feat_summary_path: finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Tess of the D'Urbervilles/section_18_part_3.txt
feat_book_id: Tess of the D'Urbervilles.chapter 50
feat_summary_id: chapter 50
feat_summary: {"name": "CHAPTER 50", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820050202/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmTessD58.asp", "summary": "In Marlott, Tess resumes her difficult work in the potato fields and takes care of her ailing parents. Once while working in the fields, she is astonished to find that Alec is working with her. He again begs Tess to let him help she and her family, a request that she resolutely refuses. Alec expresses his anger and leaves. While she is returning home, one of her sisters brings her the news of her father's death. This is a serious blow to her, especially since the family will not be able to remain in their house after his death. Another tenant farmer has the legal right to it now.", "analysis": "Notes To help pass the time in Marlott, Tess thinks about her past. She is again nostalgic about the May-Day dance episode, when she first spied the handsome Angel. It always pricks her heart to think that if she had been Angel's partner at that dance, life would perhaps have been totally different. Fate, however, did not allow that to happen. Now, there are only memories and drudgery. In tempting Tess to let him help her, Alec refers to the temptation of Eve in the Garden of Eden; he reminds her that Satan was successful in his temptation. Like Satan, Alec believes that he will also achieve his desire, if the temptations continue. With John's death, the family is left homeless, and Tess's plight is worse than ever. Fate is wearing her down and preparing her to accept temptation,"}
text: 
  
  She plunged into the chilly equinoctial darkness as the clock struck
  ten, for her fifteen miles' walk under the steely stars.  In lonely
  districts night is a protection rather than a danger to a noiseless
  pedestrian, and knowing this, Tess pursued the nearest course along
  by-lanes that she would almost have feared in the day-time; but
  marauders were wanting now, and spectral fears were driven out of
  her mind by thoughts of her mother.  Thus she proceeded mile after
  mile, ascending and descending till she came to Bulbarrow, and about
  midnight looked from that height into the abyss of chaotic shade
  which was all that revealed itself of the vale on whose further side
  she was born.  Having already traversed about five miles on the
  upland, she had now some ten or eleven in the lowland before her
  journey would be finished.  The winding road downwards became just
  visible to her under the wan starlight as she followed it, and
  soon she paced a soil so contrasting with that above it that the
  difference was perceptible to the tread and to the smell.  It was the
  heavy clay land of Blackmoor Vale, and a part of the Vale to which
  turnpike-roads had never penetrated.  Superstitions linger longest on
  these heavy soils.  Having once been forest, at this shadowy time it
  seemed to assert something of its old character, the far and the near
  being blended, and every tree and tall hedge making the most of its
  presence.  The harts that had been hunted here, the witches that had
  been pricked and ducked, the green-spangled fairies that "whickered"
  at you as you passed;--the place teemed with beliefs in them still,
  and they formed an impish multitude now.
  
  At Nuttlebury she passed the village inn, whose sign creaked in
  response to the greeting of her footsteps, which not a human soul
  heard but herself.  Under the thatched roofs her mind's eye beheld
  relaxed tendons and flaccid muscles, spread out in the darkness
  beneath coverlets made of little purple patchwork squares, and
  undergoing a bracing process at the hands of sleep for renewed labour
  on the morrow, as soon as a hint of pink nebulosity appeared on
  Hambledon Hill.
  
  At three she turned the last corner of the maze of lanes she had
  threaded, and entered Marlott, passing the field in which as a
  club-girl she had first seen Angel Clare, when he had not danced
  with her; the sense of disappointment remained with her yet.  In the
  direction of her mother's house she saw a light.  It came from the
  bedroom window, and a branch waved in front of it and made it wink at
  her.  As soon as she could discern the outline of the house--newly
  thatched with her money--it had all its old effect upon Tess's
  imagination.  Part of her body and life it ever seemed to be; the
  slope of its dormers, the finish of its gables, the broken courses of
  brick which topped the chimney, all had something in common with her
  personal character.  A stupefaction had come into these features, to
  her regard; it meant the illness of her mother.
  
