The season developed and matured.  Another year's instalment of
flowers, leaves, nightingales, thrushes, finches, and such ephemeral
creatures, took up their positions where only a year ago others had
stood in their place when these were nothing more than germs and
inorganic particles.  Rays from the sunrise drew forth the buds and
stretched them into long stalks, lifted up sap in noiseless streams,
opened petals, and sucked out scents in invisible jets and
breathings.

Dairyman Crick's household of maids and men lived on comfortably,
placidly, even merrily.  Their position was perhaps the happiest of
all positions in the social scale, being above the line at which
neediness ends, and below the line at which the _convenances_ begin
to cramp natural feelings, and the stress of threadbare modishness
makes too little of enough.

Thus passed the leafy time when arborescence seems to be the one
thing aimed at out of doors.  Tess and Clare unconsciously studied
each other, ever balanced on the edge of a passion, yet apparently
keeping out of it.  All the while they were converging, under an
irresistible law, as surely as two streams in one vale.

Tess had never in her recent life been so happy as she was now,
possibly never would be so happy again.  She was, for one thing,
physically and mentally suited among these new surroundings.  The
sapling which had rooted down to a poisonous stratum on the spot of
its sowing had been transplanted to a deeper soil.  Moreover she, and
Clare also, stood as yet on the debatable land between predilection
and love; where no profundities have been reached; no reflections
have set in, awkwardly inquiring, "Whither does this new current tend
to carry me?  What does it mean to my future?  How does it stand
towards my past?"

Tess was the merest stray phenomenon to Angel Clare as yet--a rosy,
warming apparition which had only just acquired the attribute of
persistence in his consciousness.  So he allowed his mind to be
occupied with her, deeming his preoccupation to be no more than a
philosopher's regard of an exceedingly novel, fresh, and interesting
specimen of womankind.

They met continually; they could not help it.  They met daily in that
strange and solemn interval, the twilight of the morning, in the
violet or pink dawn; for it was necessary to rise early, so very
early, here.  Milking was done betimes; and before the milking came
the skimming, which began at a little past three.  It usually fell
to the lot of some one or other of them to wake the rest, the first
being aroused by an alarm-clock; and, as Tess was the latest arrival,
and they soon discovered that she could be depended upon not to sleep
though the alarm as others did, this task was thrust most frequently
upon her.  No sooner had the hour of three struck and whizzed,
than she left her room and ran to the dairyman's door; then up the
ladder to Angel's, calling him in a loud whisper; then woke her
fellow-milkmaids.  By the time that Tess was dressed Clare was
downstairs and out in the humid air.  The remaining maids and the
dairyman usually gave themselves another turn on the pillow, and did
not appear till a quarter of an hour later.

The gray half-tones of daybreak are not the gray half-tones of the
day's close, though the degree of their shade may be the same.  In
the twilight of the morning, light seems active, darkness passive;
in the twilight of evening it is the darkness which is active and
crescent, and the light which is the drowsy reverse.

Being so often--possibly not always by chance--the first two persons
to get up at the dairy-house, they seemed to themselves the first
persons up of all the world.  In these early days of her residence
here Tess did not skim, but went out of doors at once after rising,
where he was generally awaiting her.  The spectral, half-compounded,
aqueous light which pervaded the open mead impressed them with
a feeling of isolation, as if they were Adam and Eve.  At this
dim inceptive stage of the day Tess seemed to Clare to exhibit a
dignified largeness both of disposition and physique, an almost
regnant power, possibly because he knew that at that preternatural
time hardly any woman so well endowed in person as she was likely to
be walking in the open air within the boundaries of his horizon; very
few in all England.  Fair women are usually asleep at mid-summer
dawns.  She was close at hand, and the rest were nowhere.

The mixed, singular, luminous gloom in which they walked along
together to the spot where the cows lay often made him think of the
Resurrection hour.  He little thought that the Magdalen might be
at his side.  Whilst all the landscape was in neutral shade his
companion's face, which was the focus of his eyes, rising above the
mist stratum, seemed to have a sort of phosphorescence upon it.  She
looked ghostly, as if she were merely a soul at large.  In reality
her face, without appearing to do so, had caught the cold gleam of
day from the north-east; his own face, though he did not think of
it, wore the same aspect to her.

It was then, as has been said, that she impressed him most deeply.
She was no longer the milkmaid, but a visionary essence of woman--a
whole sex condensed into one typical form.  He called her Artemis,
Demeter, and other fanciful names half teasingly, which she did not
like because she did not understand them.

"Call me Tess," she would say askance; and he did.

Then it would grow lighter, and her features would become simply
feminine; they had changed from those of a divinity who could confer
bliss to those of a being who craved it.

At these non-human hours they could get quite close to the waterfowl.
Herons came, with a great bold noise as of opening doors and
shutters, out of the boughs of a plantation which they frequented at
the side of the mead; or, if already on the spot, hardily maintained
their standing in the water as the pair walked by, watching them by
moving their heads round in a slow, horizontal, passionless wheel,
like the turn of puppets by clockwork.

They could then see the faint summer fogs in layers, woolly, level,
and apparently no thicker than counterpanes, spread about the meadows
in detached remnants of small extent.  On the gray moisture of the
grass were marks where the cows had lain through the night--dark-green
islands of dry herbage the size of their carcasses, in the general
sea of dew. From each island proceeded a serpentine trail, by which
the cow had rambled away to feed after getting up, at the end of
which trail they found her; the snoring puff from her nostrils, when
she recognized them, making an intenser little fog of her own amid
the prevailing one.  Then they drove the animals back to the barton,
or sat down to milk them on the spot, as the case might require.

Or perhaps the summer fog was more general, and the meadows lay like
a white sea, out of which the scattered trees rose like dangerous
rocks.  Birds would soar through it into the upper radiance, and
hang on the wing sunning themselves, or alight on the wet rails
subdividing the mead, which now shone like glass rods.  Minute
diamonds of moisture from the mist hung, too, upon Tess's eyelashes,
and drops upon her hair, like seed pearls.  When the day grew quite
strong and commonplace these dried off her; moreover, Tess then
lost her strange and ethereal beauty; her teeth, lips, and eyes
scintillated in the sunbeams and she was again the dazzlingly fair
dairymaid only, who had to hold her own against the other women of
the world.

About this time they would hear Dairyman Crick's voice, lecturing the
non-resident milkers for arriving late, and speaking sharply to old
Deborah Fyander for not washing her hands.

"For Heaven's sake, pop thy hands under the pump, Deb!  Upon my soul,
if the London folk only knowed of thee and thy slovenly ways, they'd
swaller their milk and butter more mincing than they do a'ready; and
that's saying a good deal."

The milking progressed, till towards the end Tess and Clare, in
common with the rest, could hear the heavy breakfast table dragged
out from the wall in the kitchen by Mrs Crick, this being the
invariable preliminary to each meal; the same horrible scrape
accompanying its return journey when the table had been cleared.

Tess is finally happy. She is in love with Angel. They walk together in misty fields. To Clare, Tess is a pagan goddess, indeed the very "essence of woman," but she insists that she is nothing more than an ordinary woman


There was a great stir in the milk-house just after breakfast.  The
churn revolved as usual, but the butter would not come.  Whenever
this happened the dairy was paralyzed.  Squish, squash echoed the
milk in the great cylinder, but never arose the sound they waited
for.

Dairyman Crick and his wife, the milkmaids Tess, Marian, Retty
Priddle, Izz Huett, and the married ones from the cottages; also
Mr Clare, Jonathan Kail, old Deborah, and the rest, stood gazing
hopelessly at the churn; and the boy who kept the horse going outside
put on moon-like eyes to show his sense of the situation.  Even the
melancholy horse himself seemed to look in at the window in inquiring
despair at each walk round.

"'Tis years since I went to Conjuror Trendle's son in Egdon--years!"
said the dairyman bitterly.  "And he was nothing to what his father
had been.  I have said fifty times, if I have said once, that I DON'T
believe in en; though 'a do cast folks' waters very true.  But I
shall have to go to 'n if he's alive.  O yes, I shall have to go to
'n, if this sort of thing continnys!"

Even Mr Clare began to feel tragical at the dairyman's desperation.

"Conjuror Fall, t'other side of Casterbridge, that they used to call
'Wide-O', was a very good man when I was a boy," said Jonathan Kail.
"But he's rotten as touchwood by now."

"My grandfather used to go to Conjuror Mynterne, out at Owlscombe,
and a clever man a' were, so I've heard grandf'er say," continued Mr
Crick.  "But there's no such genuine folk about nowadays!"

Mrs Crick's mind kept nearer to the matter in hand.

"Perhaps somebody in the house is in love," she said tentatively.
"I've heard tell in my younger days that that will cause it.  Why,
Crick--that maid we had years ago, do ye mind, and how the butter
didn't come then--"

"Ah yes, yes!--but that isn't the rights o't.  It had nothing to do
with the love-making.  I can mind all about it--'twas the damage to
the churn."

He turned to Clare.

