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 posts 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 on 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.
Chapter 17 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 broadcloth in his family pew at church, being so marked as to have inspired a rhyme-- Dairyman **** 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 used 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, Itook 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 one held up the pall 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 pall, 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.
