Tess of the dUrbervilles - Page 85/283

"To my thinking," said the dairyman, rising suddenly from a cow

he had just finished off, snatching up his three-legged stool in

one hand and the pail in the other, and moving on to the next

hard-yielder in his vicinity, "to my thinking, the cows don't gie

down their milk to-day as usual. Upon my life, if Winker do begin

keeping back like this, she'll not be worth going under by

midsummer."

"'Tis because there's a new hand come among us," said Jonathan Kail.

"I've noticed such things afore."

"To be sure. It may be so. I didn't think o't."

"I've been told that it goes up into their horns at such times," said

a dairymaid. "Well, as to going up into their horns," replied Dairyman Crick

dubiously, as though even witchcraft might be limited by anatomical

possibilities, "I couldn't say; I certainly could not. But as nott

cows will keep it back as well as the horned ones, I don't quite

agree to it. Do ye know that riddle about the nott cows, Jonathan?

Why do nott cows give less milk in a year than horned?"

"I don't!" interposed the milkmaid, "Why do they?"

"Because there bain't so many of 'em," said the dairyman.

"Howsomever, these gam'sters do certainly keep back their milk

to-day. Folks, we must lift up a stave or two--that's the only cure

for't." Songs were often resorted to in dairies hereabout as an enticement

to the cows when they showed signs of withholding their usual yield;

and the band of milkers at this request burst into melody--in purely

business-like tones, it is true, and with no great spontaneity; the

result, according to their own belief, being a decided improvement

during the song's continuance. When they had gone through fourteen

or fifteen verses of a cheerful ballad about a murderer who was

afraid to go to bed in the dark because he saw certain brimstone

flames around him, one of the male milkers said-

"I wish singing on the stoop didn't use up so much of a man's wind!

You should get your harp, sir; not but what a fiddle is best."

Tess, who had given ear to this, thought the words were addressed to

the dairyman, but she was wrong. A reply, in the shape of "Why?"

came as it were out of the belly of a dun cow in the stalls; it had

been spoken by a milker behind the animal, whom she had not hitherto

perceived.