finished_summaries/shmoop/Tess of the D'Urbervilles/section_48_part_0.txt
Tess of the D'Urbervilles.chapter 49
chapter 49
{"name": "Phase VI: \"The Convert,\" Chapter Forty-Nine", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210424232301/http://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/tess-of-the-durbervilles/summary/chapter-49", "summary": "Tess's letter is addressed to Angel's parents, since they are the ones who had his current address in Brazil. Mrs. Clare forwards it to Angel immediately, and hopes that it will make him hurry home for the visit he's been planning. Mr. Clare still feels guilty about not allowing Angel to go to the university like his brothers, and blames himself for Angel's unhappy marriage. Angel, meanwhile, has grown up an awful lot since he left for Brazil. The fever he caught soon after arriving almost killed him, and he's still weak. He's re-considering a lot of things he used to take for granted. He's decided that morality has more to do with your intentions than your actions. And Tess never intended to be raped, so was she still pure? At one point, Angel meets another Englishman in Brazil, and they become friends. Angel confides his whole story to the man, and the man tells Angel that deserting Tess was the dumbest move, ever. The man dies shortly afterwards, but his words have a lasting effect on Angel. He realizes how wrong he's been about Tess. Tess, meanwhile, is convinced that Angel will soon come back in response to her letter, and so she starts thinking about what she can do to please him when he gets back. She starts studying up on all the ballads and songs that he liked best, and daydreaming about life with Angel after his return. One day in late March, her sister 'Liza-Lu shows up at her door, telling her that their mother is sick, and their father isn't doing well, either. And their father is refusing to work on account of his noble background. Tess decides she has to go home, even though she's supposed to stick around until Old Lady Day . 'Liza-Lu is too tired to head back that night , so Tess decides to let her sister spend the night in her bed, and follow her in the morning. Tess herself leaves a message with Marian and Izz to try to excuse her to the farmer, and then sets out for home.", "analysis": ""}


The appeal duly found its way to the breakfast-table of the quiet
Vicarage to the westward, in that valley where the air is so soft and
the soil so rich that the effort of growth requires but superficial
aid by comparison with the tillage at Flintcomb-Ash, and where to
Tess the human world seemed so different (though it was much the
same).  It was purely for security that she had been requested by
Angel to send her communications through his father, whom he kept
pretty well informed of his changing addresses in the country he
had gone to exploit for himself with a heavy heart.

"Now," said old Mr Clare to his wife, when he had read the envelope,
"if Angel proposes leaving Rio for a visit home at the end of next
month, as he told us that he hoped to do, I think this may hasten his
plans; for I believe it to be from his wife."  He breathed deeply at
the thought of her; and the letter was redirected to be promptly sent
on to Angel.

"Dear fellow, I hope he will get home safely," murmured Mrs Clare.
"To my dying day I shall feel that he has been ill-used.  You should
have sent him to Cambridge in spite of his want of faith and given
him the same chance as the other boys had.  He would have grown out
of it under proper influence, and perhaps would have taken Orders
after all.  Church or no Church, it would have been fairer to him."

This was the only wail with which Mrs Clare ever disturbed her
husband's peace in respect to their sons.  And she did not vent this
often; for she was as considerate as she was devout, and knew that
his mind too was troubled by doubts as to his justice in this matter.
Only too often had she heard him lying awake at night, stifling sighs
for Angel with prayers.  But the uncompromising Evangelical did not
even now hold that he would have been justified in giving his son,
an unbeliever, the same academic advantages that he had given to the
two others, when it was possible, if not probable, that those very
advantages might have been used to decry the doctrines which he had
made it his life's mission and desire to propagate, and the mission
of his ordained sons likewise.  To put with one hand a pedestal
under the feet of the two faithful ones, and with the other to exalt
the unfaithful by the same artificial means, he deemed to be alike
inconsistent with his convictions, his position, and his hopes.
Nevertheless, he loved his misnamed Angel, and in secret mourned
over this treatment of him as Abraham might have mourned over the
doomed Isaac while they went up the hill together.  His silent
self-generated regrets were far bitterer than the reproaches which
his wife rendered audible.

