Tess of the dUrbervilles - Page 94/283

Clare looked round upon her, seated with the others.

She was not looking towards him. Indeed, owing to his long silence,

his presence in the room was almost forgotten.

"I don't know about ghosts," she was saying; "but I do know that our

souls can be made to go outside our bodies when we are alive."

The dairyman turned to her with his mouth full, his eyes charged

with serious inquiry, and his great knife and fork (breakfasts were

breakfasts here) planted erect on the table, like the beginning of

a gallows. "What--really now? And is it so, maidy?" he said.

"A very easy way to feel 'em go," continued Tess, "is to lie on the

grass at night and look straight up at some big bright star; and, by

fixing your mind upon it, you will soon find that you are hundreds

and hundreds o' miles away from your body, which you don't seem to

want at all." The dairyman removed his hard gaze from Tess, and fixed it on his

wife. "Now that's a rum thing, Christianer--hey? To think o' the miles

I've vamped o' starlight nights these last thirty year, courting, or

trading, or for doctor, or for nurse, and yet never had the least

notion o' that till now, or feeled my soul rise so much as an inch

above my shirt-collar." The general attention being drawn to her, including that of the

dairyman's pupil, Tess flushed, and remarking evasively that it was

only a fancy, resumed her breakfast. Clare continued to observe her.

She soon finished her eating, and

having a consciousness that Clare was regarding her, began to trace

imaginary patterns on the tablecloth with her forefinger with the

constraint of a domestic animal that perceives itself to be watched.

"What a fresh and virginal daughter of Nature that milkmaid is!" he

said to himself. And then he seemed to discern in her something that was familiar,

something which carried him back into a joyous and unforeseeing past,

before the necessity of taking thought had made the heavens gray. He

concluded that he had beheld her before; where he could not tell. A

casual encounter during some country ramble it certainly had been,

and he was not greatly curious about it. But the circumstance was

sufficient to lead him to select Tess in preference to the other

pretty milkmaids when he wished to contemplate contiguous womankind.

XIX

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.