"Jack Dollop, a 'hore's-bird of a fellow we had here as milker at one
time, sir, courted a young woman over at Mellstock, and deceived her
as he had deceived many afore.  But he had another sort o' woman to
reckon wi' this time, and it was not the girl herself.  One Holy
Thursday of all days in the almanack, we was here as we mid be now,
only there was no churning in hand, when we zid the girl's mother
coming up to the door, wi' a great brass-mounted umbrella in her
hand that would ha' felled an ox, and saying 'Do Jack Dollop work
here?--because I want him!  I have a big bone to pick with he, I
can assure 'n!'  And some way behind her mother walked Jack's young
woman, crying bitterly into her handkercher.  'O Lard, here's a
time!' said Jack, looking out o' winder at 'em.  'She'll murder me!
Where shall I get--where shall I--?  Don't tell her where I be!'
And with that he scrambled into the churn through the trap-door, and
shut himself inside, just as the young woman's mother busted into
the milk-house.  'The villain--where is he?' says she.  'I'll claw
his face for'n, let me only catch him!'  Well, she hunted about
everywhere, ballyragging Jack by side and by seam, Jack lying
a'most stifled inside the churn, and the poor maid--or young woman
rather--standing at the door crying her eyes out.  I shall never
forget it, never! 'Twould have melted a marble stone!  But she
couldn't find him nowhere at all."

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

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

"Well, how the old woman should have had the wit to guess it I could
never tell, but she found out that he was inside that there churn.
Without saying a word she took hold of the winch (it was turned by
handpower then), and round she swung him, and Jack began to flop
about inside.  'O Lard! stop the churn! let me out!' says he, popping
out his head.  'I shall be churned into a pummy!'  (He was a cowardly
chap in his heart, as such men mostly be).  'Not till ye make amends
for ravaging her virgin innocence!' says the old woman.  'Stop the
churn you old witch!' screams he.  'You call me old witch, do ye, you
deceiver!' says she, 'when ye ought to ha' been calling me mother-law
these last five months!'  And on went the churn, and Jack's bones
rattled round again.  Well, none of us ventured to interfere; and at
last 'a promised to make it right wi' her.  'Yes--I'll be as good as
my word!' he said.  And so it ended that day."

While the listeners were smiling their comments there was a
quick movement behind their backs, and they looked round.  Tess,
pale-faced, had gone to the door.

"How warm 'tis to-day!" she said, almost inaudibly.

It was warm, and none of them connected her withdrawal with the
reminiscences of the dairyman.  He went forward and opened the door
for her, saying with tender raillery--

"Why, maidy" (he frequently, with unconscious irony, gave her this
pet name), "the prettiest milker I've got in my dairy; you mustn't
get so fagged as this at the first breath of summer weather, or we
shall be finely put to for want of 'ee by dog-days, shan't we, Mr
Clare?"

"I was faint--and--I think I am better out o' doors," she said
mechanically; and disappeared outside.

Fortunately for her the milk in the revolving churn at that moment
changed its squashing for a decided flick-flack.

"'Tis coming!" cried Mrs Crick, and the attention of all was called
off from Tess.

That fair sufferer soon recovered herself externally; but she
remained much depressed all the afternoon. When the evening milking
was done she did not care to be with the rest of them, and went out
of doors, wandering along she knew not whither.  She was wretched--O
so wretched--at the perception that to her companions the dairyman's
story had been rather a humorous narration than otherwise; none of
them but herself seemed to see the sorrow of it; to a certainty, not
one knew how cruelly it touched the tender place in her experience.
The evening sun was now ugly to her, like a great inflamed wound in
the sky.  Only a solitary cracked-voice reed-sparrow greeted her from
the bushes by the river, in a sad, machine-made tone, resembling that
of a past friend whose friendship she had outworn.

In these long June days the milkmaids, and, indeed, most of the
household, went to bed at sunset or sooner, the morning work before
milking being so early and heavy at a time of full pails.  Tess
usually accompanied her fellows upstairs.  To-night, however, she was
the first to go to their common chamber; and she had dozed when the
other girls came in.  She saw them undressing in the orange light
of the vanished sun, which flushed their forms with its colour; she
dozed again, but she was reawakened by their voices, and quietly
turned her eyes towards them.

Neither of her three chamber-companions had got into bed.  They were
standing in a group, in their nightgowns, barefooted, at the window,
the last red rays of the west still warming their faces and necks and
the walls around them.  All were watching somebody in the garden with
deep interest, their three faces close together: a jovial and round
one, a pale one with dark hair, and a fair one whose tresses were
auburn.

"Don't push!  You can see as well as I," said Retty, the
auburn-haired and youngest girl, without removing her eyes from the
window.

"'Tis no use for you to be in love with him any more than me, Retty
Priddle," said jolly-faced Marian, the eldest, slily.  "His thoughts
be of other cheeks than thine!"

Retty Priddle still looked, and the others looked again.

"There he is again!" cried Izz Huett, the pale girl with dark damp
hair and keenly cut lips.

"You needn't say anything, Izz," answered Retty.  "For I zid you
kissing his shade."

"WHAT did you see her doing?" asked Marian.

"Why--he was standing over the whey-tub to let off the whey, and the
shade of his face came upon the wall behind, close to Izz, who was
standing there filling a vat.  She put her mouth against the wall and
kissed the shade of his mouth; I zid her, though he didn't."

"O Izz Huett!" said Marian.

A rosy spot came into the middle of Izz Huett's cheek.

"Well, there was no harm in it," she declared, with attempted
coolness.  "And if I be in love wi'en, so is Retty, too; and so be
you, Marian, come to that."

Marian's full face could not blush past its chronic pinkness.

"I!" she said.  "What a tale!  Ah, there he is again!  Dear
eyes--dear face--dear Mr Clare!"

"There--you've owned it!"

"So have you--so have we all," said Marian, with the dry frankness of
complete indifference to opinion.  "It is silly to pretend otherwise
amongst ourselves, though we need not own it to other folks.  I would
just marry 'n to-morrow!"

"So would I--and more," murmured Izz Huett.

"And I too," whispered the more timid Retty.

The listener grew warm.

"We can't all marry him," said Izz.

"We shan't, either of us; which is worse still," said the eldest.
"There he is again!"

They all three blew him a silent kiss.

"Why?" asked Retty quickly.

"Because he likes Tess Durbeyfield best," said Marian, lowering her
voice.  "I have watched him every day, and have found it out."

There was a reflective silence.

"But she don't care anything for 'n?" at length breathed Retty.

"Well--I sometimes think that too."

"But how silly all this is!" said Izz Huett impatiently.  "Of course
he won't marry any one of us, or Tess either--a gentleman's son,
who's going to be a great landowner and farmer abroad!  More likely
to ask us to come wi'en as farm-hands at so much a year!"

One sighed, and another sighed, and Marian's plump figure sighed
biggest of all.  Somebody in bed hard by sighed too.  Tears came into
the eyes of Retty Priddle, the pretty red-haired youngest--the last
bud of the Paridelles, so important in the county annals.  They
watched silently a little longer, their three faces still close
together as before, and the triple hues of their hair mingling.  But
the unconscious Mr Clare had gone indoors, and they saw him no more;
and, the shades beginning to deepen, they crept into their beds.
In a few minutes they heard him ascend the ladder to his own room.
Marian was soon snoring, but Izz did not drop into forgetfulness for
a long time.  Retty Priddle cried herself to sleep.

The deeper-passioned Tess was very far from sleeping even then.  This
conversation was another of the bitter pills she had been obliged to
swallow that day.  Scarce the least feeling of jealousy arose in her
breast.  For that matter she knew herself to have the preference.
Being more finely formed, better educated, and, though the youngest
except Retty, more woman than either, she perceived that only the
slightest ordinary care was necessary for holding her own in Angel
Clare's heart against these her candid friends.  But the grave
question was, ought she to do this?  There was, to be sure, hardly a
ghost of a chance for either of them, in a serious sense; but there
was, or had been, a chance of one or the other inspiring him with a
passing fancy for her, and enjoying the pleasure of his attentions
while he stayed here.  Such unequal attachments had led to marriage;
and she had heard from Mrs Crick that Mr Clare had one day asked, in
a laughing way, what would be the use of his marrying a fine lady,
and all the while ten thousand acres of Colonial pasture to feed,
and cattle to rear, and corn to reap.  A farm-woman would be the
only sensible kind of wife for him.  But whether Mr Clare had spoken
seriously or not, why should she, who could never conscientiously
allow any man to marry her now, and who had religiously determined
that she never would be tempted to do so, draw off Mr Clare's
attention from other women, for the brief happiness of sunning
herself in his eyes while he remained at Talbothays?

One day the butter fails to solidify and the superstitious Mrs. Crick declares that someone must be in love. Mr. Crick insists that the churn was damaged after a former worker, who "deceived" a local girl and got her pregnant, hid in the churn from the girl's angry mother. The others laugh but Tess is horrified and doesn't understand how the others fail to see the sadness in the situation. She leaves the barn and the butter begins to solidify, to everyone's relief


They came downstairs yawning next morning; but skimming and milking
were proceeded with as usual, and they went indoors to breakfast.
Dairyman Crick was discovered stamping about the house.  He had
received a letter, in which a customer had complained that the butter
had a twang.

"And begad, so 't have!" said the dairyman, who held in his left hand
a wooden slice on which a lump of butter was stuck. "Yes--taste for
yourself!"

Several of them gathered round him; and Mr Clare tasted, Tess tasted,
also the other indoor milkmaids, one or two of the milking-men, and
last of all Mrs Crick, who came out from the waiting breakfast-table.
There certainly was a twang.

