feat_summary_path: finished_summaries/novelguide/Tess of the d'Urbervilles/section_4_part_9.txt
feat_book_id: Tess of the d'Urbervilles.chapter xxxiii
feat_summary_id: chapter xxxiii
feat_summary: {"name": "Chapter XXXIII", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210213065711/https://www.novelguide.com/tess-of-the-durbervilles/summaries/phase4-chapter25-34", "summary": "Angel and Tess leave the farm to do some Christmas shopping. They encounter a man from Trantridge who makes disparaging remark about Tess. Angel immediately punches him, and the man apologizes, saying he made a mistake about Tess's identity. Angel pays his medical expenses. Back at the farm, Tess writes a confessional letter to Angel, telling him of her past and slips it under his door. The following morning, he treats her no differently, and she believes he has forgiven her. However, on the morning of their wedding Tess discovers that she inadvertently slipped the letter under both the door and the carpet and that Angel still knows nothing of her past. She attempts to tell him: \"for she you love is not my real self, but one in my image; the one I might have been\". But he quiets her and tells her to tell him after they are married. Surrounded by well-wishers from the farm, Tess Durbeyfield marries Angel Clare and asks her new husband to kiss the love-struck milkmaids goodbye. A rooster crows three times before they leave the farm", "analysis": ""}
text: 
  
  Angel felt that he would like to spend a day with her before the
  wedding, somewhere away from the dairy, as a last jaunt in her
  company while there were yet mere lover and mistress; a romantic day,
  in circumstances that would never be repeated; with that other and
  greater day beaming close ahead of them.  During the preceding week,
  therefore, he suggested making a few purchases in the nearest town,
  and they started together.
  
  Clare's life at the dairy had been that of a recluse in respect the
  world of his own class.  For months he had never gone near a town,
  and, requiring no vehicle, had never kept one, hiring the dairyman's
  cob or gig if he rode or drove.  They went in the gig that day.
  
  And then for the first time in their lives they shopped as partners
  in one concern.  It was Christmas Eve, with its loads a holly and
  mistletoe, and the town was very full of strangers who had come in
  from all parts of the country on account of the day.  Tess paid the
  penalty of walking about with happiness superadded to beauty on her
  countenance by being much stared at as she moved amid them on his
  arm.
  
  In the evening they returned to the inn at which they had put up, and
  Tess waited in the entry while Angel went to see the horse and gig
  brought to the door.  The general sitting-room was full of guests,
  who were continually going in and out.  As the door opened and shut
  each time for the passage of these, the light within the parlour fell
  full upon Tess's face.  Two men came out and passed by her among the
  rest.  One of them had stared her up and down in surprise, and she
  fancied he was a Trantridge man, though that village lay so many
  miles off that Trantridge folk were rarities here.
  
  "A comely maid that," said the other.
  
  "True, comely enough.  But unless I make a great mistake--"  And he
  negatived the remainder of the definition forthwith.
  
  Clare had just returned from the stable-yard, and, confronting the
  man on the threshold, heard the words, and saw the shrinking of
  Tess.  The insult to her stung him to the quick, and before he had
  considered anything at all he struck the man on the chin with the
  full force of his fist, sending him staggering backwards into the
  passage.
  
  The man recovered himself, and seemed inclined to come on, and Clare,
  stepping outside the door, put himself in a posture of defence.  But
  his opponent began to think better of the matter.  He looked anew at
  Tess as he passed her, and said to Clare--
  
  "I beg pardon, sir; 'twas a complete mistake.  I thought she was
  another woman, forty miles from here."
  
  Clare, feeling then that he had been too hasty, and that he was,
  moreover, to blame for leaving her standing in an inn-passage, did
  what he usually did in such cases, gave the man five shillings to
  plaster the blow; and thus they parted, bidding each other a pacific
  good night.  As soon as Clare had taken the reins from the ostler,
  and the young couple had driven off, the two men went in the other
  direction.
  
  "And was it a mistake?" said the second one.
  
  "Not a bit of it.  But I didn't want to hurt the gentleman's
  feelings--not I."
  
  In the meantime the lovers were driving onward.
  
  "Could we put off our wedding till a little later?" Tess asked in a
  dry dull voice.  "I mean if we wished?"
  
