The Project Gutenberg eBook of Barren Ground, by Ellen Anderson Gholson
Glasgow
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Title: Barren Ground
Author: Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
Release Date: August 31, 2021 [eBook #66191]
Language: English
Produced by: Laura Natal Rodrigues at Free Literature (Images generously
made available by Hathi Trust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BARREN GROUND ***
BARREN GROUND
_by_ ELLEN GLASCOW
GROSSET & DUNLAP _Publishers_
_by arrangement with Doubleday Page & Co._
CONTENTS
Part First--Broomsedge
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Part Second--Pine
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Part Third--Life-everlasting
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
_PART
FIRST_
BROOMSEDGE
"_A girl in an orange-colored shawl_. . . ."
BARREN
GROUND
I
A girl in an orange-coloured shawl stood at the window of Pedlar's store
and looked, through the falling snow, at the deserted road. Though she
watched there without moving, her attitude, in its stillness, gave an
impression of arrested flight, as if she were running toward life.
Bare, starved, desolate, the country closed in about her. The last train
of the day had gone by without stopping, and the station of Pedlar's
Mill was as lonely as the abandoned fields by the track. From the bleak
horizon, where the flatness created an illusion of immensity, the
broomsedge was spreading in a smothered fire over the melancholy brown
of the landscape. Under the falling snow, which melted as soon as it
touched the earth, the colour was veiled and dim; but when the sky
changed the broomsedge changed with it. On clear mornings the waste
places were cinnamon-red in the sunshine. Beneath scudding clouds the
plumes of the bent grasses faded to ivory. During the long spring rains,
a film of yellow-green stole over the burned ground. At autumn sunsets,
when the red light searched the country, the broomsedge caught fire from
the afterglow and blazed out in a splendour of colour. Then the meeting
of earth and sky dissolved in the flaming mist of the horizon.
At these quiet seasons, the dwellers near Pedlar's Mill felt scarcely
more than a tremor on the surface of life. But on stormy days, when the
wind plunged like a hawk from the swollen clouds, there was a quivering
in the broomsedge, as if coveys of frightened partridges were flying
from the pursuer. Then the quivering would become a ripple and the
ripple would swell presently into rolling waves. The straw would darken
as the gust swooped down, and brighten as it sped on to the shelter of
scrub pine and sassafras bushes. And while the wind bewitched the
solitude, a vague restlessness would stir in the hearts of living things
on the farms, of men, women, and animals. "Broomsage ain't jest wild
stuff. It's a kind of fate," old Matthew Fairlamb used to say.
Thirty years ago, modern methods of farming, even methods that were
modern in the benighted eighteen-nineties, had not penetrated to this
thinly settled part of Virginia. The soil, impoverished by the war and
the tenant system which followed the war, was still drained of fertility
for the sake of the poor crops it could yield. Spring after spring, the
cultivated ground appeared to shrink into the "old fields," where scrub
pine or oak succeeded broomsedge and sassafras as inevitably as autumn
slipped into winter. Now and then a new start would be made. Some
thrifty settler, a German Catholic, perhaps, who was trying his fortunes
in a staunch Protestant community, would buy a mortgaged farm for a
dollar an acre, and begin to experiment with suspicious,
strange-smelling fertilizers. For a season or two his patch of ground
would respond to the unusual treatment and grow green with promise. Then
the forlorn roads, deep in mud, and the surrounding air of failure,
which was as inescapable as a drought, combined with the cutworm, the
locust, and the tobacco-fly, against the human invader; and where the
brief harvest had been, the perpetual broomsedge would wave.
The tenant farmers, who had flocked after the ruin of war as buzzards
after a carcass, had immediately picked the featureless landscape as
clean as a skeleton. When the swarming was over only three of the larger
farms at Pedlar's Mill remained undivided in the hands of their original
owners. Though Queen Elizabeth County had never been one of the
aristocratic regions of Virginia, it was settled by sturdy English
yeomen, with a thin but lively sprinkling of the persecuted Protestants
of other nations. Several of these superior pioneers brought blue blood
in their veins, as well as the vigorous fear of God in their hearts; but
the great number arrived, as they remained, "good people," a
comprehensive term, which implies, to Virginians, the exact opposite of
the phrase, "a good family." The good families of the state have
preserved, among other things, custom, history, tradition, romantic
fiction, and the Episcopal Church. The good people, according to the
records of clergymen, which are the only surviving records, have
preserved nothing except themselves. Ignored alike by history and
fiction, they have their inconspicuous place in the social strata midway
between the lower gentility and the upper class of "poor white," a
position which encourages the useful rather than the ornamental public
virtues.
With the end of free labour and the beginning of the tenant system,
authority passed from the country to the towns. The old men stayed by
the farms, and their daughters withered dutifully beside them; but the
sons of the good people drifted away to the city, where they assumed
control of democracy as well as of the political machine which has made
democracy safe for politics. An era changed, not rudely, but as eras do
change so often, uncomfortably. Power, defying Jeffersonian theory and
adopting Jeffersonian policy, stole again from the few to the many. For
the good people, conforming to the logic of history, proceeded
immediately to enact their preferences, prejudices, habits, and
inhibitions into the laws of the state.
At Pedlar's Mill, where the old wooden mill, built a hundred years
before by the first miller Pedlar, was now a picturesque ruin, a few
stalwart farmers of Scotch-Irish descent rose above the improvident
crowd of white and black tenants, like native pines above the shallow
wash of the broomsedge. These surviving landowners were obscure branches
of the great Scotch-Irish families of the upper Valley of Virginia.
Detached from the parent tree and driven by chance winds out of the
highlands, they had rooted afresh in the warmer soil of the low country,
where they had conquered the land not by force, but by virtue of the
emphatic argument that lies in fortitude.
James Ellgood, whose mother was a McNab, owned Green Acres, the
flourishing stock farm on the other side of the railroad. It is true
that an uncle in the far West had left him a small fortune, and for five
years he had put more into the soil than he had got out of it. But in
the end Green Acres had repaid him many times, which proved, as old
Matthew, who was a bit of a philosopher, pointed out, that "it wa'n't
the land that was wrong, but the way you had treated it."
On the near side of the station, secluded behind a barricade of what
people called the back roads, which were strangled in mud from November
to June, stood Five Oaks, the ruined farm of the Greylocks. Though the
place was still held insecurely in the loose clutches of old Doctor
Greylock, who resembled an inebriated Covenanter, the abandoned acres
were rapidly growing up in sumach, sassafras, and fife-everlasting. The
doctor had been a man of parts and rural prominence in his day; but the
land and scarcity of labour had worn on his nerves, and he was now
slowly drinking himself to death, attended, beyond the social
shadow-line, by an anonymous brood of mulatto offspring.
Adjoining Five Oaks, and running slightly in front of it on one side,
with a long whitewashed house situated a stone's throw from the main
road, there was Old Farm, which belonged to Joshua Oakley and Eudora
Abernethy, his wife. The Oakleys, as the saying ran in the
neighbourhood, were "land poor." They owned a thousand acres of scrub
pine, scrub oak, and broomsedge, where a single cultivated corner was
like a solitary island in some chaotic sea.
Early in the nineteenth century, John Calvin Abernethy, a retired
missionary from India and Ceylon, came from the upper Valley into the
region of the Shenandoah, with a neat Scotch-Irish inheritance in his
pocket. His reputation, as historians remark, had preceded him; and his
subsequent career proved that he was not only an eloquent preacher of
the Gospel, but a true explorer of the spirit as well, the last of those
great Presbyterian romantics whose faith ventured on perilous
metaphysical seas in the ark of the Solemn League and Covenant. Since
there was no canny bargain to be driven, at the moment, in the
Shenandoah Valley, John Abernethy regretfully left the highlands for the
flat country, where he picked up presently, at a Dutch auction, the
thousand acres of land and fifty slaves which had belonged to one
William Golden Penner. One may charitably infer that the fifty slaves
constituted a nice point in theology; but with ingenious Presbyterian
logic and circumscribed Presbyterian imagination, John Calvin reconciled
divine grace with a peculiar institution. The fifty slaves he sold
farther south, and the price of black flesh he devoted to the redemption
of black souls in the Congo. Dramatic, yet not altogether lacking in
delicate irony. For he had observed in foreign fields that divine grace
has strange gestures; and life, as even Presbyterians know, is without
logic. To a thrifty theologian, bent on redemption with economy, there
are few points of ethics too fine-spun for splitting. From which it must
not be concluded that the first Virginian Abernethy was unworthy of his
high calling. He was merely, like the rest of us, whether theologians or
laymen, seasoned with the favourite fruit of his age. Though he might
occasionally seek a compromise in simple matters of conduct, realizing
the fall of man and the infirmity of human nature, where matters of
doctrine were concerned his conscience was inflexible. His piety,
running in a narrow groove, was deep and genuine; and he possessed
sufficient integrity, firmness, and frugality to protect his descendants
from decay for at least three generations. A few years after he had
settled near Pedlar's Mill, a small Presbyterian church, built of brick
and whitewashed within and without, rose on the far side of the
railroad, where it stands now at the gate of Green Acres. Conversion,
which had begun as a vocation with John Calvin Abernethy, became a
habit; and with the gradual running to seed of the Methodists in the
community, the Presbyterian faith sprang up and blossomed like a Scotch
thistle in barren ground.
In his long white house, encircled by the few cultivated fields in the
midst of his still-virgin acres, John Calvin Abernethy lived with
learning, prudence, and piety until he was not far from a hundred. He
had but one son, for unlike the Scotch-Irish of the Valley, his race did
not multiply. The son died in middle age, struck down by an oak he was
felling, and his only child, a daughter, was reared patiently but
sternly by her grandfather. When, in after years, this granddaughter,
whose name was Eudora, fell a victim of one of those natural instincts
which Presbyterian theology has damned but never wholly exterminated,
and married a member of the "poor white" class, who had nothing more to
recommend him than the eyes of a dumb poet and the head of a youthful
John the Baptist, old Abernethy blessed the marriage and avoided, as
far as possible, the connection. Knowing the aptitude of the poor for
futility, he employed his remaining years on earth in accumulating a
comfortable inheritance for his great-grandchildren. When he was dead,
his granddaughter's husband, young Joshua Oakley, worked hard, after the
manner of his class, to lose everything that was left. He was a good man
and a tireless labourer; but that destiny which dogs the footsteps of
ineffectual spirits pursued him from the hour of his birth. His wife,
Eudora, who resembled her grandfather, recovered promptly from the
natural instinct, and revealed shortly afterwards signs of suppressed
religious mania.
Of this union of the positive and the negative virtues, three children
survived. Two of these were sons, Josiah and Rufus; the other was a
daughter, Dorinda, the girl who, having thrown the orange shawl over her
head, had come out of the store, and stood now with the snow in her face
and her eager gaze on the road.
II
She was a tall girl, not beautiful, scarcely pretty even according to
the waxen type of the 'nineties; but there was a glow of expression, an
April charm, in her face. Her eyes were her one memorable feature.
Large, deep, radiant, they shone beneath her black lashes with a clear
burning colour, as blue as the spring sky after rain. Above them her
jutting eyebrows, very straight and thick, gave a brooding sombreness to
her forehead, where her abundant hair was brushed back in a single dark
wave. In repose her features were too stern, too decisive. Her nose,
powdered with golden freckles, was a trifle square at the nostrils; her
mouth, with its ripe, bee-stung lower lip, was wide and generous; the
pointed curve of her chin revealed, perhaps, too much determination in
its outward thrust. But the rich dark red in her cheeks lent vividness
to her face, and when she smiled her eyes and mouth lighted up as if a
lamp shone within. Against the sordid background of the store, her head
in the brilliant shawl was like some exotic flower.
Straight, tranquil, thin and fugitive as mist, the snow was falling.
Though the transparent flakes vanished as soon as they reached the
earth, they diffused in their steady flight an impression of evanescence
and unreality. Through this shifting medium the familiar scene appeared
as insubstantial as a pattern of frost on the grass. It was as if the
secret spirit of the land had traced an image on the flat surface,
glimmering, remote, unapproachable, like the expression of an animal
that man has forced into sullen submission. There were hours at
twilight, or beneath the shredded clouds of the sunrise, when the winter
landscape reminded Dorinda of the look in the faces of overworked farm
horses. At such moments she would find herself asking, with the
intellectual thrill of the heretic, "I wonder if everything has a soul?"
The country had been like this, she knew, long before she was born. It
would be like this, she sometimes thought, after she and all those who
were living with her were dead. For the one thing that seemed to her
immutable and everlasting was the poverty of the soil.
Without knowing that she looked at it, her gaze rested on the bare
station; on the crude frame buildings, like houses that children make
out of blocks; on the gleaming track which ran north and south; on the
old freight car, which was the home of Butcher, the lame negro who
pumped water into the engines; on the litter of chips and shavings and
dried tobacco, stems which strewed the ground between the telegraph
poles and the hitching-rail by the store. Farther away, in the direction
of Whippernock River, she could see the vague shape of the ruined mill,
and beyond this, on the other side of the track, the sunken road winding
in scallops through interminable acres of broomsedge. Though the snow
had fallen continuously since noon, the air was not cold, and the white
glaze on the earth was scarcely heavier than hoar-frost.
For almost a year now, ever since Mrs. Pedlar had fallen ill of
consumption, and Dorinda had taken her place in the store, the girl had
listened eagerly for the first rumble of the approaching trains. Until
to-day the passing trains had been a part of that expected miracle, the
something different in the future, to which she looked ahead over the
tedious stretch of the present. There was glamour for her in the
receding smoke. There was adventure in the silver-blue of the distance.
The glimpse of a rapidly disappearing face; a glance from strange eyes
that she remembered; the shadowy outline of a gesture; these tenuous
impressions ran like vivid threads in her memory. Her nature, starved
for emotional realities, and nourished on the gossamer substance of
literature, found its only escape in the fabrication of dreams. Though
she had never defined the sensation in words, there were moments when it
seemed to her that her inner life was merely a hidden field in the
landscape, neglected, monotonous, abandoned to solitude, and yet with a
smothered fire, like the wild grass, running through it. At twenty, her
imagination was enkindled by the ardour that makes a woman fall in love
with a religion or an idea. Some day, so ran the bright thread of her
dream, the moving train would stop, and the eyes that had flashed into
hers and passed by would look at her again. Then the stranger who was
not a stranger would say, "I knew your face among a thousand, and I came
back to find you." And the train would rush on with them into the
something different beyond the misty edge of the horizon. Adventure,
happiness, even unhappiness, if it were only different!
That was yesterday. To-day the miracle had occurred, and the whole of
life had blossomed out like a flower in the sun. She had found romance,
not in imagination, not in the pallid fiction crushed among the tomes in
her great-grandfather's library, but driving on one of the muddy roads
through the broomsedge. To the casual observer there was merely a
personable young man, the son of old Doctor Greylock, making the
scattered rural calls of a profession which his father was too drunk to
pursue. A pleasant young man, intelligent, amiable, still wearing with a
difference the thin veneer of the city. Though he was, perhaps, a trifle
too eager to please, this was a commendable fault, and readily
overlooked in an irreproachable son who had relinquished his ambition in
order to remain with his undeserving old father. Filial devotion was
both esteemed and practised in that pre-Freudian age, before
self-sacrifice had been dethroned from its precarious seat among the
virtues; and to give up one's career for a few months, at most for a
possible year, appeared dutiful rather than dangerous to a generation
that knew not psychoanalysis.
And he was not only an admirable young man, he was, what admirable young
men frequently are not, attractive as well. His dark red hair, burnished
to a copper glow, grew in a natural wave; his sparkling eyes were
brown-black like chinkapins in the autumn; his skin was tanned and
slightly freckled, with a healthy glow under the surface; his short
moustache, a shade lighter than his hair, lent mystery to a charming, if
serious, mouth, and his smile, indiscriminating in its friendliness, was
wholly delightful. To Dorinda, meeting him in the early morning as she
was walking the two miles from Old Farm to the store, it was as if an
April flush had passed over the waste places. She recognized love with
the infallible certainty of intuition. It was happiness, and yet in some
strange way it was shot through with a burning sensation which was less
pleasure than pain. Though her perceptions were more vivid than they had
ever been, there was an unreality about her surroundings, as if she were
walking in some delicious trance. Beautiful as it was, it seemed to be
vanishing, like a beam of light, in the very moment when she felt it
flooding her heart. Yet this sense of unreality, of elusiveness, made it
more precious. Watching the empty roads, through the veil of snow, she
asked herself every minute, "Will he come this way again? Shall I wait
for him, or shall I let him pass me in the road? Suppose he goes back
another way! Suppose he has forgotten----"
The door behind her opened, and old Matthew Fairlamb came hobbling out
with the help of his stout hickory stick. Though he was approaching
ninety, he was still vigorous, with a projecting thatch of hair as
colourless as straw and the aquiline profile of a Roman senator. In his
youth, and indeed until his old age, when his son William succeeded him,
he had been the best carpenter at Pedlar's Mill. His eyes were bleared
now, and his gums toothless; but he had never lost his shrewd
Scotch-Irish understanding or his sense of humour, which broke out in
flashes as swift and darting as dry weather lightning.
"You'd better be startin' home, Dorinda," he remarked as he passed her.
"The snow means to keep up, and yo' Ma will begin to worry about you."
Turning, he peered at her with his cackling laugh. "Yo' face looks like
a May mornin' to my old eyes," he added. "I ain't seen you about here
fur a couple of weeks."
With her gaze still on the distance, Dorinda answered impatiently, "No,
Ma had one of her bad spells, and I had to help out at home. But no
matter how sick she is she never gives up, and she never worries about
anything smaller than eternal damnation."
"Yes, she's a pious one," old Matthew conceded. "It's faith, I reckon,
that's kept her goin', sence the Lord must know He ain't made it none
too easy for her."
"Oh, it's hard work that she lives on," replied Dorinda. "She says if
she were to stop working, she'd drop down dead like a horse that is
winded. She never stops, not even on Sundays, except when she is in
church."
Old Matthew's hilarity dwindled into a sigh. "Well, thar ain't much rest
to be got out of that," he rejoined sympathetically. "I ain't contendin'
against the doctrine of eternal damnation," he hastened to explain, "but
as long as yo' Ma is obleeged to work so hard, 'tis a pity she ain't got
a mo' restful belief." Then, as he observed her intent gaze, he inquired
suspiciously, "You don't see nary a turnout on the road, do you?"
The dark red in the girl's cheeks brightened to carnation. "Why, of
course not. I was just watching the snow."
But his curiosity, once aroused, was as insatiable as avarice. "I don't
reckon you've seen whether young Doctor Greylock has gone by or not?"
She shook her head, still blushing. "No, I haven't seen him. Is anybody
sick at your place?"
"It ain't that," returned the old man. "I was just thinkin' he might
give me a lift on the way. It ain't more'n half a mile to my place, but
half a mile looks different to twenty and to eighty-odd years. He's a
spry young chap, and would make a good match for you, Dorinda," he
concluded, in merciless accents.
Dorinda's head was turned away, but her voice sounded smothered. "You
needn't worry about that." (Why did old age make people so hateful?) "I
haven't seen him but once since he came home."
"Well, he'll look long befo' he finds a likelier gal than you. I ain't
seen him more than a few times myself; but in these parts, whar young
men are as skeerce as wild turkeys, he won't have to go beggin'. Geneva
Ellgood would take him in a minute, I reckon, an' her Pa is rich enough
to buy her a beau in the city, if she wants one. He! He!" His malicious
cackle choked him. "They do say that young Jason was sweet on her in New
York last summer," he concluded when he had recovered.
For the first time Dorinda turned her head and looked in his face. "If
everybody believed your gossip, Mr. Fairlamb, nobody at Pedlar's Mill
would be speaking to anybody else."
Old Matthew's mouth closed like a nut-cracker; but she saw from the
twinkle in his bleared eyes that he had construed her reprimand into a
compliment. "Thar's some of 'em that wouldn't lose much by that," he
returned, after a pause. "But to come back to young Jason, he's got a
job ahead of him if he's goin' to try farmin' at Five Oaks, an' he'll
need either a pile of money or a hard-workin' wife."
"Oh, he doesn't mean to stay here. As soon as his father dies, he will
go back to New York."
The detestable cackle broke out again. "The old man ain't dead yit. I've
known some hard drinkers to have long lives, an' thar ain't nothin' more
wearin' on the young than settin' down an' waitin' fur old folks to die.
Young Jason is a pleasant-mannered boy, though he looks a bit too soft
to stand the hard wear of these here roads. I ain't got nothin' to say
aginst him, but if he'd listen to the warnin' of eighty-odd years, he'd
git away before the broomsage ketches him. Thar's one thing sartain
sure, you've got to conquer the land in the beginning, or it'll conquer
you before you're through with it."
It was all true. She had heard it before, and yet, though she knew it
was true, she refused to believe it. Whether it was true or not, she
told herself passionately, it had no connection with Jason Greylock. The
bright vision she had seen in the road that morning flickered and died
against the sombre monochrome of the landscape.
"I must go in," she said, turning away. "I haven't time to stand
talking." Old Matthew would never stop, she knew, of his own accord.
When his cackle rose into a laugh the sound reminded her of the distant
_who_--_who_--_whoee_ of an owl.
"Well, I'll be gittin' along too," replied the old man. "My eyes ain't
all they used to be, and my legs ain't fur behind 'em. Remember me to
yo' Ma, honey, and tell her I'll be lookin' over jest as soon as the mud
holes dry up."
"Yes, I'll tell her," answered the girl more gently. Old Matthew had
known her great-grandfather; he had added the wings to the house at Old
Farm and built the Presbyterian church on the other side of the track.
In the prime of his life, forty years ago, he had been the last man at
Pedlar's Mill to see Gordon Kane, her mother's missionary lover, who had
died of fever in the Congo. It was old Matthew, Dorinda had heard, who
had broken the news of Kane's death to the weeping Eudora, while she
held her wedding dress in her hands. Disagreeable as he had become, it
was impossible for the girl to forget that his long life was bound up
with three generations of her family.
When she entered the store, she felt for a moment that she should
suffocate in the heated air from the wood stove at the far end. The
stuffy smell, a mingling of turpentine, varnish, bacon, coffee, and
kerosene oil, was so different from the crystal breath of the falling
snow that it rushed over her like warm ashes, smothering, enveloping.
Yet there was nothing strange to her in the scene or the atmosphere. She
was accustomed to the close, dry heat and to the heavy odours of a place
where everything that one could not raise on a farm was kept and sold.
For eleven months she had worked here side by side with Nathan Pedlar,
and she was familiar with the usual stock-in-trade of a country store.
In a minute she could put her hand on any object from a ploughshare to
a darning needle.
"You'd better be going home early," said Nathan Pedlar, looking round
from the shelf he was putting in order. "The snow may get heavier toward
sunset."
He was a tall, lank, scraggy man, with a face that reminded Dorinda of a
clown that she had once seen in a circus. Only the clown's nose was
large and red, and Nathan's looked as if it had been mashed in by a
blow. Aunt Mehitable Green, the coloured midwife, insisted that his
features had been born like other children's, but that his mother had
rolled on him in her sleep when he was a baby, and had flattened his
nose until it would never grow straight again. Though he possessed a
reserve of prodigious strength, he failed to be impressive even as an
example of muscular development. Dorinda had worked with him every day
for eleven months, and yet she found that he had made as little
impression upon her as a pine tree by the roadside. Looking at him, she
saw clearly his gaunt round shoulders beneath the frayed alpaca coat,
his hair and eyebrows and short moustache, all the colour of dingy
rabbit fur, and his small grey eyes with blinking lids; but the moment
after he had passed out of her sight, the memory of him would become as
fluid as water and trickle out of her mind. A kind but absurd man, this
was the way she thought of him, honest, plodding, unassuming, a man
whose "word was as good as his bond," but whose personality was
negligible. The truth about him, though Dorinda never suspected it, was
that he had come into the world a quarter of a century too soon. He was
so far in advance of his age that his position inspired ridicule instead
of respect in his generation. When his lagging age had caught up with
Nathan Pedlar, it had forgotten what its prophet had prophesied. Though
he made a comfortable living out of the store, and had put by enough to
enable him to face old age with equanimity, he was by nature a farmer,
and his little farm near the mill yielded a good harvest. Unlike most
Southern farmers, he was not afraid of a theory, and he was beginning to
realize the value of rotation in crops at a period when a cornfield at
Pedlar's Mill was as permanent as a graveyard. Already he was
experimenting with alfalfa, though even the prosperous James Ellgood
made fun of "the weed with the highfalutin' name from the Middle West."
For it was a part of Nathan's perverse destiny that people asked his
advice with recklessness and accepted it with deliberation.
"I am going as soon as I speak to Rose Emily," Dorinda replied. "Did the
doctor say she was better this morning?"
Nathan's hands, which were fumbling among the boxes on the long shelf,
became suddenly still.
"No, he didn't say so," he answered, without turning. Something in his
tone made Dorinda catch her breath sharply. "He didn't say she was
worse, did he?"
At this Nathan pushed the boxes away and leaned over the counter to meet
her eyes. His face was bleak with despair, and Dorinda's heart was wrung
as she looked at him. She had often wondered how Rose Emily could have
married him. Poverty would have been happiness, she felt, compared with
so prosaic a marriage; yet she knew that, according to the standards of
Pedlar's Mill, Nathan was an exceptional husband.
"Perhaps she'll pick up when the spring comes," she added when he did
not reply.
Nathan shook his head and swallowed as if a pebble had lodged in his
throat. "That's what I'm hoping," he answered. "If she can just get on
her feet again. There's nothing this side of heaven I wouldn't do to
make her well."
For an instant she was afraid he would break down; but while she
wondered what on earth she could say to comfort him, he turned back to
the boxes. "I must get this place tidied up before night," he said in
his usual tone, with the flat, dry cough which had become chronic.
While she watched him, Dorinda threw the shawl back on one arm and
revealed her fine dark head. The heavy eyebrows and the clear stern line
of her features stood out as if an edge of light had fallen over them,
leaving the rest of her face in shadow. She was wearing an old tan
ulster, faded and patched in places, and beneath the hem her brown
calico dress and mud-stained country shoes were visible. Even at
Pedlar's Mill the changing fashions were followed respectfully, if
tardily, and in the middle 'nineties women walked the muddy roads in
skirts which either brushed the ground or were held up on one side. But
shabbiness and a deplorable fashion could not conceal the slim, flowing
lines of her figure, with its gallant and spirited carriage.
"I'm going to say a word or two to Rose Emily before I start," she said
in a cheerful voice. "I don't mind being late." Walking to the end of
the store, beyond the wood stove, which felt like a furnace, she pushed
back a curtain of purple calico, and turned the knob of a door. Inside
the room a woman was sitting up in bed, crocheting a baby's sacque of
pink wool.
"I thought you'd gone, Dorinda," she said, looking up. "The snow is
getting thicker."
Propped up among her pillows, winding the pink wool through her fragile
hands, Mrs. Pedlar faced death with the courage of a heroic illusion.
Before her marriage, as Rose Emily Milford, she had taught school in the
little schoolhouse near Pedlar's Mill, and Dorinda had been her
favourite pupil. She was a small, intelligent-looking woman, pitiably
thin, with prominent grey eyes, hair of a peculiar shade of wheaten red,
and a brilliant flush on her high cheek bones.
Ball after ball of pink wool unwound on the patchwork quilt, and was
crocheted into babies' sacques which she sold in the city; but
crocheting, as she sometimes said, "did not take your mind off things as
well as moving about," and it seemed to her that only since she had been
ill had she begun to learn anything about life. The nearer she came to
death, the more, by some perversity of nature, did she enjoy living. If
death ever entered her mind, it was as an abstraction, like the doctrine
of salvation by faith, never as a reality. Every afternoon she said, "If
it is fine, I shall get up to-morrow." Every morning she sighed happily,
"I think I'll wait till the evening."
The room was a small one, divided off from the brick store, which
adjoined the new frame house Nathan had built for his bride; and there
was a confusion of colour, for Mrs. Pedlar's surroundings reflected the
feverish optimism of her philosophy. The rag carpet and the patchwork
quilt were as gay as an autumn flower-bed; the kerosene lamp wore a
ballet skirt of crimson crape paper; earthen pots of begonias and
geraniums filled the green wooden stands at the windows. On the
hearthrug, before the open fire, three small children were playing with
paper dolls, while the fourth, a baby of nine months, lay fast asleep in
his crib, with the nipple of a bottle still held tight in his mouth.
"I'm glad I chose that orange colour for your shawl," said Mrs. Pedlar,
in the excited manner that had come upon her with her rising
temperature. "It goes so well with your black hair. You ought to be glad
you're a big woman," she continued thoughtfully. "Somehow life seems to
go easier with big women. I asked young Doctor Greylock if that wasn't
true, and he said small women seemed to think so."
Dorinda laughed, and her laughter contained a thrill of joy. Some inward
happiness had bubbled up and overflowed into her voice, her look, and
her shy dreaming movements. There was sweetness for her in hearing of
Jason Greylock; there was ecstasy in the thought that she might meet him
again in the road. Yet the sweetness and the ecstasy were thin and far
off, like music that comes from a distance. It seemed incredible that
anything so wonderful should have happened at Pedlar's Mill.
In front of the fire, the three children (Minnie May, the eldest, was
only ten) were busy with their paper dolls. They had made a doll's house
out of a cracker box, with the frayed corners of the rug for a garden.
"Now Mrs. Brown has lost her little girl, and she is going to Mrs.
Smith's to look for her," Minnie May was saying impressively.
"You've got your hands full with those children," remarked Dorinda
because she could think of nothing else that sounded natural. Her mind
was not on the children; it was miles away in an enclosed garden of
wonder and delight; but some casual part of her was still occupying her
familiar place and living her old meaningless life.
"Yes, but they're good children. They can always amuse themselves.
Minnie May cut those paper dolls out of an old fashion book, and the
younger children are all crazy about them."
"Minnie May is a great help to you."
"Yes, she takes after her father. Nathan is the best man that ever
lived. He never thinks of himself a minute."
"He gave me some sugar for Ma," Dorinda sighed as she answered, for the
thought had stabbed through her like a knife that Rose Emily was dying.
Here we are talking about sugar and paper dolls when she won't live
through the summer.
"There's a pat of butter too," said Rose Emily. "I told Minnie May to
put it in your basket. I don't see how your mother manages without
butter."
"We've had to do without it since our cow died last fall. I'm saving up,
after the taxes are paid, to buy one in the spring." Again the thought
stabbed her. "As if cows made any difference when she has only a few
months to live!" Were the trivial things, after all, the important ones?
"And Mrs. Brown found that her little girl had been run over and killed
in the middle of the road," Minnie May whispered. "So she decided that
all she could do for her was to have a handsome funeral and spend the
ten dollars she'd saved from her chicken money. That's the graveyard,
Bud, down there by the hole in the rug. Lena, stop twistin', or you'll
pull it to pieces."
"Nathan says you can get a good cow from old Doctor Greylock for thirty
dollars," said Mrs. Pedlar. "He's got one, that Blossom of his, that he
wants to sell." Then an idea occurred to her and she concluded
doubtfully, "Of course, everything may be changed now that Jason has
come back."
"Yes, of course, everything may be changed," repeated Dorinda, and the
words, though they were merely an echo, filled her with happiness. Life
was burning within her. Even the thought of death, even the knowledge
that her friend would not live through the summer, passed like a shadow
over the flame that consumed her. Everything was a shadow except the
luminous stillness, which was so much deeper than stillness, within her
heart.
"He is just the same pleasant-mannered boy he used to be when I taught
him," resumed Mrs. Pedlar. "You remember how mischievous he was at
school."
Dorinda nodded. "I was only there a year with him before he went away."
"Yes, I'd forgotten. I asked him to-day if he remembered you, and he
said he knew you as soon as he saw you in the road this morning." She
paused for an instant while a vision flickered in her eyes. "It would be
nice if he'd take a fancy to you, Dorinda, and I'm sure you're handsome
enough, with your blue eyes and your high colour, for anybody to fall in
love with, and you're better educated, too, than most city girls, with
all the books you've read. I sent Minnie May to find you while he was
here, but she brought Nathan instead; and the doctor had to hurry off to
old Mrs. Flower, who is dying."
So they were all pushing them together! It was no wonder, thought
Dorinda, since, as old Matthew said, young men were as scarce as wild
turkeys, and everybody wanted to marry off everybody else. Almost
unconsciously, the power of attraction was increased by an irresistible
force. Since every one, even the intelligent Rose Emily, thought it so
suitable!
"I've seen him only once since he came home," said the girl.
"Well, I told him about you, and he was very much interested. I believe
he's a good young man, and he seems so friendly and kindhearted. He
asked after all the coloured people he used to know, and he was so
pleased to hear how well they are getting on. His father couldn't
remember anything about anybody, he told me. I reckon the truth is that
the old doctor is befuddled with drink all the time." She laughed
softly. "Jason has picked up a lot of newfangled ideas," she added. "He
even called broomsedge 'bromegrass' till he found that nobody knew what
he was talking about."
"Is he going to stay on?"
"Just for a little while, he says, until he can get the place off his
hands. What he meant but didn't like to say, I suppose, was that he
would stay as long as his father lives. The old man has got Bright's
disease, you know, and he's already had two strokes of paralysis. The
doctor up at the Courthouse says it can't be longer than six months, or
a year at the most."
Six months or a year! Well, anything might happen, anything did happen
in six months or a year!
On the floor the children were busily pretending that the oblong hole in
the rug was a grave. "Mrs. Brown bought a crape veil that came all the
way down to the bottom of her skirt," Minnie May was whispering, alert
and animated. "That paper doll in the veil is Mrs. Brown on the way to
the funeral."
"Well, I'd better be going," Dorinda said, throwing the orange shawl
over her head, while she thought, "I ought to have worn my hat, only the
snow would have ruined my Sunday hat, and the other isn't fit to be
seen."
Picking up the basket by the door, she looked over her shoulder at Rose
Emily. "If the snow isn't too heavy, I'll be over early to-morrow, and
help you with the children. I hope you'll feel better."
"Oh, I'm planning to get up in the morning," responded Rose Emily in her
eager voice, smiling happily over the pink wool.
III
Outside, there was a little yard enclosed in white palings to which
farmers tied their horses when the hitching-rail was crowded. Everything
was bare now under the thin coating of snow, and the dried stalks of
summer flowers were protruding forlornly from heaps of straw. Beyond the
small white gate the Old Stage Road, as it was still called, ran past
the cleared ground by the station and dipped into the band of pine woods
beyond the Haney place, which had been divided and let "on shares" to
negro tenants. Within the shadow of the pines, the character of the soil
changed from the red clay on the hills to a sandy loam strewn with pine
needles.
As Dorinda walked on rapidly, the shawl she wore made a floating orange
cloud against the dim background of earth and sky. The snow was falling
in larger flakes, like a multitude of frozen moths, and beneath the
fluttering white wings the country appeared obscure, solitary, vaguely
menacing. Though the road was quite deserted, except for the scarecrow
figure of Black Tom, the county idiot, who passed her on his way to beg
supper and a night's lodging at the station, the girl was not afraid of
the loneliness. She had two miles to walk, and twilight was already
approaching; but she knew every turn of the road, and she could, as she
sometimes said to herself, "feel her way in the dark of the moon."
To-night, even if there had been wild beasts in the pines, she would not
have turned back. A winged joy had risen out of the encompassing poverty
and desolation. Though the world was colourless around her, there was a
clear golden light in her mind; and through this light her thoughts were
flying like swallows in the afterglow. Her old dreams had come back
again, but they were different now, since they were infused with the
warm blood of reality. She had found, in her mother's religious
phraseology, a "kingdom of the spirit" to which she could retreat. She
had only to close her eyes and yield herself to this clear golden light
of sensation. She had only to murmur, "I wonder if I shall meet him
again," and immediately the falling snow, the neglected fields, and the
dark pines melted away. She was caught up, she was possessed, by that
flying rapture which was like the swiftness of birds. With a phrase,
with a thought, or by simply emptying her mind of impressions, she could
bring back all the piercing sweetness of surrender.
And she had discovered the miracle for herself! No one, not even Rose
Emily, had ever hinted to her of this secret ecstasy at the heart of
experience. All around her people were pretending that insignificant
things were the only important things. The eternal gestures of milking
and cooking, of sowing and reaping! Existence, as far as she could see,
was composed of these immemorial habits. Her mother, her father, her
brother, Nathan and Rose Emily, all these persons whom she saw daily
were engaged in this strange conspiracy of dissimulation. Not one of
them had ever betrayed to her this hidden knowledge of life.
Beyond the old Haney place and the stretch of pines there were the
pastures of Honeycomb Farm, where three old maids, Miss Texanna Snead,
the postmistress, and her sisters Seena and Tabitha, who made dresses,
lived on the ragged remnant of once fertile acres. Recently the younger
brother William had returned from the West with a little property, and
though the fortunes of the sisters were by no means affluent, the fields
by the roadside were beginning to look less forlorn. A few bedraggled
sheep, huddled together beyond the "worm" fence, stared at her through
the hurrying snowflakes. Then, springing to their awkward legs, they
wavered uncertainly for a minute, and at last scampered off, bleating
foolishly. An old horse rested his head on the rails and gazed
meditatively after her as she went by, and across the road several cows
filed slowly on their way from the pasture to the cow-barn.
"That's a nice cow, that red one," thought Dorinda. "I wish she belonged
to us," and then, with the inconsequence of emotion, "if I meet him, he
will ask if he may drive me home."
There was the steady _clop-clop_ of a horse's hoofs, and the rapid turning
of wheels in the road behind her. Not for the world would she have
slackened her pace or glanced over her shoulder, though her heart
fluttered in her throat and she felt that she was choking.
She longed with all her soul to stop and look back; she knew, through
some magnetic current, that he was pursuing her, that in a minute or two
he would overtake her; yet she kept on rapidly, driven by a blind
impulse which was superior to her will. She was facing the moment, which
comes to all women in love, when life, overflowing the artificial
boundaries of reason, yields itself to the primitive direction of
instinct.
The wheels were grinding on a rocky place in the road. Though she
hurried on, the beating of her heart was so loud in her ears that it
filled the universe.
"I am going your way," he said, just as she had imagined he would.
"Won't you let me drive you home?"
She stopped and turned, while all the glimmering light of the snow
gathered in her orange shawl and deepened its hue. Around them the steep
horizon seemed to draw closer.
"I live at Old Farm," she answered.
He laughed, and the sound quickened her pulses. She had felt this way in
church sometimes when they sang the hymns she liked best, "Jesus, Lover
of My Soul" or "Nearer, My God, to Thee."
"Oh, I know you live at Old Farm. You are Dorinda Oakley. Did you think
I'd forgotten you?"
For an instant a divine dizziness possessed her. Without looking at him,
she saw his eyes, black in the pallid snowflakes, his red hair, just the
colour of the clay in the road, his charming boyish smile, so kind, so
eager, so incredibly pathetic when she remembered it afterwards. She saw
these disturbing details with the sense of familiarity which events
borrow from the dream they repeat.
"I can't get out," he said, "because the mare is hungry and wants to go
on. But you might get in."
She shook her head, and just as in every imaginary encounter with him,
she could think of nothing to reply. Though her mind worked clearly
enough at other times, she stood now in a trance between the rail fence,
where the old horse was still watching her, and the wheel ruts in the
road. By some accident, for which nothing in her past experience had
prepared her, all the laws of her being, thought, will, memory, habit,
were suspended. In their place a force which was stronger than all these
things together, a force with which she had never reckoned before,
dominated her being. The powers of life had seized her as an eagle
seizes its prey.
"Come, get in," he urged, and dumb with happiness, she obeyed him.
"I remember you very well," he said, smiling into her eyes. "You were
little Dorinda Oakley, and you once poured a bottle of ink on my head to
turn it black."
"I know--" If she had been talking in her sleep, it could not have
seemed more unreal. At this moment, when of all the occasions in her
life she longed to be most brilliant and animated, she was tongue-tied
by an immobility which was like the drowsiness, only far pleasanter,
that she felt in church on hot August afternoons.
"You've grown so tall," he resumed presently, "that at first I wondered
a bit. Were your eyes always as big as they are now?"
Though she was drowning in bliss, she could only gaze at him stupidly.
Why did love, when it came, take away all your ability to enjoy it?
"I didn't know you were coming back so soon," she said after a struggle.
"Well, Father got in such a fix I had to," he answered, with a slight
frown which made his face, she thought, more attractive. The haunting
pathos, which she detected but could not explain, looked out of his
eyes; the pathos of heroic weakness confronting insurmountable
obstacles. "Of course it isn't for ever," he said in a surprisingly
cheerful voice. "Father had a second stroke a few weeks ago, and they
sent for me because there was nobody to see that he was taken care of.
But as soon as he gets better, or if he dies," his tone was kind but
impersonal, "I'll go back again and take up my work. I had just got my
degree, and was starting in for a year's experience in a big hospital.
Until I came I thought it was for a few days. The doctor telegraphed
that Father wouldn't last out the week; but he's picked up, and may go
on for a while yet. I can't leave him until he is out of danger, and in
the meantime I'm trying to enlighten the natives. God! what a country!
Nobody seems to ask any more of life than to plod from one bad harvest
to another. They don't know the first principles of farming, except of
course Mr. Ellgood, who has made a success of Green Acres, and that
clownish-looking chap who owns the store. I wonder what the first
Pedlar's were like. The family must have been in the same spot for a
hundred and fifty years."
"Oh, they've been there always. But most of the other farmers are
tenants. Pa says that's why the land has gone bad. No man will work
himself to death over somebody else's land."
"That's the curse of the tenant system. Even the negroes become thrifty
when they own a piece of land. And I've noticed, by the way, that they
are the best farmers about here. The negro who owns his ten or twelve
acres is a better manager than the poor white with twice the number."
"I know," Dorinda assented; but she was not interested in a discussion
of farming. All her life she had heard men talk of farming and of
nothing else. Surely there were other things he could tell her! "I
should think it would be dreary for you," she added, with a woman's
antipathy to the impersonal.
Turning to her suddenly, he brushed the snow-flakes from the fur robe
over her knees. His gestures, like his personality, were firm,
energetic, and indescribably casual. Against the brooding loneliness of
the country his figure, for all its youthful audacity, appeared trivial
and fugitive. It was as if the landscape waited, plunged in melancholy,
for the passing of a ray of sunshine. Though he had sprung from the
soil, he had returned to it a stranger, and there could be no
sympathetic communion between him and the solitude. Neither as a lover
nor as a conqueror could he hope to possess it in spirit.
"If I thought it was for ever, I'd take to drink or worse," he replied
carelessly. "One can stand anything for a few weeks or even months; but
a lifetime of this would be--" He broke off and looked at her closely.
"How have you stood it?" he asked. "How does any woman stand it without
going out of her head?"
Dorinda smiled. "Oh, I'm used to it. I even like it. Hills would make me
feel shut in."
"Haven't you ever wanted to get away?"
"I used to think of it all the time. When I first went to the store, I
was listening so hard for the trains that I couldn't hear anything
else."
"And you got over it?"
Her lashes fluttered over the burning blue of her eyes. If only he could
know how recently she had got over it! "Yes, I don't feel that way now."
"You've even kept your health, and your colour. But, of course, you're
young."
"I'm twenty. When I'm forty I may feel differently. By that time I
shan't have any books left to read."
He laughed. "By that time you'll probably begin listening again, harder
than ever." He thought for a moment, and then added, with the optimism
of inexperience, "While I'm here I'll try to get a few modern ideas into
the heads of the natives. That will be worth while, I suppose. I ought
to be able to teach them something in a few weeks."
If she had been older or wiser, she might have smiled at his assurance.
As it was she repeated gently, innocent of ironical intention, "Yes,
that will be worth while."
It was enough just to sit near him in silence; to watch, through lowered
lashes, the tremor of his smile, the blinking of his eyelids, the way
the pale reddish hair grew on the back of his neck, the indolent grasp
with which he was holding the reins. It was enough, she felt, just to
breathe in the stimulating smell of his cigarettes, so different from
the heavy odour of country tobacco. And outside this enchanted circle in
which they moved, she was aware of the falling snow, of the vague brown
of the fields, of the sharp freshness of the approaching evening, of the
thick familiar scents of the winter twilight. Far away a dog barked. The
mingled effluvia of rotting leaves and manure heaps in barnyards drifted
toward her. From beyond a fence the sound of voices floated. These
things belonged, she knew, to the actual world; they had no place in the
celestial sphere of enchantment. Yet both the actual and the ideal
seemed to occur within her mind. She could not separate the scent of
leaves or the sound of distant voices from the tumult of her thoughts.
They passed Honeycomb Farm, and sped lightly over a mile of rutted track
to the fork of the Old Stage Road, where a blasted oak of tremendous
height stood beside the ruins of a burned cabin. On the other side of
the way there was the big red gate of Five Oaks, and beyond it a sandy
branch road ran farther on to the old brick house. The snow hid the view
now; but on clear days the red roof and chimneys of the house were
visible above the willow branches of Gooseneck Creek. Usually, as the
mare knew, the doctor's buggy turned in at the big gate; but to-day it
passed by and followed the main road, which dipped and rose and dipped
again on its way to Old Farm. First there was a thin border of woods,
flung off sharply, like an iron fretwork, against the sky; then a strip
of corduroy road and a bridge of logs over a marshy stream; and beyond
the bridge, on the right, stood, the open gate of Dorinda's home. The
mare stumbled and the buggy swerved on the rocky grade to the lawn.
"That's a bad turn," remarked Jason.
"I know. Pa is always hoping that he will have time to fix it. We used
to keep the gate shut, but it has sagged so that it has to stay open."
"They ought to mend the bridge first. Those holes are dangerous for
horses."
Again she assented. Why, she wondered vaguely, did he emphasize the
obvious?
Within its grove of trees, in the midst of last summer's weeds, which
were never cut, the long whitewashed house wore a forlorn yet not
inhospitable air. Through the snow the hooded roof looked close and
secretive; but there was the glimmer of a lamp in one of the lower
windows, enormous lilac bushes, which must lend gaiety in April,
clustered about the porch, and the spreading frame wings, added by old
John Calvin Abernethy, still gave an impression of comfort. It was the
ordinary Virginian farm-house of the early nineteenth century, built for
service rather than for beauty; and retaining, because of its
simplicity, a charm which had long since departed from more ambitious
pieces of architecture.
"So we're home again," said Jason, glancing about him.
The buggy had come to a stop by the front steps, and regardless of the
mare's impatience, he sprang to the ground and helped the girl to
alight.
"Yes, it looks bare, doesn't it?"
She lifted her face to his as she answered, and while he looked down
into her eyes, a quiver passed over his mouth under the short red
moustache.
"Do you go over every day?" he asked. "Why haven't I met you before?"
She looked down. "Oh, I had to help out at home. But I've worked in the
store ever since Mrs. Pedlar was taken ill. I get there about eight
usually and stay until just before sunset."
"For which, I suppose, you receive an extravagant salary?"
She blushed at his whimsical tone. "They pay me ten dollars a month."
"Ten dollars a month!" A low whistle escaped his lips. "And you walk
four miles a day to earn it."
"I don't mind the walk. In good weather I'd rather be out of doors.
Besides somebody usually picks me up."
"Exactly. As I did this evening. If I hadn't, it would have been after
dark when you got home. Well, I can help you while I'm here," he added
carelessly. "I go that way every day, and I'll look out for you."
Again the dumbness seized her, and she stood there rooted like a plant,
while he looked at her. For a moment, so intent was his gaze, she felt
that he had forgotten her presence. It was not in the least as if he
were staring at her shawl or her mud-stained ulster, or her broken
shoes; it was not even as if he were looking at her eyes and thinking
how blue they were. No, it was just as if he were seeing something
within his own mind.
"I've known so few girls," he said presently, as if he were talking to
himself, "but, somehow, you seem different." Then with delightful
irrelevance, he added playfully, "Don't forget me. I shall see you
soon."
After he had driven away, she stood gazing after him. Again the mare
hesitated, again the wheels crunched on the rocky place. Then the buggy
rolled over the bridge; she heard the sound of his voice as he avoided a
hole; and a minute later the vehicle had disappeared in the border of
leafless woods.
"_Don't forget me. I shall see you soon._"
Eight words, and the something different had at last happened to her!
Everything around her appeared fresh and strange and wonderful, as if
she were looking at it clearly for the first time. The snow wrapped her
softly like a mist of happiness. She felt it caressing her cheek, and it
seemed to her, when she moved, that her whole body had grown softer,
lighter, more intensely alive. Her inner life, which had been as bare as
a rock, was suddenly rich with bloom. Never again could she find the
hours dull and empty. "_Don't forget me. I shall see you soon_," sang her
thoughts.
IV
As she stepped on the porch, Rambler, an old black and yellow hound,
with flapping ears and the expression of a pragmatic philosopher, stole
out of the shadows and joined her.
"You'd better come in or Pa will begin to worry about you," she said,
and her voice startled her because it did not sound as if it were her
own. "I know you've been chasing rabbits again."
She wondered if the suppressed excitement showed also in her face, and
if her mother, who noticed everything, would detect it. After she had
entered the hall, which smelled of bacon and dried apples, she stopped
and tried to rub the bloom of ecstasy off her cheeks. Then, followed
sedately by Rambler, she passed the closed door of the parlour, which
was opened only for funerals or when the circuit minister was visiting
them, and went into the kitchen at the back of the house. The family
must have heard the wheels, and it was a mercy, she told herself, that
Rufus or Josiah had not come out to meet the buggy.
"Ma, Rose Emily sent you a pat of butter," she said, "and Nathan gave me
two pounds of brown sugar."
Her eyes blinked in the light; but it was not the smoky flare of the
lamp on the table that made the big kitchen, with its rough whitewashed
walls, its old-fashioned cooking-stove, its dilapidated pine table and
chairs, its battered pots and pans suspended from nails, its unused
churn standing in the accustomed place on the brick hearth--it was not
the lamp that made the room appear as unfamiliar as if she had never
seen it before. Nor was it the lamp that cast this peculiar haziness,
like a distant perspective, over the members of her family.
Mrs. Oakley, a tall, lean, angular woman, who had been almost beautiful
for a little while forty years before, placed the coffee-pot on the
table before she turned to look at her daughter. Under her sparse grey
hair, which was strained tightly back and twisted in a small knot on her
head, her face was so worn by suffering that a network of nerves
quivered beneath the pallid veil of her flesh. Religious depression,
from which she still suffered periodically, had refined her features to
austerity. Her pale grey eyes, with their wide fixed stare, appeared to
look out of caverns, and endowed her with the visionary gaze of a
mystic, like the eyes of a saint in a primitive Italian painting. Years
ago, while Dorinda was still a child, her mother had been for weeks at a
stretch what people called "not quite right in her mind," and she had
talked only in whispers because she thought the country was listening.
As long as the spell lasted, it had seemed to the child that the
farm-house crouched like a beaten hound, in the midst of the brown
fields, beneath the menacing solitude. Since then she had never lost the
feeling that the land contained a terrible force, whether for good or
evil she could not tell, and there were hours when the loneliness seemed
to rise in a crested wave and surge over her.
As she took the basket from her daughter, Mrs. Oakley's features
softened slightly, but she did not smile. Only very young things,
babies, puppies, chickens just out of the shell, made her smile, and
then her smile was more plaintive than cheerful.
"Rufus can have his buckwheat cakes for breakfast," she said, without
stopping in her movements from the table to the safe and from the safe
to the stove.
She had worked so hard for so many years that the habit had degenerated
into a disease, and thrift had become a tyrant instead of a slave in her
life. From dawn until after dark she toiled, and then lay sleepless for
hours because of the jerking of her nerves. She was, as she said of
herself, "driven," and it was the tragedy of her lot that all her toil
made so little impression. Though she spent every bit of her strength
there was nothing to show for her struggle. Like the land, which took
everything and gave back nothing, the farm had drained her vitality
without altering its general aspect of decay.
"That's good!" exclaimed Rufus, a handsome boy of eighteen, with
straight black hair, sparkling brown eyes, and the velvety dark red of
Dorinda's lips and cheeks. He was the youngest child, and after he had
been nursed through a virulent attack of scarlet fever, he had become
the idol of his mother, in spite of a temperamental wildness which she
made the subject of constant prayer. There was ceaseless contention
between him and his elder brother, Josiah, a silent, hardworking man of
thirty, with overhanging eyebrows and a scrubby beard which he seldom
trimmed. After the birth of her first child there had been a sterile
period in Mrs. Oakley's life, when her mental trouble began, and Dorinda
and Rufus both came while she was looking ahead, as she told herself, to
a peaceful middle age unhampered by childbearing.
"Sit down, Ma," said Dorinda, throwing her shawl on a chair and slipping
out of her ulster, while Flossie, the grey and white cat, rubbed against
her. "You look worn out, and it won't take me a minute. Have you been
helped, Pa?" she asked, turning to the hairy old man at the end of the
table.
"I ain't had my coffee yet," replied Joshua, raising his head from his
plate. He was a big, humble, slow-witted man, who ate and drank like a
horse, with loud munching noises. As his hair was seldom cut and he
never shaved, he still kept his resemblance to the pictures of John the
Baptist in the family Bible. In place of his youthful comeliness,
however, he wore now an air of having just emerged from the
wilderness. His shoulders were bent and slightly crooked from lifting
heavy burdens, and his face, the little that one could see of it, was
weatherbeaten and wrinkled in deep furrows, like the fissures in a red
clay road after rain. From beneath his shaggy hair his large brown eyes
were bright and wistful with the melancholy that lurks in the eyes of
cripples or of suffering animals. He was a dumb plodding creature who
had as little share in the family life as had the horses, Dan and
Beersheba; but, like the horses, he was always patient and willing to do
whatever was required of him. There were times when Dorinda asked
herself if indeed he had any personal life apart from the seasons and
the crops. Though he was not yet sixty-five, his features, browned and
reddened and seamed by sun and wind, appeared as old as a rock embedded
in earth. All his life he had been a slave to the land, harnessed to the
elemental forces, struggling inarticulately against the blight of
poverty and the barrenness of the soil. Yet Dorinda had never heard him
rebel. His resignation was the earth's passive acceptance of sun or
rain. When his crop failed, or his tobacco was destroyed by frost, he
would drive his plough into the field and begin all over again! "That
tobacco wanted another touch of sun," he would say quietly; or "I'll
make out to cut it a day earlier next year." The earth clung to him; to
his clothes, to the anxious creases in his face, to his finger nails,
and to his heavy boots, which were caked with manure from the stables.
The first time Dorinda remembered his taking her on his knee, the
strong smell of his blue jeans overalls had frightened her to tears, and
she had struggled and screamed. "I reckon my hands are too rough," he
had said timidly, and after that he had never tried to lift her again.
But whenever she thought of him now, his hands, gnarled, twisted, and
earth-stained like the vigorous roots of a tree, and that penetrating
briny smell, were the first things she remembered. His image was
embalmed in that stale odour of the farm as in a preserving fluid.
"It's snowing faster," Dorinda said, "but it doesn't stay on the
ground." Bending over her father, she covered the corn pone on his plate
with brown gravy. "Maybe it will be clear again by to-morrow," she
went on smoothly. "It's time spring was beginning."
Joshua's hand, which no amount of scrubbing could free front stain,
closed with a heavy grip on the handle of his knife. "This brown gravy
cert'n'y does taste good, honey," he said. "Yo' Ma's made out mighty
well with no milk or butter."
A deep tenderness pervaded Dorinda's heart, and this tenderness was but
a single wave of the emotion that flooded her being. "Poor Pa," she
thought, "he has never known anything but work." Oh, how splendid life
was and how hard! Aloud, she said, "I've saved up enough money to buy a
cow in May. After I help you with the taxed and the interest on the
mortgage, I'll still have enough left for the cow. Rose Emily says old
Doctor Greylock will sell us his Blossom!"
"Then we can have butter and buttermilk with the ash cake!" exclaimed
Rufus.
"I ain't so sure I'd want to buy that red cow of Doctor Greylock's,"
observed Josiah in a surly tone. That was his way, to make an objection
to everything. He had, as his mother sometimes said of him, a good
character but a mean disposition. At twenty he had married a pretty,
light woman, who died with her first child; and now, after a widowerhood
of ten years, he was falling in love with Elvira Snead, a silly young
thing, the daughter of thriftless Adam Snead, a man with scarcely a
shirt to his back or an acre to his name. Though Josiah was hardworking,
painstaking, and frugal, he preferred comeliness to character in a
woman. If it had been Rufus, Dorinda would have found an infatuation for
Elvira easier to understand. Nobody expected Rufus to be anything but
wild, and it was natural for young men to seek pleasures. The boy was
different from his father and his elder brother, who required as little
as cattle; and yet there was nothing for him to do in the long winter
evenings, except sort potatoes or work over his hare traps. The
neighbours were all too far away, and the horses too tired after the
day's work to drag the buggy over the mud-strangled roads. Dorinda could
browse happily among the yellowed pages in old Abernethy's library,
returning again and again to the Waverley Novels, or the exciting Lives
of the Missionaries; but Rufus cared nothing for books and had inherited
his mother's dread of the silence. He was a high-spirited boy, and he
liked pleasure; yet every evening after supper he would tinker with a
farm implement or some new kind of trap until he was sleepy enough for
bed. Then he would march upstairs to the fireless room under the eaves,
where the only warmth came up the chimney from the kitchen beneath. That
was all the life Rufus had ever had, though he looked exactly, Dorinda
thought, like Thaddeus of Warsaw or one of the Scottish Chiefs.
In the daytime the kitchen was a cheerful room, bright with sunshine
which fell through the mammoth scuppernong grapevine on the back porch.
Then the battered pots and pans grew bright again, the old wood stove
gave out a pleasant song; and the blossomless geraniums, in wooden
boxes, decorated the window-sill. Much of her mother's life was spent in
this room, and as a child Dorinda had played here happily with her
corncob or hickory-nut dolls. Poor as they were, there was never a
speck of dust anywhere. Mrs. Oakley looked down on the "poor white"
class, though she had married into it; and her recoil from her husband's
inefficiency was in the direction of a scrupulous neatness. She knew
that she had thrown herself away, in youth, on a handsome face; yet she
was just enough to admit that her marriage, as marriages go, had not
been unhappy. Her unhappiness, terrible as it had been, went deeper than
any human relation, for she was still fond of Joshua with the maternal
part of her nature while she despised him with her intelligence. He had
made her a good husband; it was not his fault that he could never get
on; everything from the start had been against him; and he had always
done the best that he could. She realized this clearly; but all the
romance in her life, after the death of the young missionary in the
Congo, had turned toward her religion. She could have lived without
Joshua; she could have lived even without Rufus, who was the apple of
her eye; but without her religion, as she had once confessed to Dorinda,
she would have been "lost." Like her daughter, she was subject to
dreams, but her dreams differed from Dorinda's since they came only in
sleep. There were winter nights, after the days of whispering in the
past, when the child Dorinda, startled by the flare of a lantern out in
the darkness, had seen her mother flitting barefooted over the frozen
ground. Shivering with cold and terror, the little girl had crept down
to rouse her fathers who had thrown some garments over his nightshirt,
and picking up the big raccoon-skin coat, had rushed out in pursuit of
his demented wife. A little later Josiah had followed, and then Dorinda;
and Rufus had brought sticks and paper from the kitchen and started a
fire, with shaking hands, in their mother's fireplace. When at last the
two men had led Mrs. Oakley into the house, she had, appeared so
bewildered and benumbed that she seemed scarcely, to know where she had
been. Once Dorinda had overheard Joshua whisper hoarsely to Josiah, "If
I hadn't come up with her in the nick of time, she would have done it";
but what the thing was they, whispered about the child did not
understand till long afterwards All she knew at the time was that her
mother's "missionary" dream's had come back again; a dream of blue skies
and golden sands, of palm trees on a river's bank, and of black babies
thrown to crocodiles. "I am lost, lost, lost," Mrs. Oakley had murmured
over and over, while she stared straight before her, with a prophetic
gleam in her wide eyes, as if she were seeing unearthly visions.
They ate to-night, after Joshua had asked grace, in a heavy silence,
which was broken only by the gurgling sounds Joshua and Josiah made over
their coffee-cups. Mrs. Oakley, who was decently if not delicately bred,
had become inured to the depressing tablet manners of her husband and
her elder son. After the first disillusionment of her marriage, she had
confined her efforts at improvement to the two younger children. They
had both, she felt with secret satisfaction, sprung from the finer
strain of the Abernethys; it was as if they had inherited from her that
rarer intellectual medium in which her forbears had attained their
spiritual being. There were hours when it seemed to her that the gulf
between the dominant Scotch-Irish stock of the Valley and the mongrel
breed of "poor white" which produced Joshua was as wide as the abyss
between alien races. Then the image of Joshua as she had first known him
would appear to her, and she would think, in the terms of theology which
were natural to her mind, "It must have been intended, or it wouldn't
have happened."
While the others were still eating, Mrs. Oakley rose from the food she
had barely tasted, and began to clear the table. The nervous affection
from which she suffered made it impossible for her to sit in one spot
for more than a few minutes. Her nerves jerked her up and started her on
again independently of her will or even of any physical effort. Only
constant movement quieted the twitching which ran like electric wires
through her muscles.
"Go and lie down, Ma. I'll clear off and wash up," Dorinda said. Her
pity for her mother was stronger to-night than it had ever been, for it
had become a part of the craving for happiness which was overflowing her
soul. Often this starved craving had made her bitter and self-centred
because of the ceaseless gnawing in her breast; but now it was wholly
kind and beneficent. "If you would only stop and rest," she added
tenderly, "your neuralgia would be better."
"I can't stop," replied Mrs. Oakley, with wintry calm. "I can't see
things going to rack and ruin and not try to prevent it." After a
minute, still moving about, she continued hopelessly, "It rests me to
work."
"I brought the butter for you," returned Dorinda, in hurt tones, "and
you didn't even touch it."
Mrs. Oakley shook her head. "I don't mind going without," she responded.
"You must keep it for the boys."
It was always like that. The girl had sometimes felt that the greatest
cross in her life was her mother's morbid unselfishness. Even her
nagging--and she nagged at them continually--was easier to bear.
"I've got the water all ready," Mrs. Oakley said, piling dishes on the
tin tray. "I'll get right through the washing up, and then we can have
prayers."
Family prayers in the evening provided the solitary emotional outlet in
her existence. Only then, while she read aloud one of the more
belligerent Psalms, and bent her rheumatic knees to the rag carpet in
her "chamber," were the frustrated instincts of her being etherealized
into spiritual passion. When the boys rebelled, as they sometimes did,
or Dorinda protested that she was "too busy for prayers," Mrs. Oakley
contended with the earnestness of a Covenanter: "If it wasn't for the
help of my religion, I could never keep going."
Now, having finished their meal in silence, they gathered in the
chamber, as the big bedroom was called, and waited for evening prayers.
It was the only comfortable room in the house, except the kitchen, and
the family life after working hours was lived in front of the big
fireplace, in which chips, lightwood knots, and hickory logs were burned
from dawn until midnight. Before the flames there was a crooked brass
footman, and the big iron kettle it supported kept up an uninterrupted
hissing noise. In one corner of the room stood a tall rosewood bookcase,
which contained the romantic fiction Dorinda had gleaned from the heavy
theological library in the parlour across the hall. Between the front
windows, which looked out on a cluster of old lilac bushes, there was
the huge walnut bed, with four stout posts and no curtains, and facing
it between the windows, in the opposite walls, a small cabinet of
lacquer-ware which her great-grandfather had brought from the East. In
the morning and afternoon the sunlight fell in splinters over the
variegated design of the rag carpet and the patchwork quilt on the bed,
and picked out the yellow specks in the engravings of John Knox
admonishing Mary Stuart and Martyrs for the Covenant.
"_The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his
handywork_," read Mrs. Oakley in her high thin voice, with her mystic
gaze passing over the open Bible to the whitewashed wall where the
shadows of the flames wavered.
Motionless, in her broken splint-bottom chair, scarcely daring to
breathe, Dorinda felt as if she were floating out of the scene into some
world of intenser reality. The faces about her in the shifting firelight
were the faces in a dream, and a dream that was without vividness. She
saw Joshua bending forward, his pipe fallen from his mouth, his hands
clasped between his knees, and his eyes fixed in a pathetic groping
stare, as if he were trying to follow the words. The look was familiar
to her; she had seen it in the wistful expressions of Rambler and of Dan
and Beersheba, the horses; yet it still moved her more deeply than she
had ever been moved by anything except the patient look of her father's
hands. On opposite sides of the fireplace, Josiah and Rufus were dozing,
Josiah sucking his empty pipe as a child sucks a stick of candy, Rufus
playing with the knife he had used to whittle a piece of wood. At the
first words of the Psalm he had stopped work and closed his eyes, while
a pious vacancy washed like a tide over his handsome features. Curled on
the rag carpet, Rambler and Flossie watched each other with wary
intentness, Rambler contemplative and tolerant, Flossie suspicious and
superior. The glow and stillness of the room enclosed the group in a
circle that was like the shadow of a magic lantern. The flames
whispered; the kettle hummed on the brass footman; the sound of Joshua's
heavy breathing went on like a human undercurrent to the cadences of the
Psalm. Outside, in the fields, a dog barked, and Rambler raised his
long, serious head from the rug and listened. A log of wood, charred in
the middle, broke in two and scattered a shower of sparks.
Prayers were over. Mrs. Oakley rose from her knees; Joshua prodded the
ashes in his pipe; Josiah drew a twist of home-cured tobacco from his
pocket, and cutting off a chew from the end of it, thrust it into his
cheek, where it bulged for the rest of the evening; Rufus picked up a
fishing pole and resumed his whittling. Until bedtime the three men
would sprawl there in the agreeable warmth between the fireplace and the
lamp on the table. Nobody talked; conversation was as alien to them as
music. Drugged with fatigue, they nodded in a vegetable somnolence. Even
in their hours of freedom they could not escape the relentless tyranny
of the soil.
After putting away the Bible, Mrs. Oakley took out a dozen damask
towels, with Turkey red borders and fringed ends, from her top bureau
drawer and began to look over then. These towels were the possession she
prized most, after the furniture of her grandfather, and they were never
used except when the minister or a visiting elder came to spend the
night.
"They're turning a little yellow," she remarked presently, when she had
straightened the long fringe and mended a few places. "I reckon I might
as well put them in soak to-night."
Rufus yawned and laid down his fishing-rod. "There ain't anything for me
to do but go to bed."
"We all might as well go, I reckon," Joshua agreed drowsily. "It's
gittin' on past eight o'clock, an' if the snow's off the ground, we've
got a hard day ahead of us."
"I'll put these towels in soak first," his wife responded, "and I've got
a little ironing I want to get through with before I can rest."
"Not to-night, Ma," Dorinda pleaded. While she spoke she began to yawn
like the others. It was queer the way it kept up as soon as one of them
started. Youth struggled for a time, but in the end it succumbed
inevitably to the narcotic of dullness.
"I ain't sleepy," replied Mrs. Oakley, "and I like to have something to
do with my hands. I never was one to want to lie in bed unless I was
sleepy. The very minute my head touches the pillow, my eyes pop right
open."
"But you get up so early."
"Well, the first crack of light wakes your father, and after he begins
stirring, I am never able to get a wink more of sleep. He was out at the
barn feeding the horses before day this morning." Dorinda sighed. Was
this life?
"I don't see how you keep it up, Ma," she said, with weary compassion.
"Oh, I can get along without much sleep. It's different with the rest of
you. Your father is out in the air all day, and you and the boys are
young."
She went back to the kitchen, with the towels in her hand, while Dorinda
took down one of the lamps from a shelf in the back hall, removed the
cracked chimney, and lighted the wick, which was too short to burn more
than an hour or two.
The evening was over. It was like every one Dorinda had known in the
past. It was like every one she would know in the future unless--she
caught her breath sharply--unless the miracle happened!
V
The faint grey light crept through the dormer-window and glimmered with
a diffused wanness over the small three-cornered room. Turning
restlessly, Dorinda listened, half awake, to the sound of her mother
moving about in the kitchen below. A cock in the henhouse crowed and was
answered by another. "It isn't day," she thought, and opening her eyes,
she gazed through the window at the big pine on the hill. The sun rose
over the pine; every morning she watched the twisted black boughs,
shaped like a harp, emerge from obscurity. First the vague ripple of
dawn, spreading in circles as if a stone had been cast into the
darkness; then a pearly glimmer in which objects borrowed exaggerated
dimensions; then a blade of light cutting sharply through the pine to
the old pear orchard, where the trees still blossomed profusely in
spring, though they bore only small green pears out of season. After the
edge of brightness, the round red sun would ride up into the heavens and
the day would begin. It was seldom that she saw the sunrise from her
window. Usually, unless she overslept herself and her mother got
breakfast without waking her, the men were in the fields and the two
women were attending to the chickens or cleaning the house before the
branches of the big pine were gilded with light.