The dairyman, who had thrown himself into abstraction to better
realize the taste, and so divine the particular species of noxious
weed to which it appertained, suddenly exclaimed--

"'Tis garlic! and I thought there wasn't a blade left in that mead!"

Then all the old hands remembered that a certain dry mead, into which
a few of the cows had been admitted of late, had, in years gone by,
spoilt the butter in the same way.  The dairyman had not recognized
the taste at that time, and thought the butter bewitched.

"We must overhaul that mead," he resumed; "this mustn't continny!"

All having armed themselves with old pointed knives, they went out
together.  As the inimical plant could only be present in very
microscopic dimensions to have escaped ordinary observation, to
find it seemed rather a hopeless attempt in the stretch of rich
grass before them.  However, they formed themselves into line, all
assisting, owing to the importance of the search; the dairyman at
the upper end with Mr Clare, who had volunteered to help; then
Tess, Marian, Izz Huett, and Retty; then Bill Lewell, Jonathan, and
the married dairywomen--Beck Knibbs, with her wooly black hair and
rolling eyes; and flaxen Frances, consumptive from the winter damps
of the water-meads--who lived in their respective cottages.

With eyes fixed upon the ground they crept slowly across a strip of
the field, returning a little further down in such a manner that,
when they should have finished, not a single inch of the pasture but
would have fallen under the eye of some one of them.  It was a most
tedious business, not more than half a dozen shoots of garlic being
discoverable in the whole field; yet such was the herb's pungency
that probably one bite of it by one cow had been sufficient to season
the whole dairy's produce for the day.

Differing one from another in natures and moods so greatly as they
did, they yet formed, bending, a curiously uniform row--automatic,
noiseless; and an alien observer passing down the neighbouring lane
might well have been excused for massing them as "Hodge".  As they
crept along, stooping low to discern the plant, a soft yellow gleam
was reflected from the buttercups into their shaded faces, giving
them an elfish, moonlit aspect, though the sun was pouring upon their
backs in all the strength of noon.

Angel Clare, who communistically stuck to his rule of taking part
with the rest in everything, glanced up now and then.  It was not,
of course, by accident that he walked next to Tess.

"Well, how are you?" he murmured.

"Very well, thank you, sir," she replied demurely.

As they had been discussing a score of personal matters only
half-an-hour before, the introductory style seemed a little
superfluous.  But they got no further in speech just then.  They
crept and crept, the hem of her petticoat just touching his gaiter,
and his elbow sometimes brushing hers.  At last the dairyman, who
came next, could stand it no longer.

"Upon my soul and body, this here stooping do fairly make my back
open and shut!" he exclaimed, straightening himself slowly with an
excruciated look till quite upright.  "And you, maidy Tess, you
wasn't well a day or two ago--this will make your head ache finely!
Don't do any more, if you feel fainty; leave the rest to finish it."

Dairyman Crick withdrew, and Tess dropped behind.  Mr Clare also
stepped out of line, and began privateering about for the weed.  When
she found him near her, her very tension at what she had heard the
night before made her the first to speak.

"Don't they look pretty?" she said.

"Who?"

"Izzy Huett and Retty."

Tess had moodily decided that either of these maidens would make a
good farmer's wife, and that she ought to recommend them, and obscure
her own wretched charms.

"Pretty?  Well, yes--they are pretty girls--fresh looking.  I have
often thought so."

"Though, poor dears, prettiness won't last long!"

"O no, unfortunately."

"They are excellent dairywomen."

"Yes: though not better than you."

"They skim better than I."

"Do they?"

Clare remained observing them--not without their observing him.

"She is colouring up," continued Tess heroically.

"Who?"

"Retty Priddle."

"Oh!  Why it that?"

"Because you are looking at her."

Self-sacrificing as her mood might be, Tess could not well go further
and cry, "Marry one of them, if you really do want a dairywoman and
not a lady; and don't think of marrying me!"  She followed Dairyman
Crick, and had the mournful satisfaction of seeing that Clare
remained behind.

From this day she forced herself to take pains to avoid him--never
allowing herself, as formerly, to remain long in his company, even if
their juxtaposition were purely accidental.  She gave the other three
every chance.

Tess was woman enough to realize from their avowals to herself that
Angel Clare had the honour of all the dairymaids in his keeping, and
her perception of his care to avoid compromising the happiness of
either in the least degree bred a tender respect in Tess for what she
deemed, rightly or wrongly, the self-controlling sense of duty shown
by him, a quality which she had never expected to find in one of the
opposite sex, and in the absence of which more than one of the simple
hearts who were his house-mates might have gone weeping on her
pilgrimage.

The Cricks receive a letter from a customer complaining about a foul taste in the butter, a "twang," as he calls it. Mr. Crick determines that some of the cows wandered outside the fence and ate wild garlic. The workers attempt to find the culprit weed. Tess praises the other milkmaids to Angel, particularly Izz and Retty, but Angel loves Tess. All the milkmaids toss and turn in romantic dreams of Angel Clare


The hot weather of July had crept upon them unawares, and the
atmosphere of the flat vale hung heavy as an opiate over the
dairy-folk, the cows, and the trees.  Hot steaming rains fell
frequently, making the grass where the cows fed yet more rank, and
hindering the late hay-making in the other meads.

It was Sunday morning; the milking was done; the outdoor milkers
had gone home.  Tess and the other three were dressing themselves
rapidly, the whole bevy having agreed to go together to Mellstock
Church, which lay some three or four miles distant from the
dairy-house.  She had now been two months at Talbothays, and this
was her first excursion.

All the preceding afternoon and night heavy thunderstorms had hissed
down upon the meads, and washed some of the hay into the river; but
this morning the sun shone out all the more brilliantly for the
deluge, and the air was balmy and clear.

The crooked lane leading from their own parish to Mellstock ran along
the lowest levels in a portion of its length, and when the girls
reached the most depressed spot they found that the result of the
rain had been to flood the lane over-shoe to a distance of some fifty
yards.  This would have been no serious hindrance on a week-day; they
would have clicked through it in their high pattens and boots quite
unconcerned; but on this day of vanity, this Sun's-day, when flesh
went forth to coquet with flesh while hypocritically affecting
business with spiritual things; on this occasion for wearing their
white stockings and thin shoes, and their pink, white, and lilac
gowns, on which every mud spot would be visible, the pool was an
awkward impediment.  They could hear the church-bell calling--as yet
nearly a mile off.

"Who would have expected such a rise in the river in summer-time!"
said Marian, from the top of the roadside bank on which they had
climbed, and were maintaining a precarious footing in the hope of
creeping along its slope till they were past the pool.

"We can't get there anyhow, without walking right through it, or else
going round the Turnpike way; and that would make us so very late!"
said Retty, pausing hopelessly.

"And I do colour up so hot, walking into church late, and all the
people staring round," said Marian, "that I hardly cool down again
till we get into the That-it-may-please-Thees."

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

Four hearts gave a big throb simultaneously.

His aspect was probably as un-Sabbatarian a one as a dogmatic
parson's son often presented; his attire being his dairy clothes,
long wading boots, a cabbage-leaf inside his hat to keep his head
cool, with a thistle-spud to finish him off.  "He's not going to
church," said Marian.

"No--I wish he was!" murmured Tess.

Angel, in fact, rightly or wrongly (to adopt the safe phrase of
evasive controversialists), preferred sermons in stones to sermons in
churches and chapels on fine summer days.  This morning, moreover,
he had gone out to see if the damage to the hay by the flood was
considerable or not.  On his walk he observed the girls from a long
distance, though they had been so occupied with their difficulties of
passage as not to notice him.  He knew that the water had risen at
that spot, and that it would quite check their progress.  So he had
hastened on, with a dim idea of how he could help them--one of them
in particular.

The rosy-cheeked, bright-eyed quartet looked so charming in their
light summer attire, clinging to the roadside bank like pigeons on a
roof-slope, that he stopped a moment to regard them before coming
close.  Their gauzy skirts had brushed up from the grass innumerable
flies and butterflies which, unable to escape, remained caged in
the transparent tissue as in an aviary.  Angel's eye at last fell
upon Tess, the hindmost of the four; she, being full of suppressed
laughter at their dilemma, could not help meeting his glance
radiantly.

He came beneath them in the water, which did not rise over his long
boots; and stood looking at the entrapped flies and butterflies.

"Are you trying to get to church?" he said to Marian, who was in
front, including the next two in his remark, but avoiding Tess.

"Yes, sir; and 'tis getting late; and my colour do come up so--"

"I'll carry you through the pool--every Jill of you."

The whole four flushed as if one heart beat through them.

"I think you can't, sir," said Marian.

"It is the only way for you to get past.  Stand still.  Nonsense--you
are not too heavy!  I'd carry you all four together.  Now, Marian,
attend," he continued, "and put your arms round my shoulders, so.
Now!  Hold on. That's well done."

Marian had lowered herself upon his arm and shoulder as directed, and
Angel strode off with her, his slim figure, as viewed from behind,
looking like the mere stem to the great nosegay suggested by hers.
They disappeared round the curve of the road, and only his sousing
footsteps and the top ribbon of Marian's bonnet told where they were.
In a few minutes he reappeared.  Izz Huett was the next in order upon
the bank.