  "No, my love.  Calm yourself.  Do you mean that the fellow may have
  time to summon me for assault?" he asked good-humouredly.
  
  "No--I only meant--if it should have to be put off."
  
  What she meant was not very clear, and he directed her to dismiss
  such fancies from her mind, which she obediently did as well as she
  could.  But she was grave, very grave, all the way home; till she
  thought, "We shall go away, a very long distance, hundreds of miles
  from these parts, and such as this can never happen again, and no
  ghost of the past reach there."
  
  They parted tenderly that night on the landing, and Clare ascended to
  his attic.  Tess sat up getting on with some little requisites, lest
  the few remaining days should not afford sufficient time.  While she
  sat she heard a noise in Angel's room overhead, a sound of thumping
  and struggling.  Everybody else in the house was asleep, and in her
  anxiety lest Clare should be ill she ran up and knocked at his door,
  and asked him what was the matter.
  
  "Oh, nothing, dear," he said from within.  "I am so sorry I disturbed
  you!  But the reason is rather an amusing one: I fell asleep and
  dreamt that I was fighting that fellow again who insulted you,
  and the noise you heard was my pummelling away with my fists at
  my portmanteau, which I pulled out to-day for packing.  I am
  occasionally liable to these freaks in my sleep. Go to bed and
  think of it no more."
  
  This was the last drachm required to turn the scale of her
  indecision.  Declare the past to him by word of mouth she could not;
  but there was another way.  She sat down and wrote on the four pages
  of a note-sheet a succinct narrative of those events of three or four
  years ago, put it into an envelope, and directed it to Clare.  Then,
  lest the flesh should again be weak, she crept upstairs without any
  shoes and slipped the note under his door.
  
  Her night was a broken one, as it well might be, and she listened for
  the first faint noise overhead.  It came, as usual; he descended, as
  usual.  She descended.  He met her at the bottom of the stairs and
  kissed her. Surely it was as warmly as ever!
  
  He looked a little disturbed and worn, she thought.  But he said not
  a word to her about her revelation, even when they were alone.  Could
  he have had it?  Unless he began the subject she felt that she could
  say nothing.  So the day passed, and it was evident that whatever
  he thought he meant to keep to himself.  Yet he was frank and
  affectionate as before.  Could it be that her doubts were childish?
  that he forgave her; that he loved her for what she was, just as she
  was, and smiled at her disquiet as at a foolish nightmare?  Had he
  really received her note?  She glanced into his room, and could see
  nothing of it.  It might be that he forgave her.  But even if he had
  not received it she had a sudden enthusiastic trust that he surely
  would forgive her.
  
  Every morning and night he was the same, and thus New Year's Eve
  broke--the wedding day.
  
  The lovers did not rise at milking-time, having through the whole of
  this last week of their sojourn at the dairy been accorded something
  of the position of guests, Tess being honoured with a room of her
  own.  When they arrived downstairs at breakfast-time they were
  surprised to see what effects had been produced in the large
  kitchen for their glory since they had last beheld it.  At some
  unnatural hour of the morning the dairyman had caused the yawning
  chimney-corner to be whitened, and the brick hearth reddened, and a
  blazing yellow damask blower to be hung across the arch in place of
  the old grimy blue cotton one with a black sprig pattern which had
  formerly done duty there.  This renovated aspect of what was the
  focus indeed of the room on a full winter morning threw a smiling
  demeanour over the whole apartment.
  
  "I was determined to do summat in honour o't", said the dairyman.
  "And as you wouldn't hear of my gieing a rattling good randy wi'
  fiddles and bass-viols complete, as we should ha' done in old times,
  this was all I could think o' as a noiseless thing."
  
  Tess's friends lived so far off that none could conveniently have
  been present at the ceremony, even had any been asked; but as a fact
  nobody was invited from Marlott.  As for Angel's family, he had
  written and duly informed them of the time, and assured them that he
  would be glad to see one at least of them there for the day if he
  would like to come.  His brothers had not replied at all, seeming
  to be indignant with him; while his father and mother had written
  a rather sad letter, deploring his precipitancy in rushing into
  marriage, but making the best of the matter by saying that, though
  a dairywoman was the last daughter-in-law they could have expected,
  their son had arrived at an age which he might be supposed to be the
  best judge.
  