  She opened the door so softly as to disturb nobody; the lower room
  was vacant, but the neighbour who was sitting up with her mother came
  to the top of the stairs, and whispered that Mrs Durbeyfield was no
  better, though she was sleeping just then.  Tess prepared herself a
  breakfast, and then took her place as nurse in her mother's chamber.
  
  In the morning, when she contemplated the children, they had all a
  curiously elongated look; although she had been away little more than
  a year, their growth was astounding; and the necessity of applying
  herself heart and soul to their needs took her out of her own cares.
  
  Her father's ill-health was the same indefinite kind, and he sat in
  his chair as usual.  But the day after her arrival he was unusually
  bright.  He had a rational scheme for living, and Tess asked him what
  it was.
  
  "I'm thinking of sending round to all the old antiqueerians in this
  part of England," he said, "asking them to subscribe to a fund to
  maintain me.  I'm sure they'd see it as a romantical, artistical,
  and proper thing to do.  They spend lots o' money in keeping up old
  ruins, and finding the bones o' things, and such like; and living
  remains must be more interesting to 'em still, if they only knowed
  of me.  Would that somebody would go round and tell 'em what there
  is living among 'em, and they thinking nothing of him!  If Pa'son
  Tringham, who discovered me, had lived, he'd ha' done it, I'm sure."
  
  Tess postponed her arguments on this high project till she had
  grappled with pressing matters in hand, which seemed little improved
  by her remittances.  When indoor necessities had been eased, she
  turned her attention to external things.  It was now the season for
  planting and sowing; many gardens and allotments of the villagers
  had already received their spring tillage; but the garden and the
  allotment of the Durbeyfields were behindhand.  She found, to her
  dismay, that this was owing to their having eaten all the seed
  potatoes,--that last lapse of the improvident.  At the earliest
  moment she obtained what others she could procure, and in a few
  days her father was well enough to see to the garden, under Tess's
  persuasive efforts: while she herself undertook the allotment-plot
  which they rented in a field a couple of hundred yards out of the
  village.
  
  She liked doing it after the confinement of the sick chamber, where
  she was not now required by reason of her mother's improvement.
  Violent motion relieved thought.  The plot of ground was in a high,
  dry, open enclosure, where there were forty or fifty such pieces,
  and where labour was at its briskest when the hired labour of the
  day had ended.  Digging began usually at six o'clock and extended
  indefinitely into the dusk or moonlight.  Just now heaps of dead
  weeds and refuse were burning on many of the plots, the dry weather
  favouring their combustion.
  
  One fine day Tess and 'Liza-Lu worked on here with their neighbours
  till the last rays of the sun smote flat upon the white pegs that
  divided the plots.  As soon as twilight succeeded to sunset the flare
  of the couch-grass and cabbage-stalk fires began to light up the
  allotments fitfully, their outlines appearing and disappearing under
  the dense smoke as wafted by the wind.  When a fire glowed, banks
  of smoke, blown level along the ground, would themselves become
  illuminated to an opaque lustre, screening the workpeople from one
  another; and the meaning of the "pillar of a cloud", which was a wall
  by day and a light by night, could be understood.
  
  As evening thickened, some of the gardening men and women gave over
  for the night, but the greater number remained to get their planting
  done, Tess being among them, though she sent her sister home.  It was
  on one of the couch-burning plots that she laboured with her fork,
  its four shining prongs resounding against the stones and dry clods
  in little clicks.  Sometimes she was completely involved in the smoke
  of her fire; then it would leave her figure free, irradiated by the
  brassy glare from the heap.  She was oddly dressed to-night, and
  presented a somewhat staring aspect, her attire being a gown bleached
  by many washings, with a short black jacket over it, the effect of
  the whole being that of a wedding and funeral guest in one.  The
  women further back wore white aprons, which, with their pale faces,
  were all that could be seen of them in the gloom, except when at
  moments they caught a flash from the flames.
  
