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Tess of the D'Urbervilles: Clare

Tess's spector loomed but vaguely now, until love's honest declaration brought her to poignant realization of her situation in this man-made world. But all withdrawals were overcome by Clare's gentle insistence; all attempts at revelation were lightly thwarted. Finally, within a week of the wedding-day which she had reluctantly set, her resolution takes shape in writing--a four-page confession is breathlessly thrust under his door. Ironically concealed under the carpet it lies until Tess, with a sudden late intuition on her wedding morn, discovers its hiding-place and tears it up. In a lumbering old relic of coach days (symbolic of an ancient D'Urberville legend of crime) Tess and Angel are carried to church, and upon their final departure a white cock crows thrice. "An afternoon crow," and the dairy folk shake their heads at the evil omen.

To an old farm-house--a derelict of an ancient D'Urberville mansion--in ready range of a model mill, Clare, with a sense of the practical and the romantic, takes his lovely bride. From the paneled wall outside her door two old D'Urberville portraits gleam evilly and Clare and Tess shiver as they trace a subtle likeness to her own in the malignant yet noble features. Before the glowing fire the adoring bridegroom, his wife's hand clasped in his, tells the story of his one aberration, of his forty-eight hours' dissipation with a Scarlet Woman, and confidently craves her pardon, which Tess is only too delighted to grant; and, with the first real gleam of hope, unfolds her own sad story....

The wanton action of a man of maturity--the deceived innocence of an ignorant child! And yet, the man cannot forgive the woman! All the rigid rule of his forebears, all the domination of an unjust social order, grip him. Angel Clare, the prophet of emancipation, no longer exists. For several days they lead a formal, isolated existence. Tess, whose sole wish is to please her idol, acquiesces in his attitude, and, after a first wild outburst at the injustice, does nothing to exonerate herself, and her one chance for reinstatement is blighted by the mocking witness of the vindictive portraits. No chaste-minded, unsophisticated peasant maid she, but the last dregs of a decadent stock! A separation, temporary at least, is decided upon, and while Clare rages afar, Tess again creeps home. Joan, after the first bitter reproaches for the mad disobedience of her repeated injunctions of secrecy, treats the affair with her usual fatalistic light-heartedness; but the harsh words of the father in a drunken moment of excessive ancestral pride cause a dignified departure with the conciliatory donation of half her means of subsistence and the intimation that she is rejoining her husband. Determined, however, to make no appeal to Clare's family, Tess easily finds summer employment among the farms; but with the coming of winter and too lavish contributions to her family's support, privation stares her in the face. Day after day she wanders on until at length on the high, chalky table-lands, in a great drab field of desolation, she finds the meanest, most arduous of tasks rendered tenfold difficult by a churlish boor of an employer in all the rancor of an ancient grudge against her. In the stinging rain and the chilling snow she toils unceasingly, uncomplainingly, living wholly in the hope of her husband's return. Songs that he loved she practices, the sweet, gay notes contrasting sadly with her tragic lips and great, sorrowing eyes. At length, distraught by the continued silence, she bravely decides to seek news of him from his parents, and walks the long, tremulous miles to Emminister Vicarage. Of rare spiritual as well as physical endowments, she would have undoubtedly received a welcome at the hands of the benevolent old clergyman and his wife, but an empty house reverberates to her knocking, and while she unobtrusively awaits their return from church she overhears a wayside conversation between Angel's two exemplary brothers that sends her homeward with rended heart.

The voice of a "ranter" triumphantly consigning a barnful of rustics to eternal damnation caused Tess to pause a moment in a doorway, and there on a platform of corn-bags, in sanctimonious side-whiskers and semi-clerical blacks, stood Alec D'Urberville. Animalism had yielded to fanaticism and the bold, roving eye now gleamed with a ferocious righteousness. As she passed on down the lane he came after her, imploring forgiveness and offering redemption. Repulse after repulse failed to deter Alec, who persisted day by day, at first with a marriage license and holy words, and then, his former passion uncontrollably revived by Tess's compelling beauty, his new-found religion dropped from him like a cloak, the convert disappeared, and all the arts of man and devil were employed to ensnare the girl. And poor, hopeless Tess, grinding on under a benumbing strain, was in more danger than her scorn of the man could realize. Finally her father's death, resulting in the eviction of her family from their home, precipitates Tess's doom, and as a last desperate reparation to her helpless mother and sisters she yields, with a fatalistic calm, to the inevitable.

To Sandbourne, a gay watering-place, a melancholy specter of a man, wasted by illness and regret, comes in search of his lost bride, and in a fashionable boarding-house Clare finds Tess and learns the agonizing truth. Just beyond the town she overtook him, her eyes wild and trancelike, her whole body as if bereft of soul and will. "I have killed him... he taunted me... he called you by a foul name.... I owed it to you and I owed it to myself.... It came to me as a shining light that I should get you back that way." With a final realization of the immensity of her love and the piteous plight it had brought upon her, Clare held out tender, protecting arms, and together they wandered through the untrodden ways like two children--the world and its retribution quite forgot.

For five days they continued in this idyllic state, and on the sixth night Tess half jectingly claimed sanctuary among the conspicuous ruins of the ancient pagan temple to the sun at Stonehenge. With the dawn came the guardians of the law, looming dark against the silvery horizon. In a grim, inexorable circle they waited until the sun's level rays, relentlessly reminiscent of a by-gone sacrificial day, fell full upon another victim, and Tess, deserted by all the gods, awoke. Quietly she faced her captors. "I am ready," she said.

Eight metallic strokes shiver the morning air and from a near-by hill a stricken figure rivets involuntary eyes on the flag-staff of a sullen cage of a building. For Angel the prison where Tess is confined has at this fatal hour a deadly and significant fascination. Slowly, silently, a black square creeps up the pole and flutters chill against the morning sky. Tess, more sinned against than sinning, has paid the great penalty.