  This coolness in his relations distressed Clare less than it would
  have done had he been without the grand card with which he meant to
  surprise them ere long.  To produce Tess, fresh from the dairy, as
  a d'Urberville and a lady, he had felt to be temerarious and risky;
  hence he had concealed her lineage till such time as, familiarized
  with worldly ways by a few months' travel and reading with him, he
  could take her on a visit to his parents and impart the knowledge
  while triumphantly producing her as worthy of such an ancient line.
  It was a pretty lover's dream, if no more.  Perhaps Tess's lineage
  had more value for himself than for anybody in the world beside.
  
  Her perception that Angel's bearing towards her still remained in no
  whit altered by her own communication rendered Tess guiltily doubtful
  if he could have received it.  She rose from breakfast before he had
  finished, and hastened upstairs.  It had occurred to her to look once
  more into the queer gaunt room which had been Clare's den, or rather
  eyrie, for so long, and climbing the ladder she stood at the open
  door of the apartment, regarding and pondering.  She stooped to the
  threshold of the doorway, where she had pushed in the note two or
  three days earlier in such excitement.  The carpet reached close to
  the sill, and under the edge of the carpet she discerned the faint
  white margin of the envelope containing her letter to him, which he
  obviously had never seen, owing to her having in her haste thrust it
  beneath the carpet as well as beneath the door.
  
  With a feeling of faintness she withdrew the letter. There it
  was--sealed up, just as it had left her hands.  The mountain had
  not yet been removed.  She could not let him read it now, the house
  being in full bustle of preparation; and descending to her own room
  she destroyed the letter there.
  
  She was so pale when he saw her again that he felt quite anxious.
  The incident of the misplaced letter she had jumped at as if it
  prevented a confession; but she knew in her conscience that it need
  not; there was still time.  Yet everything was in a stir; there
  was coming and going; all had to dress, the dairyman and Mrs Crick
  having been asked to accompany them as witnesses; and reflection or
  deliberate talk was well-nigh impossible.  The only minute Tess could
  get to be alone with Clare was when they met upon the landing.
  
  "I am so anxious to talk to you--I want to confess all my faults and
  blunders!" she said with attempted lightness.
  
  "No, no--we can't have faults talked of--you must be deemed perfect
  to-day at least, my Sweet!" he cried.  "We shall have plenty of time,
  hereafter, I hope, to talk over our failings.  I will confess mine at
  the same time."
  
  "But it would be better for me to do it now, I think, so that you
  could not say--"
  
  "Well, my quixotic one, you shall tell me anything--say, as soon as
  we are settled in our lodging; not now.  I, too, will tell you my
  faults then.  But do not let us spoil the day with them; they will
  be excellent matter for a dull time."
  
  "Then you don't wish me to, dearest?"
  
  "I do not, Tessy, really."
  
  The hurry of dressing and starting left no time for more than this.
  Those words of his seemed to reassure her on further reflection.
  She was whirled onward through the next couple of critical hours by
  the mastering tide of her devotion to him, which closed up further
  meditation.  Her one desire, so long resisted, to make herself his,
  to call him her lord, her own--then, if necessary, to die--had
  at last lifted her up from her plodding reflective pathway.  In
  dressing, she moved about in a mental cloud of many-coloured
  idealities, which eclipsed all sinister contingencies by its
  brightness.
  
  The church was a long way off, and they were obliged to drive,
  particularly as it was winter.  A closed carriage was ordered from
  a roadside inn, a vehicle which had been kept there ever since the
  old days of post-chaise travelling.  It had stout wheel-spokes, and
  heavy felloes a great curved bed, immense straps and springs, and a
  pole like a battering-ram.  The postilion was a venerable "boy" of
  sixty--a martyr to rheumatic gout, the result of excessive exposure
  in youth, counter-acted by strong liquors--who had stood at inn-doors
  doing nothing for the whole five-and-twenty years that had elapsed
  since he had no longer been required to ride professionally, as if
  expecting the old times to come back again.  He had a permanent
  running wound on the outside of his right leg, originated by the
  constant bruisings of aristocratic carriage-poles during the many
  years that he had been in regular employ at the King's Arms,
  Casterbridge.
  
