feat_summary_path: finished_summaries/shmoop/Tess of the D'Urbervilles/section_18_part_0.txt
feat_book_id: Tess of the D'Urbervilles.chapter 19
feat_summary_id: chapter 19
feat_summary: {"name": "Phase III: \"The Rally,\" Chapter Nineteen", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210424232301/http://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/tess-of-the-durbervilles/summary/chapter-19", "summary": "Dairyman Crick has a rule that the cows should be milked randomly--if the cow develops a preference for a particular milkmaid or milkman, he ends up having problems after they leave his farm. Knowing this, Tess tries to take whatever cows happen to be next in line, but notices that she keeps ending up with the eight or so cows that she particularly likes. She realizes that it's because Angel has been sneakily arranging the cows in that order as they come in from the field. She accuses him of sending her favorites her way, and he shrugs, and says \"So what? You'll always be here to milk them.\" She hopes she will be... but she doesn't know that. She later regrets that she called him on it. One evening in June, the air is so still that you can hear a pin drop from across the yard. Tess hears the notes of a harp out in the garden, and wanders out towards it. Tess, as we know, loves music. The harp music she hears now gives her the same kind of out-of-body experience that she described before at the breakfast table. The description of her reaction to the music makes it sound sexy. The music stops, and Tess waits for him to begin again. He doesn't, so she tries to slip away unseen, but he spots her light-colored dress against the darkness in the garden. He calls her back, and asks why she's afraid. She says she's not--at least, not of outdoor things. He asks if she's afraid of life in general, and she says yes. He says he agrees with her, but asks her why she finds life to be a burden. She innocently describes her sense of how oppressive the future is, like an inescapable progression of tomorrows. Angel is startled to find such sad thoughts in a young milkmaid, and he finds her even more interesting because of it. On her side, Tess is startled to find that the wealthy son of a parson should find life to be a burden. Neither of them understands the other, but both are interested in learning more as the opportunity presents itself. Every day they learn more about each other. She feels daunted by his superior intelligence, so he offers to teach her anything she'd like to know that he's able to teach--history, for example. She doesn't see the use in learning history. She doesn't want to know that her own life isn't unique, and that countless others have gone through similar experiences before her. All she wants to know is why the world is so unjust. Again, he's startled to find so much bitterness in such a young woman, and he walks away. Tess is ashamed of her childishness, and wonders what she can do to restore his good opinion of her. She thinks about telling him about her D'Urberville heritage, but decides to test the waters a bit first. She asks Dairyman Crick if Mr. Clare respects old families. Not at all, he tells her. Mr. Clare thinks that old families are all dried up and useless. Hearing this, Tess is glad that she hadn't told Angel about her family.", "analysis": ""}
text: 
  
  In general the cows were milked as they presented themselves, without
  fancy or choice.  But certain cows will show a fondness for a
  particular pair of hands, sometimes carrying this predilection so far
  as to refuse to stand at all except to their favourite, the pail of a
  stranger being unceremoniously kicked over.
  
  It was Dairyman Crick's rule to insist on breaking down these
  partialities and aversions by constant interchange, since otherwise,
  in the event of a milkman or maid going away from the dairy, he was
  placed in a difficulty.  The maids' private aims, however, were the
  reverse of the dairyman's rule, the daily selection by each damsel of
  the eight or ten cows to which she had grown accustomed rendering the
  operation on their willing udders surprisingly easy and effortless.
  
  Tess, like her compeers, soon discovered which of the cows had a
  preference for her style of manipulation, and her fingers having
  become delicate from the long domiciliary imprisonments to which
  she had subjected herself at intervals during the last two or three
  years, she would have been glad to meet the milchers' views in
  this respect.  Out of the whole ninety-five there were eight in
  particular--Dumpling, Fancy, Lofty, Mist, Old Pretty, Young Pretty,
  Tidy, and Loud--who, though the teats of one or two were as hard as
  carrots, gave down to her with a readiness that made her work on them
  a mere touch of the fingers.  Knowing, however, the dairyman's wish,
  she endeavoured conscientiously to take the animals just as they
  came, excepting the very hard yielders which she could not yet
  manage.
  