"Poor Ma," Dorinda said, "she wouldn't wake me." But she was not
thinking of her mother. Deep down in her being some blissful memory was
struggling into consciousness. She felt that it was floating there, just
beyond her reach, dim, elusive, enchantingly lovely. Almost she seized
it; then it slipped from her grasp and escaped her, only to return,
still veiled, a little farther off, while she groped after it. A new
happiness. Some precious possession which she had clasped to her heart
while she was falling asleep. Then suddenly the thing that she had half
forgotten came drifting, through unclouded light, into her mind. "_Don't
forget me. I shall see you soon._"
The sounds in the kitchen grew louder, and the whole house was saturated
with the aroma of coffee and frying bacon. Beyond these familiar scents
and sounds, it seemed to her that she smelt and heard the stirring of
spring in the fields and the woods, that the movement and rumour of life
were sweeping past her in waves of colour, fragrance, and music.
Springing out of bed, she dressed hurriedly, and decided, while she
shivered at the splash of cold water, that she would clean her shoes
before she went back to the store. The day was just breaking, and the
corner where her pine dressing-table stood was so dark that she was
obliged to light the lamp, which burned with a dying flicker, while she
brushed and coiled her hair. Beneath the dark waving line on her
forehead, where her hair grew in a widow's peak, her eyes were starry
with happiness. Though she was not beautiful, she had her moments of
beauty, and looking at herself in the greenish mirror, which reminded
her of the water in the old mill pond, she realized that this was one of
her moments. Never again would she be twenty and in love for the first
time.
"If only I had something pretty to wear," she thought, picking up her
skirt of purple calico and slipping it over her head. The longing for
lovely things, the decorative instinct of youth, became as sharp as a
pang. Parting the faded curtains over a row of shelves in one corner,
she took down a pasteboard box, and selected a collar of fine needlework
which had belonged to Eudora Abernethy when she was a girl. For a minute
Dorinda looked at it, strongly tempted. Then the character that showed
in her mouth and chin asserted itself, and she shook her head. "It would
be foolish to wear it to-day," she murmured, and putting it back among
the others, she closed the box and replaced it on the shelf.
"I'll black my shoes, anyway," she thought, as she hurried downstairs to
breakfast. "Even if they do get muddy again as soon as I step in the
road."
That was with the surface of her mind. In the depths beneath she was
thinking without words, "Now that he has come, life will never again be
what it was yesterday."
In the kitchen the lamp had just been put out, and the room was flooded
with the ashen stream of daybreak. Mrs. Oakley was on her knees, putting
a stick of wood into the stove, and the scarlet glare of the flames
tinged her flesh with the colour of rusty iron. After a sleepless night
her neuralgia was worse, and there was a look of agony in the face she
lifted to her daughter.
"Why didn't you wake me, Ma?" Dorinda asked a little impatiently. "You
aren't fit to get breakfast."
"I thought you might as well have your sleep out," her mother replied in
a lifeless voice. "I'll have some cakes ready in a minute. I'm just
making a fresh batch for Rufus."
"You oughtn't have made cakes, as bad as you feel," Dorinda protested.
"Rufus could have gone without just as well as the rest of us."
Mrs. Oakley struggled to her feet, and picking up the cake lifter,
turned back to the stove. While she stood there against the dull glow,
she appeared scarcely more substantial than a spiral of smoke.
"Well, we don't have butter every day," she said. "And I can't lie in
bed as long as I've got the strength to be up and doing. Wherever I
turn, I see dirt gathering."
"No matter how hard you work, the dirt will always be there," Dorinda
persisted. It was useless, she knew, to try to reason with her mother.
One could not reason with either a nervous malady or a moral principle;
but, even though experience had taught her the futility of remonstrance,
there were times when she found it impossible not to scold at a
martyrdom that seemed to her unnecessary. They might as well be living
in the house, she sometimes thought, with the doctrine of
predestination; and like the doctrine of predestination, there was
nothing to be done about it.
With a sigh of resignation, she turned to her father, who stood at the
window, looking out over the old geraniums that had stopped blooming
years ago. Against the murky dawn his figure appeared as rudimentary as
some prehistoric image of man.
"Do you think it is going to clear off, Pa?" she asked.
He looked round at her, prodding the tobacco into his pipe with his
large blunt thumb. "I ain't thinkin', honey," he replied in his thick,
earthy drawl. "The wind's settin' right, but thar's a good-size bank of
clouds over toward the west."
"You'd better make Rufus take a look at those planting beds up by Hoot
Owl Woods," said Josiah, pushing back his chair and rising from the
table. "One of Doctor Greylock's steers broke loose yesterday and was
tramplin' round up there on our side of the fence."
Rufus looked up quickly. "Why can't you attend to it yourself?" he
demanded in the truculent tone he always used to his elder brother.
Josiah, who had reached the door on his way out, stopped and looked back
with a surly expression. With his unshaven face, where the stubby growth
of a beard was just visible, and his short crooked legs, he bore still
some grotesque resemblance to his younger brother, as if the family
pattern had been tried first in caricature.
"I've got as much as I can do over yonder in the east meadow," he
growled. "You or Pa will have to look after those planting beds." Rufus
frowned while he reached for the last scrap of butter. There would be
none for his mother and Dorinda; but if this fact had occurred to him,
and it probably had not, he would have dismissed it as an unpleasant
reflection. Since he was a small child he had never lacked the courage
of his appetite.
"What's the use of my trying to do anything when you and Pa are so set
you won't let me have my way about it?" he asked. "I'd have moved those
tobacco beds long ago, if you'd let me."
"Well, they've always been thar, son," Joshua observed in a peaceable
manner. He stood in the doorway, blowing clouds of smoke over his pipe,
while he scraped the caked mud from his boots. His humble, friendly eyes
looked up timidly, like the eyes of a dog that is uncertain whether he
is about to receive a pat or a blow. "Besides, we ain't got the manure
to waste on new ground," Josiah added, with his churlish frown. "We need
all the stable trash we can rake and scrape for the fields."
Mrs. Oakley, bringing a plate of fresh cakes as a peace offering, came
over to the table. "Don't you boys begin to fuss again," she pleaded
wearily. "It's just as much as I can do to keep going anyway, and when
you start quarrelling it makes me feel as if I'd be obliged to give up.
You'd just as well take all these cakes, Rufus. I can make some more for
Dorinda by the time she is ready."
Dorinda, who was eating dry bread with her coffee, made a gesture of
exasperated sympathy. "I don't want any cakes, Ma. I'm going to start
washing up just as soon as you sit down and eat your breakfast. If you'd
try to swallow something, whether you want it or not, your neuralgia
would be better."
Mrs. Oakley shook her head, while she dragged her body like an empty
garment back to the stove. From the way she moved she seemed to have
neither bone nor muscle, yet her physical flabbiness was sustained,
Dorinda knew, by a force that was indomitable.
"I don't feel as if I could touch a morsel," she answered, pressing her
fingers over her drawn brow and eyes.
"Oh, Rufus can eat his head off, but he'll never work to earn his keep,"
Josiah grumbled under his breath.
"Well, I'm not a slave, anyway, like you and Pa," Rufus flared up. "I'd
let the farm rot before it would be my master."
Josiah had pushed past his father in the doorway. A chill draught blew
in, and out of the draught his slow, growling voice floated back.
"Somebody's got to be a slave. If Ma didn't slave for you, you'd have
to, I reckon, or starve."
He went out after his father, slamming the door behind him, and Dorinda,
hurriedly finishing her breakfast, rose and began to clear the table.
The sallow light at the window was growing stronger. Outside, there was
the sound of tramping as the horses were led by to the trough at the
well, and the crowing in the henhouse was loud and insistent. The day
had begun. It was like every other day in the past. It would be like
every other day in the future. Suddenly the feeling came over her that
she was caught like a mouse in the trap of life. No matter how
desperately she struggled, she could never escape; she could never be
free. She was held fast by circumstances as by invisible wires of steel.
Several hours later, when she started to the store, the trapped
sensation vanished, and the gallant youth within her lifted its head.
There was moisture that did not fall in the air. A chain of sullen
clouds in the west soared like peaks through a fog. Straight before her
the red road dipped and rose and dipped again in the monotonous brown of
the landscape. A few ragged crows flapped by over the naked fields.
Turning at the gate, which was never closed, she looked back at the
house huddled beneath its sloping shingled roof under the boughs of the
old locust trees. The narrow dormer-windows stared like small blinking
eyes, shy and furtive, down on the square Georgian porch, on the flagged
walk bordered by stunted boxwood, on the giant lilac bushes which had
thriven upon neglect, and on the ruined lawn with its dead branches and
its thicket of unmown weeds. In recent years the whitewashed walls had
turned yellow and dingy; the eaves were rotting away where birds nested;
and in June the empty chimneys became so alive with swallows that the
whole place was faintly murmurous, as if summer stirred in the dead wood
as well as in the living boughs.
Whenever she looked back upon it from a distance, she was visited again
by the image of the house as a frightened thing that waited, shrinking
closer to the earth, for an inevitable disaster. It was, as if the place
had preserved unaltered a mood from which she herself had escaped, and
occasionally this mood awoke in her blood and nerves and flowed through
her again. Recollection. Association. It was morbid, she told herself
sternly, to cherish such fancies; and yet she had never been able
entirely to rid her memory of the fears and dreads of her childhood.
Worse than this even was the haunting thought that the solitude was
alive, that it skulked there in the distance, like a beast that is
waiting for the right moment to spring and devour.
Bleak, raw, windswept, the morning had begun with a wintry chill. The
snow of yesterday was gone; only an iridescent vapour, as delicate as a
cobweb, was spun over the ground. Already, as she turned and went on
again, the light was changing, and more slowly, as if a veil fluttered
before it was lifted, the expression of the country changed with it. In
the east, an arrow of sunshine, too pallid to be called golden, shot
through the clouds and flashed over the big pine on the hill at the back
of the house. The landscape, which had worn a discouraged aspect,
appeared suddenly to glow under the surface. Veins of green and gold,
like tiny rivulets of spring, glistened in the winter woods and in the
mauve and brown of the fields. The world was familiar, and yet, in some
indescribable way, it was different, shot through with romance as with
the glimmer of phosphorescence. Life, which had drooped, flared up
again, burning clear and strong in Dorinda's heart. It had come back,
that luminous expectancy, that golden mist of sensation. "_Don't forget
me. I shall see you soon_," repeated an inner voice; and immediately she
was lost in an ecstasy without words and without form like the mystic
communion of religion. Love! That was the end of all striving for her
healthy nerves, her vigorous youth, the crown and the fulfilment of
life! At twenty, a future without love appeared to her as intolerable as
the slow martyrdom of her mother.
Beyond the gate there was the Old Stage Road, and across the road, in
front of the house, ran the pasture, with its winding creek fringed by
willows. Though this stream was smaller than Gooseneck Creek on the
Greylocks' farm, the water never dried even in the severest drought, and
a multitude of silver minnows flashed in ripples over the deep places.
For a quarter of a mile the road divided the pasture from the wide band
of woods on the left, and farther on, though the woods continued, the
rich grass land was fenced off from several abandoned acres, which had
been once planted in corn, but were now overgrown with broomsedge as
high as Dorinda's waist. Sprinkled over the fields, a crop of scrub
pine, grown already to a fair height, stood immovable in the ceaseless
rise and fall of the straw. Though her eyes wandered over the waste
ground as she passed, Dorinda was blind to-day to the colour and the
beauty. What a pity you could never get rid of the broomsedge, she
thought. The more you burned it off and cut it down, the thicker it came
up again next year.
For a quarter of a mile the road was deserted. Then she came up with a
covered wagon, which had stopped on the edge of the woods, while the
mules munched the few early weeds in the underbrush. She had seen these
vehicles before, for they were known in the neighbourhood as Gospel
wagons. Usually there was a solitary "Gospel rider," an aged man,
travelling alone, and wearing the dilapidated look of a retired
missionary; but to-day there were two of them, an elderly husband and
wife, and though they appeared meagre, chilled and famished, they were
proceeding briskly with their work of nailing texts to the trees by the
wayside. As Dorinda approached, the warning, "Prepare to Meet Thy God,"
sprang out at her in thick charcoal. The road to the station was already
covered, she knew, and she wondered if the wagon had passed Jason at the
gate by the fork.
Hearing her footsteps, one of the missionaries, a woman in a black poke
bonnet, turned and stared at her.
"Good morning, sister. You are wearing a gay shawl."
Dorinda laughed. "Well, it is the only gay thing you will find about
here."
With the hammer still in her hand, the woman, a lank, bedraggled figure
in a trailing skirt of dingy alpaca, scrambled over the ditch to the
road. "Yes, it's a solemn country," she replied. "Is there a place near
by where we can rest and water the mules?"
"Old Farm is a little way on. I live there, and Ma will be glad to have
you stop."
Such visitors, she knew, though they made extra work, were the only
diversion in her mother's existence. They came seldom now; only once or
twice in the last few years had the Gospel wagon driven along the Old
Stage Road; but the larger trees still bore a few of the almost
obliterated signs.
"Then we'll stop and speak a word to her. We'd better be going on,
Brother Tyburn," observed the woman to her companion, who was crawling
over the underbrush. "This don't look as if it was a much travelled
road. Brother Tyburn is my husband," she explained an instant later. "We
met when we were both doing the Lord's work in foreign fields."
Golden sands. Ancient rivers. Black babies thrown to crocodiles. Her
mother's missionary dream had come to life.
"Were you ever in Africa?" asked Dorinda.
"Yes, in the Congo. But we were younger then. After Brother Tyburn lost
his health, we had to give up foreign work. Did you say your house was
just a piece up the road?"
"A quarter of a mile. After that you won't find anything but a few negro
cabins till you come to the Garlicks' place, three miles farther on."
The man had already climbed into the wagon and was gathering up the
reins; the mules reluctantly raised their heads from the weeds; and the
woman lifted her skirt and stepped nimbly up on the wheel. After she had
seated herself under the canvas, she leaned down, gesticulating with the
hammer which she still held.
"Thank you, sister. Have you given a thought to your soul?" Wrapped in
her orange shawl, Dorinda lifted her head with a spirited gesture.
"I joined the church when I was fifteen," she answered.
While she spoke she remembered vividly the way grace had come to her, a
softly glowing ecstasy, which flooded her soul and made her feel that
she had entered into the permanent blessedness of the redeemed. It was
like the love she felt now, only more peaceful and far less subject to
pangs of doubt. For a few months this had lasted, while the prosaic
duties of life were infused with a beauty, a light. Then, suddenly, as
mysteriously as it had come, the illumination in her soul had waned and
flickered out like a lamp. Religion had not satisfied.
The wagon joggled on its way, and floating back, above the rumble of the
wheels, there came presently the words of a hymn, at first clear and
loud, and then growing fainter and thinner as the distance widened.
Often Dorinda had sung the verses in Sunday School. The hymn was a
favourite one of her mother's, and the girl hummed it now under her
breath:
"Res-cue the per-ish-ing, care for the dy-ing,
Snatch them in pity from sin and the grave;
Weep o'er the err-ing one, lift up the fall-en,
Tell them of Je-sus, the migh-ty to save.
Res-cue the per-ish-ing, care for the dy-ing,
Je-sus is mer-ci-ful, Je-sus will save."
No, religion had not satisfied.
She was still humming when she reached the fork of the road. Then,
glancing at the red gate of Five Oaks, she saw that Jason Greylock stood
there, with his hand on the bar.
"I'd just got down to open the gate, when I looked up the road and saw
you coming," he said. "I knew there wasn't another woman about who was
wearing an orange shawl, and if there were, I'd wait for her just out of
curiosity."
Though he spoke gaily, she felt, without knowing why, that the gaiety
was assumed. He looked as if he had not slept. His fresh colour had
faded; his clothes were rumpled as if he had lain down in them; and
while she walked toward him, she imagined fancifully that his face was
like a drowned thing in the solitude. If she had been older it might
have occurred to her that a nature so impressionable must be lacking in
stability; but, at the moment, joy in his presence drove every sober
reflection from her mind.
"Is there anything the matter?" she asked, eager to help.
He looked down while the gate swung back, and she saw a quiver of
disgust cross his mouth under the short moustache. Before replying, he
led his horse into the road and turned back to lower the bar. Then he
held out his hand to help her into the buggy.
"Do I look as if I'd had no sleep?" he inquired. "Father had a bad
night, and I was up with him till daybreak."
Then she understood. She had heard tales from Aunt Mehitable, whose
daughter worked at Five Oaks, of the old man's drunken frenzies, and the
way his mulatto brood ran shrieking about the place when he turned on
them with a horsewhip. Would Jason be able to rid the house of this
half-breed swarm and their mother, a handsome, slatternly yellow woman,
with a figure that had grown heavy and shapeless, and a smouldering
resentful gaze? Well, she was sorry for him if he had to put up with
things like that.
"I am sorry," she responded, and could think of nothing to add to the
words, which sounded flat and empty. In front of her on the blasted oak
she saw the staring black letters of the Gospel riders, "After Death
Comes the Judgment." Depression crept like a fog into her mind. If only
she could think of something to say! While they drove on in silence she
became aware of her body, as if it were a weight which had been fastened
to her and over which she had no control. Her hands and feet felt like
logs. She was in the clutch, she knew, of forces which she did not
understand, which she could not even discern. And these forces had
deprived her of her will at the very moment when they were sweeping her
to a place she could not see by a road that was strange to her.
"I suppose my nerves aren't what they ought to be," he said presently,
and she knew that he was miles away from her in his thoughts. "They've
always been jumpy ever since I was a child, and a night like that puts
them on edge. Then everything is discouraging around here. I thought
when I first came back that I might be able to wake up the farmers, but
it is uphill ploughing to try to get them out of their rut. Last night I
had planned a meeting in the schoolhouse. For a week I had had notices
up at the store, and I'd got at least a dozen men to promise to come and
listen to what I had to tell them about improved methods of farming. I
intended to begin with crops and sanitation, you know, and to lead off
gradually, as they caught on, to political conditions;--but when I went
over," he laughed bitterly, "there was nobody but Nathan Pedlar and that
idiot boy of John Appleseed's waiting to hear me."
"I know." She was sympathetic but uncomprehending. "They are in a rut,
but they're satisfied; they don't want to change." He turned to look at
her and his face cleared. "You are the only cheerful sight I've seen
since I got here," he said.
The light had changed again and her inner mood was changing with the
landscape. A feeling of intimate kinship with the country returned, and
it seemed to her that the colour of the broomsedge was overrunning the
desolate hidden field of her life. Something wild and strong and vivid
was covering the waste places.
"I am glad," she answered softly.
"It does me good just to look at you. I ought to be able to do without
companionship, but I can't, not for long. I am dependent upon some human
association, and I haven't had any, nothing that counts, since I came
here. In New York I lived with several men (I've never been much of a
woman's man), and I miss them like the devil. I was getting on well with
my work, too, though I never wanted to study medicine--that was Father's
idea. At first I hoped that I could distract myself by doing some good
while I was here," he concluded moodily; "but last night taught me the
folly of that."
Though he seemed to her unreasonable, and his efforts at philanthropy as
futile as the usual unsettling processes of reform, she felt
passionately eager to comfort him in his failure. That she might turn
his disappointment to her own advantage had not occurred to her, and
would never occur to her. The instinct that directed her was an
unconscious one and innocent of design.
"Well, you've just begun," she replied cheerfully. "You can't expect to
do everything in the beginning."
He laughed. "I knew you'd say that. Even in New York they tell me I try
to hurry nature. I'm easily discouraged, and I take things too hard, I
suppose. Coming back here was a bitter pill, but I had to swallow it. If
I'd been a different sort of chap I might have gone on with my work in
New York, and let Father die alone there at Five Oaks. But when he sent
for me I hadn't the heart or the courage to refuse to come. The truth
is, I've never been able to go ahead. It seems to me, when I look back,
that I've always been balked or bullied out of having what I wanted in
life. I remember once, when I was a little child, I went out with Mother
to gather dewberries, and just as I found the finest briar, all heavy
with fruit, and reached down to pick it, a moccasin snake struck out at
my hand. I got a fit, hysterics or something, and ever since then the
sight of a snake has made me physically sick. Worse than that, whenever
I reach out for anything I particularly want, I have a jumping of the
nerves, just as if I expected a snake to strike. Queer, isn't it? I
wonder how much influence that snake has had on my life?"
Though he laughed, his laugh was not a natural one and she asked herself
if he could be in earnest. She was still young enough to find it
difficult to distinguish between the ironically wise and the incredibly
foolish.
"I wish I could help you. I'll do anything in the world I can to help
you," she murmured in a voice as soft as her glance.
Their eyes met, and she watched the bitterness, the mingling of
disappointment and mortification, fade in the glow of pleasure--or was
it merely excitement?--that flamed in his face.
"Then wear a blue dress the colour of your eyes," he rejoined with the
light-hearted audacity of the day before.
The difference in his tone was so startling that she blushed and averted
her gaze.
"I haven't a blue dress," she replied stiffly, while her troubled look
swept the old Haney place as they went past. In a little while they
would reach the station. Even now they were spinning up the long slope,
white as bone dust, that led to the store.
The change in his tone sent the blood in quivering rushes to her cheeks.
She felt the sound beating in her ears as if it were music.
"Then beg, borrow, or steal one," he said gaily, "before I see you
again."
His smile died quickly, as if he were unable to sustain the high note of
merriment, and the inexplicable sadness stole into his look. Was it
substance or shadow, she wondered. Well, whatever it was, it stirred a
profound tenderness in her heart.
VI
When they parted at the station there was a dreaming smile on her lips;
and though she tried to drive it away as she entered the store, she felt
that the smile was still there, hovering about her mouth. A physical
warmth, soft and penetrating, enveloped her like sunshine. And the
miracle (for it was a miracle) had changed her so utterly that she was a
stranger to the Dorinda of yesterday. Where that practical girl had
been, there was now a tremulous creature who felt that she was capable
of unimaginable adventures. How could she reflect upon the virtues of
the red cow she would buy from old Doctor Greylock when she could not
detach her mind from the disturbing image of Doctor Greylock's son? Over
and over, she repeated mechanically, "Thirty dollars for the red cow";
yet the words might have been spoken by John Appleseed or his idiot boy,
who was lounging near the track, so remote were they from her
consciousness. Thirty dollars! She had saved the money for months. There
would be just that much after the interest on the mortgage was paid. She
had it put away safely in the best pickle-dish in the china press. Ten
dollars a month didn't go far, even if it was "ready money." _Then wear a
blue dress the colour of your eyes. Beg, borrow, or steal one before I
see you again._ From whom or where had the words come? Something within
herself, over which she had no control, was thinking aloud. And as if
her imagination had escaped from darkness into light, a crowd of
impressions revolved in her mind like the swiftly changing colours of a
kaleidoscope. His eyes, black at a distance, brown when you looked into
them. The healthy reddish tan of his skin. The white streak on his neck
under his collar. The way his hair grew in short close waves like a cap.
His straight red lips, with their look of vital and urgent youth. The
fascinating curve of his eyebrows, which bent down when he smiled or
frowned over his deep-set eyes. The way he smiled. The way he laughed.
The way he looked at her.
Nathan had opened the store and was already sweeping the tracks of mud
from the platform. Somebody was in the store behind him. He talked while
he swept, jerking his scraggy shoulders with an awkward movement. Poor
Nathan, he had as many gestures as a puppet, and they all looked as if
they were worked by strings.
Then, as she hastened up the steps of the store, there occurred one of
those trivial accidents which make history. Miss Seena Snead, attired
for travelling in her best navy blue lady's cloth and her small lace
bonnet with velvet strings, came out of the door.
"I'm runnin' down to Richmond to buy some goods and notions," she said.
"Is there any errand I can do for you or yo' Ma?"
Out of that golden mist, the strange Dorinda who had taken the place of
the real Dorinda, spoke eagerly: "I wonder--oh, I wonder, Miss Seena, if
you could get me a blue dress?"
"A blue dress? Why, of course I can, honey. Do you want gingham or
calico? I reckon Nathan has got as good blue and white check as you can
find anywhere. I picked it out for him myself."
Dorinda shook her head. Her eyes were shining and her voice trembled;
but she went on recklessly, driven by this force which she obeyed but
could not understand. "No, not gingham or calico. I don't want anything
useful, Miss Seena. I want cashmere--or nun's veiling. And I don't want
dark blue. I want it exactly the colour of my eyes."
"Well, I declare!" Miss Seena looked as if she could not believe her
ears. "Whoever heard of matchin' material by yo' eyes?" Then turning
the girl round, she examined her intently. "I ain't never paid much
attention to yo' eyes," she continued, "though I always thought they had
a kind, pleasant look in 'em. But when I come to notice 'em, they're
jest exactly the shade of a blue jay's wing. That won't be hard to
match. I can carry a blue jay's wing in my mind without a particle of
trouble. You want a new dress for spring, I s'pose? It don't matter
whether a girl's a Methodist or an Episcopalian, she's mighty sure to
begin wantin' a new dress when Easter is comin'. Geneva Ellgood ordered
her figured challis yestiddy from one of them big stores in New York.
She picked the pattern out of a fashion paper, and when the goods come,
I'm goin' to spend a week at Green Acres, an' make it up for her. It is
a real pretty pattern, and it calls for yards and yards of stuff. They
say young Doctor Greylock was a beau of hers when she was in New York
last summer, an' I reckon that's why she's buyin' so much finery.
Courtin' is good for milliners, my Ma used to say, even if marriage is
bad for wives. She had a lot of dry fun in her, my Ma had. Geneva is
gettin' a mighty pretty hat too. She's bought a wreath of wheat and
poppies, an' I'm takin' it down to Richmond to put on one of them
stylish new hats with a high bandeau."
For an instant Dorinda held her breath while a wave of dull sickness
swept over her. At that moment she realized that the innocence of her
girlhood, the ingenuous belief that love brought happiness, had departed
for ever. She was in the thick of life, and the thick of life meant not
peace but a sword in the heart. Though she scarcely knew Geneva Ellgood,
she felt that they were enemies. It was not fair, she told herself
passionately, that one girl should have everything and one nothing! A
primitive impulse struggled like some fierce invader in her mind, among
the orderly instincts and inherited habits of thought. She was startled;
she was frightened; but she was defiant. In a flash the knowledge came
to her that habit and duty and respectability are not the whole of life.
Beyond the beaten road in which her ideas and inclinations had moved,
she had discovered a virgin wilderness of mystery and terror. While she
stood there, listening to the gossip of the dressmaker, the passion that
abides at the heart of all desperation inflamed her mind. She had
learned that love casts its inevitable shadow of pain.
"I want a hat too, Miss Seena," she said quickly. "A white straw hat
with a wreath of blue flowers round the crown."
Miss Seena lifted her spectacles to her forehead, and gazed at the girl
inquiringly with her small far-sighted eyes. "I always thought you had
too much character to care about clothes, Dorinda," she said, "but that
jest proves, I reckon, that you never can tell. I s'pose youth is
obleeged to break out sooner or later. But it will cost a good deal, I'm
afraid. Wreaths are right expensive, now that they're so much worn. Yo'
Ma told me the last time I was over thar that you were savin' all you
made to help yo' Pa with the farm."
Her glance was mild, for she was not unsympathetic (when was a
dressmaker, especially a dressmaker who was at the same time a
sentimental spinster, unsympathetic about clothes?) but she wished to
feel sure that Dorinda would not regret her extravagance after it was
too late.
"You mustn't think that you can keep up with Geneva, honey," she added
kindly but indiscreetly. "You're prettier than she is, but her Pa's the
richest man anywhar about here, an' I reckon thar ain't much ugliness
that money ain't able to cure."
The advice was wholesome, but Dorinda frowned and shook her head
stubbornly. The shawl had slipped to her shoulders, and the sunlight,
which was struggling through the clouds, brought out a bluish lustre on
her black hair. Miss Seena, watching her closely, reflected that hair
and eyes like those did not often go together. With this vivid contrast
and the high colour in her lips and cheeks the girl appeared almost too
conspicuous, the dressmaker decided. "It always seemed to me mo' refined
when yo' eyes and hair matched better," she thought, "but I s'pose most
men would call her handsome, even if her features ain't so small as they
ought to be."
"I'm going to have one nice dress, I don't care what happens," Dorinda
was saying. "I don't care what happens," she repeated obstinately. "I've
got thirty dollars put away, and I want you to buy that dress and hat if
it takes every cent of it. I'm tired of doing without things."
"Well, I don't reckon they will cost that much," returned Miss Seena,
after a quick sum in mental arithmetic. "You can buy right nice,
double-width nun's veiling for seventy-five cents a yard, and I can get
you a dress, I reckon, by real careful cuttin', out of nine yards. The
fashion books call for ten, but them New York folks don't need to cut
careful. To be sure, these here bell skirts and balloon sleeves take a
heap of, goods, but I s'pose you'll want yours jest as stylish as
Geneva's?" Since the girl was determined to waste her money, it would be
a pity, Miss Seena reflected gently, to spoil the pleasure of her
improvidence. After all, you weren't young and good-looking but such a
little while!
"I'll do the best I can, honey," she said briskly. "And they'll charge
it to me at Brandywine and Plummer's store, so you don't need to bring
the money till the first of the month. Thar's the train whistlin' now,
and Sister Texanna is waitin' at the track with my basket and things.
Don't you worry, I'll get you jest the very prettiest material I can
find."
Turning away, the dressmaker hurried with birdlike fluttering steps to
the track, where Dorinda saw the stately figure of Miss Texanna standing
guard beside an indiscriminate collection of parcels. Miss Texanna,
unlike her sisters, had been pretty in her youth, and a dull glamour of
forgotten romance still surrounded her. Though she had never married,
she had had a lover killed in the war, which, as Miss Tabitha had once
remarked, was "almost as good." But Dorinda, while she watched the
approaching train, did not think of the three sisters. "I oughtn't to
have done it," she said to herself, with a feeling of panic, and then
desperately, "Well, I'm going to have one good dress, I don't care what
happens!"
A few farmers were taking the early train to town, and Dorinda saw that
Geneva Ellgood had driven her father to the station in her little
dogcart with red wheels. She was a plain girl, with a long nose, eyes
the colour of Malaga grapes, and a sallow skin which had the greenish
tinge of anemia. Her flaxen hair, which she arranged elaborately, was
profuse and beautiful, and her smile, though it lacked brightness, was
singularly sweet and appealing.
As the two girls looked at each other, they nodded carelessly; then
Geneva leaned forward and held out a slip of paper.
"I wonder if you would mind fixing up this list for me?" she asked in a
friendly tone. "I don't like to leave Neddy, and Bob has gone in to see
if there are any letters."
Running down the steps, Dorinda took the list from her and glanced over
it. "We haven't got the kind of coffee you want," she said. "It was
ordered two weeks ago, but it hasn't come yet."
"Well, we'll have to make out with what you have. If you'll wrap up the
things, Bob will bring them out to me."
She was a shy girl, gentle and amiable, yet there was a barely
perceptible note of condescension in her manner. "Just because she's
rich and I'm poor, she thinks she is better than I am," Dorinda thought
disdainfully, as she went up the steps.
While she was weighing and measuring the groceries, Bob Ellgood came
from the post office (which consisted of a partition, with a window, in
one corner of the store) and stopped by the counter to speak to her. He
was a heavy, slow-witted young man, kind, temperate, and good-looking in
a robust, beefy fashion. Because he was the eldest son of James Ellgood,
he was regarded as desirable by the girls in the neighbourhood, and
Dorinda remembered that, only a few Sundays ago, she had looked at him
in church and asked herself, with a start of expectancy, "What if he
should be the right one after all?" She laughed softly over the pure
absurdity of the recollection, and a gleam of admiration flickered in
the round, marble-like eyes of the young man.
"I hope the Greylocks' steer didn't harm your father's plant beds," he
said abruptly.
"No," she shook her head. "I haven't heard that they suffered."
Having weighed the sugar, she was pouring it into a paper bag, and his
eyes lingered on the competent way in which her fingers turned down the
opening, secured it firmly, and snipped off the end of the string with
an expert gesture. Only a week ago his attention would have flattered
her, but to-day she had other things to think of, and his admiring
oxlike stare made her impatient. Was that the way things always came,
after you had stopped wanting them?
"Well, he ought to have a good crop after the work he's put on those
fields," he continued, as she placed the packages in a cracker box and
handed them to him over the counter.
She shook her head. "No matter how hard you work it always comes back to
the elements in the end. You can't be sure of anything when you have to
depend upon the elements for a living."
"That's what Father says." He accepted the fatalistic philosophy without
dispute. "After all, the rain and frost and drought, not the farmer, do
most of the farming." He had had a good education, and though his speech
was more provincial than Jason's, it lacked entirely the racy flavour of
Pedlar's Mill.
With the box under one arm, he was still gazing at her, when the
impatient voice of Geneva rang out from the doorway, and the girl came
hurrying into the store.
"What are you waiting for, Bob? I thought you were never coming." Then,
as her eyes fell on Dorinda, she added apologetically, "Of course I know
the things were ready, but Bob is always so slow. I've got to hurry back
because Neddy won't stand alone."
She turned away and went out, while Bob followed with a crestfallen air.
"As if I cared!" thought Dorinda proudly. "As if I wanted to talk to
him!"
The train to the north had gone by at five o'clock, and the next one,
which Miss Seena had just taken to Richmond, was the last that would
stop before afternoon. The few farmers who had lounged about the track
were now waiting in the store, while Nathan weighed and measured or
counted small change into callous palms. Here and there a negro in blue
jeans overalls stood patiently, with an expression of wistful
resignation which was characteristic less of an individual than of a
race. There was little talk among the white farmers, and that little was
confined to the crops, or the weather. Rugged, gnarled, earth-stained,
these men were as impersonal as trees or as transcendental philosophers.
In their rustic pride they accepted silence as they accepted poverty or
bad weather, without embarrassment and without humility. If they had
nothing to say, they were capable of sitting for hours, dumb and
unabashed, over their pipes or their "plugs" of tobacco. They could tell
a tale, provided there was one worth the telling, with caustic wit and
robust realism; but the broad jest or the vulgar implication of the
small town was an alien product among them. Not a man of them would have
dared recite an anecdote in Pedlar's store that Dorinda should not have
heard. The transcendental point of view, the habit of thought bred by
communion with earth and sky, had refined the grain while it had
roughened the husk.
"Do you want me to wait on Mr. Appleseed?" asked Dorinda, glancing past
Nathan to the genial, ruddy old farmer, who was standing near her, with
his idiot son close at his side. As she spoke she lifted the top from
one of the tall jars on the counter, and held out a stick of striped
peppermint candy. "Here's a stick of candy for you, Billy."
The boy grinned at her with his sagging mouth, and made a snatch at the
candy.
"Say thanky, son," prompted John Appleseed.
"Thanky," muttered Billy obediently, slobbering over the candy.
"No, I'll look after John as soon as I've fixed up this brown sugar," said
Nathan. "I wish you'd take those ducks from Aunt Mehitable Green. She's
been waitin' a long time, and she ain't so young as she used to be. Tell
her I'll allow her seventy-five cents for the pair, if they're good
size. She wants the money's worth in coffee and Jamaica ginger."
"Why, I didn't know Aunt Mehitable was here!" Glancing quickly about,
she discovered the old woman sitting on a box at the far end of the
room, with the pair of ducks in her lap. "I didn't see you come in, or
I'd have spoken to you before," added the girl, hurrying to her.
Aunt Mehitable Green had assisted at Dorinda's birth, which had been
unusually difficult, and there was a bond of affection, as well as a
sentimental association, between them. Mrs. Oakley, with her superior
point of view, had always been friendly with the negroes around her.
During Dorinda's childhood both mother and daughter had visited Aunt
Mehitable in her cabin at Whistling Spring, and the old midwife had
invariably returned their simple gifts of food or wine made from
scuppernong grapes, with slips of old-fashioned flowers or "physic"
brewed from the mysterious herbs in her garden. She still bore the
reputation, bestowed half in fear, half in derision, of "a conjure
woman," and not a negro in the county would have offended her. Though
there was a growing scepticism concerning her ability to "throw spells"
or work love charms, even Mrs. Oakley admitted her success in removing
moles and warts and in making cows go dry at the wrong season. She was a
tall, straight negress, with a dark wrinkled face, in which a brooding
look rippled like moonlight on still water, and hair as scant and grey
as lichen on an old stump. Her dress of purple calico was stiffly
starched, and she wore a decent bonnet of black straw which had once
belonged to Mrs. Oakley. The stock she came of was a good one, for, as a
slave, she had belonged to the Cumberlands, who had owned Honeycomb Farm
before it was divided. Though that prosperous family had "run to seed"
and finally disappeared, the slaves belonging to it had sprung up
thriftily, in freedom, on innumerable patches of rented ground. The
Greens, with the Moodys and Plumtrees, represented the coloured
aristocracy of Pedlar's Mill; and Micajah Green, Aunt Mehitable's eldest
son, had recently bought from Nathan Pedlar the farm he had worked, with
intelligence and industry, as a tenant.
"I hope you didn't walk over here," said Dorinda, for Whistling Spring
was five miles away, on the other side of the Greylocks' farm, beyond
Whippernock River.
The old woman shook her head, while she began unwrapping the strips of
red flannel on the legs of the ducks. "Naw'm, Micajah brung me over wid
de load er pine in de oxcyart. I ain' seen you en yo' Ma; fur a mont' er
Sundays, honey," she added.
"I've wanted to get down all winter," answered Dorinda, "but the back
roads are so bad I thought I'd better wait until the mud dried. Are any
of your children living at home with you now?"
Aunt Mehitable sighed. "De las oner dem is done lef' me, but I ain't
never seed de way yit dat de ole hen kin keep de fledglin's in de
chicken coop. Dey's all done moughty well, en dat's sump'n de Lawd's
erbleeged ter be praised fur. Caze He knows," she added fervently, "de
way I use'n ter torment de Th'one wid pray'r when dey wuz all little."
"Pa says Micajah is one of the best farmers about here."
"Dat's so. He sholy is," assented the old midwife. "En Micar he's
steddyin' 'bout horse sickness along wid Marse Kettledrum, de horse
doctah," she continued, "en Moses, he's gwineter wuck on de railroad
ontwel winter, en Abraham, he's helpin' Micajah, en Eliphalet, he's
leasin' a patch er ground f'om Marse Garlick over yonder by Whippernock,
en Jemima, de one I done name arter ole Miss, she's wuckin' at Five Oaks
fur ole Doctah Greylock----"
"I thought she'd left there long ago," Dorinda broke in.
"Naw'm, she ain' left dar yit. She wuz fixin' ter git away, caze hit's
been kinder skeery over dar sence de ole doctah's been gittin' so
rambunctious; en Jemima, she ain' gwineter teck er bit er sass f'om dat
ar yaller huzzy, needer. Yas'm, she wuz all fixin' ter leave twell de
young doctah come back, an he axed 'er ter stay on dar en wait on him.
Huh!" she exclaimed abruptly, after a pause, "I 'low dar's gwinter be
some loud bellowin's w'en de young en de ole steer is done lock dere
horns tergedder." With a gesture of supreme disdain, she thrust the two
ducks away from her into Dorinda's hands. "Dar, honey, you teck dese yer
ducks," she said. "I'se moughty glad to lay eyes on you agin, but I'se
erbleeged ter be gittin' erlong back wid Micajah. You tell yo' Ma I'se
comin' ter see 'er jes' ez soon ez de cole spell is done let up. I sholy
is gwineter do hit."
When the old woman had gone, with the coffee and Jamaica ginger in her
basket, Dorinda hurried into the room at the back of the store, where
Rose Emily and the children were waiting for her.
"I couldn't get here any sooner," she explained as she entered. "First
Miss Seena Snead and then Aunt Mehitable stopped me. Are you feeling
easier to-day, Rose Emily?"
Mrs. Pedlar, wrapped in a pink crocheted shawl, with her hectic colour
and her gleaming hair, reminded Dorinda of the big wax doll they had had
in the window of the store last Christmas. She was so brilliant that she
did not look real.
"Oh, I feel like a different person this morning," she answered. It was
what she always said at the beginning of the day. "I'm sure I shall be
able to get up by evening."
"I'm so glad," Dorinda responded, as she did every morning. "Wait and
see what the doctor says."
"Yes, I thought I'd better stay in bed until he comes." She closed her
eyes from weakness, but a moment later, when she opened them, they shone
more brightly than ever. "He said he would stop by."
For an instant Dorinda hesitated; then she answered in a hushed voice.
"I met him in the road, and he drove me over."
Rose Emily's face was glowing. "Oh, did he? I'm so glad," she breathed.
"I'm afraid things aren't going well at Five Oaks," Dorinda pursued in a
troubled voice. "He looked dreadfully worried. It's the old man, I
suppose. Everybody says he's drinking himself to death, and there's that
coloured girl with all those children."
"Well, he can't live much longer," Rose Emily said hopefully, "and then,
of course, Jason will send them all packing." She reflected, as if she
were trying to recall something that had slipped her memory. "Somebody
was telling me the other day," she continued, "it must have been either
Miss Texanna or Miss Tabitha. Whoever it was thought Jason had made a
mistake to come back. Oh, I remember now! It was Miss Tabitha, and she
called Jason a fool to let his father manage his life. She said he had a
sweet nature, but that he was as light as a feather and a strong wind
could blow him away. Of course she didn't know him."
"Of course not," Dorinda assented emphatically.
"Well, I haven't seen him often, but he didn't seem to me to lack
backbone. Anyhow, I'd rather be married to a sweet nature than to a
strong will," she added. Ever since Jason's return, she had hoped so
ardently that he might fall in love with Dorinda that already, according
to her optimistic habit of mind, she regarded the match as assured.
They were still discussing young Doctor Greylock when Minnie May ran in
to say that Bud "would not mind what she told him," and Mrs. Pedlar
shifted her feverish animation in the direction of her daughter.
"Tell him if he doesn't do what you say, I'll make his Pa whip him as
soon as the store is closed," she said sternly, for she was a
disciplinarian; and the capable little girl ran out again, wiping her
red and shrivelled hands on the towel she had pinned over her short
dress.
"I declar that child's a born little mother," Rose Emily continued. "I
don't see how I could ever have pulled through without her."
Trivial as the incident was, Dorinda never forgot it. Years afterwards
the scene would return to her memory, and she would see again the
sturdy, energetic little figure, with the two thick wheaten red braids
and the towel pinned about her waist, hurrying out of the room. A born
little mother, that was the way Minnie May always appeared to her.
"Nathan needs me to help. I'd better go back," she said. "I'll look in
every now and then to see how you are." Smoothing her hair with her
hand, she hastened into the store.
As the morning advanced a line of white and coloured farmers, assembled
by the counter, with the chickens, eggs, and pats of butter which they
had brought to exchange for coffee, molasses, sugar, or simple household
remedies such as Jamaica ginger and Sloan's liniment. Tea was used only
in case of illness, and the brown tin canister on the shelf sometimes
remained empty for weeks.
Until yesterday Dorinda had regarded the monotonous routine of the store
as one of the dreary, though doubtless beneficial, designs of an
inscrutable Providence. A deep-rooted religious instinct persuaded her,
in spite of secret recoils, that dullness, not pleasure, was the
fundamental law of morality. The truth of the matter, she would probably
have said, was that one did the best one could in a world where duty was
invariably along the line of utmost resistance. But this morning, even
while she performed the empty mechanical gestures, she felt that her
mind had become detached from her body, and was whirling like a
butterfly in some ecstatic dream. Flightiness. That was how it would
have appeared to her mother. Yet, if this were flightiness, she thought,
who would ever choose to be sober? Beauty, colour, sweetness, all the
vital and radiant energy of the spring, vibrated through her. Her ears
were ringing as if she moved in a high wind. Sounds floated to her in
thin strains, from so great a distance that she was obliged to have
questions repeated before they reached her ears. And all the time, while
she weighed chickens and counted eggs and tasted butter, she was aware
that the faint, slow smile clung like an edge of light to her lips.
VII
The morning was well over when Minnie May came running into the store to
ask Dorinda to come to her mother.
"The doctor is with her," said the child, "and he wants to leave some
directions."
"Hadn't your father better see him?" Dorinda inquired, longing yet
hesitating.
"No, you go," answered Nathan before the child could reply. "You're so
much quicker at understanding," he explained, "and you can tell me what
he says after he's gone."
He looked, for all his immense frame, more bent and colourless and
ineffectual, she thought, than she had ever seen him. What a mean life
he had had! And he was good. There wasn't a better husband and father in
the world than Nathan Pedlar, and for the matter of that, there wasn't a
more honest tradesman. Yet everybody, even his own children, pushed him
aside as if he were of no consequence.
A few minutes later she was in Rose Emily's room, and her bright gaze
was on the clean-cut youthful figure leaning over her friend. Though she
had known that he would be there, her swift impression of him startled
her by its vividness. It was like this every time that she saw him.
There was an animation, a living quality in his face and smile which
made everything appear lifeless around him. Long afterwards, when she
had both remembered and forgotten, she decided that it was simply the
glamour of the unknown that she had felt in him. In those first months
after his return to Pedlar's Mill, he possessed for her the charm of
distant countries and picturesque enterprises. It was the flavour of
personality, she realized, even then, not of experience. He had
travelled little, yet his presence diffused the perilous thrill of
adventure.
"This is Dorinda," Rose Emily said; and he looked up and nodded as
casually as if he had never seen her before, or had just parted from
her. Which impression, Dorinda wondered, did he mean to convey?
"I suppose you haven't got such a thing as a hammock?" he inquired.
"What we need is to get her out on the porch. I've told her that every
time I've seen her."
"There are several hammocks in the store." As she answered his question,
Dorinda glanced at him doubtfully. In the sickroom he appeared to have
shed his youth as a snake sheds its skin. He might have been any age. He
was brisk, firm, efficient, and as sexless as a machine.
"Wouldn't it be safer to wait until the weather is milder?" Rose Emily
asked, with an anxious smile. "Cold is so bad for me."
"Nonsense!" He shook his head with a laugh. "That's the whole trouble
with you. Your lungs are starving for air. If you'd kept out of doors
instead of shutting the windows, you wouldn't be where you are now."
At this his patient made a timid protest. "Your father always said----"
He interrupted her brusquely. "My father was good in his generation, but
he belongs to the old school."
After this he talked on cheerfully, flattering her, chaffing her, while
he made fun of her old-fashioned hygiene and asked innumerable
questions, in a careless manner, about her diet, her medicine, her
diversions, and the deformity of the baby, John Abner, who was born with
a clubfoot. Though it seemed a long time to Dorinda, it was in fact not
more than a quarter of an hour before he said good-bye and nodded to the
girl to follow him out on the porch.
"I'll show you the very place to hang that hammock," he remarked as he
led the way out of doors.
Rose Emily stretched out her thin arm to detain him. "Don't you think
I'm getting better every day, Doctor?"
"Better? Of course you're better." He looked down at her with a smile.
"We'll have you up and out before summer."
Then he opened the door, and Dorinda obediently followed him outside.
"How on earth does she breathe in that oven?" he demanded moodily, while
he walked to the far end of the porch. "She'll be dead in three months,
if she doesn't get some fresh air into her lungs. And the children. It's
as bad as murder to keep them in that room."
He frowned slightly, and with his troubled frown, Dorinda felt that he
receded from her and became a stranger. His face was graver, firmer,
harassed by perplexity. It seemed to her incredible that he had looked
at her that morning with the romantic pathos and the imperative needs of
youth in his eyes.
"Will she really be up by summer?" she asked, breathless with hope and
surprise.
"Up?" He lowered his voice and glanced apprehensively over his shoulder.
"Why, she's dying. Don't you know she is dying?"
"I thought so," her voice broke. "But you told her----"
"You didn't expect me to tell her the truth, did you? What kind of brute
do you take me for?"
This new morality, for which neither religious doctrine nor experimental
philosophy had prepared her, stunned her into silence; and in that
silence he repeated, with a gesture of irritation, as if the admission
annoyed him excessively: "She'll be in her grave in six months, but you
couldn't expect me to tell her so."
"You mean there is no hope?"
"Not of a cure. Her lungs are too far gone. Of course, if she gets out
of doors, she may linger a little longer than we expect. Air and proper
nourishment work wonders sometimes."
"But don't you think she ought to have time to prepare?" It was the
question her mother would have asked, and she uttered it regretfully but
firmly.
"Prepare? You mean for her funeral?"
"No, I mean for eternity."
If she had presented some prehistoric fossil for his inspection, he
might have examined it with the same curious interest.
"For eternity?" he repeated.
Dorinda wavered. Though honest doubt was not unknown at Pedlar's Mill,
it had seldom resisted successfully the onslaught of orthodox dogma. To
the girl, with her intelligence and independence, many of her mother's
convictions had become merely habits of speech; yet, after all, was not
habit rather than belief the ruling principle of conduct?
"Will you let her die without time for repentance?" something moved her
to ask.
"Repentance! Good Lord! What opportunity has she ever had to commit a
pleasure?"
Then, as if the discussion irritated him, he picked up his medicine case
which he had laid on the railing of the porch. "I'll be passing again
about sundown," he remarked lightly, "and if you're ready to start home,
I'll pick you up as I go by."
As casually as that! "I'll pick you up as I go by!" Just as if she were
a bag of flour, she told herself in resentful despair. As he went from
her down the path to the gate, she resolved that she would not let him
drive her home if it killed her.
"I shan't be here at sundown," she called after him in the voice of a
Covenanter.
He was almost at the gate. Her heart sank like a wounded bird, and then,
recovering its lightness, soared up into the clouds. "Well, I'll manage
to come a little earlier," he responded, with tender gaiety. "Don't
disappoint me."
The small white gate between the two bare apple trees opened and closed
behind him. He untied the reins from the paling fence, and springing
into his buggy, drove off with a wave of his free hand. "God! What a
life!" he said, looking round while the buggy rolled down the slope in
the direction of the railway track. Standing there, she watched the
wheels rock slightly as they passed over the rails, and then spin on
easily along the road toward Green Acres. After the moving speck had
disappeared in the powder blue of the distance, it seemed to her that it
had left its vivid trail through the waste of the broomsedge. Her face
glowed; her bosom rose and fell quickly; her pulses were beating a
riotous tumult which shut out all other sounds. Suspense, heartache,
disappointment, all were forgotten. Why had no one told her that love
was such happiness?
Then, suddenly, her mind reproached her for the tumultuous joy. Rose
Emily was dying; yet she could not attune her thoughts to the solemn
fact of mortality. Walking the length of the porch, she opened the door
and went back into the close room.
"The doctor insists that you must open the windows," she said gravely,
subduing with an effort the blissful note in her voice.
So far had she been from the actual scene that she was not prepared for
the eagerness in Rose Emily's look.
"Oh, Dorinda," cried the dying woman, "the doctor was so encouraging!"
The girl turned her face to the window. "Yes, he was very encouraging."
"What did he say to you on the porch?"
"Only that he wanted to have you up before summer." After all, the big
lie was easier than the little one.
Mrs. Pedlar sighed happily. "I do wish summer would come!"
Dorinda bent down and straightened the pillow under the brilliant head.
It was hard to die, she thought, when the world was so beautiful. There
could be no drearier lot, she imagined, than marriage with Nathan for a
husband; better by far the drab freedom of the Snead sisters. Yet even
to Rose Emily, married to Nathan, life was not without sweetness. A
warm pity for her friend pervaded Dorinda's heart; pity for all that she
had missed and for the love that she had never known.
"It won't be long now." What more could she say?
"Dorinda!" Rose Emily's voice was quivering like the string of a harp.
"Miss Texanna came in for a minute, and she was so excited about the
dress Miss Seena is getting for you in town. Why didn't you tell me?"
"I wanted to, dear, only I didn't have time."
"I am so glad you are going to have a new dress. We can perfectly well
make it here, after Miss Seena has cut it out. Sometimes I get tired
crocheting."
Dorinda's eyes filled with tears. How kind Rose Emily was, how
unselfish, how generous! Always she was thinking of others; always she
was planning or working for the good of her children or Dorinda. Even as
a school teacher she had been like that, sweet, patient, generous to a
fault; and now, when she was dying, she grew nobler instead of peevish
and miserable like other hopelessly ill women.
"I'd love it," she said, as soon as she could trust herself to reply,
and she added hastily, "I wonder if you could eat a piece of duck
to-morrow. Aunt Mehitable brought a pair of nice fat ones."
Rose Emily nodded. "Yes, to-morrow. I'd like to see Aunt Mehitable the
next time she comes. She told me once she could conjure this mole off
the back of my neck."
"Well, you might let her try when you're out again." Tears were beading
Dorinda's lashes, and making some trivial excuse, she ran out of the
room. To be worrying about a little mole when Rose Emily would be dead
before summer was over!
A little before sunset, when the whistle of the train blew, Dorinda
picked up her shawl and hastened down to the track. Miss Texanna, having
nothing to do but knit in her box of a post office, had caught the
whistle as far away as Turkey Station, and was already waiting between
the big pump and the stranded freight car. "I reckon that's Sister Seena
on the platform," she remarked; and a few minutes later the train
stopped and the dressmaker was swung gallantly to the ground by the
conductor and the brakeman.
"I've got everything," she said, after the swift descent. "I looked
everywhere, and I bought the prettiest nun's veiling I could find. It's
as near the colour of a blue jay's wing as I ever saw, and I've got some
passementerie that's a perfect match." She was puffing while she walked
up the short slope to the store, but they were the puffs of a victorious
general. "Let's take it right straight into Rose Emily's room," she
added. "She will be just crazy about it."
When the three of them gathered about Rose Emily's bed, and the yards of
bright, clear blue unrolled on the counterpane, it seemed to Dorinda
that they banished the menacing thought of death. Though she pitied her
friend, she could not be unhappy. Her whole being was vibrating with
some secret, irrepressible hope. A blue dress, nothing more. The merest
trifle in the sum of experience; yet, when she looked back in later
years, it seemed to her that the future was packed into that single
moment as the kernel is packed into the nut.
"May I leave it here?" she asked, glancing eagerly out of the window.
"The sun has gone down, and I must hurry." Would he wait for her or had
he already gone on without her?
"We'll start cuttin' the first thing in the mornin'," said Miss Seena,
gloating over the nun's veiling. "Jest try the hat on, Dorinda, before
you go. I declar her own Ma wouldn't know her," she exclaimed, with the
pride of creation. "Nobody would ever have dreamed she was so
good-lookin', would they, Rose Emily? Ain't it jest wonderful what
clothes can do?"
With that "wonderful" tingling in her blood, Dorinda threw the orange
shawl over her head, and hastened out of the house. She felt as if the
blue waves were bearing her up and sweeping her onward. In all her life
it was the only thing she had ever had that she wanted. Yesterday there
had been nothing, and to-day the world was so rich and full of beauty
that she was dizzy with happiness. It was like a first draught of wine;
it enraptured while it bewildered.
"I was a little late, and I was afraid you would have gone," Jason said.
What did he mean by that, she asked herself. Ought she not to have
waited? She had no experience, no training, to guide her. Nothing but
this blind instinct, and how could she tell whether instinct was right
or wrong?
"Something kept me. I couldn't get away earlier," she answered. "Have
you worked all day?"
"Yes, but it isn't steady work. For hours at a time the store is empty.
Then they all come together. Of course we have to tidy up in the off
hours," she added, "and when there's nothing else to do I read aloud to
Rose Emily."
"Are you content? You look happy."
He was gazing straight ahead of him, and it seemed to her that he was as
impersonal as the Shorter Catechism. She suffered under it, yet she was
powerless, in her innocence, to change it.
"I don't know. There isn't any use thinking." Were there always these
fluctuations of hope and disappointment? Did nothing last? Was there no
stability in experience?
"Well, I got caught too," he said presently, as if he had not heard her.
"That's the rotten part of a doctor's life, everything and everybody
catches him. Good Lord! Is there never any end to it? I'd give my head
to get away. I'm not made for the country. It depresses me and lets me
down too easily. I suppose I'm born lazy at bottom, and I need the
contact with other minds to prod me into energy. This is the critical
time too. If I can't get away, I'm doomed for good. Yet what can I do?
I'm tied hand and foot as long as Father is alive."
"Couldn't you sell the farm?" Her voice sounded thin and colourless in
her ears.
"How can I? Who would buy? And it isn't only the farm. I wouldn't let
that stand in my way. Father has got into a panic about dying, and he is
afraid to be left alone with the negroes. He made me promise, when I
thought he was on his death-bed, that I wouldn't leave him as long as he
lived. He's got a will of iron--that's the only thing that keeps him
alive--and he's always had his way with me. He broke my spirit, I
suppose, when I was little. And it was the same way with Mother. She
taught me to be afraid of him, and to dodge and parry before I was old
enough to know what I was doing. When a fear like that gets into the
nerves, it's like a disease." He broke off moodily, and then went on
again without waiting for her response. "There's medicine now. I never
wanted to study medicine. I knew I wasn't cut out for it. What I wanted
to do was something entirely different,--but Father had made up his
mind, and in the end he had his way with me. He always gets his way with
me. He's thwarted everything I ever wanted to do as far back as I can
remember. For my good of course. I understand that. But you can ruin
people's lives--especially young people's lives--from the best motives."
His bitterness welled out in a torrent. It seemed to Dorinda that he had
forgotten her; yet, even though he was unaware of her sympathy, she felt
that she longed to reach out her hand and comfort him.
"I'm sorry," she said softly, "I'm sorry."
He looked at her with a laugh. "I oughtn't to have let that out," he
returned. "Something happened to upset me. I'm easy-going enough
generally, but there are some things I can't stand."
She was curious to know what had happened, what sort of things they were
that he couldn't stand; but after his brief outburst, he did not confide
in her. He was engrossed, she saw, in a recollection he did not divulge;
and, manlike, he made no effort to assume a cheerfulness he did not
feel. The drive was a disappointment to her; yet, in some inexplicable
way, the disappointment increased rather than diminished his power over
her. While she sat there, with her lips closed, she was, shedding her
allurement as prodigally as a flower sheds its fragrance. Gradually, the
afterglow thinned into dusk; the road darkened, and the broomsedge,
subdued by twilight, became impenetrable.
VIII
It was Easter Sunday, and Dorinda, wearing her new clothes with outward
confidence but a perturbed mind, stood on the front porch while she
waited for the horses to be harnessed to the spring wagon.
Though she was far less handsome in her blue dress and her straw hat
with the wreath of cornflowers than she was in her old tan ulster and
orange shawl, neither she nor Almira Pride her father's niece, who was
going to church with them, was aware of the fact. Easter would not be
acknowledged in the austere service of the church at Pedlar's Mill; but
both women knew that spring would blossom on the head of every girl who
could afford a new hat. Joshua had gone to harness the horses; and while
Mrs. Oakley put on her bonnet and her broadcloth mantle trimmed with
bugles, which she had worn to church ever since Dorinda could remember,
Almira babbled on in a rapture of admiration.
She was a pink, flabby, irresponsible person, adjusting comfortably the
physical burden of too much flesh to the spiritual repose of too little
mind. All the virtues and the vices of the "poor white" had come to
flower in her. Married at fifteen to a member of a family known as "the
low down Prides," she had been perfectly contented with her lot in a
two-room log cabin and with her husband, a common labourer, having a
taste for whiskey and a disinclination for work, who was looked upon by
his neighbours as "not all there." As the mother of children so numerous
that their father could not be trusted to remember their names, she
still welcomed the yearly addition to her family with the moral serenity
of a rabbit.
"I declar, Dorrie, I don't see how you got such a stylish flare," she
exclaimed now, without envy and without ambition. "That bell skirt sets
jest perfect!"
"I hope we got it right," said Dorinda, anxiously, as she turned slowly
round under Almira's gaze. "Is Ike staying with the children?"
"Yes, we couldn't both leave 'em the same day. Is Uncle Josh hitching
up?"
"He's coming round right now," said Mrs. Oakley, wafting a pungent,
odour of camphor before her as she appeared. "I'm glad you came over,
Almira. There's plenty of room in the wagon since we've put in the back
seat. Ain't you coming to church with us, Josiah?"
"No, I ain't," Josiah replied, stubbornly. "When I get a day's rest, I'm
goin' to take it. It don't rest me to be preached to."
"Well, it ought to," rejoined his mother, with an air of exhausted
piety. "If going to church ain't a rest, I don't know what you call
one."
But Josiah was in a stubborn and rebellious mood. He was suffering with
toothache, and though he was of the breed, he was not of the temper of
which martyrs are made. "I don't see that yo' religion has done so much
for you," he added irascibly, "or for Pa either."
In her Sunday clothes, with her buckram-lined skirt spreading about her,
Mrs. Oakley stopped, as she was descending the steps of the porch, and
looked back at her son. "It is the only thing that has kept me going,
Josiah," she answered, and her lip trembled as she repeated the
solitary formula with which experience had provided her.
"Poor Ma," Dorinda thought while she watched her. "He might a least
leave her the comfort of her religion."
"There's Uncle Josh now!" exclaimed Almira, who was by instinct a
peacemaker. "Have you got yo' hymn book, Aunt Eudora? I forgot to bring
mine along."
"It's in my reticule," Mrs. Oakley replied, producing a bag of beaded
black silk, which she had used every Sunday for twenty years. "You'll
get all muddied up, Dorinda, so I brought this old bedquilt for you to
spread over your lap. It's chilly enough, anyway, for your ulster, and
you can leave it with the quilt in the wagon. I can see you shivering
now in that thin nun's veiling."
"I'm not cold," Dorinda answered valiantly; but she slipped her arms
into the sleeves of the ulster, and accepted obediently the bedquilt
her mother held out. Something, either Josiah's surliness or the slight
chill in the early April air, had dampened her spirits, and she was
realizing that the possession of a new dress does not confer happiness.
Going down the steps, she glanced up doubtfully at the changeable blue
of the sky. "I do hope it is going to stay clear," she murmured.
Round the corner of the house, she could see Joshua harnessing the
horses, Dan and Beersheba. Dan, the leader, was still champing fodder as
he backed up to the ramshackle vehicle, and while he raised his heavy
hoofs, he turned his gentle, humid gaze on his master. He was a tall,
rawboned animal, slow but sure, as Joshua said proudly, with a flowing
tail, plaited now and tied up with red calico, and the doleful face of a
Presbyterian gone wrong. Beside him, Beersheba, his match in colour but
not in character, moved with a mincing step, and surveyed the Sabbath
prospect with a sportive epicurean eye. Unlike the Southern farmers
around him, and the unimaginative everywhere, who are without feeling
for animals, the better part of Joshua's life was spent with his two
horses; and Dorinda sometimes thought that they were nearer to him than
even his wife and his children. Certainly he was less humble and more at
home in their company. In the midst of his family he seldom spoke, never
unless a question was put to him; but coming upon him unawares in the
fields or by the watering trough, Dorinda had heard him talking to Dan
and Beersheba in the tone a man uses only to the creatures who speak and
understand the intimate language of his heart.
Always at a disadvantage in his Sunday clothes, which obscured the
patriarchal dignity of his appearance, he looked more hairy and
earthbound than ever this morning. Though he had scrubbed his face
until it shone, the colour of clay and the smell of manure still clung
to him. Only his brown eyes, with their dumb wistfulness, were bright
and living.
Wrapped in, the old bedquilt, Dorinda jogged sleepily over the familiar
road, which had become so recently the road of happiness. In a dream she
felt the jolting of the wagon; in a dream she heard the creaking of the
wheels, the trotting of the horses, the murmur of wind in the tree-tops,
the piping of birds in the meadows. In a dream she smelt the rich, vital
scents of the ploughed ground, the sharp tang of manure on the
tobacco fields, the stimulating whiff of camphor from her mother's
handkerchief. The trees were still bare in the deep band of woods,
except for the flaming points of the maple and the white and rosy foam
of, the dogwood and redbud; but beside the road patches of grass and
weeds were as vivid as emerald, and where the distance was webbed with
light and shadow, the landscape unrolled like a black and silver
brocade. While she drove on the vague depression drifted away from her
spirits, and she felt that joy mounted in her veins as the sap flowed
upward around her. In this dream, as in a remembered one of her
childhood, she was for ever approaching some magical occasion, and yet
never quite reaching it. She was for ever about to be satisfied, and yet
never satisfied in the end. The dream, like all her dreams, carried her
so far and no farther. At the very point where she needed it most, it
broke off and left her suspended in a world of gossamer unrealities.
The mud spattered over the quilt in her lap, and she heard her Mother
say in her habitual tone of nervous nagging, "Drive carefully over that
bad place, Joshua. If Elder Pursley stays with us during the missionary
meetings, I'll have to ask Miss Texanna Snead to let us have some of her
milk and butter. They have some fresh cows coming on, and I don't reckon
she would miss it. Anyway, I'll try to pay her back with scuppernong
grapes next September."
Again the prick in Dorinda's conscience! Though her mind rebelled, her
conscience was incurably Presbyterian, and while she wore the blue dress
gaily enough, she did not doubt that it was the symbol of selfishness.
Between the blue dress and the red cow, she knew, the choice was, in its
essence, one of abstract morality. Neither her father nor her mother had
reproached her; but their magnanimity had served only to sharpen the
sting of reflection. "Well, I reckon you won't be young but once,
daughter," her mother had observed with the dry tolerance of
disillusionment, "and the sooner you get over with it the better," while
her father had stretched out his toil-worn hand and fingered one of the
balloon sleeves. "That looks mighty pretty, honey, an' don't you worry
about not gittin' the red caw. It'll save yo' Ma the trouble of
churnin', an' you kind of lose the taste fur butter when you ain't had
it fur some while."
"If Elder Pursley can't come, maybe one of the foreign missionaries
will," Dorinda remarked, hoping to cheer her mother and to distract her
mind from the mud holes.
"Of course we ain't got much to offer them," replied Mrs. Oakley in a
tone of pious humility. "Though I don't reckon things of the flesh count
much with a missionary, and, anyway, I'm going to have a parcel of young
chickens to fry. Well, if we ain't most there! I declare Dan and
Beersheba are getting real sprightly again!"
In the afternoon, sitting at the window of the spare chamber, to which,
she had been driven by the sultry calm of the Sabbath at Old Farm,
Dorinda asked herself, and could find no answer, why the day had been a
disappointment? She had expected nothing, and yet because nothing had
come, she was dissatisfied and unhappy. Was there no rest anywhere? she
asked without knowing that she asked it. Was love, like life, merely a
passing from shock to shock, with no permanent peace?
Returning from church, the family had sat down, ill-humoured from
emptiness, to dinner at four o'clock. It was the custom to have dinner
in the middle of the afternoon, and no supper on Sunday; and the men
were expected to gorge themselves into a state of somnolence which
would, as Mrs. Oakley said, "tide them over until breakfast." When the
heavy meal had been dispatched but not digested by the others, Dorinda
(who had scarcely touched the apple dumplings her mother had
solicitously pressed on her) came into the unused bedroom to put away
her hat and dress in the big closet. The spare room, which was kept
scrupulously cleaned and whitewashed, was situated at the back of the
house adjoining Mrs. Oakley's chamber. All the possessions the family
regarded as sacred were preserved here in a faint greenish light and a
stale odour of sanctity. The windows were seldom opened; but Dorinda had
just flung back the shutters, and the view she gazed out upon was like
the coming of spring in an old tapestry. Though the land was not
beautiful, that also had its moments of beauty.
Immediately in front of her, the pear orchard had flowered a little late
and scattered its frail bloom on the grass. As the sunlight streamed
through the trees, they appeared to float between earth and sky in some
ineffable medium, while the petals on the ground shone and quivered with
a fugitive loveliness, as if a stir or a breath would dissolve the white
fire to dew. Above the orchard, where a twisted path ran up to it, there
was the family graveyard, enclosed by a crumbling fence which had once
been of white palings, and in the centre of the graveyard the big
harp-shaped pine stood out, clear and black, on the low crest of the
hill. It was the tallest pine, people said, in the whole of Queen
Elizabeth County; its rocky base had protected it in its youth; and
later on no one had taken the trouble to uproot it from the primitive
graveyard. In spring the boughs were musical with the songs of birds; on
stormy days the tree rocked back and forth until Mrs. Oakley imagined,
in her bad spells, that she heard the creaking of a gallows; and on hot
summer evenings, when the moon rose round and orange-red above the hill,
the branches reminded Dorinda of the dark flying shape of a witch.
While she sat there she lived over again the incidents of the morning;
but the vision in her mind was as different from the actual occurrences
as the image of her lover was different from the real Jason Greylock.
Nothing had happened to disappoint her. Absolutely nothing. There was no
reason why she should have been happy yesterday and miserable to-day;
there was no reason except the eternal unreasonableness of love! She had
tried to fix her mind on the sermon, which was a little shorter and no
duller than usual. Sitting on the hard bench which she called a pew,
bending her head over the bare back of the seat in front of her, she had
sought to win spiritual peace by driving a bargain with God. "Give me
happiness, and I----"
Then before her prayer was completed, the congregation had stood up to
sing, and she had met the eyes of Jason Greylock over the row of humble
heads and proud voices. He was sitting in the Ellgood pew, and of course
it was natural that he should have gone home with the Ellgoods to
dinner. It was, she repeated sternly, perfectly natural. It was
perfectly natural also that he should have forgotten that he had told
her to beg, borrow, or steal a blue dress. In the few minutes when he
had stopped to shake hands with her father and mother in the porch of
the church, he had turned to her and asked, "How did you know that you
ought to wear blue?" Yes, that, like everything else that had happened,
was perfectly natural. For the last few weeks he had driven her to the
store and back every day; he had appeared to have no happiness except in
the hours that he spent with her; he had spoken to her, he had looked at
her, as if he loved her; yet, she repeated obstinately, it was natural
that he should be different on Sunday. Everything had always been
different on Sunday. Since her childhood it had seemed to her that the
movement of all laws, even natural ones, was either suspended or
accelerated on the Sabbath.