They blamed themselves for this unlucky marriage.  If Angel had never
been destined for a farmer he would never have been thrown with
agricultural girls.  They did not distinctly know what had separated
him and his wife, nor the date on which the separation had taken
place.  At first they had supposed it must be something of the nature
of a serious aversion.  But in his later letters he occasionally
alluded to the intention of coming home to fetch her; from which
expressions they hoped the division might not owe its origin to
anything so hopelessly permanent as that.  He had told them that she
was with her relatives, and in their doubts they had decided not to
intrude into a situation which they knew no way of bettering.

The eyes for which Tess's letter was intended were gazing at this
time on a limitless expanse of country from the back of a mule which
was bearing him from the interior of the South-American Continent
towards the coast.  His experiences of this strange land had been
sad.  The severe illness from which he had suffered shortly after
his arrival had never wholly left him, and he had by degrees almost
decided to relinquish his hope of farming here, though, as long as
the bare possibility existed of his remaining, he kept this change
of view a secret from his parents.

The crowds of agricultural labourers who had come out to the country
in his wake, dazzled by representations of easy independence, had
suffered, died, and wasted away.  He would see mothers from English
farms trudging along with their infants in their arms, when the child
would be stricken with fever and would die; the mother would pause
to dig a hole in the loose earth with her bare hands, would bury the
babe therein with the same natural grave-tools, shed one tear, and
again trudge on.

Angel's original intention had not been emigration to Brazil but a
northern or eastern farm in his own country.  He had come to this
place in a fit of desperation, the Brazil movement among the English
agriculturists having by chance coincided with his desire to escape
from his past existence.

During this time of absence he had mentally aged a dozen years.
What arrested him now as of value in life was less its beauty than
its pathos.  Having long discredited the old systems of mysticism,
he now began to discredit the old appraisements of morality.  He
thought they wanted readjusting.  Who was the moral man?  Still more
pertinently, who was the moral woman?  The beauty or ugliness of
a character lay not only in its achievements, but in its aims and
impulses; its true history lay, not among things done, but among
things willed.

How, then, about Tess?

Viewing her in these lights, a regret for his hasty judgement began
to oppress him.  Did he reject her eternally, or did he not?  He
could no longer say that he would always reject her, and not to say
that was in spirit to accept her now.

This growing fondness for her memory coincided in point of time
with her residence at Flintcomb-Ash, but it was before she had felt
herself at liberty to trouble him with a word about her circumstances
or her feelings.  He was greatly perplexed; and in his perplexity as
to her motives in withholding intelligence, he did not inquire.  Thus
her silence of docility was misinterpreted.  How much it really said
if he had understood!--that she adhered with literal exactness to
orders which he had given and forgotten; that despite her natural
fearlessness she asserted no rights, admitted his judgement to be in
every respect the true one, and bent her head dumbly thereto.

In the before-mentioned journey by mules through the interior of the
country, another man rode beside him. Angel's companion was also an
Englishman, bent on the same errand, though he came from another part
of the island.  They were both in a state of mental depression, and
they spoke of home affairs.  Confidence begat confidence.  With that
curious tendency evinced by men, more especially when in distant
lands, to entrust to strangers details of their lives which they
would on no account mention to friends, Angel admitted to this man
as they rode along the sorrowful facts of his marriage.

The stranger had sojourned in many more lands and among many more
peoples than Angel; to his cosmopolitan mind such deviations from the
social norm, so immense to domesticity, were no more than are the
irregularities of vale and mountain-chain to the whole terrestrial
curve.  He viewed the matter in quite a different light from Angel;
thought that what Tess had been was of no importance beside what she
would be, and plainly told Clare that he was wrong in coming away
from her.

The next day they were drenched in a thunder-storm. Angel's companion
was struck down with fever, and died by the week's end.  Clare waited
a few hours to bury him, and then went on his way.