  But she soon found a curious correspondence between the ostensibly
  chance position of the cows and her wishes in this matter, till she
  felt that their order could not be the result of accident.  The
  dairyman's pupil had lent a hand in getting the cows together of
  late, and at the fifth or sixth time she turned her eyes, as she
  rested against the cow, full of sly inquiry upon him.
  
  "Mr Clare, you have ranged the cows!" she said, blushing; and in
  making the accusation, symptoms of a smile gently lifted her upper
  lip in spite of her, so as to show the tips of her teeth, the lower
  lip remaining severely still.
  
  "Well, it makes no difference," said he.  "You will always be here to
  milk them."
  
  "Do you think so?  I HOPE I shall!  But I don't KNOW."
  
  She was angry with herself afterwards, thinking that he, unaware of
  her grave reasons for liking this seclusion, might have mistaken her
  meaning.  She had spoken so earnestly to him, as if his presence
  were somehow a factor in her wish.  Her misgiving was such that at
  dusk, when the milking was over, she walked in the garden alone, to
  continue her regrets that she had disclosed to him her discovery of
  his considerateness.
  
  It was a typical summer evening in June, the atmosphere being in
  such delicate equilibrium and so transmissive that inanimate objects
  seemed endowed with two or three senses, if not five.  There was no
  distinction between the near and the far, and an auditor felt close
  to everything within the horizon.  The soundlessness impressed her as
  a positive entity rather than as the mere negation of noise.  It was
  broken by the strumming of strings.
  
  Tess had heard those notes in the attic above her head.  Dim,
  flattened, constrained by their confinement, they had never appealed
  to her as now, when they wandered in the still air with a stark
  quality like that of nudity.  To speak absolutely, both instrument
  and execution were poor; but the relative is all, and as she listened
  Tess, like a fascinated bird, could not leave the spot.  Far from
  leaving she drew up towards the performer, keeping behind the hedge
  that he might not guess her presence.
  
  The outskirt of the garden in which Tess found herself had been
  left uncultivated for some years, and was now damp and rank with
  juicy grass which sent up mists of pollen at a touch; and with tall
  blooming weeds emitting offensive smells--weeds whose red and yellow
  and purple hues formed a polychrome as dazzling as that of cultivated
  flowers.  She went stealthily as a cat through this profusion of
  growth, gathering cuckoo-spittle on her skirts, cracking snails that
  were underfoot, staining her hands with thistle-milk and slug-slime,
  and rubbing off upon her naked arms sticky blights which, though
  snow-white on the apple-tree trunks, made madder stains on her skin;
  thus she drew quite near to Clare, still unobserved of him.
  
  Tess was conscious of neither time nor space.  The exaltation which
  she had described as being producible at will by gazing at a star
  came now without any determination of hers; she undulated upon the
  thin notes of the second-hand harp, and their harmonies passed like
  breezes through her, bringing tears into her eyes.  The floating
  pollen seemed to be his notes made visible, and the dampness of
  the garden the weeping of the garden's sensibility.  Though near
  nightfall, the rank-smelling weed-flowers glowed as if they would not
  close for intentness, and the waves of colour mixed with the waves of
  sound.
  
  The light which still shone was derived mainly from a large hole in
  the western bank of cloud; it was like a piece of day left behind
  by accident, dusk having closed in elsewhere.  He concluded his
  plaintive melody, a very simple performance, demanding no great
  skill; and she waited, thinking another might be begun.  But, tired
  of playing, he had desultorily come round the fence, and was rambling
  up behind her.  Tess, her cheeks on fire, moved away furtively, as if
  hardly moving at all.
  
  Angel, however, saw her light summer gown, and he spoke; his low
  tones reaching her, though he was some distance off.
  