She was thinking of this when the door opened, and Mrs. Oakley, who had
resumed her ordinary clothes without disturbing her consecrated
expression, thrust her head into the room.
"I've looked everywhere for you, Dorinda. Are you sick?"
"No, I'm not sick."
"Has Rufus been teasing you?"
"No."
"Has anybody said anything to hurt your feelings? Josiah is grouchy; but
you mustn't mind what he says."
"Oh, no. He hasn't been any worse than usual. There isn't anything the
matter, Ma."
"I noticed you didn't half eat your dinner, and your father kind of
thought somebody had hurt your feelings."
Closing the door behind her, Mrs. Oakley crossed the room and sat down
near her daughter in the best mahogany rocker. Then, observing
that she had disarranged the fall of the purple calico flounce, she rose
and adjusted the slip cover. While she was still on her feet, she went
over to the bed and shook the large feather pillows into shape. After
that, before sitting down again, she stood for a few moments with her
stern gaze wandering about the room, as if she were seeking more dirt to
conquer. But such things did not worry her. They drifted like straws on
the surface of her mind, while her immortal spirit was preoccupied with
a profound and incurable melancholy.
"I hope you ain't upset in your mind, daughter," she said abruptly.
Dorinda turned her lucid gaze on her mother. "Ma, whatever made you
marry Pa?" she asked bluntly.
For an instant the frankness of the question stunned Mrs. Oakley. She
had inherited the impenetrable Scotch reserve on the subject of
sentiment, and it seemed to her, while she pondered the question, that
there were no words in which she could answer her daughter. Both her
vocabulary and her imagination were as innocent of terms of sex as if
she were still an infant learning her alphabet.
"Well, your father's a mighty good man, Dorinda," she replied evasively.
"I know he is, but what made you marry him?"
"He's never given me a cross word in his life," Mrs. Oakley pursued,
working herself up, as she went on, until she sounded as if she were
reciting a Gospel hymn. "I've never heard a complaint from him. There
never was a better worker, and it isn't his fault if things have always
gone against him."
"I know all that," said Dorinda, as implacable as truth, "but what made
you marry him? Were you ever in love with him?"
Mrs. Oakley's eyes lost suddenly their look of mystic vision and became
opaque with memories. "I reckon I sort of took a fancy to him," she
responded.
"Is there ever any reason why people marry?"
A mild regret flickered into the face of the older woman. "I s'pose they
think they've got one."
She must have been pretty once, Dorinda thought while she watched her.
She must have been educated to refinements of taste and niceties of
manner; yet marriage had been too strong for her, and had conquered her.
"I don't see how you've stood it!" she exclaimed, with the indignant
pity of youth.
Mrs. Oakley's bleak eyes, from which all inner glory had departed,
rested pensively on her daughter. "There ain't but one way to stand
things," she returned slowly. "There ain't but one thing that keeps you
going and keeps a farm going, and that is religion. If you ain't got
religion to lean back on, you'd just as well give up trying to live in
the country."
"I don't feel that way about religion," Dorinda said obstinately. "I
want to be happy."
"You're too young yet. Your great-grandfather used to say that most
people never came to God as long as there was anywhere else for them to
go."
"Was that true of great-grandfather?"
"It must have been. He told me once that he didn't come to Christ until
he had thirsted for blood."
To Dorinda this seemed an indirect way to divine grace; but it made her
great-grandfather appear human to her for the only time in her life.
"But he must have had something else first," she observed logically.
"People always seem to have had something else first, or they wouldn't
have found out how worthless it is. You must have been in love once,
even if you have forgotten it."
Mrs. Oakley shook her head. "I haven't forgotten it, daughter," she
answered. "It's time you were knowing things, I reckon, or you wouldn't
be asking."
"Yes, it's time I was knowing things," repeated Dorinda. "You told me
once that great-grandfather tried to keep you from marrying. Then why
did you do it?"
For a minute or two before she replied the muscles in Mrs. Oakley's face
and throat worked convulsively. "I was so set on your father that I
moped myself into a decline," she said in a voice that was half
strangled. "Those feelings have always gone hard in our family. There
was your great-aunt Dorinda, the one you were named after," she
continued, passing with obvious relief from her personal history. "When
she couldn't get the man she'd set her heart on, she threw herself into
the millstream; but after they fished her out and dried her off, she
sobered down and married somebody else and was as sensible as anybody
until the day of her death. She lived to be upwards of ninety, and your
great-grandfather used to say he prized her advice more than that of any
man he knew. Then there was another sister, Abigail, who went deranged
about some man she hadn't seen but a few times, and they had to put her
away in a room with barred windows. They didn't have good asylums then
to send anybody to. But she got over it too, and went as a missionary
overseas. That all happened in Ireland before your great-grandfather
came to this country. I never saw your great-aunt Dorinda, but she
corresponded regularly, till the day of her death, with your
great-grandfather. I remember his telling me that she used to say
anybody could be a fool once, but only a born fool was ever a fool
twice."
"I wonder what it was?" said Dorinda wearily.
Mrs. Oakley sighed. "It's nature, I reckon," she replied, without
reproach but without sympathy. "Grandfather used to say that when a
woman got ready to fall in love the man didn't matter, because she could
drape her feeling over a scarecrow and pretend he was handsome. But,
being a man, I s'pose he had his own way of looking at it; and if it's
woman's nature to take it too hard, it's just as much the nature of man
to take it too easy. The way I've worked it out is that with most women,
when it seems pure foolishness, it ain't really that. It's just the
struggle to get away from things as they are."
To get away from things as they are! Was this all there was in her
feeling for Jason; the struggle to escape from the endless captivity of
things as they are? In the bleak dawn of reason her dreams withered like
flowers that are blighted by frost.
"Whatever it is, you haven't a good word for it," she said, vaguely
resentful.
Mrs. Oakley considered the question impartially. "Well, it ain't
catching and it ain't chronic," she remarked at last, with the temperate
judgment of one who has finished with love. "I've got nothing to say
against marriage, of course," she explained. "Marriage is the Lord's own
institution, and I s'pose it's a good thing as far as it goes. Only,"
she added wisely, "it ain't ever going as far as most women try to make
it. You'll be all right married, daughter, if you just make up your mind
that whatever happens, you ain't going to let any man spoil your life."
The brave words, striking deep under the surface, rang against the vein
of iron in Dorinda's nature. Clear and strong as a bell, she heard the
reverberations of character beneath the wild bloom of emotion. Yes,
whatever happened, she resolved passionately, no man was going to spoil
her life! She could live without Jason; she could live without any man.
The shadows of her great-aunts, Dorinda and Abigail, demented victims of
love, stretched, black and sinister, across the generations. In her
recoil from an inherited frailty, she revolted, with characteristic
energy, to the opposite extreme of frigid disdain.
"Were all great-grandfather's sisters like that?" she asked hopefully,
remembering that he had had six.
"Oh, no." Her mother was vague but encouraging. "I don't recollect ever
hearing anything foolish about Rebekah and Priscilla, and even the
others were sensible enough when they had stopped running after men."
Running after men! The phrase was burned with acid into her memory. Was
that what her mother, who did not know, would think of her? Was that
what Jason, who did know, thought of her now? Her love, which had been
as careless in its freedom as the flight of a bird, became suddenly shy
and self-conscious. She had promised that she would meet him at
Gooseneck Creek after sunset; but she knew now that she could not go,
that something stronger than her desire to be with him was holding her
back.
After her mother had gone she sat there for hours, with her eyes on the
lengthening shadows over the pear orchard. This something stronger than
her desire was hardening into resolution within her. She would avoid him
in the future wherever she could; she would not look for him at the fork
of the road; she would go to work an hour earlier and return an hour
later in order that she might not appear to throw herself in his way.
Already the inevitable battle between the racial temperament and the
individual will was beginning, and before the evening was over she told
herself that she was victorious. Though her longing drew her like a cord
to Gooseneck Creek, and the quiver of her nerves was as sharp as the
pain of an aching tooth, she stayed in her mother's chamber until
bedtime, and tried unsuccessfully to fix her mind on her
great-grandfather's dry sermon on temperance. When the evening was over
at last, and she went upstairs to her room, she felt as if the blood had
turned back in her veins. In the first fight she had conquered, but it
was one of those victories, she knew without admitting the knowledge,
which are defeats.
IX
In May and June, for a brief season between winter desolation and summer
drought, the starved land flushed into loveliness. Honey-coloured
sunlight. The notes of a hundred birds. A roving sweetness of wild grape
in the air. To Dorinda, whose happiness had come so suddenly that her
imagination was still spinning from the surprise of it, the flowerlike
blue of the sky, the songs of birds, and the elusive scent of the wild
grape, all seemed to be a part of that rich inner world, with its
passionate expectancy and its sense of life burning upward.
They were to be married in the autumn. Even now, when she repeated the
words, they sounded so unreal that she could scarcely believe them; but
her prudent Scotch mind, which still distrusted ecstasy, had ceased long
ago to distrust Jason's love. The thing she wanted had come, at last,
and it had come, she realized, after she had deliberately turned her
back upon it. She had found happiness, not by seeking it, but by running
away from it. For two weeks she had persisted in her resolution; she had
drawn desperately upon the tough fibre of inherited strength. For two
weeks she had avoided Jason when it was possible, and in avoiding him,
she could not fail to perceive, she had won him. To her direct,
forward-springing nature there was a shock in the discovery that, where
the matter is one of love, honesty is at best a questionable policy. Was
truth, after all, in spite of the exhortations of preachers, a weaker
power than duplicity? Would evasion win in life where frankness would
fail? Then, as passion burned through her like the sunrise, doubt was
extinguished. Since her heart told her that he was securely hers, what
did it matter to her how she had won him?
For the first time in her life she had ceased longing, ceased striving.
She was as satisfied as Almira to drift with the days toward some
definite haven of the future. Detached, passive, still as a golden lily
in a lily-pond, she surrendered herself to the light and the softness.
Her soul was asleep, and beyond this inner stillness, men and women were
as impersonal as trees walking. There was no vividness, no reality even,
except in this shining place where her mind brooded with folded leaves.
She was no longer afraid of life. The shadows of her great-aunts,
Dorinda and Abigail, were as harmless as witches that have been robbed
of their terror.
In those months, while her eyes were full of dreams, her immature beauty
bloomed and ripened into its summer splendour. There was a richer gloss
on her hair, which was blue black in the shadow, a velvet softness to
her body, a warmer flush, like the colour of fruit, in her cheeks and
lips. Her artless look wavered and became shy and pensive. Some subtle
magic had transformed her; and if the natural Dorinda still survived
beneath this unreal Dorinda, she was visible only in momentary sparkles
of energy. When she was with Jason she talked little. Expression had
never been easy for her, and now, since silence was so much softer and
sweeter than speech, she sat in an ecstatic dumbness while she drank in
the sound of his voice. Feeling, which had drugged her until only half
of her being was awake, had excited him into an unusual mental activity.
He was animated, eager, weaving endless impracticable schemes, like a
man who is intoxicated but still in command of his faculties.
"Are you happy?" she asked one August afternoon, while they sat in the
shade of the thin pines which edged the woods beyond Joshua's
tobacco field. It was the question she asked every day, and his answers,
though satisfying to her emotion, were unconvincing to her intelligence.
He loved her as ardently as she loved him; yet she was beginning to
realize that only to a woman are love and happiness interchangeable
terms. Some obscure anxiety working in his mind was stronger than all
her love, all her tenderness. She gave way before it, but never, except
in rare moments of ecstasy, did it yield place to her.
He smiled. "Of course; but I'll be happier when we can get away. I can't
stand this country. My nerves begin to creep as soon as twilight comes
on."
The woods behind them, known to the negroes in slavery days as "Hoot Owl
Woods," divided the front of Old Farm from the fallow meadows of Five
Oaks, and stretched westward to the Old Stage Road and the gate at the
fork. In front of the lovers, looking east, a web of blue air hung over
the tobacco field, where the huge plants were turning yellow in the
intense heat. Back and forth in the furrows Joshua and Josiah were
moving slowly, like giant insects, while they searched for the hidden
"suckers" along the thick juicy stalks. Beyond the tobacco field there
was a ragged vegetable garden, where the tomatoes were rotting to pulp
in the sun, and even the leaves of the corn looked wilted. The air was
so breathless that a few languid crows appeared to float like dead
things over the parched country.
"You don't feel that when you are with me," she said.
"The trouble is that I can't be with you but a part of the time. There's
this worthless practice. I can't give it up, if I'm to keep on in
medicine, and yet it means that I must spend half my life jogging over
these God-forsaken roads. Then the night!" He shivered with disgust. "If
you only knew, and I'm thankful you don't, what it means to be shut up
in that house. Some nights my father doesn't sleep at all unless he is
drugged into stupor. He wanders about with a horsewhip, looking in every
room and closet for something to flog."
While he spoke she had a vision of the house, with its dust and cobwebs,
and of the drunken old man, in his nightshirt and bare feet, roaming up
and down the darkened staircase. She could see his bleared eyes, his
purple face, his skinny legs, like the legs of a turkey gobbler, and his
hands, as sharp as claws, lashing out with the horsewhip. The picture
was so vivid that, coming in the midst of her dreamy happiness, it
sickened her. Why did Jason have to stand horrors like that?
"It can't last much longer," she said. Was it the right thing, she
wondered, or ought she to have kept up the pretence of loving the old
man and dreading his death? Life would be so much simpler, she
reflected, if people would only build on facts, not on shams.
He shook his head. "Nobody can say. Sometimes I think he can't last but
a few weeks. Then he improves, without apparent reason, and his strength
is amazing. According to everything we know about his condition, he
ought to have died months ago; yet he appears to be getting better now
instead of worse. I believe it is simply a question of will. He is kept
alive by his terror of dying. It's brutal, I know," he added, "to look
forward to anybody's death, especially your own father's; but if you
only knew how my life is eaten away hour by hour."
"You couldn't make some arrangement?" she asked. "Engage somebody to
stay with him, or--or send him away?"
"I've thought of that. God knows I've thought of everything. But he
isn't mad, you see. He is as sane as I am except when his craving for
whiskey overcomes his fear of death, and he drinks himself into a
frenzy. He won't have anybody else with him. I am the only human being
who can do anything with him, and strange as it seems, I believe he has
some kind of crazy affection for me in his heart. That's why I've put up
with him so long. Several times I've been ready to leave, with my bags
packed and the buggy at the door, and then he's broken down and wept
like a child and begged me not to desert him. He reminds me then that he
is dying, and that I promised to stick by him until the end. It's
weakness in me to give in, but he broke my will when I was a child, he
and my mother between them, and I can't get over the habit of yielding.
I may be all wrong. Sometimes I know that I am. But, after all, it was a
good impulse that made me promise to stick to him." For an instant he
hesitated, and then added bitterly, "I can't tell you how often in life
I've seen men betrayed by their good impulses."
"After it is over, you will be glad that you didn't leave him."
"I don't know. The truth is I'm in an infernal muddle. After all my
medical training, there's a streak of darky superstition somewhere
inside of me. You'd think science would have knocked it out, but it
hasn't. The fact is that I never really cared a hang about science. I
was pushed into medicine, but the only aptitude I have for the
profession is one of personality, and the only interest I feel in it is
a sentimental pleasure in relieving pain. However, I've kept the
superstition all right, and I have a sneaking feeling that if I break my
word and desert the old man, it will come back at me in the end."
"But you're a wonderful doctor," she murmured, with her face against his
shoulder. "Look at the people you've helped since you've been here."
He laughed without merriment. "That reminds me of the way I used to
think I'd bring civilization to the natives. I imagined, when I first
came back, that all I had to do was to get people together and tell them
how benighted they were, and that they'd immediately want to see wisdom.
Do you remember the time I put up notices and opened the schoolhouse,
and got only Nathan Pedlar and an idiot boy for an audience? The hardest
thing to believe when you're young is that people will fight to stay in
a rut, but not to get out of it. Well, that was almost six months ago,
and those six months have taught me that any prejudice, even the
prejudice in favour of the one-crop system, is a sacred institution.
Look at the land!" He waved his hand vaguely in the direction of the
sun-bleached soil. "Even generations of failure can't teach the farmers
about here that it is impossible to make bread out of straw."
"Do you think it is really the way they have treated the land?" she
asked. "That's what Nathan is always saying, you know."
"Oh, the curse started with the tenant system, I'll admit. The tenants
used the land as a stingy man uses a horse he has hired by the month.
But the other farmers, even those who own their farms, are no better now
than the tenants. They've worked and starved the land to a skeleton. Yet
it's still alive, and it could be brought back to health, if they'd have
the sense to treat it as a doctor treats an undernourished human body.
Take Nathan Pedlar and James Ellgood. James Ellgood has made one of the
best stock farms in the state; and that, by the way, is what this
country is best suited for--stock or dairy farms. If I had a little
money I could make a first rate dairy farm out of Five Oaks or Old Farm.
You've got rich pasture land over the other side, and so have we, down
by Whippernock River. It could be made a fine place for cattle, with the
long grazing season and the months when cows could live in the open. Yet
to suggest anything but the antiquated crop system is pure heresy. The
same fields of tobacco that get eaten by worms or killed by frost. The
same fields of corn year in and year out--" he broke off impatiently and
bent his lips down to hers. "I'm talking you to sleep, Dorrie."
"I like to listen to you," she said, when she had kissed him. "If you
tell them over and over, in time they may believe you."
"After I'm dead, perhaps. Hasn't Nathan Pedlar told them again and
again? Hasn't he even proved it to them? He's been experimenting with
alfalfa, and he's getting four cuttings now off those fields of his; but
they think he's a fool because he isn't satisfied with one poor crop of
corn."
"I know. Pa doesn't think anything of alfalfa," she answered. "He says
Nathan is wasting his time raising a weed that cattle won't touch when
it is dry."
"They all talk that way. Half daft, that's what they call anybody who
wants to step out of the mud or try a new method. Ezra Flower told me
yesterday that Nathan was half daft. No, I want to get away, not to
spend my life as a missionary to the broomsedge. I feel already as if it
were growing over me and strangling the little energy I ever had. That's
the worst of it. If you stay here long enough, the broomsedge claims
you, and you get so lazy you cease to care what becomes of you. There's
failure in the air."
She remembered what old Matthew had said to her that March afternoon.
"If he'd take the advice of eighty-odd years, he'd git away befo' the
broomsage ketches him."
Was it true, what the old man believed, that the broomsedge was not only
wild stuff, but a kind of fate? Fear, not for herself, but for Jason,
stabbed through her.
"You're so easily discouraged," she said tenderly. To her, whose inner
life was a part of the country, poverty had been an inevitable condition
of living, and to fight had seemed as natural as to suffer or to endure.
"I suppose I am, but I'm made that way. I can't change my temperament,"
he replied, with a touch of the fatalism he condemned but could not
resist.
"Well, I'll help you," she responded cheerfully. "After we are married,
everything will be different. I am not afraid of Five Oaks or of
anything else as long as I have you."
He was gazing over her head into the bleached distance, and she felt the
tightened pressure of his arms about her. "I'd be all right here, even
at Five Oaks, if you were with me," he answered. "You put something in
me that I need. I don't know what it is--fibre, I suppose, the courage
of living." Suddenly his eyes left the landscape and looked down into
hers. "What I ought to do," he added impulsively, "is to marry you
to-day. We could get the last train to Washington, and be married
to-morrow morning before any one knew of it. Would you come if I asked
you?"
Her look did not waver. "I'll go anywhere that you ask me to. I'll do
anything that will help you," she answered. Her body straightened as if
its soft curves were moulded by the vein of iron in her soul.
But his impulse had spent its force in an imaginary flight. "That's what
I'd like to do," he said slowly, while his rosy visions were obliterated
by the first impact with reality. "But there are so many damned things
to consider. There are always so many damned things to consider. First
of all there's the money. I haven't got enough to take us away and keep
us a week. After Father stopped helping me, I started out on my own hook
in New York, and I was just making enough from the hospital to give me a
living. I didn't put by a cent, and, of course, since I've been here
I've made nothing. Down here the doctor gets paid after the undertaker,
or not at all."
"I've got fifty dollars put away," she returned crisply, determined not
to be discouraged. "And I don't need money. I've never had any." (How
foolish she had been to buy the blue dress when clothes made so little
difference!) "After we're married, I can keep on in the store just the
same."
He laughed. "Ten dollars a month will hardly keep the fox from the
henhouse."
Bending his head he began to kiss her in quick light kisses; then, as
his ardour increased, in deeper and longer ones; and at last with a
hungry violence. Though her love was the only thing that was vivid to
her, she had even now, while she felt his arms about her and his lips
seeking hers, the old haunting sense of impermanence, as if the moment,
like the perfect hour of the afternoon, were too bright to endure.
However much she loved him, she could not sink the whole of herself into
emotion; something was left over, and this something watched as a
spectator. Ecstasy streamed through her with the swiftness of light; yet
she never lost completely the feeling that at any instant the glory
might vanish and she might drop back again into the dull grey of
existence.
X
When they parted, and she went home along the edge of the tobacco field,
the sun was beginning to go down, and from the meadows, veiled in
quivering heat, there rose the humming of innumerable insects. The long
drought had scorched the leaves of the trees, and even the needles on
the pines looked rusty against the metallic blue of the sky. In the
fields the summer flowers were dry and brittle, and over the moist
places near the spring, clusters of pale blue butterflies, as fragile as
flower petals, hung motionless. Only the broomsedge thrived in the
furnace of the earth, and sprang up in a running fire over the waste
places.
As she went by the tobacco field, her father stopped work, for a moment,
and stooped to take a drink of water from the wooden bucket which stood
at the end of the furrow. Before she reached him the steaming odour of
his body, like that of an overheated ox, floated to her. His face, the
colour of red clay, was dripping with sweat, and his shirt of blue
jeans, which was open on his broad, hairy chest, was as wet as if he had
been swimming. There was nothing human about him, except his fine
prophet's head and the humble dignity of one who has kept in close
communion with earth and sky. He had known nothing but toil; he had no
language but the language of toil.
"Has the drought done much harm, Pa?" she asked.
With the gourd raised to his lips, Joshua looked round at her.
"Middlin'," he replied hoarsely because of his parched throat. He had
removed his hat while he worked, for fear that the wide brim might
bruise the tender leaves of the tobacco; but resting now for a minute,
he covered his head again from the bladelike rays of the sun.
"You'll get sunstroke if you go bareheaded," she said anxiously. "The
minister was in the store this morning, and he told me that, if the
drought doesn't break by the end of the week, he's going to put up
prayers for rain in church next Sunday. I wonder if prayer ever brought
rain?"
Joshua rolled his eyes toward the implacable sky. "Don't it say so in
the Bible, daughter?"
Dorinda nodded, without pursuing the inquiry. "And what the dry weather
doesn't spoil, the tobacco-worms will. They were as thick as hops
yesterday. It's this way every year unless we have a cool summer; then
the tobacco ripens so late that the frost kills it. Why don't you give
up tobacco next year and sow this field in peas or corn? Jason says the
best method of farming is to change the crop whenever you can."
Having drained the last drop of tepid water, Joshua tilted the gourd
bottom upward on the rim of the bucket. "I ain't one fur newfangled
ways, honey," he rejoined stubbornly.
He turned back to his work, and Dorinda went on slowly along the dusty
path that skirted the field. "If I had my way," she was thinking, "I
would do everything differently. I'd try all the crops, one after
another, until I found out which was best."
As she approached the house, the mingled scents of drying apples and
boiling tomatoes enveloped her; for her mother was working desperately
in an effort to save the ripening fruit and vegetables before the sun
spoiled them. Boards covered with sliced apples were spread on crude
props and decrepit tables, which had been brought out of doors. Above
them a crowd of wasps, hornets, flies, and gnats were whirling madly,
and every now and then Mrs. Oakley darted out from beneath the
scuppernong grapevine and dispersed the delirious swarms with the branch
of a locust tree. Though she insisted that the dry weather had "helped
her neuralgia," she was suffering now from a sun headache, and could
hope for no relief until evening. Her face, with its look of blended
physical pain and spiritual ecstasy, was as parched and ravaged as the
drought-stricken landscape.
"You got home early to-day, daughter."
"Yes, it was too hot to walk, and Jason came by sooner than usual."
"How does Rose Emily stand the heat?"
"I'm afraid she isn't getting any better," Dorinda's voice trembled.
"Jason says she can't last through another bad hæmorrhage."
"And all those children," sighed Mrs. Oakley, pressing one hand over her
throbbing eyes and waving the locust branch energetically with the
other. "Well, the Lord's ways are past understanding. I wonder if they
will ever be able to do anything for that baby's clubfoot."
"I don't know. Jason would like to operate, but Nathan and Rose Emily
won't let him. They are afraid it may make it worse. Poor Rose Emily. I
don't see how she can be so cheerful."
"It's her faith," said Mrs. Oakley. "She feels she's saved, and she's
nothing more to worry about. I'm sorry for Nathan too," she concluded,
with the compassion of the redeemed for the heathen. "He's a good man,
but he hasn't seen the light like Rose Emily."
"Yes, he's a good man," Dorinda assented, "but I never understood how
she could marry him."
Mrs. Oakley dropped the branch, and then picking it up began a more
vigorous attack on the cloud of insects. "I declare, it seems to me
sometimes that the bugs are going to eat up this place. Did you see your
father as you came by?"
"Yes. He was working bareheaded. I told him he would have sunstroke. I
wish he would try a different crop next year, but he's so set in his
ways."
"Well, it's being set in a rut, I reckon, that keeps him going. If he
weren't set, he'd have stopped long ago. You've a mighty high colour,
Dorinda. Have you been much in the sun?"
"I walked across from the woods. When we turned in at the red gate I saw
Miss Tabitha Snead going up the road in her buggy. Did she stop by to
see you?"
"Yes, she brought me a bucket of fresh buttermilk. I've got it in the
ice-house with the watermelons, so it will be cold for supper. She told
me Geneva Ellgood had gone away for the summer."
"Oh, she went the first of July. I saw her at the station."
Mrs. Oakley's gaze was riveted upon an enterprising hornet that had
started out from the crowd and was pursuing a separate investigation of
the tomato juice on her hands. While she watched it, she swallowed hard
as if her throat were too dry. "Miss Tabitha told me that her brother
William went up as far as Washington on the train with Geneva. He's just
back last week, and what do you reckon he said Geneva told him on the
way up?" She broke off and aimed a fatal blow at the hornet. "What with
wasps and bees and hornets and all the thousand and one things that bite
and sting," she observed philosophically, "it's hard to understand how
the Lord ever had time to think of a pest so small as a seed tick. Yet I
believe I'd rather have all the other biting things together. I got some
seed ticks on me when I went down to the old spring in the pasture
yesterday, and they've been eating me up ever since."
"They are always worse in a drought," Dorinda said, and she asked
curiously: "What was it Geneva told Mr. William?"
Mrs. Oakley swallowed again. "Of course I know there ain't a bit of
truth in it," she said slowly, as if the words hurt her as she uttered
them. "But William says Geneva told him she was engaged to marry Jason
Greylock. She said he courted her in New York a year ago."
Dorinda laughed. "Why, how absurd!" she exclaimed. "Miss Tabitha knows
we are to be married in October. Hasn't she watched Miss Seena helping
me with my sewing? I was spending the evening over there last week and
we talked about my marriage. She knows there isn't a word of truth in
it."
"Oh, she knows. She said she reckoned Geneva must be crazy. There ain't
any harm in it, but I thought maybe I'd better tell you."
"I don't mind," replied Dorinda, and she laughed again, the exultant
laugh of youth undefeated. "Ma," she asked suddenly, "did you ever want
anything very much in your life?"
Startled out of her stony resignation, Mrs. Oakley let fall the branch,
and the spinning swarms descended like a veil over the apples. "I'll
have to hang a piece of mosquito netting over these apples," she said.
"There's some we used for curtains in the spare room. Well, I told you
I'd kind of set my heart on your father," she added in a lifeless tone.
"But there's one thing I can tell you, daughter, mighty few folks in
this world ever get what they want."
"Oh, I mean before you knew Pa, when you were a girl. Didn't you ever
feel that there was only one thing in the world that could make you
happy?"
Mrs. Oakley pondered the question. "I reckon like most other people I
was afraid of the word happiness," she replied. "But when I was just a
girl, not more than sixteen or seventeen, I felt the call to be a
missionary, and I wanted it, I s'pose, more than I've ever wanted
anything in my life. I reckon it started with my favourite hymn, the
missionary one. Even as a little child I used to think and dream about
India's coral strand and Afric's sunny fountains. That was why I got
engaged to Gordon Kane. I wasn't what you'd call in love with him; but I
believed the Lord had intended me for work in foreign fields, and it
seemed, when Gordon asked me to marry him, that an opportunity had been
put in my way. I had my trunk all packed to go to the Congo to join him.
I was just folding up my wedding-dress of white organdie when they broke
the news to me of his death." She gasped and choked for a moment. "After
that I put the thought of the heathen out of my mind," she continued
when she had recovered her breath. "Your great-grandfather said I was
too young to decide whether I had a special vocation or not, and then
before I came out of mourning, I met your father, and we were married.
For a while I seemed to forget all about the missionary call; but it
came back just before Josiah was born, and I've had it ever since
whenever I'm worried and feel that I'll have to get away from things, or
go clean out of my mind. Then I begin to have that dream about coral
strands and palm trees and ancient rivers and naked black babies thrown
to crocodiles. When it first came I tried to drive it away by hard work,
and that was the way I got in the habit of working to rest my mind. I
was so afraid folks would begin to say I was unhinged."
"Does it still come back?" asked the girl.
"Sometimes in my sleep. When I'm awake I never think of it now, except
on missionary Sunday when we sing that hymn."
"That's why you enjoy sermons about the Holy Land and far-off places."
"I used to know all those pictures by heart in your great-grandfather's
books about Asia and Africa. It was a wild streak in me, I reckon," she
conceded humbly, "but with the Lord's help, I've managed to stamp it
out."
A missionary, her mother! For more than forty years this dark and secret
river of her dream had flowed silently beneath the commonplace crust of
experience. "I wonder if there is any of that wildness in me?" thought
the girl, with a sensation of fear, as if the invisible flood were
rushing over her.
"Did you ever tell Pa?" she asked.
Mrs. Oakley shook her head. "I never told anybody when I was in my
right mind. I don't believe in telling men more than you're obliged to.
After all, it was nobody's fault the way things turned out," she added,
with scrupulous justice. "I'm going in now to get that mosquito netting.
There's your father coming. I reckon he'd like a drink of fresh water
from the well."
Following her mother's glance, Dorinda saw her father's bowed figure
toiling along the path on the edge of the vegetable garden. Far beyond
him, where a field had been abandoned because it contained a gall, where
nothing would grow, she could just discern the scalloped reaches of the
broomsedge, rippling, in the lilac-coloured distance, like still water
at sunset. Yes, old Matthew was right. What the broomsedge caught, it
never relinquished.
Lifting the wooden bucket from the shelf on the back porch, she poured
the stale water over a thin border of portulaca by the steps, and
started at a run for the well. By the time Joshua had reached the house,
she had brought the bucket of sparkling water, and had a gourd ready for
him.
"You must be worn out, Pa. Don't you want a drink?"
"That I do, honey." He took the gourd from her, and raised it to his
bearded lips where the sweat hung in drops. "Powerful hot, ain't it?"
"It's scorching. And you've been up since before day. I'll hunt worms
for you to-morrow." She was thinking, while she spoke, that her father
was no longer young, and that he should try to spare himself. But she
knew that it was futile to remind him of this. He had never spared
himself in her memory, and he would not begin now just because he was
old. The pity of it was that, even if he wore himself out in the effort
to save his crop from the drought or the worms, there was still the
possibility that the first killing frost would come too soon and inflict
as heavy a damage.
He shook his head with a chuckle of pride. "Thar's no use yo' spilin'
yo' hands. I've hired a parcel of Uncle Toby Moody's little niggers to
hunt 'em in the mornin'. If they kill worms every day till Sunday, I've
promised 'em the biggest watermelon I've got in the ice-house."
Before going on to feed the horses, he stopped to wash his face in the
tin basin on the back porch. "I declar' I must be gittin' on," he
remarked cheerfully. "I've got shootin' pains through all my j'ints."
This was nearer a complaint than any speech she had ever heard from him,
and she looked at him anxiously while he dried his face on the roller
towel. "You ought to take things more easily, Pa. The way you work is
enough to kill anybody."
"Wall, I'll take my ease when the first snow falls," he responded
jocosely.
"But you won't. You work just as hard in winter."
"Is that so?" He appeared genuinely surprised. "I never calculated! The
truth is I've got the land on my back, an' it's drivin' me. Land is a
hard driver."
"And a good steed, they say," she answered. "If you could only get the
better of it."
He smiled wistfully, and she watched the clay-coloured skin above his
thick beard break into diverging fissures. "We've got to wait for that,
I reckon, till my ship comes in. It takes money to get money, daughter."
While he trudged away to the stable, Dorinda went up to her room and
changed into a pink gingham dress which Rose Emily had given her a year
ago. The flower-like colour tinged her face when she came downstairs and
found her mother, who had dropped from exhaustion, in a rocking-chair on
the front porch.
"I felt as if I couldn't stand the kitchen a minute longer." Mrs. Oakley
glanced wearily at her daughter over the palm leaf fan she was waving.
"You ain't going out before supper, Dorinda?" Her damp hair looked as if
it had been plastered over her skull, and in the diminishing light her
pallid features resembled a waxen mask.
"I can't wait for supper," the girl replied. "I've promised to meet
Jason over by Gooseneck Creek."
"Well, don't stay out too long after dark. The night air ain't healthy."
Dorinda laughed. "Jason says that's as much a superstition as the belief
that Aunt Mehitable can make cows go dry. But I shan't be late. Jason
can't stay out long at night, unless somebody is dying, and then he gets
one of the field hands to sleep in the house. It must be terrible over
at Five Oaks."
"I ain't easy in my mind about your living there with that old man,
daughter. He's been a notorious sinner as far back as I can recollect,
though he was a good enough doctor till he went half crazy from drink.
But even before his wife died, he kept that bright yellow girl,
Idabella, living over there in the old wing of the house. And he's not
only as hard as nails," she concluded, with final condemnation, "he's
close-fisted as well."
"Poor Jason can't help his father's sins," Dorinda rejoined loyally.
"After all, it's worse on him than it is on anybody else." As she turned
away from the flagged walk, she resolved that the dissolute old man
should not spoil her happiness.
Her path led by the pear orchard, past the vegetable garden, which was
fenced off from the tobacco field, and continued in an almost
obliterated track through the feathery plumes of the broomsedge. At the
end of the barren acres the thin edge of Hoot Owl Woods began, and after
she had passed this, there would be only a stretch of sandy road between
her and the creek. By the willows she knew the air would be fresh and
moist, and she knew also that Jason was waiting for her in the tall
blue-eyed grasses.
She went slowly along the path, in a mood so pensive that it might have
been merely a reflection of the summer trance. The vagrant breeze, which
had roamed for a few minutes at sunset, had died down again with the
afterglow. Heat melted like colour into the distance. Not a blade of
grass trembled; the curled leaves on the pear trees were limp and heavy;
even the white turkeys, roosting in a solitary oak near the orchard,
were as motionless as if they were under a spell. As far as she could
see there was not a stir or quiver in the landscape, and the only sounds
that jarred the leaden silence were the monotonous chirping of the
locusts, the discordant croak of a tree-frog, and the staccato shrieks
of the little negroes hunting tobacco-flies.
The sun had gone down long ago, and the western sky was suffused with
the transparent yellow-green of August evenings. All the light on the
earth had vanished, except the faint glow that was still cast upwards by
the broomsedge. Wave by wave, that symbol of desolation encroached in a
glimmering tide on the darkened boundaries of Old Farm. It was the one
growth in the landscape that thrived on barrenness; the solitary life
that possessed an inexhaustible vitality. To fight it was like fighting
the wild, free principle of nature. Yet they had always fought it. They
had spent their force for generations in the futile endeavour to uproot
it from the soil, as they had striven to uproot all that was wild and
free in the spirit of man.
At the edge of the woods she paused and looked back. There would be
light enough later, for the golden rim of a moon, paling as it ascended,
was visible through the topmost branches of the big pine in the
graveyard. While she stood there she was visited by a swift perception,
which was less a thought than a feeling, and less a feeling than an
intuitive recognition, that she and her parents were products of the
soil as surely as were the scant crops and the exuberant broomsedge. Had
not the land entered into their souls and shaped their moods into
permanent or impermanent forms? Less a thought than a feeling; but she
went on more rapidly toward the complete joy of the moment in which she
lived.
XI
On the first Sunday in October, Dorinda came out on the porch, with old
Rambler at her side, and looked over the road and the pasture to the
frowning sky. The range of clouds, which had huddled all the afternoon
above the western horizon, was growing darker, and there was a slow
pulsation, like the quiver of invisible wings, in the air. While she
stood there, she wondered if the storm would overtake her before she
reached Whistling Spring.
"I think I'll risk it," she decided at last. "It's looked this way for
hours, and it won't hurt me to get wet."
For days she had felt disturbed, and she told herself that her anxiety
had sprung from a definite cause, or, if not from a definite
cause,--well, at least from a plausible reason. Jason had been away for
two weeks, and she had had only one letter. He had promised to write
every day, and she had heard from him once. More than this, when he
left, against his father's wish, he had expected to stay only a week,
and the added days had dragged on without explanation. Of course there
were a dozen reasons why he should not have written. He had gone to
select surgical instruments, and it was probable that he had been kept
busy by professional matters. Her heart made excuses. She repeated
emphatically that there was no need for her to worry; but, in spite of
this insistence, it was useless, she found, to try to argue herself out
of a condition of mind. The only thing was to wait as patiently as she
could for his return. They were to be married in a week; and the hours
before and after her work at the store were spent happily over her
sewing. Mrs. Oakley had neglected her other work in order to help her
daughter with her wedding clothes, and the drawers in Dorinda's walnut
bureau were filled with white, lace-edged garments, made daintily, with
fine, even stitches, by her mother's rheumatic fingers.
"I shouldn't be satisfied if you didn't have things to start with like
other girls," Mrs. Oakley had remarked, while she pinned a paper pattern
to a width of checked muslin. "I don't want that old doctor to say his
son is marrying a beggar."
"Well, Jason won't say that," Dorinda had protested. "It would cost less
if I were married in my blue nun's veiling; but Miss Seena thinks a
figured challis would be more suitable."
"Well, I reckon Miss Seena knows," Mrs. Oakley had agreed. "It ain't
lucky not to have a new dress to be married in, and though I don't set a
bit of store by superstition, it won't do any harm not to run right up
against it." Glancing round at her daughter, she had continued in a tone
of anxiety: "Ain't you feeling well, daughter? You've been looking right
peaked the last day or two, and I noticed you didn't touch any
breakfast."
"Oh, I'm all right," Dorinda had responded. "I've been worrying about
not hearing from Jason, that's all." As she answered, she had turned
away and dropped into a chair. "I've been bending over all day," she had
explained, "and the weather has been so sultry. It makes me feel kind of
faint."
"Take a whiff of camphor," Mrs. Oakley had advised. "There's the bottle
right there on the bureau. I get a sinking every now and then myself, so
I like to have it handy. But there ain't a bit of use worrying yourself
sick about Jason. It ain't much more than two weeks since he went away."
"Two weeks to-morrow, but I haven't heard since the day after he left. I
am worried for fear something has happened."
"Your father could ask the old doctor?"
Frowning over the bottle of camphor, Dorinda had pondered the
suggestion. "No, he doesn't like us," she had replied at last. "I doubt
if he'd tell us anything. Jason told me once he wanted him to marry
Geneva Ellgood."
"You might send a telegram," Mrs. Oakley had offered as the final
resource of desperation.
Dorinda had flushed through her pallor. "I did yesterday, but there
hasn't been any answer." After a minute's reflection, she had added, "If
it's a good day to-morrow, I think I'll walk down to Whistling Spring in
the evening and see Aunt Mehitable Green. Her daughter Jemima works over
at Five Oaks, and she may have heard something."
"Then you'd better start right after dinner, and you can get back before
dark," Mrs. Oakley had returned. The word "afternoon" was never used at
Pedlar's Mill, and any hour between twelve o'clock and night was known
as "evening."
That was yesterday, and standing now on the front porch, Dorinda
considered the prospect. Scorched and blackened by the long summer, the
country was as bare as a conquered province after the march of an
invader. "I'll start anyway," she repeated, and turning, she called out,
"Ma, is there anything I can take Aunt Mehitable?"
"Doesn't it look as if it were getting ready to rain, Dorinda?"
"I don't care. If it does, I'll stop somewhere until it is over."
Entering the hall, the girl paused on the threshold of the room where
her mother sat reading her Bible.
"Where would you stop?" Mrs. Oakley was nothing if not definite. "There
ain't anybody living on that back road between Five Oaks and Whistling
Spring. It makes me sort of nervous for you to walk down there by
yourself, Dorinda. Can't you get Rufus to go with you?"
"No, he's gone over to see the Garlick girls, and I don't want him
anyway. I'd rather walk down by myself. Anybody I'd meet on the road
would know who I am. I see them all at the store. May I take a piece of
the molasses pudding we had for dinner?"
"Yes, there's some left in the cupboard. I was saving it for Rufus, but
you might as well take it. Then there are the last scuppernong grapes on
the shelf. Aunt Mehitable was always mighty fond of scuppernong grapes."
Going into the kitchen, Dorinda put the molasses pudding into the little
willow basket, and then, covering it with cool grape leaves, laid the
loose grapes on top. A slip of the vine had been given to her
great-grandfather by a missionary from Mexico, and had grown luxuriantly
at Old Farm, clambering over the back porch to the roof of the house. It
was a peculiarity of the scuppernong that the large, pale grapes were
not gathered in a bunch, but dropped grape by grape, as they ripened.
"Is there any message you want to send Aunt Mehitable?" she asked,
returning through the hall.
On a rag carpet in the centre of her spotless floor, Mrs. Oakley rocked
slowly back and forth while she read aloud one of the Psalms. It was the
only time during the week that she let her body relax; and now that the
whip of nervous energy was suspended, her face looked old, grey, and
hopeless. The dreary afternoon light crept through the half-closed
shutters, and a large blue fly buzzed ceaselessly, with a droning sound,
against the ceiling.
"Tell her my leg still keeps poorly," she said, "and if she's got any
more of that black liniment, I'd be glad of a bottle. You ain't so spry,
to-day yourself, daughter."
"I got tired sitting in church," the girl answered, "but the walk will
make me feel better."
"Be sure you come back if you hear thunder. I don't like your setting
out in the face of a storm. Can you take Rambler?"
"No, he's old and rheumatic, and it's too far. But I'm all right."
Without waiting for more advice or remonstrance, Dorinda hastened
through the hall and out of the house.
For the first quarter of a mile, before she reached the red gate at the
fork and turned into the sandy road leading to Five Oaks, her naturally
level spirits drooped under an unusual weight of depression. Then, as
she lifted the bar and passed through the gate, she felt that the
solitude, which had always possessed a mysterious sympathy with her
moods, reached out and received her into itself. Like a beneficent tide,
the loneliness washed over her, smoothing out, as it receded, the vague
apprehensions that had ruffled her thoughts. The austere horizon, flat
and impenetrable beneath the threatening look of the sky; the brown and
yellow splashes of woods in the October landscape; the furtive windings
and recoils of the sunken road; the perturbed murmur and movement of the
broomsedge, so like the restless inlets of an invisible sea,--all these
external objects lost their inanimate character and became as personal,
reserved, and inscrutable as her own mind. So sensitive were her
perceptions, while she walked there alone, that the wall dividing her
individual consciousness from the consciousness of nature vanished with
the thin drift of woodsmoke over the fields.
The road sank gradually to Gooseneck Creek and then ascended as evenly
to the grounds of Five Oaks. To reach the back road by the short cut,
which saved her a good mile and a half, she was obliged to pass between
the house and the barn, where she caught a glimpse of the old doctor and
heard the sound of a gun fired at intervals. He was shooting, she
surmised, at a chicken hawk, which was hovering low over the barnyard.
Why, she wondered, with all the heavens and the earth around him, had he
placed the stoop-shouldered rustic barn within call of the dwelling
house? The ice-house, three-cornered and red, like all the buildings on
the place, was so near the front porch that one might almost have tossed
the lumps of ice into the hall. Though the red roof, chimneys, and
outbuildings produced, at a distance, an effect of gaiety, she felt that
the colour would become oppressive on hot summer afternoons. Dirt,
mildew, decay everywhere! White turkeys that were discoloured by mould.
Chips, trash, broken bottles littering the yard and the back steps,
which were rotting to pieces. Windows so darkened by dust and cobwebs
that they were like eyes blurred by cataract. Several mulatto babies
crawling, like small, sly animals, over the logs at the woodpile. "Poor
Jason," she thought. "No wonder his nerves are giving way under the
strain."
She followed the path between the house and the barn, and then, crossing
an old cornfield, turned into the back road, which led, through thick
woods, to Whistling Spring and Whippernock River. After she had lost
sight of the house, she came up with old Matthew Fairlamb, who was
trudging sturdily along, with his hickory stick in his hand and a small
bundle, tied up in a bandanna handkerchief, swinging from his right arm.
"Are you on your way to see William?" she inquired as she joined him,
for she knew that his son William lived a mile away, on one of the
branch roads that led through to the station. "You must have come quite
a distance out of your way."
Old Matthew wagged his knowing head. "That's right, gal, I'm gittin'
along to William's now," he replied. "I took dinner over to John
Appleseed's, that's why you find me trampin' through Five Oaks. Ain't
you goin' too fur from home, honey? Thar's a storm brewin' over yonder
in the west, and it'll most likely ketch you."
"I'm going down to Whistling Spring," Dorinda replied, falling into step
at his side.
He smacked his old lips. "Then you'll sholy be caught," he rejoined,
with sour pleasure. "It's a matter of five miles or so, ain't it?"
"That's by the long road. It isn't over four by the short cut through
Five Oaks."
"Thar ain't nobody but the niggers livin' down by Whistling Spring."
"I'm going down to see Aunt Mehitable Green. She nursed Ma when she was
sick."
"I recollect her." Old Matthew wagged again. "She conjured some liver
spots off the face of my son's wife. They used to say she was the best
conjure woman anywhar round here."
"I know the darkeys are still afraid of her," Dorinda returned. "But she
was good to me when I was little, and I don't believe anything bad about
her."
"Mebbe not, mebbe not," old Matthew assented. "Anyhow, if she's got a
gift with moles an' warts, thar can't nobody blame her fur practisin'
it. How's yo' weddin' gittin' on, honey? By this time next week you'll
be an old married woman, won't you?"
Dorinda blushed. "It's hard for me to realize it."
"Jason's gone away, ain't he?"
"Yes, he went to New York to buy some instruments."
"It's a mortal wonder his Pa let him. I hear he keeps as tight a rein on
him as if he'd never growed up. Wall, wall, he didn't ax the advice of
eighty-odd years. But, mark my words, he'll live to regret the day he
come back to Five Oaks."
"But what else could he do?" the girl protested loyally. "His father
needed him."
Old Matthew broke into a sly cackle. "Oh, he'll larn, he'll larn. I
ain't contendin'. He's a pleasant-mannered youngster, an' I wish you all
the joy of him you desarve. You ain't heerd from Geneva Ellgood sence
she went away, have you?"
"Oh, no. She never writes to me."
"I kind of thought she might have. But to come back to Jason, he's got
everything you want in a man except the one quality that counts with the
land."
"You speak as if Jason lacked character," she said resentfully.
"Wall, if he's got it, you'll know it soon," rejoined the disagreeable
old man, "and if he ain't got it, you'll know it sooner. I ain't
contendin'. It don't pay to contend when you're upwards of eighty." He
rolled the words of ill omen like a delicate morsel on his tongue. "This
here is my turnout, honey. Look sharp that you don't git a drenchin'."
They nodded in the curt fashion of country people, and the old man
tramped off, spitting tobacco juice in the road, while Dorinda hurried
on into the deepening gloom of the woods. She was glad to be free of old
Matthew. He was more like an owl than ever, she thought, with his
ominous _who-who-whoee_.
Here alone in the woods, with the perpetually moist clay near the stream
underfoot, the thick tent of arching boughs overhead, the aromatic smell
of dampness and rotting leaves in her nostrils, she felt refreshed and
invigorated. After all, why was she anxious? She was securely happy. She
was to be married in a week. She knew beyond question, beyond distrust,
that Jason loved her. For three months she had lived in a state of bliss
so supreme that, like love, it had created the illusion of its own
immortality. Yes, for three months she had been perfectly happy.
Above, the leaves rustled. Through the interlacing boughs she could see
the grey sky growing darker. The warm scents of the wood were as heavy
as perfumed smoke.
Presently the trees ended as abruptly as they had begun, and she came
out into the broomsedge which surrounded the negro settlement of
Whistling Spring. A narrow path led between rows of log cabins, each
with its patchwork square of garden, and its clump of gaudy prince's
feather or cockscomb by the doorstep. Aunt Mehitable's cabin stood
withdrawn a little; and when Dorinda reached the door, there was a
mutter of thunder in the clouds, though the storm was still distant and
a silver light edged the horizon. On the stone step a tortoise-shell cat
lay dozing, and a little to one side of the cabin the smouldering embers
of a fire blinked like red eyes under an iron pot, which hung suspended
from a rustic crane made by crossing three sticks.
In response to the girl's knock on the open door, the cat arched its
back in welcome, and the old negress came hurriedly out of the darkness
inside, wiping her hands on her blue gingham apron. She took Dorinda in
her arms, explaining, while she embraced her, that she had just heated
some water to make a brew of herbs from her garden.
"Dar ain' no use kindlin' a fire inside er de cabin twell you're
obleeged ter," she remarked. "You ain' lookin' so peart, honey. I've got
a bottle of my brown bitters put away fur yo' Ma, en you ax 'er ter gin
you a dose de fust thing ev'y mawnin'. Yo' Ma knows about'n my brown
bitters daze she's done tuck hit, erlong wid my black liniment. Hit'll
take erway de blue rings unner yo' eyes jes' ez sho', en hit'll fill yo'
cheeks right full er roses agin."
"I've been worrying," said the girl, sitting down in the chair the old
woman brought. "It's taken my appetite, and made me feel as if I dragged
myself to the store and back every day. Isn't it funny what worry can do
to you, Aunt Mehitable?"
"Dat 'tis, honey, dat 'tis."
"I get dizzy too, when I bend over. You haven't got any camphor about,
have you?"
Aunt Mehitable hastened into the cabin, and brought out a bottle of
camphor. "Yo' Ma gun me dat' de ve'y las' time I wuz at Ole Farm," she
said, removing the stopper, and handing the bottle to Dorinda. "Hit's a
long walk on dis heah peevish sort of er day. You jes' set en res' wile
I git you a swallow uv my blackberry cord'al. Dar ain't nuttin' dat'll
pick you up quicker'n blackberry cord'al w'en it's made right."
Going indoors again, she came out with the blackberry cordial in a ruby
wineglass which had once belonged to the Cumberlands. "Drink it down
quick, en you'll feel better right befo' you know hit. Huccome you been
worryin', chile, w'en yo is gwineter be mah'ed dis time nex' week?" she
inquired abruptly.
"I'm afraid something has happened," Dorinda said. "Jason has been away
two weeks, and I haven't had a word since the day after he left. I
thought you might have heard something from Jemima."
The old woman mumbled through toothless gums. She was wearing a bandanna
handkerchief wrapped tightly about her head, and beneath it a few
grey-green wisps of hair straggled down to meet the dried grass of her
eyebrows. Her face was so old that it looked as if the flesh had been
polished away, and her features shone like black lacquer where the light
struck them.
"Naw'm, I ain't heerd nuttin'," she replied, "but I'se done been lookin'
fur you all de evelin'. Dar's a lil' bird done tole me you wuz comin',"
she muttered mysteriously.
"I wasn't sure of it myself till just before I started."
"I knowed, honey, I knowed," rejoined Aunt Mehitable, leaning against
the smoke-blackened pine by her doorstep, while she fixed her bleared,
witchlike gaze on the girl. There was the dignity in her demeanour that
is inherent in all simple, profound, and elemental forces. The pipe she
had taken out of the pocket of her apron was in her mouth, but the stem
was cold and she mumbled over it without smoking. With her psychic
powers, which were a natural endowment, she combined a dramatic gift
that was not uncommon among the earlier generations of negroes. In
another century Aunt Mehitable would have been either a mystic
philosopher or a religious healer.
"Can you really see things, Aunt Mehitable?" Dorinda inquired, impressed
but not convinced.
Aunt Mehitable grunted over her smokeless pipe. "Mebbe I kin en mebbe I
cyan't."
"They say you can tell about the future?"
"Hi!" the old negress exclaimed, and continued with assumed
indifference. "Dey sez I kin do a heap mo'n I kin do. But I ain'
steddyin' about'n dat, honey. I knows w'at I knows. I kin teck moles en
warts en liver spots off'n you twell you is jes' ez smooth ez de pa'm er
my han', en ern ennybody's done put a conjure ball ovah yo' do' er
th'owed a ring on de grass fur you to walk in, I kin tell you whar you
mus' go ter jump ovah runnin' water. Ern you is in enny trubble, honey,
hit's mos' likely I kin teck hit erway. Is you stuck full er pins an'
needles in yo' legs an' arms, jes' lak somebody done th'owed a spell on
you?"
"No, it isn't that," answered Dorinda. "I came because I thought you
might have heard something from Jemima. I'd better be starting back now.
I want to get home, if I can, before the storm breaks----"
She had risen to her feet, and was turning to look at the clouds in the
west, when the broomsedge plunged forward, like a raging sea, and
engulfed her. She felt the pain and dizziness of the blow; she heard the
thunder of the waves as they crashed together; and she saw the billows,
capped with spray-ike plumes, submerging the cabin, the fields, the
woods, and the silver crescent of the horizon.
When she came to herself, it was an hour, a day, or a year afterwards.
She was still on the bare ground, beneath the blackened pine, in front
of Aunt Mehitable's cabin. The tortoise-shell cat still dozed on the
step. The dying embers still blinked under the hanging pot. There was a
pungent smell in her nostrils, as the old woman splashed camphor over
her forehead. Her consciousness was struggling through the fumes which
saturated her brain.
"Dar now, honey. Don't you worry. Hit's all right," crooned Aunt
Mehitable, bending above her.
Dorinda sat up slowly, and looked round her. "I believe I fainted," she
said. "I never fainted before." The roar of far-off waters was still in
her ears.
The old woman held out the ruby wineglass, which she had refilled.
"Hit's all right, honey, hit's all right."
"It came on so suddenly." Dorinda pushed the glass away after she had
obediently swallowed a few sips. "It was exactly like dying; but I'm
well now. The walk must have been too long on a sultry day."
"Don't you worry, caze hit's gwineter be all right," crooned Aunt
Mehitable. "I'se done axed de embers en hit's gwineter be all right."
The magnetic force emanating from the old negress enveloped the girl,
and she abandoned herself to it as to a mysterious and terrible current
of wisdom. How did Aunt Mehitable know things before other people? she
wondered. She shivered in the warm air, and laid her head on the wizened
shoulder. Of course no one believed in witches any longer; but there was
something queer in the way she could look ahead and tell fortunes.
"Befo' de week's up you is gwineter be mah'ed," muttered the old woman,
"en dar ain't a livin' soul but Aunt Mehitable gwineter know dat de
chile wuz on de way sooner----"
"I--" Dorinda began sharply. Rising quickly to her feet, she stood
looking about her like a person who has been dazzled by a flash of
lightning. She was bewildered, but she was less bewildered than she had
been for the last three months. In the illumination of that instant a
hundred mysteries were made plain; but her dominant feeling was one of
sharp awakening from a trance. Swift and savage, animal terror clutched
at her heart. Where was Jason? Suppose he was dead! Suppose he was lost
to her! The longing to see him, the urgent need of his look, of his
touch, of his voice, shuddered through her like a convulsion. It seemed
to her that she could not live unless she could feel the reassuring
pressure of his arms and hear the healing sound of her name on his lips.
"I must go back," she said. "I'll come again, Aunt Mehitable, but I must
hurry before the storm."
Breaking away from the old woman's arms, she walked rapidly, as if she
were flying before the approaching storm, through the acres of
broomsedge to the road by which she had come.
XII
On either side of the road the trees grew straight and tall, and overhead
the grey arch of sky looked as if it were hewn out of rock. The pines
were dark as night, but the oaks, the sweet gums, the beeches, and
hickories were turning slowly, and here and there the boughs were
brushed with wine-colour or crimson. Far away, she could hear the rumble
of the storm, and it seemed to her that the noise and burden of living
marched on there at an immeasurable distance. Within the woods there was
the profound silence of sleep. Nothing but the occasional flutter of a
bird or stir of a small animal in the underbrush disturbed the serenity.
The oppressive air stifled her, and she felt that her breath, like the
movement of the wind, was suspended.
"If I don't hurry, I shall never get out of the woods," she thought. "I
ought not to have come."
Forgetting the attack of faintness, she quickened her steps into a run,
and stumbled on over the wheel ruts in the road, which was scarcely
wider than a cart track. For a while this stillness was so intense that
she felt as if it were palpitating in smothered throbs like her heart.
The storm was gathering on another planet. So remote it was that the
slow reverberations were echoed across an immensity of silence. The
first mile was past. Then the second. With the ending of the third, she
knew that she should come out into the pasture and the old cornfield at
Five Oaks.
Presently a few withered leaves fluttered past her, flying through the
narrow tunnel of the woods toward the clearer vista ahead. Immediately
round her the atmosphere was still motionless. Like an alley in a dream
the road, stretched, brown, dim, monotonous, between the tall trees; and
this alley seemed to her unutterably sad, strewn with dead leaves and
haunted by an autumnal taint of decay. The fear in her own mind had
fallen like a blight on her surroundings, as if the external world were
merely a shadow thrown by the subjective processes within her soul.
Suddenly, without nearer warning, the storm broke. A streak of white
fire split the sky, and the tattered clouds darkened to an angry purple.
The wind, which had been chained at a distance, tore itself free with a
hurtling noise and crashed in gusts through the tree-tops. Overhead, she
heard the snapping of branches, and when she glanced back, it seemed to
her that the withered leaves had gathered violence in pursuit, and were
whirling after her like a bevy of witches. As she came out of the
shelter of the trees, the stream of wind and leaves swept her across the
cornfield, with the patter of rain on her shoulders. Where the road
turned, she saw the red barn and the brick dwelling of Five Oaks, and in
obedience to the wind rather than by the exercise of her own will, she
was driven over the field and the yard to the steps of the back porch.
Her first impression was that the place was deserted; and running up the
steps, she sank into one of the broken chairs on the porch, and shook
the water from her hat while she struggled for breath. On the roof of
the house the rain was beating in drops as hard as pebbles. She heard it
thundering on the shingles; she saw it scattering the chips and straws
by the woodpile, and churning the puddles in the walk until they foamed
with a yeasty scum. The sky was shrouded now in a crape-like pall, and
where the lightning ripped open the blackness, the only colour was that
jagged stain of dull purple. "I'm wet already," she thought. "In another
minute I'd have been soaked through to the skin." Turning her head, she
looked curiously at the home of her lover.
The thought in her mind was, "You could tell no woman lived here. When I
get the chance, it won't take me long to make things look different."
With the certainty that this "chance" would one day be hers, she forgot
her anxiety and fatigue, and a thrill of joy eased her heart. Yes,
things would be different when she and Jason lived here together and
little children played under the great oaks in the grove. Her fingers
"itched," as she said to herself, to clean up the place and make it tidy
without and within. A rivulet of muddy water was pouring round the
corner of the house, wearing a channel in the gravelled walk, which was
littered with rubbish. Beside the porch there was a giant box-bush,
beneath which several bedraggled white turkeys had taken shelter. She
could see them through the damp twilight of the boughs, shaking drenched
feathers or scratching industriously in the rank mould among the roots.
Leaning back in her wet clothes, against the splints of the chair, which
sagged on one rocker, she glanced about her at the refuse that
overflowed from the hall. The porch looked as if it had not been swept
for years. There was a pile of dusty bagging in one corner, and,
scattered over the floor, she saw a medley of oil cans, empty
cracker boxes and whiskey bottles, loose spokes of cart wheels, rolls of
barbed wire, and stray remnants of leather harness. "How can any one
live in such confusion?" she thought. Through the doorway, she could
distinguish merely a glimmer of light on the ceiling, from which the
plaster was dropping, and the vague shape of a staircase, which climbed,
steep and slender, to the upper story. It was a fairly good house of its
period, the brick dwelling, with ivy-encrusted wings, which was
preferred by the more prosperous class of Virginia farmers. The
foundation of stone had been well laid; the brick walls were stout and
solid, and though neglect and decay had overtaken it, the house still
preserved, beneath its general air of deterioration, an underlying
character of honesty and thrift. Turning away, she gazed through the
silver mesh of rain, past the barn and the stable, to the drenched
pasture, where a few trees rocked back and forth, and a flock of
frightened sheep huddled together. Where were the farm labourers, she
wondered? What had become of Jemima, who, Aunt Mehitable had said, was
still working here? Two men living alone must keep at least one woman
servant. Had the storm thrown a curse of stagnation over the place, and
made it incapable of movement or sound? She could barely see the sky for
the slanting rain, which drove faster every minute. Was she the only
living thing left, except the cowering sheep in the pasture and the
dripping white turkeys under the box-bush?
While she was still asking the question, she heard a shuffling step in
the hall behind her, and looking hastily over her shoulder, saw the
figure of the old man blocking the doorway. For an instant his squat
outline, blurred between the dark hall and the sheets of rain, was all
that she distinguished. Then he lurched toward her, peering out of the
gloom. Yesterday, she would have run from him in terror. Before her
visit to Whistling Spring she would have faced the storm rather than the
brooding horror at Five Oaks. But the great fear had absorbed the small
fears as the night absorbs shadows. Nothing mattered to her if she could
only reach Jason.
"Come in, come in," the old doctor was mumbling, with a dreary effort at
hospitality.
He held out his palsied hand, and all the evil rumours she had heard
since he had given up his practice and buried himself at Five Oaks
rushed into her mind. It must be true that he had always been a secret
drinker, and that the habit had taken possession now of his faculties.
Though she had known him all her life, the change in him was so
startling that she would scarcely have recognized him. His once robust
figure was wasted and flabby, except for his bloated paunch, which hung
down like a sack of flour; his scraggy throat protruding from the
bristles of his beard reminded the girl of the neck of a buzzard; his
little fiery eyes, above inflamed pouches of skin, flickered and shone,
just as the smouldering embers had flickered and shone under Aunt
Mehitable's pot. And from these small bloodshot eyes something sly and
secretive and malignant looked out at her. Was this, she wondered, what
whiskey and his own evil nature could do to a man?
"I am on my way back from Whistling Spring," she explained, while she
struggled against the repulsion he aroused in her. "The storm caught me
just as I reached here."
He smirked with his bloodless old lips, which cracked under the strain.
"Eh? Eh?" he chuckled, cupping his ear in his hand. Then catching hold
of her sleeve, he pulled her persuasively toward the doors "Come in,
come in," he urged. "You're wet through. I've kindled a bit of fire to
dry my boots, and it's still burning. Come in, and dry yourself before
you take cold from the wetting."
Still clutching her, he stumbled into the hall, glancing uneasily back,
as if he feared that she might slip out of his grasp. On the right a
door stood ajar, and a few knots of resinous pine blazed, with a thin
blue light, in the cavernous fireplace. As he led her over the
threshold, she noticed that the windows were all down, and that the only
shutters left open were those at the back window, against which the
giant box-bush had grown into the shape of a hunchback. There was a film
of dust or wood ashes over the floor and the furniture, and cobwebs were
spun in lacy patterns on the discoloured walls. A demijohn, still half
full of whiskey, stood on the crippled mahogany desk, and a pitcher of
water and several dirty glasses were on a tin tray beside it. Near the
sparkling blaze a leather chair, from which the stuffing protruded,
faced a shabby footstool upholstered in crewel work, and a pile of
hickory logs, chips, and pine knots, over which spiders were crawling.
While Dorinda sat down in the chair he pointed out, and looked nervously
over the dust and dirt that surrounded her, she thought that she had
never seen a room from which the spirit of hope was so irrevocably
banished. How cheerful the room at Pedlar's Mill, where Rose Emily lay
dying, appeared by contrast with this one! What a life Jason's mother
must have led in this place! How had Jason, with his charm, his
fastidiousness, his sensitive nerves, been able to stay here? Her gaze
wandered to the one unshuttered window, where the sheets of rain were
blown back and forth like a curtain. She saw the hunched shoulder of the
box-bush, crouching under the torrent of water which poured down from
the roof. Yet she longed to be out in the storm. Any weather was better
than this close, dark place, so musty in spite of its fire, and this
suffocating stench of whiskey and of things that were never aired.
"Just a thimbleful of toddy to ward off a chill?" the old man urged,
with his doddering gestures.
She shook her head, trying to smile. A drop of the stuff in one of those
fly-specked glasses would have sickened her.
Darkness swept over her with the ebb and flow of the sea. She felt a
gnawing sensation within; there wag a quivering in her elbows; and it
seemed to her that she was dissolving into emptiness. The thin blue
light wavered and vanished and wavered again. When she opened her eyes
the room came out of the shadows in fragments, obscure, glimmering,
remote. On the shingled roof the rain was pattering like a multitude of
tiny feet, the restless bare feet of babies. Terror seized her. She
longed with all her will to escape; but how could she go back into the
storm without an excuse; and what excuse could she find? After all,
repulsive as he appeared, he was still Jason's father.
"No, thank you," she answered, when he poured a measure of whiskey into
a glass and pushed it toward her. "Aunt Mehitable gave me some
blackberry cordial." After a silence she asked abruptly: "Where is
Jemima?"
Lifting the glass she had refused, he added a stronger dash to the weak
mixture, and sipped it slowly. "There's nothing better when you're wet
than a little toddy," he muttered. "Jemima is off for the evening, but
she'll be back in time to get supper. I heard her say she was going over
to Plumtree."
A peal of thunder broke so near that she started to her feet, expecting
to see the window-panes shattered.
"There, there, don't be afraid," he said, nodding at her over his glass.
"The worst is over now. The rain will have held up before you're dry and
ready to go home."
It was like a nightmare, the dark, glimmering room, with its dust and
cobwebs, the sinister old man before the blue flames of the pine knots,
the slanting rain over the box-bush, the pattering sound on the roof,
and the thunderbolts which crashed near by and died away in the
distance. Even her body felt numbed, as if she were asleep, and her
feet, when she rose and took a step forward, seemed to be walking on
nothing. It was just as if she knew it was not real, that it was all
visionary and incredible, and as if she stood there waiting until she
should awake. The dampness, too, was not a genuine dampness, but the
sodden atmosphere of a nightmare.
"Why, it has stopped now!" she exclaimed suddenly. "The storm is over."
Then, because she did not wish to show fear of him, she came nearer and
held her wet dress to the flames. "You won't need a fire much longer,"
she said. "It is warmer out of doors than it is inside."
"That's why I keep the windows down." He looked so dry and brittle, in
spite of the dampness about him, that she thought he would break in
pieces if he moved too quickly. There was no life, no sap, left in his
veins.
"I'm by myself now," he winked at her. "But it won't be for long. Jason
comes back to-night."
"To-night!" Joy sang in her voice. But why hadn't he written? Was there
anything wrong? Or was he merely trying to surprise her by his return?
"You hadn't heard? Well, that proves, I reckon, that I can keep a
secret." He lurched to his feet, balanced himself unsteadily for an
instant, and then stumbled to the window. Beyond him she saw the black
shape of the box-bush, with a flutter of white turkeys among its boughs,
and overhead a triangle of sky, where the grey was washed into a
delicate blue. Yes, the storm was over.
"They ought to reach the station about now," he said. "When the windows
are open and the wind is in the right direction, you can hear the
whistle of the train." There was malignant pleasure in his tone. "You
didn't know, I s'pose, that he'd gone off to get married?"
"Married?" She laughed feebly, imagining that he intended a joke. How
dreadful old men were when they tried to be funny! His pointed beard
jerked up and down when he talked, and his little red blinking eyes
stared between his puffed eyelids like a rat's eyes out of a hole. Then
something as black and cold as stale soot floated out from the chimney
and enveloped her. She could scarcely get her breath. If only he would
open the windows.
