第 十八 章 · Chapter XVIII The Miniature

. Chapter XVIII The Miniature

Angel Clare rises out of the past not altogether as a distinct figure,

but as an appreciative voice, a long regard of fixed, abstracted eyes,

and a mobility of mouth somewhat too small and delicately lined for a

man’s, though with an unexpectedly firm close of the lower lip now and

then; enough to do away with any inference of indecision. Nevertheless,

something nebulous, preoccupied, vague, in his bearing and regard,

marked him as one who probably had no very definite aim or concern

about his material future. Yet as a lad people had said of him that he

was one who might do anything if he tried.

He was the youngest son of his father, a poor parson at the other end

of the county, and had arrived at Talbothays Dairy as a six months’

pupil, after going the round of some other farms, his object being to

acquire a practical skill in the various processes of farming, with a

view either to the Colonies or the tenure of a home-farm, as

circumstances might decide.

His entry into the ranks of the agriculturists and breeders was a step

in the young man’s career which had been anticipated neither by himself

nor by others.

Mr Clare the elder, whose first wife had died and left him a daughter,

married a second late in life. This lady had somewhat unexpectedly

brought him three sons, so that between Angel, the youngest, and his

father the Vicar there seemed to be almost a missing generation. Of

these boys the aforesaid Angel, the child of his old age, was the only

son who had not taken a University degree, though he was the single one

of them whose early promise might have done full justice to an

academical training.

Some two or three years before Angel’s appearance at the Marlott dance,

on a day when he had left school and was pursuing his studies at home,

a parcel came to the Vicarage from the local bookseller’s, directed to

the Reverend James Clare. The Vicar having opened it and found it to

contain a book, read a few pages; whereupon he jumped up from his seat

and went straight to the shop with the book under his arm.

“Why has this been sent to my house?” he asked peremptorily, holding up

the volume.

“It was ordered, sir.”

“Not by me, or any one belonging to me, I am happy to say.”

The shopkeeper looked into his order-book.

“Oh, it has been misdirected, sir,” he said. “It was ordered by Mr

Angel Clare, and should have been sent to him.”

Mr Clare winced as if he had been struck. He went home pale and

dejected, and called Angel into his study.

“Look into this book, my boy,” he said. “What do you know about it?”

“I ordered it,” said Angel simply.

“What for?”

“To read.”

“How can you think of reading it?”

“How can I? Why—it is a system of philosophy. There is no more moral,

or even religious, work published.”

“Yes—moral enough; I don’t deny that. But religious!—and for _you_, who

intend to be a minister of the Gospel!”

“Since you have alluded to the matter, father,” said the son, with

anxious thought upon his face, “I should like to say, once for all,

that I should prefer not to take Orders. I fear I could not

conscientiously do so. I love the Church as one loves a parent. I shall

always have the warmest affection for her. There is no institution for

whose history I have a deeper admiration; but I cannot honestly be

ordained her minister, as my brothers are, while she refuses to

liberate her mind from an untenable redemptive theolatry.”

It had never occurred to the straightforward and simple-minded Vicar

that one of his own flesh and blood could come to this! He was

stultified, shocked, paralysed. And if Angel were not going to enter

the Church, what was the use of sending him to Cambridge? The

University as a step to anything but ordination seemed, to this man of

fixed ideas, a preface without a volume. He was a man not merely

religious, but devout; a firm believer—not as the phrase is now

elusively construed by theological thimble-riggers in the Church and

out of it, but in the old and ardent sense of the Evangelical school:

one who could

Indeed opine

That the Eternal and Divine

Did, eighteen centuries ago

In very truth...

Angel’s father tried argument, persuasion, entreaty.

“No, father; I cannot underwrite Article Four (leave alone the rest),

taking it ‘in the literal and grammatical sense’ as required by the

Declaration; and, therefore, I can’t be a parson in the present state

of affairs,” said Angel. “My whole instinct in matters of religion is

towards reconstruction; to quote your favorite Epistle to the Hebrews,

‘the removing of those things that are shaken, as of things that are

made, that those things which cannot be shaken may remain.’”

His father grieved so deeply that it made Angel quite ill to see him.

“What is the good of your mother and me economizing and stinting

ourselves to give you a University education, if it is not to be used

for the honour and glory of God?” his father repeated.

“Why, that it may be used for the honour and glory of man, father.”

