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.
XVII
The dairymaids and men had flocked down from their
cottages and out of the dairy-house with the arrival
of the cows from the meads; the maids walking in pattens,
not on account of the weather, but to keep their shoes
above the mulch of the barton. Each girl sat
down on her three-legged stool, her face sideways,
her right cheek resting against the cow, and looked
musingly along the animal’s flank at Tess as
she approached. The male milkers, with hat-brims
turned down, resting flat on their foreheads and gazing
on the ground, did not observe her.
One of these was a sturdy middle-aged man—whose
long white “pinner” was somewhat finer
and cleaner than the wraps of the others, and whose
jacket underneath had a presentable marketing aspect—the
master-dairyman, of whom she was in quest, his double
character as a working milker and butter maker here
during six days, and on the seventh as a man in shining
broad-cloth in his family pew at church, being so
marked as to have inspired a rhyme:
