# Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891)/Chapter 37

XXXVII
MIDNIGHT came and passed silently, for there was nothing to announce it in the Valley of the Var.
Not long after one o’clock there was a slight creak in the darkened farm-house once the mansion of the D’Urbervilles. Tess, who used the upper chamber, heard it and awoke. It had come from the corner step of the staircase, which, as usual was loosely nailed. She saw the door of her bedroom open, and the figure of her husband crossed the stream of moonlight with a curiously careful tread. He was in his shirt and trousers only, and her first flush of joy died when she perceived that his eyes were fixed in an unnatural stare on vacancy. When he reached the middle of the room he stood still and murmured, in tones of indescribable sadness—
‘Dead! dead! dead!’
​Under the influence of any strongly-disturbing force Clare would occasionally walk in his sleep, and even perform strange feats, such as he had done on the night of their return from market just before their marriage, when he re-enacted in his bedroom his combat with the man who had insulted her. Tess saw that continued mental distress had wrought him into that somnambulistic state now.
Her loyal confidence in him lay so deep down in her heart that, awake or asleep, he inspired her with no sort of personal fear. If he had entered with a pistol in his hand he would scarcely have disturbed her trust in his protectiveness.
Clare came close, and bent over her. ‘Dead, dead, dead!’ he murmured.
After fixedly regarding her for some moments with the same gaze of unmeasurable woe he bent lower, enclosed her in his arms, and rolled her in the sheet as in a shroud. Then lifting her from the bed with as much respect as one would show to a dead body in such circumstances, he carried her across the room, murmuring—
‘My poor, poor Tess—my dearest, darling Tess! So sweet, so good, so true!’
​The words of endearment, withheld so severely in his waking hours, were inexpressibly sweet to her forlorn and hungry heart. If it had been to save her weary life she would not, by moving or struggling, have put an end to the position she found herself in. Thus she lay in absolute stillness, scarcely venturing to breathe, and, wondering what he was going to do with her, suffered herself to be borne out upon the landing.
‘My wife—dead, dead!’ he said.
He paused in his labours for a moment to lean with her against the bannister, over which her feet hung ominously. Was he going to throw her down? Self-solicitude was near extinction in her, and in the sickening knowledge that he had planned to depart on the morrow, possibly for always, she lay in his arms in this precarious position with a sense rather of luxury than of terror. If they could only fall together, and both be dashed to pieces, how fit, how desirable. She did not wish to save herself.
However, he did not let her fall, but took advantage of the support of the handrail to imprint a kiss upon her lips—lips in the daytime scorned. Then he clasped her with a renewed ​firmness of hold, and descended the staircase. The creak of the loose stair did not awaken him, and they reached the ground-floor safely. Freeing one of his hands from its grasp of her for a moment, he slid back the door-bar and passed out, slightly striking his stockinged toe against the edge of the door. But this he seemed not to mind, and, bearing her off the premises, turned in the direction of the river a few yards off.
His ultimate intention, if he had any, she had not yet divined; and she found herself conjecturing on the matter as a third person might have done. So easefully had she delivered her whole being up to him that it pleased her to think he was regarding her as his absolute possession, to dispose of as he should choose. It was consoling, under the hovering terror of to-morrow’s separation, to feel that he really recognized her now as his wife Tess, and did not cast her off, even if in that recognition he went so far as to arrogate to himself the right of harming her.
Ah! now she knew what he was dreaming of—that Sunday morning when he had borne her along through the water with the other dairymaids, who had loved him nearly as much as she, ​if that were possible, which Tess could hardly admit. Clare did not cross the bridge with her, but proceeding several paces on the same side till he was drawing towards the mill, at length stood still on the brink of the river.
Its waters, in creeping down these miles of meadow-land, frequently divided, serpentining in purposeless curves, looping themselves around little islands that had no name, returning, and reembodying themselves as a broad main stream further on. Opposite the spot to which he had arrived with her was such a general confluence, and the river was proportionately voluminous and deep. Across it was a narrow foot-bridge; but now the autumn rains had washed the handrail away, leaving the bare plank only, which, lying a few inches above the speeding current, formed a giddy pathway for all but steady heads; and Tess had noticed from the window of the house in the daytime young men walking across upon it as a feat in balancing. Her husband had possibly observed the same performance; anyhow, he now mounted the plank, and, sliding one foot forward, advanced along it.
Was he going to drown her? Probably he ​was. The spot was lonely, the river deep and wide enough to make such a purpose easy of accomplishment. He might drown her if he would; it would be better than parting tomorrow to lead severed lives.
The swift stream raced and gyrated under them, tossing, distorting, and splitting the moon’s reflected face. Spots of froth travelled past, and intercepted weeds waved behind the piles. If they could both fall together into the current now, their arms would be so tightly clasped together that they could not be saved; they would go out of the world almost painlessly, and there would be no more reproach to her, or to him for marrying her. His last half-hour with her would have been a loving one, while if they lived till he awoke his daytime aversion would return, and this hour would remain to be contemplated only as a transient dream.