"Hasn't he told you that we are to be married next week?" she asked.
"No, he hasn't told me." He gloated over the words as if they were
whiskey, and she wondered what he was like when he was not drinking, if
that ever happened. He could be open-handed, she had heard, when the
humour struck him. Once, she knew, he had helped Miss Texanna Snead
raise the money for her taxes, and when Aunt Mehitable's cow died he had
given her another. "I had a notion that you and he were sweethearts," he
resumed presently, "and he'd have to look far, I reckon, before he could
pick out a finer girl. He's a pleasant-tempered boy, is Jason, but he
ain't dependable, even if he is my son, so I hope you haven't set too
much store by him. I never heard of him mixing up with girls, except you
and Geneva. That ain't his weakness. The trouble with him is that he was
born white-livered. Even as a child he would go into fits if you showed
him a snake or left him by himself in the dark----"
"He loves me," she said stoutly, closing her ears and her mind to his
words.
He nodded. "I don't doubt it, I don't doubt it. He loved you well
enough, I reckon, to want to jilt Geneva; but he found out, when he
tried, that she wasn't as easy to jilt as he thought. He'd courted her
way back yonder last year, when they were in New York together. Later on
he'd have been glad to wriggle out of it; but when Jim and Bob Ellgood
came after him, he turned white-livered again. They took him off and
married him while he was still shaking from fright. A good boy, a
pleasant boy," continued the old man, smacking his dry lips, "but he
ain't of my kidney."
When he had finished, she gazed at him in a dumbness which had attacked
her like paralysis. She tried to cry out, to tell him that she knew he
lied; but her lips would not move in obedience to her will, and her
throat felt as if it were petrified. Was this the way people felt when
they had a stroke, she found herself thinking. On the surface she was
inanimate; but beneath, in the buried jungle of her consciousness, there
was the stirring of primitive impulses, and this stirring was agony. All
individual differences, all the acquired attributes of civilization, had
turned to wood or stone; yet the racial structure, the savage fibre of
instinct, remained alive in her.
The room had grown darker. Only the hearth and the evil features of the
old man were picked out by the wavering blue light. She saw his face,
with its short wagging beard and its fiery points of eyes, as one sees
objects under running water. Everything was swimming round her, and
outside, where a cloud had drifted over the triangle of clear sky, the
box-bush and the white turkeys were swimming too.
"You'll meet 'em on the road if you go by the fork," piped a voice
beneath that shifting surface. "They will be well on the way by the time
you have started."
Stung awake at last, she thrust out her arm, warding him off. The one
thought in her mind now was to escape, to get out of the room before he
could stop her, to put the house and its terrors behind her. It couldn't
be true. He was drunk. He was lying. He was out of his head. She was
foolish even to listen, foolish to let the lie worry her for an instant.
Turning quickly, she ran from him out of the room, out of the house, out
of the stagnant air of the place.
At the beginning of the sandy road, where the water had hollowed a
basin, she met the coloured woman, Idabella, who said "good evening,"
after the custom of the country, as she went by. She was a handsome
mulatto, tall, deep-bosomed, superb, and unscrupulous, with the regal
features that occasionally defy ethnology in the women of mixed blood.
Her glossy black hair was worn in a coronet, and she moved with the slow
and arrogant grace which springs from a profound immobility.
"The dreadful old man," thought Dorinda, as she hurried in the direction
of Gooseneck Creek. "The dreadful, lying old man!"
XIII
The sun had riddled the clouds, and a watery light drenched the trees,
the shrubs, and the bruised weeds. This light, which bathed the external
world in a medium as fluid as rain, penetrated into her thoughts, and
enveloped the images in her mind with a transparent brilliance.
"It isn't true," she repeated over and over, as she went down the sandy
slope to Gooseneck Creek, and over the bridge of logs in the willows.
When she reached the meadows, rain was still dripping from the
golden-rod and life-everlasting. A rabbit popped up from the briers and
scuttled ahead of her, with his little white tail bobbing jauntily.
"How funny it looks," she thought, "just as if it were beckoning me to
come on and play. The rain is over, but I am soaked through. Even my
skin is wet. I'll have to dry all my clothes by the kitchen fire, if it
hasn't gone out. What a terrible old man!" Out of nowhere there flashed
into her mind the recollection of a day when she had gone to a dentist
at the County Courthouse to have an aching tooth drawn. All the
way, sitting beside her father, behind Dan and Beersheba, she had kept
repeating, "It won't hurt very much." Strange that she should have
thought of that now! She could see the way Dan and Beersheba had turned,
flopping their ears, and looked round, as if they were trying to show
sympathy; and how the bunches of indigo, fastened on their heads to keep
flies away, had danced fantastically like uprooted bushes. "It isn't
true;" she said now, seeking to fortify her courage as she had tried so
passionately on the drive to the dentist. "When Jason comes back, we
will laugh over it together. He will tell me that I was foolish to be
worried, that it proved I did not trust him. But, of course, I trust
him. When we are married, I will stand between him and the old man as
much as I can. I am not afraid of him. No, I am not afraid," she said
aloud, stopping suddenly in the road as if she had seen a snake in her
path. "When Jason comes back, everything will be right. Yes, everything
will be right," she repeated. "Perhaps the old man suspected something,
and was trying to frighten me. Doctors always know things sooner than
other people. . . . What a dirty place it is! Ma would call it a pig sty.
Well, I can clean it up, bit by bit. Even if the old man doesn't let
anybody touch his den, I can clean the rest of the house. I'll begin
with the porch, and some day, when he is out, I can make Jemima wash
that dreadful floor and the window-panes. The outside is almost as bad
too. The walk looks as if it had never been swept." In order to deaden
this fear, which was gnawing at her heart like a rat, she began to plan
how she would begin cleaning the place and gradually bring system out of
confusion. "A little at a time," she said aloud, as if she were reciting
a phrase in a foreign language. "A little at a time will not upset him."
At the fork of the road, approaching the red gate, where the thick belt
of woods began, her legs gave way under her, and she knew that she could
go no farther. "I'll have to stop," she thought, "even if the ground is
so wet, I'll have to sit down." Then the unconscious motive, which had
guided her ever since she left Five Oaks, assumed a definite form. "If
he came on that train, he ought to be here in a few minutes," she said.
"The whistle blew a long time ago. Even if he waited for the mail, he
ought to be here in a little while."
Stepping over the briers into the woods, she looked about for a place to
sit down. An old stump, sodden with water, pushed its way up from the
maze of creepers, and she dropped beside it, while she relapsed into the
suspense that oozed out of the ground and the trees. As long as her
response to this secret fear was merely physical, she was able to keep
her thoughts fixed on empty mechanical movements; but the instant she
admitted the obscure impulse into her mind, the power of determination
seemed to go out of her. She felt weak, unstrung, incapable of rational
effort.
A thicket of dogwood and redbud trees made a close screen in front of
her, and through the dripping branches, she could see the red gate, and
beyond it the blasted oak and the burned cabin on the other side of the
road. Farther on, within range of her vision, there were the abandoned
acres of broomsedge, and opposite to them she imagined the Sneads'
pasture, with the white and red splotches of cows and the blurred
patches of huddled sheep.
While she sat there the trembling passed out of her limbs, and the
strength that had forsaken her returned slowly. Removing her hat, she
let the branches play over her face, like the delicate touch of cool,
moist fingers. She felt drenched without and within. The very thoughts
that came and went in her mind were as limp as wet leaves, and blown
like leaves in the capricious stir of the breeze. For a few minutes she
sat there surrounded by a vacancy in which nothing moved but the leaves
and the wind. Without knowing what she thought, without knowing even
what she felt, she abandoned herself to the encompassing darkness. Then,
suddenly, without warning from her mind, this vacancy was flooded with
light and crowded with a multitude of impressions.
Their first meeting in the road. The way he looked at her. His eyes when
he smiled. The red of his hair. His hand when he touched her. The
feeling of his arms, of his mouth on hers, of the rough surface of his
coat brushing her face. The first time he had kissed her. The last time
he had kissed her. No. It isn't true. It isn't true. Deep down in her
being some isolated point of consciousness, slow, rhythmic, monotonous,
like a swinging pendulum, was ticking over and over: It isn't true. It
isn't true. True. True. It isn't true. On the surface other thoughts
came and went. That horrible old man. A fire in summer. The stench of
drunkenness. Tobacco stains on his white beard. A rat watching her from
a hole. How she hated rats! Did he suspect something, and was he trying
to frighten her? Trying to frighten her. But she would let him see that
she was too strong for him. She was not afraid. . . . The thoughts went
on, coming and going like leaves blown in the wind, now rising, now
fluttering down again. But far away, in a blacker vacancy, the pendulum
still swung to and fro, and she heard the thin, faint ticking of the
solitary point of consciousness: _True. True. It isn't true. It isn't
true--true--true_--
No, he couldn't frighten her. She was too sure of herself. Too sure of
Jason, too sure of her happiness. "Too sure of Jason," she repeated
aloud.
The little sad, watery sun sputtered out like a lantern, and after a few
minutes of wan greyness, shone more clearly, as if it had been relighted
and hung up again in the sky. Colour flowed back into the landscape,
trickling in shallow streams of blue and violet through the nearer
fields and evaporating into dark fire where the broomsedge enkindled
the horizon. She started up quickly, and fell back. When she put her
hand on the slimy moss it felt like a toad.
Far down the road, somewhere in the vague blur of the distance, there
was the approaching rumble of wheels. She heard the even rise and fall
of the hoofs, the metallic clink of horseshoes striking together, the
jolting over the rock by the Sneads' pasture, the splash of mud in the
bad hole near the burned cabin, and the slip and scramble of the mare as
she stumbled and then, recovering herself, broke into a trot.
_It isn't true. It isn't true_, ticked the pin point of consciousness. Her
mind was still firm; but her limbs trembled so violently that she
slipped from the stump to the carpet of moss and soaked creepers.
Shutting her eyes, she held fast to the slimy branch of a tree. "When he
turns at the fork, I will look. I will not look until he turns at the
fork."
The rumble was louder, was nearer. An instant of silence. The buggy was
approaching the fork. It was at the fork. She heard close at hand the
familiar clink of the steel shoes and the sharper squeak of a loosened
screw in the wheel. Rising on the sodden mould, she opened her eyes,
pushed aside the curtain of branches, and looked out through the leaves.
She saw Jason sitting erect, with the reins in his hands. She saw his
burnished red hair, his pale profile, his slightly stooping shoulders,
his mouth which was closed in a hard straight line. Clear and sharp, she
saw him with the vividness of a flash of lightning, and beside him, she
saw the prim, girlish figure and the flaxen head of Geneva Ellgood.
_It isn't true. It isn't true._ The pendulum was swinging more slowly; and
suddenly the ticking stopped, and then went on in jerks like a clock
that is running down. _It isn't true. It isn't true--true--true._
She felt cold and wet. Though she had not lost the faculty of
recollection, she was outside time and space, suspended in ultimate
darkness. There was an abyss around her, and through this abyss wind was
blowing, black wind, which made no sound because it was sweeping through
nothingness. She lay flat in this vacancy, yet she did not fall through
it because she also was nothing. Only her hands, which clutched
wood mould, were alive. There was mould under her finger nails, and the
smell of wet earth filled her nostrils. Everything within her had
stopped. The clock no longer ticked; it had run down. She could not
think, or, if she thought, her thoughts were beyond her consciousness,
skimming like shadows over a frozen lake. Only the surface of her could
feel, only her skin, and this felt as if it would never be warm again.
"So it is true," she said aloud, and the words, spoken without a thought
behind them, startled her. The instant afterwards she began to come back
to existence; she could feel life passing through her by degrees, first
in her hands and feet, where needles were pricking, then in her limbs,
and at last in her mind and heart. And while life fought its way into
her, something else went out of her for ever--youth, hope, love--and the
going was agony. Her pain became so intolerable that she sprang to her
feet and started running through the woods, like a person who is running
away from a forest fire. Only she knew, while she ran faster and faster,
that the fire was within her breast, and she could not escape it. No
matter how far she ran and how fast, she could not escape it.
Presently the running shook her senses awake, and her thoughts became
conscious ones. In the silence the shuddering beats of her heart were
like the unsteady blows of a hammer--one, two, one, one, two, two. Her
breath came with a whistling sound, and for a minute she confused it
with the wind in the tree-tops.
"So this is the end," she said aloud, and then very slowly, "I didn't
know I could feel like this. I didn't know anybody could feel like
this." A phrase of her mother's, coloured with the barbaric imagery of a
Hebrew prophet, was driven, as aimlessly as a wisp of straw, into her
mind: "Your great-grandfather said he never came to Christ till he had
thirsted for blood." Thirsted for blood! She had never known what that
meant. It had seemed to her a strange way to come to Christ, but now she
understood.
The wet briers tore her legs through her stockings. Branches whipped her
face and bruised its delicate flesh. Once, when she came out of the
woods, she slipped and fell on her hands and knees. The splinters of the
fence pierced her skin when she climbed over the rails. But still she
ran on, trying to escape from the fire within her breast.
XIV
On the front porch, with her hand shielding her eyes from the sunset,
her mother stood and looked out for her.
"I was watching for you, Dorinda. You must have got caught in the
storm."
"Just at the beginning. I stopped at Five Oaks."
"Was anybody there?"
"Nobody but the old doctor. Jemima was off."
"Did he say when he expected Jason?"
"Yes, he told me he might come back this evening."
Once, long ago, she had heard a ventriloquist at a circus, and her voice
was like the voice that had come out of the chair, the table, or the wax
doll. As she stepped on the porch, her mother examined her closely.
"Well, you're as white as a sheet. Go up and take off your wet things as
quick as you can, and bring 'em down to the fire. Supper'll be ready in
a minute."
Dorinda tried to smile when she hurried by, but her muscles, she found,
eluded the control of her will, and the smile was twisted into a
smirking grimace. Without trusting herself to meet her mother's eyes,
she went upstairs to her room and took off her rain-soaked clothes,
hanging her skirt and shirtwaist in the closet, and putting her muddy
shoes side by side, as if they were standing at attention on the edge of
the rug. Pushing back the curtain over the row of hooks, she selected an
old blue gingham dress which she had discarded, and put it on, carefully
adjusting the belt, from which the hooks and eyes, were missing, with
the help of a safety pin. All the time, while she performed these
trivial acts, she felt that her intimate personal self had stepped
outside her body, and was watching her from a distance. When she went
downstairs, it was only a marionette, like one of the figures she had
seen as a child in a Punch and Judy show, that descended the stairs and
sat down at the table. She looked at her father and mother, her father
eating so noisily, her mother pouring buttermilk, without spilling a
drop, into the row of glasses, and wondered what she had to do with
these people? Why had she been born in this family and not in another?
Could she have been a changeling that they had picked up?
"Dorinda stopped at Five Oaks until the storm was over," she heard her
mother say to the others; and suddenly, as if the sound had touched some
secret spring in her mind, she became alive again, and everything was
bathed in the thin blue light of that room at Five Oaks. The pain was
more than she could bear. It was more than anybody could be expected to
bear. In a flash of time it became so violent that she jumped up from
her chair, and began walking up and down as if she were in mortal agony.
"What's the matter, daughter? Did you come down on your tooth?" inquired
Mrs. Oakley solicitously.
"No, it isn't that. I don't want any supper," replied the girl, hurrying
out of the room and walking the length of the hall to the front door. "I
must do something," she thought. "If I don't do something, this pain
will go on for ever."
She had crossed the threshold to the porch, when, wheeling abruptly, she
went back into the hall and from the hall into her mother's chamber,
where the family Bible lap open on the table and the big fly was still
knocking against the ceiling. She had not known that flies lived so
long! It seemed an eternity, not a few hours ago, when her mother had
sat there reading the Psalms and the fly had buzzed in the stillness.
The peaceful room, pervaded by the Sabbath lethargy, with the open Bible
waiting for family prayers, and the battered old furniture arranged in
changeless order, seemed to close over her like a trap. "I must do
something, or this misery will never end," she thought again. But there
was nothing that she could do. There would never be anything that she
could do in her life. It was over. Everything was over, and she might
live to be ninety. "And the child coming too." There also she could find
no escape. "No matter what I do, I can change nothing." Something had
caught her. Life had caught her. She could not get away, no matter how
hard she struggled. A drop of blood fell on her fingers, and glancing
into the mirror, she saw that she had bitten her lip until it bled, yet
she had not felt it. Nothing like that, nothing on the outside of
herself, could ever hurt her again. "If I could only do something," she
said in a whisper, and walked from the chamber to the spare room, and
from the spare room, which looked as if it were hiding something, out
into the hall. Suddenly, like a person moving in delirium, she walked
out of the house, and along the path between the pear orchard and the
vegetable garden. The green afterglow had faded; but a sallow moon was
riding high over the big pine, and gave light enough for her to see her
way. Like a wet sheet the twilight folded about her, clinging to her
arms and legs when she tried to shake herself free from it. She would
have moonlight in the woods, and besides she had nothing to fear. A dry
sob broke from her, hurting her throat. You had reached the worst, she
realized, when you had nothing to fear.
She followed the path rapidly. By the pear orchard, by the big pine on
the hill, by the tobacco field, through the pasture, and into the dark
belt of woods. Here the smell of wet earth stifled her, and she lived
over again the moment when she had waited there, listening, in the
suspense which was more terrible than any certainty. "I didn't know what
it was when I went through with it," she thought. "I didn't know what it
was until afterwards." Memory, she felt, was gathering like an ulcer in
her mind. If she could not let out the pain, the sore would burst from
its own swelling. "If I don't do something, I shall die," she said
aloud, standing there, on the edge of the woods, among the wet leaves
and rotting mould. Then, swift as an inspiration, there came to her the
knowledge of what she must do. She must find Jason. Yes, she must find
Jason. This knowledge, which was as infallible as instinct, went no
further than the imperative necessity of seeing him. Beyond this, the
impulse gave way, like a bridge that breaks in the middle of a stream.
It left her there, without prop, without direction, hanging over the
black current of emptiness.
As she hurried on, a bough struck her so sharply that it bruised her
cheek, but she did not feel it. With the act of decision her body had
become so airy and transparent that she was no longer conscious of it as
a drag on her spirit. Though she ought to have been tired, she felt
instead amazingly strong and fresh, amazingly full of vitality. Only now
and then, as she walked rapidly through the willows and over the log
bridge, lights flickered and vanished and flickered again before her
eyes. At first she thought that a million sparks glittered out there in
the moist purple twilight; then she realized that they were not there at
all but within her brain. And these lights, which flitted round her as
she went on, illumined the blind impulse that directed her movements. It
was as if she were harnessed to this impulse and driven by it toward
some end of which she was ignorant, but which she would presently
discern in the fog.
She moved quickly, with her gaze fixed straight in front of her. The
dusk was gilded with fireflies, but she could not distinguish these
vagrant insects from the roving lights in her brain. The earth underfoot
gave out, when it was crushed, a strong, warm, vital odour. Very near
and loud, there was the hoot of an owl, followed presently by another;
but the cries seemed to be a part of the inner voice which was urging
her on. Her feet slipped on the logs. She recovered herself and went on
more quickly, more lightly, as if her body did not exist, or existed
merely as a cloud. Now she could see the lamps glimmering in the lower
windows of the house. There were lights in the hall, in the dining room,
in the old doctor's retreat; but all the upstairs windows were dark
except for the reflected rays of the moonbeams. Was the old man still
crouching over his fire, she wondered, with his rat eyes watching out of
a hole?
Around the house there were puddles of water and the piles of trash that
she had seen in the afternoon. Like a fawn, she sped over them and
stopped, unaware of her panting breath, with her eyes on the back door,
which was open. She could see within the hall, where a kerosene lamp was
fastened in a bracket near the staircase. The same heaps of bagging and
boxes and empty bottles were scattered about; the same collection of
rusty guns and broken fishing-poles. For the first time she thought
clearly, while her gaze travelled over these ordinary objects, "Why did
I come? What is the meaning of it? Why am I waiting out here in the
night?" But there was no answer to her question. She could not remember
why she had come, why she was standing there alone, with her eyes on the
open door, watching. Vacancy was around her, was within her; she was
drowning in vacancy. Looking away from the house, she saw that there was
a light in the barn, and that the big musty place was deserted. The
buggy, from which the horse had been taken, was standing near the door,
and one of those formless thoughts which she could not distinguish from
feeling told her that Jason would come out to put it under the shed. "If
I wait here long enough, I shall see him." Though the words were spoken
outside her brain, she knew that she must wait there all night if he did
not come.
Stepping over the loosened boards of the threshold of the barn, she
glanced about at the disorder, which was like the disorder of the house,
only it seemed to her cleaner because it was less human. Wheat, corn,
fodder. Farming implements. A reaping machine. Medicine for stock. A
jumble of odds and ends that had been thrown out of a tool house.
Against a barrel by the door there was the gun with which the old doctor
had shot the hawk in the afternoon. Her hands moved over it caressingly,
wonderingly. A good gun, not rusty, like everything else on the place.
Jason's probably. Far away over the fields a voice was speaking, and the
sound floated to her, thin and clear as distant chimes. "_He never came
to Christ till he had thirsted for blood._" A strange way--but she knew
now, she understood.
There was a noise at the house. A figure darkened the lamplight
on the porch; she heard a familiar step; she saw a shadow
approaching. It was Jason, she knew, and as he came toward her, she left
the barn and went out into the moonlight to meet him. She felt calm now,
fresh, strong, relentless; but the ulcer in her mind throbbed as if it
were bursting. Yes, it was Jason. He was coming down the steps. He was
coming along the path to the barn. In a minute he would see her standing
there, another shadow in the moonlight. In a minute he would speak to
her.
Suddenly, while she stood there in silence, the gun went off in her
hands. She saw the flash; she heard the sound, as if the discharge were
miles away; she smelt the powder. The next instant she felt the tremor
of the shock as the weapon, recoiled in her hands; and she thought
quietly and steadily, "I tried to do it. I wanted to do it."
"Dorinda," he called out, while the smoke drifted past him, and she saw
his face go as white as paper in the dimness.
Then, as swiftly as it had come, her resolution went out of her. The gun
slipped from her hands to the ground, and lay there in the mud at her
feet. Her will, with all its throbbing violence, urged her to shoot him
and end the pain in her mind. But something stronger than her conscious
will, stronger than her agony, stronger than her hate, held her
motionless. Every nerve in her body, every drop of her blood, hated him;
yet because of this nameless force within the chaos of her being, she
could not compel her muscles to stoop and pick up the gun at her feet.
Like a dream, like a fantasy of delirium, her resolution vanished, and
she knew that it would not return. "Why am I here? What is the meaning
of it all?" she asked wildly of the emptiness within her soul.
"Dorinda!" he said again. He had seen her; he had called her name. They
were alone together in the moonlight as they had been when she loved
him. If only she had the power to stoop and pick up the gun! If only she
had the power to make her muscles obey the wish in her heart! If only
she had the power to thrust him out of her life! It was not love, it was
not tenderness, it was not pity even, that held her back. Nothing but
this physical inability to bring her muscles beneath the control of her
will.
"Dorinda!" he said again incoherently, as if he had been drinking. "So
you know. But you can't know all. Not what I've been through. Not what
I've suffered. Nobody could. It is hell. I tell you I've been through
hell since I left you. I never wanted to do it. You are the one I care
for. I never wanted to marry her. It was something I couldn't help. They
brought pressure on me that I couldn't bear. They made me do it. I was
engaged to her before I came back. It was in New York last summer. She
showed she liked me and it seemed a good thing. Then I met you. I didn't
want to marry her. Before God, Dorinda, I never meant to do it. But I
did it. You will never understand. I told you that I funked things. I
have ever since I can remember. It's the way my mother funked things
with my father. Well, I'm like that, so you oughtn't to blame me so
much. God knows I'd help it if I could. I never meant to throw you over.
It was their fault. They oughtn't to have brought that pressure to bear
on me. They oughtn't to have threatened me. They ought to have let me do
the best I could. Speak to me. Say something, Dorinda----"
He went on endlessly, overcome by the facile volubility of a weak
nature. Was it in time or in eternity that he was speaking? She thought
that he would never stop; but his words made as little impression on her
as the drip, drip of rain from the eaves. Nothing that he said made any
difference to her. Nothing that he could ever say in the future would
make any difference. In that instant, with a piercing flash of insight,
she saw him as he was, false, vain, contemptible, a coward in bone and
marrow. He had wronged her; he had betrayed her; he had trampled her
pride in the dust; and he had done these things not from brutality, but
from weakness. If there had been strength in his violence, if there had
been one atom of genuine passion in his duplicity, she might have
despised him less even while she hated him more. But weak, vain, wholly
contemptible as she knew him to be, she had given him power over her.
She had placed her life in his hands, and he had ruined it. With the
fury of a strong nature toward a weak one that has triumphed over it,
she longed to destroy him and she knew that she was helpless. Nothing
that she could do would alter a single fact in his future. Even now he
excused himself. Even now he blamed others.
"I swear I never meant to do it, Dorinda," he repeated more vehemently,
encouraged by her silence. "You won't give me up, will you?"
Thoughts wheeled like a flight of bats in her mind, swift, vague, dark,
revolving in circles. They were pressing upon her from every side, but
she could distinguish nothing clearly in the thick palpitating darkness.
Impressions skimmed so swiftly over her consciousness that they left no
visible outline. Before she was aware of them they had wheeled away from
her into ultimate chaos. Bats, nothing more. And outside, against the
lighted door of the barn, other bats were revolving.
While she stood there without thinking, her perceptions of external
objects became acutely alive. She saw Jason's face, chalk-white in the
moonlight; she saw the jerking of his muscles while he talked; she saw
his arm waving with a theatrical gesture, like the arm of an evangelist.
_Drip, drip_, like water from the eaves, she heard the fall of his words,
though the syllables were as meaningless as the rain or the wind.
She had not spoken since he approached her; and she realized, standing
there in the mud, that she was silent because she could find no words to
utter. There was no vehicle strong enough to endure the storm of pain
and bitterness in her mind. Dumbness had seized her, and though she
struggled to pour out all that she suffered, when she opened her lips to
speak, she could make no audible sound. No, there was nothing that she
could say, there was nothing that she could do.
"You won't give me up, will you, Dorinda?" he pleaded.
Turning away, she started back again as rapidly as she had come. Though
he called after her in a whisper, though he followed her as far as the
end of the yard, she did not slacken her pace or look back at him.
Swiftly and steadily, like a woman walking in her sleep, she went down
the narrow sandy road to the creek and over the bridge of logs. There
was a stern beauty in her face and in her tall, straight figure, which
passed, swiftly and unearthly as a phantom, through the moonlight. An
impulse was driving her again, but it was the impulse to escape from his
presence. She was flying now from the vision she had seen of his naked
soul.
She walked in the moonlight without seeing it; past the frogs in the
bulrushes without hearing them; through the moist woods without smelling
them. Time had stood still for her, space had vanished; there was no
beginning and no end to this solitary aching nerve of experience. She
was aware of nothing outside herself until she entered the house and saw
her mother's chamber, with the open Bible and the big blue fly, which
still buzzed against the ceiling.
"We're waiting prayers for you, Dorinda. Ain't you coming?"
"No, I'm not coming. I've got a headache."
"Why did you go out again?"
"I thought I heard a coon or something in the henhouse."
"It might make your head better to hear a chapter of the Bible."
"No, it won't. I'm not coming. I'm never coming to prayers again."
XV
In the morning she awoke with the feeling that she was lying under a
stone. Something was pressing on her, holding her down when she
struggled to rise, and while she came slowly back to herself, she
realized that this weight was the confused memory of all that had
happened. Yes, it was life. She was caught under it and she couldn't
escape.
So far only, her muscles had awakened. Sensation was returning by slow
degrees to her limbs; she could feel the quiver of despair in her knees
and elbows; but her mind was still drugged by the stupor of exhaustion.
Recollection was working its way upward to her brain. Deadened as she
was, it astonished her that her muscles should remember more accurately
than her mind, that they should record a separate impression. "Something
dreadful has happened," she found herself saying mechanically. "It will
all come back in a minute."
While she dragged herself out of bed, she tried to fix her thoughts on
insignificant details. Her shoes were still damp, and she changed them
for a pair her mother had given her a few weeks ago because they drew
her ankles. There was a broken lace. She must remember to buy a new one
at the store. Beyond the window she could see the orchard and the
graveyard, with the big pine on the hill, and farther away the shallow
ripples of the broomsedge. All these things seemed to her fantastic and
meaningless, as if they were painted on air. She recalled now what had
happened last evening; but this also appeared meaningless and unreal,
and she felt that the whole flimsy situation would evaporate at the
first touch of an actual event. She could remember now; but it was a
recollection without accompanying sensation, as inanimate as the
flitting picture cast by a lantern. Some, terrible mistake seemed to
have occurred to her. Just as if she had stepped, for a few dreadful
moments, into a life that was not her own. And all the past, when she
looked back upon it, wore this aspect of unreality. The world in which
she had surrendered her being to love--that world of spring meadows and
pure skies--had receded from her so utterly that she could barely
remember its outlines. By no effort of the imagination could she
recapture the ecstasy. Colours, sounds, scents, she could recall; the
pattern of the horizon; evening skies the colour of mignonette; the
spangled twilight over the bulrushes; but she could not revive a single
wave, a single faint quiver, of emotion. Never would it come back again.
The area of feeling within her soul was parched and blackened, like an
abandoned field after the broomsedge is destroyed. Other things might
put forth; but never again that wild beauty. Around this barren region,
within the dim border of consciousness, there were innumerable surface
impressions, like the tiny tracks that birds make in the snow. She could
still think, she could even remember; but her thoughts, her memories,
were no deeper than the light tracks of birds.
"Why did it happen? What was the meaning of it?" she asked dully,
sitting on the side of her bed, with her shoe in her hand. A few hours
ago she had loved Jason; now she loved him no longer. All that had drawn
her to him seemed now to drive her away; all that had been desire had
turned into loathing; all that was glowing with flame was now burned out
to cinders. There were women, she knew, who could love even when they
hated; but she was not one of these. The vein of iron in her nature
would never bend, would never break, would never melt completely in any
furnace. "He is weak and a coward," she thought. "How could I love a
coward?" Yes, how could she love a coward? And, strangely enough, when
she despised him most bitterly, she thought not of the wrong he had done
her, not of his treachery and his betrayal of her love, but of the way
he had looked in the moonlight, with his chalk-white face, his jerking
muscles, and his arm waving with the gestures of an evangelist.
Well, it was all over now. Everything was over but the immediate trouble
that she must face. Memories, impressions, undeveloped sensations that
led to nothing, swarmed upon her from the hidden crevices of her being.
The Old Stage Road. The way it branched at the burned cabin. The blasted
oak with the Gospel sign on it. The clink of the mare's shoes. The
benign faces of Dan and Beersheba as they looked back at her under
bunches of indigo. Work. Never anything but work. Her mother's voice
nagging, always nagging. Coral strands and palm trees and naked black
babies. What was the meaning of it? Jason as he looked last night. Weak,
whining, apologetic, blaming everything and everybody except himself.
His hair plastered in damp streaks on his forehead. His eyes, red and
blinking, as if he had wept. His hands that were never still; nervous
hands, without a firm grip on anything. How she hated him. What had she
ever seen in him to love? Cinders. Nothing left of it but cinders. Not
so much as a spark. Life. That was what it meant. Then, suddenly, the
way he used to look. His eyes when he smiled, crinkling at the corners.
His straight eyebrows brooding like a storm over his brown-black eyes.
The feeling of his hand on her arm. His charm. Yes, his charm that she
had forgotten. Like a breath of air, or a subtle fragrance, she felt his
charm stealing back through her senses, as if minute waves of aromatic
incense were blowing over her nerves. Though she hated him, could so
slight a thing as the memory of his smile awake the familiar vibrations?
Though her mind had broken away from him, was her body still held a
prisoner? And would his power come back always, without warning of its
approach, like the aching of a tooth that one has touched in a sensitive
spot? A few minutes ago she was deadened into the emotional stupor she
called peace. Now, because of a single external image, because of so
trivial a recollection as the way his eyebrows drew down over his eyes,
all the agony of life was beginning again.
She thrust her foot into the shoe and stood up, flinging back her head
as she went to the mirror to shake out her hair. The stubborn
resolution, which was the controlling motive in her character, shot
through her like a bolt. "Well, there's no use thinking," she said
aloud. "I've got to go through with it." While she combed her hair back
from her forehead, and twisted it into its usual compact knot on her
head, she gazed wonderingly at her face in the mirror. After all she had
suffered it seemed strange to her that her face had not withered and her
hair turned white in a night. But there was scarcely a perceptible
change in her appearance. The line of her hair was still dark and
waving; her eyes were still clear and blue; the velvety colour still
flowed beneath the few golden freckles on her cheeks. Only there was
something in her eyes that had not been there until yesterday. She knew
life now, she reflected, and that showed in her eyes.
Fastening her dress as she left the room, she hurried downstairs and
into the kitchen where her mother was already busy about breakfast.
"What do you want me to do, Ma?"
"Everything's 'most ready. You can call your father and the boys and
then pour out the coffee."
"Why didn't you wake me?"
"You're always tired Monday morning, so I thought I'd let you sleep. I
don't see how it is. Sermons rest me. Why didn't you bring your wet
things down to the kitchen last night?"
"I was so tired I forgot." Would her mother never stop nagging? Would
there never be any quiet?
She called the men to breakfast, poured out their coffee, and helped her
mother serve the cornbread and bacon. Then she sat down and ate slowly
and deliberately, forcing herself to swallow, as she had forced herself
to take gruel when she had had measles. The agony had died down; she
felt bruised and sore as if she had been beaten; but the intensity of
the pain had settled into a hard substance like lead in her breast.
There was not a ripple of emotion surrounding this island of bitterness
into which her love had resolved; there was only a vast sea of
indifference. The torture would return, she supposed. She was accustomed
now to the fact that it came and went, without reason, like one of her
mother's attacks of neuralgia; but, for the moment, at least, her nerves
had ceased their intolerable vibration.
After breakfast, when she walked along the road to the store, it seemed
to her that the landscape had lost colour, that the autumn glow had gone
out of the broomsedge. When she came to the fork she found herself
listening for the clink of the mare's shoes, and she resolved that she
would run into the woods or cower down in the brushwood if she heard the
buggy approaching. Never would she see him again, if she could prevent
it. Her mind played with absurd fancies. She imagined him dying, and she
saw herself looking on without pity, refusing to save him, standing
motionless while he drowned before her eyes, or was trampled to death by
steers. No, she would never see him again.
There was no sound at the fork. She walked on past the burned cabin,
past the Sneads' farm, where the cows looked at her pensively, past the
second belt of woods, and up the bone-white slope to the station. Here
she found the usual sprinkling of passengers for the early train, and in
order to avoid them she went into the store and began arranging the
shelves. In a minute Minnie May came to fetch her, and following the
little girl into the bedroom, Dorinda found Mrs. Pedlar lying flat in
bed, with the pink sacque, which she was too weak to slip on, spread
over her breast. The summer had drained the last reserve of her
strength. She was growing worse every hour, and she was so fragile that
her flesh was like paper. Yet she still kept her vivacity and her eager
interest in details.
"Oh, Dorinda," she breathed. "It isn't true, is it?"
Dorinda picked up the sacque and slipped it over the meagre shoulders.
"If you aren't careful, you'll take cold," she said quietly, and then,
after an imperceptible pause. "Yes, it is true."
"You don't mean he has married Geneva?"
"Yes, he has married Geneva."
"Oh, why? But, Dorinda----"
While Rose Emily was still talking, the girl turned away and went back
into the store. If she didn't work and deaden thought, she couldn't
possibly go through with it. All this numbness was on the surface of her
being, like the insensibility that is produced by a narcotic. It didn't
lessen a single pang underneath, nor alter a solitary fact of
existence. At any minute, without premonition, the effects of the
narcotic might wear off, and she might come back to life again. Coming
back to life, with all that she had to face, would be terrible. Taking
the broom from the corner behind the door, she began sweeping the floor
in hard, long strokes, as if she were sweeping away a mountain of trash;
and into these strokes she put as much as she could of her misery. When
she had finished sweeping the store, she brushed the mud from the
platform and the steps to the pile of refuse which had accumulated at
the back of the house. Then she brought a basin of water and a cake of
soap, and scrubbed the counter and the shelves where the dry goods were
kept. She worked relentlessly, with rigid determination, as if to clean
the store were the one absorbing purpose of her life.
"What's got into you, Dorinda?" asked Nathan, while he watched her. "You
look as if you'd gone dirt crazy." Dirt crazy! That was what the boys
said of her mother.
"I get so tired looking at dust," she replied.
"Dust? I didn't know there was a speck of dust anywhere around. Old
Jubilee swept and dusted this morning."
With her dripping brush in her hand, Dorinda turned from the shelves she
was washing and looked at him over the counter. She wondered why he had
not spoken of Jason, and some dormant instinct, buried in the morass of
her consciousness, was grateful to him because he had avoided the
subject. He must know. Everybody knew by this time. Yet he had not
alluded by word or look to the wreck of her happiness. Though she did
not think of it at the moment, long afterwards she realized that this
was one of the occasions when Nathan had shown a tactfulness which she
had never imagined that he possessed.
She finished the shelves, going scrupulously into each crack and corner.
Then, putting the basin and the cake of soap aside, she wiped the
dampness off with a cloth, and arranged the bolts of figured calico and
checked gingham in orderly rows. When this was over she attacked the
pasteboard boxes on the adjoining shelf, cleaning, dusting, reassorting
the contents of each separate box. It was amazing the way dust
collected. Old Jubilee had cleaned the store. Yet here was dirt poked
away in the corners.
She had made herself cheap, that was the trouble. If you are going to
cheapen yourself, her mother had said, be sure first that the man is not
cheap also. Then, even if you are sure, it pays to be prudent. Prudence
builds no poorhouses--that was her mother again. Oh, if only she had
known when knowledge could have been useful! If only you could live your
life after experience and not before! She knew now how to face
things. . . .
At that instant, with a stab of anguish, she became alive. Her pain,
which had been merely a dull ache, was suddenly as keen as if a blade
had been driven into her wound. She couldn't bear it. Nobody could bear
it. In a kind of daze she picked up the cloth, the dust pan, the cake of
soap, and carried them to the end of the room. Then, taking down her hat
from a peg behind the door, she put it on and went out of the store and
across the yard to the gate and the road. It seemed to her that if only
she could reach home quickly, she should find that it had all been a
mistake, that something had happened to make the situation less terrible
than it appeared from a distance. What this something was she tried to
imagine. Perhaps the old man had lied. Perhaps Jason was not really
married. Perhaps he hadn't meant her to understand that he was married.
There were so many possibilities, she told herself, that she could not
think of them all. A hundred accidents--anything might have occurred.
Only at the store she felt smothered and shut away, as if she were left
behind by the hours. A deep instinct, like the instinct that drives a
wounded animal to flight, was urging her to go somewhere--anywhere--as
long as it was to a different place. She had made a mistake, she saw
now, to come to the store. At home it would be easier. At home she
should be able to think of some way out of her misery.
She walked as fast as she could, panting for breath, hurrying over the
bad places in the road, as if the thing she feared were pursuing her.
Down the long slope; through the thin pines; over the mile of red clay
road, broken with mud holes; past the Sneads' pasture, where the sourish
smell of cattle hung perpetually in the air; by the burned cabin at the
fork; and on into the edge of Hoot Owl Woods at the beginning of Old
Farm. When, at last, she struggled over the sagging bridge and up the
rocky grade to the porch, she was almost surprised to find that the
house was not on fire. There was an unnatural aspect, she felt, in the
familiar scene, as of a place that had suffered beneath a tornado and
yet remained unchanged on the surface. And this smiling October serenity
appeared to her to be unendurable. Trembling like a blade of grass, she
stood hesitating on the threshold. "Why did I come?" she asked in
amazement. "What did I expect to find?"
"Is that you, Dorinda?" called her mother from the kitchen, where she
was washing clothes. A kettle of "sour pickle" was simmering on the
stove, and the air was laden with the pungent aroma. "What on earth is
the matter?"
"I forgot something."
"It must have been mighty important. What was it you forgot?"
The trembling had passed from Dorinda's limbs to her thoughts. She felt
as if she should drop. "I--I can't remember," she answered.
"Well, I never!" Mrs. Oakley appeared in the doorway, her bare arms
glazed with soapsuds and her face beaded with steam. "You ain't
sick, are you?"
"No, I remember now. It was a piece of embroidery Rose Emily was doing.
She asked me to bring it."
"Embroidery? I should think she might have managed to wait till
to-morrow."
"I didn't mind the walk. It is better than being in the store."
"Anyway, you'd better rest a bit before you go back. You look real
peaked. Have you got a headache?" So her mother hadn't heard! Who would
be the first one to tell her?
"A little. It was getting wet yesterday, I reckon." She must say
something. If she didn't, her mother would question her all day.
"If you'd listened to what I told you," said Mrs. Oakley, "you wouldn't
have got caught in that storm. Before you go upstairs you'd better rub a
little camphor on your forehead."
She lifted her arms, on which soapsuds had dried like seaweed, and went
back into the kitchen, while Dorinda, without stopping to look for the
camphor, toiled upstairs to her room. Here she flung herself on the bed
and lay staring straight up at the stained ceiling, where wasps were
crawling. One, two, three, she counted them idly. There was a pile of
apples on her mantelpiece. That must have brought them. But she couldn't
lie here. Springing up, she went over to the mirror and began nervously
changing things on her dressing-table.
Yes, she was ashen about the eyes and her features were thin and drawn.
Her warm colour still held firm, but she was mottled about the mouth
like a person in a high fever. Even her full red lips looked parched and
unnatural. "I am losing my looks," she thought. "I am only twenty and I
look middle-aged."
Why had she come back? It was worse here than it was at the store. Her
suffering was more intolerable, and she seemed farther away from relief
than she had been while she was cleaning the shelves. Perhaps if she
went back she should find that it was easier. Something might have
happened to change things. At least her mother wouldn't be at the store,
and she dreaded her mother more than anything that she had to face. Yes,
she had made a mistake to come home.
Going over to the curtain, she pushed it aside and looked at her
dresses, taking them down from the hooks and hanging them back again, as
if she could not remember which one she wanted. Then, in a single flash,
just as it had returned at the store, all the horror rushed over her
afresh, and she turned away and ran out of the room. Any spot, she
realized, was more endurable than the place she was in.
"You ain't going back already, Dorinda?" called her mother from the
kitchen.
"Yes, I'm going back. I feel better."
"It seems to me it wasn't worth your while walking all that way twice.
I'd take my time going back. There ain't a bit of use hurrying like
that. When you come home in the evening, I wish you'd remember to bring
me that box of allspice. You forgot it on Saturday. It seems to me
you're growing mighty forgetful."
But Dorinda was far down the walk on her way to the gate, and she did
not stop to reply. She retraced her steps rapidly over the bridge and
along the edge of the woods, where the shadows lay thick and cool.
Behind her she heard the bumping of a wagon in the mud holes; but she
did not glance round, for she knew that it was only one of the farmers
on the way to the station.
"Going to the store?" inquired the man, as he came up with her. "Can I
give you a lift?"
She shook her head, smiling up at him. "I'm not going back yet awhile,
thank you. I'm out looking for one of our turkeys."
Stepping out of the road, she waited until the wagon had bumped out of
sight, and then went on, in a bewildered way, as if she could not see
where she was walking. As she approached the fork, her legs refused to
carry her farther, and scrambling on her knees up the bank by the
roadside, she dropped to the ground and abandoned herself to despair.
She couldn't go on and she couldn't sit still. All she could do was to
cower there behind the thicket of brushwood, and let life have its way
with her. She had reached the end of endurance. That was what it meant,
she had reached the end of what she could bear. The trembling, which had
begun in her hands and feet, ran now in threads all over her body. For a
minute her mind was a blank; then fear leaped at her out of the
stillness. Springing to her feet, she looked wildly about, and sank down
again because her legs would not support her.
"I've got to do something," she thought. "I've got to do something, or
I'll go out of my mind." Never once, in her fright and pain, did the
idea of an appeal to Jason enter her thoughts. No, she had finished with
him for ever. There was no help there, and if there were help in him,
she would die before she would seek it.
Raising her head, she leaned against the bole of a tree and looked, with
dimmed eyes, at the October morning. Around her she heard the murmurous
rustle of leaves, the liquid notes of a wood robin, like the sprinkling
of rain on the air, the distant shrill chanting of insects; all the
natural country sounds which she would have called silence. Smooth as
silk the shadows lay on the red clay road. Over the sky there was a thin
haze, as if one looked at the sun through smoked glasses. "You've got to
do something," repeated a derisive voice in her brain. "You've got to do
something, or you'll go out of your mind." It seemed to her that the
whole landscape waited, inarticulate but alive, for her decision.
Despair overwhelmed her; yet through all her misery there persisted a
dim, half conscious recognition that she was living with only a part of
her being. Deep down in her, beneath the rough texture of experience,
her essential self was still superior to her folly and ignorance, was
superior even to the conspiracy of circumstances that hemmed her in. And
she felt that in a little while this essential self would reassert its
power and triumph over disaster. Vague, transitory, comforting, this
premonition brooded above the wilderness of her thoughts. Yes, she was
not broken. She could never be broken while the vein of iron held in her
soul.
For a long while she sat there by the roadside, with her eyes on the
pale sunshine and the transparent shadows. What would her mother say if
she knew? When would she know? Who would have the courage to tell her?
For twenty years they had lived in the house together, yet they were
still strangers. For twenty years they had not spent a night apart, and
all the time her mother had dreamed of coral strands and palm trees,
while she herself had grown into a thing as strange and far away as
Africa. Were people like this everywhere, all over the world, each one a
universe in one's self separate like the stars in a vast emptiness?
XVI
Far over the autumn fields, she heard the whistle of the train as it
rounded the long curve at the station. Before the sound had floated past
her she had come to one of those impetuous decisions which were
characteristic of her temperament. "I'll go away in the morning," she
resolved. "I'll go on the first train, the one that whistles at sunrise.
If I take that, I can leave the house before light."
Immediately afterwards, as soon as the idea had taken possession of her,
she felt the renewal of courage in her thoughts. Once that was settled,
she told herself, and there was no turning back, everything would be
easier. Just to go away somewhere. It made no difference where the train
went. She would go to the very end, the farther the better, as long as
her money held out. "I can scrape together almost seventy dollars," she
thought. "Besides the fifty I made at the store, I've saved the twenty
dollars Nathan and Rose Emily gave me for a wedding present. That much
ought to take me somewhere and keep me until I can find something to
do." Her father, she realized with a pang, would have to manage without
her. Perhaps he would be obliged to mortgage the place again. She hoped
he wouldn't have to sell Dan and Beersheba, and she was confident in her
heart that he would never do this. He would sooner part with the roof
over his head. It would be hard on him; but he had Josiah and Rufus, and
after her marriage, it was doubtful if she could have continued to help
him. "Josiah may marry too," she reflected, "and of course Rufus is
always uncertain." Nobody could tell what Rufus might some day take it
into his head to do. Then, because weakness lay in that direction, she
turned her resolute gaze toward her own future. There was no help
outside herself. She knew that the situation, bad as it was now, would
be far worse before it was better. Romantic though she was, she was
endowed mentally with a stubborn aptitude for facing facts, for looking
at life fearlessly; and now that imagination had done its worst, she set
herself to the task of rebuilding her ruined world. All her trouble, she
felt, had come to her from trying to make life over into something it
was not. Dreams, that was the danger. Like her mother she had tried to
find a door in the wall, an escape from the tyranny of things as they
are; and like her mother, she had floundered among visions. Even though
she was miserable now, her misery was solid ground; her feet were firmly
planted among the ancient rocks of experience. She had finished with
romance, as she had finished with Jason, for ever.
Twisting about on the earth, she pushed aside the branches, and looked
down on Old Farm, folded there so peacefully between the road and the
orchard. Wreathed in sunlight as pale as cowslips, she saw the house
under the yellowing locust trees. Over the roof a few swallows were
curving; from a single chimney smoke rose in a column; there was a
cascade of shadows down the rocky path to the gate. She saw these
blended details, not as she had seen them yesterday or the moment before
she had made her decision, but as one looks on a place which one has
loved and from which one is parting for ever. A bloom of sentiment and
regret coloured the stark outline; and so, she knew, it would remain
indelibly softened in her memory.
Rising from the ground, she went back over the road to the bridge and up
the rocky grade to the porch. As she drew nearer she saw her mother come
out of the kitchen and go in the direction of the hog-pen, with a basin
of vegetable parings in her hand. For a few minutes at least the house
would be empty! Running indoors and up the two flights of stairs to the
attic, Dorinda brought down an old carpet bag which had belonged first
to her grandfather and then to her mother. Once, when she was a child,
her mother had used it when she had taken her to spend a night in
Richmond, with a distant relative, an old maid, who had died the next
year, and again Josiah and Rufus had carried the bag with them when they
went to the State fair one autumn. Now, while she dusted it inside and
out, and tossed the few papers it contained into a bureau drawer, she
decided that it would hold all the clothes she could take with her. "It
will be heavy, but I'll manage it," she thought, moving softly lest her
mother should return without stopping to gather the eggs in the
henhouse. "I'd just as well pack and get it over," she added. "Anything
is better than sitting down and waiting for something to happen."
One by one, she smoothed and folded her wedding clothes. Six of
everything; nightgowns, chemises, corset covers, with frills across the
bosom, starched white petticoats, with wide tucked flounces. She looked
at each garment with swimming eyes and a lump like a rock in her throat,
before she laid it away in one of the bulging compartments of the
carpet bag. How fine the stitches were! It was a wonder what her mother
could do with her rheumatic joints.
Stepping as lightly as she could, she brought her shoes from the closet
and packed them away. Then the dresses, one after another. Two blue
cotton dresses that she wore in the store. The pink gingham Rose Emily
had given her. Would she ever need that again, she wondered. Last of
all, the blue nun's veiling. "It would have been more sensible to have
got it darker," she thought grimly. There wasn't room for the hat; but,
after she had put in her stockings and handkerchiefs and collars, with
the bits of ribbon she sometimes wore at her neck, she folded the orange
shawl and spread it on top of everything else. "That may come in
useful," she added. "You never can tell what the weather will be." It
was October, and everybody said winter came earlier in the North. She
had decided prudently that she would wear her old blue merino, with the
tan ulster and the felt hat she had put away from moths in the spare
room. She could easily steal in and get them out of the closet while her
mother was looking after the pigs or the chickens.
Well, that was over. After she had closed and strapped the bag, she
pushed it behind the curtain. There was no telling, she reminded
herself, when her mother would poke her nose into places.
When she went downstairs it was twelve o'clock and the men had come in
from the fields.
"Why, Dorinda, I didn't know you'd be here to dinner!" her mother
exclaimed. "Is your head bad again?"
"Yes, I wasn't feeling so well, and there wasn't much to do at the
store."
"I thought Monday was the busiest day." How like her mother that was!
She could never let a thing drop. Some demon of contradiction impelled
her to find a point of offense everywhere. There was a glass pitcher of
buttermilk on the table. A little boy, the son of William Snead, had
brought it over early in the morning, as soon as Miss Tabitha had
churned. Lifting the pitcher, Dorinda filled the five glasses standing
in a circle at the end of the table. As she handed a glass to her
father, she looked at him with a grave impersonal sentiment, as if he
were a part of the farm that she was leaving. Nothing, not even her
mother's nervous nagging, could annoy her to-day. She felt only a
despairing tenderness, like a mist of tears, in her heart.
"I'm sorry you ain't well, daughter," Joshua said, as he took the glass
from her hand; and she felt that he had put an incalculable affection
into the words. It was the only remark he made during the meal, and
ordinary as it was, it seemed to bring her closer to him than she had
ever been in her life. Or was it only because she was parting from him
so soon? Everything was precious to her now, precious and indescribably
sad and lovely. If she were to speak a word, she knew that she should
burst into tears.
In the afternoon, when she had helped her mother hang out the clothes at
the back of the house, she came indoors and waited for an opportunity to
bring down the carpet bag. "Perhaps I've always tried too hard," she
thought wearily. "If I'd just give up and let things drift, it might be
that something would go right." She dropped on the bottom step of the
staircase; but she had no sooner decided to give up the struggle than
she heard her mother's voice telling her that she was going down into
the garden.
"The last of those tomatoes will spoil if I don't pick them," she said.
"Do you want me to help you?" Dorinda called back.
"No, the sun is kind of sickening. You'd better keep out of it. There
ain't much left after the storm, but I might as well use the tomatoes."
She went out, with the big splint-basket on her arm; and she was
scarcely out of sight before Dorinda had dragged down the carpet bag and
hidden it under the front porch behind one of the primitive rock pillars
of the foundation. It would be impossible, she knew, to bring down the
bag in the morning without waking her mother, who was a light sleeper.
Her father and the boys, drugged by toil in the open, could sleep
through thunder; but her mother would start up and call out at the
scratching of a mouse. After she had hidden the bag, she went back into
the spare room and unwrapped her tan ulster and brown felt hat from the
newspapers which protected them from moths. As she unpinned the parcels,
a smell of mingled camphor and lavender was released on the air, and she
hoped that her mother would not detect it. "If she says anything, I'll
tell her it's time to be wearing my winter clothes," she decided, while
she carried the ulster and hat upstairs to her room. Since she had clung
desperately to the thought of going away, her suffering had been more
endurable; the vehement pain had dulled into an apathetic despair which
deadened every cell of her body. She dreaded the moment when the stupor
would lift and she should think and feel clearly again.
All night she slept only in restless waves of unconsciousness. The
darkness was broken up into false dawns, and at every deceptive glimmer
she would steal softly to the window and watch for the first splinter of
light. While it was still dark, she dressed herself in the clothes she
had laid by her bed, and then sat waiting for the sound of a crow in the
henhouse. In the early part of the night there was a vaporous moon; but
as the hours wore on, the sky clouded over, and when the day began to
break a fine, slow rain was falling. "I hate so terribly to go," she
thought, while she smoothed her hair and then wrapped up her brush and
comb and slipped them into the pocket of her ulster. "I don't believe
I'll go after all." But she knew, even while she lingered over the idea,
that there was no turning back.
When she remembered it afterwards it seemed to her that the longest
journey of her life was the one down the dark staircase. In reality her
descent occupied only a few minutes; but the tumult of her emotions, the
startled vigilance of her nerves, crowded these vivid instants with
excitement. She lived years, not moments, while she hung there in the
darkness, expecting the sound of her mother's voice or the vision of a
grey head thrust out of the chamber doorway. What would her mother say
if she discovered her? What would she say when she went upstairs and
found her room empty? At the foot of the staircase Rambler poked his
nose into her hand, and padded after her to the front door. He would
have followed her outside, but stooping over him, she kissed his long
anxious face before she pushed him back into the hall. Her eyes were
heavy with tears as she hurried noiselessly across the porch, down the
steps, and round the angle of the house to the rock pillar where she had
hidden her bag. Not until she had passed through the gate and into the
shadow of the woods, did she rest the heavy bag on the ground and stop
to draw breath. Now, at last, she was safe from discovery. "If nobody
comes by, I'll have to take some of the things out of the bag and try to
carry it," she said aloud, in a desperate effort to cling to practical
details. But it was scarcely likely, she told herself presently, that
nobody would come by. Even on a rainy morning there were always a few
farmers who went out to the station at daybreak.
While she waited there by the bridge, she seemed to be alone on the
earth. It was a solitude not of the body but of the spirit, vast,
impersonal, and yet burdened, in some strange way, with an
incommunicable regret. The night had released the wild scents of autumn,
and these were mingled with the formless terrors that overshadowed her
mind. She thought without words, enveloped in a despondency as shapeless
as night.
Up the road there was the measured beat of a trot, followed by the light
rattle of a vehicle beyond the big honey-locust at the pasture bars.
While she watched, the rattle grew louder, accompanied by the jarring
turn of a screw, and a minute later a queer two-wheeled gig, with a hood
like a chicken coop, appeared on the slope by the gate. She knew the
vehicle well; it belonged to Mr. Kettledrum, the veterinarian, and she
had passed it frequently on the road to the station.
"He will talk me to death," she thought, with dogged patience, "but I
can't help it."
Lifting the carpet bag, which felt heavier than it had done at the
start, she stepped out into the road and waited until the nodding gig
drew up beside her. Mr. Kettledrum, a gaunt, grizzled man of middle age,
with a beaked nose and a drooping moustache, which was dyed henna-colour
from tobacco, looked down at her with his sharp twinkling eyes.
"Thanky, Dorinda, I'm as well as common," he replied to her greeting. "I
declar', it looks for all the world as if you was settin' out on a
journey."
"So I am." Dorinda smiled bravely. "I wonder if you'll give me a lift to
the station?"
"To be sure, to be sure." In a minute he was out on the ground and had
swung the bag into the gig beside a peculiar kind of medicine case made
of sheepskin. "I'm on my way back from Sam Garlick's, and it'll be more
than a pleasure," he added gallantly, "to have you ride part of the way
with me. Sam sets a heap of store by that two-year-old bay of his, and
he had me over in the night to ease him with colic. Wall, wall, it ain't
an easy life to be either a horse or a horse doctor in this here
on certain world."
It was easier to laugh than to speak, and his little joke, which was as
ancient and as trustworthy as his two-wheeled gig, started them well on
their way. After all, he was a kind man; her father had had him once or
twice to see Dan or Beersheba; and people said that, at a pinch, he had
been known to treat human beings as successfully as horses. He had a
large family of tow-headed children; and though she had heard recently
that his wife was "pining away," nobody blamed him, for he had been a
good provider, and wives were known occasionally to pine from other
causes than husbands.
"It's a right good thing I came by when I did," he remarked genially.
"As it happened, I was goin' to stop by anyway for that early train. I
like to allow plenty of time, and I generally unhitch my mare befo' the
train blows. She ain't skittish. Naw, I ain't had no trouble with her;
but she's got what some folks might consider eccentric habits, an' I
ain't takin' no chances. So you say you're goin' off on a journey?" he
inquired, dropping his voice, and she knew by intuition that he was
wondering if he had better allude to Jason's marriage. He would blame
him of course; a man couldn't jilt a woman with impunity at Pedlar's
Mill; but what good would that, or anything else, do her now?
"Yes, I'm going away." She tried to make her voice steady.
"On the up train or the down one?" he inquired, as he leaned out of the
gig to squirt a jet of tobacco juice in the road. Upon reflection, he
had abandoned his sympathetic manner and assumed one of facetious
pleasantry.
"The earliest. The one that goes north. Shall we be in time for it?"
He pursed his lips beneath the sweeping moustache. "Don't you worry.
We'll git you thar. Whar are you bound for?"
She spoke quickly. "I'm going to New York." That was the farthest place
that came to her mind.
"You don't say so?" He appeared astonished. "Then you'll be on the train
all day. You didn't neglect to bring along a snack, did you?"
A snack? No, she had not thought of one, and she had eaten no breakfast.
Mr. Kettledrum was regretful but reassuring. "It's always better to
provide something when you set out," he remarked. "An empty stomach
ain't a good travellin' companion; but it's likely enough that the
conductor can git you a bite at one of the stops. Along up the road, at
the junction, thar's generally some niggers with fried chicken legs; but
all the same it's safer to take along a snack when you're goin' to
travel far."
They were passing the fork of the road. Over the big gate she could see
the ample sweep of the meadows, greenish-grey under the drizzle of rain;
and beyond Gooseneck Creek, the roof and chimneys of Five Oaks made a
red wound in the sky. Seen through the cleft of the trees, the whole
place wore a furtive and hostile air. How miserable the fields looked on
a wet day, miserable and yet as if they were trying to keep up an
appearance. Some natural melancholy in the scene drifted through her
mind and out again into the landscape. She felt anew her kinship with
the desolation and with the rain that fell, fine and soft as mist, over
it all. Even when she went away she would carry a part of it with her.
"That's what life is for most people, I reckon," she thought drearily.
"Just barren ground where they have to struggle to make anything grow."
"Now, I've never been as far as New York," Mr. Kettledrum was saying in
a sprightly manner. "But from all accounts it must be a fine city. My
brother John's son Harry has lived there for fifteen years. He's got a
job with some wholesale grocers--Bartlett and Tribble. If you run across
him while you're there, be sure to tell him who you are. He'll be glad
of a word from his old uncle. Don't forget the name. Bartlett and
Tribble. They've stores all over the town, Harry says. You can't
possibly miss them."
They had reached the Sneads' pasture, deserted at this early hour except
for a mare and her colt. A minute later they passed the square brick
house, where the cows were trailing slowly across the lawn in the
direction of the bars which a small coloured boy was lowering. Then came
the mile of bad road, broken by mud holes. On they spun into the thin
woods and out again to the long slope. At the farm her mother was
calling her. There was the smell of frying bacon in the kitchen. Her
father was coming in from the stable. Rufus was slouching into his chair
with a yawn. Steam was pouring from the spout of the big tin coffee-pot
on the table. The glint of light on the stove and the walls. Rambler.
Flossie. . . . She remembered that she had eaten nothing. Hunger seized
her, and worse than hunger, the longing to burst into tears.
"Wall, here we are. The train's blowing now down at the next station.
You've plenty of time to take it easy while I unhitch the mare." He
helped her to alight, and then, picking up her bag, carried it down to
the track. "You jest stand here whar the train stops," he said. "I'll
take the mare out and be back in a jiffy. You've got your ticket ready,
I reckon?"
She shook her head. No, she hadn't her ticket; but it didn't matter; she
would get one on the train. It occurred to her, while he stepped off
nimbly on his long legs, which reminded her of stilts, that if she had
not met him in the road, she would have missed the early train north and
have taken the later one that went to Richmond. So small an incident,
and yet the direction in which she was going, and perhaps her whole
future, was changed by it. Well, she knew what was ahead of her, she
thought miserably, while she stood there shivering in the wet. She was
chilled; she was empty; she was heartbroken; yet, in spite of her
wretchedness, hope could not be absent from her courageous heart. The
excitement of her journey was already stirring in her veins, and waiting
there beside the track, in the rain, she began presently to look, not
without confidence, to the future. After all, things might have been
worse. She was young; she was strong; she had seventy dollars pinned
securely inside the bosom of her dress. Dimly she felt that she was
meeting life, at this moment, on its own terms, stripped of illusion,
stripped even of idealism, except the idealism she could wring from the
solid facts of experience. The blow that had shattered her dreams had
let in the cloudless flood of reality. "You can't change the past by
thinking," she told herself stubbornly, "but there must be something
ahead. There must be something in life besides love."
The train whistled by the mill; the smoke billowed upward and outward;
and the engine rushed toward her. Her knees were trembling so that she
could barely stand; but her eyes were bright with determination, and
there was a smile on her lips. Then, just as the wheels slackened and
stopped, she saw Nathan running down the gradual descent from the store.
Reaching her as she was about to step on the train, he thrust a shoe box
into her hand.
"You couldn't go so far without a bite of food. I fixed you a little
snack." There was a queer look in his eyes. Absurd as it seemed, for a
minute he reminded her of her father.
"So Mr. Kettledrum told you I was going away?"
He nodded. "Take care of yourself. If you want any money, write back for
it. You know we're here, don't you?"
She smiled up at him with drenched eyes. A moment more and she would
have broken down; but before she had time to reply she was pushed into
the train; and when she looked out of the window, Nathan was waving
cheerfully from the track. "I wonder how I could ever have thought him
so ugly?" she asked herself through her tears.
The figures at the station wavered, receded, and melted at last into the
transparent screen of the distance. Then the track vanished also, the
deserted mill, the store, the old freight car, and the dim blue edge of
the horizon. All that she could see, when she raised the window and
looked out, was the dull glow of the broomsedge, smothered yet alive
under the sad autumn rain.
_PART
SECOND_
PINE
"_The big pine was like greenish bronze_. . . ."
I
The big pine was like greenish bronze against the October sky. . . .
A statue in Central Park had brought it back to her, the pine and the
ruined graveyard and the autumn sunlight raking the meadows. It was a
fortnight since she had come to New York, and in that fortnight she felt
that she had turned into stone. Her shoes were worn thin; her feet
throbbed and ached from walking on hard pavements. There were times,
especially toward evening, when the soles of her feet were edged with
fire, and the pain brought stinging tears to her eyes. Yet she walked
on grimly because it was easier to walk than to wait. Up Fifth Avenue;
down one of the cross streets to the Park, which was, she thought,
merely an imitation of the country; back again to Sixth Avenue; and up
Sixth Avenue until she drifted again over the Park and into the
prison-like streets that ran toward the river. Occasionally she glanced
up to read the name of a street; but the signs told her nothing. Fifth
Avenue she had learned by name, and Broadway, and the dirty street where
she rented a hall room, for fifty cents a day, over a cheap restaurant.
Yesterday, she had asked for work on the other side of the city; but
nobody wanted help in a store, and her obstinate pride insisted that she
would rather starve than take a place as a servant. Twice she had waited
in the restaurant beneath her room; but the dirt and the close smells
had nauseated her, and by the end of the second day she had been too
sick to stand on her feet. After that the waitress whose place she had
taken had returned, and the woman in charge had not wanted her any
longer. "You'd better get used to smells before you try to make a living
in the city," she had said disagreeably. The advice was sound, as
Dorinda knew, and she had no just cause for resentment. Yet there were
moments when it seemed to her that New York would live in her
recollection not as a place but as an odour.
All day she walked from one stony street to another, stopping to rest
now and then on a bench in one of the squares, where she would sit
motionless for hours, watching the sparrows. Her food, usually a tough
roll and a sausage of dubious tenderness, she bought at the cheapest
place she could find and carried, wrapped in newspaper, to the bench
where she rested. Her only hope, she felt, lay in the dogged instinct
which told her that when things got as bad as they could, they were
obliged, if they changed at all, to change for the better. There was no
self-pity in her thoughts. The unflinching Presbyterian in her blood
steeled her against sentimentality. She would meet life standing and she
would meet it with her eyes open; but she knew that the old buoyant
courage, the flowing outward of the spirit, was over for ever.
What surprised her, when she was not too tired to think of it, was that
the ever-present sense of sin, which made the female mind in
mid-Victorian literature resemble a page of the more depressing
theology, was entirely absent from her reflections. She was sorry about
the blue dress; she felt remorse because of the cow her mother might
have had; but everything else that had happened was embraced in the
elastic doctrine of predestination. It had to be, she felt, and no
matter how hard she had struggled she could not have prevented it.
At night, worn out with fatigue, she would go back to the room over the
restaurant. The brakeman on the train had given her the address, and he
had put her in the street car that brought her to the door in Sixth
Avenue. Here also the smells of beer and of the cooking below stairs had
attacked her like nausea. The paper on the walls was torn and stained;
all the trash in the room had been swept under the bed; and when she
started to wash her hands at the rickety washstand in one corner, she
had found a dead cockroach in the pitcher. Turning to the narrow window,
she had dropped into a chair and stared down on the crawling throng in
the street. Disgust, which was more irksome than pain, had rushed over
her. After all the fuss that had been made over it, she had asked in
bitter derision, was this Life?
Walking up Sixth Avenue one afternoon, she asked this question again.
Something was trying to break her. Life or the will of God, it made no
difference, for one hurt as much as the other. She could not see any use
in the process, but she went on as blindly as a machine that has been
wound up and cannot stop until it has run down. Nothing was alive except
the burning sore of her memory. All the blood of her body had been drawn
into it. Every other emotion--affection, tenderness, sympathy,
sentiment--all these natural approaches to experience had shrivelled up
like nerves that are dead. She was consumed by a solitary anguish; and
beyond this anguish there was nothing but ashes. The taste of ashes was
in her mouth whenever she tried to look ahead or to pretend an interest
in what the future might bring. Though her mind saw Jason as he was,
weak, false, a coward and a hypocrite, he was so firmly knit into her
being that, even when she tore him from her thoughts, she still suffered
from the aching memory of him in her senses. Pedlar's Mill or New York,
what did it matter? The city might have been built of straw, so little
difference did it make to her inescapable pain.
At first the noises and the strange faces had confused her. Then it
occurred to her that there might be temporary solace in the crowd, that
she might lose herself in the street and drift on wherever the throng
carried her. Her self-confidence returned when she found how easy it was
to pursue her individual life, to retain her secret identity, in the
midst of the city. She discovered presently that when nothing matters
the problem of existence becomes amazingly simple. Fear, which had been
perversely associated with happiness, faded from her mind when despair
entered it. From several unpleasant episodes she had learned to be on
the watch and to repulse advances that were disagreeable; but at such
moments her courage proved to be as vast as her wretchedness. Once an
elderly woman in deep mourning approached her while she sat on a bench
in the Park, and inquired solicitously if she needed employment. In the
beginning the stranger had appeared helpful; but a little conversation
revealed that, in spite of her mourning garb, she was in search of a
daughter of joy. After this several men had followed Dorinda on
different occasions. "Do I look like that kind?" she had asked herself
bitterly. But in each separate instance, when she glanced round at her
pursuer, he had vanished. In a city where joy may be had for a price,
there are few who turn and follow the footsteps of tragedy. Yes, she
could take care of herself. Poverty might prove to be a match for her
strength, but as far as men were concerned, she decided that she had
taken their measure and was no longer afraid of them.
