finished_summaries/gradesaver/Tess of the D'Urbervilles/section_3_part_3.txt
Tess of the D'Urbervilles.chapter 27
chapter 27
{"name": "Chapter 27", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210410060617/https://www.gradesaver.com/tess-of-the-durbervilles/study-guide/summary-phase-4-chapters-25-34", "summary": "Angel returns to Talbothays, where he finds Tess, who has recently awakened. Angel tells Tess that he shall soon want to marry, and asks Tess if she will be his wife. Tess declares that she cannot be his wife, and she claims that the reason is that his father is a parson and his mother wouldn't want her to marry him. He counters these objections, telling her that he has discussed the matter with his parents. Angel then recounts the story that his father told him about Alec d'Urberville, not mentioning the actual name, and when he asks Tess about marriage once more she says that it cannot be.", "analysis": "Hardy shifts the burden of obstacles to the romance between Tess and Angel to Tess in this chapter, in which she refuses his proposal of marriage. Although Tess claims that it is her lowly status and the objections that his parents would make to her as the rationale for her rejection of Angel, the mention of Alec d'Urberville serves as a reminder that it is rather fear of her past that drives Tess to reject Angel. Tess views this as an insurmountable obstacle to her happiness; she cannot tell Angel about her past because he would reject her in turn, while she cannot keep it as a secret for he would inevitably learn of her more sordid history"}


An up-hill and down-hill ride of twenty-odd miles through a garish
mid-day atmosphere brought him in the afternoon to a detached knoll
a mile or two west of Talbothays, whence he again looked into that
green trough of sappiness and humidity, the valley of the Var or
Froom.  Immediately he began to descend from the upland to the fat
alluvial soil below, the atmosphere grew heavier; the languid perfume
of the summer fruits, the mists, the hay, the flowers, formed therein
a vast pool of odour which at this hour seemed to make the animals,
the very bees and butterflies drowsy. Clare was now so familiar with
the spot that he knew the individual cows by their names when, a long
distance off, he saw them dotted about the meads.  It was with a
sense of luxury that he recognized his power of viewing life here
from its inner side, in a way that had been quite foreign to him in
his student-days; and, much as he loved his parents, he could not
help being aware that to come here, as now, after an experience of
home-life, affected him like throwing off splints and bandages; even
the one customary curb on the humours of English rural societies
being absent in this place, Talbothays having no resident landlord.

Not a human being was out of doors at the dairy.  The denizens were
all enjoying the usual afternoon nap of an hour or so which the
exceedingly early hours kept in summer-time rendered a necessity.
At the door the wood-hooped pails, sodden and bleached by infinite
scrubbings, hung like hats on a stand upon the forked and peeled limb
of an oak fixed there for that purpose; all of them ready and dry
for the evening milking.  Angel entered, and went through the silent
passages of the house to the back quarters, where he listened for a
moment.  Sustained snores came from the cart-house, where some of
the men were lying down; the grunt and squeal of sweltering pigs
arose from the still further distance.  The large-leaved rhubarb and
cabbage plants slept too, their broad limp surfaces hanging in the
sun like half-closed umbrellas.

He unbridled and fed his horse, and as he re-entered the house the
clock struck three.  Three was the afternoon skimming-hour; and, with
the stroke, Clare heard the creaking of the floor-boards above, and
then the touch of a descending foot on the stairs.  It was Tess's,
who in another moment came down before his eyes.

She had not heard him enter, and hardly realized his presence there.
She was yawning, and he saw the red interior of her mouth as if it
had been a snake's.  She had stretched one arm so high above her
coiled-up cable of hair that he could see its satin delicacy above
the sunburn; her face was flushed with sleep, and her eyelids hung
heavy over their pupils.  The brim-fulness of her nature breathed
from her.  It was a moment when a woman's soul is more incarnate than
at any other time; when the most spiritual beauty bespeaks itself
flesh; and sex takes the outside place in the presentation.

Then those eyes flashed brightly through their filmy heaviness,
before the remainder of her face was well awake.  With an oddly
compounded look of gladness, shyness, and surprise, she exclaimed--"O
Mr Clare!  How you frightened me--I--"

There had not at first been time for her to think of the changed
relations which his declaration had introduced; but the full sense of
the matter rose up in her face when she encountered Clare's tender
look as he stepped forward to the bottom stair.

"Dear, darling Tessy!" he whispered, putting his arm round her, and
his face to her flushed cheek.  "Don't, for Heaven's sake, Mister me
any more.  I have hastened back so soon because of you!"