  Inside this cumbrous and creaking structure, and behind this decayed
  conductor, the _partie carree_ took their seats--the bride and
  bridegroom and Mr and Mrs Crick.  Angel would have liked one at least
  of his brothers to be present as groomsman, but their silence after
  his gentle hint to that effect by letter had signified that they did
  not care to come.  They disapproved of the marriage, and could not be
  expected to countenance it.  Perhaps it was as well that they could
  not be present. They were not worldly young fellows, but fraternizing
  with dairy-folk would have struck unpleasantly upon their biased
  niceness, apart from their views of the match.
  
  Upheld by the momentum of the time, Tess knew nothing of this, did
  not see anything, did not know the road they were taking to the
  church.  She knew that Angel was close to her; all the rest was
  a luminous mist.  She was a sort of celestial person, who owed
  her being to poetry--one of those classical divinities Clare was
  accustomed to talk to her about when they took their walks together.
  
  The marriage being by licence there were only a dozen or so of people
  in the church; had there been a thousand they would have produced
  no more effect upon her.  They were at stellar distances from her
  present world.  In the ecstatic solemnity with which she swore her
  faith to him the ordinary sensibilities of sex seemed a flippancy.
  At a pause in the service, while they were kneeling together, she
  unconsciously inclined herself towards him, so that her shoulder
  touched his arm; she had been frightened by a passing thought, and
  the movement had been automatic, to assure herself that he was really
  there, and to fortify her belief that his fidelity would be proof
  against all things.
  
  Clare knew that she loved him--every curve of her form showed that--
  but he did not know at that time the full depth of her devotion, its
  single-mindedness, its meekness; what long-suffering it guaranteed,
  what honesty, what endurance, what good faith.
  
  As they came out of church the ringers swung the bells off their
  rests, and a modest peal of three notes broke forth--that limited
  amount of expression having been deemed sufficient by the church
  builders for the joys of such a small parish.  Passing by the tower
  with her husband on the path to the gate she could feel the vibrant
  air humming round them from the louvred belfry in the circle of
  sound, and it matched the highly-charged mental atmosphere in which
  she was living.
  
  This condition of mind, wherein she felt glorified by an irradiation
  not her own, like the angel whom St John saw in the sun, lasted till
  the sound of the church bells had died away, and the emotions of the
  wedding-service had calmed down.  Her eyes could dwell upon details
  more clearly now, and Mr and Mrs Crick having directed their own gig
  to be sent for them, to leave the carriage to the young couple, she
  observed the build and character of that conveyance for the first
  time.  Sitting in silence she regarded it long.
  
  "I fancy you seem oppressed, Tessy," said Clare.
  
  "Yes," she answered, putting her hand to her brow.  "I tremble at
  many things.  It is all so serious, Angel.  Among other things I seem
  to have seen this carriage before, to be very well acquainted with
  it.  It is very odd--I must have seen it in a dream."
  
  "Oh--you have heard the legend of the d'Urberville Coach--that
  well-known superstition of this county about your family when they
  were very popular here; and this lumbering old thing reminds you of
  it."
  
  "I have never heard of it to my knowledge," said she.  "What is the
  legend--may I know it?"
  
  "Well--I would rather not tell it in detail just now.  A certain
  d'Urberville of the sixteenth or seventeenth century committed a
  dreadful crime in his family coach; and since that time members of
  the family see or hear the old coach whenever--But I'll tell you
  another day--it is rather gloomy.  Evidently some dim knowledge of
  it has been brought back to your mind by the sight of this venerable
  caravan."
  
  "I don't remember hearing it before," she murmured.  "Is it when we
  are going to die, Angel, that members of my family see it, or is it
  when we have committed a crime?"
  
  "Now, Tess!"
  
  He silenced her by a kiss.
  
  By the time they reached home she was contrite and spiritless.  She
  was Mrs Angel Clare, indeed, but had she any moral right to the name?
  Was she not more truly Mrs Alexander d'Urberville?  Could intensity
  of love justify what might be considered in upright souls as culpable
  reticence?  She knew not what was expected of women in such cases;
  and she had no counsellor.
  