  "What makes you draw off in that way, Tess?" said he.  "Are you
  afraid?"
  
  "Oh no, sir--not of outdoor things; especially just now when the
  apple-blooth is falling, and everything is so green."
  
  "But you have your indoor fears--eh?"
  
  "Well--yes, sir."
  
  "What of?"
  
  "I couldn't quite say."
  
  "The milk turning sour?"
  
  "No."
  
  "Life in general?"
  
  "Yes, sir."
  
  "Ah--so have I, very often.  This hobble of being alive is rather
  serious, don't you think so?"
  
  "It is--now you put it that way."
  
  "All the same, I shouldn't have expected a young girl like you to see
  it so just yet.  How is it you do?"
  
  She maintained a hesitating silence.
  
  "Come, Tess, tell me in confidence."
  
  She thought that he meant what were the aspects of things to her, and
  replied shyly--
  
  "The trees have inquisitive eyes, haven't they?--that is, seem as
  if they had.  And the river says,--'Why do ye trouble me with your
  looks?'  And you seem to see numbers of to-morrows just all in a
  line, the first of them the biggest and clearest, the others getting
  smaller and smaller as they stand farther away; but they all seem
  very fierce and cruel and as if they said, 'I'm coming!  Beware of
  me!  Beware of me!' ...  But YOU, sir, can raise up dreams with your
  music, and drive all such horrid fancies away!"
  
  He was surprised to find this young woman--who though but a milkmaid
  had just that touch of rarity about her which might make her the
  envied of her housemates--shaping such sad imaginings.  She was
  expressing in her own native phrases--assisted a little by her Sixth
  Standard training--feelings which might almost have been called those
  of the age--the ache of modernism.  The perception arrested him less
  when he reflected that what are called advanced ideas are really in
  great part but the latest fashion in definition--a more accurate
  expression, by words in _logy_ and _ism_, of sensations which men and
  women have vaguely grasped for centuries.
  
  Still, it was strange that they should have come to her while yet so
  young; more than strange; it was impressive, interesting, pathetic.
  Not guessing the cause, there was nothing to remind him that
  experience is as to intensity, and not as to duration.  Tess's
  passing corporeal blight had been her mental harvest.
  
  Tess, on her part, could not understand why a man of clerical family
  and good education, and above physical want, should look upon it as a
  mishap to be alive.  For the unhappy pilgrim herself there was very
  good reason.  But how could this admirable and poetic man ever have
  descended into the Valley of Humiliation, have felt with the man of
  Uz--as she herself had felt two or three years ago--"My soul chooseth
  strangling and death rather than my life.  I loathe it; I would not
  live alway."
  
  It was true that he was at present out of his class.  But she knew
  that was only because, like Peter the Great in a shipwright's yard,
  he was studying what he wanted to know.  He did not milk cows because
  he was obliged to milk cows, but because he was learning to be a
  rich and prosperous dairyman, landowner, agriculturist, and breeder
  of cattle.  He would become an American or Australian Abraham,
  commanding like a monarch his flocks and his herds, his spotted
  and his ring-straked, his men-servants and his maids.  At times,
  nevertheless, it did seem unaccountable to her that a decidedly
  bookish, musical, thinking young man should have chosen deliberately
  to be a farmer, and not a clergyman, like his father and brothers.
  
  Thus, neither having the clue to the other's secret, they were
  respectively puzzled at what each revealed, and awaited new knowledge
  of each other's character and mood without attempting to pry into
  each other's history.
  
  
  Every day, every hour, brought to him one more little stroke of
  her nature, and to her one more of his.  Tess was trying to lead a
  repressed life, but she little divined the strength of her own
  vitality.
  
  At first Tess seemed to regard Angel Clare as an intelligence rather
  than as a man.  As such she compared him with herself; and at every
  discovery of the abundance of his illuminations, of the distance
  between her own modest mental standpoint and the unmeasurable, Andean
  altitude of his, she became quite dejected, disheartened from all
  further effort on her own part whatever.
  
