Chapter Chapter 16 · Chapter XVI The Warnings of Experience

. Chapter XVI The Warnings of Experience

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 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.