A surface car clanged threateningly in her ears, and stepping back on
the corner, she looked uncertainly over the block in front of her. While
she hesitated there, a man who had passed turned and stared at her,
arrested by the fresh colour in the face under the old felt hat. Her
cheeks were thinner; there were violet half-moons under her eyes; but
her eyes appeared by contrast larger and more radiantly blue. The
suffering of the last two weeks, fatigue, hunger, and unhappiness had
refined her features and imparted a luminous delicacy to her skin.
Threading the traffic to the opposite pavement, she turned aimlessly,
without purpose and without conjecture, into one of the gloomy streets.
It was quieter here, and after the clamour and dirt of Sixth Avenue, the
quiet was soothing. Longer shadows stretched over the grey pavement, and
the rows of dingy houses, broken now and then by the battered front of
an inconspicuous shop, reminded her fantastically of acres of
broomsedge. When she had walked several blocks she found that the
character of the street changed slightly, and it occurred to her, as she
glanced indifferently round, that by an accident she had drifted into
the only old-fashioned neighbourhood in New York. Or were there others
and had she been unable to find them? She had stopped, without observing
it, in front of what had once been a flower garden, and had become, in
its forlorn and neglected condition, a refuge for friendless statues and
outcast objects of stone. For a few minutes the strangeness of the scene
attracted her. Then, as the pain in her feet mounted upward to her
knees, she moved on again and paused to look at a collection of battered
mahogany furniture, which had overflowed from a shop to the pavement. "I
wonder what they'll do with that old stuff," she thought idly. "Some of
it is good, too. There's a wardrobe exactly like the one
great-grandfather left."
She was looking at the mahogany wardrobe, when the door of the shop
widened into a crack, and a grey and white cat, with a pleasant face,
squeezed herself through and came out to watch the sparrows in the
street.
"She is the image of Flossie," thought Dorinda. Her eyes smarted with
tears, and stooping over, she stroked the cat's arching back, while she
remembered that her mother would be busy at this hour getting supper.
"Anybody can see you like cats," said a voice behind her; and turning
her head, she saw that a stout middle-aged woman, wearing a black
knitted shawl over a white shirtwaist, was standing in the midst of the
old furniture. Like her cat she had a friendly face and wide-awake eyes
beneath sleek grey and white hair.
"She is just like one we had at home," Dorinda answered, with her
ingenuous smile.
"You don't live in New York, then?" remarked the woman, while she
glanced charitably at the girl's faded tan ulster.
"No, I came from the country two weeks ago. I want to find something to
do."
The woman folded her shawl tightly over her bosom and shook her head.
"Well, it's hard to get work these days. There are so many walking the
streets in search of it. The city is a bad place to be when you are out
of work."
Dorinda's heart trembled and sank. "I thought there was always plenty to
do in the city."
"You did? Well, whoever told you that never tried it, I guess."
"There are so many stores. I hoped I could find something to do in one
of them."
"Have you ever worked in a store?"
"Yes, at home. It was a country store where they kept everything."
"I know that kind. My father used to keep one up the state."
As she bent over the cat, Dorinda asked in a voice that she tried to
keep steady. "You don't need any help, do you?"
The other shook her head sorrowfully. "I wish we did; but times are so
hard that we've had to give up the assistant we had. I'm just out of the
hospital, too, and that took up most of our savings for the last year."
Her large, kind face showed genuine sympathy. "I'd help you if I could,"
she continued, "because you've got a look that reminds me of my sister
who went into a convent. She's dead now, but she had those straight
black eyebrows, jutting out just like yours over bright blue eyes. That
sort of colouring ain't so common as it used to be. Anyhow, it made me
think of her as soon as I looked at you. It gave me a start at first.
That's because I'm still weak after the operation, I guess."
"Was it a bad operation?"
"Gall stones. One of the worst, they say, when it has gone on as long as
my trouble. Have you ever been in a hospital?"
Dorinda shook her head. "There wasn't any such thing where I lived. We
always nursed the sick at home. Great-grandfather was bedridden for
years before his death, and my mother nursed him and did all the work
too."
The woman looked at her with interest. "Well, that's the way you do in
the country, of course," she replied, adding after a moment's
hesitation, "You look pretty tired out. Would you like to come in and
rest a few minutes? I was getting so low in my spirits a little while
ago that I looked out to see if I couldn't find somebody to speak a few
words to. When this sinking feeling comes on me in the afternoon, I
don't like to be by myself. I thought a cup of tea might help me. They
haven't let me touch beer since I went to the hospital, so I'd just put
the kettle on to boil. It ought to be ready about now, and a bite of
something might pick you up as well as me. My mother came from England
and she was always a great one for a cup of tea. 'Put the kettle on,'
she used to say, 'I'm feeling low in my spirits.' Day or night it didn't
make any difference. Whenever she felt herself getting low she used to
have her tea."
She led the way, the cat following, through the shop to a corner at the
back, where she could still watch the door and the pavement. Here a
kettle was humming on a small gas stove; and a quaint little table, with
a red damask cloth over it, was laid for tea. There were cups and
saucers, a tea set, and a wooden caddy with a castle painted on the
side. "It looks old-fashioned, I know, but we are old-fashioned folks,
and my husband sometimes says that we haven't got any business in the
progressive 'nineties. Everything's too advanced for us now, even
religion. I guess it's living so much with old furniture and things that
were made in the last century."
Dorinda smiled at her gratefully and sat down beside the little red
cloth, with her smarting feet crossed under the table. If only she might
take off her shoes, she thought, she could begin to be comfortable. At
Pedlar's Mill tea was not used except in illness or bereavement, and she
was not prepared for the immediate consolation it afforded her. Strange
that a single cup of tea and a buttered muffin from a bakery should
revive her courage! After all, the city wasn't so stony and inhospitable
as she had believed. People were friendly here, if you found the right
ones, just as they were in the country. They liked cats too. She
remembered that she had seen a number of cats in New York, and they all
looked contented and prosperous. It was pleasant in the little room,
with its restful air of another period; but at last tea was over, and
she thanked the woman and rose to leave. "I can't tell you the good it's
done me," she said, and added plaintively, "Do you know of any place
where I might find work?"
The woman--her name, she said, was Garvey--bent her head in meditation
over the tea-pot. "I do know a woman who wants a plain seamstress for a
few weeks," she said at last a trifle dubiously, for, in spite of her
kindness, she was a cautious body. "The girl she had went to the
hospital the day I came out, and she has never been suited since then.
Do you know how to sew?"
"I've helped make children's dresses, and of course my own clothes,"
Dorinda added apologetically. "You see, I never had much to make them
out of."
"I see," Mrs. Garvey assented, without additional comment. After
pondering a minute or two, she continued cheerfully, "Well, you might
suit. I can't tell, but I'd like to help you. It's hard being without
friends in a big city, and the more I talk to you, the more you remind
me of my sister. I'll write down the address for you anyway. It's
somewhere in West Twenty-third Street. You know your way about, don't
you?"
"Oh, I'll find it. People are good about directing me, especially the
policemen."
"Well, be sure you don't go until after six o'clock. Then the other
girls will be gone, and she will have more time to attend to you. But
you mustn't set your heart on this place. She may have taken on someone
since I talked with her."
Dorinda smiled. No, she wouldn't set her heart on it. "I'll go and sit
in a park while I'm waiting," she replied gratefully. "If I'm going to
be a dressmaker, I ought to notice what women are wearing."
With the slip of paper in her purse, and her purse slipped into the
bosom of her dress, she left the shop and followed the street back to
Fifth Avenue. The hour spent with the stranger had restored her
confidence and there was no shadow of discouragement in her mind.
Something told her, she would have said, that her troubles were
beginning to mend. "I can sew well enough when I try, even if I don't
like it," she thought. "Ma taught me how to make neat buttonholes, and I
can run up a seam as well as any one."
As she approached Fifth Avenue she began to observe the way the women
were dressed, and for the first time since she left Pedlar's Mill she
felt old-fashioned and provincial. The younger women who passed her were
all wearing enormous balloon sleeves and bell skirts, which were held up
with the newest twist by tightly gloved hands. Now and then, she
noticed, the sleeves were made of a different material from the dress,
but the gloves were invariably of white kid, and the small coquettish
hats were perched very high above crisply waved hair which was worn
close at the temples.
In spite of her blistered feet, she walked on rapidly, lifting her face
to the wind, which blew strong and fresh over the lengthening shadows.
How high and smooth and round the sky looked over the steep brown
houses! Presently, from a hotel of grey stone, as gloomy as a prison, a
gaily dressed girl flitted out into a hansom cab which was waiting in
front of the door. There was a vision of prune-coloured velvet sleeves
in a dress of grey satin, of a skirt that rustled in eddying folds over
the pavement, and of a jingling gold chatelaine attached to the front of
a pointed basque. "How happy she must be," Dorinda thought, "dressed
like that, and with everything on earth that she wants!"
She had turned to move on again, when a man carrying a basket of
evergreens brushed against her, and she saw that he was engaged in
replenishing the stone window boxes on the ground floor of the hotel. As
she passed, a whiff of wet earth penetrated her thoughts, and
immediately, in a miracle of recollection, she was back at Five Oaks in
the old doctor's retreat. Every detail of that stormy afternoon started
awake as if it had been released from a spell of enchantment. She saw
the darkened room, lighted by the thin blue flame from the resinous
pine; she saw the one unshuttered window, with the hunched box-bush and
the white turkeys beyond; she heard the melancholy patter of the rain on
the shingled roof; and she watched the old man's face, every line and
blotch distorted by the quivering light, while he wagged his drunken
head at her. A shudder jerked through her limbs. Her memory, which was
beginning to heal, was suddenly raw again. Would she never be free? Was
she doomed to bear that moment of all the moments in her life wherever
she went? Her courage faded now as if the sun had gone under a cloud.
She had been dragged back by the wind, by an odour, into the suffocating
atmosphere of the past. Though her body was walking the city street, in
her memory she was rushing out of that old house at Five Oaks. She was
running into the mist; she was hurrying down the sandy road through the
bulrushes; she was crouching by the old stump, with the wet leaves in
her face and that suspense more terrible than any certainty in her mind.
She listened again for the turn of the wheels, the clink of the mare's
shoes; the slip and scramble in the mud holes; the hollow sound of hoofs
striking on rock. . . .
Never in her life had she been so tired. In an effort to shake her
thoughts free from despair, she quickened her pace, and looked about for
a bench where she could rest. On the opposite side of Fifth Avenue a row
of cab horses waited near a statue under some fine old trees. She had
never seen the name of the square, but it appeared restful in the
afternoon light; and crossing the street, she found a place in the shade
on a deserted bench. It was five o'clock now, and Mrs. Garvey had told
her not to go to see the dressmaker until six. Well, it was a relief to
sit down. Slipping off her shoes, she pushed them under the bench and
spread her wide skirt over her feet. The quiet was pleasant in the
moving shadows of the trees. From where and how far, she wondered, did
the people come who were lounging on the benches around her? So many
people in New York were always resting, but she concluded that they must
have money put by or they couldn't afford to spend so much time doing
nothing.
Gradually, while she sat there, watching the sparrows fluttering round
the nose bags of the horses, hollow phrases, without meaning and without
sequence, swarmed into her mind. Five o'clock. At home her mother would
be getting ready for supper. That grey and white cat had made her think
of Flossie. They were alike as two peas. Remembering the old man had
upset her. She must put him out of her mind. You couldn't change things
by thinking. How could horses feed in those nose bags? What would Dan
and Beersheba think of them? There was another woman with velvet sleeves
in a silk dress. How Miss Seena would exclaim if you told her that so
many women were wearing sleeves of different material from their
dresses! That flaring collar of lace was pretty though. . . . The way
the old man had leered at her over the whiskey bottle. "He's coming back
this evening. He went away to be married." No, she must stop thinking
about it. If she could only blot it all out of her memory. The buildings
in New York were so high. She wondered people weren't afraid to go to
the top of them. There was a poor-looking old man on the bench by the
fountain. In rags and with the soles dropping away from his shoes.
People were rich in New York, but they were poor too. Nobody but Black
Tom, the county idiot, wore rags like that at Pedlar's Mill. How her
feet ached! Would they ever stop hurting? . . . "He went away to be
married. He went away to be married." How dark the room was growing, and
how black the box-bush looked in the slanting rain beyond the window.
Feet were pattering on the shingled roof, or was it only the rain? . . .
It was getting late. Almost time to go to the dressmaker's. Suppose the
dressmaker were to take a fancy to her. Such things happened in books.
"You are the very girl I am looking for. One who isn't afraid to work."
There was a fortune, she had heard, in dressmaking in New York. Miss
Seena knew of a dressmaker who kept her own carriage. . . . How funny
those lights were coming out in the street! They were winking at her,
one after another. It was time to be going; but she didn't feel as if
she could stir a step. Her knees and elbows were full of pins and
needles. It's resting that makes you know how tired you are, her mother
used to say. . . .
Suddenly nausea washed over her like black water, rising from her body
to her exhausted brain. She could scarcely sit there, holding tight to
the bench, while this icy tide swept her out into an ocean of space. The
noises of the city grew fainter, receding from her into the grey fog
which muffled the sky, the lights, the tall buildings, the vehicles in
the street. It would be dreadful if she were sick here in the square,
with that ugly old man and all the cab drivers staring at her. . . . Then
the sickness passed as quickly as it had come; and leaning back against
the bench, she closed her eyes until she should be able to get up and
start on again. After a minute or two, she felt so much better that she
slipped her feet into her shoes, fastened the buttons with a hairpin,
and rising slowly and awkwardly, walked across the square to the nearest
corner.
The noises, which had almost died away, became gradually louder. There
was a tumult of drums in the air, but she could not tell whether the
beating was in her ears or a parade was marching by somewhere in the
distance. Evidently it was a procession, though she could see nothing
except the moving line of vehicles in the street, which had left the
ground and were swimming in some opaque medium between earth and sky.
"How queer everything looks," she thought. "It must be the lights that
never stop winking."
She put her foot cautiously down from the curb, imagining, though she
could not see it, that the street must be somewhere in front of her. As
she made a step forward into the traffic, the sickness swept over her
again, and an earthquake seemed to fling the pavement up against the
back of her head. She saw the lights splinter like glass when it is
smashed; she heard the drums of the invisible procession marching toward
her; she tried to struggle up, to call out, to move her arms, and with
the effort, she dropped into unconsciousness.
II
She opened her eyes and looked at the white walls, white beds, white
screens, white sunlight through the windows, and women in white caps and
dresses moving silently about with white vessels in their hands.
"Why, this must be a hospital," she thought. "How on earth did I come
here?"
Her arm, lying outside the sheet, looked blue and cold and felt as if it
did not belong to her. She could not turn her head because it was
bandaged, and when, after an eternity of effort, she succeeded in
lifting her hand, she discovered that her hair had been cut away on one
side. Closing her eyes again, she lay without thinking, without
stirring, without feeling, while she let life cover her slowly in a warm
flood. The blessed relief was that nothing mattered; nothing that had
happened or could ever happen mattered at all. After the months when she
had cared so intensely, it was like the peace of the Sabbath not to care
any longer, neither to worry nor to wonder about the future.
"I must have hurt myself when I fell," she said.
To her surprise a voice close by the bed answered, "Yes, you fainted in
the street and a cab struck you. You have been ill, but you're getting
all right now."
A man was standing beside her, a large, ruddy, genial-looking man, with
a brown beard and the kindest eyes she had ever seen. He wore a red and
black tie and there was a square gold medal hanging from his
watch chain.
"Have I been here long?" she asked, and her voice sounded so queer that
she couldn't believe it had come out of her lips.
"A week to-day. It will be another week at least before you're strong
enough to be out."
"Was I very ill?"
"At first. We had to operate. That's why your head is shaved on one
side. But you came through splendidly," he added in his hearty manner.
"You have a superb constitution."
For an instant she pondered this. "Are you the doctor?" she inquired
presently.
"I am Doctor Faraday." His hand was on her wrist and he was smiling at
her as if he hadn't a care or a qualm.
She wondered if he knew anything about her. He appeared so big and wise
and strong that he might have known all there was to know about
everybody.
"Is there anything that worries you?" he asked gently, with his air of
taking the world and all it contained as an inexhaustible joke. She
shook her head as well as she could for the bandages, which made all her
movements seem clumsy and unnatural. "I was just thinking----"
"Do you remember where you were going when you were knocked down?"
She met his eyes candidly, yielding her will to the genial strength of
his personality. "I was looking for work. There was a dressmaker in West
Twenty-third Street. She will have filled the place by now."
"You mustn't worry about that." She liked the way the wrinkles gathered
about his merry grey eyes. "Don't worry about anything. We'll see that
you have something to do as soon as you're strong enough. Meanwhile,
just lie still and get well. Keep a stiff upper lip," he concluded, with
a subdued laugh which would have boomed out if he hadn't suppressed it.
"That's the only way to meet life. Keep a stiff upper lip," he concluded
with a subdued laugh which would have boomed out if he hadn't suppressed
it. "That's the only way to meet life. Keep a stiff upper lip."
"I can't help thinking,"--she glanced weakly about the room, where the
white iron beds--they were the smallest beds she had ever seen--stood in
a row. "Is this a charity place?"
"Now, I told you not to worry. No, we don't call it charity, but there
is no charge for those who need treatment and cannot afford to pay for
it. We don't expect you to be one of the rich patients. Is there
anything else?"
She tried again to shake her head. All at once she had forgotten what
she wanted to know. She was too weak to remember things, even important
things. There was a pain at the back of her head, and this pain was
shooting in wires down her neck and through her shoulders to her spine.
Nothing made any difference.
"Don't make an effort. Don't try to talk," he said, and turned away to
one of the beds by the door.
Hours later, when one of the nurses brought her a cup of broth, she
struggled to speak collectedly. "What did the doctor tell me his name
is? I don't seem to remember things."
"That's because you're still weak. His name is Faraday. He is a
celebrated surgeon, and he operated on you because he brought you to the
hospital. He was driving by when you were struck. The operation saved
your life."
"Does he come often?"
"Not as a rule. He hasn't time to visit the patients. But he is
interested in your case. It is an unusual one, and he is very much
interested."
"Does he know who I am?"
"Yes, the woman you rented a room from read about the accident in the
papers, and came to identify you. Can you remember anything of this last
week?"
"Only that my head hurt me. Yes, and figures passing to and fro against
white walls."
"It was a wonder you weren't killed. But you're all right now. You'll be
as well as you ever were in a little while."
"I feel so queer with my head shaved. I can feel it even with the
bandages."
"That will soon be well, and the scar won't show at all under your hair.
You've everything to be thankful for," the nurse concluded in a brisk
professional tone.
Dorinda was gazing up at her with a strange, groping expression. Her
eyes, large, blue, and wistful in the pallor of her face, appeared to
have drained all the vitality from her body. "There was something I
wanted to ask the doctor," she began. "I don't seem to be able to
remember what it was. . . ."
"Don't remember," replied the nurse with authority. She hesitated an
instant, and stared down into the empty cup. Then, after reflection, she
continued clearly and firmly, "It won't hurt you to know that you have
been very ill, now that you are getting well again?"
Dorinda's features, except for her appealing eyes, were without
expression. Yes, she remembered now; she knew what she had wished to
ask, "Oh, no, it won't hurt me," she answered.
"Well, I thought you'd take it sensibly." After waiting a moment to
watch the effect of her words, the nurse turned away and walked briskly
out of the ward.
Lying there in her narrow bed, Dorinda repeated slowly, "I thought you
would feel that way about it." Words, like ideas, were dribbling back
into her mind; but she seemed to be learning them all over again.
Relief, in which there was a shade of inexplicable regret, tinged her
thoughts. She would have liked a child if it had been all hers, with
nothing to remind her of Jason. For a second she had a vision of it,
round, fair and rosy. Then, "it might have had red hair," she reminded
herself, "and I should have hated it."
Relief and regret faded together. She closed her eyes and lay helpless,
while the stream of memory, now muddy, now clear, flowed through her
into darkness. At first this stream was mere swirling blackness, swift,
deep, torrential as a river in flood. Then gradually the rushing noise
passed away, and the stream became lighter and clearer, and bore
fragmentary, rapidly moving images on its surface. Some of these images
floated through her in obscurity; others shone out brightly and steadily
as long as they remained within range of her vision; but one and all,
they came in fragments and floated on before she could grasp the
complete outline. Nothing was whole. Nothing lasted. Nothing was related
to anything else.
Thirst. Would they soon bring her something to drink? The old well
bucket at home. The mossy brim; the cool slippery feeling of the sides;
the turning of the rope as it went down; the dark greenish depths, when
one looked over, with the gleaming ripple, like a drowned star, at the
bottom. Cool places. Violets growing in hollows. A hollow at Whistling
Spring, where she had stepped on a snake in the tall weeds. What was it
she couldn't remember about snakes? Something important, but she had
forgotten it. "I've always funked things." Who said that? Why was that
woman moaning so behind the screen in the corner? . . . The snake had come
back now. Jason had put his hand on a snake, and that was why everything
else had happened. If Jason hadn't put his hand on a snake when he was a
child, he would never have deserted her, she would never have been
picked up in the street, she would not be lying now in a hospital with
half of her hair shaved away. How ridiculous that sounded when one
thought of it; yet it was true. What was it her mother said so often?
The ways of Providence are past finding out. . . . The nurse again. Oh,
yes, water. . . .
The morning when she sat up for the first time, Doctor Faraday stayed
longer than usual and asked her a number of questions. She felt quite at
home with him. "When any one has saved your life, I suppose he feels
that you have a claim on him," she thought; and she replied as
accurately as she could to whatever he asked. Naturally reticent, she
found now that she suffered from a nervous inability to express any
emotion. She could talk freely of external objects, of the hospital, the
nurses, the other patients in the ward; but constraint sealed her lips
when she endeavoured to put feeling into words.
"When you are discharged, I think we can find a place for you," said
Doctor Faraday. "My wife is coming to talk to you. We've been looking
for a girl to stay in my office in the morning and help with the
children in the afternoon. Not a nurse, you know. The office nurse has
other duties; but some one to receive the patients and make
appointments."
She looked at him incredulously. "You aren't just making it up?" With a
laugh he ignored the question. "You haven't any plans?"
"Oh, no. It will be too late to go to the dressmaker, and besides she
might not have wanted me."
"You are sure you don't wish to go home?"
She gazed at his firm fleshy face, over which the clean shining skin was
drawn so smoothly that it looked as if it were stretched; the thick
brown hair, just going grey and divided by a pink part in the centre;
the crisp beard, clipped close on the cheeks and rounding to a point at
the chin. Yes, she liked his face. It was a comfortable face to watch,
and she had never seen hands like his before, large, strong,
mysteriously beneficent hands.
"No," she answered in her reserved voice, "I can't go back yet."
If she went back, she should be obliged to face the red chimneys of Five
Oaks, the burned cabin, and the place where she had sat and waited for
Jason's return. These things were still there, perpetual and unchanged.
"I've talked to my wife about you," Doctor Faraday said. "I believe you
are a good girl, and we both wish to help you to lead a good life."
"You've been so kind," she responded. "I can't tell you what I feel, but
I do feel that. I want you to know."
"My dear girl." He bent over and touched her hand. "I know it. If you'd
had as much experience with emotional women as I've had, you'd
understand the blessedness of reserve. Wait till you see my wife. You'll
find her easy to talk to. Every one does."
A few mornings afterwards, as she was preparing to get up, Mrs. Faraday
came and sat by the little bed. She was a plump, maternal-looking woman,
with an ample figure, which did not conform to the wasp waist of the
period, and a round pink face, to which her tightly crimped hair and
small fashionable hat lent an air of astonishment, as if she were
thinking continually, "I didn't know I looked like this." Her mantle was
of claret-coloured broadcloth heavily garnished with passementerie, and
she wore very short white kid gloves, above which her plump wrists
bulged in infantile creases. While she sat there, panting a little from
her tight stays and her unnatural elegance, Dorinda gazed at her
sympathetically and thought it was a pity that she did her hair in a way
that made her temples look skinned.
"Doctor Faraday is very much interested in your case," she began in a
voice that was as fresh and sweet as her complexion. "He has been so
kind to me."
"We both wish to help you, and we think it might be good for you to take
the place in his office for a little while--a few weeks," she added
cautiously, "until you are able to find something else. In that way the
doctor can keep an eye on you until you are well again. Of course the
work will be light. He has a nurse and a secretary. However, you could
help with the children after the office hours are over. The nurse and
Miss Murray, the governess, take them to the Park every afternoon; but
there are six of them, and we can't have too much help. That's a large
family for New York," she finished gaily.
"We have much larger ones at Pedlar's Mill. The Garlicks were twelve
until one died last year, and old Mrs. Flower, the Mother of the
auctioneer, had thirteen children."
"You like children?"
"Oh, yes, I like children." She couldn't put any enthusiasm into her
voice, and she hated herself for the lack of it. She was dead, turned
into stone or wood, and she didn't really care about anything. Did she
or did she not like children? She couldn't have answered the question
truthfully if her life had depended upon it. In her other existence she
had liked them; but that was so long ago and far away that it had no
connection with her now.
"Then that is settled." What a happy manner Mrs. Faraday had! "The nurse
tells me you are leaving to-morrow. Will you come straight to us or
would you like a day to yourself?"
"A day to myself, if you don't mind. I ought to get a dress, oughtn't
I?"
"Oh, any plain simple dress will do. Navy blue poplin with white linen
collar and cuffs would be nice. But don't tire yourself or spend any
money you can't afford. Well arrange all that later."
Mrs. Faraday had risen and was holding out one firmly gloved hand. As
she grasped it, Dorinda could feel the soft flesh beneath the deeply
embedded buttons. "Then I'll look for you day after to-morrow," said the
older woman in her sprightly tone. "Navy blue will look well on you with
your hair and eyes," she added encouragingly. "I always liked blue eyes
and black hair."
Dorinda smiled up at her. "And now half my hair is gone. I must look a
fright, and the scar isn't even hidden. I'll be marked all my life."
"Oh, but your hair will come back thicker than ever. Even now your scalp
is covered, and in a little while no one will know that there is a
scar." She beamed down on the bed. "Here is the address. Have you a
place you can put the card, so it won't slip away?"
"I've got my purse under my pillow." As Dorinda drew out the little
leather bag, and slipped the card into it, she thought wearily, "How
funny it is that this should have happened to me."
Since her illness, the whole of life, all she had gone through, all she
saw around her, all feeling everywhere, appeared less tragic than
ludicrous. Though her capacity for emotion was dead, some diabolical
sense of humour had sprung up like, fireweed from the ruins. She could
laugh at everything now, but it was ironic laughter.
III
Her first thought, when she opened her eyes the next morning, was that
she was free to leave the hospital as soon as she pleased. If only she
might have stayed there until she died, tranquil, indifferent, with
nothing left but this sardonic humour. A little later, as she glanced at
the other patients in the ward, at the woman who moaned incessantly and
at the young girl, with flaming red hair, who had lost her leg in an
accident, she told herself that there were people in the world who were
worse off than she was. Through the high window she could see that the
sky was clear, and that a strong breeze was blowing a flag on the top of
a grey tower. She was glad it was not raining. It would have been a pity
to go back into the world on a wet day.
After she had had her breakfast, and a glib young doctor had given her
some directions, she got out of bed and a pupil nurse helped her to
dress. They had arranged, she discovered presently, that a friend of one
of the other patients--the moaning woman, it soon appeared--should go
with her as far as her lodging-house. That was the stranger's way also,
and she had promised to see that Dorinda reached her room safely.
"Do they know that you are coming?"
"Yes, the nurse telephoned for me. I can get the sane room, and they've
put my bag in it."
"Well, I'll be glad to go with you," said the woman, a depressed-looking
person, in rusty mourning. "You must be careful about crossing the
street while you're so weak."
"I don't feel as if I could walk a step," Dorinda answered, sinking into
a chair while she dressed.
Her street clothes were so uncomfortable that she wondered how she could
ever have worn them. Her stockings were too large, and the feet of them
were drawn out of shape; her dress felt as if it weighed tons. But her
hair troubled her most. No matter how hard she tried, she could not make
it look neat. So much of it had been cut away on the right side that she
was obliged to wind what was left into a thin twist and fasten it like a
wreath round her head. Her face was thin and pallid, just the shape and
colour of an egg, she thought despondently, and "I'm all eyes," she
added, while she gazed at herself in the small mirror.
It was late afternoon when she left the hospital, leaning on the arm of
the stranger, who remarked with every other step, "I hope you ain't
beginning to feel faint," or, "You'd better take it more slowly." The
bereaved woman was provided with a collection of gruesome anecdotes,
which she related with relish while they crept along the cross street in
the direction of Sixth Avenue. "There ain't much I don't know about
operations," she concluded at the end of her recital.
As the air brushed her face, Dorinda's first sensation was a physical
response to the invigorating frostiness. Then it seemed to her that
whenever she took a step forward the pavement rose slightly and slid up
to meet her. In so short a time she had forgotten the way to walk, and
she felt troubled because in her case the law of gravitation appeared to
be arbitrarily suspended. When she put her foot out, she did not know,
she told herself, whether it would have the weight to come down or would
go floating up into the air. "Could anything have happened to my brain,"
she wondered, "when I was struck on the head?" In a little while,
however, the sensation of lightness gave place to the more familiar one
of strained muscles. Though she could walk easily now, she was beginning
to feel very tired, and she could barely do more than crawl over the
long block.
A high wind was blowing from the west, billowing the sleeves and skirts
of women's dresses, whipping the dust into waves, and tossing the gay
streamers in Fifth Avenue. The sunlight appeared to splinter as it
struck against the crystal blue of the sky and to scatter a shower of
sparkling drops on the city. Though it was all bright, gay, beautiful,
to Dorinda the scene might have been made of glass in the windy hollow
of the universe. "I'm dried up at the core," she thought, "and yet, I've
got to go on pretending that I'm alive, that I'm like other people." She
felt nothing; she expected nothing; she desired nothing; and this
insensibility, which was worse than pain, had attacked her body as well
as her heart and mind. "If somebody were to stick a pin in me, I
shouldn't feel it," she told herself. "I'm no better than a dead tree
walking."
At the corner of Sixth Avenue, a gust of wind struck her sharply, and
still leaning on the arm of her companion, she drew back into the
shelter of a shop.
"Let's stand here until the next car comes."
"Do you feel any worse?"
"No, not worse, only different."
"I've known 'em to faint dead away the first time they left the
hospital."
"Well, I've no idea of fainting. Just tell me when you see the right car
coming."
The thing that worried her most, and she had puzzled over this from the
minute she came down the steps of the hospital, was the curious
impression in her mind that she had seen everything and everybody
before. Every face was familiar to her. She seemed to have known each
person who passed her in some former time and place, which she dimly
remembered; and each reminded her, in some vague resemblance of contour,
feature, or shifting expression, of the way Jason had looked when she
first loved him. "Just as I was trying to forget him," she thought, with
irritation, "everybody begins to look like him."
When the car came, and she got on and found a seat beside a fat German,
who was buried in his newspaper, this senseless irritation still
persisted. "Maybe if I stop looking at their faces and keep my eyes
fixed on their clothes, the resemblance will pass away," she told
herself resolutely. "What a funny hat, just like a cabbage, that woman
is wearing, and the man with her has on a tie like a little boy's. He
must be an artist. I read in some book that artists wore velvet coats
and flowing ties." Then, inadvertently, she raised her eyes to the face
of the stranger, and discovered that he was gazing at her with a look
that reminded her of Jason. Even the fat German wore a familiar
expression when he turned to touch the bell and glanced down at her as
he rose to go out of the car.
At the lodging-house, where she had to explain her case all over again,
she was still haunted by this delusive resemblance. There might have
been a general disintegration and reassembling of personalities since
she had gone to the hospital, and she felt that she had seen them all
before in other circumstances and other periods.
Alone, at last, in her little room, she dropped wearily on the hard bed,
which, like the wife of the proprietor, bulged in the wrong places, and
lay, without seeing or hearing, surrendered to the grey hollowness of
existence. Sheer physical weakness kept her motionless for an hour; and
when at the end of that time, she lifted her hands to take off her hat,
she felt as if she were recovering from the effects of an anæsthetic.
Gradually, as the stupor wore off, she became aware of the objects
around her; of the hissing gas jet, which burned in the daytime; of the
dirty carpet, with an ink splotch in the centre; of the unsteady
washstand that creaked under its own weight; of the stale ashes of a
cigar in the top of the soap dish; of the sharp ridge down the middle of
the bed on which she was lying. And she thought clearly, "No matter how
bad it is, I've got to go through with it."
The hardest thing, she knew, that she had to face was not the wreck of
her happiness, but the loss of a vital interest in life. Even people who
were unhappy retained sometimes sufficient interest in the mere husk of
experience to make life not only endurable but even diverting. With her,
however, she felt that she had nothing to expect and nothing to lose.
One idea had possessed her so completely that now, when it had been torn
out from the roots like a dying nerve, there was no substitute for
happiness that she could put in its place. "I've finished with love,"
she repeated over and over. "I've finished with love, and until I find
something else to fill my life, I shall be only an empty shell. . . ."
Rising from the bed, she opened her bag and unfolded her dresses. None
of them would do for New York, she realized. All of them, she saw now,
were absurd and countrified. As she shook out the blue nun's veiling,
she said to herself, "If I hadn't bought this dress, perhaps he would
never have fallen in love with me, and than I should still be living at
Old Farm, and Ma would have her cow and nothing would have happened that
has happened." She laughed with the perverse humour that she had brought
back out of the depths of unconsciousness. If only one could get outside
of it and stand a little way off, how ridiculous almost any situation in
life would appear! Even those moments when she had waited in anguish at
the fork of the road were tinged with irony when they revived now in her
memory. "All the same I wouldn't go through them again for anything that
life could offer," she thought.
IV
Dorinda stood in Doctor Faraday's office and looked out into East
Thirty-seventh Street. Beneath her there was a grey pavement swept by
wind and a few pale bars of sunshine. She saw the curved iron railing of
the porch and the steps of the area, where an ashcan, still unemptied,
awaited the call of the ashcart. A fourwheeler, driven by a stout,
red-faced driver, was passing in the street; at the corner an Italian
youth with a hunchback was selling shoe-strings; on the pavement in
front of the house, a maltese cat, wearing a bell on a red ribbon,
sunned himself lazily while he licked the fur on his stomach. Overhead,
the vault of the sky appeared remote, colourless, as impenetrable as
stone.
When she turned into the house, she knew to weariness what she should
find awaiting her. A narrow oval room, with sand-coloured walls,
curtains of brown damask, and furniture of weathered oak, which was
carved and twisted out of all resemblance to her mother's cherished
pieces of mahogany. On the long tables piles of old magazines lay in
orderly rows. In the fireplace three neat gas logs shed a yellow flame
shot with blue sparkles. Very far apart, three patients were sitting,
with strained expectant eyes turned in the direction of the folding
doors which led into the inner office. In the last two years she had
learned to know the office and the street outside as if they were books
which she had studied at school.
Standing there, she thought idly of her new dress of navy blue poplin.
She knew that she looked well in it, that the severe white linen collar
and cuffs suited the grave oval of her face. Though she had lost her
girlish softness and bloom, she had gained immeasurably in dignity and
distinction, and people, she noticed, turned to look at her now when she
went out alone in the street. The severe indifference of her expression
emphasized the richness of her lips and the vivid contrast of her
colouring. Her eyes had lost their springtime look, but they were still
deeply blue beneath the black, shadows of her lashes. Young as she was
she had acquired the ripe wisdom and the serene self-confidence of
maturity; she had attained the immunity from apprehension which comes to
those only who can never endure the worst again. Yet she was not
unhappy. In the security of her disenchantment there was the quiet that
follows a storm.
While she waited there for the sound of the doctor's bell, she thought
dispassionately of what the last two years had meant in her life.
Everything and nothing! Her outward existence had been altered by them,
but to her deeper self they had been scarcely more than dust blowing
across her face. Dust blowing, that was all they had meant to her!
She lived the period over again in her recollection, as she might have
lived over one of the plays she had seen. She thought of the Faradays;
of her diffidence, of their kindness; of the English governess and the
French teacher, neither of whose speech was intelligible to her. She
recalled the morning breakfasts; the walks in the Park in the afternoon;
her nervous dread of the office; her first mistakes; the patience of the
doctor and Mrs. Faraday; the way she had gradually become one of the
family circle; the six small children, and especially the little girl
Penelope, who had taken a fancy to her from the beginning; the two
summers when she had gone to Maine with the family; the bathing, and how
strange she had felt coming out on the beach with no shoes on and skirts
up to her knees. Then she thought of Penelope's illness; of the sudden
attack of pneumonia while Mrs. Faraday was in bed with influenza; of the
days and nights of nursing because Penelope cried for her and refused to
take her medicine from the trained nurse; of the night when they thought
the child was dying, and how she had sat by the bed until the crisis at
dawn. Then of the crisis when it came. The quieter breathing; the way
the tiny hand fluttered in hers; the band of steel that loosened about
her heart; and Mrs. Faraday crying from her bed, "Dorinda, we can never
forget what you have done! You must stay with us always!" After that she
had grown closer to them. Where else could she go? Nowhere, unless she
went back to Pedlar's Mill, and that, she felt, was still impossible.
Some day she might go back again. Not yet, but some day, when her hate
was as dead as her love. There were moments when she missed Old Farm,
vivid moments when she smelt growing things in the Park, when she longed
with all her heart for a sight of the April fields and the pear orchard
in bloom and the big pine where birds were singing. But the broomsedge
she tried to forget. The broomsedge was too much alive. She felt that
she hated it because it would make her suffer again.
They missed her at home, she knew. Her father had not been well. He was
getting old. Every month she sent him half of her salary. They would not
have had that much if she had stayed at Pedlar's Mill; and then there
was the extra money at Christmas. Last Christmas the doctor had given
her a check for fifty dollars, and after Penelope's illness, they had
wished to give her more, but she had refused to let them pay her for
nursing the child. . . . There was a cow at home now, not the red one of
Doctor Greylock's, but a Jersey her father had bought from James
Ellgood. Her father's tobacco crop had done well last year, and he had
mended some of the fences. When the mortgage came due, she hoped he
would be able to meet it. She wondered if life had changed there at all.
Rose Emily was dead--that would make a difference to her. And Jason's
father, that horrible old man, was actually dying, her mother had
written. . . .
The doctor's bell rang, and she turned, while the folding doors opened,
to usher the next patient into the private office. Two women went in
together, while the doctor's assistant, a young physician named Burch,
led the remaining patient away for examination. She had grown to know
the young doctor well, and since last summer, when he spent his vacation
in Maine, she had suspected that he was on the verge, of falling in love
with her. Cautious, deliberate, methodical, he was in no danger, she
felt, of plunging precipitately into marriage. Doctor Faraday approved,
she was aware, and his wife had done all in her power to make the match;
but Dorinda had felt nothing stronger than temperate liking. Richard
Burch was not ugly; he was even attractive looking after you got used to
his features. He had a short, rather stocky figure, and a square, not
uninteresting face, a good face, Mrs. Faraday called it. Almost any girl
who had the will to love might have argued herself into loving him. That
emotion was, in part at least, the result of a will to love, Dorinda had
learned in the last two years, since she had picked up more or less of
the patter of science; and the last thing she wished to do, she assured
herself, was ever to live through the destructive process again. With a
complete absence of self-deception, she could ask herself now if she had
been in love with love when she met Jason Greylock, and if any other
reasonably attractive man would have answered as well in his place. Was
it the moment, after all, and not the man, that really mattered? If Bob
Ellgood had shown that admiring interest in her the year before instead
of the day after she met Jason, would her life have been different? Did
the importunate necessity exist in the imagination, and were you
compelled to work it out into experience before you could settle down to
the serious business of life?
She looked round as the door opened, and saw Doctor Burch coming out
with the two women patients.
"At ten to-morrow," the elder woman said, as she slipped on her fur
coat.
"Ten to-morrow," Dorinda repeated mechanically, while she went over to
the desk and wrote down the appointment in the office book. When she
turned away, the woman had gone, and Doctor Burch was gazing at her with
his twinkling, near-sighted eyes from behind rimless eyeglasses.
"There's one more to come," she observed in a brisk, professional tone.
"One more?"
"Patient, I mean."
"Oh, yes. That will finish them till we go out. You ought to thank your
stars you don't have to make calls."
"Yes. I get tired listening to complaints."
He smiled. "You aren't sympathetic?"
She thought of Rose Emily. "Well, I've seen so much real misery."
"It's real enough everywhere."
"Yes, I know. I suppose the truth is that life doesn't seem to me to be
worth all the fuss they make over it. The more they suffer, the harder
they appear to cling to living. I believe in facing what you have to
face and making as little fuss about it as possible."
"I've noticed that. You hate fussiness."
She assented gravely. "When you've been very poor, you realize that it
is the greatest extravagance."
"You've been very poor, then?"
"Almost everybody is poor at Pedlar's Mill. The Ellgoods are the only
people who have prospered. The rest of us have had to wring whatever
we've had out of barren ground. It was a struggle to make anything
grow."
"Well, your face gives you away," he said thoughtfully. "Any nerve
specialist could tell you that you are made up of contradictions. You've
got the most romantic eyes I ever saw--they are as deep as an autumn
twilight--and the sternest mouth. Your eyes are gentle and your mouth is
hard--too hard, if you don't mind my saying so."
"Oh, I don't mind. People say we make our mouths. I heard Doctor Faraday
tell a woman that a few days ago. But it isn't true. Life makes us and
breaks us. We don't make life. The best we can do is to bear it."
"And you do that jolly well."
She did not smile as she answered. "Oh, I'm satisfied. I'm not
unhappy--except in spots," she corrected herself.
"Yet you have very little pleasure. You never go out."
"Yes, I do--sometimes. Every now and then Mrs. Faraday takes me to the
theatre."
"Do you ever go to hear music?"
"No, Mrs. Faraday doesn't care for it." She laughed. "The best I've ever
heard was a band in the street."
For an instant he hesitated, and she wondered what was coming. Then he
said persuasively: "There's a good concert to-morrow. Would you care to
come?"
She glanced at him inquiringly. "Sunday afternoon?"
"Yes, there's this new pianist, Krause. You aren't too pious, are you?"
"I'm not pious at all." A satirical memory sifted through her mind, and
she heard her own voice saying, "Will you let her die without giving her
time to prepare?"
"Then I'll come for you at half-past two. We'll hear the concert, and
then have tea somewhere, or a stroll in the Park."
When he had gone, she put the office in order, and then waited until the
last patient should leave. After all, why shouldn't she try to find some
pleasure in life? Her hesitation had come, she felt, from a nervous
avoidance of crowds, a shrinking from any change in her secluded manner
of living. She hummed a line from one of the Gospel hymns. "Rescue the
perishing, care for the dying."
"How ignorant he will think me when he discovers I have never heard any
music. I am ignorant, yet I am educated compared to what I was two years
ago. I know life now, and that is a great deal."
The patient came out and left, and in a few minutes Doctor Faraday
passed through the room on his way to put on his overcoat.
"Are you going out before lunch?" she asked, because she knew Mrs.
Faraday hated to have him miss his meals.
"Yes, I can't wait, but I'll light a cigar."
He took out one of the long slender cigars he preferred, and stopped in
front of her while she struck a match and held her hand by the flame.
"That's a suitable young man, Dorinda," he remarked irrelevantly, with
his whimsical smile.
"Young man?" She glanced up inquiringly. Though her sense of humour had
developed almost morbidly, she had discovered that it was of a wilder
variety than Doctor Faraday's.
"I think, my dear girl," he explained, "that you could go farther and do
worse than take Richard. If I'm not mistaken, he has a future before
him."
She laughed. "There wouldn't be much for me in that sort of future."
"But there might be in the results." Then he grew serious. "He is
interested in you, and I hope something will come of it."
A pricking sensation in her nerves made her start away from him.
"Don't," she said sharply. "I've finished with all that sort of thing."
"Not for good. You are too young."
"Yes, for good. I can't explain what I mean, but the very thought of
that makes me--well, sick all over."
Her face had gone white, and struck by the change, he looked at her
closely. "Some women," he said, "are affected that way by a shock."
"You mean by a blow on the head?"
"No, I don't mean a physical blow. I mean an emotional shock. Such a
thing may produce a nervous revulsion."
"Well, that has happened to me."
He laid his hand on her shoulder. "It will pass probably. You are
handsomer than ever. It is natural that you should need love."
A wave of aversion swept over her face. "But 'I don't need it. I am
through with all that."
He looked at her gravely. "And you will fill your life--with what?"
She laughed derisively. How little men knew! "With something better than
broomsedge. That's the first thing that puts out on barren soil, just
broomsedge. Then that goes and pines come to stay--pines and
life-everlasting. You won't understand," she explained lightly. "I was
talking to Doctor Burch about Pedlar's Mill just before you came in, and
I told him we had to get our living from barren ground."
He patted her shoulder. "Well, I hope that, too, will pass," he answered
as he turned to put on his overcoat.
She remembered his words the next day while she sat in the concert
hall waiting for the music to begin. At first she had tried to
make out the names on the programme, desisting presently because
they confused her. Beethoven. Bach. Chopin. She went over the
others again, stumbling because she could make nothing of the syllables.
A-p-p-a-s-s-i-o-n-a-t-a. What did the strange word mean?
P-a-t-h-é-tique--that she could dimly grasp. Sonata? Nocturne? What
did the strange words mean? How could she be expected to know she had
never heard them before?
Suddenly, while she struggled over the letters, the music floated toward
her from the cool twilight of the distance. This was not music, she
thought in surprise, but the sound of a storm coming up through the tall
pines at Old Farm. She had heard this singing melody a thousand times,
on autumn afternoons, in the woods. Then, as it drew nearer, the harmony
changed from sound into sensation; and from pure sensation, rippling in
wave after wave like a river, it was merged and lost in her
consciousness.
In the beginning, while she sat there, rapt in startled apprehension,
she thought of innumerable things she had forgotten; detached incidents,
impressions which glittered sharply, edged with light, against the
mosaic of her recollections. Mellow sunshine, sparkling like new cider,
streamed over her. Music, which she had imagined to be sound only, was
changing into colour. She saw it first in delicate green and amber; then
in violent clashes of red and purple; but she saw it always as vividly
as if it reached her brain through her eyes. She thought first of the
evening sky over the bulrushes; of the grass after rain in the pasture;
of the pear trees breaking with the dawn from palest green into white.
Then the colours changed, and she remembered sunsets over the
broomsedge. The glow cast upward from the earth as if the wild grass
were burning. The bough of a black-gum tree emblazoned in scarlet on the
blue sky. The purple mist of autumn twilight, like the bloom on a grape.
The road home through the abandoned fields. The solitary star in a sky
which was stained the colour of ripe fruit. The white farm-house. The
shingled roof like a hood. Swallows flying. Swallows everywhere, a world
of swallows spinning like curved blades in the afterglow.
With the flight of wings, ecstasy quivered over her, while sound and
colour were transformed into rhythms of feeling. Pure sensation held and
tortured her. She felt the music playing on her nerves as the wind plays
on a harp; she felt it shatter her nerves like broken string, and sweep
on crashing, ploughing through the labyrinth of her soul. Down there, in
the deep below the depths of her being, she felt it tearing her vitals.
Down there, in the buried jungle, where her thoughts had never
penetrated, she felt it destroying the hidden roots of her life. In this
darkness there was no colour; there was no glimmer of twilight; there
was only the maze of inarticulate agony. . . .
Now it was dying away. Now it was returning. Something that she had
thought dead was coming to life again. Something that she had buried out
of sight under the earth was pushing upward in anguish. Something that
she had defeated was marching as a conqueror over her life. Suddenly she
was pierced by a thousand splinters of crystal sound. Little quivers of
light ran over her. Beads of pain broke out on her forehead and her
lips. She clenched her hands together, and forced her body back into her
chair. "I've got to stand it. No matter what it does to me, I've got to
stand it."
V
"I am afraid you found it difficult," Doctor Burch said, when it was
over. "It wasn't an easy programme. I wish there had been more of
Krause."
"I'm not sure I liked it," she answered wearily. "I feel as if I had
ploughed a field. It made me savage, just the way moonlight used to when
I was growing up."
"That is the pure essence of sensation. Now, I never get that response
to music. To me it is little more than an intellectual exercise. The
greatest musician I ever knew told me once that his knowledge of the
theory of music had, in a way, spoiled his complete enjoyment of a
concert."
She had refused tea, and they had strolled in the direction of the Park.
As she left the concert hall, it had seemed to her that she was stifling
for air, and now, when they entered the Park, she threw back her head
and breathed quickly, with her gaze on the bright chain of sky threading
the tree-tops.
"This smells like November at Old Farm," she said. "Whenever I smell the
country, I want to go home."
"Yours is a large farm?"
She laughed. "A thousand acres and we couldn't afford to buy a cow. Do
you know what it means to be land poor? After the war my father couldn't
hire labour, so he had to let all the land go bad, as we say, except the
little he could cultivate himself. The rest has run to old fields.
Everything is eaten up by the taxes and the mortgage. There are pines,
of course, and Nathan Pedlar tells us if we let the timber stand, it
will one day be valuable. Now we can't get a good price because the
roads are so bad it takes too many mules to haul it away. Once in a
while, we sell some trees to pay the taxes, but they bring so little. My
father cut down seven beautiful poplars at Poplar Spring; but when he
sold them he couldn't get but a dollar and a half for each one where it
fell. It doesn't seem worth while destroying trees for that."
"What do you do with the abandoned fields?"
"Nothing. Some people turn sheep into them, but my father says that
doesn't pay. The fields run to broomsedge and life-everlasting, and in
time pine and scrub oak get a good start."
"But they can be reclaimed. The land can be brought back, if it is well
treated."
"I know, but that takes labour; and Father and Josiah have as much work
as they can manage. There isn't any money to pay the wages of hands.
We've got some good pastures too. If only there was something to begin
with, we might have a dairy farm. Nathan Pedlar says, or a stock farm
like James Ellgood's. I wish I knew the science of farming," she
concluded earnestly. "Doctor Faraday says it is as much a science as
medicine."
It was The first time he had seen her deeply interested. Strange, the
hold the country could get over one!
"Is there any way I could learn farming from books?" Dorinda asked
before he could reply. "I mean learn the modern ways of getting the best
out of the soil?"
He smiled. "It all comes back to chemistry, doesn't it? That, I imagine,
is what Doctor Faraday meant--the chemistry of agriculture. Yes, there
are books you can study. I'll get you a list from a friend of mine who
is a professor in the University of Wisconsin. By the way, he is to give
a lecture on that very subject in New York next month. There is to be a
series of lectures. I'll find out about it and take you if you'll go
with me. You must remember, though, that practical experience is always
the best teacher."
She shook her head. "We have the experience of generations, and it has
taught us nothing except to do things the way we've always done them.
Mother used to say that the only land she would ever cultivate, if she
had to choose over again, is the land of Canaan where
'generous fruits that never fail,
On trees immortal grow!'"
He laughed. "I think I'd like your mother."
The casual remark arrested her. Would he really like her mother, she
wondered, with her caustic humour, her driven energy, her periodical
neuralgia, and her perpetual melancholy? Had he ever known any one who
resembled her? Had he ever known any woman whose life was so empty?
"Poor Ma!"--She corrected herself: "Poor Mother, the farm has eaten away
her life. It caught her when she was young, and she was never able to
get free."
"Doesn't she care for it?"
"I don't know. I sometimes think she hates it, but I know it would kill
her to leave it. It is like a bad heart. You may suffer from it, but it
is your life, and it would kill you to lose it." She broke off, pondered
deeply for a few moments, and then added impulsively, "If I had the
money, I'd go back and start a dairy farm there."
While she spoke a vision glimmered between the windy dusk in the Park
and the orange light of the afterglow. She saw it with an intensity, an
eagerness that was breathless;--the fields, the roads, the white gate,
the long low house, the lamp shining in the front window. For the first
time she could think of Old Farm without invoking the image of Jason.
For the first time since she had left home, she felt that earlier and
deeper associations were reaching out to her, that they were groping
after her, like the tendrils of vines, through the darkness and violence
of her later memories. Earlier and deeper associations, rooted there in
the earth, were drawing her back across time and space and
forgetfulness. Passion stirred again in her heart; but it was passion
transfigured, recoiling from the personal to the impersonal object. It
seemed to her, walking there in the blue twilight, that the music had
released some imprisoned force in the depths of her being, and that this
force was spreading out over the world, that it was growing wider and
thinner until it covered all the desolate country at Old Farm. With a
shock of joy, she realized that she was no longer benumbed, that she had
come to life again. She had come to life again, but how differently!
"I feel as if the farm were calling to me to come back and help it," she
said.
That night she dreamed of Pedlar's Mill. She dreamed that she was
ploughing one of the abandoned fields, where the ghostly scent of the
life-everlasting reminded her of the smell of her mother's flowered
bandbox when she took it out of the closet on Sunday mornings--the aroma
of countless dead and forgotten Sabbaths. Dan and Beersheba were
harnessed to the plough, and when they had finished one furrow, they
turned and looked back at her before they began another. "You'll never
get this done if you plough a hundred years," they said, "because there
is nothing here but thistles, and you can't plough thistles under." Then
she looked round her and saw that they were right. As far as she could
see, on every side, the field was filled with prickly purple thistles,
and every thistle was wearing the face of Jason. A million thistles, and
every thistle looked up at her with the eyes of Jason! She turned the
plough where they grew thickest, trampling them down, uprooting them,
ploughing them under with all her strength; but always when they went
into the soil, they cropped up again. Millions of purple flaunting
heads! Millions of faces! They sprang up everywhere; in the deep furrow
that the plough had cut; in the dun-coloured clods of the upturned
earth; under the feet of the horses; under her own feet, springing back,
as if they were set on wire stems, as soon as she had crushed them into
the ground. "I am going to plough them under, if it kills me," she said
aloud; and then she awoke. A chill wind was blowing the white curtains
at the window. Was it only her imagination, or did the wind, blowing
over the city, bring the fragrance of pine and life-everlasting? For an
instant, scarcely longer than a quick breath, she felt a sensation of
physical nearness, as if some one had touched her. Then it vanished,
leaving her in a shudder of memory. It was not love; of this she was
positive. Was it hate which had assumed, in the moment between sleep and
waking, the physical intensity of love? It was the first time she had
dreamed of Jason. Long after she had ceased to think of him, she told
herself resentfully.
The next morning, when office hours were over, she went to the library
and asked for a list of books on dairy farming. She read with eagerness
every one that was given to her, patiently making notes, keeping in her
mind the peculiar situation at Old Farm. When Doctor Burch arranged for
the course of lectures, she attended them regularly, adding, with
diligence, whatever she could to her knowledge of methods; gleaning,
winnowing, storing away in her memory the facts which she thought might
some day be useful. Before her always were the neglected fields. She saw
the renewal of promise in the land; the sowing of the grain, the
springing up, the ripening, the immemorial celebration of the harvest.
She saw the yellowing waves of wheat, the poetic even swath falling
after the mower. "All that land," she thought, "all that land wasted!"
The possibility of the dairy farm haunted her mind. Enterprise,
industry, and a little capital with which to begin! That was all that
one needed. If she could start with a few cows, six perhaps, and do all
the work of the dairy herself, it might be managed. But Old Farm must be
made to pay, she decided emphatically. Old Farm with a thousand acres
could supply sufficient pasture and fodder for as many cows as she would
ever be likely to own. "If I could get the labour it wouldn't be so
hard," she thought one day, while she was sitting by the window in the
nursery. "If I could buy the cows and hire a little extra labour, it
wouldn't be impossible to make a success." Then her spirit drooped. "You
can't do anything without a little money," she thought, and laughed
aloud. "Not much, but a little makes all the difference."
"What are you laughing at, Dorinda?" asked Mrs. Faraday, turning from
the crib, where she was bending over the baby.
"I was thinking I'd give anything I've got for six--no, a dozen cows."
"Cows?"
"At Old Farm. It hurts me to think of all that land wasted."
"It is a pity. I suppose it was good land once?"
"In great-grandfather's day it was one of the best farms in that part of
the country. Of course he never cultivated much of it. He let a lot of
it stand in timber. That's what we paid the taxes with right after the
war. Father and Josiah do the best they can," she added, "but everything
is always against them. Some people are like that, you know."
"It's a bad way to be," commented Mrs. Faraday, and she asked presently,
"What would you like to do with the farm?"
Dorinda's cheeks flushed as she answered. "First, if I had the money,
I'd try to bring up the fields. I'd sow cowpeas and turn them under
this year wherever I could. Then I'd add to the pasture. We can easily
do that, and in a little while we could get a good stand of grass. Then
I'd buy some cows from James Ellgood, some of his Jerseys, and try to
set up a dairy farm, a very little one, but I wouldn't let anybody touch
the milk and butter except Mother and myself. I wouldn't be satisfied
with anything that wasn't better than the best," she concluded, with an
energy that was characteristic of the earlier Dorinda.
"And you'd sell your butter--where?"
For an instant this dampened the girl's enthusiasm. How funny that she
had never once thought of that!
"Oh, well, we're near enough to Richmond or Washington," she said. "The
road to the station is bad, but it is only two miles. We could churn one
day and send the butter out before sunrise the next morning."
Mrs. Faraday looked at her sympathetically. "I could help you in
Washington," she said. "I've a friend there who owns one of the biggest
hotels. The manager would take your butter, I know, and eggs too, if
they are the very best that can be bought. And you'd ask a large price.
People are always willing to pay for the best."
Dorinda sighed. "It's just like a fairy tale," she said, "but, of
course, it is utterly out of the question."
"Well, I don't see why." Mrs. Faraday lifted the baby from the crib and
sat down to nurse it. "We would lend you the money you needed to start
with. After all you've done for Penelope, we'd be only too glad to do
that in return. But it would be drudgery, even if you succeeded, and you
ought not to look forward to that. You ought to marry, my dear."
Dorinda flinched. "Oh, I've finished with all that!"
"But you haven't. You're too young to give up that side of life."
"I don't care. I'm through with it," repeated Dorinda, and she meant it.
"Well, just remember that we are ready to help you at any time. It would
mean nothing to us to invest a few thousand dollars in your farm. You
could pay us back when you succeeded."
"And I could pay you interest all the time."
"Of course--if it would make you feel easier. Only don't let your
foolish pride stand in the way of achieving something in the end."
Dorinda gazed thoughtfully out of the window. Her pride was foolish, she
supposed, but it was all that she had. With nothing else to fall back
on, she had taken refuge in an exaggerated sense of independence.
"You are so capable," Mrs. Faraday was saying, "that I am sure you will
never fail in anything that you undertake. The doctor was telling me
only yesterday that, for a woman without special training, your
efficiency is really remarkable. It isn't often the girls of your age
are so practical."
A laugh without merriment broke from Dorinda's lips. "That would please
my mother," she said. "They used to say at Old Farm that my head was
full of notions."
"Most young girls' are. But you were fortunate to settle down as
soon as you did."
Without replying, Dorinda stared at the baby in Mrs. Faraday's arms. It
was a fat, pink baby, with a round face in which the features were like
tiny flowers, and a bald head, as clear and smooth as an egg shell. When
it laughed back at her, the pink face crumpled up and it gurgled with
toothless gums.
"If you've ever been poor, you can't get over the dread of having to
borrow," she answered after a pause.
For the next few months, while she read books and attended lectures
without understanding them, the idea of the country worked like leaven
in Dorinda's imagination. Gradually, though she was unprepared for the
change in her attitude, some involuntary force was driving her back to
Old Farm. Problems that had appeared inexplicable became as simple as
arithmetic; obstacles that had looked like mountains evaporated into
mist as she approached them. "I couldn't let them do it," she would
declare, adding a minute later, with weakening obstinacy, "After all, it
isn't as if they were giving me the money. I can always pay them in the
end, even if I have to mortgage the farm."
As the winter passed, she saw more and more of Burch. She liked him; she
enjoyed her walks with him; his friendship had become a substantial
interest in her life; but she realized now and then, when he
accidentally touched her hand, that every nerve in her body said, "So
far and no farther" to human intercourse. Her revulsion from the
physical aspect of love was a matter of the nerves, she knew, for more
than two years under the roof of a great surgeon had taught her
something deeper than the patter of science. Yet, though her shrinking
was of the nerves only, it was none the less real. One side of her was
still dead. The insensibility of the last two years, which had made her
tell herself at moments that she could not feel the prick of a pin in
her flesh, had worn off slowly from that area of her mind which was
superior to the emotions. But the thought of love, the faintest reminder
of its potency, filled her with aversion, with an inexpressible
weariness. She simply could not bear, she told herself bluntly, to be
touched.
"There must be something in life besides love," she thought, in revolt
from the universal harping upon a single string. Watching the people in
the street, she would find herself thinking, "That woman looks as if she
lived without love, but she doesn't look unhappy. She must have found
something else." Then, with the vision of Old Farm in her mind, she
would reflect exultantly: "There is something else for me also. Love
isn't everything."
"Do you know, I've almost decided to go home," she said to Doctor Burch
one day in April, when they were sitting in the Park. "Did you see those
lilacs in the florists' windows as we passed? It is lilac time at Old
Farm now, and the big bushes in the corner of the west wing are all in
bloom. They are so old that they reach to the roof, and the catbirds
build in them every year." She lifted her head and looked at the
delicate pattern of the elms against the pale sky. How cold and thin
spring was in the North!
"You mean you'll go back and begin farming?"
"I mean I can't stay away any longer. I'm part of it. I belong to the
abandoned fields."
"Will you let me come?" he asked abruptly.
Her hand lay, palm upward, in her lap, and as he asked the question, his
fingers closed caressingly over hers. Instantly the alarm began in her
nerves; she felt the warning quiver dart through them like the vibration
in a wire. Her nerves, not her heart, repulsed him. She might even love
him, she thought, if only he could keep at a distance; if he would never
touch her; if he would remain contented and aloof, neither giving nor
demanding the signs of emotion. But at the first gesture of approach
every cell in her body sprang on the defensive.
"You wouldn't be comfortable," she said, while an expression that was
almost hostile crept over her full red mouth. "It is so different from
anything you have known."
His smile was winning. "I shouldn't mind that if you wanted me."
She looked over his head at the elm boughs arching against the sky. Yes,
it was lilac time in Virginia. She saw the rich clusters drooping beside
the whitewashed walls, under the grey eaves where wrens were building.
The door was open, and the fragrance swept the clean, bare hall, with
the open door at, the other end, beyond which the green slope swelled
upward to the pear orchard. Over all, there was the big pine on the
hill, brushing the quiet sky like a bird's outstretched wing. How
peaceful it seemed. After the storm through which she had passed,
tranquillity meant happiness.
The silence had grown intimate, tender, provocative; and for a moment
she had a feeling of relaxation from tension, as if the iron in her soul
were dissolving. Then the pressure of his fingers tightened, and she
shivered and drew away her hand.
"You don't like me to touch you?" he asked, and there was a hurt look in
his eyes.
She shook her head. "I don't like anybody to touch me."
"Are you as hard as that?"
"I suppose I am hard, but I can't change."
"Not if I wait? I can wait as long as you make me."
"It wouldn't make any difference. Waiting wouldn't change me. I've
finished with all that."
She rose because the thought of Jason had come to her out of the vision
of Old Farm; and though she no longer loved him, though she hated him,
this thought was so unexpected and yet so real that it was as if he had
actually walked into her presence. He was nothing to her, but his
influence still affected her life; he was buried somewhere in her
consciousness, like a secret enemy who could spring out of the
wilderness and strike when she was defenseless.
On the hall table, when she entered the house, she found a letter,
addressed in the pale, repressed handwriting of her mother. As she went
upstairs she tore it open, and dropping into a chair by the window of
her room, she read the closely written sheets by the last gleam of
daylight.
_My dear Daughter_:
I hate to have to send you bad news, but your father had a stroke last
Saturday while he was ploughing the tobacco field. He had not been well
for several days, but you know he never complains, and he did not stop
work till he dropped in the field. Josiah and Rufus had to pick him up
between them and bring him into the house.
We sent straight for the doctor. Rufus saddled Beersheba and rode to
Pedlar's Mill, and Nathan sent word to Doctor Stout up near the
Courthouse. It was more than two hours before the doctor got here, but
your father had not come to himself. The doctor says he will never be up
again, and if you want to see him alive, you had better come as soon as
you can. We do everything that is possible, and Nathan has been the
greatest help in the world. I don't know what I should do without him.
Josiah spends the nights here. Since his marriage he has lived, as I
wrote you, in that place over beyond Plumtree, but he is real good about
helping, and so is Elvira. She has offered to help me nurse, but she is
so flighty that I had rather have Aunt Mehitable's granddaughter,
Fluvanna Moody. Fluvanna comes every day. She is a mighty good nurse and
your father likes to have her around, even if she is one of the new
order of darkeys. I believe she takes after Aunt Mehitable more than any
of the other grandchildren. Your father does not give any trouble, and
he has not spoken but twice since his fall. It is right hard to
understand what he says--he speaks so thickly--but Fluvanna and I both
think he was asking for you.
The farm is going on just the same. Rufus hates the work here, and wants
to go to the city. A week before his stroke your father was offered a
thousand dollars for the timber between Poplar Spring and the back gate.
Nathan advised him to hold on a little longer, but I reckon we will have
to sell it now to pay for your father's sickness. The cow is a great
comfort. Your father cannot take any solid food. I give him a little
milk and a few swallows of chicken broth. Mrs. Garlick sent him some
chicken broth yesterday, and one of the Miss Sneads comes over with
something every day.
Your affectionate mother,
EUDORA ABERNETHY OAKLEY.
So, after all, the decision had been taken out of her hands. Life was
treating her still as if she were a straw in the wind, a leaf on a
stream. The invisible processes which had swept her away were sweeping
her back again. While she sat there with the letter in her hand, she had
the feeling that she was caught in the whirlpool of universal anarchy,
and that she could not by any effort of her will bring order out of
chaos.
"Poor Pa." This was her first thought, and she used instinctively the
name that had been on her lips as a child. So this was the end for him,
and what had he ever had? He had known nothing except toil. Suddenly, as
if the fact added an intolerable poignancy to her grief, she remembered
that he had never learned even to read and write. He could sign his
name, that was all. When he was a child the "poor white" was expected to
remain unlettered, and in later years the knowledge her mother had
taught him had not, as he used to say apologetically, "stuck by him."
Rising quickly, she put the letter aside and began folding her clothes.
VI
As the train rushed through the familiar country, Dorinda counted the
new patches of ploughed ground in the landscape. "James Ellgood must be
trying to reclaim all his old fields," she thought.
The sun had not yet risen above the fretwork of trees on the
horizon, but the broomsedge had felt the approach of day and was
flying upward to meet it. Out of the east, she saw gradually emerge
the serpentine curves of Whippernock River; then the clouds of blown
smoke, the irregular pattern of the farms, and the buildings of the
station, which wore a startled and half-awake air in the dawn.
After more than two years how strange it felt to be back again!
To be back again just as if nothing had happened! How small the
station looked, and how desolate, stranded like a wrecked ship
in the broomsedge. What isolation! What barrenness! In her memory
the horizon had been so much wider, the road so much longer, the band of
woods so much deeper. It seemed to her that the landscape must have
diminished in an incredible way since she had left it. Even the untidy
look of the station; the litter of shavings and tobacco stems; the
shabbiness and crudeness of the country people meeting the train; the
disreputable rags of Butcher, the lame negro, who lived in the freight
car; the very fowls scratching in the dust of the cleared space;--all
these characteristic details were uglier and more trivial than she had
remembered them. A sense of loneliness swept her thoughts, as if the
solitude had blown over her like smoke. She realized that the Pedlar's
Mill of her mind and the Pedlar's Mill of actuality were two different
places. She was returning home, and she felt as strange as she had felt
in New York. Well, at least she had not crawled back. She had returned
with her head held high, as she had resolved that she would.
The whistle was sounding again, and the brakeman was hastily gathering
her bags. She followed him to the platform, where the conductor stood
waiting, the same conductor who had helped her into the train the
morning she had gone away. He did not recognize her, and for some
obscure reason, she felt flattered because he had forgotten her.
The train was stopping slowly. The faces of the assembled farmers
started out so close to the track that they gave her a shock. There was
Jim Ellgood ready to leave for Richmond; there was Mr. Garlick meeting
somebody, his daughter probably; there was Mr. Kettledrum, looking as
stringy and run-to-seed, as if he had not moved out of his wheelrut
since the morning he had picked her up in the rain. In the little group
she saw Rufus, slender, handsome, sullen as ever. How black his eyes
were, and how becoming the dark red was in his cheeks! Then, as the
train reached the station, she saw Nathan Pedlar running down to the
track with the mail bag in his hand. Just at the last minute, but always
in time--how like Nathan that was!