  However, when she found herself alone in her room for a few
  minutes--the last day this on which she was ever to enter it--she
  knelt down and prayed.  She tried to pray to God, but it was her
  husband who really had her supplication.  Her idolatry of this man
  was such that she herself almost feared it to be ill-omened.  She was
  conscious of the notion expressed by Friar Laurence: "These violent
  delights have violent ends."  It might be too desperate for human
  conditions--too rank, to wild, too deadly.
  
  "O my love, why do I love you so!" she whispered there alone; "for
  she you love is not my real self, but one in my image; the one I
  might have been!"
  
  Afternoon came, and with it the hour for departure. They had decided
  to fulfil the plan of going for a few days to the lodgings in the old
  farmhouse near Wellbridge Mill, at which he meant to reside during
  his investigation of flour processes.  At two o'clock there was
  nothing left to do but to start.  All the servantry of the dairy were
  standing in the red-brick entry to see them go out, the dairyman and
  his wife following to the door.  Tess saw her three chamber-mates
  in a row against the wall, pensively inclining their heads.  She
  had much questioned if they would appear at the parting moment; but
  there they were, stoical and staunch to the last.  She knew why the
  delicate Retty looked so fragile, and Izz so tragically sorrowful,
  and Marian so blank; and she forgot her own dogging shadow for a
  moment in contemplating theirs.
  
  She impulsively whispered to him--
  
  "Will you kiss 'em all, once, poor things, for the first and last
  time?"
  
  Clare had not the least objection to such a farewell formality--which
  was all that it was to him--and as he passed them he kissed them in
  succession where they stood, saying "Goodbye" to each as he did so.
  When they reached the door Tess femininely glanced back to discern
  the effect of that kiss of charity; there was no triumph in her
  glance, as there might have been.  If there had it would have
  disappeared when she saw how moved the girls all were.  The kiss had
  obviously done harm by awakening feelings they were trying to subdue.
  
  Of all this Clare was unconscious.  Passing on to the wicket-gate he
  shook hands with the dairyman and his wife, and expressed his last
  thanks to them for their attentions; after which there was a moment
  of silence before they had moved off.  It was interrupted by the
  crowing of a cock.  The white one with the rose comb had come and
  settled on the palings in front of the house, within a few yards of
  them, and his notes thrilled their ears through, dwindling away like
  echoes down a valley of rocks.
  
  "Oh?" said Mrs Crick.  "An afternoon crow!"
  
  Two men were standing by the yard gate, holding it open.
  
  "That's bad," one murmured to the other, not thinking that the words
  could be heard by the group at the door-wicket.
  
  The cock crew again--straight towards Clare.
  
  "Well!" said the dairyman.
  
  "I don't like to hear him!" said Tess to her husband.  "Tell the man
  to drive on.  Goodbye, goodbye!"
  
  The cock crew again.
  
  "Hoosh!  Just you be off, sir, or I'll twist your neck!" said the
  dairyman with some irritation, turning to the bird and driving him
  away.  And to his wife as they went indoors: "Now, to think o' that
  just to-day!  I've not heard his crow of an afternoon all the year
  afore."
  
  "It only means a change in the weather," said she; "not what you
  think: 'tis impossible!"
  
  
  
feat_summary_name: Chapter XXXIII
target: Angel and Tess leave the farm to do some Christmas shopping. They encounter a man from Trantridge who makes disparaging remark about Tess. Angel immediately punches him, and the man apologizes, saying he made a mistake about Tess's identity. Angel pays his medical expenses. Back at the farm, Tess writes a confessional letter to Angel, telling him of her past and slips it under his door. The following morning, he treats her no differently, and she believes he has forgiven her. However, on the morning of their wedding Tess discovers that she inadvertently slipped the letter under both the door and the carpet and that Angel still knows nothing of her past. She attempts to tell him: "for she you love is not my real self, but one in my image; the one I might have been". But he quiets her and tells her to tell him after they are married. Surrounded by well-wishers from the farm, Tess Durbeyfield marries Angel Clare and asks her new husband to kiss the love-struck milkmaids goodbye. A rooster crows three times before they leave the farm