feat_summary_path: finished_summaries/novelguide/Tess of the d'Urbervilles/section_4_part_3.txt
feat_book_id: Tess of the d'Urbervilles.chapter xxvii
feat_summary_id: chapter xxvii
feat_summary: {"name": "Chapter XXVII", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210213065711/https://www.novelguide.com/tess-of-the-durbervilles/summaries/phase4-chapter25-34", "summary": "When Angel returns to the dairy, Tess is waking up from the afternoon nap, required during the long summer working hours. Struck by her beauty, he asks her to marry him. She becomes visibly agitated, tells him that she loves him, but that it's out of the question for her to marry him: \"Oh, Mr. Clare--I cannot be your wife\". He dismisses her answer and tells her to take her time but never lets up in persuading her otherwise. Despite her protests, Tess knows that that she cannot ultimately refuse him", "analysis": ""}
text: 
  
  An up-hill and down-hill ride of twenty-odd miles through a garish
  mid-day atmosphere brought him in the afternoon to a detached knoll
  a mile or two west of Talbothays, whence he again looked into that
  green trough of sappiness and humidity, the valley of the Var or
  Froom.  Immediately he began to descend from the upland to the fat
  alluvial soil below, the atmosphere grew heavier; the languid perfume
  of the summer fruits, the mists, the hay, the flowers, formed therein
  a vast pool of odour which at this hour seemed to make the animals,
  the very bees and butterflies drowsy. Clare was now so familiar with
  the spot that he knew the individual cows by their names when, a long
  distance off, he saw them dotted about the meads.  It was with a
  sense of luxury that he recognized his power of viewing life here
  from its inner side, in a way that had been quite foreign to him in
  his student-days; and, much as he loved his parents, he could not
  help being aware that to come here, as now, after an experience of
  home-life, affected him like throwing off splints and bandages; even
  the one customary curb on the humours of English rural societies
  being absent in this place, Talbothays having no resident landlord.
  
  Not a human being was out of doors at the dairy.  The denizens were
  all enjoying the usual afternoon nap of an hour or so which the
  exceedingly early hours kept in summer-time rendered a necessity.
  At the door the wood-hooped pails, sodden and bleached by infinite
  scrubbings, hung like hats on a stand upon the forked and peeled limb
  of an oak fixed there for that purpose; all of them ready and dry
  for the evening milking.  Angel entered, and went through the silent
  passages of the house to the back quarters, where he listened for a
  moment.  Sustained snores came from the cart-house, where some of
  the men were lying down; the grunt and squeal of sweltering pigs
  arose from the still further distance.  The large-leaved rhubarb and
  cabbage plants slept too, their broad limp surfaces hanging in the
  sun like half-closed umbrellas.
  
  He unbridled and fed his horse, and as he re-entered the house the
  clock struck three.  Three was the afternoon skimming-hour; and, with
  the stroke, Clare heard the creaking of the floor-boards above, and
  then the touch of a descending foot on the stairs.  It was Tess's,
  who in another moment came down before his eyes.
  
  She had not heard him enter, and hardly realized his presence there.
  She was yawning, and he saw the red interior of her mouth as if it
  had been a snake's.  She had stretched one arm so high above her
  coiled-up cable of hair that he could see its satin delicacy above
  the sunburn; her face was flushed with sleep, and her eyelids hung
  heavy over their pupils.  The brim-fulness of her nature breathed
  from her.  It was a moment when a woman's soul is more incarnate than
  at any other time; when the most spiritual beauty bespeaks itself
  flesh; and sex takes the outside place in the presentation.
  
  Then those eyes flashed brightly through their filmy heaviness,
  before the remainder of her face was well awake.  With an oddly
  compounded look of gladness, shyness, and surprise, she exclaimed--"O
  Mr Clare!  How you frightened me--I--"
  
  There had not at first been time for her to think of the changed
  relations which his declaration had introduced; but the full sense of
  the matter rose up in her face when she encountered Clare's tender
  look as he stepped forward to the bottom stair.
  
  "Dear, darling Tessy!" he whispered, putting his arm round her, and
  his face to her flushed cheek.  "Don't, for Heaven's sake, Mister me
  any more.  I have hastened back so soon because of you!"
  