  Westward, the wiry boughs of the bare thorn hedge which formed the
  boundary of the field rose against the pale opalescence of the lower
  sky.  Above, Jupiter hung like a full-blown jonquil, so bright
  as almost to throw a shade.  A few small nondescript stars were
  appearing elsewhere.  In the distance a dog barked, and wheels
  occasionally rattled along the dry road.
  
  Still the prongs continued to click assiduously, for it was not late;
  and though the air was fresh and keen there was a whisper of spring
  in it that cheered the workers on.  Something in the place, the
  hours, the crackling fires, the fantastic mysteries of light and
  shade, made others as well as Tess enjoy being there. Nightfall,
  which in the frost of winter comes as a fiend and in the warmth of
  summer as a lover, came as a tranquillizer on this March day.
  
  Nobody looked at his or her companions.  The eyes of all were on the
  soil as its turned surface was revealed by the fires.  Hence as Tess
  stirred the clods and sang her foolish little songs with scarce
  now a hope that Clare would ever hear them, she did not for a long
  time notice the person who worked nearest to her--a man in a long
  smockfrock who, she found, was forking the same plot as herself, and
  whom she supposed her father had sent there to advance the work.
  She became more conscious of him when the direction of his digging
  brought him closer.  Sometimes the smoke divided them; then it
  swerved, and the two were visible to each other but divided from all
  the rest.
  
  Tess did not speak to her fellow-worker, nor did he speak to her.
  Nor did she think of him further than to recollect that he had not
  been there when it was broad daylight, and that she did not know
  him as any one of the Marlott labourers, which was no wonder, her
  absences having been so long and frequent of late years.  By-and-by
  he dug so close to her that the fire-beams were reflected as
  distinctly from the steel prongs of his fork as from her own.  On
  going up to the fire to throw a pitch of dead weeds upon it, she
  found that he did the same on the other side. The fire flared up,
  and she beheld the face of d'Urberville.
  
  The unexpectedness of his presence, the grotesqueness of his
  appearance in a gathered smockfrock, such as was now worn only by the
  most old-fashioned of the labourers, had a ghastly comicality that
  chilled her as to its bearing.  D'Urberville emitted a low, long
  laugh.
  
  "If I were inclined to joke, I should say, How much this seems like
  Paradise!" he remarked whimsically, looking at her with an inclined
  head.
  
  "What do you say?" she weakly asked.
  
  "A jester might say this is just like Paradise.  You are Eve, and I
  am the old Other One come to tempt you in the disguise of an inferior
  animal.  I used to be quite up in that scene of Milton's when I was
  theological.  Some of it goes--
  
  
     "'Empress, the way is ready, and not long,
     Beyond a row of myrtles...
     ... If thou accept
     My conduct, I can bring thee thither soon.'
     'Lead then,' said Eve.
  
  
  "And so on.  My dear Tess, I am only putting this to you as a thing
  that you might have supposed or said quite untruly, because you think
  so badly of me."
  
  "I never said you were Satan, or thought it.  I don't think of you in
  that way at all.  My thoughts of you are quite cold, except when you
  affront me.  What, did you come digging here entirely because of me?"
  
  "Entirely.  To see you; nothing more.  The smockfrock, which I
  saw hanging for sale as I came along, was an afterthought, that I
  mightn't be noticed.  I come to protest against your working like
  this."
  
  "But I like doing it--it is for my father."
  
  "Your engagement at the other place is ended?"
  
  "Yes."
  
  "Where are you going to next?  To join your dear husband?"
  
  She could not bear the humiliating reminder.
  
  "O--I don't know!" she said bitterly.  "I have no husband!"
  
  "It is quite true--in the sense you mean.  But you have a friend, and
  I have determined that you shall be comfortable in spite of yourself.
  When you get down to your house you will see what I have sent there
  for you."
  
  "O, Alec, I wish you wouldn't give me anything at all!  I cannot take
  it from you!  I don't like--it is not right!"
  
  "It IS right!" he cried lightly.  "I am not going to see a woman whom
  I feel so tenderly for as I do for you in trouble without trying to
  help her."
  