Tess's excitable heart beat against his by way of reply; and there
they stood upon the red-brick floor of the entry, the sun slanting in
by the window upon his back, as he held her tightly to his breast;
upon her inclining face, upon the blue veins of her temple, upon her
naked arm, and her neck, and into the depths of her hair.  Having
been lying down in her clothes she was warm as a sunned cat.  At
first she would not look straight up at him, but her eyes soon
lifted, and his plumbed the deepness of the ever-varying pupils, with
their radiating fibrils of blue, and black, and gray, and violet,
while she regarded him as Eve at her second waking might have
regarded Adam.

"I've got to go a-skimming," she pleaded, "and I have on'y old Deb to
help me to-day.  Mrs Crick is gone to market with Mr Crick, and Retty
is not well, and the others are gone out somewhere, and won't be home
till milking."

As they retreated to the milk-house Deborah Fyander appeared on the
stairs.

"I have come back, Deborah," said Mr Clare, upwards.  "So I can help
Tess with the skimming; and, as you are very tired, I am sure, you
needn't come down till milking-time."

Possibly the Talbothays milk was not very thoroughly skimmed that
afternoon.  Tess was in a dream wherein familiar objects appeared
as having light and shade and position, but no particular outline.
Every time she held the skimmer under the pump to cool it for the
work her hand trembled, the ardour of his affection being so palpable
that she seemed to flinch under it like a plant in too burning a sun.

Then he pressed her again to his side, and when she had done running
her forefinger round the leads to cut off the cream-edge, he cleaned
it in nature's way; for the unconstrained manners of Talbothays dairy
came convenient now.

"I may as well say it now as later, dearest," he resumed gently.  "I
wish to ask you something of a very practical nature, which I have
been thinking of ever since that day last week in the meads.  I shall
soon want to marry, and, being a farmer, you see I shall require for
my wife a woman who knows all about the management of farms.  Will
you be that woman, Tessy?"

He put it that way that she might not think he had yielded to an
impulse of which his head would disapprove.

She turned quite careworn.  She had bowed to the inevitable result of
proximity, the necessity of loving him; but she had not calculated
upon this sudden corollary, which, indeed, Clare had put before her
without quite meaning himself to do it so soon.  With pain that was
like the bitterness of dissolution she murmured the words of her
indispensable and sworn answer as an honourable woman.

"O Mr Clare--I cannot be your wife--I cannot be!"

The sound of her own decision seemed to break Tess's very heart, and
she bowed her face in her grief.

"But, Tess!" he said, amazed at her reply, and holding her still more
greedily close.  "Do you say no?  Surely you love me?"

"O yes, yes!  And I would rather be yours than anybody's in the
world," returned the sweet and honest voice of the distressed girl.
"But I CANNOT marry you!"

"Tess," he said, holding her at arm's length, "you are engaged to
marry some one else!"

"No, no!"

"Then why do you refuse me?"

"I don't want to marry!  I have not thought of doing it.  I cannot!
I only want to love you."

"But why?"

Driven to subterfuge, she stammered--

"Your father is a parson, and your mother wouldn' like you to marry
such as me.  She will want you to marry a lady."

"Nonsense--I have spoken to them both.  That was partly why I went
home."

"I feel I cannot--never, never!" she echoed.

"Is it too sudden to be asked thus, my Pretty?"

"Yes--I did not expect it."

"If you will let it pass, please, Tessy, I will give you time," he
said.  "It was very abrupt to come home and speak to you all at once.
I'll not allude to it again for a while."

She again took up the shining skimmer, held it beneath the pump, and
began anew.  But she could not, as at other times, hit the exact
under-surface of the cream with the delicate dexterity required, try
as she might; sometimes she was cutting down into the milk, sometimes
in the air.  She could hardly see, her eyes having filled with two
blurring tears drawn forth by a grief which, to this her best friend
and dear advocate, she could never explain.

"I can't skim--I can't!" she said, turning away from him.

Not to agitate and hinder her longer, the considerate Clare began
talking in a more general way:

You quite misapprehend my parents.  They are the most simple-mannered
people alive, and quite unambitious.  They are two of the few
remaining Evangelical school.  Tessy, are you an Evangelical?"

"I don't know."

"You go to church very regularly, and our parson here is not very
High, they tell me."