"Here he comes," she murmured, and they could hear that her lips were
dry with emotion.  "And I have to put my arms round his neck and look
into his face as Marian did."

"There's nothing in that," said Tess quickly.

"There's a time for everything," continued Izz, unheeding.  "A time
to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; the first is now
going to be mine."

"Fie--it is Scripture, Izz!"

"Yes," said Izz, "I've always a' ear at church for pretty verses."

Angel Clare, to whom three-quarters of this performance was a
commonplace act of kindness, now approached Izz.  She quietly and
dreamily lowered herself into his arms, and Angel methodically
marched off with her.  When he was heard returning for the third time
Retty's throbbing heart could be almost seen to shake her.  He went
up to the red-haired girl, and while he was seizing her he glanced at
Tess.  His lips could not have pronounced more plainly, "It will soon
be you and I."  Her comprehension appeared in her face; she could not
help it.  There was an understanding between them.

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

However, he got through with the disquieted creature, deposited her,
and returned.  Tess could see over the hedge the distant three in a
group, standing as he had placed them on the next rising ground.  It
was now her turn.  She was embarrassed to discover that excitement at
the proximity of Mr Clare's breath and eyes, which she had contemned
in her companions, was intensified in herself; and as if fearful of
betraying her secret, she paltered with him at the last moment.

"I may be able to clim' along the bank perhaps--I can clim' better
than they.  You must be so tired, Mr Clare!"

"No, no, Tess," said he quickly.  And almost before she was aware,
she was seated in his arms and resting against his shoulder.

"Three Leahs to get one Rachel," he whispered.

"They are better women than I," she replied, magnanimously sticking
to her resolve.

"Not to me," said Angel.

He saw her grow warm at this; and they went some steps in silence.

"I hope I am not too heavy?" she said timidly.

"O no.  You should lift Marian!  Such a lump.  You are like an
undulating billow warmed by the sun.  And all this fluff of muslin
about you is the froth."

"It is very pretty--if I seem like that to you."

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

"No."

"I did not expect such an event to-day."

"Nor I...  The water came up so sudden."

That the rise in the water was what she understood him to refer to,
the state of breathing belied.  Clare stood still and inclinced his
face towards hers.

"O Tessy!" he exclaimed.

The girl's cheeks burned to the breeze, and she could not look into
his eyes for her emotion.  It reminded Angel that he was somewhat
unfairly taking advantage of an accidental position; and he went no
further with it.  No definite words of love had crossed their lips
as yet, and suspension at this point was desirable now. However,
he walked slowly, to make the remainder of the distance as long as
possible; but at last they came to the bend, and the rest of their
progress was in full view of the other three.  The dry land was
reached, and he set her down.

Her friends were looking with round thoughtful eyes at her and him,
and she could see that they had been talking of her.  He hastily bade
them farewell, and splashed back along the stretch of submerged road.

The four moved on together as before, till Marian broke the silence
by saying--

"No--in all truth; we have no chance against her!"  She looked
joylessly at Tess.

"What do you mean?" asked the latter.

"He likes 'ee best--the very best!  We could see it as he brought
'ee.  He would have kissed 'ee, if you had encouraged him to do it,
ever so little."

"No, no," said she.

The gaiety with which they had set out had somehow vanished; and
yet there was no enmity or malice between them.  They were generous
young souls; they had been reared in the lonely country nooks where
fatalism is a strong sentiment, and they did not blame her.  Such
supplanting was to be.

Tess's heart ached.  There was no concealing from herself the fact
that she loved Angel Clare, perhaps all the more passionately from
knowing that the others had also lost their hearts to him.  There is
contagion in this sentiment, especially among women.  And yet that
same hungry nature had fought against this, but too feebly, and the
natural result had followed.

"I will never stand in your way, nor in the way of either of you!"
she declared to Retty that night in the bedroom (her tears running
down).  "I can't help this, my dear!  I don't think marrying is in
his mind at all; but if he were ever to ask me I should refuse him,
as I should refuse any man."

"Oh! would you?  Why?" said wondering Retty.

"It cannot be!  But I will be plain.  Putting myself quite on one
side, I don't think he will choose either of you."

"I have never expected it--thought of it!" moaned Retty.  "But O! I
wish I was dead!"

The poor child, torn by a feeling which she hardly understood, turned
to the other two girls who came upstairs just then.

"We be friends with her again," she said to them.  "She thinks no
more of his choosing her than we do."

So the reserve went off, and they were confiding and warm.

"I don't seem to care what I do now," said Marian, whose mood was
turned to its lowest bass.  "I was going to marry a dairyman at
Stickleford, who's asked me twice; but--my soul--I would put an end
to myself rather'n be his wife now!  Why don't ye speak, Izz?"

"To confess, then," murmured Izz, "I made sure to-day that he was
going to kiss me as he held me; and I lay still against his breast,
hoping and hoping, and never moved at all.  But he did not.  I don't
like biding here at Talbothays any longer!  I shall go hwome."

The air of the sleeping-chamber seemed to palpitate with the
hopeless passion of the girls.  They writhed feverishly under the
oppressiveness of an emotion thrust on them by cruel Nature's law--an
emotion which they had neither expected nor desired.  The incident
of the day had fanned the flame that was burning the inside of their
hearts out, and the torture was almost more than they could endure.
The differences which distinguished them as individuals were
abstracted by this passion, and each was but portion of one organism
called sex.  There was so much frankness and so little jealousy
because there was no hope.  Each one was a girl of fair common sense,
and she did not delude herself with any vain conceits, or deny her
love, or give herself airs, in the idea of outshining the others.
The full recognition of the futility of their infatuation, from a
social point of view; its purposeless beginning; its self-bounded
outlook; its lack of everything to justify its existence in the eye
of civilization (while lacking nothing in the eye of Nature); the one
fact that it did exist, ecstasizing them to a killing joy--all this
imparted to them a resignation, a dignity, which a practical and
sordid expectation of winning him as a husband would have destroyed.

They tossed and turned on their little beds, and the cheese-wring
dripped monotonously downstairs.

"B' you awake, Tess?" whispered one, half-an-hour later.

It was Izz Huett's voice.

Tess replied in the affirmative, whereupon also Retty and Marian
suddenly flung the bedclothes off them, and sighed--

"So be we!"

"I wonder what she is like--the lady they say his family have looked
out for him!"

"I wonder," said Izz.

"Some lady looked out for him?" gasped Tess, starting.  "I have never
heard o' that!"

"O yes--'tis whispered; a young lady of his own rank, chosen by his
family; a Doctor of Divinity's daughter near his father's parish of
Emminster; he don't much care for her, they say.  But he is sure to
marry her."

They had heard so very little of this; yet it was enough to build up
wretched dolorous dreams upon, there in the shade of the night.  They
pictured all the details of his being won round to consent, of the
wedding preparations, of the bride's happiness, of her dress and
veil, of her blissful home with him, when oblivion would have fallen
upon themselves as far as he and their love were concerned.  Thus
they talked, and ached, and wept till sleep charmed their sorrow
away.

After this disclosure Tess nourished no further foolish thought that
there lurked any grave and deliberate import in Clare's attentions
to her.  It was a passing summer love of her face, for love's own
temporary sake--nothing more. And the thorny crown of this sad
conception was that she whom he really did prefer in a cursory way
to the rest, she who knew herself to be more impassioned in nature,
cleverer, more beautiful than they, was in the eyes of propriety far
less worthy of him than the homelier ones whom he ignored.

One Sunday morning, all the milkmaids set out for the Mellstock Church but are stopped by flooding waters. Clare comes to their rescue by offering to carry each across the flooded road. Each girl is ecstatic and hopes he will steal a kiss, but Clare leaves Tess for last and walks slowly, holding her tenderly. The good-spirited girls realize he loves Tess and there is nothing they can do to attract him. She decides to see less of him but can't help watching from afar. One night in their dormitory bedroom they all, except for Tess, confess their love for Angel and sadly insist that he loves only Tess. She tells them that she has decided never to marry


Amid the oozing fatness and warm ferments of the Froom Vale, at a
season when the rush of juices could almost be heard below the hiss
of fertilization, it was impossible that the most fanciful love
should not grow passionate.  The ready bosoms existing there were
impregnated by their surroundings.

July passed over their heads, and the Thermidorean weather which came
in its wake seemed an effort on the part of Nature to match the state
of hearts at Talbothays Dairy.  The air of the place, so fresh in the
spring and early summer, was stagnant and enervating now.  Its heavy
scents weighed upon them, and at mid-day the landscape seemed lying
in a swoon. Ethiopic scorchings browned the upper slopes of the
pastures, but there was still bright green herbage here where the
watercourses purled.  And as Clare was oppressed by the outward
heats, so was he burdened inwardly by waxing fervour of passion for
the soft and silent Tess.

