Tess of the d'Urbervilles

n 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 forever!”

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 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.