Tess's ideas on the views of the parish clergyman, whom she heard
every week, seemed to be rather more vague than Clare's, who had
never heard him at all.

"I wish I could fix my mind on what I hear there more firmly than I
do," she remarked as a safe generality.  "It is often a great sorrow
to me."

She spoke so unaffectedly that Angel was sure in his heart that his
father could not object to her on religious grounds, even though she
did not know whether her principles were High, Low or Broad.  He
himself knew that, in reality, the confused beliefs which she held,
apparently imbibed in childhood, were, if anything, Tractarian as to
phraseology, and Pantheistic as to essence.  Confused or otherwise,
to disturb them was his last desire:


      Leave thou thy sister, when she prays,
         Her early Heaven, her happy views;
         Nor thou with shadow'd hint confuse
      A life that leads melodious days.


He had occasionally thought the counsel less honest than musical; but
he gladly conformed to it now.

He spoke further of the incidents of his visit, of his father's mode
of life, of his zeal for his principles; she grew serener, and the
undulations disappeared from her skimming; as she finished one lead
after another he followed her, and drew the plugs for letting down
the milk.

"I fancied you looked a little downcast when you came in," she
ventured to observe, anxious to keep away from the subject of
herself.

"Yes--well, my father had been talking a good deal to me of his
troubles and difficulties, and the subject always tends to depress
me.  He is so zealous that he gets many snubs and buffetings from
people of a different way of thinking from himself, and I don't
like to hear of such humiliations to a man of his age, the more
particularly as I don't think earnestness does any good when carried
so far.  He has been telling me of a very unpleasant scene in
which he took part quite recently.  He went as the deputy of some
missionary society to preach in the neighbourhood of Trantridge, a
place forty miles from here, and made it his business to expostulate
with a lax young cynic he met with somewhere about there--son of some
landowner up that way--and who has a mother afflicted with blindness.
My father addressed himself to the gentleman point-blank, and there
was quite a disturbance.  It was very foolish of my father, I
must say, to intrude his conversation upon a stranger when the
probabilities were so obvious that it would be useless.  But whatever
he thinks to be his duty, that he'll do, in season or out of season;
and, of course, he makes many enemies, not only among the absolutely
vicious, but among the easy-going, who hate being bothered.  He says
he glories in what happened, and that good may be done indirectly;
but I wish he would not wear himself out now he is getting old, and
would leave such pigs to their wallowing."

Tess's look had grown hard and worn, and her ripe mouth tragical; but
she no longer showed any tremulousness.  Clare's revived thoughts of
his father prevented his noticing her particularly; and so they went
on down the white row of liquid rectangles till they had finished
and drained them off, when the other maids returned, and took their
pails, and Deb came to scald out the leads for the new milk.  As
Tess withdrew to go afield to the cows he said to her softly--

"And my question, Tessy?"

"O no--no!" replied she with grave hopelessness, as one who had
heard anew the turmoil of her own past in the allusion to Alec
d'Urberville. "It CAN'T be!"

She went out towards the mead, joining the other milkmaids with
a bound, as if trying to make the open air drive away her sad
constraint.  All the girls drew onward to the spot where the cows
were grazing in the farther mead, the bevy advancing with the bold
grace of wild animals--the reckless, unchastened motion of women
accustomed to unlimited space--in which they abandoned themselves to
the air as a swimmer to the wave.  It seemed natural enough to him
now that Tess was again in sight to choose a mate from unconstrained
Nature, and not from the abodes of Art.



Chapter 27
Angel returns to Talbothays, where he finds Tess, who has recently awakened. Angel tells Tess that he shall soon want to marry, and asks Tess if she will be his wife. Tess declares that she cannot be his wife, and she claims that the reason is that his father is a parson and his mother wouldn't want her to marry him. He counters these objections, telling her that he has discussed the matter with his parents. Angel then recounts the story that his father told him about Alec d'Urberville, not mentioning the actual name, and when he asks Tess about marriage once more she says that it cannot be.
Hardy shifts the burden of obstacles to the romance between Tess and Angel to Tess in this chapter, in which she refuses his proposal of marriage. Although Tess claims that it is her lowly status and the objections that his parents would make to her as the rationale for her rejection of Angel, the mention of Alec d'Urberville serves as a reminder that it is rather fear of her past that drives Tess to reject Angel. Tess views this as an insurmountable obstacle to her happiness; she cannot tell Angel about her past because he would reject her in turn, while she cannot keep it as a secret for he would inevitably learn of her more sordid history