  He observed her dejection one day, when he had casually mentioned
  something to her about pastoral life in ancient Greece.  She was
  gathering the buds called "lords and ladies" from the bank while he
  spoke.
  
  "Why do you look so woebegone all of a sudden?" he asked.
  
  "Oh, 'tis only--about my own self," she said, with a frail laugh of
  sadness, fitfully beginning to peel "a lady" meanwhile.  "Just a
  sense of what might have been with me!  My life looks as if it had
  been wasted for want of chances!  When I see what you know, what you
  have read, and seen, and thought, I feel what a nothing I am!  I'm
  like the poor Queen of Sheba who lived in the Bible.  There is no
  more spirit in me."
  
  "Bless my soul, don't go troubling about that!  Why," he said with
  some enthusiasm, "I should be only too glad, my dear Tess, to help
  you to anything in the way of history, or any line of reading you
  would like to take up--"
  
  "It is a lady again," interrupted she, holding out the bud she had
  peeled.
  
  "What?"
  
  "I meant that there are always more ladies than lords when you come
  to peel them."
  
  "Never mind about the lords and ladies.  Would you like to take up
  any course of study--history, for example?"
  
  "Sometimes I feel I don't want to know anything more about it than I
  know already."
  
  "Why not?"
  
  "Because what's the use of learning that I am one of a long row
  only--finding out that there is set down in some old book somebody
  just like me, and to know that I shall only act her part; making me
  sad, that's all.  The best is not to remember that your nature and
  your past doings have been just like thousands' and thousands', and
  that your coming life and doings 'll be like thousands's and
  thousands'."
  
  "What, really, then, you don't want to learn anything?"
  
  "I shouldn't mind learning why--why the sun do shine on the just and
  the unjust alike," she answered, with a slight quaver in her voice.
  "But that's what books will not tell me."
  
  "Tess, fie for such bitterness!"  Of course he spoke with a
  conventional sense of duty only, for that sort of wondering had not
  been unknown to himself in bygone days.  And as he looked at the
  unpracticed mouth and lips, he thought that such a daughter of the
  soil could only have caught up the sentiment by rote.  She went on
  peeling the lords and ladies till Clare, regarding for a moment the
  wave-like curl of her lashes as they dropped with her bent gaze on
  her soft cheek, lingeringly went away.  When he was gone she stood
  awhile, thoughtfully peeling the last bud; and then, awakening
  from her reverie, flung it and all the crowd of floral nobility
  impatiently on the ground, in an ebullition of displeasure with
  herself for her _niaiserie_, and with a quickening warmth in her
  heart of hearts.
  
  How stupid he must think her!  In an access of hunger for his good
  opinion she bethought herself of what she had latterly endeavoured to
  forget, so unpleasant had been its issues--the identity of her family
  with that of the knightly d'Urbervilles.  Barren attribute as it was,
  disastrous as its discovery had been in many ways to her, perhaps
  Mr Clare, as a gentleman and a student of history, would respect
  her sufficiently to forget her childish conduct with the lords and
  ladies if he knew that those Purbeck-marble and alabaster people in
  Kingsbere Church really represented her own lineal forefathers; that
  she was no spurious d'Urberville, compounded of money and ambition
  like those at Trantridge, but true d'Urberville to the bone.
  
  But, before venturing to make the revelation, dubious Tess indirectly
  sounded the dairyman as to its possible effect upon Mr Clare, by
  asking the former if Mr Clare had any great respect for old county
  families when they had lost all their money and land.
  