The impulse stirred in her, yet she dared not indulge it, to make a movement that would have precipitated them both into the gulf. How she valued her own life had been proved; but his—she had no right to tamper with it. He reached the other side with her in safety.
​Here the ground led up to a plantation, and close to it was a fence which had formed the margin of the Abbey grounds. He paused at this spot, clambered over, and, taking a new hold of her, went onward a few steps till they reached the ruined choir of the Abbey-church. Against the north wall was the empty stone coffin, of an abbot, without a lid. In this he carefully laid her. Having kissed her lips a second time, he breathed deeply, as if a greatly desired end were attained. Clare then lay down on the ground alongside, when he immediately fell into the deep dead slumber of exhaustion, and remained motionless as a log. The spurt of mental excitement which had produced the effort was now over.
Tess sat up in the coffin. The night, though dry and mild for the season, was more than sufficiently cold to make it dangerous for him to remain here long, in his half-clothed state. If he were left to himself he would in all probability stay there till the morning, and be chilled to certain death. She had heard of such deaths after sleep-walking. But how could she dare to awaken him, and let him know what he had been doing, when it would mortify him to discover his ​folly in respect of her? Tess, however, stepping out of her stone confine, shook him slightly, but was unable to arouse him without being violent. It was indispensable to do something, for she was beginning to shiver, the sheet being but a poor protection. Her excitement had in a measure kept her warm during the adventure; but that beatific interval was over.
It suddenly occurred to her to try persuasion; and accordingly she whispered in his ear, with as much firmness and decision as she could summon—
‘Let us walk on darling,’ at the same time taking him suggestively by the arm. To her relief, he unresistingly acquiesced; her words had apparently thrown him back into his dream, which thenceforward seemed to enter on a new phase, wherein he fancied she had risen as a spirit, and was leading him to Heaven. Thus she conducted him by the arm, by the track away from the ruins, and along to the outskirts of their residence where they reached the stone bridge over the stream, crossing which they stood at the manor house door. Tess’s feet were quite bare, and the stones hurt her, and chilled her to the bone; but ​Clare was in his woollen stockings, and appeared to feel no discomfort.
There was no further difficulty. She induced him to lie down on his own sofa bed, and covered him up warmly, lighting a temporary fire of wood, to dry any dampness out of him. The noise of these attentions she thought might awaken him, and secretly wished that they might. But the exhaustion of his mind and body was such that he remained undisturbed.
As soon as they met the next morning Tess divined that Angel knew nothing of how far she had been concerned in the night’s excursion, though as regarded himself, he may have had an inkling that he had not lain still. In truth, he had awakened that morning from a sleep deep as annihilation; and during those first few moments in which the brain, like a Samson shaking himself, is trying its strength, had waited in expectancy to discern its pointing; he knew that if any intention of his, concluded over-night, did not vanish in the light of morning, it stood on a basis approximating to one of pure reason, even if initiated by impulse of feeling; that it was so far, therefore, to be trusted.
​He had thus beheld in the pale morning light the resolve to separate from her; not as a hot and indignant instinct, but denuded of the passionateness which had made it scorch and burn; standing in its bones; nothing but a skeleton, but none the less there. Clare no longer hesitated.
At breakfast, and while they were packing the few remaining articles, he showed his weariness from the night’s effort so unmistakably that Tess was on the point of revealing all that had happened; but the reflection that it would anger him, grieve him, stultify him, to know that he had instinctively manifested a fondness for her of which his common-sense did not approve; that his inclination had compromised his dignity when reason slept, again deterred her. It was too much like laughing at a man when sober for his erratic deeds during intoxication.
It just crossed her mind, too, that he might have a faint recollection of his tender vagary, and was disinclined to allude to it from a conviction that she would take advantage of the undoubted opportunity it gave her of appealing to him anew not to go.
​He had ordered by letter a vehicle from the nearest town, and soon after breakfast it arrived. She saw in it the beginning of the end—the temporary end, at least, for the revelation of his tenderness by the incident of the night raised dreams of a possible future with him. The luggage was put on the top, and the man drove them off, the miller and the old waiting-woman expressing some surprise at their precipitate departure, which Clare attributed to his discovery that the mill-work was not of the modern kind which he wished to investigate, a statement that was true so far as it went. Beyond this there was nothing in the manner of their leaving to suggest a fiasco or that they were not going together to visit friends.
Their route lay near the dairy from which they had started with such solemn joy in each other a few days back, and, as Clare wished to wind up his business with Mr. Crick, Tess could hardly avoid paying Mrs. Crick a call at the same time, unless she would excite suspicion of their unhappy state.