The rains having passed, the uplands were dry.  The wheels of the
dairyman's spring-cart, as he sped home from market, licked up the
pulverized surface of the highway, and were followed by white ribands
of dust, as if they had set a thin powder-train on fire.  The cows
jumped wildly over the five-barred barton-gate, maddened by the
gad-fly; Dairyman Crick kept his shirt-sleeves permanently rolled up
from Monday to Saturday; open windows had no effect in ventilation
without open doors, and in the dairy-garden the blackbirds and
thrushes crept about under the currant-bushes, rather in the manner
of quadrupeds than of winged creatures.  The flies in the kitchen
were lazy, teasing, and familiar, crawling about in the unwonted
places, on the floors, into drawers, and over the backs of the
milkmaids' hands. Conversations were concerning sunstroke; while
butter-making, and still more butter-keeping, was a despair.

They milked entirely in the meads for coolness and convenience,
without driving in the cows.  During the day the animals obsequiously
followed the shadow of the smallest tree as it moved round the stem
with the diurnal roll; and when the milkers came they could hardly
stand still for the flies.

On one of these afternoons four or five unmilked cows chanced to
stand apart from the general herd, behind the corner of a hedge,
among them being Dumpling and Old Pretty, who loved Tess's hands
above those of any other maid.  When she rose from her stool under a
finished cow, Angel Clare, who had been observing her for some time,
asked her if she would take the aforesaid creatures next.  She
silently assented, and with her stool at arm's length, and the pail
against her knee, went round to where they stood.  Soon the sound of
Old Pretty's milk fizzing into the pail came through the hedge, and
then Angel felt inclined to go round the corner also, to finish off a
hard-yielding milcher who had strayed there, he being now as capable
of this as the dairyman himself.

All the men, and some of the women, when milking, dug their foreheads
into the cows and gazed into the pail.  But a few--mainly the younger
ones--rested their heads sideways.  This was Tess Durbeyfield's
habit, her temple pressing the milcher's flank, her eyes fixed on
the far end of the meadow with the quiet of one lost in meditation.
She was milking Old Pretty thus, and the sun chancing to be on the
milking-side, it shone flat upon her pink-gowned form and her white
curtain-bonnet, and upon her profile, rendering it keen as a cameo
cut from the dun background of the cow.

She did not know that Clare had followed her round, and that he sat
under his cow watching her.  The stillness of her head and features
was remarkable: she might have been in a trance, her eyes open, yet
unseeing.  Nothing in the picture moved but Old Pretty's tail and
Tess's pink hands, the latter so gently as to be a rhythmic pulsation
only, as if they were obeying a reflex stimulus, like a beating
heart.

How very lovable her face was to him.  Yet there was nothing ethereal
about it; all was real vitality, real warmth, real incarnation.  And
it was in her mouth that this culminated.  Eyes almost as deep and
speaking he had seen before, and cheeks perhaps as fair; brows as
arched, a chin and throat almost as shapely; her mouth he had seen
nothing to equal on the face of the earth.  To a young man with the
least fire in him that little upward lift in the middle of her red
top lip was distracting, infatuating, maddening.  He had never before
seen a woman's lips and teeth which forced upon his mind with such
persistent iteration the old Elizabethan simile of roses filled with
snow.  Perfect, he, as a lover, might have called them off-hand.  But
no--they were not perfect.  And it was the touch of the imperfect
upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was
that which gave the humanity.

Clare had studied the curves of those lips so many times that he
could reproduce them mentally with ease: and now, as they again
confronted him, clothed with colour and life, they sent an _aura_
over his flesh, a breeze through his nerves, which well nigh produced
a qualm; and actually produced, by some mysterious physiological
process, a prosaic sneeze.

She then became conscious that he was observing her; but she would
not show it by any change of position, though the curious dream-like
fixity disappeared, and a close eye might easily have discerned that
the rosiness of her face deepened, and then faded till only a tinge
of it was left.

The influence that had passed into Clare like an excitation from the
sky did not die down.  Resolutions, reticences, prudences, fears,
fell back like a defeated battalion.  He jumped up from his seat,
and, leaving his pail to be kicked over if the milcher had such a
mind, went quickly towards the desire of his eyes, and, kneeling down
beside her, clasped her in his arms.

Tess was taken completely by surprise, and she yielded to his embrace
with unreflecting inevitableness.  Having seen that it was really her
lover who had advanced, and no one else, her lips parted, and she
sank upon him in her momentary joy, with something very like an
ecstatic cry.

He had been on the point of kissing that too tempting mouth, but he
checked himself, for tender conscience' sake.

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

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

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

She slipped up from her seat, and they stood together, his arm still
encircling her.  Tess's eyes, fixed on distance, began to fill.

"Why do you cry, my darling?" he said.

"O--I don't know!" she murmured.

As she saw and felt more clearly the position she was in she became
agitated and tried to withdraw.

"Well, I have betrayed my feeling, Tess, at last," said he, with a
curious sigh of desperation, signifying unconsciously that his heart
had outrun his judgement.  "That I--love you dearly and truly I need
not say.  But I--it shall go no further now--it distresses you--I am
as surprised as you are.  You will not think I have presumed upon
your defencelessness--been too quick and unreflecting, will you?"

"N'--I can't tell."

He had allowed her to free herself; and in a minute or two the
milking of each was resumed.  Nobody had beheld the gravitation of
the two into one; and when the dairyman came round by that screened
nook a few minutes later, there was not a sign to reveal that
the markedly sundered pair were more to each other than mere
acquaintance.  Yet in the interval since Crick's last view of them
something had occurred which changed the pivot of the universe for
their two natures; something which, had he known its quality, the
dairyman would have despised, as a practical man; yet which was based
upon a more stubborn and resistless tendency than a whole heap of
so-called practicalities.  A veil had been whisked aside; the tract
of each one's outlook was to have a new horizon thenceforward--for a
short time or for a long.

END OF PHASE THE THIRD

Phase the Fourth: The Consequence

One late summer afternoon, while they milk the cows in the field, Angel can stand his anxiety surrounding Tess no more and jumps up and takes her in his arms. For a moment, she accepts his embrace with delight but then pulls away. To her amazement, he confesses his love for her. They return to work as if nothing happened.

. As the title of the section, "Phase the Third: The Rally," implies, Tess indeed rallies and leaves depression behind, for a while at least. However, she resists happiness as if she feels she doesn't deserve it. At Talbothays Dairy, surrounded by cows and milk, and singing dairymen, the life force is strong and "the invincible instinct toward self-delight" invades her being. She is intoxicated by the lush fertile landscape which Hardy goes to great lengths to describe. Indeed, the pastoral setting metaphorically represents Eden, containing Eve in the form of Tess and Angel as Adam. Although she never expected it, she finds happiness and falls in love with Angel Clare although, in her self-deprecating manner, she thinks the other young women are more deserving. Despite her attempt "to live a repressed life. she little divined the strength of her own vitality". The young woman fits perfectly into the Dairy. It's as if she belongs there and in a sense she does, since her noble family has roots in this soil. The green fertile landscape has a calming effect on her troubled soul and belies the sadness she finds within. The summer weather mimics the burgeoning relationship between Tess and Clare. Clare has mentioned that a country girl, instead of a lady, would suit him much better for a wife because he plans on immigrating and starting a farm. As the days grow hotter so too does their passion, until one particularly hot August afternoon, Clare loses control, embraces Tess and tells her he loves her. But, although she shares his feelings, she has learned from the past and puts the brakes on, so to speak. On the surface, Tess and Clare seems well suited to each other. He has gone against his father's wishes by choosing his own career as a gentleman farmer. Similarly, Tess has left her parents, whose advice she doesn't respect, and set out on her own, something extremely rare for women during this era. But as the novel progresses, Clare will change; he is not what he appears. In addition, like the garlic-tinged butter, their relationship is tainted because Clare doesn't know the truth about Tess. From the beginning, he thinks of her as a virgin: "what a fresh and virginal daughter of Nature that milkmaid is" and, ironically, he even calls her "maidy". In this regard, Tess is like Clare; not what she seems. No doubt Hardy will continue his literary hypothesis--that despite her virtue, Tess is a helpless victim and that fate controls her life. Hardy contrasts the fair-haired heavenly Angel with the dark-haired devilish Alec d'Urberville. While Alec forces himself on Tess, Clare is caring and careful and subsequently feels ashamed of his passionate behavior after embracing her. Unlike Alec, he courts Tess and treats her as if it were she who was the Angel. Tess on the other hand stands in comparison with the other dairymaids: nervous Izz, red-haired Retty and plump Marian who pale in beauty, delicacy and intelligence when compared to Tess. All four girls love Angel, but he focuses solely on Tess


Clare, restless, went out into the dusk when evening drew on, she who
had won him having retired to her chamber.

The night was as sultry as the day.  There was no coolness after dark
unless on the grass.  Roads, garden-paths, the house-fronts, the
barton-walls were warm as hearths, and reflected the noontime
temperature into the noctambulist's face.

He sat on the east gate of the dairy-yard, and knew not what to think
of himself.  Feeling had indeed smothered judgement that day.

Since the sudden embrace, three hours before, the twain had kept
apart.  She seemed stilled, almost alarmed, at what had occurred,
while the novelty, unpremeditation, mastery of circumstance
disquieted him--palpitating, contemplative being that he was.  He
could hardly realize their true relations to each other as yet, and
what their mutual bearing should be before third parties
thenceforward.

