Baptism

"O merciful God, have pity; have pity upon my poor
baby!" she cried. "Heap as much anger as you want to
upon me, and welcome; but pity the child!"

She leant against the chest of drawers, and murmured
incoherent supplications for a long while, till she
suddenly started up.

"Ah! perhaps baby can be saved! Perhaps it will be
just the same!"

She spoke so brightly that it seemed as though her face
might have shone in the gloom surrounding her. She lit
a candle, and went to a second and a third bed under
the wall, where she awoke her young sisters and
brothers, all of whom occupied the same room. Pulling
out the washing-stand so that she could get behind it,
she poured some water from a jug, and made them kneel
around, putting their hands together with fingers
exactly vertical. While the children, scarcely awake,
awe-stricken at her manner, their eyes growing larger
and larger, remained in this position, she took the
baby from her bed--a child's child--so immature as
scarce to seem a sufficient personality to endow its
producer with the maternal title. Tess then stood
erect with the infant on her arm beside the basin, the
next sister held the Prayer-Book open before her, as
the clerk at church held it before the parson; and thus
the girl set about baptizing her child.

Her figure looked singularly tall and imposing as she
stood in her long white nightgown, a thick cable of
twisted dark hair hanging straight down her back to her
waist. The kindly dimness of the weak candle
abstracted from her form and features the little
blemishes which sunlight might have revealed--the
stubble scratches upon her wrists, and the weariness of
her eyes--her high enthusiasm having a transfiguring
effect upon the face which had been her undoing,
showing it as a thing of immaculate beauty, with a
touch of dignity which was almost regal. The little
ones kneeling round, their sleepy eyes blinking and
red, awaited her preparations full of a suspended
wonder which their physical heaviness at that hour
would not allow to become active.

The most impressed of them said:

"Be you really going to christen him, Tess?"

The girl-mother replied in a grave affirmative.

"What's his name going to be?"

She had not thought of that, but a name suggested by a
phrase in the book of Genesis came into her head as she
proceeded with the baptismal service, and now she
pronounced it:

"SORROW, I baptize thee in the name of the Father, and
the Son, and the Holy Ghost."

She sprinkled the water, and there was silence.

"Say 'Amen,' children."

The tiny voices piped in obedient response "Amen!"

Tess went on:

"We receive this child"--and so forth--"and do sign him
with the sign of the Cross."

Here she dipped her hand into the basin, and fervently
drew an immense cross upon the baby with her
forefinger, continuing with the customary sentences as
to his manfully fighting against sin, the world, and
the devil, and being a faithful soldier and servant
unto his life's end. She duly went on with the Lord's
Prayer, the children lisping it after her in a thin
gnat-like wail, till, at the conclusion, raising their
voices to clerk's pitch, they again piped into silence,
"Amen!"

Then their sister, with much augmented confidence in
the efficacy of the sacrament, poured forth from the
bottom of her heart the thanksgiving that follows,
uttering it boldly and triumphantly in the
stopt-diapason note which her voice acquired when her
heart was in her speech, and which will never be
forgotten by those who knew her. The ecstasy of faith
almost apotheosized her; it set upon her face a glowing
irradiation, and brought a red spot into the middle of
each cheek; while the miniature candle-flame inverted
in her eye-pupils shone like a diamond. The children
gazed up at her with more and more reverence, and no
longer had a will for questioning. She did not look
like Sissy to them now, but as a being large, towering,
and awful--a divine personage with whom they had
nothing in common.

Poor Sorrow's campaign against sin, the world, and the
devil was doomed to be of limited brilliancy--luckily
perhaps for himself, considering his beginnings. In
the blue of the morning that fragile soldier and
servant breathed his last, and when the other children
awoke they cried bitterly, and begged Sissy to have
another pretty baby. The calmness which had possessed
Tess since the christening remained with her in the
infant's loss. In the daylight, indeed, she felt her
terrors about his soul to have been somewhat
exaggerated; whether well founded or not she had no
uneasiness now, reasoning that if Providence would not
ratify such an act of approximation she, for one, did
not value the kind of heaven lost by the
irregularity--either for herself or for her child.

So passed away Sorrow the Undesired--that intrusive
creature, that bastard gift of shameless Nature who
respects not the social law; a waif to whom eternal
Time had been a matter of days merely, who knew not
that such things as years and centuries ever were; to
whom the cottage interior was the universe, the week's
weather climate, new-born babyhood human existence, and
the instinct to suck human knowledge.

Tess, who mused on the christening a good deal,
wondered if it were doctrinally sufficient to secure a
Christian burial for the child. Nobody could tell this
but the parson of the parish, and he was a new-comer,
and did not know her. She went to his house after
dusk, and stood by the gate, but could not summon
courage to go in. The enterprise would have been
abandoned if she had not by accident met him coming
homeward as she turned away. In the gloom she did not
mind speaking freely.

"I should like to ask you something, sir."

He expressed his willingness to listen, and she told
the story of the baby's illness and the extemporized
ordinance. "And now, sir," she added earnestly, "can
you tell me this--will it be just the same for him as
if you had baptized him?"

Having the natural feelings of a tradesman at finding
that a job he should have been called in for had been
unskilfully botched by his customers among themselves,
he was disposed to say no. Yet the dignity of the
girl, the strange tenderness in her voice, combined to
affect his nobler impulses--or rather those that he had
left in him after ten years of endeavour to graft
technical belief on actual scepticism. The man and the
ecclesiastic fought within him, and the victory fell to
the man.

"My dear girl," he said, "it will be just the same."

"Then will you give him a Christian burial?" she asked
quickly.

The Vicar felt himself cornered. Hearing of the baby's
illness, he had conscientiously gone to the house after
nightfall to perform the rite, and, unaware that the
refusal to admit him had come from Tess's father and
not from Tess, he could not allow the plea of necessity
for its irregular administration.

"Ah--that's another matter," he said.

"Another matter--why?" asked Tess, rather warmly.

"Well--I would willingly do so if only we two were
concerned. But I must not--for certain reasons."

"Just for once, sir!"

"Really I must not."

"O sir!" She seized his hand as she spoke.

He withdrew it, shaking his head.

"Then I don't like you!" she burst out, "and I'll never
come to your church no more!"

"Don't talk so rashly."

"Perhaps it will be just the same to him if you don't?
... Will it be just the same? Don't for God's sake
speak as saint to sinner, but as you yourself to me
myself--poor me!"

How the Vicar reconciled his answer with the strict
notions he supposed himself to hold on these subjects
it is beyond a layman's power to tell, though not to
excuse. Somewhat moved, he said in this case also--

"It will be just the same."

So the baby was carried in a small deal box, under an
ancient woman's shawl, to the churchyard that night,
and buried by lantern-light, at the cost of a shilling
and a pint of beer to the sexton, in that shabby corner
of God's allotment where He lets the nettles grow, and
where all unbaptized infants, notorious drunkards,
suicides, and others of the conjecturally damned are
laid. In spite of the untoward surroundings, however,
Tess bravely made a little cross of two laths and a
piece of string, and having bound it with flowers, she
stuck it up at the head of the grave one evening when
she could enter the churchyard without being seen,
putting at the foot also a bunch of the same flowers in
a little jar of water to keep them alive. What matter
was it that on the outside of the jar the eye of mere
observation noted the words "Keelwell's Marmalade"?
The eye of maternal affection did not see them in its
vision of higher things.

notes

stage directions

camera again

dramatic dialogue