<h2><SPAN name="chap16"></SPAN>XVI</h2>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 forever!”</p>
<p>She suddenly stopped and murmured: “But perhaps I don’t quite know
the Lord as yet.”</p>
<p>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 <i>Benedicite</i> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Suddenly there arose from all parts of the lowland a prolonged and repeated
call—“Waow! waow! waow!”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <i>façades</i> long ago, or the outline of Alexander,
Caesar, and the Pharaohs.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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