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.