To make the call as unobtrusive as possible they left the carriage by the wicket leading down ​from the high road to the dairy-house, and descended the track on foot, side by side. The withy-bed had been cut, and they could see over the stumps the spot to which Clare had followed her when he pressed her to be his wife; to the left the enclosure in which she had been fascinated by his harp; and far away behind the cowstalls the mead which had been the scene of their first embrace. The gold of the summer picture was now grey, the colours mean, the rich soil mud, and the river cold.
Over the barton-gate the dairyman saw them, and came forward, throwing into his face the kind of joviality deemed appropriate in Talbothays and its vicinity on the re-appearance of the newly-married. Then Mrs. Crick emerged from the house, and several others of their old acquaintance, though Marian and Retty did not appear to be there.
Tess valiantly bore their sly attacks and friendly humours, which affected her far otherwise than they supposed. In the tacit agreement of husband and wife to keep their estrangement a secret they behaved as would have been ordinary. And then, although she would rather there had ​been no word spoken on the subject, Tess had to hear in detail the story of Marian and Retty. The latter had gone home to her father’s, and Marian had left to look for employment elsewhere. They feared she would come to no good.
To dissipate the sadness of this recital Tess went and bade all her favourite cows good-bye, touching each of them with her hand, and as she and Clare stood side by side at leaving, as if united body and soul, there would have been something peculiarly sorry in their aspect to one who should have seen it truly; two limbs of one life, as they outwardly were, his arm touching hers, her skirts touching him, facing one way, as against all the dairy facing the other, speaking in their adieux as ‘we,’ and yet sundered like the poles. Perhaps something unusually stiff and embarrassed in their attitude, some awkwardness in acting up to their profession of unity, different from the natural shyness of young couples, may have been apparent, for when they were gone Mrs. Crick said to her husband—
‘How onnatural the brightness of her eyes did seem, and how they stood like waxen images and talked as if they were in a dream! Didn’t it ​strike ’ee that ’twas so? Tess had always sommat strange in her, and she’s not now quite like the proud young bride of a well-be-doing man.’
They re-entered the vehicle, and were driven along the roads to distant Weatherbury and Stagfoot Lane, till they reached Nuzzlebury, where Clare dismissed the fly and man. They rested here a while, and entering the Vale were next driven onward towards her home by a stranger who did not know their relations. At a midway point, when many miles had been passed over, and where there were cross-roads, Clare stopped the conveyance and said to Tess that if she meant to return to her mother’s house it was here that he would leave her. As they could not talk with freedom in the driver’s presence he asked her to accompany him for a few steps on foot along one of the branch roads; she assented, and directing the man to wait a few minutes they strolled away.
‘Now, let us understand each other,’ he said gently. ‘There is no anger between us, though there is that which I cannot endure at present. I will try to bring myself to endure it. I will let you know where I go to as soon as I know myself. And if I can bring myself to bear it—if ​it is desirable, possible—I will come to you. But until I come to you it will be better that you should not try to come to me.’
The severity of the decree seemed deadly to Tess; she saw his view of her clearly enough; he could regard her in no other light than that of one who had practised gross deceit upon him. Yet could a woman who had done even what she had done deserve all this? But she could contest the point with him no further. She simply repeated after him his own words.
‘Until you come to me I must not try to come to you?’
‘Just so.’
‘May I write to you?’
‘Oh yes—if you are ill, or want anything at all. I hope that will not be the case; so that it may happen that I write first to you.’
‘I agree to the conditions, Angel; because you know best what my punishment ought to be; only—only—don’t make it more than I can bear!’
That was all she said on the matter. If Tess had been artful, had she made a scene, fainted, wept hysterically, in that lonely lane, notwithstanding the fury of fastidiousness with which he ​was possessed, he would probably not have withstood her. But her mood of long-suffering made his way easy for him, and she herself was his best advocate. In her submission—which perhaps was a symptom of that acquiescence in chance too apparent in the whole D'Urberville family—the many effective chords which she could have stirred by an appeal were left untouched.
The remainder of their discourse was on practical matters only. He now handed her a packet containing a fairly good sum of money, which he had obtained from his bankers for the purpose. The brilliants, the interest in which seemed to be Tess’s for her life only (if he understood the wording of the will), he advised her to let him send to a bank for safety; and to this she readily agreed.
These things arranged he walked with Tess back to the carriage, and handed her in. The coachman was paid and told where to drive her. Taking then his own bag and umbrella—the sole articles he had brought with him hitherwards—he bade her good-bye; and they parted there and then.
​The fly moved creepingly up the hill, and Clare watched it go with an unpremeditated hope that Tess would look out of the window for one moment. But that she never thought of doing, would not have ventured to do, lying in a half-dead faint inside. Thus he beheld her recede, and in the anguish of his heart quoted a line from a poet, with peculiar emendations of his own—
God’s not in his heaven: all's wrong with the world!
When Tess had passed over the crest of the hill he turned to go his own way, and did not know that he loved her still.
Layout 2