feat_summary_path: finished_summaries/novelguide/Tess of the d'Urbervilles/section_3_part_1.txt
feat_book_id: Tess of the d'Urbervilles.chapter xvi
feat_summary_id: chapter xvi
feat_summary: {"name": "Chapter XVI", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210213065711/https://www.novelguide.com/tess-of-the-durbervilles/summaries/phase3-chapter16-24", "summary": "At the age of twenty, with new-found optimism, Tess leaves Marlott in a hired cart for Stourcastle to work at Talbothays Dairy in the Valley of the Great Dairies. Feeling \"akin\" to the area, she learns that it is in Kingsmere that the d'Urberville's originated and that their bones remain entombed in the local church. She dismisses any thoughts of grandeur", "analysis": ""}
text: 
  
  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 for ever!"
  
  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 _facades_ 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.
  
  
  
feat_summary_name: Chapter XVI
target: At the age of twenty, with new-found optimism, Tess leaves Marlott in a hired cart for Stourcastle to work at Talbothays Dairy in the Valley of the Great Dairies. Feeling "akin" to the area, she learns that it is in Kingsmere that the d'Urberville's originated and that their bones remain entombed in the local church. She dismisses any thoughts of grandeur