The conductor, with one foot on the step, was swinging his free leg
while he felt for the ground. She put up her hand, hurriedly arranging
her small blue hat with the flowing chiffon veil. Then she lifted the
folds of her skirt as the conductor, who was firmly planted now on the
earth, helped her to alight. Her heart was sad for her father, but
beneath the sadness her indomitable pride supported her. Yes, she had
come back unashamed. She might not return as a conqueror, but she had
returned undefeated. They were looking at her as she stepped to the
ground, and she felt, with a thrill of satisfaction, that, in her navy
blue poplin with the chiffon veil framing her face (hanging veils were
much worn in New York that year) she was worthy of the surprised glances
they cast at her. A little thinner, a little paler, less girlish but
more striking, than she had been when she went away. Her height gave her
dignity, and this dignity was reflected in her vivid blue eyes, with
their unflinching and slightly arrogant gaze. Romantic eyes, Burch had
called them, and she had wondered what he meant, for surely there was
little romance left now in her mind. If experience had taught her
nothing else, it had at least made her a realist. She had learned to
take things as they are, and that, as Burch had once remarked
whimsically, "in the long run fustian wears better than velvet." She had
learned, too, she told herself in the first moments of her homecoming,
that so long as she could rule her own mind she was not afraid of the
forces without.
They had gathered round her. She was smiling and shaking the
outstretched hands. "Well, it looked as if we'd about lost you for
good." "You've been gone two years, ain't you?" "Hardly know Pedlar's
Mill, I reckon, since Nathan's painted the store red?" "I saw her
off," Mr. Kettledrum was saying over and over. "I saw her
off. A good long visit, warn't it?"
Moving out of the throng, she kissed Rufus, who looked dejected and
resentful.
"How is Pa, Rufus?"
"There ain't any change. The doctor says he may drag on this way for
several weeks, or he may go suddenly at any time."
"Well, we'd better start right on." Walking quickly up the slope to
where the old buggy was standing, she put her arms round Dan's neck and
laid her cheek against him. "He knows me," she said, "dear old Dan, he
hasn't forgotten me. Is there anything you want for Ma at the store?"
"She gave me a list. I left it with Minnie May."
"Minnie May doesn't work in the store, does she? Who looks after the
children?"
"She does. She does everything."
"Well, it's a shame. She oughtn't to, and only thirteen. I'll speak to
Nathan about it."
At her commanding tone, Rufus grinned. "You've come back looking as if
you could run the world, Dorinda," he observed, with envy. "I wish I
could go away. I'd start to-morrow, if it wasn't for Pa."
"Yes, that's why I came back. We can't leave Pa and Ma now. But it's
hard on you, Rufus."
"You bet it is! It's my turn to get away next."
She assented. "I know it. If the time comes when Pa can do without you,
I'll help you to go. You'll never make much of a farmer."
He stared moodily at the road, but she could see that her promise had
encouraged him. "There's nothing in it," he answered. "I believe it is
the meanest work ever made. You may slave till you drop, and there's
never anything to show for it. Look at Pa."
"Pa never had a chance. He grew up at the wrong time. But all farming
isn't bad. Suppose we had a dairy farm?"
He grinned again. "O Lord! with one cow! You're out of your head!"
"Perhaps. Anyway, I've come back to see what I can do."
Her glance wavered as Nathan, having dashed into the store with the mail
bag, came toward them with the kind of lope that he used when he was in
a hurry. "I didn't get a chance to speak to you at the train, Dorinda,"
he said, "but all the same I'm glad you're home again. The children want
to get a peek at you in your city clothes. Minnie May's gone crazy about
your veil."
In two years he had altered as little as the landscape. Lank,
sand-coloured, with his loping, stride, his hands that were all
knuckles, and his kindly clown's face under hair that was as short as
rubbed-off fur, he appeared to her, just as he used to do, as both
efficient and negligible. Poor Nathan, how unattractive he was, but how
good and faithful! Clean, too, notwithstanding the fact that he never
stopped working. His face and neck looked well scrubbed, and his blue
cotton shirt was still smelling of starch and ironing. The memory of the
lunch he had given her when she went away was in her mind as she held
out her hand to him and then stooped to kiss the children, one after
another. How they must miss their mother, these children! She must do
something for Minnie May, who had the stunted look of overworked
childhood. Nathan was well off for Pedlar's Mill, yet he let the little
girl work like a servant. It was simply that he did not know, and she
would make it her business, she told herself firmly, to instruct him.
Minnie May was a nice, earnest child, with the look of her mother. She
would be almost pretty, too, if she could get that driven expression out
of her pinched little face. Her hair was really lovely, wheaten red like
Rose Emily's, only it needed brushing, and she wore it dragged back from
her forehead where, at thirteen, wrinkles were already forming. Yes,
Dorinda decided, she would certainly speak to Nathan.
"You look fine, Dorinda," he was saying while he stared at her.
"She is like a paper doll in a book," Minnie May exclaimed. "One of
those fashion books Miss Seena Snead has."
The three smaller children were staring with wide open eyes and mouths,
and John Abner, the baby, she remembered, with the clubfoot, was holding
a slice of bread and butter in both hands. He limped badly when he
walked, she noticed. What a job it must be keeping these children washed
and dressed.
"Are you the nurse too, Minnie May?" she inquired.
"Yes, I do everything," the little girl replied proudly, wrinkling her
forehead. "We had a coloured girl, but the children didn't like her and
wouldn't mind her."
Dorinda turned to Nathan. "It's too much, Nathan. You oughtn't to let
her do it."
"I tell her not to slave so hard," he answered helplessly. "But it
doesn't do any good. She promised her mother that she would take care of
the children."
"But Rose Emily never meant this. It is making an old woman of the child
before she grows up."
"I can't help it. She's as stubborn as a mule about it. Maybe you can do
something."
Dorinda nodded with her capable air. "Well, I'll fix it." She looked
cool, composed, and competent, the picture of dignified self-reliance,
as she stepped between the muddy wheels of the dilapidated buggy.
"I hope you'll find your father better," Nathan said. "I'll come over
later in the day and see if there is anything I can help about." She
smiled gratefully over her shoulder, and Rufus remarked, in his sullen,
suppressed voice, as they drove off, "He's been over every single
evening since Pa had his stroke."
"Nobody ever had a kinder heart," Dorinda responded absently, for she
was not thinking of Nathan.
As the buggy jolted down the slope to the pine woods, a dogcart passed
them on the way to the station, and she recognized Geneva Greylock. She
was driving the dogcart with red wheels which she had used before her
marriage; she was wearing the same jaunty clothes; but the change in her
appearance made Dorinda turn to glance back at her. Though she was still
in her early twenties, she looked like a middle-aged woman. Her sallow
cheeks had fallen in, her long nose was bony and reddened at the tip,
and her abundant flaxen hair was lustreless and untidy.
"How soon blondes break," Dorinda said aloud, and she thought, "Two
years of marriage have made an old woman of her."
"Yes, she's lost what looks she ever had," returned Rufus. "She was
always delicate, they say, and now her health has gone entirely. It's
the life she leads, I reckon. Folks say he is beginning to follow in his
father's footsteps. That's why the new doctor up by the Courthouse is
getting all his practice." When he spoke of Jason he carefully refrained
from calling his name.
"Are there any children?" Dorinda asked. Her spirits were drooping; but
this depression, as far as she was aware, had no connection with Jason.
Not her own regret, but the futility of things in general, oppressed her
with a feeling of gloom.
"Not that I ever heard of," Rufus replied. "To tell the truth I never
hear anybody mention his name. You can ask Nathan. He knows everything
about everybody." He shut his sullen lips tight, and stared straight
ahead of him.
"Oh, it doesn't matter. I was merely wondering why her health had
failed."
They had come out of the woods, and the wheels were creaking over the
dried mudholes. The sun had risen through a drift of cloud, and beneath
the violet rim an iridescent light rained over the abandoned fields.
While they drove on, it seemed to Dorinda that it was like moving within
the heart of an opal. Every young green leaf, every dew-drenched weed,
every silken cobweb, every brilliant bird, or gauzy insect,--all these
things were illuminated and bedizened with colour. Only the immense
black shadow of the horse and buggy raced sombrely over the broomsedge
by the roadside.
"Nothing has changed," Dorinda thought. "Nothing has changed but
myself."
Yes, it was all familiar, but it was different, and this difference
existed only within herself. All that she had suffered was still with
her. It was not an episode that she had left behind in the distance; it
was a living part of her nature. Even if she worked her unhappiness into
the soil; even if she cut down and burned it off with the broomsedge,
it would still spring up again in the place where it had been. Already,
before she had reached the house, the past was settling over her like
grey dust.
They passed the Sneads' red brick house with white columns. The same
flowers bloomed in the borders; the same shrubs grew on the lawn; the
same clothes appeared to hang perpetually on the same clothes-line at
the corner of the back porch. In the pasture, the friendly faces of cows
looked at her over the rail fence, and she remembered that two years
ago, as she went by, she had seen them filing to the well trough. In a
few minutes she would pass the burned cabin and the oak with the fading
Gospel sign fastened to its bark. Her heart trembled. The racing shadow
by the road appeared to stretch over the sunrise. She felt again the
chill of despair, the involuntary shudder of her pulses. Then she lifted
her eyes with a resolute gesture and confronted remembrance.
The place was unchanged. The deep wheelruts where the road forked; the
flat rock on which the mare slipped; the cluster of dogwood which
screened the spot where she had waited for Jason's return; the very
branch she had pushed aside,--not one of these things had altered. Only
the fire in her heart had gone out. The scene was different to her
because the eyes with which she looked on it had grown clearer. The
stone was merely a stone; the road was nothing more than a road to her
now. Over the gate, she could see the willows of Gooseneck Creek. Beyond
them the tall chimneys of Five Oaks lay like red smears on the
changeable blue of the sky.
After they had left the fork, Dan quickened his pace.
"The fence has been mended, I see, Rufus."
"Yes, we had so much trouble with the cow straying. Pa was trying to get
all the fences near the house patched before fall. We were using the
rails that were left over from the timber he sold."
"Those weren't the woods Ma wrote me about?" She could never think of
living trees as timber.
"No, he is holding on to that in hope of getting a better price."
They travelled the last quarter of a mile without speaking, and not
until the buggy had turned in at the gate and driven up the rocky grade
to the porch, did Dorinda ask if her father expected her.
"Yes, Ma told him, but she wasn't sure that he understood. He was awake
before I left the place and Ma was seeing about breakfast."
"Haven't you had any yet?"
"Yes, I had a bite before I started. I'm no friend to an empty stomach,
and I reckon I can manage a little something after I've turned Dan into
the pasture. Pa was ploughing the tobacco field when he had his stroke,
but he had decided not to plant tobacco there this year. We're going to
try corn."
"I'm glad he's given up tobacco."
"He hasn't. Not entirely. But it takes more manure than he can spare
this year. Well, we're here at last. Is that you, Ma?" he shouted, as
the wheel scraped against the "rockery" by the steps.
At his second call, the door opened and Mrs. Oakley ran out on the
porch.
"So you've come, daughter," she said, and stood wiping her hands on her
apron while she waited for Dorinda to alight. How old she had grown,
thought the girl, with a clutch at her heart. Only the visionary eyes
looked out of the ravaged face through a film of despair, as stars shine
through a fog.
VII
Jumping out of the buggy, Dorinda took her mother into her arms; but
while she pressed her lips to the wrinkled cheek, it occurred to her
that it was like kissing a withered leaf.
"How is Pa?" she asked in an effort to conceal the embarrassment they
both felt.
"About the same. I don't see any change."
"May I speak to him now?"
"You'd better have your breakfast first. I've got breakfast ready for
you."
"In a minute, but I'd like just to say a word to him. Oh, there's dear
old Rambler." She stooped to caress the hound. "I don't see Flossie."
"I reckon she's up at the barn hunting mice. She had a new set of
kittens, but we had to drown all but one. We couldn't feed so many
cats."
Embarrassment was passing away. How much had her mother known, she
wondered; how much had she suspected?
"Well, I shan't be a minute," the girl said. "Is he in the chamber?"
"Yes, he hasn't been out of bed since his stroke. Go right in. I don't
know whether he'll recognize you or not."
Pushing the door open, Dorinda went in, followed by Rambler, walking
stiffly. The room was flooded with morning sunlight, for the green
outside shutters were open, and the window was raised that looked on the
pear orchard and the crooked path to the graveyard. It was all just as
she remembered it, except that in her recollection the big bed was
empty, and now her father lay supine on one side of it, with his head
resting upon the two feather pillows. There was a grotesque look in his
face, as if it had been pulled out of shape by some sudden twist, but
his inquiring brown eyes, with their wistful pathos, seemed to be
asking, "Why has it happened? What is the meaning of it all?" When she
bent over and touched his forehead with her lips, she saw that he could
not move himself, not even his head, not even his hand. Fallen and
helpless, he lay there like a pine tree that has been torn up by the
roots.
"I've come back to help take care of you, Pa."
His lips quivered, and she apprehended rather than heard what he said.
"I'm glad to see you again, daughter."
Dropping into the chair by the bedside, she laid her arms gently about
him. "You don't suffer, do you?"
How immeasurably far away he seemed! How futile was any endeavour to
reach him! Then she remembered that he had always been far away, that he
had always stood just outside the circle in which they lived, as if he
were a member of some affectionate but inarticulate animal kingdom.
He tried to smile, but the effort only accentuated the crooked line of
his mouth.
"No, I don't suffer." For a moment he was silent; then he added in an
almost inaudible tone: "It's sort of restful."
A leaden weight of tears fell on her heart. Not his death, but his life
seemed to her more than she could bear. What was her pain, her
wretchedness, compared to his monotony of toil? What was any pain, any
wretchedness, compared to the emptiness of his life?
For a little while she talked on cheerfully, telling him of the lectures
she had heard and the books she had read, and of all the plans she had
made to help him with the farm.
"I've borrowed some money to start with, and we'll make something of it
yet, Pa," she said brightly.
His lips moved, but she could not understand what he said. Straining her
ears, she bent over him. For an instant it seemed to her that his tone
became clearer, and that he was on the point of speaking aloud; then the
struggle ceased, and he lay looking at her with his expression of mute
resignation.
After this, though she tried to interest him in her plans, she saw that
his attention was beginning to wander. Every now and then he made an
effort to follow her, while a bewildered expression crept into his face;
but it was only for a minute at a time that he could fix his mind on
what she was saying, and when the strain became too great for him, his
gaze wandered to the open window and the harp-shaped pine, which
towered, dark as night, against the morning blue of the sky.
"Well, I'll go to breakfast now," she said, as carelessly as she could.
"Ma has it ready for me."
Rising from her chair, she stood looking down on him with misty eyes.
After all, the pathos of life was worse than the tragedy. "Is the light
too strong?" she asked, as she turned away. "Shall I close one of the
shutters?"
At first he did not follow her, his thoughts had roved so far away, and
she repeated her question in another form. "Does the sun hurt your
eyes?"
A smile wrung his lips. "No, I like to see the big pine," he answered;
and stealing out noiselessly, she left him alone with the tree and the
sky.
In the kitchen her mother stood over her while she ate, watching every
mouthful with the eyes of repressed and hungry devotion.
"You ain't so plump as you were, Dorinda, but you've kept your high
colour."
"Oh, I'm well enough, but you look worn out, Ma."
Mrs. Oakley hurried to the stove and back again. "Let me give you
another slice of bacon. You must be empty after that long trip. Well, of
course, I've had a good deal on me since your father got sick. Until
Fluvanna came, I didn't have anybody but Elvira to help me, and though
she was willing to do what she could, her fingers were all thumbs when
it came to making up a bed or moving things in a sickroom."
"I can take most of the burden off you now. You know I learned a good
deal about illness when I was with Doctor Faraday."
"Yes, you'll be a comfort, I know, but you're going back again as soon
as your father begins to mend, ain't you?"
Dorinda shook her head with a smile, which, she told herself, looked
braver than it felt. "No, I'm not going back. I'd sooner stay here and
try to make something out of the farm. A thousand acres of land ought
not to be allowed to run to broomsedge like an old field."
"Heaven knows we've tried, daughter. Nobody ever worked harder than your
father, and whatever came of it?"
"Poor Pa. I know, but he came after the war when there wasn't any money
or any labourers."
She told of the money Doctor Faraday would lend her, and of the hotel in
Washington which would take all the butter she could make. "But it must
be as good as the best," she explained, with a laugh. "I'm going over to
Green Acres to buy seven Jersey cows. Seven is a lucky number for me, so
I am going to start with it."
"You'll have to have some help, then."
"Not at first. Of course I'll need a boy for the barnyard, but I am
going to do the milking and all the work of the dairy myself. You can
help me with the skimming until we get a separator, and when Fluvanna
isn't waiting on Pa, she can lend a hand at the churning."
Mrs. Oakley shook her head drearily. "You haven't tried it, Dorinda."
"I know I haven't, but I'm going to. I learned a lot in the hospital,
and the chief thing was that it is slighting that has ruined us, white
and black alike, in the South. Hasn't Fluvanna got a brother Nimrod that
I could hire?" she asked more definitely.
"Yes, and he's a good boy too. Fluvanna had him over here one day last
week chopping wood when Rufus was out in the field ploughing. That's a
thrifty family, the Moodys. I never saw a darkey that had as much vim as
Fluvanna. And she belongs to the new order too. I always thought it
spoiled them to learn to read and write till I hired her. She's got all
the sense Aunt Mehitable had, and she's picked up some education
besides. I declare, she talks better than a lot of white people I know."
"I wonder if she'd stay on and help me with the farm?" Dorinda asked. "I
mean," she added, while her face clouded, "after Pa is up again." Though
she knew that her father would never be up again, she united with her
mother in evading the fact.
"Oh, I'm sure she will," Mrs. Oakley responded, with eagerness. "She has
been helping me with my white Leghorns. All the hens are laying well. I
am setting Eva and Ida now."
"You didn't have them when I was here."
"No, Juliet hatched them. You remember Juliet? She was the first white
Leghorn hen I ever had."
"Yes, I remember her. Have you got her still?"
Mrs. Oakley sighed. "No, a coon broke into the henhouse last winter and
killed her. She was a good hen, if I ever had one." It was amazing to
Dorinda the way her mother knew every fowl on the place by name. To be
sure, there were only a dozen or so; but these white Leghorns all looked
exactly alike to the girl, though Mrs. Oakley could tell each one at a
distance and was intimately acquainted with the peculiarities of every
rooster and hen that she owned.
"I'd like to get a hundred and fifty white Leghorns, if we could look
after them," Dorinda said thoughtfully. "That's one good way to make
money."
A ray of light, which was less a flush than a warmer pallor, flickered
across Mrs. Oakley's wan features. While her mother's interest was
awakening, Dorinda felt that her own was slowly drugged by the poverty
of her surroundings. The sunlight bathing the ragged lawn only
intensified the aspect of destitution. Colour, diversity, animation, all
these were a part of the world she had relinquished. Pushing her chair
away from the table, she went to the back door and stood gazing out over
the woodpile in the direction of the well-house. A few cultivated acres
in the midst of an encroaching waste land! From the broomsedge and the
flat horizon, loneliness rose and washed over her. Loneliness, nothing
more! The same loneliness that she had feared and hated as a child; the
same loneliness from which she had tried to escape in flights of
emotion. Food, work, sleep, that was life as her father and mother had
known it, and that life was to be hers in the future. For an instant it
seemed to her that she must break down. Then, lifting her head with a
characteristic gesture of defiance, she turned back into the room. "I'd
better start straight about it," she said aloud, smiling at Mrs.
Oakley's startled look.
"Did you say anything, Dorinda? I believe I've got something wrong with
my ears."
"I said I was going upstairs to change my dress. The same old room, I
suppose?"
"Yes, I fixed the same room for you."
While she cleared off the table, Mrs. Oakley gazed after her daughter
with a perplexed and anxious expression. Dorinda in her flowing veil,
with her air of worldly knowledge and disillusioned experience, had awed
and impressed her. Was it possible that she had created this superior
intelligence, that she had actually brought this paragon of efficiency
into the world? "Well, I hope it will turn out the way you want it," she
remarked presently to her daughter's retreating back, "but, in my time,
I've watched many a big bloom that brought forth mighty small fruit."
At sunset, when Nathan Pedlar came for his daily visit, Dorinda walked
over a part of the farm with him. He was wearing his Sunday suit of
clothes, and though this emphasized his grotesqueness, it increased also
the air of having been well scrubbed and brushed which had distinguished
him from the other farmers at the station. Since his wife's death he had
prospered, as widowers were so frequently known to do, Dorinda
reflected; and now that he was able to employ an assistant, he was not
closely confined to the store. Though his neighing laugh still irritated
the girl, she found herself regarding his deficiencies more leniently.
After all, he was not to blame for the way he looked; he was not even to
blame, she conceded less readily, for the things that he thought funny.
Since that fantastic humour had taken root in her mind, she had been
continually puzzled by the variety of obvious facts which people, and
especially men, found amusing. She could not, to save her life, laugh at
the spectacles they enjoyed, nor did the freakish destiny that provoked
her to merriment appear to divert them at all. From the cool and
detached point of view she had attained, life appeared to her to be
essentially comic; but comic acts, whether presented in the theatre or
in the waggish hilarity of Pedlar's Mill, seemed to her merely
depressing. She was not amused by the classic jokes of the period, which
were perpetually embodied in a married man who was too fat or an
unmarried woman who was too thin. Flesh or the lack of it, hats or the
pursuit of them, crockery or the breaking of it; none of these common
impediments to happiness possessed, for her, the genuine qualities of
mirth. But reprehensible though she knew it to be, she could not recall
the misguided earnestness of her girlhood without the pricking of
ridicule; and the image of mankind strutting with pompous solemnity into
the inevitable abyss impressed her as the very spirit of comedy. Tragic
but comic, too, as most tragedy was. Would it ever pass, she wondered,
this capricious and lonely laughter?
"I can't help it," she thought, walking by Nathan's side, and listening
soberly to his story of a coloured woman who had tried to make him pay
an additional price for a chicken with three legs. "I can't help it if
they, not the things they laugh at, seem funny to me."
It was a misty, lilac-scented afternoon in April. The sun shone softly
when it began to go down, as if it were caught in a silver scarf, and
the grass in the pear orchard was white with drifting blossoms. Those
old trees always bloomed late, she remembered, and the ground was still
snowy with fallen petals when the lilac bushes by the west wing were
breaking into flower.
As she followed the beaten track by the orchard, her gaze swept the
ploughed fields, where the upturned earth was changing from chocolate to
purple as the light faded. Around her the farm spread out like an open
fan, ploughed ground melting into waste land, fields sinking into
neglected pasture, pasture rising gradually into the dark belt of the
pines. She knew that the place was more to her than soil to be
cultivated; that it was the birthplace and burial ground of hopes,
desires, and disappointments. The old feeling that the land thought and
felt, that it possessed a secret personal life of its own, brushed her
mood as it sped lightly by.
"All this and just waste, waste, waste," she said slowly.
Nathan glanced up at the big pine on the hill. "Ever think of cutting
that tree down for timber?" he inquired.
She shook her head. "It's the only thing Pa likes to watch now. He loves
it."
Nathan neighed under his breath, with the sound Dan gave when he saw
clover.
"Well, I kind of know how he feels. I like a big tree myself."
"Sometimes in stormy weather that pine is like a rocky crag with the sea
beating against it," Dorinda said. "I used to remember it up in Maine. I
suppose that is why Pa likes to look at it. All the meaning of his life
has gone into it, and all the meaning of the country. Endurance, that's
what it is."
"What a fancy you've got," Nathan answered admiringly, "and always had
even when you were a child. But you're right about endurance. This farm
looks to me as if it had endured about as much as it can stand."
"Oh, I'm going to change all that."
"Then you'd better get busy."
"I'll begin to-morrow, if you'll send me some field hands." She stopped
and made a gesture, full of vital energy, in the direction of the road.
"I want to make a new pasture out of that eighteen-acre field next to
the old one."
"It has run to broomsedge now, hasn't it?"
"Yes, but it used to be a cornfield in great-grandfather's day. If you
can get me the hands, I'll start them clearing it off the first thing in
the morning."
He chuckled with enjoyment. "Oh, I'll get you anything you want, but the
niggers won't work for nothing, you know."
"I've borrowed two thousand dollars. That ought to help, oughtn't it?"
She wished he wouldn't say "niggers." That scornful label was already
archaic, except among the poorest of the "poor white class" at Pedlar's
Mill.
"Two thousand dollars!" he ejaculated. "Well, that ought to go some
way."
"I'll have to spend a good deal for cows," she explained. "How much will
they ask at Green Acres?"
For a minute he hesitated. "That's a fine Jersey herd," he replied
presently. "I don't reckon they'll take less than a hundred dollars for
a good cow. You can get scrub cows cheaper, but you want good ones."
"Oh, yes. I want good ones."
"Well, seeing it's you, Jim Ellgood may let you have them for less. I
don't know; but he got a hundred and fifty for those he sold at the
fair. One of his young bulls took the blue ribbon, you know."
She nodded. "I'm going over to see him to-morrow, if Pa doesn't get
worse."
"Jim's a first-rate land doctor. He'll tell you what to do with that old
field."
"Why, everybody says you're as good a farmer as James Ellgood."
"Oh, no, I'm not. Not by a long way. He spends a lot of money on
phosphate and nitrate of soda; but in the end he gets it back again. He
reclaimed some bad land several years ago and made it yield forty
bushels an acre. For several years he kept sowing cowpeas and turning
them under. Then he sowed sweet clover with lime, and when it was in
full bloom, he turned that under too. Takes money, his method, but it
pays in the long run. He has just begun using alfalfa; but you watch and
he'll get five cuttings from it in no time. I get four, and Jim always
goes me one better."
She was listening to him, for the first time in her life, with attention
and interest. It was surprising, she reflected, what a bond of sympathy
farming could make. He was as dull probably as he had ever been; but his
dullness had ceased now to bore her. "I'll find him useful, anyhow," she
thought; and usefulness, she was to discover presently, makes an even
firmer bond than an interest in farming. Her mind was filled with her
new vocation, and just as in that earlier period she had had ears for
any one who would speak to her of Jason, so she listened now to whoever
displayed the time and the inclination to talk of Old Farm. After all,
how much mental tolerance, she wondered, was based upon the devouring
egoism at the heart of all human nature? It was a question her
great-grandfather might have asked, for though she had burst the cocoon
of his theology, her mind was still entangled in the misty cobwebs of
his dialectics. Yes, she had always deluded herself with the belief that
the superior Rose Emily had made it possible for her to think tolerantly
of Nathan. Yet, deprived of that advantage, and left to flounder on
without intelligent guidance, he had become, Dorinda admitted
thoughtfully, more likable than ever. For the first time it occurred to
her that a marriage too much above one may become as great an obstacle
as a marriage too much below one.
"How big is Green Acres?" she asked, keenly interested.
Nathan's gaze sought the horizon. Before he replied he spat
a wad of tobacco from his mouth, while she looked vaguely over
the fields.
"Counting the
wasteland, it's near about fourteen hundred acres,
I reckon," he answered. "If Old Farm and Five Oaks were thrown
together, they'd more than balance Jim's land."
"Are they doing anything over at Five Oaks?"
"It don't look so, does it?" He waved his arm vaguely toward the blur of
spring foliage in the southeast. "I ain't heard any talk of it lately."
His tone had taken a sharper edge, and Dorinda knew he was thinking that
Jason had jilted her. People would always remember that whenever they
heard her name or Jason's. If they both lived to be old persons, and
never spoke to each other again, they could never dissolve that
intangible bond. In some subtle fashion, which she resented, she and
Jason were eternally joined together.
"If they don't look sharp," Nathan concluded without glancing at her,
"the place will slip through their fingers. The old man has a big
mortgage on it. I took a share of it myself, and some day, if Jason
keeps going downhill, there'll be a foreclosure right over his head."
A flame passed over Dorinda's face. So vivid was the sensation that she
felt as if they were encircled by burning grass. Ambition, which had
been formless and remote, became definite and immediate.
"I'd give ten years of my life to own Five Oaks," she said.
"You would?" The wish appeared to amuse him. "Looks as if you were
beginning to count your chickens before they're hatched."
"Yes, it's absurd; but all the same I'd give ten years of my life to own
Five Oaks."
The colour burned in her face and in her blue eyes which were looking
straight at the sunset. She appeared suddenly taller, stronger, more
imperious in her demands of life.
"If we ever foreclose the mortgage, I'll bid in the farm for you," he
returned, with admiring facetiousness. A flush like the stain of
pokeberry juice was spreading over his leathery skin.
She nodded gravely. "By that time I may be able to buy it. If hard work
can get you anywhere on a farm, I am going to be one of the best farmers
in this country."
"Is Rufus to have any hand in it? You won't get far with Rufus."
"No, he hates it. He is going to the city next winter. There won't be
anybody but Pa and me to manage." Her voice faltered from its dominant
note. Would there be her father?
"Well, I'll help you," he promised, "all' I can. I've learned a little
by failing. That's as much as most farmers can say." When he dropped the
personal tone and began to talk of the things he knew, there was a
rustic dignity in his ugliness. After all, she could depend on him, and
that meant a good deal to her as a farmer. Rose Emily, she remembered,
used to say that you never realized Nathan's value until you tried
depending upon other people. The vision of Rose Emily illuminated her
thoughts like the last flare of the sunset. How brave she was, and how
brilliant! Though Nathan had loved her and been faithful to her while
she lived, after her death he had ceased to think of her with the mental
alacrity which appeared to overtake the emotions of the faithful and the
unfaithful alike. Already, she felt, Rose Emily was becoming nearer to
her than to Nathan. Nathan had lost a wife; but as the years passed her
friend would begin to live more vitally in her memory.
They followed the band of pines and crossed an old hayfield, where a
flock of meadow-larks drifted up from the grass and scattered with a
flutter of white tail feathers. It was the thrushes' hour, and the
trees, reaching tall and straight up into the golden air, were as
musical as harps. She had forgotten Nathan now, and while she walked on
rapidly she was thinking that she would divide the farm into five
separate parts, leaving the larger part still abandoned. "I must go
slowly," she thought. "If I overdo it in the beginning, I'll spoil
everything."
"You're up against something," Nathan was saying facetiously but firmly.
"This used to be good land in your great-grandfather's day, and some of
it ain't gone so bad but a thorough fertilizing would bring it back.
Your father did all he could, but one man ain't a team. He had to work
uphill with every darn thing, including the elements, against him."
"Yes, of course Pa did all he could." She had spoken the words so often
that they sounded now as hollow as a refrain. Yet they were true. Her
father had done all that one man could do on the farm. Yet the farm had
conquered him in the end and eaten away his strength.
They were approaching Poplar Spring, where a silver vein of a stream
trickled over the flat grey rocks. The smell of wet leaves floated
toward her, and instantly the quiet moment snapped in two as if a blow
had divided it. Half of her mind was here, watching the meadow-larks
skimming over the fields, and the other half crouched under the dripping
boughs by the fork of the road. Only the imaginary half seemed more
real, more physical even, than the actual one. Not her mind, she felt
with horror, but her senses, her nerves, and the very corpuscles of her
blood, remembered the agony.
"I think I'll go back," she said, turning quickly. "Ma might want me to
help her."
"You look tired," he returned, with the consideration which Rose Emily
had disciplined into a habit. "Would you like to sit down and rest?"
"No, I'd better go back."
They walked to the house in silence, and she scarcely heard him when he
said, "Good night," at the porch.
"I hope you'll find your father better."
"Yes, I hope I'll find him better."
"If there's anything I can do, let me know."
"If there is, I'll let you know."
As he stepped into his buggy, he turned and called out, "I'll try to get
word to the hands to-night, and send them over the first thing in the
morning."
What hands? What did they matter? What did anything matter? It seemed to
her suddenly that, not only her love for Jason, but everything, the
whole of life, was a mistake. Even her best endeavours, even her return
to the farm--"It might have been better if I'd decided differently," she
thought wearily; but when she tried to be definite, to imagine some
other decision she might have made, nothing occurred to her. Something?
But what? Where? She saw no other way, and she felt blindly that she
should never see one.
"I'm tired," she thought, "and this makes me weak. Weakness doesn't help
anything." For an instant this thought held her; then it occurred to her
that, in the years to come, she would be continually tired; and that,
tired or not, she must fight against weakness. "I've got to go straight
ahead, no matter how I feel."
VIII
"Ebenezer Green?"
"Dat's me."
"Peter Plumtree?"
"Dat's me."
"Toby Jackson?"
"Dat's me, Miss D'rindy."
"Rapidan Finley?"
"Dat's me."
She was calling the names of the field hands, and while she went over
the list, her mind was busily assorting and grouping the faces before
her. Yes, she knew them all. Ever since she could remember they had been
a part of the country; she had passed them in the road every week, or
seen them in the vegetable patches in front of their cabins. Like her
mother, she was endowed with an intuitive understanding of the negroes;
she would always know how to keep on friendly terms with that immature
but not ungenerous race. Slavery in Queen Elizabeth County had rested
more lightly than elsewhere. The religion that made people hard to
themselves, her mother had often pointed out, made them impartially just
to their dependents; and like most generalizations, this one was elastic
enough to cover the particular instance. It was true that the coloured
people about Pedlar's Mill were as industrious and as prosperous as any
in the South, and that, within what their white neighbours called
reasonable bounds, there was, at the end of the nineteenth century,
little prejudice against them. Here and there a thriftless farmer, such
as Ike Pryde or Adam Snead, would display a fitful jealousy of Micajah
Green, who had turned a few barren acres into a flourishing farm; but
the better class of farmers preferred the intelligent coloured neighbour
to the ignorant white one. Both were social inferiors; but where the
matter was one solely of farming, the advantages would usually fall to
the more diligent. As for the negroes themselves, they lived contentedly
enough as inferiors though not dependents. In spite of the influence of
Aunt Mehitable Green, they had not yet learned to think as a race, and
the individual negro still attached himself instinctively to the
superior powers.
"I remember you well, Ebenezer," she said; "you have a sister, Mary Joe.
I want her to help look after my henhouse." She laughed as she spoke
because she knew that the negroes would work twice as well for an
employer who laughed easily; but she wondered if they detected the
hollowness of the sound. It occurred to her, as she looked at the doomed
broomsedge across the road, that farming, like love, might prove
presently to be no laughing matter.
Turning back toward the house, she met her mother, who was coming out
with a basin of cornmeal dough for the chickens. The sun had just risen,
and there was a sparkling freshness over the earth and in the luminous
globe of the sky. She had slept well, and with the morning weakness had
vanished. The wild part of her had perished like burned grass; out of
nothing, into nothing, that was the way of it. Now, armoured in reason,
she was ready to meet life on its own terms.
"Do you know where Rufus is?" she asked. "I want him to see the hands
start work in the eighteen-acre field."
Mrs. Oakley shook her head. "I don't know. I thought he was going to
finish ploughing the tobacco field, but I saw him start off right after
breakfast with Ike Pryde. It seems they found honey in a big oak over by
Hoot Owl Woods, and they've set off with an axe to cut down the tree."
"Oh, the fool, the fool!" Dorinda exclaimed, and determined that she
would expect nothing more from Rufus.
"Well, you know how men are," returned her mother, with unpolemical
wisdom. "They'll seize any excuse to stop work and cut down a tree."
"I do know. But to cut down a big oak, and for honey!"
The old woman scattered dough on the ground with an impartial hand.
"Rufus has got a mighty sweet tooth," she remarked.
"So has Pa, but you never found him making an excuse to stop work."
"I know. Your Pa always put his wishes aside. There ain't many men you
can say that of." Though she sighed over the fact, she accepted it as
one of the natural or acquired privileges of the male; and she felt that
these were too numerous to justify a special grievance against a
particular one. Even acquiescence with a sigh is easier than argument
when one is worn out with neuralgia and worse things. A frost had
blighted her impulse of opposition, and this seemed to Dorinda one of
the surest signs that her mother was failing. There were moments when it
would have been a relief to be contradicted.
"Well, I'll have to do it myself. Because I am a woman the hands will
expect me to shirk, and I must show them that I know what I am about."
"I'll help you all I can, daughter."
"I know you will." Dorinda's conscience reproached her for her
impatience. "You will be wonderful with the hens, and I'll get
Ebenezer's sister Mary Joe to help you. She must be fourteen or
fifteen."
"Yes, she's a real bright girl," Mrs. Oakley remarked, without
enthusiasm. She had scarcely closed her eyes all night, and bright
coloured girls, even when they helped in the henhouse, left her
indifferent. "I'm going down in the garden to see if I can find a mess
of turnip salad," she added after a pause, in which she scooped the last
remnant of dough out of the basin and flung it into the midst of the
brood of chickens.
"Let me go while you sit with Pa. I was coming in to see about him
before I went down to the field where they are working."
Mrs. Oakley shook her head. "No, I can't keep still in the daytime. It's
hard enough having to do it at night. Fluvanna couldn't get over early
to-day; but she sent her little sister Ruby, and she is keeping the
flies off your father's face. That's all anybody can do for him now."
"Well, I'll speak to him anyway. Then I'll see after the hands."
Mrs. Oakley raised her eyes to her daughter's face. "You've brought back
a heap of vim, Dorinda," she said dispassionately, "but I reckon you've
been away from the farm too long to know what it's like."
She put the basin down on a bench, picked up a blue gingham sunbonnet
she had laid there when she came out, and started, with her nervous
walk, to the garden at the end of the yard.
In her father's room, Dorinda found a small coloured girl, in a pink
calico slip, perched on a high stool by the bedside. Her bare feet
clutched the round of the stool; her eyes, like black beads, roved
ceaselessly from the wall to the floor; and her thin monkey-like hand
waved a palm-leaf fan to and fro over Joshua's immovable features.
"Good morning, Ruby. Has Pa moved since you've been here?"
"Gwamawnin'. Naw'm, he ain' don ez much ez bat 'is eyelids."
Dorinda caught the fan away from her. "Don't you go to school in the
mornings?" she inquired, after a pause in which she tried to think of
something to say.
"Dar ain' none."
"Aren't you learning to read and write?"
"Yes'm. Fluvanna she knows, en she's larnin' me."
"Well, run away now, and come back when I call you."
The little girl ran out gladly, and Dorinda took her place on the stool
and brushed the flies away with slow, firm waves of the fan.
Immediately, as soon as she had settled herself, something of her
mother's restlessness rushed over her, and she felt a hysterical longing
to get up and move about or to go out into the air. "If I feel this
way," she thought, "what must it mean to poor Pa to lie there like
that?"
Since the hour of her return he had not appeared to recognize her. He
was beyond reach of any help, of any voice, of any hand, lost in some
mental wilderness which was more impenetrable than the jungles of earth.
Though he was apparently not unconscious, he was beyond all awareness.
His eyes never left the great pine, and once when his wife had started
to close the shutters, a frown had gathered on his forehead and lingered
there until she had desisted and turned away from the window. Then his
face had cleared and the look of hard-earned rest had returned to his
features.
While she sat there, Dorinda began counting imaginary chickens, a method
of collecting her thoughts which she had learned as a child from Aunt
Mehitable. She was still counting the fictitious flock when Joshua
opened his eyes and looked straight up at her with an expression of
startled wonder and surprise, as if he were on the point of speaking.
"What is it?" she asked, bending nearer.
His lips moved, and for an instant she was visited by an indescribable
sensation. He was so near to her that she seemed, in the same moment,
never to have known him before and yet to know him completely. She felt
that he was trying to speak some words that would make everything clear
and simple between them, that would explain away all the mistakes and
misunderstandings of life.
"What is it?" she repeated, breathless with hope.
Again his lips moved slightly; but no sound came, and the look of wonder
and surprise faded slowly out of his face. His eyes closed, and a minute
later his heavy breathing told her that he had relapsed into stupor.
"I must ask him when he wakes," she thought. "I must ask him what he
wanted to tell me."
After dinner she hunted for Rufus again, but he had not, it appeared,
returned to the farm.
"I reckon he went home with Ike Pryde," his mother said. "He's been
seeing too much of Ike, and I'm afraid it ain't good for him. The last
time Almira was over here she told me Ike was drinking again." She was
worried and anxious, and the twitching was worse in her face. "I declare
I don't see how Almira can put up with him," she said.
"Then I'll have to harness Dan myself," Dorinda replied. "I've got on my
best dress, so I hoped Rufus would drag out the buggy. I'm going over to
Green Acres."
"I was wondering what you'd put on your blue poplin for," Mrs. Oakley
returned. "I'd think that hanging veil would get in your way; but if
you're going over to the Ellgoods', I'm glad you dressed up. Fluvanna, I
reckon, will hitch up the buggy for you."
Fluvanna, emerging from the kitchen, offered eagerly to look for Dan in
the pasture. "He ain't got away," she said, "for I saw him at the bars
jest a minute ago." She had gone to school whenever there was one for
coloured children in the neighbourhood, and though her speech was still
picturesque, she had discarded the pure dialect of Aunt Mehitable and
her generation. "Don't you worry, Miss Dorinda," she added, hurrying
down the path to the pasture.
"I tell Fluvanna that her sunny disposition is worth a fortune," Mrs.
Oakley remarked. "She never gets put out about anything."
"I believe she'll be a great comfort to us," Dorinda returned
thoughtfully. She liked the girl's pleasant brown face, as glossy as a
chestnut, her shining black eyes, and her perfect teeth, which showed
always, for she never stopped smiling. "Just to have anybody look
intelligent is a relief."
"Well, you'll find that Fluvanna has plenty of sense. Of course she
slights things when she can, but she is always willing and
good-humoured. You don't often find a hard worker, white or black, with
a sunny temper."
They were still discussing her when Fluvanna drove up in the buggy and
descended to offer the dilapidated reins to Dorinda.
"Thank you, Fluvanna. I declare this buggy looks as if it hadn't been
washed off for a year."
Fluvanna, who had not observed the mud, turned her beaming eyes on the
buggy and perceived that it was dirty.
"I'll come over the first thing in the mawnin' an' wash it for you," she
promised. "There ain't a bit of use dependin' on Mr. Rufus. He won't do
nothin'."
Dorinda gathered up the reins, settled herself on the bagging which
covered the seat, and turned Dan's head kindly but firmly away from the
pasture.
"I wonder if things used to look as dilapidated, only I didn't notice
them so much," she thought.
IX
Dan travelled slowly, and the Ellgoods lived three miles on the other
side of Pedlar's Mill. Green Acres was the largest stock farm in the
county; but what impressed Dorinda more than the size was the general
air of thrift which hovered over the pastures, the deep green meadows,
and the white buildings clustering about the red brick house.
"I couldn't have anything like this in a hundred years," she thought
cheerlessly. Her scheme, which had appeared so promising when she
surveyed it from Central Park, presented, at a closer view, innumerable
obstacles. There was not one chance in a thousand, she told herself now,
that the venture would lead anywhere except into a bog. "But I'm in it
now, and I must see it through," she concluded, with less audacity than
determination. "I'll not give up as long as there is breath left in my
body." Rolling in mud-caked wheels up the neat drive to the house, she
resolved stubbornly that no one, least of all James Ellgood, should
suspect that she had lost heart in her enterprise.
James Ellgood was at Queen Elizabeth Courthouse for the day; but Bob,
his son, who had recently brought home a dissatisfied and delicate wife
from a hospital in Baltimore, was on the front porch awaiting his
visitor. When she appeared in sight, he threw away the match he was
striking on his boot, and after thrusting his old brier pipe into his
pocket, descended the steps and came across the drive to the buggy.
Nathan would have smoked, or still worse have chewed, Dorinda knew,
while he received her; but inconsistently enough, she did not like him
the less for his boorishness. Utility, not punctilio, was what she
required of men at this turning point in her career.
While Bob Ellgood held out his hand, she could see her reflection in his
large, placid eyes as clearly as if her features were mirrored in the
old mill pond. It gave her pleasure to feel that she was more
distinguished, if less desirable, than she had been two years ago; but
her pleasure was as impersonal as her errand. She had no wish to attract
this heavy, masterful farmer, who reminded her of a sleek, mild-mannered
Jersey bull; no wish, at least, to attract him beyond the point where
his admiration might help her to drive a bargain in cows. Gazing
critically at his handsome face, she remembered the Sunday mornings when
she had watched him in church and had wished with all her heart that he
would turn his eyes in her direction. Then he had not so much as glanced
at her over his hymn book, his slow mind was probably revolving round
his engagement; but now she felt instinctively that he was ready to
catch fire from a look or a word. The absurd twist of an idea jerked
into her mind. "He would have suited me better than Jason, and I should
have suited him better than the woman he married." Well, that was the
way the eternal purpose worked, she supposed, but it seemed to her a
cumbersome and blundering method.
"Nathan told me you wanted to buy some cows," he was saying, for he was
as single-minded as other successful men, only more so. "I picked out
seven fine ones this morning and had them brought up to the small
pasture. They'll be at the bars now, and you can look them over. There
isn't a better breed than the Jersey, that's what we think, and these
young cows are as good as any you'll find."
At the bars of the pasture, where a weeping willow dipped over the
watering trough, the Jerseys were standing in a row, satin-coated,
fawn-eyed, with breath like new-mown hay. What beauties they were,
thought Dorinda, swept away in spite of her determination to bargain.
When Bob told her the names she repeated them in blissful accents.
"Rose. Sweetbriar. Hollyhock. Pansy. Daisy. Violet. Verbena." To think
that she, who had never owned anything, should actually possess these
adorable creatures! Even the price, which seemed to her excessively
high, could not spoil her delight. A hundred dollars for each cow, Bob
explained, was a third less than they would bring at the fair next
autumn.
"I am glad you are going into the dairy business," he proceeded. "I
always said this country would do for dairy farming, though it takes
more money, of course, to start a dairy farm than it does just to plant
crops. The cows ain't all of it, you know. You ought to raise your own
hay and the corn you need for silage. Borrow money, too, if you haven't
got it, to drain and tile your fields. It will pay you back in the long
run, for I doubt if you will get any good clover until you put ditches
in your land. All that takes money, of course," he continued, with
depressing accuracy, "but it is the only way to make anything out of a
farm. Father says there ain't but one way to learn to do anything, and
that's the right way."
"I know," Dorinda assented. Her tone was confident, but it seemed to her
while she spoke that she was being buried under the impoverished acres
of Old Farm.
"And there's machinery," he added. "Father borrowed money after the war
to buy new machinery. When he came home after Appomattox, all the farm
implements were either lost or good for nothing. He went in debt and
bought the newest inventions, and that was the beginning of his success.
The legacy from Uncle Mitchell came after he was well started, and he
always says he could have got on without it, though perhaps not on so
large a scale."
"Well, I'll borrow," said Dorinda defiantly. "We've always been afraid
of debt; but I've already borrowed two thousand dollars, and if I need
more, I'll try to get it. Nathan is going to pick up whatever machinery
he can at auction. That will be less than half the actual cost, he
says."
He was looking at her now with keen, impersonal admiration. Just as if
she had been a man, she thought, with a glow of triumph. Though the
sensation was without the excitement of sex vanity, she found that it
was quite as gratifying, and, she suspected, more durable. Already he
had forgotten the momentary physical appeal she had made to him in the
beginning; and she felt that his respect for her was based upon what he
believed to be her character. "It isn't what I am really that matters,"
she thought. "It is just the impression I make on his mind or senses.
Men are all like that, I suppose. They don't know you. They don't even
wish to know you. They are interested in nothing on earth but their own
reactions." And she remembered suddenly that Jason had once generalized
like this about women, and that she was merely copying what he had said.
How stupid generalizations were, and how deceptive!
"I hope you'll make a success of it," Bob said. "I like women who take
hold of things and aren't afraid of work when they have to do it. That's
the right spirit." A moody frown contracted his fore head, and she knew
that he was thinking of his wife, though he added after a moment's
hesitation, "Look at my sister now. She's as young as you are and she
lies round all day like an old woman."
"Perhaps it's her health," Dorinda suggested, moving away.
"Why shouldn't she be healthy? We're all healthy enough, Heaven knows!
Not that I wonder at it," he continued thoughtlessly, "when I remember
that she was such a fool as to fall in love with Jason Greylock." The
next instant a purple flush dyed his face, and she could see his
thoughts rising like fish to the fluid surface of his mind. "Not that he
ill-treats her. He knows Father wouldn't stand for that," he added
hurriedly, caught in the net he had unconsciously spread. "But his
laziness is bred in the bone, and he's the sort that will let apples rot
on the ground rather than pick them up."
"I know," Dorinda said, and she did. That was what her mother called the
mental malaria of the country.
"Well, it's the blood, I reckon," he conceded more tolerantly. "There's
enough to work against without having to struggle to get the better of
your own blood. Come this way," he continued, leading her to a different
pasture, "I want you to have a look at our prize bull. Five blue ribbons
already; and we've a yearling that promises to be still finer. A beauty,
isn't he?"
Dorinda gazed at the bull with admiration and envy, while he returned
her look with royal, inscrutable eyes. "I wonder if I shall ever own a
creature like that?" she thought. "He looks as if he owned everything
and yet despised it," she said aloud.
Bob laughed. "Yes, he's got a high-and-mighty air, hasn't he? By the
way, those Jerseys have never been milked by a woman. I don't know how
they'll take to it. Will you hire a man?"
"Not at first. Until I get started well, I'm going to do my own milking.
I can put on Rufus's overalls, and when I milk myself I can be sure of
the way the cows are handled. With negroes you can never tell. Nathan
says they let his cows go dry because they don't take the trouble to
milk them thoroughly. And they won't be clean, no matter how much you
talk to them. When I tell them I'm going to keep my cows washed and
brushed and the stalls free from a speck of dirt, they think it's a
joke."
"That's the trouble. Cleanliness is a joke with most of the farmers
about here, but it's the first step to success in dairy farming. It
keeps down disease, especially contagious abortion, better than anything
else. Yes, you've got the right idea. It means hard work, of course,
though you'll find it's worth while in the end."
"Oh, I don't mind work. What else is there in life?"
His eyes were shining as he looked at her. "Well, I wish my wife had a
little of your spirit. It isn't only that she's delicate. I believe that
she's afraid of everything in the country from a grasshopper to an ox."
"She didn't grow up on a farm. That makes a difference." He sighed.
"Yes, it does make a difference."
"Well, it's a pity. I'm glad I don't have to struggle with fear." A
little later, as she drove across the railway tracks and down the long
slope in the direction of Old Farm, she reflected dispassionately upon
the crookedness of human affairs. Why had that honest farmer, robust,
handsome, without an idea above bulls and clover, mated with a woman who
was afraid of a grasshopper? And why had she, in whom life burned so
strong and bright, wasted her vital energy on the mere husk of a man?
Why, above all, should Nature move so unintelligently in the matter of
instinct? Did this circle of reasoning lead back inevitably, she
wondered, to the steadfast doctrine of original sin? "The truth is we
always want what is bad for us, I suppose," she concluded, and gave up
the riddle.
Just beyond the station, in front of the "old Haney place," she met
William Fairlamb, and stopped to ask him about repairing the cow-barn
and the henhouse. He was a tall, stooped, old-looking young man, with
shaggy flaxen hair and round grey eyes as opaque as pebbles. Though his
expression was stupid, he had intelligence above the ordinary, and was
the best carpenter at Pedlar's Mill.
"If you're going to keep cows, you'd better see that Doctor Greylock
mends his fences," he said, after he had promised to begin on the
cow-barn as soon as he had finished his contract with Ezra Flower. "That
old black steer of his is a public nuisance. I've had him wandering over
my wheat-fields all winter. It's a mortal shame the way the Greylocks
are letting that farm peter out."
"Yes, it's a shame," she agreed, and drove on again. Wherever she
turned, it appeared that she was to be met by a reminder that Jason was
living so near her. "If only he were dead," she thought, as impersonally
as if she were thinking of the black steer that trampled the ploughed
fields. "I shall have to go on hearing about him now until the end of my
days."
There was no regret, she told herself, left in her memory; yet whenever
she heard his name, or recalled his existence, her spirits flagged
beneath an overpowering sense of futility. At such moments, she was
obliged to spur her body into action. "It will be like this always,
until one of us is dead," she reflected. Though she neither loved nor
hated him now, the thought of him, which still lived on in some obscure
chamber of her mind, was sufficient to disturb and disarrange her whole
inner life. The part of her consciousness that she could control she had
released from his influence; but there were innate impulses which were
independent of her will or her emotions; and in these blind instincts of
her being there were even now occasional flashes of longing. While she
was awake she could escape him; but at night, when she slept, she would
live over again all the happiest hours she had spent with him. Never the
pain, never the cruelty of the past; only the beauty and the
unforgettable ecstasy came back to her in her dreams.
As she drove out of the woods the sun was sinking beyond the cleft of
the road, and a slow procession of shadows was moving across the
broomsedge, where little waves of light quivered and disappeared and
quivered again like ripples in running water. While she passed on, the
expression of the landscape faded from tranquil brightness to the look
of unresisting fortitude which it had worn as far back as she could
remember. In her heart also she felt that the brightness quivered and
died. With her drooping energy, weariness had crept over her; but out of
weariness, she passed presently, like the country, into a mood of
endurance. She realized, without despair, that the general aspect of her
life would be one of unbroken monotony. Enthusiasm would not last.
Energy would not last. Cheerfulness, buoyancy, interest, not one of
these qualities would last as long as she needed it. Nothing would last
through to the end except courage.
Her gaze was on the horizon. The reins, tied together with a bit of
rope, were held loosely in her hands. With every turn of the wheel, a
shower of dried mud was scattered over her clothes. So completely lost
was she in memory that at first she barely heard the noise of an
approaching rider, and the hollow sound of horseshoes striking on rock.
Even before her mind became aware of Jason's approach, her startled
senses leaped toward him. Her body bent for an instant, and then sprang
back like a steel wire. With an impassive face, and a torment of memory
in her heart, she sat staring far ahead, at the blur of road by the
cabin. She was back again within the prison of that moment which was
eternal; yet there was no sign of suffering in the blank look of her
eyes. Her hand did not tremble; the loosened reins did not waver; and
when a voice called her name, she did not reveal by the quiver of an
eyelash that she listened.
"Dorinda! Dorinda, let me speak to you!"
She raised her eyes from the road and looked beyond the waving
broomsedge to the topaz-coloured light on the western horizon. The
longing to look in his face, to turn and rend him with her scorn, was as
sharp as a blade; but some deep instinct told her that if she yielded to
the impulse, the struggle was lost. To recognize his existence was to
restore, in a measure, his power over her life. Only by keeping him
outside her waking moments could she win freedom.
"Dorinda, you are hard. Dorinda----"
They were side by side now in the road. If he had reached out his hand,
he could have touched her. If she had turned her head, she might have
looked into his eyes. But she did not turn; she did not withdraw her
gaze from the landscape; she did not relax in the weakest muscle from
her attitude of unyielding disdain. Though he were to ride all the way
home with her, she told herself, he could not force her to speak to him.
No matter what he did, he could never make her speak to him or look at
him again!
The sunken places in the road retarded him, and when he reached her side
again, they were passing the burned cabin. For an instant, when they
approached the fork, he hesitated, as if he were tempted to follow her
still farther. Then, deciding abruptly, he wheeled about and alighted to
open the red gate of Five Oaks.
"I'll see you again," he called back.
For a few minutes after he had disappeared, she sat rigidly erect, as if
she had been frozen into her attitude of repulsion. Then, suddenly, she
gave way; a shudder seized her limbs, and the reins slipped from her
hands to the bottom of the buggy. She was like a person who has escaped
some fearful calamity, and who has not realized the danger until it is
over. When the trembling had passed, she stooped and picked up the
reins. "It will be easier next time," she said, and a moment later, "I
suppose I've got to get used to it. You can get used to anything if you
have to." A dull misery stupefied her thoughts, and she was without
clear perception of what the meeting had meant to her. "I can't
understand why I suffer so," she pondered. "I can't understand how a
person you despise can make you so unhappy."
As she drew nearer home, Dan quickened his pace, and the buggy rattled
over the bridge and up the rocky slope to the stable. The glow had faded
from the west, and the long white house glimmered through the twilight,
which was settling like silver dust over the landscape. A banner of
smoke drooped low over a single chimney. Beyond the roof the budding
trees appeared as diaphanous as mist against the greenish-blue of the
sky. In the window of the west wing a lamp was shining. So she had seen
it on innumerable evenings in the past; so she would see it, if she
lived, on innumerable evenings in the future.
Then, just as she was about to drive on to the stable, she observed that
shadows were moving to and fro beyond the single lighted window. Though
the outward aspect of the house was unchanged, there was, nevertheless,
a subtle alteration in its spirit. For an instant, while she hesitated,
there seemed to her an ominous message in these hurried shadows and this
absence of noise. Her throat tightened, and she sprang from the buggy as
the door opened and Rufus came out.
"He died a few minutes ago," he said.
A few minutes ago! "I'll never know now what he tried to tell me," she
thought. "No matter how long I live, I shall never know."
X
After the last prayer, the earth was shovelled back into the hollow
beneath the great pine in the graveyard, and the movement of the farm
began again with scarcely a break in its monotony. Joshua Oakley had
sacrificed his life to the land, and yet, or so it seemed to Dorinda,
his death made as little difference as if a tree had fallen and rotted
back into the soil. Even her own sorrow was a sense of pity rather than
a personal grief.
When the neighbours had driven solemnly out of the gate, the family
assembled in Mrs. Oakley's chamber and gazed through the window to the
graveyard on the hill, as if they were waiting expectantly for the dead
man to rise and return to his work. The only change would be, they
acknowledged, that two hired labourers would grumble over a division of
the toil which Joshua had performed alone and without a complaint. The
farm had always belonged to Mrs. Oakley; but in order that her authority
might be assured, Joshua had made a will a few months before his death
and had left her the farm implements and the horses. Dissimilar as her
parents had appeared to be, there was a bond between them which Dorinda
felt without comprehending. This was the growth of habit, she supposed,
or the tenacious clinging of happy memories which had survived the frost
of experience. In his dumb way, Joshua had been proud of his wife, and
Eudora had depended upon her husband for more substantial qualities than
those of sentiment. He had been useful to her in the practical details
of living, and she was feeling his loss as one feels the loss of a
faculty. Here was another proof, Dorinda reflected, of the varied
texture of life, another reminder of her folly in attempting to weave
durable happiness out of a single thread of emotion.
"I don't see how we'll manage to get on without him," said Mrs. Oakley,
who looked gaunt and bleached in the old mourning she had worn for her
dead children.
"I reckon it means I'll have to stay on here," Rufus muttered in a tone
of sullen rebellion. "I'll have to give up that job Tom Garlick promised
me next winter in New York. It's darn luck, that's what I call it."
"Oh, no, you mustn't stay," Dorinda urged. "Ma and I can get on
perfectly by ourselves. It won't make any difference if you go in the
fall."
"You'd better take Dorinda's advice and get away, Rufus." Though Mrs.
Oakley spoke in a quiet voice, her face had gone grey at the thought of
losing Rufus also.
"Well, I'm afraid I can't help you now," said Josiah, glancing furtively
at his wife, who had proved to be a termagant with generous impulses
which were brief but explosive.
"Of course your Ma could always come to live with us," suggested Elvira,
obeying the briefest of these impulses. "She'd find plenty to do looking
after the chickens, and the children would keep her from being
lonesome."
Mrs. Oakley's eyes filled with tears. The old hound, having outlived his
master, lay at her feet, and stooping over she stroked his head with a
trembling hand. "But what would become of the farm?" she asked in a
voice that quavered. "I want to die on the farm where I was born."
"We'll stay here alone, Ma and I," Dorinda declared, with the stern
integrity she had won from transgression. "The farm belongs to Ma, and
she and I can take care of it. We don't need a man," she added crisply.
"If I couldn't do better than the men about here, I'd be a mighty poor
farmer."
Elvira breathed more freely, and the wrinkles vanished from Josiah's
forehead. As for Rufus, he had lost interest in the discussion as soon
as it was decided that he might leave the farm in the autumn.
"I'm sure none of us would want to take Ma against her will," Elvira
said, relieved and conciliatory because her generosity had been wasted.
"The place belongs to her anyway, so the rest of us haven't anything to
say about what she does with it." With a habitual jerk, which had
annoyed Dorinda the first moment she saw her, the girl adjusted the belt
of her skirt and rested her hands on her rapidly spreading hips.
"You needn't worry about Ma," Dorinda rejoined firmly. "I am going to
take care of her." Her one wish, she felt, was to get Elvira and Josiah
out of the house. Even Rufus was less depressing. Rufus at least had
good looks; but Josiah and Elvira existed in her mind only as appalling
examples of inherent futility. While she looked at Josiah, it seemed to
her that failure oozed out of the very pores of his skin. Though he
worked from morning till night, he was hampered by a fumbling slowness
which reminded Dorinda of the efforts of a half-witted person. Yet her
father, in spite of his ignorance, had possessed an industry that was
tireless, while her mother was afflicted by a veritable mania of energy.
Was it a matter of circumstances, after all, not of heredity? Had the
more active strain succumbed at last to the climatic inertia? Well, if
the fight had narrowed down to one between herself and her surroundings,
she was determined to conquer. Beneath her sombre brows her eyes looked
out like caged bluebirds. She was wearing a black calico dress which had
once belonged to Miss Seena Snead, and the mourning brought out vividly
the dusk of her hair and the bright red of her lips. "There's no use
talking to me. I've made up my mind," she said.
An hour later, when Josiah and Elvira had gone home, Dorinda helped her
mother to take off her mourning and straighten the chamber in which
Joshua had lain.
"It's the smell of mourning I can't stand," said the girl, while she
folded the crape veil and laid it away in the bandbox. "Do you think
I'll have to wear it?"
"It wouldn't be respectful not to," Mrs. Oakley replied, and she asked
after a minute: "What do you want with those overalls of Rufus's that
you took upstairs?"
Dorinda turned from the wardrobe and looked at her. "They are old ones
I'm patching," she answered. "I am going to wear them when I'm milking.
Those Jerseys have never been milked by a woman."
"I s'pose they'd get used to it."
"They might, but it's easier for me to wear overalls than to break them.
You can't farm in skirts anyway."
"You ain't going to wear them on the farm, are you?"
"If I can farm better in them, I'm going to wear them."
Mrs. Oakley sighed. "Well, I hope nobody will see you."
"I don't care," Dorinda replied stubbornly. "I'm going to milk my cows
my own way. I've got some common sense," she added sternly, "and I'm the
only person, man or woman, in the county who has."
The old woman's face was as inanimate as a mask, but her eyes were
fixed, with their look of prophetic doom, on the great pine in the
graveyard. "I can't help thinking," she murmured, "how your father used
to lie here day after day and look at that big pine. It seems as if that
tree meant more to him than anything human."
Dorinda followed her gaze. "In a way it did," she said slowly, as if
some inscrutable mystery were dissolving in a flood of surprise. "In a
different way."
With a band of crape in her hands, Mrs. Oakley stared up at the
harp-shaped boughs. "I reckon it's a heathenish way to think about
things," she observed presently, "but I can't help feeling there's a
heap of comfort in it."
When the room had been cleaned and the mourning pinned up again in
newspapers, Dorinda begged her mother to rest before Rufus came back to
supper.
"I couldn't, daughter, not with all I've got on my mind," Mrs. Oakley
replied firmly. "I remember when the doctor tried to get your father to
give up for a while, he'd shake his head and answer, 'Doctor, I don't
know how to stop.' That's the trouble with me, I reckon. I don't know
how to stop."
"If you choose to kill yourself, I don't see how I can prevent it."
Dorinda's voice wavered with exasperation. If only her mother would
listen to reason, she felt, both of their lives would be so much easier.
But did mothers ever listen to reason? "I'm going to walk up to Poplar
Spring and look at the woods you wrote me about," she added. "I hope we
shan't have to sell them and put the money into the land."
"Your father was holding on to that timber to bury us with. There are
all the funeral expenses to come."
"Yes, I know." Dorinda regarded her thoughtfully. "Poor Pa, it was all
he had and he wanted to hold on to it. But, you see,"--her tone
sharpened to the bitter edge of desperation--"I am depending upon my
butter to bury us both, and who knows but your chickens may supply us
with tombstones."
"I hope New York didn't turn you into a scoffer, Dorinda."
Dorinda laughed. "New York didn't get a chance, Ma. Pedlar's Mill had
done it first."
"Well, there ain't anything too solemn for some folks to joke about. You
ain't goin' out in Seena Snead's black dress, are you?"
"She's gone out of mourning, so she gave it to me."
"I'd think you'd hate to take charity."
There were times when it seemed to Dorinda that she could not breathe
within the stark limitations of her mother's point of view. As she ran
out of the room and the house, without heeding Mrs. Oakley's request
that she should wear a hat at least on the day of the funeral, she asked
herself if this aimless nagging was all that she could expect in the
future. She was fond of her mother; but fondness, strangely enough, did
not seem to make it easier for people to bear one another's tempers.
The path to Poplar Spring ran beside the eighteen-acre field, and she
stopped amid the dusty fennel and ragweed to inspect the work of the
last two days. The broomsedge had been partly cut down and burned, and
the blackened ruins waited now for the final obliteration. "It will be
hard work to get good grass here," she thought, "but if I keep turning
cowpeas under, I may bring up the soil in time." In the pasture, beyond
a rail fence, the grass was rank and high, for only Dan and Beersheba
had grazed there for the last four or five years. The solitary cow, when
they were fortunate as to own one, lived on the lawn or what was called
"the home field," where Mrs. Oakley milked in summer. Across the road
she saw the scantily fenced west meadow, where her father had sown his
winter wheat, and her eyes filled with tears as she gazed on the
sprinkling of green over the earth. While she stood there she remembered
the look on his face when he lay in his coffin; a look which was
austere, inaccessible, with a reproachful wonder beneath its mask of
solemnity, as if he were still asking life why it had crushed him.
"Whatever I give, the farm will be always mine," she thought. "That was
the way he felt. The farm isn't human and it won't make you suffer. Only
human things break your heart." Everything appeared so simple when she
regarded it through the film of sentiment that obscured her judgment.
Kinship with the land was filtered through her blood into her brain; and
she knew that this transfigured instinct was blended of pity, memory,
and passion. Dimly, she felt that only through this fresh emotion could
she attain permanent liberation of spirit.
Moving away, she followed the path which threaded the scrub pines on the
border of the broomsedge. Presently she distinguished the blur of Poplar
Spring in the distance, and toward the east the acres of fair timber
which had matured since her great-grandfather's death. In her new
reverence for her father she shrank from cutting down the tall trees.
"It would be slaughter," she said to herself. "I'll let the woods stand
as long as I can."
Overhead, the pines were soughing in a light wind, and for a moment or
two the sound of footsteps behind her was scarcely louder than the
whispering trees. Then, with a start, she realized that she was
followed, and glancing round, she saw Jason walking over the scarred
field.
"I know you didn't want me at the funeral, Dorinda," he said, "but it
was all I could do to show my respect for your father. He was one of the
best men who ever lived."
Her breast quivered with pain, but she moved on without appearing to be
aware of his presence.
"I was afraid you were angry because I came," he continued.
At this her pride was swallowed up in bitterness, and she stopped and
looked back. "You had no right to come. You knew I did not want you
there."
Without replying to her charge, he stared at her as if he were amazed by
the change in her face. "This is the first time you've looked at me
since you came home," he said. "You've treated me as if I were the dirt
under your feet."
Her hand was on the slender bough of a pine, and stripping the needles
from the branch, she flung them out on the wind with a passionate
gesture. Over the chaos in her mind there darted the shadow of a regret.
"If only I had killed him that night!"
"Even now, you won't let your eyes rest on me," he complained. "If you'd
given me a chance, I'd have done anything you wanted. But you never gave
me a chance. You never listened."
Her gaze, which had been fixed on the horizon beyond him, swept back to
his face. "Your following me won't make me listen."
"If only you knew what I've suffered."
She was looking at him now with merciless eyes. For this thing she had
ruined her life! Then, before the thought had left her mind, she
realized that in his presence, with her eyes on his face, she was
farther away from him than she had been in New York. Yesterday, he had
had power over her senses; to-morrow, he might have power again over her
memory; but at this instant, while they stood there, so close together
that she could almost feel his breath on her face, her senses and her
memory alike were delivered from the old torment of love.
"My nerve is going," he said weakly, attempting to soften her. "I've
started drinking like Father."
Looking at him, she admitted that it was only her feeling for him, not
the man himself, that had changed. Superficially, in spite of excessive
drinking, he was as attractive as he had ever been; yet this appeal,
which she had found so irresistible two years ago, failed now to awaken
the faintest tremor in her heart. The contrast between his brown-black
eyes and his red hair seemed to her artificial: there was something
repellent to her in the gleam of his white teeth through his short red
moustache. These were the physical details that had once affected her so
deeply; these traits which she saw now, for the first time, in the
spectral light of disenchantment.
"Can you never understand," she asked suddenly, "that I don't hate you
because you mean to me--just nothing."