Perhaps if Angel had persevered he might have gone to Cambridge like

his brothers. But the Vicar’s view of that seat of learning as a

stepping-stone to Orders alone was quite a family tradition; and so

rooted was the idea in his mind that perseverance began to appear to

the sensitive son akin to an intent to misappropriate a trust, and

wrong the pious heads of the household, who had been and were, as his

father had hinted, compelled to exercise much thrift to carry out this

uniform plan of education for the three young men.

“I will do without Cambridge,” said Angel at last. “I feel that I have

no right to go there in the circumstances.”

The effects of this decisive debate were not long in showing

themselves. He spent years and years in desultory studies,

undertakings, and meditations; he began to evince considerable

indifference to social forms and observances. The material distinctions

of rank and wealth he increasingly despised. Even the “good old family”

(to use a favourite phrase of a late local worthy) had no aroma for him

unless there were good new resolutions in its representatives. As a

balance to these austerities, when he went to live in London to see

what the world was like, and with a view to practising a profession or

business there, he was carried off his head, and nearly entrapped by a

woman much older than himself, though luckily he escaped not greatly

the worse for the experience.

Early association with country solitudes had bred in him an

unconquerable, and almost unreasonable, aversion to modern town life,

and shut him out from such success as he might have aspired to by

following a mundane calling in the impracticability of the spiritual

one. But something had to be done; he had wasted many valuable years;

and having an acquaintance who was starting on a thriving life as a

Colonial farmer, it occurred to Angel that this might be a lead in the

right direction. Farming, either in the Colonies, America, or at

home—farming, at any rate, after becoming well qualified for the

business by a careful apprenticeship—that was a vocation which would

probably afford an independence without the sacrifice of what he valued

even more than a competency—intellectual liberty.

So we find Angel Clare at six-and-twenty here at Talbothays as a

student of kine, and, as there were no houses near at hand in which he

could get a comfortable lodging, a boarder at the dairyman’s.

His room was an immense attic which ran the whole length of the

dairy-house. It could only be reached by a ladder from the cheese-loft,

and had been closed up for a long time till he arrived and selected it

as his retreat. Here Clare had plenty of space, and could often be

heard by the dairy-folk pacing up and down when the household had gone

to rest. A portion was divided off at one end by a curtain, behind

which was his bed, the outer part being furnished as a homely

sitting-room.

At first he lived up above entirely, reading a good deal, and strumming

upon an old harp which he had bought at a sale, saying when in a bitter

humour that he might have to get his living by it in the streets some

day. But he soon preferred to read human nature by taking his meals

downstairs in the general dining-kitchen, with the dairyman and his

wife, and the maids and men, who all together formed a lively assembly;

for though but few milking hands slept in the house, several joined the

family at meals. The longer Clare resided here the less objection had

he to his company, and the more did he like to share quarters with them

in common.

Much to his surprise he took, indeed, a real delight in their

companionship. The conventional farm-folk of his

imagination—personified in the newspaper-press by the pitiable dummy

known as Hodge—were obliterated after a few days’ residence. At close

quarters no Hodge was to be seen. At first, it is true, when Clare’s

intelligence was fresh from a contrasting society, these friends with

whom he now hobnobbed seemed a little strange. Sitting down as a level

member of the dairyman’s household seemed at the outset an undignified

proceeding. The ideas, the modes, the surroundings, appeared

retrogressive and unmeaning. But with living on there, day after day,

the acute sojourner became conscious of a new aspect in the spectacle.

Without any objective change whatever, variety had taken the place of

monotonousness. His host and his host’s household, his men and his

maids, as they became intimately known to Clare, began to differentiate

themselves as in a chemical process. The thought of Pascal’s was

brought home to him: “_A mesure qu’on a plus d’esprit, on trouve qu’il

y a plus d’hommes originaux. Les gens du commun ne trouvent pas de

différence entre les hommes_.” The typical and unvarying Hodge ceased

to exist. He had been disintegrated into a number of varied

fellow-creatures—beings of many minds, beings infinite in difference;

some happy, many serene, a few depressed, one here and there bright

even to genius, some stupid, others wanton, others austere; some mutely

Miltonic, some potentially Cromwellian—into men who had private views

of each other, as he had of his friends; who could applaud or condemn

each other, amuse or sadden themselves by the contemplation of each

other’s foibles or vices; men every one of whom walked in his own

individual way the road to dusty death.

Unexpectedly he began to like the outdoor life for its own sake, and

for what it brought, apart from its bearing on his own proposed career.