  "Mr Clare," said the dairyman emphatically, "is one of the most
  rebellest rozums you ever knowed--not a bit like the rest of his
  family; and if there's one thing that he do hate more than another
  'tis the notion of what's called a' old family.  He says that it
  stands to reason that old families have done their spurt of work in
  past days, and can't have anything left in 'em now.  There's the
  Billets and the Drenkhards and the Greys and the St Quintins and
  the Hardys and the Goulds, who used to own the lands for miles down
  this valley; you could buy 'em all up now for an old song a'most.
  Why, our little Retty Priddle here, you know, is one of the
  Paridelles--the old family that used to own lots o' the lands out by
  King's Hintock, now owned by the Earl o' Wessex, afore even he or
  his was heard of.  Well, Mr Clare found this out, and spoke quite
  scornful to the poor girl for days.  'Ah!' he says to her, 'you'll
  never make a good dairymaid!  All your skill was used up ages ago
  in Palestine, and you must lie fallow for a thousand years to git
  strength for more deeds!'  A boy came here t'other day asking for
  a job, and said his name was Matt, and when we asked him his surname
  he said he'd never heard that 'a had any surname, and when we asked
  why, he said he supposed his folks hadn't been 'stablished long
  enough.  'Ah! you're the very boy I want!' says Mr Clare, jumping
  up and shaking hands wi'en; 'I've great hopes of you;' and gave him
  half-a-crown.  O no! he can't stomach old families!"
  
  After hearing this caricature of Clare's opinion poor Tess was glad
  that she had not said a word in a weak moment about her family--even
  though it was so unusually old almost to have gone round the circle
  and become a new one.  Besides, another diary-girl was as good as
  she, it seemed, in that respect.  She held her tongue about the
  d'Urberville vault and the Knight of the Conqueror whose name she
  bore.  The insight afforded into Clare's character suggested to her
  that it was largely owing to her supposed untraditional newness that
  she had won interest in his eyes.
  
  
  
feat_summary_name: Phase III: "The Rally," Chapter Nineteen
target: Dairyman Crick has a rule that the cows should be milked randomly--if the cow develops a preference for a particular milkmaid or milkman, he ends up having problems after they leave his farm. Knowing this, Tess tries to take whatever cows happen to be next in line, but notices that she keeps ending up with the eight or so cows that she particularly likes. She realizes that it's because Angel has been sneakily arranging the cows in that order as they come in from the field. She accuses him of sending her favorites her way, and he shrugs, and says "So what? You'll always be here to milk them." She hopes she will be... but she doesn't know that. She later regrets that she called him on it. One evening in June, the air is so still that you can hear a pin drop from across the yard. Tess hears the notes of a harp out in the garden, and wanders out towards it. Tess, as we know, loves music. The harp music she hears now gives her the same kind of out-of-body experience that she described before at the breakfast table. The description of her reaction to the music makes it sound sexy. The music stops, and Tess waits for him to begin again. He doesn't, so she tries to slip away unseen, but he spots her light-colored dress against the darkness in the garden. He calls her back, and asks why she's afraid. She says she's not--at least, not of outdoor things. He asks if she's afraid of life in general, and she says yes. He says he agrees with her, but asks her why she finds life to be a burden. She innocently describes her sense of how oppressive the future is, like an inescapable progression of tomorrows. Angel is startled to find such sad thoughts in a young milkmaid, and he finds her even more interesting because of it. On her side, Tess is startled to find that the wealthy son of a parson should find life to be a burden. Neither of them understands the other, but both are interested in learning more as the opportunity presents itself. Every day they learn more about each other. She feels daunted by his superior intelligence, so he offers to teach her anything she'd like to know that he's able to teach--history, for example. She doesn't see the use in learning history. She doesn't want to know that her own life isn't unique, and that countless others have gone through similar experiences before her. All she wants to know is why the world is so unjust. Again, he's startled to find so much bitterness in such a young woman, and he walks away. Tess is ashamed of her childishness, and wonders what she can do to restore his good opinion of her. She thinks about telling him about her D'Urberville heritage, but decides to test the waters a bit first. She asks Dairyman Crick if Mr. Clare respects old families. Not at all, he tells her. Mr. Clare thinks that old families are all dried up and useless. Hearing this, Tess is glad that she hadn't told Angel about her family.