"You are sending me straight to the dogs."
She laughed. How theatrical men were! Beneath her ridicule, she felt the
cruelty which gnaws like a worm at the heart of emotion in its decay.
"Why should I care?" she demanded.
"You mean you wouldn't care if I were to die a drunkard like my father?"
His voice trembled, and she saw that he was wrestling with man's
inability to believe that a woman's love can perish while his own still
survives.
"No, I shouldn't care."
"You're hard, Dorinda, as hard as a stone."
Her smile was exultant. "Yes, I am hard. I'm through with soft things."
Turning her back on him, she walked rapidly away over the ploughed
ground in the direction of the house. Oh, if the women who wanted love
could only know the infinite relief of having love over!
XI
On an afternoon in October, Dorinda stood under the harp-shaped pine in
the graveyard and looked down on the farm.
The drift of autumn was in the air; the shadows from the west were
growing longer; and in a little while Nimrod, the farm boy, would let
down the bars by the watering-trough, and the seven Jersey cows would
file sleepily across the road and the lawn to the cow-barn. At the first
glimpse of Nimrod she would run down and slip into her overalls. Ever
since the cows had come from Green Acres, she had milked them morning
and evening, and she was wondering now how many more she could handle
with only Fluvanna to help her. Only by doing the work herself and
keeping a relentless eye on every detail, could she hope to succeed in
the end. If she were once weak enough to compromise with the natural
carelessness of the negroes, she knew that the pails and pans would not
be properly scalded, and the milk would begin to lose its quality.
Fluvanna was the superior of most ignorant white women; but even
Fluvanna, though she was, as Dorinda said to herself, one in a thousand,
would slight her work as soon as she was given authority over others.
There were times when it seemed to Dorinda that this instinct to slight
was indigenous to the soil of the South. In the last six months she had
felt the temptation herself. There had been hours of weariness when it
had seemed to her that it was better to be swift and casual than to be
slow and thorough; but she had always suppressed the impulse before it
was translated into outward negligence. Would her power of resistance
survive, she wondered, or would it yield inevitably to the surrounding
drought of energy?
Six months were gone now, and how hard she had worked! She thought of
the mornings when she had risen before day, eaten a hurried breakfast by
the crack of dawn, and milked the cows by the summer sunrise. From the
moment the warm milk frothed into the pails until the creamy butter was
patted into moulds and stamped with the name Old Farm beneath the device
of a harp-shaped pine, there was not a minute detail of the work that
was left to others. Even the scalding of the churns, the straining and
skimming of the milk in the old-fashioned way without a separator,--all
these simple tasks came under her watchful eyes. When the first supply
of butter was sent off, she waited with nervous dread for the verdict.
The price had seemed extravagant, for selling directly to her customer
she had asked thirty cents a pound, while butter in Pedlar's store was
never higher than ninepence in summer and a shilling in winter, measured
in the old English terms which were still commonly used in Queen
Elizabeth County.
"It seems a mighty high price," her mother had objected.
"I know, but Mrs. Faraday told me to ask more. She said the dairy would
get a dollar a pound for the very best. Some people are always ready to
pay a high price, and they value a thing more if they pay too much for
it. I found out all I could about butter making in New York, and I'm
sure nobody could have taken more trouble. It tasted like flowers."
"Well, perhaps--" Mrs. Oakley had sounded dubious. "We'll wait and see."
When the letter and check came together, Dorinda's spirits had soared on
wings. The hotel and the dairy would take all that she could supply of
that quality; and though she had known that her success was less
fortuitous than appeared on the surface, she had not paused to inquire
whether it was owing to influence or to accident. "If everything goes
well, I'll have twenty-five cows by next fall," she said hopefully, "and
Ebenezer and Mary Joe Green to help Fluvanna."
"You always jump so far ahead, Dorinda."
"I'm made that way. I can't help it. If I didn't live in the future, I
couldn't stand things as they are."
Now, in the soft afternoon light, she stretched her arms over her head
with a gesture of healthy fatigue. The aromatic scent of the pine was in
her nostrils. In the sun-steeped meadows below there was the murmurous
chanting of grasshoppers. At the hour she felt peaceful and pleasantly
drowsy, and all her troubles were lost in the sensation of physical
ease. She was thinner than ever; her muscles were hard and elastic; the
colour of her skin was burned to a pale amber; and the curves of her
rich mouth were firmer and less appealingly feminine. In a few years the
work of the farm would probably coarsen her features; but at
twenty-three she was still young enough to ripen to a maturer beauty.
Though her hands were roughened by work and the nails were stained and
broken, she wasted no regret upon the disfigurement of her body as long
as her senses remained benumbed by toil. She slept now without dreaming.
This alone seemed to her to be worth any sacrifice of external softness.
Her glance travelled over the cornfield, where the shocks were gathered
in rows amid the stubble, and she reflected that the harvest had been
better than usual. Then her eyes passed along the orchard path to the
new cow-barn, and she watched the figure of William Fairlamb climbing
down from the roof. An agreeable sense of possession stole into her
mind, while she looked from the cow-barn to the back of the house, and
saw her mother moving along the path from the porch. There were a
hundred and fifty hens in the poultry yard now, and it seemed to Dorinda
that the old woman's happiness had simmered down into an enjoyment of
chickens. Though she still worshipped Rufus, he was only a
disappointment and an increasing anxiety. Of late he had done no work on
the farm; his days were spent in hunting with Ike Pryde or Adam Snead,
and it was evident to Dorinda that he was beginning to drink too much
bad whiskey. It would be a relief, she felt, when November came and he
went away for the winter.
Turning her head, as she prepared to leave the graveyard, she glanced
beyond the many-coloured autumn scene to the distant chimneys of Five
Oaks. How far-off was the time when the sight of those red chimneys
against a blue or grey sky would not stab into her heart? Her love was
dead; and her regret clung less to the thought that love had ended in
disappointment than to the supreme tragedy that love ended at all.
Nothing endured. Everything perished of its own inner decay. That, after
all, was the gnawing worm at the heart of experience. If either her love
or her hatred had lasted, she would have found less bitterness in the
savour of life.
For the first few weeks after her meeting with Jason on the edge of the
pines, she had been enveloped in profound peace. Then, gradually, it
seemed to her that the farther she moved away from him in reality, the
closer he approached to her hidden life. As the days went by, the
freedom she had won in his presence wore off like the effects of an
anodyne, and the bondage of the nerves and the senses began to tighten
again. Never, since she had looked into his face and had told herself
that she was indifferent, had she known complete disillusionment. The
trouble was, she discovered, that instead of remembering him as she had
last seen him, her imagination created images which her reason denied.
Not only her pain, but the very memory of pain that had once been, could
leave, she found, a physical soreness.
Beyond the fields and the road the sun was sinking lower, and the
western sky was stained with the colour of autumn fruits. While she
watched the clouds, Dorinda remembered the heart of a pomegranate that
she had seen in a window in New York; and immediately she was swept by a
longing for the sights and sounds of the city. "There's no use thinking
of that now," she said to herself, as she left the brow of the hill and
walked down the path through the orchard. "Like so many other things, it
is only when you look back on it that you seem to want it. While I was
in New York I was longing to be away. There comes Nimrod with the cows,
and Fluvanna bringing the milk pails."
On the back porch her mother was drying apples, for the apple crop had
been good, and the cellar was already stored with russets and winesaps.
"We ought to have dried apples enough to last us till next year," Mrs.
Oakley remarked, while she wiped the discoloured blade of the knife on
her apron. "The whole time I was slicing these apples, I couldn't help
thinking how partial your father was to dried fruit, and last fall there
were hardly any apples fit to keep." Raising her hand to her eyes, she
squinted in the direction from which her daughter had come. "I can't
make out who that is running across the cornfield, but whoever it is,
he's in a mighty big hurry."
Dorinda followed her gaze. "It's Rufus. He looks as if something were
after him."
Mrs. Oakley's face was twisted into what was called her "neuralgic
look." "He promised me to mend that churn before night," she said in a
dissatisfied tone. "But I haven't laid eyes on him since dinner time. He
goes too much in bad company. I haven't got a particle of use for Ike
Pryde and those two Kittery boys over by Plumtree."
Dorinda nodded. "I'm glad he is going away. The sooner, the better."
"I reckon he has just recollected the churn." Mrs. Oakley's tone was
without conviction, and she added presently, "He certainly does look
scared, doesn't he?"
"I wonder what could have frightened him?" As the boy drew nearer,
Dorinda saw that he was panting for breath and that his usually florid
face was blanched to a leaden pallor. "What on earth has happened,
Rufus?" she called sharply.
He waved angrily to her to be silent. His palmetto hat was in his hand,
and when he reached the porch, he hurled it through the open door into
the hall. Though his breath came in gasps as if he were stifling for
air, he picked up a hammer from one of the benches, and without stopping
to rest, bent over the broken churn at the side of the step.
"What on earth has happened, Rufus?" Dorinda asked again. She saw that
her mother was trembling with apprehension, and the sight exasperated
her against Rufus.
"You ought to have let me go away last spring," the boy replied in a
truculent tone. He lifted the hammer above his head and, still wheezing
from his race, drove a nail crookedly into the bottom of the churn. His
hand trembled, and Dorinda noticed that the swinging blow fell unevenly.
"You haven't done anything you oughtn't to, have you, son?" his mother
inquired shrilly.
Rufus turned his head and stared at her in moody silence. Though his
handsome face wore his usual sulky frown, Dorinda suspected that his
resentful manner was a veil that covered an inner disturbance. His dark
eyes held a smouldering fire, as if fear were waiting to leap out at a
sound, and the hand in which he clutched the hammer had never stopped
shaking.
"Don't you let on I wasn't here, no matter who asks you," he said
doggedly. "It wasn't my fault anyway. There isn't anybody coming, is
there?"
"No, that's Nimrod bringing up the cows," Dorinda rejoined impatiently.
"I must put on my overalls."
Whatever happened, the cows must be milked, she reflected as she entered
the house. This morning and evening ritual of the farm had become as
inexorable as law. Hearts might be broken, men might live or die, but
the cows must be milked.
When she came back from the dairy, Rufus had disappeared, but her
mother, who was preparing supper, beckoned her into the kitchen. "I
haven't found out yet what's the matter," whispered the old woman. "He
won't open his mouth, though I can see that he's terribly upset about
something. I'm worried right sick."
"He's probably got into a quarrel with somebody. You know how
overbearing he is."
"I reckon I spoiled him." Mrs. Oakley's lip trembled while she poured a
little coffee into a cup and then poured it back again into the
coffee-pot. "Your father used to tell me I made a difference because he
was the youngest. I s'pose I oughtn't to have done it, but it's hard to
see how I could have helped it. He was a mighty taking child, was
Rufus."
"Where is he now?"
"Up in his room. I've called him to supper. He's loaded his gun again,
but he didn't seem to want me to notice, and he's put it back in the
corner behind the door."
"Oh, well, try not to worry about it, Ma. Some fool's play most likely.
Can I help you get supper? I'll be straight back as soon as I've slipped
out of these overalls. There's a lot of work for me afterwards in the
dairy."
She ran upstairs to her room, and on the way down, as she passed Rufus's
door, she called cheerfully, "Rufus, aren't you coming to supper?"
To her surprise, his door opened immediately, as if he had been hiding
behind it, and he came out and followed her meekly downstairs into the
kitchen. His excitement had apparently left him, but his healthy colour
had not returned and his eyes looked strained and bloodshot. Bad
whiskey, she thought, though she said as amiably as she could, "If I
were you, I'd go to New York next week even if the job isn't ready."
He looked at her gratefully. "I was just thinking I'd better do that."
His manner was so conciliatory that it made her vaguely uneasy. Jason
had been like that, she remembered, in the weeks before he had jilted
her, and, unjustly or not, she had come to regard suavity in men with
suspicion. It was on the tip of her tongue to ask Rufus if he had got
into a scrape; but she decided, as she brought his supper to the table,
that it was a situation which she had better ignore. No good had ever
come, she reflected with the ripe wisdom of experience, of putting
questions to a man. What men wished you to know, and occasionally what
they did not wish you to know, they would divulge in their own good
time. Her mother, she knew, had spent her life trying to make men over,
and what had come of her efforts except more trouble and stiffer
material to work on?
When she sat down at the table, she expected her mother to begin her
usual interrogation; but the old woman allowed Rufus to finish his
supper undisturbed. Even when the last cake was lifted from the
gridiron, and Mrs. Oakley dropped into her chair behind the tin
coffee-pot, she was still silent. The cords in her throat twitched and
strained when she raised a cup to her lips, and after a vain effort to
swallow, she pushed her plate away with the food untasted.
"Poor Ma," thought the girl, watching the drawn grey face, where the
veins in the temples bulged in knots of pain, "can she never have
peace?" A longing seized her to fold the spare frame in her young arms
and speak comforting words; but the habit of reserve was like an iron
mould from which she could not break away. Nothing but death was strong
enough to shatter that inherited restraint and resolve it into
tenderness. While words of affection struggled to her lips, all she said
was, "You look worn out. Is your neuralgia worse?"
"No, it ain't worse. I've got a stabbing pain in my temple, that's all."
Rising from her chair, she began to mix cornbread and gravy for Rambler
and Flossie. Though she tottered when she moved, she put aside Dorinda's
offer of help. "I'm used to doing things," she said, without stopping
for an instant. "You and Rufus had better go along about what you want
to do."
The hound and the cat were at her skirts, and she had just put the tin
plates down for them and taken up the empty dish, when there was a sound
of wheels on the rocks outside, and Dorinda, who was watching Rufus, saw
him turn a muddy grey, like the discoloured whitewash on the walls.
"Don't you let on that I was off this afternoon, Ma," he whispered
hoarsely.
"I declare, Rufus, you talk as if you were crazy," snapped Mrs. Oakley,
flinching from a dart of neuralgia. Though her tone was merely one of
irritation, her hands trembled so violently that the china dish she was
holding dropped to the floor and crashed into bits. "This china never
was a particle of account!" she exclaimed, as she bent over to pick up
the pieces.
"I wonder who it can be this time of night?" Dorinda said more lightly
than she would have believed possible.
"Maybe I'd better go," Rufus jerked out.
"You sit right down, son," his mother retorted tartly.
Going into the hall, Dorinda opened the front door and stood waiting in
the square of lamplight on the threshold. It was a dark night, for the
moon had not yet risen, and all that she could distinguish was what
appeared to be the single shape of a horse and buggy. Only when the
vehicle had jogged up the slope among the trees, and the driver had
alighted and ascended the steps of the porch, did she recognize the
squat shape and flabby features of Amos Wigfall, the sheriff. She had
known him at the store in his political capacity as the familiar of
every voter; yet friendly as he had always appeared to be, she could not
repress a feeling of apprehension while she held out her hand. People,
especially farmers, she knew, did not venture out, except with good
reason, on bad roads after dark.
"Why, it's you, Mr. Wigfall!" she exclaimed, with cheerful hospitality.
"Ma, Mr. Wigfall is here. I hope you've got some supper for him." And
all the time she was thinking, "I might have known Rufus had done
something foolish. Poor Ma!"
The sheriff heaved his bulky figure into the house. "I ain't come to
supper, Dorinda," he said heartily. "Don't you go and get yo' Ma upset.
I don't reckon it's anything to worry about. I wouldn't have come if I
could have helped it."
Still grasping the girl's hand, he stood blinking apologetically in the
glare of the lamp. His face was so bloated and so unctuous that it might
have been the living embodiment of the fee system upon which it had
fattened. He was chewing tobacco as he spoke, and wheeling abruptly he
spat a wad into the night before he followed Dorinda down the hall to
the kitchen. "The fact is I've come about Rufus," he explained, adding,
"I hope I ain't intrudin', mum," as he whipped off his old slouch hat
with an air of gallantry which reminded Dorinda of the burlesque of some
royal cavalier.
"Oh, no, you ain't intruding, Mr. Wigfall," Mrs. Oakley replied. "What
was it you said about Rufus?"
"He said he was sure it wasn't anything to worry about," Dorinda
hastened to explain. She did not glance at Rufus while she spoke, yet
she was aware that he had risen and was scowling at their visitor.
"Wall, as between friends," the sheriff remarked ingratiatingly, "I hope
thar ain't a particle of truth in the charge; but Peter Kittery was
found dead over by Whistling Spring this evening, and Jacob has got it
into his head that 'twas Rufus that shot him."
"It's a lie!" Rufus shouted furiously. "I never went near Whistling
Spring this evening. Ma knows I was mending her churn for her from
dinner till supper time."
"Wall, I'm downright glad of that, son," Mr. Wigfall returned, and he
looked as if he meant it, fee or no fee. "Yo' Pa was a good friend to me
when he got a chance, and I shouldn't like to see his son mixed up in a
bad business. Jacob says you and Peter had a fuss over cards last night
at the store. But if you ain't been near Whistling Spring," he
concluded, with triumphant logic, "it stands to reason that you couldn't
have done it. You jest let him come along with me, mum," he added after
a pause, as he turned to Mrs. Oakley. "I'll take good care of him, and
send him back to you as soon as the hearing is over to-morrow. Thar
ain't no need for you to worry a mite."
"I never saw Peter after last night!" Rufus cried out in a storm of rage
and terror. "I never went near Whistling Spring. Ma knows I was working
over her old churn all the evening."
His words and his tone struck with a chill against Dorinda's heart. Why
couldn't the boy be silent? Why was he obliged, through some obliquity
of nature, invariably to appear as a braggart and a bully? While she
stood there listening to his furious denial of guilt, she was as
positive that he had killed Peter Kittery as if she had been on the
spot.
For a minute there was silence; then a new voice began to speak, a voice
so faint and yet so shrill that it was like the far-off whistle of a
train. At first the girl did not recognize her mother's tone, and she
glanced quickly at the door with the idea that a stranger might have
entered after the sheriff.
"It couldn't have been Rufus," the old woman said, with that whistling
noise. "Rufus was here with me straight on from dinner time till supper.
I had him mending my old churn because I didn't want to use one of
Dorinda's new ones. Dorinda went off in the fields to watch the hands,"
she continued firmly, "but Rufus was right here with me the whole
evening."
When she had finished speaking, she reached for a chair and sat down
suddenly, as if her legs had failed her. Rufus broke into a nervous
laugh which had an indecent sound, Dorinda thought, and Mr. Wigfall
heaved a loud sigh of relief.
"Wall, you jest come over to-morrow and tell that to the magistrate," he
said effusively. "I don't reckon there could be a better witness for
anybody. Thar ain't nobody round Pedlar's Mill that would be likely to
dispute yo' word." Slinging his arm, he gave Rufus a hearty slap on the
back. "I'm sorry I've got to take you along with me, son, but I hope you
won't bear me any grudge. It won't hurt you to spend a night away from
yo' Ma, and my wife, she'll be glad to have you sample her buckwheat
cakes. I hope you're having good luck with your chickens," he remarked
to Mrs. Oakley as an afterthought. "My wife has been meaning to get over
and look at yo' white leghorns."
"Tell her I'll be real glad to see her whenever she can get over," Mrs.
Oakley replied, as she made an effort to struggle to her feet. "Ain't
you going to take any clean clothes to wear to-morrow, Rufus? That shirt
looks right mussed."
Rufus shook his head. "No, I'm not. If they want me, they can take me as
I am."
"Wall, he looks all right to me," the sheriff observed, with jovial
mirth. "I'll expect you about noon," he said, as he shook hands. "Don't
you lose a minute's sleep. Thar ain't nothing in the world for you to
worry about."
Picking up the kerosene lamp from the table, Dorinda went out on the
porch to light the way to the gate. "There's a bad place near the
'rockery,'" she cautioned.
He had climbed heavily into the buggy, and Rufus was in the act of
mounting between the wheels, when Mrs. Oakley came out of the house and
thrust a parcel wrapped in newspaper into the boy's hand. "There's a
clean collar and your comb," she said, drawing quickly back. "Be sure
not to forget them in the morning."
XII
Standing there on the porch, with the light from the lamp she held
flaring out against the silver black of the night sky, Dorinda watched
the buggy crawling down the dangerous road to the gate. Something dark
and cold had settled over her thoughts. She could not shake it off
though she told herself that it was unreasonable for her to feel so
despondent. As if despondency, she added, were the product of reason!
Mother love was a wonderful thing, she reflected, a wonderful and a
ruinous thing! It was mother love that had helped to make Rufus the
mortal failure he was, and it was mother love that was now accepting, as
a sacrifice, the results of this failure. Mrs. Oakley was a pious and
God-fearing woman, whose daily life was lived beneath the ominous shadow
of the wrath to come; yet she had deliberately perjured herself in order
that a worthless boy might escape the punishment which she knew he
deserved.
"I'm not like that," Dorinda thought. "I couldn't have done it." At the
bottom of her heart, in spite of her kinship to Rufus, there was an
outraged sense, not so much of justice as of economy. The lie appeared
to her less sinful than wasted. After all, why should not Rufus be held
responsible for his own wickedness? She was shocked; she was
unsympathetic; she was curiously exasperated. Her mother's attitude to
Rufus impressed her as sentimental rather than unselfish; and she saw in
this painful occurrence merely one of the first fruits of that long
weakness. Since she had been brought so close to reality she had had
less patience with evasive idealism. "I suppose I'm different from other
women," she meditated. "I may have lost feeling, or else it was left out
of me when I was born. Some women would have gone on loving Jason no
matter how he treated them; but I'm not made that way. There's something
deep down in me that I value more than love or happiness or anything
outside myself. It may be only pride, but it comes first of all."
The buggy had disappeared into the night, and lowering the lamp, she
turned and entered the house. As she closed the door the mocking screech
of an owl floated in, and she felt that the frost was slipping over the
threshold. All the ancient superstitions of the country gathered in her
mind. It was foolish, she knew, to let herself remember these things at
such a time; but she had lost control of her imagination, which galloped
ahead dragging her reason after it.
In the kitchen she found her mother bending over the dish-pan with her
arms plunged in soapsuds.
"Come to bed, Ma. I'll finish the dishes."
To her surprise, Mrs. Oakley did not resist. The spirit of opposition
was crushed out of her, and she tottered as she turned away to wipe her
hands on a cup towel.
"I reckon I'd better," she answered meekly. "I don't feel as if I could
stand on my feet another minute."
Putting her strong young arm about her, Dorinda led her across the hall
into her bedroom. While the girl struck a match and lighted the lamp on
the table, she saw that her mother was shaking as if she had been
stricken with palsy.
"I'll help you undress, Ma."
"I can manage everything but my shoes, daughter. My fingers are too
swollen to unbutton them."
"Don't you worry. I'll put you to bed." As she turned down the bed and
smoothed out the coarse sheets and the patchwork quilt, it seemed to
Dorinda that the inanimate objects in the room had borrowed pathos from
their human companions. All the stitches that had gone into this quilt,
happy stitches, sad stitches, stitches that had ended in nothing! Her
eyes filled with tears, and she looked quickly away. What was it in
houses and furniture that made them come to life in hours of suspense
and tear at the heartstrings?
Mrs. Oakley was undressing slowly, folding each worn, carefully mended
garment before she placed it on a chair near the foot of the bed.
"Do you reckon they will do anything to Rufus?" she asked presently in a
quavering voice.
She had released her hair from the tight coil at the back of her head,
and it hung now, combed and plaited by Dorinda, in a thin grey braid on
her shoulders. The childish arrangement gave a fantastic air to the
shadow on the whitewashed wall.
"Not after what you said. Didn't you hear Mr. Wigfall tell you that he
was taking him just for the night?"
Mrs. Oakley turned her head, and the shadow at her back turned with her.
"Yes, I heard him. Well, if the Lord will give me strength to go through
with it, I'll never ask for anything else."
"He'll be more likely to help you if you get some sleep and stop
worrying. The Lord helps good sleepers." Though she spoke flippantly,
she was frightened by the look in her mother's face.
"I don't feel as if I could close my eyes." Mrs. Oakley had climbed into
bed, and was lying, straight and stiff as an effigy, under the quilt.
"Don't you think it would be a comfort if we were to read a chapter in
the Bible?"
Dorinda broke into a dry little laugh. "No, I don't. The only comforting
thing I can imagine is to get my head on a pillow. I've got seven cows
to milk by sunrise, and that is no easy job."
"Yes, you'd better go," her mother assented reluctantly, and she added
with a sigh, "I can't help feeling that something dreadful is going to
happen."
"You won't prevent it by lying awake. Don't get up in the morning until
you're obliged to milk the cows before day and get Fluvanna to help
about breakfast as soon as she comes. It's a long way to Queen Elizabeth
Courthouse, and we'll have to allow plenty of time for the horses. Do
you want anything more?" She resisted an impulse to stoop and kiss the
wrinkled cheek because she knew that the unusual exhibition of
tenderness would embarrass them both. "Shall I put out the lamp for
you?"
"No, I like a little light. You can see so many things in the dark after
the fire goes out."
Dorinda moved away as noiselessly as she could; but she had barely
crossed the hall before she heard a muffled sound in the room, and knew
that her mother was out of bed and on her knees. "I can't do anything,"
thought the girl desperately. "It is going to kill her, and I can't do
anything to prevent it." Every muscle in her body ached from the strain
of the day while she washed the dishes and cleaned the kitchen for the
next morning. She realized that she should have to do most of her farm
work before sunrise, and she decided that, in case Fluvanna came late,
it would be well to put out whatever she needed for breakfast. After
that--well, even if Rufus had murdered somebody, she couldn't keep awake
any longer.
In the morning, when she came back into the house after milking, she
found that her mother was already in the kitchen, and that a pot of
coffee was bubbling on the stove. Of course Fluvanna, on the day when
she was particularly needed, had contrived to be late.
"I told you not to worry about breakfast, Ma," Dorinda said, provoked in
spite of her pity.
"I know you did, but I couldn't lie in bed any longer. I was so afraid
you might oversleep yourself and not wake me in time." She was the
victim of a nervous apprehension lest they should be too late for the
magistrate, and it was futile to attempt to reason her out of her folly.
"You sit right down in your overalls and drink your coffee while it's
hot," she continued, stirring restlessly. "I've got some fried eggs and
bacon to keep up your strength."
"My strength is all right." Dorinda washed her hands and then came over
to the table where breakfast was waiting for her. "The sun isn't up yet,
and we can't start before day."
"Well, I wanted to be ready in plenty of time. You'll have to be away
from the farm all day, won't you?"
"I don't know," Dorinda rejoined briskly. "Fluvanna and Nimrod will have
to manage the best they can. I'm not going to worry about it. People can
always be spared easier than they think they can."
Her animation, however, was wasted, for her mother was not following
her. Mrs. Oakley had grown so restless that she could not sit still at
the table, and she jumped up and ran to the stove or the safe whenever
she could find an excuse. She wore the strained expression of a person
who is listening for an expected sound and is afraid of missing it by a
moment of inadvertence. Already, before lighting the stove, she had put
on her Sunday dress of black alpaca, and had protected it in front by an
apron of checked blue and white gingham. If she had had the courage,
Dorinda suspected, she would have cooked breakfast in her widow's
bonnet, with the streamer of rusty crape at her back.
"Is that somebody going along the road?" she inquired whenever Dorinda
looked up from her plate.
"No, I don't hear anybody," the girl replied patiently. "Try to eat
something, or you'll be sick."
Mrs. Oakley obediently lifted a bit of egg on her fork, and then put it
down again before it had touched her lips. "I don't feel as if I could
swallow a morsel."
"Drink a little coffee anyway," Dorinda pleaded.
Again the old woman made a futile effort to swallow. "I don't know what
can be the matter with me," she said, "but my throat feels as if it were
paralyzed."
"Well, I'll fix up a snack for you, and you can nibble at it on the way.
Somebody will be sure to ask us to dinner. Now, I'll clear the table
before I get ready."
But, after all, Dorinda was left at home for the day. Just as Nimrod,
animated by misfortune, was leading Dan and Beersheba out to the wagon,
a buggy drove briskly into the yard, and Nathan Pedlar alighted.
"I kind of thought you'd want a man with your Ma, Dorinda," he
explained, "so I left Bob Shafer in charge of the store and came right
over. Rufus spoke to me as he was going by with the sheriff last night,
and I told him I'd take his Ma to the Courthouse."
Though Dorinda was doubtful at first, Mrs. Oakley responded immediately.
In spite of her protracted experience with masculine helplessness, she
had not lost her confidence in the male as a strong prop in the hour of
adversity. "I can't tell you how thankful I am to have you, Nathan," she
replied eagerly. "Dorinda had just as well stay at home and look after
the farm."
"Don't you think I'd better go too, Ma?" the girl asked, not without a
tinge of exasperation in her tone. It seemed absurd to her that her
mother should prefer to have Nathan Pedlar stand by her simply because
he happened to be a man.
"I don't believe she'll need you, Dorinda," remarked Nathan, who, like
Nimrod, was inspired by adversity. "But if you feel you'd like to come,
I reckon we can all three squeeze into my buggy."
"There ain't a bit of use in your going," Mrs. Oakley insisted. "You
just stay right here and take care of things."
"Well, I won't go." Dorinda gave way after a resistance that was only
half hearted. "Take care of her, Nathan, and make her eat something
before she gets there."'
Running into the house, she wrapped two buttered rolls and boiled eggs
in a red and white napkin, and put them into a little basket. Then she
added a bottle of blackberry wine, and carried the basket out to the
buggy, while Mrs. Oakley tied on her bonnet with trembling hands.
"Where's my bottle of camphor, Dorinda?"
"Here it is, Ma, in your reticule. Be sure and take a little blackberry
wine if you feel faint." Not until she had watched the buggy drive
through the gate and out on the road, where the sun was coming up in a
ball of fire, did the girl understand what a relief it was not to go. "I
believe she'd rather have Nathan," she decided, as she went upstairs to
change into her old gingham dress, "because he doesn't know that she is
not telling the truth."
When she thought of it afterwards, that day towered like a mountain in
the cloudy background of her life. Alone on the farm, for the first time
in her recollection, she felt forlorn and isolated. It was impossible
for her to keep her mind fixed on her tasks. Restlessness, like an
inarticulate longing, pricked at her nerves. When the morning work in
the dairy was over, she wandered about the farm, directing the work in
the fields, and stopping for a minute or two to talk with old Matthew
Fairlamb, who was handing up the shingles to his son William on the roof
of the new barn. At a little distance the old house of the overseer,
which had been used as a tobacco barn since her great-grandfather's
death, was being cleaned and repaired for Jonas Walsh (one of the "poor
Walshes") who had undertaken to work as a manager in return for a living
and a share of the crops. After Rufus went, Mrs. Oakley insisted, a
white man and his family would be required on the place, and though
Dorinda preferred loneliness to such company, she found it less wearing
to yield to her mother than to argue against her opinion. "Mrs. Walsh
will be company for Ma, anyway," she said to herself. "Even if she is
slatternly, they will still have chickens in common."
"Do you think Jonas will be useful?" she inquired of old Matthew, while
she paused to watch the expert shingling of the roof.
Old Matthew made a dubious gesture, "Mebbe he will, an' mebbe he won't.
I ain't prophesyin'."
"Well, he can shoot anyhow," William observed cynically, as he stooped
down for the shingles his father held up. "He's got a gun and a coon
dog."
"But I need him to work. How can you make a living out of the land
unless you work it?"
Old Matthew chuckled. "The trouble with this here land is that tobaccy
has worn it out. I ain't never seen the land yit that it wouldn't wear
out if you gave it a chance. You take my advice, Dorindy, and don't have
nothin' more to do with tobaccy. As long as you don't smoke and don't
chaw, thar ain't no call for you to put up with it."
"I won't," Dorinda replied with determination. "All the tobacco fields
are giving way to cowpeas."
"I see you're making a new field alongside of the old one."
"Yes. I sowed sweet clover with lime, and turned the clover under when
it was in bloom. I can't afford to do that again. It was an experiment,
but it improved the land."
"You're right thar, honey. Put yo' heart in the land. The land is the
only thing that will stay by you."
She smiled and passed on, stopping to say a few words to Mary Joe Green
at the door of the henhouse. Though she was aware that her aimless
movements accomplished nothing, she could not settle down to the steady
work which was awaiting her. The sound of a wagon in the road shook her
nerves into a quiver of fear, and she started whenever a bird flew
overhead or an acorn dropped on the dead leaves at her feet. At dinner
time she did not kindle a fire in the stove, but drank a glass of
buttermilk and ate a "pone" of cornbread while she stood on the front
porch and looked at the road. One moment she wished that she had gone
with her mother to the Courthouse, and the next she was glad that she
had waited at home. Whatever Rufus's fate might be, she felt that the
mental strain would be the end of her mother. Even if Rufus were to go
free, Mrs. Oakley's conscience would torment her to death.
As the day declined the place became insupportable to her, and leaving
the house, she walked across the yard to the gate, with Rambler and
Flossie trailing at her heels. The road under the honey locust tree was
strewn with oblong brown pods, as glossy as satin, and treading over
them, she walked slowly past the bridge and up the shaded slope between
the pasture and the band of Hoot Owl Woods. In the pasture she could see
the Jerseys gathered by the stream under the willows, and now and then a
silver tinkle of cowbells floated over the trumpet vine on the fence.
It was a rich October afternoon, with a sky of burnished blue and an air
of carnival in the wine-red and ashen-bronze of the woods. For an
instant the brightness hurt her eyes, and when she opened them it seemed
to her that the autumnal radiance fluttered like a blown shawl over the
changeless structure of the landscape. Beneath the fugitive beauty the
stern features of the country had not softened.
She walked on, still followed by Rambler and Flossie, beyond the woods
to the fork of the road. Looking away from the gate of Five Oaks, she
kept her eyes on the acres of broomsedge belonging to Honeycomb Farm.
The stretch of road beyond the burned cabin was deserted, and the only
sound was the monotonous droning of insects and the dropping of
persimmons or acorns on the dead leaves under the trees. Far away, in
the direction of Old Farm, the shocked corn on the hill was swimming in
a rain of apricot-coloured lights. "If only it would last," she thought,
"things would not be so hard to bear. But it is like happiness. Before
you know that you have found it, it goes."
Turning away, because beauty was like a knife in her heart, she called
Rambler back to her side. In the middle of the road, bathed in the
apricot-coloured glow, Flossie was sitting, and farther on, she saw the
figures of old Matthew and William Fairlamb on their way home from work.
When they reached her they spoke without stopping.
"Good evening. We'll be over bright and early to-morrow."
"Good evening to you both. There won't be a killing frost to-night, will
there?"
"Not enough to hurt. Thar ain't nothin' but flowers left out by this
time, I reckon."
Old Matthew's cheeks were as red as winter apples, and his eyes twinkled
like black haws in their sockets. "He! He! When thar ain't nothin' to
hurt, we've no need to worry!"
As they trudged away, she turned and looked after them. She wanted to
ask what they had heard of the shooting; but she resisted the impulse
until they were too far away for her words to reach them. Standing
there, while the two figures dwindled gradually into the blue distance,
she was visited again by the feeling that the moment was significant, if
only she could discover the meaning of it before it eluded her. Strange
how often that sensation returned to her now! Everything at which she
gazed; the frosted brown and yellow and wine-red of the landscape; the
shocked corn against the sunset; the figures of the two men diminishing
in the vague smear of the road; all these images were steeped in an
illusion of mystery. "I've let myself get wrought up over nothing," she
thought, with an endeavour to be reasonable.
By the time she came within sight of the house again the afterglow was
paling, and a chill had crept through the thick shawl that she wore.
Perhaps, in spite of old Matthew, there would be a heavy frost before
morning, and she was glad to reflect that only the few summer flowers in
her mother's rockery would be blighted. Smoke was rising from two of the
chimneys, and she knew that Mary Joe had kindled fires in the kitchen
and in her mother's chamber. Already Fluvanna would be well on with the
milking. It was the first time Dorinda had trusted it to the girl and
Nimrod, and she hoped that there would be nothing to find fault with
when she went out to the barn.
Two hours later, when the milking and the straining were both over, she
hurried out of the dairy at the noise of wheels in the darkness. As the
buggy drew up to the steps, she saw that her mother was seated between
Rufus and Nathan; and even before she caught the words they shouted, she
understood that the boy had been discharged. It was what she had
expected; yet after the assurance reached her, her anxiety was still as
heavy as it had been all day. When her eyes fell on her mother's
shrunken figure she realized that the old woman must have paid a fearful
price for her son's freedom. "She looks bled," the girl thought
bitterly. "She looks as if she would crumble to a handful of dust if you
touched her." A hot anger against Rufus flamed in her heart. Then she
saw that the boy was shaking with emotion, and her anger was smothered
in pity. After all, who was to blame? Who was ever to blame in life?
"It's all right, Dorinda," Nathan said, as he helped Mrs. Oakley to the
ground and up on the porch. "Your Ma held up splendidly, but it's been
too much for her. She's worn clean out, I reckon."
"I wish you'd been there to see the way she did it," Rufus added.
"Nobody said a word after she got through." Had he actually forgotten,
Dorinda asked herself, that his mother had sworn to a lie in order to
save him?
XIII
For the second time in her life Mrs. Oakley allowed herself to be put to
bed without protest. She hung limp and cold when they placed her in a
chair, and watched her children with vacant eyes while Rufus piled fresh
logs on the fire and Dorinda brought bottles of hot water wrapped in her
orange shawl. When the grey flannelette nightgown was slipped over her
shoulders, the old woman spoke for the first time since she had entered
the house.
"Dorinda, the Lord gave me strength."
"They have killed her," the girl thought resentfully; but she said only,
"Now you must get to bed as quick as you can."
Mrs. Oakley stared up at her with eyes that were wind-swept in their
bleakness. Her face looked flattened and drawn to one side, as if some
tremendous pressure had just been removed. "I reckon I'd better," she
answered listlessly.
"You must try to eat something. Fluvanna is making you some tea and
toast."
"I ain't sick enough for tea."
"Then I'll make you a cream toddy. There's some nice cream I saved for
you."
While Dorinda was speaking she leaned over the bed and wrapped the
clammy feet in the orange shawl. "Can you feel the hot water bottles?"
she asked. The feet that she warmed so carefully were as stiff already,
she told herself in terror, as if they belonged to a corpse. Neither
the hot water nor the blazing fire could put any warmth into the
shivering body.
"Yes, I feel them, but I'm sort of numbed."
"Now I'll make the toddy. I've got some whiskey put away where Rufus
couldn't find it. If Fluvanna brings your supper, try to eat the egg
anyway."
"I'll try, but I feel as if I couldn't keep it down," Mrs. Oakley
replied submissively.
Flames were leaping up the chimney, and the shadows had melted into the
cheerful light. When Dorinda returned with the cream toddy, Mrs. Oakley
drank it eagerly, and with the stimulant of the whiskey in her veins,
she was able to sit up in bed and eat the supper Fluvanna had prepared.
It was long after the coloured girl's hour for going home, but the
excitement had braced her to self-sacrifice, and she had offered to stay
on for the night. "I can make up a pallet jest as easy as not in yo'
Ma's room," she said to Dorinda, "an' I'll fix Mr. Rufus' breakfast for
him, so he can catch the train befo' day."
There were few negroes who did' not develop character, either good or
bad, in a crisis, Dorinda reflected a little later as she went out to
the dairy. Though there was no need for her to visit the dairy, since
Fluvanna and Nimrod had finished the work, she felt that she could not
sleep soundly until she had inspected the milk. Was this merely what
Rufus called "woman's fussiness," she wondered, or was it the kind of
nervous mania that afflicted even the most successful farmer?
The brilliant autumn day had declined into a wan evening. From the dark
fields the wind brought the trail of woodsmoke mingled with the
effluvium of rotting leaves; and this scent invaded her thoughts like
the odour of melancholy. Not even the frosty air or the fragrant breath
of the cows in the barn could dispel the lethargy which had crept over
her. "I'm tired out," she reasoned. "I've been going too hard the last
six months, and I feel the strain as soon as I stop." Though she was
saddened by the haunting pathos of life, she did not feel the intimate
pang of grief. All that, it seemed to her, was over for ever. The power
to pity was still hers, for compassion is a detached impulse, but she
had lot beyond recall the gift of poignant emotion. Nothing had
penetrated that dead region around her heart. Not her father's death,
not her mother's illness--nothing. Drought had withered her, she told
herself cynically, and the locust had eaten away the green of her
spirit.
In the morning, Rufus went off on the early train, and Dorinda drew a
breath of relief as she turned back to her work. The shock of the
tragedy appeared to have cleared the boy's temper, and he showed genuine
distress when he parted from his mother. "I feel as if I'd never see her
again," he said to Dorinda on the porch, while he was waiting for the
farmer who had promised to stop for him on the way to the station.
Dorinda shook her head. Helplessness in the face of misery acted always
as an irritant on her nerves. "You never can tell," she replied. "But
remember all you have cost her and try to keep straight in the future."
"I swear I'll never give her another minute's worry," he responded,
stuffing his handkerchief into his pocket.
Perhaps he meant it; but it seemed to Dorinda that his repentance, like
his gift with tools, was too facile. "Whatever comes of this, it has
been the death of Ma," she thought, as she went into the house.
When the day's churning was over, and she was in her mother's room, the
new doctor from the Courthouse arrived with his instruments and his
medicine case. He was a brisk, very ugly young man, with an awkward
raw-boned figure, and an honest face which was covered with unsightly
freckles. As different from Jason as any man could well be! He had risen
by sheer ability from the poorer class, and already, notwithstanding his
plain appearance and uncompromising honesty, he had built up a better
practice than the hereditary one of the Greylocks. For one thing, he
insisted upon having his fees paid, and it was natural, Dorinda had
discovered, to value advice more highly when it was not given away.
As the doctor sat down beside Mrs. Oakley's bed, she opened her eyes and
looked at him without surprise and without welcome. Her bed was smooth
and spotlessly clean; the best quilt of log-cabin design lay over her
feet; and she was wearing a new nightgown which was buttoned closely
about her neck. Without her clothes, she had the look, in spite of her
ravaged face, of a very old child.
"I've never spent a day in bed in my life, doctor," she said, "except
when my children were born."
"I know," he rejoined, with dry sympathy. "That is the trouble."
He did not waste words, but bent over immediately to begin his
examination; and when it was over, he merely patted the old woman's
shoulder before packing away his instruments.
"You'll have to stay in bed a while now," he said, as he stood up with
his case in his hands. "I'll leave some medicine with your daughter; but
it isn't medicine you need; it is rest."
Her groping gaze followed him with irrepressible weariness. "I don't
know what will become of the chickens," she said. "I reckon everything
will go to rack and ruin, but I can't help it. I've done all I could."
He turned on the threshold. "My dear Mrs. Oakley, you couldn't get up if
you tried. Your strength has given out."
She smiled indifferently. All the nervous energy upon which she had
lived for forty years was exhausted. There was nothing now but the
machine which was rapidly running down. "Yes, I reckon I'm worn out,"
she responded, and turned her face to the wall.
Not until they had left the porch and crossed the trodden ragweed to
where the buggy was waiting, did Dorinda summon the courage to ask a
question.
"Is she seriously ill, doctor?"
At her words he stopped and looked straight into her eyes, a look as
bare and keen as a blade. "She isn't ill at all in the strict sense of
the word," he answered. "She told the truth when she said that she was
worn out."
"Then she will never be up again?"
"One never knows. But I think this is the beginning of the end." He
hesitated, and added regretfully, "I ought not to put it so bluntly."
She shook her head. "I'd rather know. Poor Ma! She is only sixty-two. It
has come so suddenly."
"Suddenly." The word broke from him like an oath. "Why, the woman in
there has been dying for twenty years!"
Her eyes were stony while she watched him mount into his buggy and turn
the horse's head toward the gate. The wheels spun over the rocks and out
into the road, as if they were revolving over the ice in her heart.
Would nothing thaw the frozen lake that enveloped her being? Would she
never again become living and human? The old sense of the hollowness of
reality had revived. Though she knew it was her mother of whom they had
been speaking, the words awoke only echoes in her thoughts. She longed
with all her soul to suffer acutely; yet she could feel nothing within
this colourless void in which she was imprisoned.
When the buggy had disappeared, she retraced her steps to the house and
entered her mother's room with a smile on her lips.
"You'll have to rest now, Ma, no matter how you hate it."
At Dorinda's cheerful voice, the old woman turned over and looked at her
daughter as if she were a stranger.
"I don't know how you'll manage," she answered; but her tone was
perfunctory.
"Oh, we'll manage all right. Don't you worry. Just try to get well, Ma."
A change of expression rippled like a shadow over the grey features, and
passed without leaving a trace. "I was afraid maybe the doctor didn't
think I was sick enough to stay in bed. I know I ain't exactly sick, but
I seem to have given way. I reckon Mary Joe can look after the chickens
till I'm able to be up."
After this she fell into a doze from which she did not awaken until
Dorinda brought her favourite dinner of jowl and turnip salad.
"The doctor says you must eat, Ma, or you'll never get back your
strength."
"I know I ought to, daughter, but I feel as if something was choking
me."
Day after day, month after month. Nothing else all through the autumn
and winter.
Though Mrs. Oakley lived more than a year longer, she was never able
again to leave her bed. For the greater part of the time she lay, silent
and inert, in a state between waking and sleeping, unconcerned after all
her fruitless endeavours. Rufus, she never asked for, and when his
letters were read to her, she would smile vaguely and turn away as if
she had ceased to be interested. Old Rambler spent his days on a mat at
the side of her bed, and Flossie lay curled up on the patchwork quilt
over her feet. If they were absent long, she would begin to move
restlessly, and beg presently that they should be brought back. At the
end, they were the only companions that she desired, for, as she said
once, they "did not bother her with questions." The tragedy to Dorinda
was not so much in her mother's slow dying as in her unconditional
surrender to decay. For more than forty years she had fought her
dauntless fight against the sordid actuality, and at the last she
appeared to become completely reconciled to her twin enemies, poverty
and dirt. Nothing made any difference to her now, and because nothing
made any difference to her, dying was the happiest part of her life.
"There ain't any use struggling," she said once, while Dorinda was
cleaning her room, and after a long pause, "It doesn't seem just right
that we have to be born. It ain't worth all the trouble we go through."
But there were other days when her inextinguishable energy would flare
up in sparks, and she would insist upon sitting up in bed while the
white Leghorns flocked by the window. Then she would recognize her
favourite hens and call them by name; and once she had Romeo, the prize
rooster, brought into her room, and kept him under her eyes, until he
began to strut and behave indelicately, when she "shooed" him out in her
old peremptory manner. Frequently, in the last few months, she asked to
have Dan and Beersheba led to her window. Tears would come into her eyes
while the long sad faces of the horses looked at her through the panes,
and she would murmur plaintively, "There's a heap of understanding in
animals. You'll never let those horses want, will you, daughter?"
"Never, Ma. In a few years, if nothing happens, I'll turn them out to
pasture for the rest of their lives."
Mrs. Oakley would smile as if she had forgotten, and after a long
silence, she would begin talking in an animated voice of her girlhood
and her parents. As the weeks went by, all the years of her marriage and
motherhood vanished from her memory, and her mind returned to her early
youth when she was engaged to the young missionary. Her old tropical
dream came back to her; in her sleep she would ramble on about palm
trees and crocodiles and ebony babies. "I declare, it seems just as if
I'd been there," she said one morning. "It's queer how much more real
dreams can be than the things you're going through."
At the end of the year, in the middle of the night before she died, she
awoke Dorinda, and talked for a long time about the heathen and the
sacrifices that Presbyterian missionaries had made to bring them to
Christ. "Your great-grandfather was a wonderful scholar," she said, "and
I reckon that's where you get most of your sense. I s'pose missionaries
have to be scholars. They need something besides religion to fall back
on in their old age." Never once did she allude to anything that had
occurred since her marriage, and she appeared to have forgotten that she
had ever known Joshua.
The next afternoon she died in her sleep while Nathan was sitting beside
her bed. For a few minutes Dorinda broke down and wept, less from grief
than from the knowledge that grief was expected of her; and Nathan, who
was always at his best in the house of mourning, won her everlasting
gratitude by his behaviour. She found herself depending upon him as if
he had been some ideal elder brother such as she had never known. So
naturally that fate seemed to have arranged it on purpose, he assumed
authority over the household and the funeral. He thought of everything,
and everybody deferred to him. Funerals were the only occasions when he
had ever risen to dignity, and though he had sincerely liked Mrs.
Oakley, the few days before her burial were among the pleasantest that
he had ever spent in his life.
"I shall never forget how good you have been," Dorinda said, when it was
over. "I don't know what I should have done without you." And though the
words were spoken impulsively, as a matter of fact she never, in the
future, forgot Nathan's kindness. It was a mark of her proud and
self-sufficient nature that she could not forget either gratitude or
resentment.
When he had driven away, she turned to Fluvanna, who was picking up bits
of rusty crape from the floor of the porch.
"I really don't know what we should have done without him," she remarked
over again.
"If you ax me, Miss Dorinda, he is one handy man at a funeral," answered
Fluvanna, who relapsed into dialect on tragic or perilous occasions. "I
was thinkin' right along how pleased yo' Ma would have been if she could
have seen him, for she cert'n'y did like handy folks about her."
"Poor Ma, I wish she could have had the chickens a few years earlier,"
Dorinda sighed. "To think of the years she went without a cow."
"Well, she enjoyed 'em while she had 'em," Fluvanna responded fervently.
"Have you thought yet what you're goin' to do, Miss Dorinda?"
"Yes, I've thought. The farm is mine. Ma left it to me, and I'm going to
stay on as we are."
"Just you and me? Won't you get lonesome without some white folks?"
"After Jonas Walsh moves out of the overseer's house, I'll engage Martin
Flower, who is a better farmer, and has a sensible wife. Mary Joe can
take care of the chickens, and I'm going to hire her brother Ebenezer to
help Nimrod with the cows. If everything goes well this winter, I'll be
ready to start a real dairy in the spring. Then I'll need more hands, so
we shan't be lonely."
"Naw'm, I don't reckon we'll, get lonesome, not the way we work,"
Fluvanna agreed. "I ain' never seen no man work as hard as you do, Miss
Dorinda. Yo' Ma told me befo' she passed away that you had stayin' power
and she reckoned that you was the only one of the family that had.
Sprightliness don't git you far, she said, unless you've got stayin'
power enough to keep you after you git thar. Well, it's all your'n now,
ain't it?" she inquired placidly, as Dorinda's eyes swept the horizon.
"Yes, it's all mine." Walking over to the edge of the porch, Dorinda
looked across the vague, glimmering fields. Another autumn had gone.
Another sunset like the heart of a pomegranate was fading out in the
west. Again the wandering scents of wood smoke and rotting leaves came
and went on the wind.
For an instant, the permanence of material things, the inexorable
triumph of fact over emotion, appeared to be the only reality. These
things had been ageless when her mother was young; they would be still
ageless when she herself had become an old woman. Over the immutable
landscape human lives drifted and vanished like shadows.
XIV
When she looked back on the years that followed her mother's death,
Dorinda could remember nothing but work. Out of a fog of recollection
there protruded bare outlines which she recognized as the milestones of
her prosperity. She saw clearly the autumn she had turned the
eighteen-acre field into pasture; the failure of her first experiment
with ensilage; the building of the new dairy and cow-barns; the gradual
increase of her seven cows into a herd. Certain dates stood out in her
farm calendar. The year the blight had fallen on her cornfield and she
had had to buy fodder from James Ellgood; the year she had first planted
alfalfa; the year she had lost a number of her cows from contagious
abortion; the year she had reclaimed the fields beyond Poplar Spring;
the year her first prize bull had won three blue ribbons. With the slow
return of fertility to the soil, she had passed, by an unconscious
process, into mute acquiescence with the inevitable. The bitter irony of
her point of view had shaded into a cheerful cynicism which formed a
protective covering over her mind and heart. She had worked relentlessly
through the years; but it was work that she had enjoyed, and above all
it was work that had created anew the surroundings amid which she lived.
In a changed form her mother's frustrated passion to redeem the world
was finding concrete expression.
At thirty-three, the perspective of the last ten years was incredibly
shortened. All the cold starry mornings when she had awakened before day
and crept out to the barn by lantern light to attend to the milking,
appeared to her now as a solitary frozen dawn. All the bleak winters,
all the scorching summers, were a single day; all the evenings, when she
had dreamed half asleep in the firelit dusk, were a single night. She
could not separate these years into seasons. In her long retrospect they
were crystallized into one flawless pattern.
Through those ten years, while she struggled to free the farm from debt,
she had scrimped and saved like a miser; and this habit of saving, she
knew, would cling to her for the rest of her life. She went without
butter; she drank only buttermilk, in order that she might keep nothing
back from the market. Her clothes were patched and mended as long as
they held together, and she had stopped going to church because her
pride would not suffer her to appear there in overalls, or in the faded
calico dresses she wore in the house. Though she was obliged to hire
women to help her with the milking and in the dairy, she herself worked
harder than any of them. Nothing, she told herself grimly, could elude
her vigilance. In her passionate recoil from the thriftlessness of the
poor, she had developed a nervous dread of indolence which reminded her
of her mother. She went to bed, stupefied by fatigue, as soon as the
last pound of butter was wrapped for the early train; yet she was up
again before the break of day while the hands were still sleeping. And
only Fluvanna, who lived in the house with her now, knew the hours she
spent beside her lamp counting the pounds of butter and the number of
eggs she had sent to market. If only she could save enough to pay off
the mortgage and return the money she had borrowed from the Faradays,
she felt that she should begin to breathe freely for the first time in
her life.
And there was more than hard work in her struggle; there was unflagging
enterprise as well. Her father had worked harder than she could ever do,
toiling summer and winter, day and night, over the crops, which always
failed because they were expected to thrive on so little. She remembered
him perpetually hauling manure or shredding fodder, until he loomed in
her memory as a titanic image of the labourer who labours without hope.
"The truth is, I would rather have failed at the start than have gone on
like that," she thought. "I was able to take risks because I was too
unhappy to be afraid." Yes, she had had the courage of desperation, and
that had saved her from failure. Without borrowed money, without the
courage to borrow money, she could never have made the farm even a
moderate success. This had required not only perseverance but audacity
as well; and it had required audacity again to permeate the methodical
science of farming with the spirit of adventure. Interest, excitement
even, must be instilled into the heartless routine. The hours of work
never varied. Chores were done by necessity, as in the old days without
system, but by the stroke of the clock. Each milker had her own place,
and milked always the same cows. After the first trial or two, Dorinda
had yielded to the reluctance of the cow when her accustomed milker was
changed. She had borrowed money again, "hiring money" they called it at
Pedlar's Mill, to buy her first Jersey bull; but the daughters of that
bull were still her best butter-making cows.
Gradually, as the years passed, her human associations narrowed down to
Fluvanna's companionship and the Sunday afternoon visits of Nathan
Pedlar and his children. The best years of her youth, while her beauty
resisted hard work and sun and wind, were shared only with the coloured
woman with whom she lived. She had prophesied long ago that Fluvanna
would be a comfort to her, and the prophecy was completely fulfilled.
The affection between the two women had outgrown the slender tie of
mistress and maid, and had become as strong and elastic as the bond that
holds relatives together. They knew each other's daily lives; they
shared the one absorbing interest in the farm; they trusted each other
without discretion and without reserve. Fluvanna respected and adored
her mistress; and Dorinda, with an inherited feeling of condescension,
was sincerely attached to her servant. Though Dorinda still guarded the
reason of her flight to New York, she did this less from dread of
Fluvanna's suspecting the truth than from secret terror of the
enervating thought of the past. That was over and done with, and every
instinct of her nature warned her to let dead bones lie buried.
Sometimes on winter nights, when the snow was falling or the rain
blowing in gusts beyond the window, the two women would sit for an hour,
when work was over, in front of the log fire in Dorinda's room which had
once been her mother's chamber. Then they would talk sympathetically of
the cows and the hens, and occasionally they would speak of Fluvanna's
love affairs and of Dorinda's years in the city. The coloured girl would
ask eager questions in the improved grammar her mistress had taught her.
"I don't see how you could bear to come back to this poky place. But, of
course, when yo' Pap died somebody had to be here to look after things.
I don't reckon you'll ever go back, will you?"
"No, I shall never go back. I had enough of it when I was there."
"Wouldn't you rather look at the sights up there than at cows and
chickens?"
Dorinda would shake her head thoughtfully. "Not if they are my cows and
chickens."
In this reply, which was as invariable as a formula, she touched
unerringly the keynote of her character. The farm belonged to her, and
the knowledge aroused a fierce sense of possession. To protect, to lift
up, rebuild and restore, these impulses formed the deepest obligation
her nature could feel.
Though she talked frankly to Nathan about the farm and the debts which
had once encumbered it, she had never given him her confidence as
generously as she had bestowed it on Fluvanna. Kind as he had been, the
fact that he was a man and a widower made an impalpable, and she told
herself ridiculous, barrier between them. She had grown to depend upon
him, but it was a practical dependence, as devoid of sentiment as her
dependence upon the clock or the calendar. If he had dropped out of her
life, she would have missed him about the barn and the stable; and it
would have been difficult, she admitted, to manage the farm without his
advice. There were the children, too, particularly the younger boy, who
had been born with a clubfoot. The one human emotion left in Dorinda's
heart, she sometimes thought, was her affection for Rose Emily's boy,
John Abner.
If he had been her own son he could not have been closer to her; and his
infirmity awakened the ardent compassion that love assumed in her strong
and rather arrogant nature. Though he was barely fourteen, he was more
congenial with her than any grown person at Pedlar's Mill. He devoured
books as she used to do when she was a girl, and he was already
developing into a capable farmer. Years ago she had given Nathan no
peace until he had taken the child to town and had had an operation
performed on his crippled foot; and when no improvement had resulted,
she had insisted that he should have John Abner's shoes made from
measurements. As a little girl, her mother had always said to her that
she preferred lame ducks to well ones; and John Abner was the only lame
duck that had ever come naturally into her life. Fortunately, he was a
boy of deep, though reserved, affections, and he returned in his
reticent way the tenderness Dorinda lavished upon him. Minnie May, who
had grown into a plain girl of much character, had been jealous at
first; but a little later, when she became engaged to be married, she
was prudently reconciled to the difference Dorinda made in her life. The
two other children, though they were both healthy and handsome, with a
dash of Rose Emily's fire and spirit, were received as lightly and
forgotten as quickly as warm days in winter or cool ones in summer. The
girl Lena, who had just turned seventeen, was a pretty, vain, and
flirtatious creature, with a head "as thick with beaux," Fluvanna
observed, "as a brier patch with briers"; and the boy, Bertie,
familiarly called "Bud," was earning a good salary in a wholesale
grocery store in the city. It was pleasant to have Nathan and the
children come over every week; but John Abner was the only one Dorinda
missed when accident or bad weather kept them away. In the beginning
they had visited her in the afternoons, and she had had nothing better
to offer them than popcorn or roasted apples and chestnuts; but as the
years passed and debts were paid, there was less need of rigid economy,
and she had drifted into the habit of having the family with her at
Sunday dinner. This had gradually become the one abundant meal of the
week, and she and Fluvanna both looked forward to it with the keen
anticipation of deferred appetite.
The work was so exacting and her nerves so blessedly benumbed by toil,
that Dorinda seldom stopped to ask herself if she were satisfied with
her lot. Had the question been put to her, she would probably have
dismissed it with the retort that she "had no time to worry about things
like that." On the surface her days were crowded with more or less
interesting tasks; but in her buried life there were hours when the old
discontent awoke with the autumn wind in the broomsedge. At such moments
she would feel that life had cheated her, and she would long
passionately for something bright and beautiful that she had missed. Not
love again! No, never again the love that she had known! What she longed
for was the something different, the something indestructibly desirable
and satisfying. Then there would return the blind sense of a purpose in
existence which had evaded her search. The encompassing dullness would
melt like a cloud, and she would grasp a meaning beneath the deceptions
and the cruelties of the past. But this feeling was as fugitive as all
others, and when it vanished it left not the glorified horizon, but
simply the long day's work to be done.
Years had passed now, and she had stopped thinking of Jason. Since she
never left the farm, she was spared the accident of a meeting, and she
had excluded him for so long from her consciousness that his memory had
appeared to acquiesce in the banishment. For the first two or three
years after her return, she had lived in dread of seeing him again in
the flesh, or of having his image awake to life in her mind. She had
been afraid to go to sleep, because in her dreams she was still
defenseless against him; and after her love for him had died, her fear
had remained embedded in hatred. But that had passed also, and she had
ceased to remember him, except when Nathan or one of the labourers on
the farm mentioned his name.
"Doctor Stout is taking all Jason's practice," Nathan said one day.
"That comes, I reckon, of trying to please everybody."
"I thought drink was his ruin," Dorinda rejoined indifferently.
"Of course drink helped it along, though it began farther back with his
being so pleasant that you couldn't believe what he said. At first folks
liked it, but after a while they began to see through it. By the way,
his wife has been acting kind of queer. They say she's got a screw loose
somewhere in her brain."
"I know," was all that Dorinda answered, but she thought, "And I once
wished I could be in her place!"
She remembered the way Geneva had slipped up behind her one afternoon in
an old field where broomsedge was burning, and had talked in a rambling,
excited manner about her marriage and how blissfully happy they both
were. "Not that we shouldn't like a child," she had continued, with a
grimace which had begun as a smile, "but we can't expect to have
everything, and we are blissfully happy. Blissfully happy!" she had
screamed out suddenly in her high, cracked voice. At the time Dorinda
had been puzzled, but now she understood and was sorry. The staring
face, with its greenish skin and too prominent eyes, framed in the
beautiful flaxen hair, softened her heart. "At least Geneva was not to
blame, yet she is the one who is punished most," she thought; and this
seemed to her another proof of the remorseless injustice of destiny. "I
suppose the Lord knew what was best for me," she said to herself in the
pious idiom her mother had used; but, as the phrase soared in her mind,
it was as empty as a balloon. When she remembered her girlhood now, she
would think contemptuously, "How could I ever have had so little sense?"
Were all girls as foolish, she wondered, or was she exceptional in her
romantic ignorance of life?
Without warning, after not thinking of Jason for years, she dreamed of
him one night. She dreamed of him, not as she knew that he was to-day,
but as she had once believed him to be. For a moment, through the
irresistible force of illusion, she was caught again, she was imprisoned
in the agony of that old passion. In her dream she saw herself fleeing
from some invisible pursuer through illimitable deserts of broomsedge.
Though she dared not look back, she could hear the rush of footsteps
behind her; she could almost feel the breath of the hunter on her neck.
For minutes that were an eternity the flight endured. Then as she
dropped to her knees, with her strength exhausted, she was caught up in
the arms of the pursuer, and looking up, felt Jason's lips pressed to
hers.
There was thunder in her ears when she awoke. Springing out of bed, she
ran in her nightgown to the window and threw the shutters wide open.
Outside, beneath a dappled sky, she saw the frosted November fields and
the dark trees flung off sharply, like flying buttresses, between the
hill and the horizon. The wind cut through her gown; far away in the
moonlight an owl hooted. Gradually, while she stood shivering in the
frosty air, the terror of her dream faded and ice froze again over her
heart.
Through ten years of hard work and self-denial the firm, clear surface
of her beauty remained unroughened. Then one October morning, Fluvanna,
looking at her in the sunlight, exclaimed, "Miss Dorindy, you're too
young to have crow's feet!"
Crow's feet! She turned with a start from the brood of white turkeys she
was counting. Yes, she was too young, she was only thirty-three, but she
was already beginning to break. Youth was going! Youth was going, the
words echoed and reechoed through the emptiness of the future. Week by
week, month by month, year by year, youth was slipping away; and she had
never known the completeness, the fulfilment, that she had expected of
life. Even now, she could not tell herself, she did not know, what it
was that she had missed. It was not love, nor was it motherhood. No, the
need went deeper than nature. It lay so deep, so far down in her hidden
life, that the roots of it were lost in the rich darkness. Though she
felt these things vaguely, without thinking that she felt them, it
seemed to her, standing there with her gaze on the brood of white
turkeys, that all she had ever hoped for or believed in was eluding her
grasp. In a little while, with happiness still undiscovered, she would
be as wrinkled and grey as her mother. Only her mother's restless habit
of work would remain to fill the vacancy of her days.
"I've been working too hard, Fluvanna," she said, "and what do I get out
of it?"
"You oughtn't to let yo'self go, Miss Dorindy. There ain't any use in
the world for you to slave and stint the way you do. You ought to go
about mo' and begin to take notice."
Dorinda laughed. "You talk as if I were a widower."
"Naw'm, I ain't. No widower ever lived the way you do."
"It's true. I haven't bought a good dress or been anywhere for ten
years."
"Thar ain't a particle of use in it. You'll be old and dried up soon
enough. What's the use of being young and proud if you don't strut?"
Yes, Fluvanna was right. What was the use? She had made a success of her
undertaking; but it was inadequate because there were no spectators of
her triumph. She had kept so close to the farm that her neighbours knew
her only as a dim figure against the horizon, a moving shape among
corn shocks and hay ricks in the flat landscape, an image that vanished
with these inanimate objects in the lengthening perspective. Even in the
thin and isolated community in which she lived, she did not stand out,
clearly projected, like James Ellgood; perhaps, for the simple reason,
she told herself now, that she had drilled her energy down into the soil
instead of training it upward.
"I believe you're right, Fluvanna," she said. "Now that we're out of
debt and things are going fairly well, I ought to try to get something
out of life while I'm still young."
After the turkeys were counted, she left Fluvanna to turn them out into
the woods, and going into her bedroom, looked at herself in the mirror
which had once belonged to her mother. While she stared into the glass
it seemed to her that another face was watching her beyond her
reflection, a face that was drawn and pallid, with a corded neck and the
famished eyes of a disappointed dreamer. Well, she would never become
like that if she could prevent it. She would never let disappointment
eat away the heart in her bosom.
She was still handsome. The grave oval of her face, the fine austerity
of its modelling, would remain noble even after she became an old woman
and the warm colour of the flesh was mottled and stained with yellow. It
was true that lines were forming about her eyes; but the eyes themselves
were as deeply blue as the autumn sky, and though her skin had coarsened
in the last ten years, the dark red of her cheeks and lips was as vivid
as ever. Her black hair was still abundant, though it had lost its gloss
in the sunshine. In spite of hard work, or because of it, her tall,
straight figure had kept the slender hips and the pointed breasts of a
goddess. She did not look young for her age; the sunny bloom, like the
down on a peach, had hardened to the glaze of maturity; but she had not
lost the April charm of her expression. "For all I've ever had, I might
as well have been born plain," she thought.
XV
That afternoon she harnessed Molly, the new mare, to the buggy, and
accompanied by Ranger, son of Rambler, drove over to Honeycomb Farm.
"I want a dress to wear to church," she said to Miss Seena, "something
good that will last."
"Then you're going to church again? I must say it is time." Rawboned,
wintry, rheumatic, the dressmaker was still an authority.
"The roads were so bad." To her surprise, Dorinda found herself becoming
apologetic. "I couldn't take the teams out on Sundays, but I've bought a
chestnut mare for my own use, and I'll begin going again."
"Well, I'm glad you ain't a confirmed backslider. What sort of material
had you thought of?"
Dorinda reflected. "Something handsome. Silk--no, satin. That shines
more."
"Why don't you order it out of a catalogue? My fingers have got so stiff
I've had to give up sewin' the last few months. They put everything in
catalogues now." Miss Seena selected one from the pile on the table and
opened it as she spoke. "You'll want blue, I reckon. You were always
partial to blue."
Dorinda frowned. "No, not blue. Any colour but blue."
"I thought you favoured it. Do you recollect the dress I bought to match
yo' eyes one spring when you were a girl? My, but you did look well in
it!"
"Isn't there any other colour worn?"
"Well, there's brown. The fashion books speak highly of brown this year.
Black's real stylish too. With yo' bright complexion black ought to go
mighty well. You'd better order this model. It is the newest style." She
pointed to a picture which seemed to Dorinda to be the extreme of
fashion. "Them box pleats and pointed basques is the latest thing. I
reckon you'll have to get a new corset," she concluded sharply, looking
the girl up and down. "These styles don't set well unless they're worn
over a straight font."
"Then I'll get one." Dorinda was prepared for any discomfort. "And I
need a coat--and a hat, a big one with a feather."
"You want a willow plume. They're all the rage this season, and a long
coat of seal plush. There're some handsome ones in the front of that
catalogue. Seal plush is goin' to be mo' worn than fur, all the fashion
books say."
After the choice was made and the letter written by the cramped fingers
of the dressmaker, Dorinda drove home consoled by the discovery that
crow's feet make, after all, less difference than clothes in one's
happiness, Strange how a little thing like a new dress could lift up
one's spirits! Her changed mood persisted until she approached the fork
of the road and saw a woman's figure against the dying flare of the sun.
As she reached the spot, the woman came down into the middle of the
road, and she recognized Geneva Greylock.
"I want to talk to you, Dorinda," Geneva began, with a trill of
laughter. "Won't you stop and listen?"
