Kabanata Kabanata 25 · Chapter XXV First Absence

. Chapter XXV First Absence

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.