Considering his position he became wonderfully free from the chronic

melancholy which is taking hold of the civilized races with the decline

of belief in a beneficent Power. For the first time of late years he

could read as his musings inclined him, without any eye to cramming for

a profession, since the few farming handbooks which he deemed it

desirable to master occupied him but little time.

He grew away from old associations, and saw something new in life and

humanity. Secondarily, he made close acquaintance with phenomena which

he had before known but darkly—the seasons in their moods, morning and

evening, night and noon, winds in their different tempers, trees,

waters and mists, shades and silences, and the voices of inanimate

things.

The early mornings were still sufficiently cool to render a fire

acceptable in the large room wherein they breakfasted; and, by Mrs

Crick’s orders, who held that he was too genteel to mess at their

table, it was Angel Clare’s custom to sit in the yawning chimney-corner

during the meal, his cup-and-saucer and plate being placed on a hinged

flap at his elbow. The light from the long, wide, mullioned window

opposite shone in upon his nook, and, assisted by a secondary light of

cold blue quality which shone down the chimney, enabled him to read

there easily whenever disposed to do so. Between Clare and the window

was the table at which his companions sat, their munching profiles

rising sharp against the panes; while to the side was the milk-house

door, through which were visible the rectangular leads in rows, full to

the brim with the morning’s milk. At the further end the great churn

could be seen revolving, and its slip-slopping heard—the moving power

being discernible through the window in the form of a spiritless horse

walking in a circle and driven by a boy.

For several days after Tess’s arrival Clare, sitting abstractedly

reading from some book, periodical, or piece of music just come by

post, hardly noticed that she was present at table. She talked so

little, and the other maids talked so much, that the babble did not

strike him as possessing a new note, and he was ever in the habit of

neglecting the particulars of an outward scene for the general

impression. One day, however, when he had been conning one of his

music-scores, and by force of imagination was hearing the tune in his

head, he lapsed into listlessness, and the music-sheet rolled to the

hearth. He looked at the fire of logs, with its one flame pirouetting

on the top in a dying dance after the breakfast-cooking and boiling,

and it seemed to jig to his inward tune; also at the two chimney crooks

dangling down from the cotterel, or cross-bar, plumed with soot, which

quivered to the same melody; also at the half-empty kettle whining an

accompaniment. The conversation at the table mixed in with his

phantasmal orchestra till he thought: “What a fluty voice one of those

milkmaids has! I suppose it is the new one.”

Clare looked round upon her, seated with the others.

She was not looking towards him. Indeed, owing to his long silence, his

presence in the room was almost forgotten.

“I don’t know about ghosts,” she was saying; “but I do know that our

souls can be made to go outside our bodies when we are alive.”

The dairyman turned to her with his mouth full, his eyes charged with

serious inquiry, and his great knife and fork (breakfasts were

breakfasts here) planted erect on the table, like the beginning of a

gallows.

“What—really now? And is it so, maidy?” he said.

“A very easy way to feel ’em go,” continued Tess, “is to lie on the

grass at night and look straight up at some big bright star; and, by

fixing your mind upon it, you will soon find that you are hundreds and

hundreds o’ miles away from your body, which you don’t seem to want at

all.”

The dairyman removed his hard gaze from Tess, and fixed it on his wife.

“Now that’s a rum thing, Christianer—hey? To think o’ the miles I’ve

vamped o’ starlight nights these last thirty year, courting, or

trading, or for doctor, or for nurse, and yet never had the least

notion o’ that till now, or feeled my soul rise so much as an inch

above my shirt-collar.”

The general attention being drawn to her, including that of the

dairyman’s pupil, Tess flushed, and remarking evasively that it was

only a fancy, resumed her breakfast.

Clare continued to observe her. She soon finished her eating, and

having a consciousness that Clare was regarding her, began to trace

imaginary patterns on the tablecloth with her forefinger with the

constraint of a domestic animal that perceives itself to be watched.

“What a fresh and virginal daughter of Nature that milkmaid is!” he

said to himself.

And then he seemed to discern in her something that was familiar,

something which carried him back into a joyous and unforeseeing past,

before the necessity of taking thought had made the heavens gray. He

concluded that he had beheld her before; where he could not tell. A

casual encounter during some country ramble it certainly had been, and

he was not greatly curious about it. But the circumstance was

sufficient to lead him to select Tess in preference to the other pretty

milkmaids when he wished to contemplate contiguous womankind.