it would not have had much. It
was the last of the three lives for whose duration the house and
premises were held under a lease; and it had long been coveted by the
tenant-farmer for his regular labourers, who were stinted in cottage
accommodation.  Moreover, "liviers" were disapproved of in villages
almost as much as little freeholders, because of their independence
of manner, and when a lease determined it was never renewed.

Thus the Durbeyfields, once d'Urbervilles, saw descending upon them
the destiny which, no doubt, when they were among the Olympians of
the county, they had caused to descend many a time, and severely
enough, upon the heads of such landless ones as they themselves were
now.  So do flux and reflux--the rhythm of change--alternate and
persist in everything under the sky.



Chapter 50
Tess returns home to find a neighbor who has been caring for Joan Durbeyfield. John tells Tess that he is thinking of asking local antiquarians to subscribe to a fund to maintain him as a part of local history. He says that such societies keep local bones, and living remains should be far more interesting. Alec finds Tess in Marlott. He asks Tess if her engagement at Flintcomb-Ash has ended, and mocks the idea that she might join her husband. Tess replies that she has no husband. Alec tells her that he has sent her something that should have arrived at her house, and insists that he will help her in spite of herself. When Tess returns home, she finds that her father has died.
The death of John Durbeyfield is an ironic reversal of fortune for the Durbeyfield family, for it is Joan, who makes a sudden recovery, whose health seemed most in danger. This plot point is particularly ironic when considered in reference to his final conversation with his daughter in which he notes that local antiquarians support old bones of d'Urbervilles, and might do so for living descendants from that family. Durbeyfield therefore holds his final hopes on his worth as a d'Urberville. Although he notes the discrepancy between antiquarians supporting artifacts but not living remains, he does not find the irony in this predicament; instead, he holds to the same system of values that prizes the antique and the established over the modern. It is John Durbeyfield's reliance on his history as a d'Urberville that proves his most significant flaw, one with tragic consequences for his family. Alec's attempts to help Tess appear more sinister in this chapter, for Alec uses them more explicitly as a means for domination. Alec approaches his efforts to aid Tess as if his kindness must be inflicted upon her; he essentially states that he will help her whether she likes her or not. This once again reinforces that, even when Alec appears ready to aid Tess, he in fact proves dangerous to her, a fact that Tess rightfully realizes