feat_summary_path: finished_summaries/shmoop/Tess of the D'Urbervilles/section_19_part_0.txt
feat_book_id: Tess of the D'Urbervilles.chapter 20
feat_summary_id: chapter 20
feat_summary: {"name": "Phase III: \"The Rally,\" Chapter Twenty", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210424232301/http://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/tess-of-the-durbervilles/summary/chapter-20", "summary": "Time passes at the dairy. Everyone's enjoying the summer weather. Tess and Angel are studying each other day by day--but not quite in love yet. Tess is happier now than she's ever been in recent memory. She and Angel see each other frequently--often they're the first ones up. And dairy farmers have to get up really early in the morning. We're talking 3:30 a.m. Being the first ones up makes them feel like they're the only two people in the world. They're like Adam and Eve. He calls her \"Artemis\" and \"Demeter\" , but she prefers to be called Tess . In the pale light of the early morning, Tess's beauty seems almost supernatural to Angel, and he seems the same to her. But then their solitude would be ended by the arrival of the other milkmen and milkmaids, and the milking would begin.", "analysis": ""}
text: 
  
  The season developed and matured.  Another year's instalment of
  flowers, leaves, nightingales, thrushes, finches, and such ephemeral
  creatures, took up their positions where only a year ago others had
  stood in their place when these were nothing more than germs and
  inorganic particles.  Rays from the sunrise drew forth the buds and
  stretched them into long stalks, lifted up sap in noiseless streams,
  opened petals, and sucked out scents in invisible jets and
  breathings.
  
  Dairyman Crick's household of maids and men lived on comfortably,
  placidly, even merrily.  Their position was perhaps the happiest of
  all positions in the social scale, being above the line at which
  neediness ends, and below the line at which the _convenances_ begin
  to cramp natural feelings, and the stress of threadbare modishness
  makes too little of enough.
  
  Thus passed the leafy time when arborescence seems to be the one
  thing aimed at out of doors.  Tess and Clare unconsciously studied
  each other, ever balanced on the edge of a passion, yet apparently
  keeping out of it.  All the while they were converging, under an
  irresistible law, as surely as two streams in one vale.
  
  Tess had never in her recent life been so happy as she was now,
  possibly never would be so happy again.  She was, for one thing,
  physically and mentally suited among these new surroundings.  The
  sapling which had rooted down to a poisonous stratum on the spot of
  its sowing had been transplanted to a deeper soil.  Moreover she, and
  Clare also, stood as yet on the debatable land between predilection
  and love; where no profundities have been reached; no reflections
  have set in, awkwardly inquiring, "Whither does this new current tend
  to carry me?  What does it mean to my future?  How does it stand
  towards my past?"
  
  Tess was the merest stray phenomenon to Angel Clare as yet--a rosy,
  warming apparition which had only just acquired the attribute of
  persistence in his consciousness.  So he allowed his mind to be
  occupied with her, deeming his preoccupation to be no more than a
  philosopher's regard of an exceedingly novel, fresh, and interesting
  specimen of womankind.
  
  They met continually; they could not help it.  They met daily in that
  strange and solemn interval, the twilight of the morning, in the
  violet or pink dawn; for it was necessary to rise early, so very
  early, here.  Milking was done betimes; and before the milking came
  the skimming, which began at a little past three.  It usually fell
  to the lot of some one or other of them to wake the rest, the first
  being aroused by an alarm-clock; and, as Tess was the latest arrival,
  and they soon discovered that she could be depended upon not to sleep
  though the alarm as others did, this task was thrust most frequently
  upon her.  No sooner had the hour of three struck and whizzed,
  than she left her room and ran to the dairyman's door; then up the
  ladder to Angel's, calling him in a loud whisper; then woke her
  fellow-milkmaids.  By the time that Tess was dressed Clare was
  downstairs and out in the humid air.  The remaining maids and the
  dairyman usually gave themselves another turn on the pillow, and did
  not appear till a quarter of an hour later.
  
  The gray half-tones of daybreak are not the gray half-tones of the
  day's close, though the degree of their shade may be the same.  In
  the twilight of the morning, light seems active, darkness passive;
  in the twilight of evening it is the darkness which is active and
  crescent, and the light which is the drowsy reverse.
  