Angel had come as pupil to this dairy in the idea that his temporary
existence here was to be the merest episode in his life, soon passed
through and early forgotten; he had come as to a place from which
as from a screened alcove he could calmly view the absorbing world
without, and, apostrophizing it with Walt Whitman--

  Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes,
  How curious you are to me!--

resolve upon a plan for plunging into that world anew.  But behold,
the absorbing scene had been imported hither.  What had been the
engrossing world had dissolved into an uninteresting outer dumb-show;
while here, in this apparently dim and unimpassioned place, novelty
had volcanically started up, as it had never, for him, started up
elsewhere.

Every window of the house being open, Clare could hear across the
yard each trivial sound of the retiring household.  The dairy-house,
so humble, so insignificant, so purely to him a place of constrained
sojourn that he had never hitherto deemed it of sufficient importance
to be reconnoitred as an object of any quality whatever in the
landscape; what was it now?  The aged and lichened brick gables
breathed forth "Stay!"  The windows smiled, the door coaxed and
beckoned, the creeper blushed confederacy.  A personality within
it was so far-reaching in her influence as to spread into and make
the bricks, mortar, and whole overhanging sky throb with a burning
sensibility.  Whose was this mighty personality? A milkmaid's.

It was amazing, indeed, to find how great a matter the life of the
obscure dairy had become to him.  And though new love was to be held
partly responsible for this, it was not solely so.  Many besides
Angel have learnt that the magnitude of lives is not as to their
external displacements, but as to their subjective experiences.  The
impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life
than the pachydermatous king.  Looking at it thus, he found that life
was to be seen of the same magnitude here as elsewhere.

Despite his heterodoxy, faults, and weaknesses, Clare was a man with
a conscience.  Tess was no insignificant creature to toy with and
dismiss; but a woman living her precious life--a life which, to
herself who endured or enjoyed it, possessed as great a dimension
as the life of the mightiest to himself.  Upon her sensations
the whole world depended to Tess; through her existence all her
fellow-creatures existed, to her.  The universe itself only came into
being for Tess on the particular day in the particular year in which
she was born.

This consciousness upon which he had intruded was the single
opportunity of existence ever vouchsafed to Tess by an unsympathetic
First Cause--her all; her every and only chance.  How then should he
look upon her as of less consequence than himself; as a pretty trifle
to caress and grow weary of; and not deal in the greatest seriousness
with the affection which he knew that he had awakened in her--so
fervid and so impressionable as she was under her reserve--in order
that it might not agonize and wreck her?

To encounter her daily in the accustomed manner would be to develop
what had begun.  Living in such close relations, to meet meant to
fall into endearment; flesh and blood could not resist it; and,
having arrived at no conclusion as to the issue of such a tendency,
he decided to hold aloof for the present from occupations in which
they would be mutually engaged.  As yet the harm done was small.

But it was not easy to carry out the resolution never to approach
her.  He was driven towards her by every heave of his pulse.

He thought he would go and see his friends.  It might be possible
to sound them upon this.  In less than five months his term here
would have ended, and after a few additional months spent upon other
farms he would be fully equipped in agricultural knowledge and in
a position to start on his own account.  Would not a farmer want a
wife, and should a farmer's wife be a drawing-room wax-figure, or a
woman who understood farming?  Notwithstanding the pleasing answer
returned to him by the silence, he resolved to go his journey.

One morning when they sat down to breakfast at Talbothays Dairy some
maid observed that she had not seen anything of Mr Clare that day.

"O no," said Dairyman Crick.  "Mr Clare has gone hwome to Emminster
to spend a few days wi' his kinsfolk."

For four impassioned ones around that table the sunshine of the
morning went out at a stroke, and the birds muffled their song.
But neither girl by word or gesture revealed her blankness.  "He's
getting on towards the end of his time wi' me," added the dairyman,
with a phlegm which unconsciously was brutal; "and so I suppose he
is beginning to see about his plans elsewhere."

"How much longer is he to bide here?" asked Izz Huett, the only
one of the gloom-stricken bevy who could trust her voice with the
question.

The others waited for the dairyman's answer as if their lives hung
upon it; Retty, with parted lips, gazing on the tablecloth, Marian
with heat added to her redness, Tess throbbing and looking out at
the meads.

"Well, I can't mind the exact day without looking at my
memorandum-book," replied Crick, with the same intolerable unconcern.
"And even that may be altered a bit.  He'll bide to get a little
practice in the calving out at the straw-yard, for certain.  He'll
hang on till the end of the year I should say."

Four months or so of torturing ecstasy in his society--of "pleasure
girdled about with pain".  After that the blackness of unutterable
night.

At this moment of the morning Angel Clare was riding along a narrow
lane ten miles distant from the breakfasters, in the direction of
his father's Vicarage at Emminster, carrying, as well as he could,
a little basket which contained some black-puddings and a bottle of
mead, sent by Mrs Crick, with her kind respects, to his parents.  The
white lane stretched before him, and his eyes were upon it; but they
were staring into next year, and not at the lane.  He loved her;
ought he to marry her?  Dared he to marry her?  What would his mother
and his brothers say?  What would he himself say a couple of years
after the event?  That would depend upon whether the germs of staunch
comradeship underlay the temporary emotion, or whether it were a
sensuous joy in her form only, with no substratum of everlastingness.

His father's hill-surrounded little town, the Tudor church-tower of
red stone, the clump of trees near the Vicarage, came at last into
view beneath him, and he rode down towards the well-known gate.
Casting a glance in the direction of the church before entering his
home, he beheld standing by the vestry-door a group of girls, of
ages between twelve and sixteen, apparently awaiting the arrival of
some other one, who in a moment became visible; a figure somewhat
older than the school-girls, wearing a broad-brimmed hat and
highly-starched cambric morning-gown, with a couple of books in her
hand.

Clare knew her well.  He could not be sure that she observed him; he
hoped she did not, so as to render it unnecessary that he should go
and speak to her, blameless creature that she was.  An overpowering
reluctance to greet her made him decide that she had not seen him.
The young lady was Miss Mercy Chant, the only daughter of his
father's neighbour and friend, whom it was his parents' quiet hope
that he might wed some day.  She was great at Antinomianism and
Bible-classes, and was plainly going to hold a class now.  Clare's
mind flew to the impassioned, summer-steeped heathens in the Var
Vale, their rosy faces court-patched with cow-droppings; and to one
the most impassioned of them all.

It was on the impulse of the moment that he had resolved to trot
over to Emminster, and hence had not written to apprise his mother
and father, aiming, however, to arrive about the breakfast hour,
before they should have gone out to their parish duties.  He was
a little late, and they had already sat down to the morning meal.
The group at the table jumped up to welcome him as soon as he
entered.  They were his father and mother, his brother the Reverend
Felix--curate at a town in the adjoining county, home for the inside
of a fortnight--and his other brother, the Reverend Cuthbert, the
classical scholar, and Fellow and Dean of his College, down from
Cambridge for the long vacation.  His mother appeared in a cap and
silver spectacles, and his father looked what in fact he was--an
earnest, God-fearing man, somewhat gaunt, in years about sixty-five,
his pale face lined with thought and purpose.  Over their heads hung
the picture of Angel's sister, the eldest of the family, sixteen
years his senior, who had married a missionary and gone out to
Africa.

Old Mr Clare was a clergyman of a type which, within the last twenty
years, has well nigh dropped out of contemporary life.  A spiritual
descendant in the direct line from Wycliff, Huss, Luther, Calvin; an
Evangelical of the Evangelicals, a Conversionist, a man of Apostolic
simplicity in life and thought, he had in his raw youth made up his
mind once for all in the deeper questions of existence, and admitted
no further reasoning on them thenceforward.  He was regarded even by
those of his own date and school of thinking as extreme; while, on
the other hand, those totally opposed to him were unwillingly won
to admiration for his thoroughness, and for the remarkable power he
showed in dismissing all question as to principles in his energy for
applying them.  He loved Paul of Tarsus, liked St John, hated St
James as much as he dared, and regarded with mixed feelings Timothy,
Titus, and Philemon.  The New Testament was less a Christiad then a
Pauliad to his intelligence--less an argument than an intoxication.
His creed of determinism was such that it almost amounted to a
vice, and quite amounted, on its negative side, to a renunciative
philosophy which had cousinship with that of Schopenhauer and
Leopardi.  He despised the Canons and Rubric, swore by the Articles,
and deemed himself consistent through the whole category--which in a
way he might have been.  One thing he certainly was--sincere.

To the aesthetic, sensuous, pagan pleasure in natural life and lush
womanhood which his son Angel had lately been experiencing in Var
Vale, his temper would have been antipathetic in a high degree, had
he either by inquiry or imagination been able to apprehend it.  Once
upon a time Angel had been so unlucky as to say to his father, in
a moment of irritation, that it might have resulted far better for
mankind if Greece had been the source of the religion of modern
civilization, and not Palestine; and his father's grief was of that
blank description which could not realize that there might lurk a
thousandth part of a truth, much less a half truth or a whole truth,
in such a proposition.  He had simply preached austerely at Angel for
some time after.  But the kindness of his heart was such that he
never resented anything for long, and welcomed his son to-day with a
smile which was as candidly sweet as a child's.