The cursory remarks of the large-minded stranger, of whom he knew
absolutely nothing beyond a commonplace name, were sublimed by his
death, and influenced Clare more than all the reasoned ethics of the
philosophers.  His own parochialism made him ashamed by its contrast.
His inconsistencies rushed upon him in a flood.  He had persistently
elevated Hellenic Paganism at the expense of Christianity; yet in
that civilization an illegal surrender was not certain disesteem.
Surely then he might have regarded that abhorrence of the un-intact
state, which he had inherited with the creed of mysticism, as at
least open to correction when the result was due to treachery.  A
remorse struck into him.  The words of Izz Huett, never quite stilled
in his memory, came back to him.  He had asked Izz if she loved him,
and she had replied in the affirmative.  Did she love him more than
Tess did?  No, she had replied; Tess would lay down her life for him,
and she herself could do no more.

He thought of Tess as she had appeared on the day of the wedding.
How her eyes had lingered upon him; how she had hung upon his words
as if they were a god's!  And during the terrible evening over the
hearth, when her simple soul uncovered itself to his, how pitiful her
face had looked by the rays of the fire, in her inability to realize
that his love and protection could possibly be withdrawn.

Thus from being her critic he grew to be her advocate.  Cynical
things he had uttered to himself about her; but no man can be always
a cynic and live; and he withdrew them.  The mistake of expressing
them had arisen from his allowing himself to be influenced by general
principles to the disregard of the particular instance.

But the reasoning is somewhat musty; lovers and husbands have gone
over the ground before to-day.  Clare had been harsh towards her;
there is no doubt of it.  Men are too often harsh with women they
love or have loved; women with men.  And yet these harshnesses are
tenderness itself when compared with the universal harshness out
of which they grow; the harshness of the position towards the
temperament, of the means towards the aims, of to-day towards
yesterday, of hereafter towards to-day.

The historic interest of her family--that masterful line of
d'Urbervilles--whom he had despised as a spent force, touched his
sentiments now.  Why had he not known the difference between the
political value and the imaginative value of these things?  In
the latter aspect her d'Urberville descent was a fact of great
dimensions; worthless to economics, it was a most useful ingredient
to the dreamer, to the moralizer on declines and falls.  It was a
fact that would soon be forgotten--that bit of distinction in poor
Tess's blood and name, and oblivion would fall upon her hereditary
link with the marble monuments and leaded skeletons at Kingsbere.  So
does Time ruthlessly destroy his own romances.  In recalling her face
again and again, he thought now that he could see therein a flash of
the dignity which must have graced her grand-dames; and the vision
sent that _aura_ through his veins which he had formerly felt, and
which left behind it a sense of sickness.

Despite her not-inviolate past, what still abode in such a woman as
Tess outvalued the freshness of her fellows.  Was not the gleaning
of the grapes of Ephraim better than the vintage of Abiezer?

So spoke love renascent, preparing the way for Tess's devoted
outpouring, which was then just being forwarded to him by his father;
though owing to his distance inland it was to be a long time in
reaching him.

Meanwhile the writer's expectation that Angel would come in response
to the entreaty was alternately great and small.  What lessened it
was that the facts of her life which had led to the parting had
not changed--could never change; and that, if her presence had not
attenuated them, her absence could not.  Nevertheless she addressed
her mind to the tender question of what she could do to please him
best if he should arrive.  Sighs were expended on the wish that she
had taken more notice of the tunes he played on his harp, that she
had inquired more curiously of him which were his favourite ballads
among those the country-girls sang.  She indirectly inquired of Amby
Seedling, who had followed Izz from Talbothays, and by chance Amby
remembered that, amongst the snatches of melody in which they had
indulged at the dairyman's, to induce the cows to let down their
milk, Clare had seemed to like "Cupid's Gardens", "I have parks, I
have hounds", and "The break o' the day"; and had seemed not to care
for "The Tailor's Breeches" and "Such a beauty I did grow", excellent
ditties as they were.

To perfect the ballads was now her whimsical desire. She practised
them privately at odd moments, especially "The break o' the day":


   Arise, arise, arise!
   And pick your love a posy,
   All o' the sweetest flowers
   That in the garden grow.
   The turtle doves and sma' birds
   In every bough a-building,
   So early in the May-time
   At the break o' the day!