  Tess's excitable heart beat against his by way of reply; and there
  they stood upon the red-brick floor of the entry, the sun slanting in
  by the window upon his back, as he held her tightly to his breast;
  upon her inclining face, upon the blue veins of her temple, upon her
  naked arm, and her neck, and into the depths of her hair.  Having
  been lying down in her clothes she was warm as a sunned cat.  At
  first she would not look straight up at him, but her eyes soon
  lifted, and his plumbed the deepness of the ever-varying pupils, with
  their radiating fibrils of blue, and black, and gray, and violet,
  while she regarded him as Eve at her second waking might have
  regarded Adam.
  
  "I've got to go a-skimming," she pleaded, "and I have on'y old Deb to
  help me to-day.  Mrs Crick is gone to market with Mr Crick, and Retty
  is not well, and the others are gone out somewhere, and won't be home
  till milking."
  
  As they retreated to the milk-house Deborah Fyander appeared on the
  stairs.
  
  "I have come back, Deborah," said Mr Clare, upwards.  "So I can help
  Tess with the skimming; and, as you are very tired, I am sure, you
  needn't come down till milking-time."
  
  Possibly the Talbothays milk was not very thoroughly skimmed that
  afternoon.  Tess was in a dream wherein familiar objects appeared
  as having light and shade and position, but no particular outline.
  Every time she held the skimmer under the pump to cool it for the
  work her hand trembled, the ardour of his affection being so palpable
  that she seemed to flinch under it like a plant in too burning a sun.
  
  Then he pressed her again to his side, and when she had done running
  her forefinger round the leads to cut off the cream-edge, he cleaned
  it in nature's way; for the unconstrained manners of Talbothays dairy
  came convenient now.
  
  "I may as well say it now as later, dearest," he resumed gently.  "I
  wish to ask you something of a very practical nature, which I have
  been thinking of ever since that day last week in the meads.  I shall
  soon want to marry, and, being a farmer, you see I shall require for
  my wife a woman who knows all about the management of farms.  Will
  you be that woman, Tessy?"
  
  He put it that way that she might not think he had yielded to an
  impulse of which his head would disapprove.
  
  She turned quite careworn.  She had bowed to the inevitable result of
  proximity, the necessity of loving him; but she had not calculated
  upon this sudden corollary, which, indeed, Clare had put before her
  without quite meaning himself to do it so soon.  With pain that was
  like the bitterness of dissolution she murmured the words of her
  indispensable and sworn answer as an honourable woman.
  
  "O Mr Clare--I cannot be your wife--I cannot be!"
  
  The sound of her own decision seemed to break Tess's very heart, and
  she bowed her face in her grief.
  
  "But, Tess!" he said, amazed at her reply, and holding her still more
  greedily close.  "Do you say no?  Surely you love me?"
  
  "O yes, yes!  And I would rather be yours than anybody's in the
  world," returned the sweet and honest voice of the distressed girl.
  "But I CANNOT marry you!"
  
  "Tess," he said, holding her at arm's length, "you are engaged to
  marry some one else!"
  
  "No, no!"
  
  "Then why do you refuse me?"
  
  "I don't want to marry!  I have not thought of doing it.  I cannot!
  I only want to love you."
  
  "But why?"
  
  Driven to subterfuge, she stammered--
  
  "Your father is a parson, and your mother wouldn' like you to marry
  such as me.  She will want you to marry a lady."
  
  "Nonsense--I have spoken to them both.  That was partly why I went
  home."
  
  "I feel I cannot--never, never!" she echoed.
  
  "Is it too sudden to be asked thus, my Pretty?"
  
  "Yes--I did not expect it."
  
  "If you will let it pass, please, Tessy, I will give you time," he
  said.  "It was very abrupt to come home and speak to you all at once.
  I'll not allude to it again for a while."
  
  She again took up the shining skimmer, held it beneath the pump, and
  began anew.  But she could not, as at other times, hit the exact
  under-surface of the cream with the delicate dexterity required, try
  as she might; sometimes she was cutting down into the milk, sometimes
  in the air.  She could hardly see, her eyes having filled with two
  blurring tears drawn forth by a grief which, to this her best friend
  and dear advocate, she could never explain.
  
  "I can't skim--I can't!" she said, turning away from him.
  
  Not to agitate and hinder her longer, the considerate Clare began
  talking in a more general way:
  
  You quite misapprehend my parents.  They are the most simple-mannered
  people alive, and quite unambitious.  They are two of the few
  remaining Evangelical school.  Tessy, are you an Evangelical?"
  