Angel sat down, and the place felt like home; yet he did not so much
as formerly feel himself one of the family gathered there.  Every
time that he returned hither he was conscious of this divergence,
and since he had last shared in the Vicarage life it had grown even
more distinctly foreign to his own than usual.  Its transcendental
aspirations--still unconsciously based on the geocentric view of
things, a zenithal paradise, a nadiral hell--were as foreign to his
own as if they had been the dreams of people on another planet.
Latterly he had seen only Life, felt only the great passionate pulse
of existence, unwarped, uncontorted, untrammelled by those creeds
which futilely attempt to check what wisdom would be content to
regulate.

On their part they saw a great difference in him, a growing
divergence from the Angel Clare of former times.  It was chiefly a
difference in his manner that they noticed just now, particularly
his brothers.  He was getting to behave like a farmer; he flung his
legs about; the muscles of his face had grown more expressive; his
eyes looked as much information as his tongue spoke, and more.  The
manner of the scholar had nearly disappeared; still more the manner
of the drawing-room young man.  A prig would have said that he had
lost culture, and a prude that he had become coarse.  Such was the
contagion of domiciliary fellowship with the Talbothays nymphs and
swains.

After breakfast he walked with his two brothers, non-evangelical,
well-educated, hall-marked young men, correct to their remotest
fibre, such unimpeachable models as are turned out yearly by
the lathe of a systematic tuition.  They were both somewhat
short-sighted, and when it was the custom to wear a single eyeglass
and string they wore a single eyeglass and string; when it was the
custom to wear a double glass they wore a double glass; when it was
the custom to wear spectacles they wore spectacles straightway, all
without reference to the particular variety of defect in their own
vision.  When Wordsworth was enthroned they carried pocket copies;
and when Shelley was belittled they allowed him to grow dusty on
their shelves.  When Correggio's Holy Families were admired, they
admired Correggio's Holy Families; when he was decried in favour
of Velasquez, they sedulously followed suit without any personal
objection.

If these two noticed Angel's growing social ineptness, he noticed
their growing mental limitations.  Felix seemed to him all Church;
Cuthbert all College.  His Diocesan Synod and Visitations were the
mainsprings of the world to the one; Cambridge to the other.  Each
brother candidly recognized that there were a few unimportant score
of millions of outsiders in civilized society, persons who were
neither University men nor churchmen; but they were to be tolerated
rather than reckoned with and respected.

They were both dutiful and attentive sons, and were regular in their
visits to their parents.  Felix, though an offshoot from a far more
recent point in the devolution of theology than his father, was less
self-sacrificing and disinterested.  More tolerant than his father of
a contradictory opinion, in its aspect as a danger to its holder, he
was less ready than his father to pardon it as a slight to his own
teaching.  Cuthbert was, upon the whole, the more liberal-minded,
though, with greater subtlety, he had not so much heart.

As they walked along the hillside Angel's former feeling revived
in him--that whatever their advantages by comparison with himself,
neither saw or set forth life as it really was lived.  Perhaps, as
with many men, their opportunities of observation were not so good
as their opportunities of expression.  Neither had an adequate
conception of the complicated forces at work outside the smooth and
gentle current in which they and their associates floated.  Neither
saw the difference between local truth and universal truth; that what
the inner world said in their clerical and academic hearing was quite
a different thing from what the outer world was thinking.

"I suppose it is farming or nothing for you now, my dear fellow,"
Felix was saying, among other things, to his youngest brother, as
he looked through his spectacles at the distant fields with sad
austerity.  "And, therefore, we must make the best of it.  But I do
entreat you to endeavour to keep as much as possible in touch with
moral ideals.  Farming, of course, means roughing it externally; but
high thinking may go with plain living, nevertheless."

"Of course it may," said Angel.  "Was it not proved nineteen hundred
years ago--if I may trespass upon your domain a little?  Why should
you think, Felix, that I am likely to drop my high thinking and my
moral ideals?"

"Well, I fancied, from the tone of your letters and our
conversation--it may be fancy only--that you were somehow losing
intellectual grasp.  Hasn't it struck you, Cuthbert?"

"Now, Felix," said Angel drily, "we are very good friends, you
know; each of us treading our allotted circles; but if it comes to
intellectual grasp, I think you, as a contented dogmatist, had
better leave mine alone, and inquire what has become of yours."

They returned down the hill to dinner, which was fixed at any time at
which their father's and mother's morning work in the parish usually
concluded.  Convenience as regarded afternoon callers was the last
thing to enter into the consideration of unselfish Mr and Mrs Clare;
though the three sons were sufficiently in unison on this matter to
wish that their parents would conform a little to modern notions.

The walk had made them hungry, Angel in particular, who was now
an outdoor man, accustomed to the profuse _dapes inemptae_ of the
dairyman's somewhat coarsely-laden table.  But neither of the old
people had arrived, and it was not till the sons were almost tired of
waiting that their parents entered.  The self-denying pair had been
occupied in coaxing the appetites of some of their sick parishioners,
whom they, somewhat inconsistently, tried to keep imprisoned in the
flesh, their own appetites being quite forgotten.

The family sat down to table, and a frugal meal of cold viands
was deposited before them.  Angel looked round for Mrs Crick's
black-puddings, which he had directed to be nicely grilled as they
did them at the dairy, and of which he wished his father and mother
to appreciate the marvellous herbal savours as highly as he did
himself.

"Ah! you are looking for the black-puddings, my dear boy," observed
Clare's mother.  "But I am sure you will not mind doing without them
as I am sure your father and I shall not, when you know the reason.
I suggested to him that we should take Mrs Crick's kind present to
the children of the man who can earn nothing just now because of his
attacks of delirium tremens; and he agreed that it would be a great
pleasure to them; so we did."

"Of course," said Angel cheerfully, looking round for the mead.

"I found the mead so extremely alcoholic," continued his mother,
"that it was quite unfit for use as a beverage, but as valuable
as rum or brandy in an emergency; so I have put it in my
medicine-closet."

"We never drink spirits at this table, on principle," added his
father.

"But what shall I tell the dairyman's wife?" said Angel.

"The truth, of course," said his father.

"I rather wanted to say we enjoyed the mead and the black-puddings
very much.  She is a kind, jolly sort of body, and is sure to ask me
directly I return."

"You cannot, if we did not," Mr Clare answered lucidly.

"Ah--no; though that mead was a drop of pretty tipple."

"A what?" said Cuthbert and Felix both.

"Oh--'tis an expression they use down at Talbothays," replied Angel,
blushing.  He felt that his parents were right in their practice if
wrong in their want of sentiment, and said no more.

Angel visits his family at the parsonage in Emminster to think and to tell his parents about his plans to marry Tess. He finds them at breakfast with his brothers Felix, a village curate, and Cuthbert, a Cambridge dean. They notice that Angel has taken on the crude mannerisms of the farm, and he realizes that they have become frozen intellectually. Angel's mother gives away the meat puddings Mrs. Crick prepared as a gift and puts the mead in the medicine cabinet because it is too strong to drink


It was not till the evening, after family prayers, that Angel found
opportunity of broaching to his father one or two subjects near his
heart.  He had strung himself up to the purpose while kneeling behind
his brothers on the carpet, studying the little nails in the heels of
their walking boots.  When the service was over they went out of the
room with their mother, and Mr Clare and himself were left alone.

The young man first discussed with the elder his plans for the
attainment of his position as a farmer on an extensive scale--either
in England or in the Colonies.  His father then told him that, as he
had not been put to the expense of sending Angel up to Cambridge, he
had felt it his duty to set by a sum of money every year towards the
purchase or lease of land for him some day, that he might not feel
himself unduly slighted.

"As far as worldly wealth goes," continued his father, "you will no
doubt stand far superior to your brothers in a few years."

This considerateness on old Mr Clare's part led Angel onward to the
other and dearer subject.  He observed to his father that he was
then six-and-twenty, and that when he should start in the farming
business he would require eyes in the back of his head to see to all
matters--some one would be necessary to superintend the domestic
labours of his establishment whilst he was afield.  Would it not be
well, therefore, for him to marry?

His father seemed to think this idea not unreasonable; and then Angel
put the question--

"What kind of wife do you think would be best for me as a thrifty
hard-working farmer?"

"A truly Christian woman, who will be a help and a comfort to you in
your goings-out and your comings-in.  Beyond that, it really matters
little.  Such an one can be found; indeed, my earnest-minded friend
and neighbour, Dr Chant--"

"But ought she not primarily to be able to milk cows, churn good
butter, make immense cheeses; know how to sit hens and turkeys and
rear chickens, to direct a field of labourers in an emergency, and
estimate the value of sheep and calves?"

"Yes; a farmer's wife; yes, certainly.  It would be desirable."  Mr
Clare, the elder, had plainly never thought of these points before.
"I was going to add," he said, "that for a pure and saintly woman you
will not find one more to your true advantage, and certainly not more
to your mother's mind and my own, than your friend Mercy, whom you
used to show a certain interest in.  It is true that my neighbour
Chant's daughter had lately caught up the fashion of the younger
clergy round about us for decorating the Communion-table--altar, as I
was shocked to hear her call it one day--with flowers and other stuff
on festival occasions.  But her father, who is quite as opposed to
such flummery as I, says that can be cured.  It is a mere girlish
outbreak which, I am sure, will not be permanent."

"Yes, yes; Mercy is good and devout, I know.  But, father, don't you
think that a young woman equally pure and virtuous as Miss Chant,
but one who, in place of that lady's ecclesiastical accomplishments,
understands the duties of farm life as well as a farmer himself,
would suit me infinitely better?"

