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CHAPTER XVI
On a thyme-scented, bird-hatching morning in May, between two and three years after
the return from Trantridge--silent, reconstructive years for Tess Durbeyfield--
she left her home for the second time.
Having packed up her luggage so that it could be sent to her later, she started in
a hired trap for the little town of Stourcastle, through which it was necessary
to pass on her journey, now in a direction
almost opposite to that of her first adventuring.
On the curve of the nearest hill she looked back regretfully at Marlott and her
father's house, although she had been so anxious to get away.
Her kindred dwelling there would probably continue their daily lives as heretofore,
with no great diminution of pleasure in their consciousness, although she would be
far off, and they deprived of her smile.
In a few days the children would engage in their games as merrily as ever, without the
sense of any gap left by her departure.
This leaving of the younger children she had decided to be for the best; were she to
remain they would probably gain less good by her precepts than harm by her example.
She went through Stourcastle without pausing and onward to a junction of
highways, where she could await a carrier's van that ran to the south-west; for the
railways which engirdled this interior
tract of country had never yet struck across it.
While waiting, however, there came along a farmer in his spring cart, driving
approximately in the direction that she wished to pursue.
Though he was a stranger to her she accepted his offer of a seat beside him,
ignoring that its motive was a mere tribute to her countenance.
He was going to Weatherbury, and by accompanying him thither she could walk the
remainder of the distance instead of travelling in the van by way of
Casterbridge.
Tess did not stop at Weatherbury, after this long drive, further than to make a
slight nondescript meal at noon at a cottage to which the farmer recommended
her.
Thence she started on foot, basket in hand, to reach the wide upland of heath dividing
this district from the low-lying meads of a further valley in which the dairy stood
that was the aim and end of her day's pilgrimage.
Tess had never before visited this part of the country, and yet she felt akin to the
landscape.
Not so very far to the left of her she could discern a dark patch in the scenery,
which inquiry confirmed her in supposing to be trees marking the environs of Kingsbere-
-in the church of which parish the bones of
her ancestors--her useless ancestors--lay entombed.
She had no admiration for them now; she almost hated them for the dance they had
led her; not a thing of all that had been theirs did she retain but the old seal and
spoon.
"Pooh--I have as much of mother as father in me!" she said.
"All my prettiness comes from her, and she was only a dairymaid."
The journey over the intervening uplands and lowlands of Egdon, when she reached
them, was a more troublesome walk than she had anticipated, the distance being
actually but a few miles.
It was two hours, owing to sundry wrong turnings, ere she found herself on a summit
commanding the long-sought-for vale, the Valley of the Great Dairies, the valley in
which milk and butter grew to rankness, and
were produced more profusely, if less delicately, than at her home--the verdant
plain so well watered by the river Var or Froom.
It was intrinsically different from the Vale of Little Dairies, Blackmoor Vale,
which, save during her disastrous sojourn at Trantridge, she had exclusively known
till now.
The world was drawn to a larger pattern here.
The enclosures numbered fifty acres instead of ten, the farmsteads were more extended,
the groups of cattle formed tribes hereabout; there only families.
These myriads of cows stretching under her eyes from the far east to the far west
outnumbered any she had ever seen at one glance before.
The green lea was speckled as thickly with them as a canvas by Van Alsloot or Sallaert
with burghers.
The ripe hue of the red and dun kine absorbed the evening sunlight, which the
white-coated animals returned to the eye in rays almost dazzling, even at the distant
elevation on which she stood.
The bird's-eye perspective before her was not so luxuriantly beautiful, perhaps, as
that other one which she knew so well; yet it was more cheering.
It lacked the intensely blue atmosphere of the rival vale, and its heavy soils and
scents; the new air was clear, bracing, ethereal.
The river itself, which nourished the grass and cows of these renowned dairies, flowed
not like the streams in Blackmoor.
Those were slow, silent, often turbid; flowing over beds of mud into which the
incautious wader might sink and vanish unawares.
The Froom waters were clear as the pure River of Life shown to the Evangelist,
rapid as the shadow of a cloud, with pebbly shallows that prattled to the sky all day
long.
There the water-flower was the lily; the crow-foot here.
Either the change in the quality of the air from heavy to light, or the sense of being
amid new scenes where there were no invidious eyes upon her, sent up her
spirits wonderfully.
Her hopes mingled with the sunshine in an ideal photosphere which surrounded her as
she bounded along against the soft south wind.
She heard a pleasant voice in every breeze, and in every bird's note seemed to lurk a
joy.
Her face had latterly changed with changing states of mind, continually fluctuating
between beauty and ordinariness, according as the thoughts were gay or grave.
One day she was pink and flawless; another pale and tragical.
When she was pink she was feeling less than when pale; her more perfect beauty accorded
with her less elevated mood; her more intense mood with her less perfect beauty.
It was her best face physically that was now set against the south wind.
The irresistible, universal, automatic tendency to find sweet pleasure somewhere,
which pervades all life, from the meanest to the highest, had at length mastered
Tess.