  Being so often--possibly not always by chance--the first two persons
  to get up at the dairy-house, they seemed to themselves the first
  persons up of all the world.  In these early days of her residence
  here Tess did not skim, but went out of doors at once after rising,
  where he was generally awaiting her.  The spectral, half-compounded,
  aqueous light which pervaded the open mead impressed them with
  a feeling of isolation, as if they were Adam and Eve.  At this
  dim inceptive stage of the day Tess seemed to Clare to exhibit a
  dignified largeness both of disposition and physique, an almost
  regnant power, possibly because he knew that at that preternatural
  time hardly any woman so well endowed in person as she was likely to
  be walking in the open air within the boundaries of his horizon; very
  few in all England.  Fair women are usually asleep at mid-summer
  dawns.  She was close at hand, and the rest were nowhere.
  
  The mixed, singular, luminous gloom in which they walked along
  together to the spot where the cows lay often made him think of the
  Resurrection hour.  He little thought that the Magdalen might be
  at his side.  Whilst all the landscape was in neutral shade his
  companion's face, which was the focus of his eyes, rising above the
  mist stratum, seemed to have a sort of phosphorescence upon it.  She
  looked ghostly, as if she were merely a soul at large.  In reality
  her face, without appearing to do so, had caught the cold gleam of
  day from the north-east; his own face, though he did not think of
  it, wore the same aspect to her.
  
  It was then, as has been said, that she impressed him most deeply.
  She was no longer the milkmaid, but a visionary essence of woman--a
  whole sex condensed into one typical form.  He called her Artemis,
  Demeter, and other fanciful names half teasingly, which she did not
  like because she did not understand them.
  
  "Call me Tess," she would say askance; and he did.
  
  Then it would grow lighter, and her features would become simply
  feminine; they had changed from those of a divinity who could confer
  bliss to those of a being who craved it.
  
  At these non-human hours they could get quite close to the waterfowl.
  Herons came, with a great bold noise as of opening doors and
  shutters, out of the boughs of a plantation which they frequented at
  the side of the mead; or, if already on the spot, hardily maintained
  their standing in the water as the pair walked by, watching them by
  moving their heads round in a slow, horizontal, passionless wheel,
  like the turn of puppets by clockwork.
  
  They could then see the faint summer fogs in layers, woolly, level,
  and apparently no thicker than counterpanes, spread about the meadows
  in detached remnants of small extent.  On the gray moisture of the
  grass were marks where the cows had lain through the night--dark-green
  islands of dry herbage the size of their carcasses, in the general
  sea of dew. From each island proceeded a serpentine trail, by which
  the cow had rambled away to feed after getting up, at the end of
  which trail they found her; the snoring puff from her nostrils, when
  she recognized them, making an intenser little fog of her own amid
  the prevailing one.  Then they drove the animals back to the barton,
  or sat down to milk them on the spot, as the case might require.
  
  Or perhaps the summer fog was more general, and the meadows lay like
  a white sea, out of which the scattered trees rose like dangerous
  rocks.  Birds would soar through it into the upper radiance, and
  hang on the wing sunning themselves, or alight on the wet rails
  subdividing the mead, which now shone like glass rods.  Minute
  diamonds of moisture from the mist hung, too, upon Tess's eyelashes,
  and drops upon her hair, like seed pearls.  When the day grew quite
  strong and commonplace these dried off her; moreover, Tess then
  lost her strange and ethereal beauty; her teeth, lips, and eyes
  scintillated in the sunbeams and she was again the dazzlingly fair
  dairymaid only, who had to hold her own against the other women of
  the world.
  
  About this time they would hear Dairyman Crick's voice, lecturing the
  non-resident milkers for arriving late, and speaking sharply to old
  Deborah Fyander for not washing her hands.
  
  "For Heaven's sake, pop thy hands under the pump, Deb!  Upon my soul,
  if the London folk only knowed of thee and thy slovenly ways, they'd
  swaller their milk and butter more mincing than they do a'ready; and
  that's saying a good deal."
  
  The milking progressed, till towards the end Tess and Clare, in
  common with the rest, could hear the heavy breakfast table dragged
  out from the wall in the kitchen by Mrs Crick, this being the
  invariable preliminary to each meal; the same horrible scrape
  accompanying its return journey when the table had been cleared.
  
  
  
feat_summary_name: Phase III: "The Rally," Chapter Twenty
target: Time passes at the dairy. Everyone's enjoying the summer weather. Tess and Angel are studying each other day by day--but not quite in love yet. Tess is happier now than she's ever been in recent memory. She and Angel see each other frequently--often they're the first ones up. And dairy farmers have to get up really early in the morning. We're talking 3:30 a.m. Being the first ones up makes them feel like they're the only two people in the world. They're like Adam and Eve. He calls her "Artemis" and "Demeter" , but she prefers to be called Tess . In the pale light of the early morning, Tess's beauty seems almost supernatural to Angel, and he seems the same to her. But then their solitude would be ended by the arrival of the other milkmen and milkmaids, and the milking would begin.