His father persisted in his conviction that a knowledge of a farmer's
wife's duties came second to a Pauline view of humanity; and the
impulsive Angel, wishing to honour his father's feelings and to
advance the cause of his heart at the same time, grew specious.
He said that fate or Providence had thrown in his way a woman who
possessed every qualification to be the helpmate of an agriculturist,
and was decidedly of a serious turn of mind.  He would not say
whether or not she had attached herself to the sound Low Church
School of his father; but she would probably be open to conviction
on that point; she was a regular church-goer of simple faith;
honest-hearted, receptive, intelligent, graceful to a degree, chaste
as a vestal, and, in personal appearance, exceptionally beautiful.

"Is she of a family such as you would care to marry into--a lady, in
short?" asked his startled mother, who had come softly into the study
during the conversation.

"She is not what in common parlance is called a lady," said Angel,
unflinchingly, "for she is a cottager's daughter, as I am proud to
say.  But she IS a lady, nevertheless--in feeling and nature."

"Mercy Chant is of a very good family."

"Pooh!--what's the advantage of that, mother?" said Angel quickly.
"How is family to avail the wife of a man who has to rough it as I
have, and shall have to do?"

"Mercy is accomplished.  And accomplishments have their charm,"
returned his mother, looking at him through her silver spectacles.

"As to external accomplishments, what will be the use of them in the
life I am going to lead?--while as to her reading, I can take that
in hand.  She'll be apt pupil enough, as you would say if you knew
her. She's brim full of poetry--actualized poetry, if I may use the
expression.  She LIVES what paper-poets only write...  And she is an
unimpeachable Christian, I am sure; perhaps of the very tribe, genus,
and species you desire to propagate."

"O Angel, you are mocking!"

"Mother, I beg pardon.  But as she really does attend Church almost
every Sunday morning, and is a good Christian girl, I am sure you
will tolerate any social shortcomings for the sake of that quality,
and feel that I may do worse than choose her."  Angel waxed quite
earnest on that rather automatic orthodoxy in his beloved Tess which
(never dreaming that it might stand him in such good stead) he had
been prone to slight when observing it practised by her and the other
milkmaids, because of its obvious unreality amid beliefs essentially
naturalistic.

In their sad doubts as to whether their son had himself any right
whatever to the title he claimed for the unknown young woman, Mr and
Mrs Clare began to feel it as an advantage not to be overlooked that
she at least was sound in her views; especially as the conjunction of
the pair must have arisen by an act of Providence; for Angel never
would have made orthodoxy a condition of his choice.  They said
finally that it was better not to act in a hurry, but that they would
not object to see her.

Angel therefore refrained from declaring more particulars now.
He felt that, single-minded and self-sacrificing as his parents
were, there yet existed certain latent prejudices of theirs, as
middle-class people, which it would require some tact to overcome.
For though legally at liberty to do as he chose, and though their
daughter-in-law's qualifications could make no practical difference
to their lives, in the probability of her living far away from them,
he wished for affection's sake not to wound their sentiment in the
most important decision of his life.

He observed his own inconsistencies in dwelling upon accidents in
Tess's life as if they were vital features.  It was for herself that
he loved Tess; her soul, her heart, her substance--not for her skill
in the dairy, her aptness as his scholar, and certainly not for
her simple formal faith-professions.  Her unsophisticated open-air
existence required no varnish of conventionality to make it palatable
to him.  He held that education had as yet but little affected the
beats of emotion and impulse on which domestic happiness depends.  It
was probable that, in the lapse of ages, improved systems of moral
and intellectual training would appreciably, perhaps considerably,
elevate the involuntary and even the unconscious instincts of human
nature; but up to the present day, culture, as far as he could see,
might be said to have affected only the mental epiderm of those
lives which had been brought under its influence.  This belief was
confirmed by his experience of women, which, having latterly been
extended from the cultivated middle-class into the rural community,
had taught him how much less was the intrinsic difference between the
good and wise woman of one social stratum and the good and wise woman
of another social stratum, than between the good and bad, the wise
and the foolish, of the same stratum or class.

It was the morning of his departure.  His brothers had already left
the Vicarage to proceed on a walking tour in the north, whence one
was to return to his college, and the other to his curacy.  Angel
might have accompanied them, but preferred to rejoin his sweetheart
at Talbothays.  He would have been an awkward member of the
party; for, though the most appreciative humanist, the most ideal
religionist, even the best-versed Christologist of the three, there
was alienation in the standing consciousness that his squareness
would not fit the round hole that had been prepared for him.  To
neither Felix nor Cuthbert had he ventured to mention Tess.

His mother made him sandwiches, and his father accompanied him,
on his own mare, a little way along the road.  Having fairly well
advanced his own affairs, Angel listened in a willing silence, as
they jogged on together through the shady lanes, to his father's
account of his parish difficulties, and the coldness of brother
clergymen whom he loved, because of his strict interpretations of
the New Testament by the light of what they deemed a pernicious
Calvinistic doctrine.

"Pernicious!" said Mr Clare, with genial scorn; and he proceeded to
recount experiences which would show the absurdity of that idea.
He told of wondrous conversions of evil livers of which he had been
the instrument, not only amongst the poor, but amongst the rich and
well-to-do; and he also candidly admitted many failures.

As an instance of the latter, he mentioned the case of a young
upstart squire named d'Urberville, living some forty miles off, in
the neighbourhood of Trantridge.

"Not one of the ancient d'Urbervilles of Kingsbere and other places?"
asked his son.  "That curiously historic worn-out family with its
ghostly legend of the coach-and-four?"

"O no.  The original d'Urbervilles decayed and disappeared sixty
or eighty years ago--at least, I believe so.  This seems to be a
new family which had taken the name; for the credit of the former
knightly line I hope they are spurious, I'm sure.  But it is odd
to hear you express interest in old families.  I thought you set less
store by them even than I."

"You misapprehend me, father; you often do," said Angel with a
little impatience.  "Politically I am sceptical as to the virtue of
their being old.  Some of the wise even among themselves 'exclaim
against their own succession,' as Hamlet puts it; but lyrically,
dramatically, and even historically, I am tenderly attached to them."

This distinction, though by no means a subtle one, was yet too
subtle for Mr Clare the elder, and he went on with the story he had
been about to relate; which was that after the death of the senior
so-called d'Urberville, the young man developed the most culpable
passions, though he had a blind mother, whose condition should have
made him know better.  A knowledge of his career having come to
the ears of Mr Clare, when he was in that part of the country
preaching missionary sermons, he boldly took occasion to speak to
the delinquent on his spiritual state.  Though he was a stranger,
occupying another's pulpit, he had felt this to be his duty, and
took for his text the words from St Luke: "Thou fool, this night thy
soul shall be required of thee!"  The young man much resented this
directness of attack, and in the war of words which followed when
they met he did not scruple publicly to insult Mr Clare, without
respect for his gray hairs.

Angel flushed with distress.

"Dear father," he said sadly, "I wish you would not expose yourself
to such gratuitous pain from scoundrels!"

"Pain?" said his father, his rugged face shining in the ardour of
self-abnegation.  "The only pain to me was pain on his account, poor,
foolish young man.  Do you suppose his incensed words could give
me any pain, or even his blows?  'Being reviled we bless; being
persecuted we suffer it; being defamed we entreat; we are made as the
filth of the world, and as the offscouring of all things unto this
day.'  Those ancient and noble words to the Corinthians are strictly
true at this present hour."

"Not blows, father?  He did not proceed to blows?"

"No, he did not.  Though I have borne blows from men in a mad state
of intoxication."

"No!"

"A dozen times, my boy.  What then?  I have saved them from the guilt
of murdering their own flesh and blood thereby; and they have lived
to thank me, and praise God."

"May this young man do the same!" said Angel fervently.  "But I fear
otherwise, from what you say."

"We'll hope, nevertheless," said Mr Clare.  "And I continue to pray
for him, though on this side of the grave we shall probably never
meet again.  But, after all, one of those poor words of mine may
spring up in his heart as a good seed some day."

Now, as always, Clare's father was sanguine as a child; and though
the younger could not accept his parent's narrow dogma, he revered
his practice and recognized the hero under the pietist.  Perhaps he
revered his father's practice even more now than ever, seeing that,
in the question of making Tessy his wife, his father had not once
thought of inquiring whether she were well provided or penniless.
The same unworldliness was what had necessitated Angel's getting
a living as a farmer, and would probably keep his brothers in the
position of poor parsons for the term of their activities; yet Angel
admired it none the less.  Indeed, despite his own heterodoxy, Angel
often felt that he was nearer to his father on the human side than
was either of his brethren.

That evening Angel takes his father into his confidence telling him that he wishes to marry a country woman who will help on the farm he wishes to purchase: "would not a farmer want a wife, and should a farmer's wife be a drawing-room wax figure, or a woman who understood farming. Both parents attempt to persuade him to marry their pious neighbor, Mercy Chant, instead. He tells them about Tess and stresses her purity. His father tells him that the funds he had put aside for Angel to attend college can be used instead to purchase land. Before Angel leaves, his father tells him he had a troublesome time attempting to convert a Trantridge man named Alec d'Urberville, and Angel remarks how he himself has no regard for old families