It would have melted the heart of a stone to hear her singing these
ditties whenever she worked apart from the rest of the girls in this
cold dry time; the tears running down her cheeks all the while at the
thought that perhaps he would not, after all, come to hear her, and
the simple silly words of the songs resounding in painful mockery of
the aching heart of the singer.

Tess was so wrapt up in this fanciful dream that she seemed not to
know how the season was advancing; that the days had lengthened, that
Lady-Day was at hand, and would soon be followed by Old Lady-Day, the
end of her term here.

But before the quarter-day had quite come, something happened which
made Tess think of far different matters.  She was at her lodging as
usual one evening, sitting in the downstairs room with the rest of
the family, when somebody knocked at the door and inquired for Tess.
Through the doorway she saw against the declining light a figure
with the height of a woman and the breadth of a child, a tall, thin,
girlish creature whom she did not recognize in the twilight till the
girl said "Tess!"

"What--is it 'Liza-Lu?" asked Tess, in startled accents.  Her sister,
whom a little over a year ago she had left at home as a child, had
sprung up by a sudden shoot to a form of this presentation, of which
as yet Lu seemed herself scarce able to understand the meaning.
Her thin legs, visible below her once-long frock, now short by her
growing, and her uncomfortable hands and arms revealed her youth and
inexperience.

"Yes, I have been traipsing about all day, Tess," said Lu, with
unemotional gravity, "a-trying to find 'ee; and I'm very tired."

"What is the matter at home?"

"Mother is took very bad, and the doctor says she's dying, and as
father is not very well neither, and says 'tis wrong for a man of
such a high family as his to slave and drave at common labouring
work, we don't know what to do."

Tess stood in reverie a long time before she thought of asking
'Liza-Lu to come in and sit down.  When she had done so, and 'Liza-Lu
was having some tea, she came to a decision.  It was imperative that
she should go home.  Her agreement did not end till Old Lady-Day, the
sixth of April, but as the interval thereto was not a long one she
resolved to run the risk of starting at once.

To go that night would be a gain of twelve-hours; but her sister
was too tired to undertake such a distance till the morrow.  Tess
ran down to where Marian and Izz lived, informed them of what had
happened, and begged them to make the best of her case to the farmer.
Returning, she got Lu a supper, and after that, having tucked the
younger into her own bed, packed up as many of her belongings as
would go into a withy basket, and started, directing Lu to follow
her next morning.



Phase VI: "The Convert," Chapter Forty-Nine
Tess's letter is addressed to Angel's parents, since they are the ones who had his current address in Brazil. Mrs. Clare forwards it to Angel immediately, and hopes that it will make him hurry home for the visit he's been planning. Mr. Clare still feels guilty about not allowing Angel to go to the university like his brothers, and blames himself for Angel's unhappy marriage. Angel, meanwhile, has grown up an awful lot since he left for Brazil. The fever he caught soon after arriving almost killed him, and he's still weak. He's re-considering a lot of things he used to take for granted. He's decided that morality has more to do with your intentions than your actions. And Tess never intended to be raped, so was she still pure? At one point, Angel meets another Englishman in Brazil, and they become friends. Angel confides his whole story to the man, and the man tells Angel that deserting Tess was the dumbest move, ever. The man dies shortly afterwards, but his words have a lasting effect on Angel. He realizes how wrong he's been about Tess. Tess, meanwhile, is convinced that Angel will soon come back in response to her letter, and so she starts thinking about what she can do to please him when he gets back. She starts studying up on all the ballads and songs that he liked best, and daydreaming about life with Angel after his return. One day in late March, her sister 'Liza-Lu shows up at her door, telling her that their mother is sick, and their father isn't doing well, either. And their father is refusing to work on account of his noble background. Tess decides she has to go home, even though she's supposed to stick around until Old Lady Day . 'Liza-Lu is too tired to head back that night , so Tess decides to let her sister spend the night in her bed, and follow her in the morning. Tess herself leaves a message with Marian and Izz to try to excuse her to the farmer, and then sets out for home.