Being even now only a young woman of twenty, one who mentally and sentimentally
had not finished growing, it was impossible that any event should have left upon her an
impression that was not in time capable of transmutation.
And thus her spirits, and her thankfulness, and her hopes, rose higher and higher.
She tried several ballads, but found them inadequate; till, recollecting the psalter
that her eyes had so often wandered over of a Sunday morning before she had eaten of
the tree of knowledge, she chanted: "O ye Sun and Moon ...
O ye Stars ... ye Green Things upon the Earth ... ye Fowls of the Air ...
Beasts and Cattle ...
Children of Men ... bless ye the Lord, praise Him and magnify Him for ever!"
She suddenly stopped and murmured: "But perhaps I don't quite know the Lord as
yet."
And probably the half-unconscious rhapsody was a Fetishistic utterance in a
Monotheistic setting; women whose chief companions are the forms and forces of
outdoor Nature retain in their souls far
more of the Pagan fantasy of their remote forefathers than of the systematized
religion taught their race at later date.
However, Tess found at least approximate expression for her feelings in the old
Benedicite that she had lisped from infancy; and it was enough.
Such high contentment with such a slight initial performance as that of having
started towards a means of independent living was a part of the Durbeyfield
temperament.
Tess really wished to walk uprightly, while her father did nothing of the kind; but she
resembled him in being content with immediate and small achievements, and in
having no mind for laborious effort towards
such petty social advancement as could alone be effected by a family so heavily
handicapped as the once powerful d'Urbervilles were now.
There was, it might be said, the energy of her mother's unexpended family, as well as
the natural energy of Tess's years, rekindled after the experience which had so
overwhelmed her for the time.
Let the truth be told--women do as a rule live through such humiliations, and regain
their spirits, and again look about them with an interested eye.
While there's life there's hope is a conviction not so entirely unknown to the
"betrayed" as some amiable theorists would have us believe.
Tess Durbeyfield, then, in good heart, and full of zest for life, descended the Egdon
slopes lower and lower towards the dairy of her pilgrimage.
The marked difference, in the final particular, between the rival vales now
showed itself.
The secret of Blackmoor was best discovered from the heights around; to read aright the
valley before her it was necessary to descend into its midst.
When Tess had accomplished this feat she found herself to be standing on a carpeted
level, which stretched to the east and west as far as the eye could reach.
The river had stolen from the higher tracts and brought in particles to the vale all
this horizontal land; and now, exhausted, aged, and attenuated, lay serpentining
along through the midst of its former spoils.
Not quite sure of her direction, Tess stood still upon the hemmed expanse of verdant
flatness, like a fly on a billiard-table of indefinite length, and of no more
consequence to the surroundings than that fly.
The sole effect of her presence upon the placid valley so far had been to excite the
mind of a solitary heron, which, after descending to the ground not far from her
path, stood with neck erect, looking at her.
Suddenly there arose from all parts of the lowland a prolonged and repeated call--
"Waow! waow! waow!"
From the furthest east to the furthest west the cries spread as if by contagion,
accompanied in some cases by the barking of a dog.
It was not the expression of the valley's consciousness that beautiful Tess had
arrived, but the ordinary announcement of milking-time--half-past four o'clock, when
the dairymen set about getting in the cows.
The red and white herd nearest at hand, which had been phlegmatically waiting for
the call, now trooped towards the steading in the background, their great bags of milk
swinging under them as they walked.
Tess followed slowly in their rear, and entered the barton by the open gate through
which they had entered before her.
Long thatched sheds stretched round the enclosure, their slopes encrusted with
vivid green moss, and their eaves supported by wooden posts rubbed to a glossy
smoothness by the flanks of infinite cows
and calves of bygone years, now passed to an oblivion almost inconceivable in its
profundity.
Between the post were ranged the milchers, each exhibiting herself at the present
moment to a whimsical eye in the rear as a circle on two stalks, down the centre of
which a switch moved pendulum-wise; while
the sun, lowering itself behind this patient row, threw their shadows accurately
inwards upon the wall.
Thus it threw shadows of these obscure and homely figures every evening with as much
care over each contour as if it had been the profile of a court beauty on a palace
wall; copied them as diligently as it had
copied Olympian shapes on marble facades long ago, or the outline of Alexander,
Caesar, and the Pharaohs. They were the less restful cows that were
stalled.
Those that would stand still of their own will were milked in the middle of the yard,
where many of such better behaved ones stood waiting now--all prime milchers, such
as were seldom seen out of this valley, and
not always within it; nourished by the succulent feed which the water-meads
supplied at this prime season of the year.
Those of them that were spotted with white reflected the sunshine in dazzling
brilliancy, and the polished brass knobs of their horns glittered with something of
military display.
Their large-veined udders hung ponderous as sandbags, the teats sticking out like the
legs of a gipsy's crock; and as each animal lingered for her turn to arrive the milk
oozed forth and fell in drops to the ground.