  "I don't know."
  
  "You go to church very regularly, and our parson here is not very
  High, they tell me."
  
  Tess's ideas on the views of the parish clergyman, whom she heard
  every week, seemed to be rather more vague than Clare's, who had
  never heard him at all.
  
  "I wish I could fix my mind on what I hear there more firmly than I
  do," she remarked as a safe generality.  "It is often a great sorrow
  to me."
  
  She spoke so unaffectedly that Angel was sure in his heart that his
  father could not object to her on religious grounds, even though she
  did not know whether her principles were High, Low or Broad.  He
  himself knew that, in reality, the confused beliefs which she held,
  apparently imbibed in childhood, were, if anything, Tractarian as to
  phraseology, and Pantheistic as to essence.  Confused or otherwise,
  to disturb them was his last desire:
  
  
        Leave thou thy sister, when she prays,
           Her early Heaven, her happy views;
           Nor thou with shadow'd hint confuse
        A life that leads melodious days.
  
  
  He had occasionally thought the counsel less honest than musical; but
  he gladly conformed to it now.
  
  He spoke further of the incidents of his visit, of his father's mode
  of life, of his zeal for his principles; she grew serener, and the
  undulations disappeared from her skimming; as she finished one lead
  after another he followed her, and drew the plugs for letting down
  the milk.
  
  "I fancied you looked a little downcast when you came in," she
  ventured to observe, anxious to keep away from the subject of
  herself.
  
  "Yes--well, my father had been talking a good deal to me of his
  troubles and difficulties, and the subject always tends to depress
  me.  He is so zealous that he gets many snubs and buffetings from
  people of a different way of thinking from himself, and I don't
  like to hear of such humiliations to a man of his age, the more
  particularly as I don't think earnestness does any good when carried
  so far.  He has been telling me of a very unpleasant scene in
  which he took part quite recently.  He went as the deputy of some
  missionary society to preach in the neighbourhood of Trantridge, a
  place forty miles from here, and made it his business to expostulate
  with a lax young cynic he met with somewhere about there--son of some
  landowner up that way--and who has a mother afflicted with blindness.
  My father addressed himself to the gentleman point-blank, and there
  was quite a disturbance.  It was very foolish of my father, I
  must say, to intrude his conversation upon a stranger when the
  probabilities were so obvious that it would be useless.  But whatever
  he thinks to be his duty, that he'll do, in season or out of season;
  and, of course, he makes many enemies, not only among the absolutely
  vicious, but among the easy-going, who hate being bothered.  He says
  he glories in what happened, and that good may be done indirectly;
  but I wish he would not wear himself out now he is getting old, and
  would leave such pigs to their wallowing."
  
  Tess's look had grown hard and worn, and her ripe mouth tragical; but
  she no longer showed any tremulousness.  Clare's revived thoughts of
  his father prevented his noticing her particularly; and so they went
  on down the white row of liquid rectangles till they had finished
  and drained them off, when the other maids returned, and took their
  pails, and Deb came to scald out the leads for the new milk.  As
  Tess withdrew to go afield to the cows he said to her softly--
  
  "And my question, Tessy?"
  
  "O no--no!" replied she with grave hopelessness, as one who had
  heard anew the turmoil of her own past in the allusion to Alec
  d'Urberville. "It CAN'T be!"
  
  She went out towards the mead, joining the other milkmaids with
  a bound, as if trying to make the open air drive away her sad
  constraint.  All the girls drew onward to the spot where the cows
  were grazing in the farther mead, the bevy advancing with the bold
  grace of wild animals--the reckless, unchastened motion of women
  accustomed to unlimited space--in which they abandoned themselves to
  the air as a swimmer to the wave.  It seemed natural enough to him
  now that Tess was again in sight to choose a mate from unconstrained
  Nature, and not from the abodes of Art.
  
  
  
feat_summary_name: Chapter XXVII
target: When Angel returns to the dairy, Tess is waking up from the afternoon nap, required during the long summer working hours. Struck by her beauty, he asks her to marry him. She becomes visibly agitated, tells him that she loves him, but that it's out of the question for her to marry him: "Oh, Mr. Clare--I cannot be your wife". He dismisses her answer and tells her to take her time but never lets up in persuading her otherwise. Despite her protests, Tess knows that that she cannot ultimately refuse him