  "But I am very well off!  I am only in trouble about--about--not
  about living at all!"
  
  She turned, and desperately resumed her digging, tears dripping upon
  the fork-handle and upon the clods.
  
  "About the children--your brothers and sisters," he resumed. "I've
  been thinking of them."
  
  Tess's heart quivered--he was touching her in a weak place.  He had
  divined her chief anxiety.  Since returning home her soul had gone
  out to those children with an affection that was passionate.
  
  "If your mother does not recover, somebody ought to do something for
  them; since your father will not be able to do much, I suppose?"
  
  "He can with my assistance.  He must!"
  
  "And with mine."
  
  "No, sir!"
  
  "How damned foolish this is!" burst out d'Urberville.  "Why, he
  thinks we are the same family; and will be quite satisfied!"
  
  "He don't.  I've undeceived him."
  
  "The more fool you!"
  
  D'Urberville in anger retreated from her to the hedge, where he
  pulled off the long smockfrock which had disguised him; and rolling
  it up and pushing it into the couch-fire, went away.
  
  Tess could not get on with her digging after this; she felt restless;
  she wondered if he had gone back to her father's house; and taking
  the fork in her hand proceeded homewards.
  
  Some twenty yards from the house she was met by one of her sisters.
  
  "O, Tessy--what do you think!  'Liza-Lu is a-crying, and there's a
  lot of folk in the house, and mother is a good deal better, but they
  think father is dead!"
  
  The child realized the grandeur of the news; but not as yet its
  sadness, and stood looking at Tess with round-eyed importance till,
  beholding the effect produced upon her, she said--
  
  "What, Tess, shan't we talk to father never no more?"
  
  "But father was only a little bit ill!" exclaimed Tess distractedly.
  
  'Liza-Lu came up.
  
  "He dropped down just now, and the doctor who was there for mother
  said there was no chance for him, because his heart was growed in."
  
  Yes; the Durbeyfield couple had changed places; the dying one was
  out of danger, and the indisposed one was dead.  The news meant even
  more than it sounded.  Her father's life had a value apart from his
  personal achievements, or perhaps it would not have had much. It
  was the last of the three lives for whose duration the house and
  premises were held under a lease; and it had long been coveted by the
  tenant-farmer for his regular labourers, who were stinted in cottage
  accommodation.  Moreover, "liviers" were disapproved of in villages
  almost as much as little freeholders, because of their independence
  of manner, and when a lease determined it was never renewed.
  
  Thus the Durbeyfields, once d'Urbervilles, saw descending upon them
  the destiny which, no doubt, when they were among the Olympians of
  the county, they had caused to descend many a time, and severely
  enough, upon the heads of such landless ones as they themselves were
  now.  So do flux and reflux--the rhythm of change--alternate and
  persist in everything under the sky.
  
  
  
feat_summary_name: CHAPTER 50
target: In Marlott, Tess resumes her difficult work in the potato fields and takes care of her ailing parents. Once while working in the fields, she is astonished to find that Alec is working with her. He again begs Tess to let him help she and her family, a request that she resolutely refuses. Alec expresses his anger and leaves. While she is returning home, one of her sisters brings her the news of her father's death. This is a serious blow to her, especially since the family will not be able to remain in their house after his death. Another tenant farmer has the legal right to it now.
feat_summary_analysis: Notes To help pass the time in Marlott, Tess thinks about her past. She is again nostalgic about the May-Day dance episode, when she first spied the handsome Angel. It always pricks her heart to think that if she had been Angel's partner at that dance, life would perhaps have been totally different. Fate, however, did not allow that to happen. Now, there are only memories and drudgery. In tempting Tess to let him help her, Alec refers to the temptation of Eve in the Garden of Eden; he reminds her that Satan was successful in his temptation. Like Satan, Alec believes that he will also achieve his desire, if the temptations continue. With John's death, the family is left homeless, and Tess's plight is worse than ever. Fate is wearing her down and preparing her to accept temptation,