Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman
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 _façades_ 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.
XVII
The dairymaids and men had flocked down from their cottages and out of
the dairy-house with the arrival of the cows from the meads; the maids
walking in pattens, not on account of the weather, but to keep their
shoes above the mulch of the barton. Each girl sat down on her
three-legged stool, her face sideways, her right cheek resting against
the cow, and looked musingly along the animal’s flank at Tess as she
approached. The male milkers, with hat-brims turned down, resting flat
on their foreheads and gazing on the ground, did not observe her.
One of these was a sturdy middle-aged man—whose long white “pinner” was
somewhat finer and cleaner than the wraps of the others, and whose
jacket underneath had a presentable marketing aspect—the
master-dairyman, of whom she was in quest, his double character as a
working milker and butter maker here during six days, and on the
seventh as a man in shining broad-cloth in his family pew at church,
being so marked as to have inspired a rhyme:
Dairyman Dick
All the week:
On Sundays Mister Richard Crick.
Seeing Tess standing at gaze he went across to her.
The majority of dairymen have a cross manner at milking time, but it
happened that Mr Crick was glad to get a new hand—for the days were
busy ones now—and he received her warmly; inquiring for her mother and
the rest of the family—(though this as a matter of form merely, for in
reality he had not been aware of Mrs Durbeyfield’s existence till
apprised of the fact by a brief business-letter about Tess).
“Oh—ay, as a lad I knowed your part o’ the country very well,” he said
terminatively. “Though I’ve never been there since. And a aged woman of
ninety that use to live nigh here, but is dead and gone long ago, told
me that a family of some such name as yours in Blackmoor Vale came
originally from these parts, and that ’twere a old ancient race that
had all but perished off the earth—though the new generations didn’t
know it. But, Lord, I took no notice of the old woman’s ramblings, not
I.”
“Oh no—it is nothing,” said Tess.
Then the talk was of business only.
“You can milk ’em clean, my maidy? I don’t want my cows going azew at
this time o’ year.”
She reassured him on that point, and he surveyed her up and down. She
had been staying indoors a good deal, and her complexion had grown
delicate.
“Quite sure you can stand it? ’Tis comfortable enough here for rough
folk; but we don’t live in a cowcumber frame.”
She declared that she could stand it, and her zest and willingness
seemed to win him over.
“Well, I suppose you’ll want a dish o’ tay, or victuals of some sort,
hey? Not yet? Well, do as ye like about it. But faith, if ’twas I, I
should be as dry as a kex wi’ travelling so far.”
“I’ll begin milking now, to get my hand in,” said Tess.
She drank a little milk as temporary refreshment—to the
surprise—indeed, slight contempt—of Dairyman Crick, to whose mind it
had apparently never occurred that milk was good as a beverage.
“Oh, if ye can swaller that, be it so,” he said indifferently, while
holding up the pail that she sipped from. “’Tis what I hain’t touched
for years—not I. Rot the stuff; it would lie in my innerds like lead.
You can try your hand upon she,” he pursued, nodding to the nearest
cow. “Not but what she do milk rather hard. We’ve hard ones and we’ve
easy ones, like other folks. However, you’ll find out that soon
enough.”
When Tess had changed her bonnet for a hood, and was really on her
stool under the cow, and the milk was squirting from her fists into the
pail, she appeared to feel that she really had laid a new foundation
for her future. The conviction bred serenity, her pulse slowed, and she
was able to look about her.
The milkers formed quite a little battalion of men and maids, the men
operating on the hard-teated animals, the maids on the kindlier
natures. It was a large dairy. There were nearly a hundred milchers
under Crick’s management, all told; and of the herd the master-dairyman
milked six or eight with his own hands, unless away from home. These
were the cows that milked hardest of all; for his journey-milkmen being
more or less casually hired, he would not entrust this half-dozen to
their treatment, lest, from indifference, they should not milk them
fully; nor to the maids, lest they should fail in the same way for lack
of finger-grip; with the result that in course of time the cows would
“go azew”—that is, dry up. It was not the loss for the moment that made
slack milking so serious, but that with the decline of demand there
came decline, and ultimately cessation, of supply.
After Tess had settled down to her cow there was for a time no talk in
the barton, and not a sound interfered with the purr of the milk-jets
into the numerous pails, except a momentary exclamation to one or other
of the beasts requesting her to turn round or stand still. The only
movements were those of the milkers’ hands up and down, and the swing
of the cows’ tails. Thus they all worked on, encompassed by the vast
flat mead which extended to either slope of the valley—a level
landscape compounded of old landscapes long forgotten, and, no doubt,
differing in character very greatly from the landscape they composed
now.
“To my thinking,” said the dairyman, rising suddenly from a cow he had
just finished off, snatching up his three-legged stool in one hand and
the pail in the other, and moving on to the next hard-yielder in his
vicinity, “to my thinking, the cows don’t gie down their milk to-day as
usual. Upon my life, if Winker do begin keeping back like this, she’ll
not be worth going under by midsummer.”
“’Tis because there’s a new hand come among us,” said Jonathan Kail.
“I’ve noticed such things afore.”
“To be sure. It may be so. I didn’t think o’t.”
“I’ve been told that it goes up into their horns at such times,” said a
dairymaid.
“Well, as to going up into their horns,” replied Dairyman Crick
dubiously, as though even witchcraft might be limited by anatomical
possibilities, “I couldn’t say; I certainly could not. But as nott cows
will keep it back as well as the horned ones, I don’t quite agree to
it. Do ye know that riddle about the nott cows, Jonathan? Why do nott
cows give less milk in a year than horned?”
“I don’t!” interposed the milkmaid, “Why do they?”
“Because there bain’t so many of ’em,” said the dairyman. “Howsomever,
these gam’sters do certainly keep back their milk to-day. Folks, we
must lift up a stave or two—that’s the only cure for’t.”
Songs were often resorted to in dairies hereabout as an enticement to
the cows when they showed signs of withholding their usual yield; and
the band of milkers at this request burst into melody—in purely
business-like tones, it is true, and with no great spontaneity; the
result, according to their own belief, being a decided improvement
during the song’s continuance. When they had gone through fourteen or
fifteen verses of a cheerful ballad about a murderer who was afraid to
go to bed in the dark because he saw certain brimstone flames around
him, one of the male milkers said—
“I wish singing on the stoop didn’t use up so much of a man’s wind! You
should get your harp, sir; not but what a fiddle is best.”
Tess, who had given ear to this, thought the words were addressed to
the dairyman, but she was wrong. A reply, in the shape of “Why?” came
as it were out of the belly of a dun cow in the stalls; it had been
spoken by a milker behind the animal, whom she had not hitherto
perceived.