She was wearing a thin summer dress, though the air was sharp, and round
her waist she had tied a faded blue sash with streamers which blew out
in the wind. Her face, in its masklike immobility, resembled the face of
a dead woman. Only her gleaming flaxen hair was alive.
"I'm afraid it's too late," Dorinda replied as pleasantly as she could.
"Supper will be waiting, and besides you ought not to be out in that
dress. You will catch your death of cold."
Geneva shook her head, while that expressionless laughter trickled in a
stream from her lips. "I'm not cold," she answered. "I'm so happy that I
must talk to somebody. It is our wedding anniversary, and I'm obliged to
tell somebody how blissfully happy we are. Jason went to sleep right
after dinner, and he hasn't waked up yet, so I had to come out and find
somebody to talk to. I've got a secret that nobody knows, not even
Jason."
So it was the same thing over again! Her eyes looked as if they would
leap out of her head, they were so staring and famished. "I'll tell you
what I'll do," Dorinda responded, her voice softened by pity. "If you'll
get into the buggy, I'll drive you down to Gooseneck Creek. That will be
halfway home." This was what marriage to Jason had brought, and yet
there had been a time when she would have given her life to have been
married to him for a single year.
"Oh, will you?" Geneva sprang up on the step and into the buggy. She was
so thin that her bones seemed to rattle as she moved, and there were
hollows in her chest and between her shoulder blades. "Then I can tell
you my secret."
"I wouldn't if I were you. I've got to keep an eye on the road, so I
can't talk."
For a few minutes Geneva rambled on in her strained voice as if she had
not heard her. Then pausing, she asked abruptly, "Why did you never like
me, Dorinda? I always wanted to be friends with you."
"I like you. I do like you."
Geneva shook her head. "You never liked me because you loved Jason.
Jason jilted you." She broke into her cracked laugh again. "You don't
know, but there are worse things than being jilted."
Anger flamed up in Dorinda's heart, but it died down before she allowed
herself to reply. "I suppose there are," she said at last. "That was
long ago, anyhow. So long that it doesn't matter what happened." Poor
demented creature, she thought, how many months would it be before they
put her away?
Suddenly Geneva leaned toward her and began to whisper so rapidly that
Dorinda could scarcely follow her words. "If I tell you my secret, will
you promise never to repeat it? When you hear it, you will know there
are worse things than being jilted. I had a baby, and Jason killed it.
He killed it as soon as it was born and buried it in the garden. He
doesn't know that I saw him. He thinks that I was asleep, but I found
the grave under the lilac bushes at the end of the garden path. Now, we
are going to have another baby, and I'm afraid he will kill this one
too. That's why I pretend to be so blissfully happy. Blissfully happy,"
she cried out in a high voice as she jumped over the wheel before the
buggy came to a stop. Yes, they would probably have to send her away
very soon. "I wish I had been kinder to her when I had the chance,"
Dorinda thought, as she turned the mare toward home.
The next Sunday afternoon she asked Nathan for news of Geneva. It was
easy for her to speak of the Greylocks now since that dreadful encounter
had obliterated even the memory of jealousy.
"Every six months or so she's taken like that," Nathan answered. "Then
she goes clean out of her head; but they say it isn't as bad as the
moping in between the attacks."
"Is there nothing that can be done?"
"Oh, they'll have to put her away, sooner or later. Her father has tried
his best to get her to leave Jason, but she won't hear of it when she's
in her right mind. Once he took her home while she was deranged and kept
her in a room with barred windows. It didn't last, however, and as soon
as she came to her senses, she insisted on going back to Jason. They
lead a cat-and-dog life together, and when she is out of her head she
runs about telling everybody that she had a child and he murdered it."
"Poor thing," said Dorinda. "She told me too."
"That's when she's crazy. As soon as she gets her senses again, you
can't make her leave him."
For a few minutes Dorinda was silent. When she spoke it was to remark
irrelevantly, "How little human beings know what is best for them."
"I didn't understand what you said, Dorinda."
"No matter. I was only thinking aloud."
It was a mellow October afternoon, and around them the fields were
resting after a fair harvest. As far as she could see, east, north,
west, the land belonged to her. Only toward the south there were the
pale green willows of Gooseneck Creek, and beyond the feathery edge she
saw the red chimneys of Five Oaks. But for those chimneys she would have
felt that the whole horizon was hers!
"They say Five Oaks will come under the hammer before long." Nathan's
gaze also was on the red smears in the sky. "It's mortgaged now for as
much as it'll ever bring, and there's trouble about the taxes."
A wild idea shot into her mind. "I suppose it will bring a good deal?"
"If it is put up at a forced sale, it will probably go for a song.
Nobody is buying land now. Amos Wigfall bought the old Haney place five
years ago for a dollar an acre. Some day, if he looks out, it will be
worth a hundred."
She looked at him with calculating eyes. "If I could buy Five Oaks, my
farm would be as big as Green Acres."
His neighing laugh broke out. "Good Lord, Dorinda, what would you do
with it?"
"I don't know what I'd do with it, but I want it. I'd give ten years of
my life for the chance of owning Five Oaks before I die."
His laugh dropped to a chuckle. "Now, that's downright queer because
I've been studying about bidding on it myself. It looks to me as if that
would be the only way to save my money."
"Well, I'd rather you'd own it than anybody else," she said grudgingly.
"But I'm going to the sale when it comes, and if I'm able to sell my
prize bull, I'm going to bid against you. I've got almost five thousand
dollars in bank."
"You'd better leave it there for the present. I wouldn't bid a cent on
the place if it wasn't for the fact that I own most of it already. It's
going to be hard to make anybody buy it. Just you wait and see."
"What will become of Jason?" she inquired abruptly.
Nathan looked dubious. "He'll go to work for James Ellgood, I reckon, or
more likely drink himself out of the way. But he's been doing better of
late, I hear. He was at church last Sunday in the Ellgood pew, looking
all spruced up, as if he hadn't smelt whiskey for a month."
Her next words came quickly, as if she were afraid of drawing them back
before they escaped. "Why didn't he ever go away after his father died?"
"He'd lost the wish, I reckon. Things happen like that sometimes. The
old man hung on to him until all the sap was drained dry."
"His father died years ago."
"It must be going on nine years or so." He stopped to calculate as he
did when he was adding up an account in the store. "Well, I reckon he'd
used up all his energy in wishing to get away. When the chance came, he
didn't have enough spirit left to take advantage' of it." He sighed.
"I've seen that happen I can't tell you how many times."
She looked away from him, and for a few minutes there was silence. Then
he made a sound between a gasp and a chuckle, and turning to glance at
him, she met an expression which she had never before seen in his face.
Her nerves shivered into repulsion, while she drew farther away. Why
were men so unaccountable? she asked herself in annoyance.
"I was just thinking," he stammered.
She regarded him with severity. After all, no one took Nathan seriously.
"I was just thinking," he began again, "that if you could make up your
mind to marry me, we might throw the two farms into one."
"To marry you?" She stared at him incredulously. "Are you out of your
head?"
He broke into an embarrassed laugh. "I reckon it sounds like that at
first," he admitted, "but I hoped you might get used to the idea if you
thought it over. It ain't as if I were a poor man. I'm about as
well-to-do as anybody round Pedlar's Mill, if you leave out James
Ellgood, and he's got a wife already, besides being too old. I ain't so
young as you, I know; but I'm a long ways younger than James Ellgood.
There ain't more than ten years' difference between us, and I think all
the world of you. You might have things your own way just as you're
doing now. I wouldn't want to interfere with you."
She was still gazing at him as if he were distraught. "I can't imagine,"
she replied sternly, "how you ever came to think of such a thing.". It
was absurd; it was incredible; and yet she supposed that even stranger
things had happened! She had seen enough of the world to know that you
took your husband, as Fluvanna observed, where you found him, and she
was troubled by few illusions about marriage.
His face turned the colour of beet juice while he looked at her with
humble, imploring eyes, like the eyes of young Ranger when they were
training him. "I was just thinking how useful I could be on the farm,"
he said apologetically. "You seemed so set on owning Five Oaks, and then
you like to have the children about."
The incredulity faded from her face. "I do like to have the children
about."
"Well, you know I'd never put myself in your way. You could have both
the farms to manage just as you like. I'd buy Five Oaks whenever it was
sold."
"Yes, the two farms could be thrown together--or farmed separately." Her
mind was still working over Five Oaks, not over the question of
marriage.
"Then couldn't you get used to the idea, Dorinda?"
His tone rather than his words awoke her with a start, to his meaning.
"The idea! You mean marriage? No, I couldn't do it. There's no use
thinking about it."
His face scarcely changed, so little had he dared hope for her consent.
"Well, I won't press you," he said after a minute, "but if the time ever
comes----"
She shook her head emphatically. "The time will never come. Don't let
that thought get into your head."
While she spoke her dispassionate gaze examined him, and she asked
herself, with a tinge of amusement, why the idea of marrying him did not
startle her more. He was ridiculous; he was uncouth; he was the last man
on earth, she told herself firmly, who could ever have inspired her with
the shadow of sentiment. Only after she had speculated upon these
decisive objections did she begin to realize that absence of emotion was
the only appeal any marriage could make to her. Her nerves or her senses
would have revolted from the first hint of passion. The only marriage
she could tolerate, she reflected grimly, was one which attempted no
swift excursions into emotion, no flights beyond the logical barriers of
the three dimensions.
"Of course, I'm not your equal," Nathan said abruptly. "You're a scholar
like your great-grandfather, and you've read all his books. You know a
lot of things I never heard of."
Dorinda laughed. "Much good books ever did me!" Much good indeed, she
reflected. "There's no use thinking about it; I could never do it," she
repeated in a tone of harsh finality, as she turned to walk homeward.
XVI
Two weeks later, one Saturday afternoon, Miss Seena brought over the new
clothes; and Dorinda sat up until midnight, taking up the belt and
letting down the hem of the black satin dress. When s put it on the next
morning and listened to Fluvanna's admiring, ejaculations, she
remembered the day she had first worn the blue nun's veiling and the
drive to church sitting beside Almira Pryde in the old carryall.
"You look like a queen, Miss Dorinda," Fluvanna exclaimed. "Thar ain't
nothin'----"
"Anything, Fluvanna."
"There ain't anything that gives you such an air as one of them
willow plumes."
"Those, Fluvanna. Yes, it does look nice," Dorinda assented, after the
correction. "I'm glad I got it black. It makes me look older, but there
isn't anything so distinguished."
A few hours afterwards, while she walked slowly up the aisle in church,
she felt rather than saw that the congregation, forgetting to stand up
to sing, sat motionless and stared at her from the pews. For the first
time in her life she tasted the intoxicating flavour of power. On the
farm, success was translated into well-tilled acres or golden pounds of
butter; but here, with these astonished eyes on her, she discovered that
it contained a quality more satisfying than any material fact. What it
measured was the difference between the past which Jason had ruined and
the present which she had triumphantly built on the ruins he had left.
In spite of everything that had happened, in spite of his betrayal of
her faith and the black despair that had wiped love out of her heart,
she, not he, was to-day the victor over life!
As she marched up the aisle, in her handsome, commonplace clothes, she
might have been a contented rustic beauty whose first youth was slowly
slipping away. A warm flush dyed her cheeks; her eyes were like blue
stars beneath the projecting shadow of her eyebrows; she carried the
willow plume high above the dusky cloud of her hair; and the luxurious
swish-swish of her satin skirt was as loud as the sound of wind in the
grass. Not until she reached the pew where she used to sit between her
father and mother, did she drop her eyes to the level of the
congregation and discover that Jason was sitting with the Ellgoods under
the high west window. She had not seen him face to face since the
afternoon of her father's funeral, more than ten years ago, and he
looked ages older, she thought, than she had remembered him. His skin
had lost the clear red-brown of health and acquired a leathery texture.
Though his hair was still red, there was a rusty edge where the light
fell on it. His moustache, which was too long, drooped in bedraggled
ends over his chin, as if he had fallen into the habit of chewing
tobacco--he who had always been so fastidious! He was dressed neatly
enough in his Sunday clothes; but sitting there in the broad band of
sunlight, he reminded Dorinda of a tree when the sap has dried, with the
brittle ashen brown leaves still clinging to the boughs. Even his hands,
which shook a little as they held the hymn book open in front of his
wife, were the hands of a man whose grasp had slackened. He was not yet
forty, but life had already used him up and flung him aside.
Suddenly, he raised his eyes from the book and their glances met and
crossed before they fell away again to the printed lines. In that
instant, something passed between them which could never be uttered
because it was profounder than speech. Resolute, imperious, her gaze
swept him! While her eyes, as hard and cold as a frozen lake, gave back
his reflection, she felt, with a shiver of terror, that the past had
never died, that it existed eternally as a wave in the sea of her
consciousness. Memory was there, flowing on, strong, silent, resistless,
with no fresher tides of emotion to sweep over and engulf it in the
flood of experience. In her whole life there had been only that one man.
He had held her in his arms. He would remain always an inseparable part
of her being. . . . Resentment struggled within her. All the strength of
her spirit rebelled against the tyranny of the past, against the burden
of a physical fact, which she dragged after her like a dead fish in a
net. She saw him harshly as he was, and she despised herself because she
had ever imagined him tenderly as he was not. As she opened her mouth to
sing, it seemed to her that she was choked with the effluvium of the old
despair. She shut her eyes while her voice rose with the hymn. Rain on
the shingled roof; rain on the bare red earth; rain on the humped
box-bush; rain on the bedraggled feathers of white turkeys. The face of
the old man emerging from the blue light in the room, mottled, flabby,
repellent. Memories like that. He meant nothing more to her now. Only
the beauty that had turned into ugliness. Only the happiness of which
she had been cheated. . . .
She was the last one to come out of church, and by the time she had
spoken to the minister and a few of the older members who stopped to
welcome her, the Ellgoods had driven away. She was glad that she did not
see Jason again; for the sight of him, though it no longer stirred her
heart, left that disagreeable pricking sensation in the nervous fibre of
her body.
Nathan and the children were waiting for her at the gate of the
churchyard, and she drove home with John Abner, while the others
followed in Nathan's new surrey with the fringed top.
"You look good enough to eat, Dorinda," the boy said admiringly. "You
ought to keep dressed up all the time."
She smiled down on him. "Much work I'd do on the farm! Ten years ago
they almost turned me out of church because I milked in overalls; but
they forgot that this morning when I went back wearing a willow plume."
There was no one in the world who adored her as uncritically as did this
boy with the clubfoot. He was a good boy, she knew, with a streak of
morbid melancholy which was curiously attractive to her adventurous
temperament. His face, with its bulging forehead and deep dark eyes,
hiding stars of light in them like gleams at the bottom of a well, was
an unusual one for a country boy, and made her wonder at times if there
could be more in him than any one suspected. In his childhood his
clubfoot had been a torment to him, and for this reason he had kept away
from the rough sports of other children.
"You'd rather farm than do anything else, wouldn't you, John Abner?" she
asked abruptly.
"Except read. I'm glad winter is coming, so I can stay in the house and
read."
"You wouldn't like to go to boarding school in the city?"
He shook his head, flinching as if from the cut of a whip. "Not with the
other boys. I'd rather stay in the country with Father and you and the
animals." His sympathetic understanding of animals was one of the
strongest bonds between them. From his birth he had known what it was to
suffer and endure.
"I hoped that the new kind of shoe would make it easier for you," she
said presently. "Is it comfortable?"
"If it weren't so heavy. They are all heavy."
She sighed, for her heart was drooping with pity. John Abner had
penetrated the armour of her arrogance in its one weak spot, which was
her diffused maternal instinct. The longing to protect the helpless was
still alive in her.
At home they found Fluvanna in a clean apron, with a blazing; fire and a
lavish Sunday dinner awaiting them. Roast duck with apple sauce, candied
sweet potatoes, tomatoes stewed with brown sugar, and plum pudding,
which was Nathan's favourite sweet. True, it was the one abundant meal
of the week; but while she sat at the head of her table listening to the
chatter of happy children, Dorinda remembered the frugal Sunday dinners
of her mother and father, and her eyes smarted with tears. That, she had
learned, was the hidden sting of success; it rubbed old sores with the
salt of regret until they were raw again.
In the hall, after dinner, while Dorinda was fastening a worn blue cape
over her satin dress, Nathan stood gazing thoughtfully up the staircase.
"Have you ever thought of putting a stove in the back hall, Dorinda?" he
asked. "It would make a lot of difference in the comfort of the house,
and it would help heat the bedrooms upstairs."
She turned and gazed at him, surprised at this fresh proof of his
ingenuity. Yes, it was a good idea; she wondered why she had never
thought of it herself. Indeed, since he had mentioned it, it seemed to
her that it was what she had always intended to do.
"If only we could have had it in Ma's lifetime," she said. "It would
have been such a help to her neuralgia."
"Yes, that's the trouble about getting comforts. We always remember that
other people went without them. I've got the carpets now that Rose Emily
wanted." After all, no one but Nathan had ever really understood her.
With the thought she asked herself incredulously if understanding had
anything whatever to do with love? Did people who loved ever understand?
Wasn't the misunderstanding even a part of love's divine madness?
"Yes, I ought to have done it long ago," she murmured inattentively.
"I'll order one, if you want me to. There's a catalogue at the store,
and I can get it at a discount. There are all sorts of contrivances for
saving fuel, too, so it won't cost as much as you'd imagine. These
newfangled stoves give twice as much heat as an open fire, and don't
burn one fourth as much fuel. It's a close sort of heat. You wouldn't
like it in your chamber, but it would be the very thing for this hall."
While they went out of doors together, she meditated upon the fact of
his usefulness. He was always thinking of ways and means to be
comfortable or economical before they occurred to her or to anyone else,
and he had what he called a knack for mending anything that was broken.
He was kind; he was honest in every fibre; he was neat in his appearance
for a farmer; and he was, she reflected cynically, almost emasculate in
his unselfishness. To be sure, he had habits which she disliked; but, as
she told herself with dispassionate realism, one couldn't have
everything. It never occurred to her that these habits might be broken
by marriage, for she was wise enough to perceive that a man's habits are
more firmly rooted than his emotions. What she felt was that in exchange
for his helpfulness she might learn to tolerate the things to which she
objected. What good ever came, she demanded impatiently, of trying to
make any one over? Hadn't her mother tried for forty years to make her
father stop chewing tobacco, and yet it was the last thing that he
relinquished. No, she had few illusions remaining. Though she still told
herself inflexibly that she could never make up her mind to marry
Nathan, she felt, in spite of her will, that the insidious force of
logic was gradually undermining her scruples. She had suffered too much
from love in the past ever to walk again with open eyes into the
furnace. Sex emotion, she repeated grimly, was as dead as a burned-out
cinder in her heart. But respect she could still feel, and a marriage
founded upon respect and expediency might offer an available refuge from
loneliness. As she grew older, the thing she feared most was not death,
not poverty even, but the lonely fireside.
She walked on, disheartened by indecision, and Nathan was obliged to
repeat his question twice before she heard what he was saying.
"Have you thought over what I asked you, Dorinda?" She shook her head.
"There's no use thinking."
His only answer was a comical sigh, and after a long pause she repeated
more sharply, "There's no use thinking about that."
Some hidden edge to her tone made him glance at her quickly. This was
another moment when the keenness of Nathan's perceptions surprised her.
"You'd be just as free as you are now," he said discreetly but
hopefully.
"I couldn't stand any love-making." Though the light bloomed on her lips
and cheeks, her eyes darkened with memory.
He sighed again less hopefully. What a pity it was, she thought, that
everything about him grew in the wrong way; his hair like moth-eaten
fur, his flat clownish features; his long moustache which always
reminded her of bleached grass. Well, even so, you couldn't have
everything. If the outward man had been more attractive, the inward one,
she acknowledged, would have been less humble; and when all was said and
done, few virtues are more comfortable to live with than humility.
"It doesn't do any good to keep thinking of that," she reiterated
firmly, but the firmness had oozed from her mind into her manner. The
fact that she needed Nathan on the farm was driven home to her every day
of her life. Without him, she would never become anything more than a
farmer who was extraordinary chiefly in being a woman as well; and this
provoking disadvantage was a continual annoyance. Her life, in spite of
the companionship of Fluvanna, was an empty one, and as the shadow of
middle age grew longer, she would become more and more solitary.
They had reached the high ground by the graveyard, and over Gooseneck
Creek she saw the red chimneys of Five Oaks. At the sight a suffering
thought awoke and throbbed in her brain.
"I'll never interfere with you, Dorinda," Nathan said in a husky tone.
She turned suddenly and looked into his eyes. "It doesn't do any good to
keep thinking about it," she insisted in an expressionless voice as if
she were reciting a phrase she had learned by heart.
XVII
The exact moment of her yielding was so vague that she could never
remember it; but three weeks later they drove over to the Presbyterian
church at Pedlar's Mill and were married. Until the evening before she
had told no one but Fluvanna; and only the pastor's wife, a farmer or
two, and Nathan's children, witnessed the marriage. As they stood
together before the old minister, a shadowy fear fluttered into
Dorinda's mind, and she longed to turn and run back to the safe
loneliness of Old Farm. "Can it be possible," she asked herself, "that I
am doing this thing?" She seemed to be standing apart as a spectator
while she watched some other woman married to Nathan.
When it was over the few farmers came up to shake hands with her; but
their manner was repressed and unnatural, and even the children had
become bashful and constrained.
"Wall, you was wise to git it over," John Appleseed said. "I don't
favour marryin' fur a woman as long as she's got a better means of
provision; but it's fortunate we don't all harbour the same opinions."
He had attended with his idiot son, who was now a man of twenty-five,
but still retained his fondness for a crowd or a noise. While she looked
into his vacant face, Dorinda recalled Jason's ineffectual endeavours to
enlighten the natives, and the lecture on farming that he had delivered
to Nathan Pedlar and Billy. Appleseed, the idiot. Poor Jason! After
all, he had had his tragedy.
"Nobody wants to hear croaking at a wedding, John," William Fairlamb
remarked genially.
"Oh, I don't mind him." Dorinda laughed, but the laugh went no deeper
than her throat. Terror had seized her, the ancient panic quiver of the
hunted, and her face wore a strained and absent look as if she were
listening to some far-off music in the broomsedge. "How did I ever come
to do such a thing?" a voice like a song was asking over and over.
On the drive home she could think of nothing to say. Her mind, which was
usually crowded with ideas, had become as blank as a wall, and she sat
gazing in silence over the head of the brisk young mare Nathan was
driving. So small a thing as the fact that Nathan was holding the reins
made her feel stiff and uncomfortable.
As they passed the old mill, Geneva Greylock came running out of the
ruins and waved a blue scarf in the air. They could not see her face
clearly; but there was a distraught intensity in the lines of her thin
figure and in the violent gestures of her arms beneath the flying curves
of blue silk, which wound about her like a ribbon of autumn sky.
"She's getting worse every day," Nathan said, glancing toward her as
they spun past. "It won't be long now before they have to send her to
the asylum. Last Sunday, when the minister was taking dinner with James
Ellgood, Geneva went round the table and poured molasses into every
soup plate. When they asked her why she had done it, she said she was
trying to make life sweeter."
"Poor thing," Dorinda sighed. "She was always ailing."
It was a brown afternoon in November, with a smoky sky and a strong,
clean wind which rushed in a droning measure through the broomsedge. All
the leaves had fallen and been swept in wind drifts under the rail
fences. The only animate shapes in the landscape were the buzzards
flocking toward a dead sheep in the pasture.
"Did you tell the children to come straight over?" Nathan inquired
presently.
"Yes, I've got their rooms ready. I had paper put on the walls instead
of whitewash, and they look very nice. The new stove heats them,
comfortably."
"You mustn't let my children bother you, Dorinda."
"Oh, no. I'm glad to have them. They will be company for me. We can
begin reading again at night."
The mare trotted briskly, and the edge of the wind felt like ice on
Dorinda's face. "It's turning much colder," she said after a long pause.
"Yes, there'll be a hard frost to-night if it clears."
She turned away from him, lifting her gaze to the sky where broken
clouds were driven rapidly toward the south. A sword of light was thrust
suddenly through the greyness, and she said slowly, as if the words were
of profound significance, "The wind seems to be changing." Always
responsive to her surroundings, she told herself that the landscape
looked as if it were running away from the wind. "Does it really look
this way or is it only in my mind," she thought, as they went on past
the fork. Of course, if she had to go over it again, she could never
bring herself to be married; but since she had walked into the marriage
with open eyes, all she could do now was to endeavour to make the best
of her mistake. Nathan was a good man and--well, you couldn't have
everything! Youth, with its troubled rapture and its unsatisfied
craving, was well over. Green evening skies. The scent of wild grape.
The flutter of the heart like a caged bird. Feet flying toward
happiness. . . . Yes, he was a good man, and you couldn't have
everything.
When she reached the farm she left Nathan to build up the fire in the
hall stove, and ran upstairs to put the finishing touches to the
bedrooms she had prepared for the children. Everything was in order.
There was nothing that she could find to do; yet she lingered to
straighten a picture or change the position of a chair until she heard
wheels approaching. Then, after she ran downstairs and exchanged
embarrassed greetings, she visited the henhouse and the barn before she
went into the kitchen to help Fluvanna with supper. All the work of the
farm, so heavy and engrossing on other days that it made her a slave to
routine, was suspended like a clock after the hour has struck.
"Do you want me to make the hard sauce for the plum pudding, Fluvanna?"
"Naw, Miss Dorindy, there ain't nothin' on earth for you to bother yo'
head with to-day. Miss Minnie May has made it, and she's helping me as
much as I want. You sit right down in the parlour and wait till supper
is ready. I don't see," she concluded in a faultfinding tone, "why
anybody wanted to have a poky wedding like this. There ain't even a
fiddle to make things lively."
Dorinda went out, but not into the parlour. As she passed through the
hall she caught a glimpse of Nathan, in his new suit of grey tweed,
sitting bolt upright in the best chair, while he slowly turned the
leaves of the family Bible. No, she had always disliked the parlour, in
spite of her great-grandfather's library which almost covered the walls.
Would it be possible, she wondered, to turn the room into a more
comfortable and cheerful place? Yet she shrank from making any definite
change. Though she hated the furniture and the air of chill repose in
which it had weathered the years, she could not banish the feeling that
it was dedicated to the ancestral spirits of her family.
As she opened the back door, which admitted a gust of wind and a shower
of brown leaves, she heard Nimrod laughing with Fluvanna in the kitchen.
"Ef'n you ax me, it mought ez well be anybody's wedding ez hem. I lay she
ain' never so much as smelt dat ar wedding cake." Immediately,
Fluvanna's more educated accents responded, "I declare I couldn't help
feelin' all the time that I was baking a cake for a corpse."
"How in the world did I ever do it?" Dorinda asked herself for the
hundredth time; and she pictured the years ahead as an interminable
desert of time in which Nathan would sit like a visitor in the parlour
and perpetually turn the leaves of the family Bible. Nothing but the
first day that she had had young Ranger as an untrained puppy on her
hands had ever seemed to her so endless. "I don't see how I'm going to
stand it for the rest of my life," she thought. A different wedding day
from the one of which she had dreamed long ago! But then, as she had
learned through hard experience, imagination is a creative principle and
depends little upon the raw material of life. Nothing, she supposed,
ever happened exactly as you hoped that it would.
Supper was a dreary affair. The children were restless and awkward, and
even the wedding cake, which Fluvanna had baked in secret, and over
which she had lamented with Nimrod, was lumpy and heavy. Nathan
endeavoured to enliven the meal by a few foolish jokes badly told, and
when even Dorinda, who felt sorry for him, forgot to laugh, he stared at
her with humble, sheepish eyes while he relapsed into silence. It was a
relief when Bud, of Gargantuan appetite, refused a fifth slice of the
indigestible cake, and the last piece was wrapped in a napkin and put
away for Billy Appleseed.
"Are you going to have suppers like this every night?" Bud, the
facetious, inquired, giving his stomach a comical pat.
For the first time a laugh unforced and unafraid broke from Dorinda and
Nathan. After all, she concluded more hopefully, it was possible that
the children might make the house brighter. "I like it over here better
than I do at home," John Abner said. "It's farther away."
"Farther away from what?" asked Nathan, who was trying to appear easy
and flippant.
"Oh, I don't know. Farther away from school, I reckon."
"I wouldn't want to go back to the city if we could have plum pudding
every night till Christmas," Bud persisted.
Dorinda shook her head. "Oh, you greedy boy!" she exclaimed, smiling.
"When you are a little older you'll learn that you can't have
everything."
When supper was over she put on her overalls and lighted her lantern,
for the short November day was already closing in. She knew that the
milkers were probably slighting their work, and it made her restless to
think that the cows might not have been handled properly. The negroes
were cheerful and willing workers, but ten years of patient discipline
on her part had failed to overcome their natural preference for the
easiest way.
"You ain't going out again, are you, Dorinda?" Nathan asked anxiously,
while he watched her preparations.
"Yes, we had supper early so Fluvanna and Mary Joe could help with the
milking, but I'd better go out and see what they are doing. There's a
lot to do in the dairy and the darkeys are still a little afraid of the
new machinery."
Nathan laughed good-humouredly. "I might as well help you. Dairy work is
the sort that won't keep."
"No, it won't wait. The butter has to be packed for the early train."
"That means you'll be up before daybreak?"
She nodded impatiently. "Well, you're used to that. Don't you breakfast
by candlelight in winter?"
"Yes, I'm used to it. I'll come out now and help."
"I don't want you. There's plenty of work for you in the fields, but I
don't want you meddling in my dairy."
For the first time she understood what work had meant in her mother's
life; the flight of the mind from thought into action. To have Nathan
hanging round her in the dairy was the last thing, she said to herself,
that she had anticipated in marriage.
"Of course, I didn't mean to interfere with you." He fell back into the
house, and with a sigh of relief she fled out to the new cow-barn, where
the last milkers still lingered and chatted over the wedding. As she
passed into the heavy atmosphere and inhaled the pasture-scented breath
of the cows, she felt that a soothing vapour had blown over her nerves.
"I declar, Miss Dorindy, you mought jes' ez well not be mah'ed at all,"
Nimrod remarked dolefully.
"Well, I won't let it interfere with my work. No man is going to do
that."
Mary Joe bridled and giggled; for, being an engaging mulatto girl, she
knew all that could be told of the interference of men. "Naw'm, dat dey
ain't, nor breck yo' heart needer. Hit's a pity we ain't all ez
strong-minded ez you is."
Dorinda laughed. "Break my heart? I should think not," she replied. And
she meant what she said while she was saying it. One man had ruined her
life; but no other man should interfere with it. She was encased in
wounded pride as in defensive armour.
One of the other milkers, a big black woman named Saphira, smiled
approvingly. "Hi! Dat's moughty sassy, Miss Dorindy," she exclaimed,
"but hit ain't natur!"
After the milkers had gone home, Dorinda went into the dairy with
Fluvanna and Mary Joe and worked until nearly midnight. Usually, she had
finished by nine o'clock, at the latest, but to-night there were a dozen
extra tasks for her willing hands to perform. As the hours went on she
became so particular and so sharply critical that the two coloured women
were driven to tears. "Ef'n you ax me, hit's a good thing she cyarn't
git mah'd but oncet," muttered Mary Joe, as she was leaving.
At midnight, when there was nothing else that she could find to do and
her limbs were aching from fatigue, Dorinda went back into the house and
locked the hall door which Nathan had left unfastened. The lamp on the
bracket by the staircase was flaring up, and she stopped to lower the
wick, while Ranger rose from his bed on a mat by the door and sidled up
to her.
"Is that you, Dorinda?" whispered a voice from beyond the bend in the
staircase. "Do you work this late every night?" When she looked up, she
saw Minnie May blinking down on her.
"No, not every night. We had put off the dairy work so that Fluvanna
could go to the--" Her tongue stumbled over the word "wedding," so she
said "church" instead.
Holding her red flannel wrapper together over her flat girlish breast,
Minnie May stole noiselessly down the staircase. Her pale red hair hung
in a tight pigtail down her back, and the wrinkles of premature middle
age were visible in her young forehead. She was a girl who had, as
Fluvanna tartly observed, "run to character instead of looks."
"I tried to wait up for you," she said, "but you were so long coming,
and Pa wouldn't let me go out to the dairy. Mr. Garlick stopped by long
enough to tell us about Geneva Greylock, and I thought you ought to know
it. She threw herself into the old millpond this evening and was
drowned."
"Drowned?" Dorinda's voice was colourless. "Why, she waved to us as we
came by." While she spoke, it seemed to her that she could never stop
seeing the blue scarf flying round the distraught figure with its
violent gestures.
"I know. John Appleseed saw her, but he didn't tell anybody, and when
they missed her they didn't know where to look. It was the Haneys'
little boy who saw the blue scarf floating on the pond when he was
playing by the mill-wheel. For months, they say, she had gone about
telling everybody that Jason had murdered her baby; but, of course, it
was just a delusion."
"Poor thing." Dorinda turned away and went over to the wood stove where
the fire was quite dead. "There was something wrong with her. Even as a
girl she was always moping." Out of the fog of weariness there drifted a
vision of the red chimneys of Five Oaks. So, like an old wound that
begins to ache, the memory of Jason was thrust back into her life.
"Haven't you been to sleep, Minnie May?"
"No, I was listening for you. You came in so softly I hardly heard you."
"Well, you'd better go to bed. We have breakfast at five o'clock."
"Oh, I don't mind. I wake early, and I'll get up and help you pack the
butter."
As the girl went up the stairs, Dorinda opened the door of her room and
stepped over the threshold. The fire had been freshly made up and a
pleasant ruddiness suffused the large quaintly furnished chamber where
her parents had lived and died. Nathan had tried to keep the room warm
and to sit up for her; but overcome at last by the loneliness and the
firelight, he had fallen asleep on the big couch by the hearth. Having
removed only his coat, he lay stretched out on his back, snoring
slightly, with his jaw drooping above his magenta tie and his glazed
collar. His features wore the defenseless look which sleep brings to men
and women alike, and she felt, with a pang of sympathy, that he was at
her mercy because he cared while she was indifferent. She would be
always, she realized, the stronger of the two; for it seemed to her one
of the inconsistencies of human nature that strength should be measured
by indifference rather than by love.
Picking up the old grey blanket from the foot of the bed, she spread it
over him so gently that he did not stir in his sleep. The honesty she
had felt in him from the beginning was the single attribute that
survived in unconsciousness. If only she could remember his goodness and
forget his absurdity, life would be so much easier.
Too tired to do more than let down her hair and slip into a wrapper, she
dropped on the bed and drew the patchwork quilt up to her chin. As the
firelight flickered over her face, she remembered the night when Rufus
was arrested. Now, as then, she felt that the end of endurance was
reached. "Even if I am married to Nathan and Geneva has drowned herself,
I can't keep awake any longer."
XVIII
Up by the barn John Appleseed's threshing machine was droning like a
gigantic swarm of June beetles. After a rainy spring the sky had cleared
with the beginning of summer, and as the weeks went on, the weather
remained warm and dry for the wheat harvest.
Standing on the porch, with her curved palm screening her eyes, Dorinda
watched for Nathan to leave the threshing and come home to dinner. All
the morning Fluvanna had been baking wheaten bread for the white men and
corn pone for the coloured hands, who had their midday meal out under
the locust trees at the back of the house. It was five years since the
night of her wedding day, when Nathan had fallen asleep by the fire, and
never in those five years had she known a season of such bountiful
crops.
As she watched there in the sunlight, she looked exactly what she was in
reality, a handsome, still youthful woman of thirty-eight, who had been
hardened but not embittered by experience. Her tall straight figure had
thickened; there was a silver sheen on the hair over her temples, and
lines had gathered in the russet glow of her skin. Repose, dignity,
independence, these were the attributes with which she faced middle age,
for the lines in her face were marks of character, not of emotion. She
had long ago ceased to worry over wrinkles. Though she clung to youth,
it was youth of the arteries and the spirit. Her happiness was
independent, she felt, of the admiration of men, and her value as a
human being was founded upon a durable, if an intangible, basis. Since
she had proved that she could farm as well as a man there was less need
for her to endeavour to fascinate as a woman. Yet, as she occasionally
observed with surprise, in discouraging the sentimental advances of men,
she had employed the most successful means of holding their interest.
When all was said and done, was she not the only woman at Pedlar's Mill
who did not stoop habitually to falsehood and subterfuge to gain her
end?
Looking back from the secure place where she stood, she could afford to
smile at the perturbation of spirit which had attended her wedding.
Marriage had made, after all, little difference in the orderly precision
of her days. She held the reins of her life too firmly grasped ever to
relinquish them to another; and as she had foreseen on her
wedding night, she possessed an incalculable advantage in merely liking
Nathan while he loved her. On her side at least marriage had begun where
it so often ends happily, in charity of mind. Though she could not love,
she had chosen the best substitute for love, which is tolerance.
After five years of marriage, Nathan was scarcely more than a superior
hired man on the farm. Dorinda still smiled at his jokes; she still
considered his appetite; she still spoke of him respectfully to the
children as "your father"; but he had no part, he had never had any
part, in her life. It was his misfortune, perhaps, that by demanding
nothing, he existed as an individual through generosity alone. Yet
humble as he was in the house, his repressions fell away from him as
soon as he was out on the farm. The mechanical gesture of sowing or
reaping released his spiritual stature from the restraints that crippled
it in the flesh. Contact with the soil dissolved his humility, as
alcohol dissolved the inhibitions which had made Rufus when he was sober
colourless and ineffectual in comparison with Rufus when he was drunk.
Farming was Nathan's solitary outlet, for he did not drink and he had
observed scrupulously his promise not to encroach on Dorinda's freedom.
He left her at liberty, as he often reminded her, to have things her own
way, and nothing in his nature, except his habits, was strong enough to
resist her. Though she had been able to break him of chewing tobacco in
the house, he still drank his coffee from his saucer and sat with his
feet on the railing of the porch. Yet he was an easy man, she reflected,
to live with, and for a woman who was growing arrogant with prosperity,
an easy man was essential. At thirty-eight her philosophy had
crystallized into the axiom, "you can't have everything."
In the midst of the abandoned acres the broad cultivated fields were
rich and smiling. Where the broomsedge had run wild a few years ago, the
young corn was waving, or the ragged furrows of the harvest wheat were
overflowing with feathery green. In the pasture, if she had looked from
the front porch instead of from the back one, she would have seen the
velvety flanks of the cattle standing knee deep in grass. At her feet, a
flock of white Leghorns, direct descendants of Romeo and Juliet, were
scratching busily in the sheepmint.
Lifting her hand from her eyes, she brushed a lock of hair back from her
forehead and glanced down at the blue and white gingham dress she had
put on for dinner. Of late she had fallen into the habit of powdering
her face with her pink flannel starch bag and changing into a clean
dress before dinner. Her life, she knew, was becoming simplified into an
unbreakable chain of habits, a series of orderly actions at regular
hours. Vaguely, she thought of herself as a happy woman; yet she was
aware that this monotony of contentment had no relation to what she had
called happiness in her youth. It was better perhaps; it was certainly
as good; but it measured all the difference between youth and maturity.
She was not old. At thirty-eight, she was still young; and there were
moments in the spring when her tranquillity was shot through with arrows
of flame. Her romantic ardour lay buried under the years, but she
realized now and then that it was still living.
"Dar dey is!" exclaimed Nimrod behind her, and immediately afterwards
she heard Fluvanna's voice inquiring if it "wasn't time to begin dishing
up dinner?"
Across the fields the men were walking slowly, Nathan and John Appleseed
a little ahead, the others straggling behind them, with John Abner
limping alone at a distance. She would have recognized Nathan's loping
walk as far-off as she could distinguish his figure, and John Abner's
limp never failed to awaken a sympathetic feeling in her bosom. Of the
four children, he was the only one who had grown into her life. Minnie
May was married and the unselfish mother of an anæmic tow-headed brood;
Bud was working his way to the head of the wholesale grocery business;
and Lena had developed into a pretty, vain, empty-headed girl, who had
been engaged half a dozen times, but had always changed her mind before
it was too late. She attracted men as naturally as honey attracts flies,
and since she was troubled by neither religion nor morality, her
stepmother's only hope was "to get her safely married before anything
happened." For John Abner, Dorinda felt no anxiety beyond the maternal
one which arose from his lameness and his delicate health. He had been a
comfort to her ever since he had come to the farm; and yet, in spite of
John Abner and the knowledge that she had married from fear of a
solitary old age, she realized that she was still lonely. Evidently,
whatever else marriage might prevent, it was not a remedy for isolation
of spirit.
As Nathan reached the porch he fumbled in the pocket of his overalls and
drew out a greasy paper.
"John Appleseed brought me this notice about Five Oaks," he said. "Jason
has never paid his taxes, and the farm is to be sold on the tenth of
August. I saw the notice at the store yesterday, but I didn't stop long
enough to take it in." Though Nathan still owned the general store at
Pedlar's Mill, he had placed a manager in charge of it a few years ago.
The tenth of August! It seemed a long time to wait. Though Dorinda had
expected the sale for the last five years, she told herself that it
seemed a long time to wait. There was not the slightest surprise for her
in Nathan's announcement. She had known for months that neither the
taxes nor the interest on the mortgage could be paid, and that the farm
would soon be sold at public auction. But with the inherent perversity
of human nature, she felt now that the bare statement of the foreclosure
had startled her out of a sleep. When the men had gone to wash their
hands at the well, she lingered on the porch and gazed over the
harvested fields and the low curve of the hill in the direction of Five
Oaks. Peace surrounded her; peace was within her mind and heart; yet the
past clung to her like an odour and she could not brush it away.
"It looks mighty like we'll get Five Oaks at last," Nathan said that
night when they were alone. "To save my soul I can't see why you're so
set on it, but when a woman wants a thing as much as that, it looks as
if Providence couldn't hold out against her."
"Is there any chance of James Ellgood bidding it in?" This had been her
secret dread ever since she had heard of the sale. Suppose James
Ellgood, who could go as high as he liked, should begin bidding against
her!
"There ain't one chance in a million that Jim will lift a finger. He's
hated Jason ever since Geneva drowned herself--and before too."
"When he loses his farm, do you know what he will do? Jason Greylock, I
mean."
"He'll still own that little old house in the woods across Whippernock
River. Maybe he'll go down there to live. There ain't much land
belonging to it, but he's given up farming anyway same he's taken to
drink. The two things don't work together."
"He's his father all over again," Dorinda said, with a shiver of
repulsion.
"Yes, it looks like it." Nathan's tone was more compassionate. "John
Appleseed saw him a few days ago when he was over there with Tom Snead
looking for a foxhound puppy he'd lost. The dirt would have given you a
fit, Dorinda, he said. There was a slatternly looking coloured wench
getting dinner; but she had thrown all the vegetable peelings out into
the yard, and the front hall was stacked with kindling wood."
"Did he see Jason?"
"Yes, he came out when he heard the noise and asked what they wanted.
The old man is getting the best of him, John Appleseed said."
"And while his father was alive, he hated him so."
"Well, it's often like that, I reckon. Maybe he hated him all the more
because he felt he was like him." Nathan shook his head as if he were
dislodging a gnat. "I must say, for my part, I'd have picked the old man
of the two. At least he wasn't white-livered."
White-livered! It seemed to Dorinda that the old man himself was
speaking to her out of his grave. Even he, steeped in iniquity, had
scorned Jason because he lacked the courage of his wickedness.
Not for years had she heard directly of the Greylocks, and while she
listened she felt that the streak of cruelty in her own nature was
slowly appeased.
"I wonder why he never went North again?" Nathan said, as he rose to
undress. "I remember he told me once years ago that all he wanted was a
quiet life. He didn't care a damn for the farm, he said, he'd always
hated it."
Yes, it was true, he had always hated it. Through his whole life he had
been tied by his own nature to the thing that he hated.
When the tenth of August came, Dorinda put on her best dress, a navy
blue and white foulard which Leona Prince, the new dressmaker, had cut
after the fashionable "Princesse style." She was waiting on the porch
when Nathan, who had just removed his overalls, looked out of the window
to ask if they were going to walk.
"No, let's have the surrey." For a reason which she did not stop to
define she preferred the long way by the road to the short cut over the
fields. "Lena wants to go with us."
Nathan whistled. "What on earth has she got up her sleeve now?"
If she had spoken the thought in her mind, Dorinda would have replied
tartly, "She wants to go because she thinks men will be there"; but
instead she answered simply, "Oh, she's always ready to go anywhere."
"Well, can't she walk? It ain't over a mile by the short cut."
"She's afraid of seed ticks. Besides, she's putting on her flowered
organdie."
"What on earth?" Nathan demanded a second time. Then, after a meditative
pause, he added logically, "I reckon she's got her eye open for young
Jim Ellgood, but she'll be disappointed."
Lena had recently turned her seductions in a new direction; and Dorinda
was divided between pity for the victim, a nice boy of twenty, and the
fervent hope that Lena might be safely, if not permanently, settled. To
be sure, young Jim had given no sign as yet of responding to her
energetic advances; but the girl had never failed when she had gone
about her business in a whole-hearted fashion, and Dorinda remained
optimistic though vaguely uneasy about the results. Of course her
step-daughter was the last wife in the world for a farmer. Scheming,
capricious, dangerously oversexed, and underworked, she had revealed of
late a chronic habit of dissimulation, and it was impossible to decide
whether she was lying for diversion or speaking the truth from
necessity. Yet none of these moral imperfections appeared to detract an
iota from the advantage of a face like an infant Aphrodite, vacant but
perfect as the inside of a shell. A deplorable waste of any good man's
affection, thought Dorinda. However, she had ceased long ago to worry
over what she could not prevent, and she had observed that the strongest
desires are directed almost invariably toward the least desirable.
"I am not sure that it is young Jim," she said, firm but indefinite.
"Anyhow, you'll have to hitch up the surrey. The weeds would tear that
dress to pieces."
When she spoke in that tone, she knew that Nathan never waited to argue.
"All right. I turned the horses out to graze, but I'll see if I can find
them." He went off obediently enough, after protesting again that it
wasn't a mile by the short cut through the woods. Though Nathan always
gave in to her wishes, he seldom gave in without grumbling.
It took him a quarter of an hour of hard hunting to catch the horses;
but by the time Lena was ready, he appeared at the dour with the surrey.
"If you don't hurry up and come on, the sale will be over before we get
there," he remarked in the casual tone of a man who is not interested in
the result.
"Why, I thought we had plenty of time," Dorinda replied; but she hurried
Lena down the steps and into the vehicle, in spite of the girl's
complaint that the ruffles on her skirt would be ruined if she did not
spread a robe over the seat. Not until they had started off at a brisk
pace and were well on the road, did Dorinda's heart stop its rapid
pulsation. Suppose her own stupid folly in withstanding Nathan should
cost her the possession of Five Oaks!
XIX
Up the long shady slope; into the branch road by the fork; between the
wastes of Joe-Pyeweed and life-everlasting; over the rotting bridge
across Gooseneck Creek, where the dragon-flies swarmed above the partly
dried stream; up the rutted track through last year's corn stubble; and
past the broken fences of the farmyard to the group of indifferent
farmers gathered on benches, chairs, and upturned cracker boxes, under
the fine old oaks. All through the drive something invisible was
whipping her on, as if the memory of wet branches stung her face in the
blue August weather. A question was beating unanswered at the back of
her brain. Why, since she neither loved nor hated Jason, should she long
so passionately to own the place where he lived? Was it merely that the
possession of Five Oaks would complete her victory and his degradation?
Or was it simply that feeling like hers never died, that it returned
again and again, in some changed form, to the place where it had first
taken root?
When she reached the lawn, Ezra Flower, the auctioneer, was intoning
from the front porch to the gathering under the trees. He was a fat
little man, with a beard which stood out like ruffled grey feathers and
the impudent manner of a bedraggled sparrow. From his scolding tone,
Dorinda inferred that the bidding had been fainthearted. Nobody wanted
land, for land was the one thing that everybody owned and could not give
away. While Nathan drove on to the side of the house, Dorinda walked
quickly over to a chair a farmer was relinquishing. Only after she had
seated herself between John Appleseed and William Fairlamb, did she
glance round and observe that Lena had not followed her, but had stopped
among the younger men and boys who were sprawling over the grass.
Already the girl was rolling her eyes and giggling without modesty.
Well, what did it matter? Dorinda had tried, she felt sincerely, to do
her duty by Nathan and his children; but it was impossible for any
stepmother to be responsible for the character of a girl who possessed
none. A stern expression forced her lips together, and she looked away
to the twitching figure of Ezra Flower.
Still the auctioneer droned on, eliciting now and then responses as curt
as oaths. Presently she heard Nathan's dry cough and his slow emphatic
voice rasping out the words, "Three thousand dollars!" The bidding was
about to begin in earnest, she saw, and a chill sensation ran over her
as she settled her flaring skirt in the rush-bottomed chair.
While she sat there, listening to the rise and fall of the bidding, she
tried to keep her mind firmly fixed on the objects before her. Overhead,
the sky was of larkspur blue. Far away in the glittering fields, she
heard the shrill chorus of grasshoppers chiming in with the monotonous
hum of the auctioneer's voice. In the nearer meadow clouds of golden
pollen were drifting like swarms of devouring insects. Over the grass on
the lawn a flock of white turkeys moved in a sedate procession.
Yes, what had happened had happened, she told herself, and was over. Her
affair was not with the past; it was not with the future. The only thing
that concerned her vitally was the moment in which she was living. Only
by keeping her mind close to the immediate present could she prevent her
thoughts from slipping back into the abyss. Even now there were hours
when memory seemed to be dragging her into the past; and when this
occurred, a sense of weakness, of futility, of distaste for living,
would sweep over her like a malady. To look back, she knew, meant the
frustration of effort. To go on, taking the moment as it came,
surmounting the obstacles, one by one, as they confronted her; to lavish
her vital energy on permanent, not fugitive, endeavours,--these were the
resolves which had carried her triumphantly over the years.
"Six thousand dollars," sang the auctioneer. "Going--going--going for six
thousand dollars. Only six thousand dollars. Will nobody bid more? Not a
quarter of what it is worth. Will nobody bid more for this fine old
farm? Going--going--what? Nobody bids more? Going--going--gone for six
thousand dollars!"
She rose and went over to where Nathan stood surrounded by a few
farmers, who were trying in vain to pretend that they did not think him
a fool. "Should have thought you had as much land as you knew what to do
with," John Appleseed was saying, as she approached. "What are you going
to do with Five Oaks, now you've got it? Eat it, I reckon?"
"It ain't mine. I bid on it for my wife," Nathan replied stubbornly.
"She was so set on it I couldn't hold out against her."
Yes, Nathan was a good man, there was no denying it. Feeling nearer to
him than she had ever felt in her life, she moved over to his side and
slipped her hand through his arm.
"Wall, she got it dirt cheap," the auctioneer declared. "Dirt cheap, if
I do say so."
"I don't see what you want with two farms, ma'am," chuckled Mr.
Kettledrum, the veterinarian. "It looks as if you was goin' to live on
one an' let Nathan live by himself on the other."
Then the faint-hearted bidders mounted their horses or stepped into
their buggies, while Ezra Flower invited the new owners into the house.
"Come right in an' clinch the sale with Doctor Greylock. He's settin'
right there now with the papers to draw up," he added persuasively, as
Dorinda hung back.
Beckoning Lena to follow them, Dorinda went up the steps with Nathan and
entered the hall. Only once before had she been inside the house; but
every detail of the interior had bitten into her memory. She knew the
bend in the staircase down which the old man had roamed with his whip at
night. She had never forgotten the litter of dust in the corners; the
guns and fishing-poles crowded behind the door; the collection of hats
on the table and sofa; the empty whiskey bottles arranged in a row by
the wainscoting. Above all, she remembered the stale odour of
degeneration, of mingled whiskey and tobacco, which saturated the walls.
Eighteen years ago, and nothing, not even that odour, had changed! In
those eighteen years she had spent her youth and had restored dead land
to life; but this house in which Jason had lived was still sunk in
immovable sloth and decay.
Ezra Flower passed, with his sprightly sparrow-like twitter, through the
hall, and flung open the door of a room on the right--the room in which
she had sat with the drunken old man while the storm broke outside.
Jason, she saw, was standing on the very spot in the rug where his
father had stood that afternoon in November.
As she crossed the threshold, it seemed to her that the room shifted and
came forward to meet her. She heard Nathan's voice saying meaningless
words. Then Jason took her hand and dropped it so limply that it might
have been a dead leaf.
"Won't you sit down?" he asked courteously, for he had evidently kept
sober until the sale could be concluded. "So you've bought Five Oaks,"
he continued, as indifferently as if he were speaking of corn or wheat.
"Well, it's never been any use to me, and I'm not sorry to get rid of
it. But I don't see what you're going to do with it. Isn't one farm as
much as you're able to manage?" As he finished, he pushed a decanter of
whiskey in the direction of Nathan. "We might as well have a drink over
it anyway."
Yes, nothing had altered. It might have been the same dust that lay in a
film over the floor, the furniture and the walls. It might have been the
same pile of old newspapers on the table. It might have been the same
spot of grease on the table cover; the same rattrap baited with a piece
of greenish cheese in one corner; the same light falling obliquely
through the speckled window-panes. She would not have been surprised,
when she turned her head, to see the sheets of rain blowing out like a
curtain over the hunched box-bush.
Jason laughed, and the sound had a sardonic merriment. She had never
thought that he resembled the old man, and she told herself now, while
she watched him, that it was only the bad light or a trick of memory
which gave him the discouraged and desperate air of his father. In
looking at him she seemed not to brush aside, but to gather together all
the years that had gone. Why had she ever loved him? What was there in
this one man that was different from all other men whom she had known?
Once she had beheld him within a magic circle of wonder and delight,
divided and set apart from the surrounding dullness of existence. Now
the dullness had swept over him as the waste flows over the abandoned
fields.
He leaned back in his chair, glancing from Nathan to Ezra Flower with
morose and weary eyes. His face, which had been charming in youth, was
now spiritless and inert. There were yellow blotches under his eyes; his
eyelids were puffed and heavy; his features were swollen and leaden in
colour; and even his hair, which had once been so alive, was as sandy
and brittle as straw. Yes, the broomsedge had grown over him.
For a minute she scarcely heard what they were saying; then the details
of the sale were discussed, and she made an effort to follow the words.
When, presently, Nathan asked her to sign a paper, she turned
automatically and wrote her name in the race that Ezra Flower pointed
out to her. As she laid down the pen, she saw that Jason was smiling,
and for an instant a glimmer of his old bright charm shone in his
expression. She wished that he had not smiled. Then, with the wish still
in her mind, she saw that he was smiling, not at her, but at Lena. His
heavy gaze turned Lena as instinctively as the eyes turn to a flaring
lamp in a darkened room. His look was not amorous, for drink, Dorinda
knew, not sex, was his preoccupation; but, while she watched it, a
sensation of physical nausea attacked her.
Rising from her chair, she stood waiting for Nathan to finish the
discussion. It was agreed, she understood vaguely, that Jason should
leave the farm the first day of October, and that Nathan should take over
the better part of the furniture. "I'll be glad to get rid of it," Jason
remarked agreeably enough, "and I hope that you will make more out of the
farm than I ever did. All I can say that it ruined me. If I had been
hard-hearted about it instead of soft, I'd be a different man from the
one I am to-day."
"Yes, you weren't cut out for a farmer," Nathan rejoined mildly, and he
added with one of his untimely jests, "Now, is you'd been as thrifty as
my wife, you'd have found a way to make two leaves of alfalfa grow where
there wasn't even one blade of grass before."
At this, for the first time, Jason looked at her attentively, and she
knew from his gaze that his interest in her was as casual as his
interest in Nathan. With his look, she felt that the part of her that
was sex withered and died; but something more ancient than sex came to
her rescue, and this was the instinct of self-preservation which had
made her resolve in her youth that no man should spoil her rife. In the
matter of sex, he had won; matched merely as human beings, as man to
man, she knew that she was the stronger. Though she did not realize its
significance, the moment was a crisis in her experience; for when it had
passed she had discarded for ever the allurements of youth. She felt
securely middle-aged, but it was the middle age of triumphant
independence.
Jason's glance had wandered from her to Nathan, and she detected the
flicker of ridicule in his smile. Anger seized her at the suspicion that
he was mocking them, and with the anger a passionate loyalty to Nathan
welled up in her heart. She saw Nathan as clearly as Jason saw him, but
she saw also something fine and magnanimous in his character which Jason
could never see because he was blind to nobility. "I don't care," she
thought indignantly, "he is worth twenty of Jason." Obeying a protective
impulse, she moved nearer to her husband and laid her hand on his arm.
It was the second time that afternoon that she had drawn closer to him
of her own accord.
"Well, I reckon we'd better be starting home," Nathan said, as he held
out his hand in simple good will. "I hope you'll make out all right
where you're going."
"All I ask is a quiet life," Jason repeated. Then, as they were leaving
the room, his eyes roved back to Lena and clung to her face as if he
hated to see the last of her. "Take good care of that daughter of
yours," he advised. "She's the prettiest girl I ever saw in my life."
"Well, she ain't bad-looking," Nathan retorted with spirit, "but she
can't hold a candle to the way her mother and Dorinda looked when they
were her age."
Without touching Jason's hand again, Dorinda walked quickly down the
hall and out of the house. Not until they were driving over Gooseneck
Creek, did it occur to her that she had not opened her lips at Five
Oaks.
"I hope you're satisfied, Dorinda," Nathan remarked, with hilarity.
"Yes, I'm satisfied."
"I fancied you looked kind of down in the mouth while we were in the
room. You ain't changed your mind about wanting the farm, have you?"
"Oh, no, I haven't changed my mind."
"I'm glad of that. You never can tell about a woman. He seemed to think
that Lena was good to look at."
Though she had believed that her anger was over, the embers grew red and
then grey again. Middle age as an attitude of mind might enjoy an
immunity from peril, but it suffered, she found, from the disadvantages
of an unstable equilibrium.
"I wonder if he has forgotten Geneva," she observed irrelevantly.
At the reminder of that tragic figure Nathan's hilarity died. "When a
thing like that has happened to a man," he responded, "he doesn't
usually keep the dry bones lying around to look at."
The sun was beginning to go down and the sandy stretch of road, where
the shadow of the surrey glided ahead of them, glittered like silver.
After the intense heat of the day the fitful breeze was as torrid as the
air from an oven.
"John Abner promised he would drive me over to the ice cream festival at
the church," Lena said hopefully. There were pearly beads on her
shell-like brow and Nathan's leathery face was streaming with
perspiration.
"Poor John Abner! It is so hot and he will be tired!" protested Dorinda,
though she was aware that any protest was futile, for Lena possessed the
obstinacy peculiar to many weak-minded women.
"He needn't stay," retorted the girl. "Somebody will be sure to bring me
home." She pressed her pink lips together and smiled with the secret
wisdom of instinct.
As soon as they reached the house Dorinda slipped into her gingham dress
and hurried out to the barn. Milking had already begun, but she knew
that it would proceed with negligence if she were long absent. In
summer, as in winter, they had supper after dark, and for a little while
when the meal was over she liked to rest on the porch with Nathan and
John Abner. To-night, John Abner was away with Lena, and when Dorinda
came out into the air, she dropped, with a sigh of relief, into the
hammock beneath the climbing rose Nathan had planted.
"I never felt anything like the heat," she said, "there's not a breath
anywhere."
Nathan stirred in the darkness and removed his pipe from his mouth.
"Yes, if it don't break soon, the drought will go hard with the crops."
"And with the dairy too. The ice melts so fast I can't keep the butter
firm."
She leaned back, breathing in the scent of his pipe. The protective
feeling, so closely akin to tenderness, which had awakened in her heart
at Five Oaks, had not entirely vanished, and she felt nearer to her
husband, sitting there in the moonlight of her thoughts, than she had
felt since her marriage. Even that moment at Five Oaks when Jason had
laughed at him had not brought him so close. She longed to tell him this
because she knew how much the knowledge of it would mean to him; yet she
could find no words delicate enough to convey this new sense of his
importance in her life. The only words at her command were those that
had struggled in her mind over at Five Oaks: "He is worth twenty of
Jason," and these were not words that could be spoken aloud.
"There goes a shooting star!" Nathan exclaimed suddenly out of the
stillness.
"And another," she added, after a brief silence.
"I wonder what becomes of them," he continued presently. "When you stop
to think of it, it's odd what becomes of everything. It makes the
universe seem like a scrap heap."
She left the hammock and sat down on the step at his feet. "That reminds
me of all the trash over at Five Oaks. What in the world can we do with
it? Doesn't that screech owl sound as if he were close by us."
"Well, we'll have to put a manager on that farm, I reckon. We can't look
after both farms and make anything of them. I never heard so many
tree frogs as we've had this summer. What with the locusts and the
katydids you can't hear yourself talk. But it's right pleasant sitting
here like this, ain't it?"
"Yes, it's pleasant." She tried to say something affectionate and gave
up the effort. "I like to think that Five Oaks belongs to us." Her
accent on the "us" was the best that she could do in the matter of
sentiment; yet she was sure that he understood her mood and was touched
by its gentleness.
They talked until late, planning changes in the old farm and
improvements in the new one. It was an evening that she liked to
remember as long as she lived. Whenever she looked back on it
afterwards, it seemed to lie there like a fertile valley in the arid
monotony of her life.
_PART
THIRD_
LIFE-EVERLASTING
"_For the next few years_. . . ."
I
For the next few years she gave herself completely to Five Oaks. Only by
giving herself completely, only by enriching the land with her abundant
vitality, could she hope to restore the farm. Reclaiming the abandoned
fields had become less a reasonable purpose than a devouring passion in
her mind and heart. Old Farm was managed by Nathan now, and since he had
let his own place to a thrifty German tenant, he had, as Dorinda
frequently reminded him, "all the time in the world on his hands." The
dairy work, which had prospered when three trains a day were run between
Washington and the South, still remained under her supervision; but all
the hours that she could spare were spent on the freshly ploughed acres
of Five Oaks. Over these acres she toiled as resolutely as the pioneer
must have toiled when he snatched a home from the wilderness. Though she
had installed Martin Flower in the house, she had rejected Nathan's idea
of letting the farm "on shares" to the tenant. This was the only
disagreement she had ever had with Nathan, and he had yielded at last to
the habit of, command which had fastened upon her. As she grew older she
clung to authority as imperiously as a king who refuses to abdicate.
There were moments in these years when, arrested by some sudden check on
her arrogance, she stopped to wonder if any man less confirmed in
humility than Nathan could have stood her as a wife. But, immediately
afterwards, she would reflect, with the faint bitterness which still
flavoured her opinion of love, that if she had married another man, he
might not have found her overbearing.
Though the gentleness of mood which had stolen over her that August
evening had not entirely departed, it lingered above the bare reason of
her mind as a tender flush might linger over the austere pattern of the
landscape. After that evening she had drawn no nearer to her husband,
yet she had felt no particular impulse to stand farther away. Their
association had touched its highest point in the soft darkness of that
night, and she knew that they could never again reach the peak of
consciousness together. But the quiet friendliness of their intercourse
was not disturbed by Dorinda's interest in Five Oaks; and when, after a
longer pursuit and a fiercer capture than usual, Lena finally married
young Jim Ellgood, the days at Old Farm assumed the aspect of bright
serenity which passes so often for happiness. Though Dorinda was not
happy in the old thrilling sense of the word, she drifted, as middle age
wore on, into a philosophy of acquiescence. John Abner was still her
favourite companion, and he shared her ardent interest in Five Oaks. In
time, she hoped he would marry some girl whom she herself should select,
and that they would live with their children at Old Farm. When she
suggested this to Nathan, he chuckled under his breath.
"It wouldn't surprise me if he wanted his head when he comes to
marrying," he observed.
"Of course you think I am high-handed," she rejoined.
"Well, it don't make any difference to me what you are. And as long as
you can manage me," he added, "you needn't worry about not keeping your
hand in."
"It's for your own good anyway," she retorted. "You're too easy-going
with everybody."
"I know it, honey. I ain't complaining."
He was refilling his pipe from his shabby old pouch of tobacco, and
while he prodded the bowl with his thumb, he lifted his eyes and looked
at her with his sheepish smile.
"I heard 'em talking about Jason Greylock yesterday at the store," he
said.
She made a gesture of aversion. "What did they say?"
"Not much that I can recollect. Only that he is too lazy to come for his
mail. He has buried himself in that house in the woods across
Whippernock River, and he sometimes lets a whole month go by without
coming to the post office."
"Perhaps he hasn't any way of getting over."
"He's still got his horse and buggy. I doubt if he's really as poor as
he makes out. He hires Aunt Mehaley Plumtree to cook for him and look
after the poultry. She comes every morning and stays till dark."
"To think of coming down to that after Five Oaks!"
"Well, the country goes against you when you ain't cut out for a farmer.
Since the old man brought him back from the North, I reckon Jason has
had a hard row to hoe."
"He wasn't obliged to stay here," she observed scornfully.
"No, but he was always too easy-going. A pleasant enough fellow when he
was a boy; but soon ripe, soon rotten."
"Oh, I give it up." Dorinda was untying her apron while she answered.
"He isn't worth all the time we've wasted talking about him."
"Good Lord, Dorinda! You haven't been sitting here ten minutes."
"Well, ten minutes will pick a bushel, as Ebenezer says. They are
waiting for me over at Five Oaks."
This was the secret of her contentment, she knew, breathless activity.
If she was satisfied with her life, it was only because she never
stopped long enough in her work to imagine the kind of life she should
have preferred. While her health was good and her energy unimpaired, she
had no time for discontent. If she had looked for it, she sometimes told
herself, she could have found sufficient cause for unhappiness; but she
was careful not to look for it.
In these years there were brief periods when her old dreams awakened.
Beauty that seemed too fugitive to be real was still more a torment than
a delight to her. The moon rising over the harp-shaped pine; the shocked
corn against the red sunsets of autumn; the mulberry-coloured twilights
of winter;--while she watched these things the past would glow again
with the fitful incandescence of memory. But the inner warmth died with
the external beauty, and she dismissed the longing as weakness. "You
know where that sort of thing leads you," she would tell herself
sternly. "Three months of love, and you pay for it with all the rest of
your life."
Looking round at other women, she could not see that they were
better off in the matter of love than she was herself. Even the few
who had married the men they had chosen had paid for it--or so it
appeared to her--with a lifetime of physical drudgery or emotional
disappointment. She supposed they had compensations that she could not
discover--otherwise how could they have borne with their lives?--but
there was lot one among them with whom she would have changed places.
Those who had been most deeply in love appeared to her to have become
most bitterly disenchanted.
"I've a lot to be thankful for," she would repeat, while she went out to
struggle against he scrub pine or broomsedge.
At Five Oaks, during those first seasons, she converted her repressed
energy into the work of destruction. She would watch the reclaiming of
the waste places, the burning of the broomsedge, the grubbing up of the
pin and the sassafras, as if the fire and smoke were clearing her life
of its illusions. Her nightmare dream of ploughing under the thistles
was translated into the actual event. Perhaps, as the years went by, the
reality would follow the dream into oblivion. At thirty she had looked
forward to forty, as the time of her release from van expectation; but
when forty came, she pushed the horizon of her freedom still farther
away. "Perhaps at fifty I shall be rid of it for ever," she thought.
The winter had begin with a heavy snowstorm in December, and the week
before Christmas Nathan went to bed with a cold which left him with at
abscess in one of his teeth. There was no dental surgeon nearer than
Richmond, and Doctor Stout had advised him to go to the city and have
the tooth out as quickly as possible. "You won't lave a minute's peace
until you do," the doctor added decisively.
That was weeks ago, for Nathan had deferred the evil day until the
twentieth of January when he was required as a witness in a lawsuit Bob
Ellgood was bringing against the railroad. "As long as I've got to go to
Richmond anyway, I might as well wait and kill two birds with one
store," he said.
A few days before the case was called his toothache began again with
violence, and for two nights he had walked the floor in agony.
"You will be so thankful afterwards that it is over!" Dorinda assured
him encouragingly.
She was busily seeding raisins for a plum pudding, and she paused long
enough in her task to glance out of the window and shake her head.
Though her forty-second birthday had just gone, the wintry flush in her
cheeks and the imperious carriage of her head still created, at a little
distance, the aspect of youth. There was a white lock on her forehead;
but the premature greyness appeared theatrical rather than elderly above
the intense blue of her eyes. "You look as good to me as you ever did,"
Nathan had said to her on her birthday.
As she turned from the window and put down the bowl of raisins, a frown
wrinkled her forehead. "I wonder if it will ever stop snowing?" she
said.
For days the weather had been bitterly cold, and the bare country had
frozen under a leaden sky. Then at sunset the evening before a red fire
had streamed over the rim of the horizon, and in the night snow had
begun to fall. When Dorinda had gone out to the barn at five o'clock,
she had found the landscape covered with a white blanket and deep drifts
at the corners of the house and on the north side of the well and the
woodpile. The blackness had been so thick that she had been obliged to
walk in the flitting circle of light her lantern had cast on the ground.
She had already sent off the butter to meet the five o'clock train to
Washington; but Nimrod had overslept himself, and Nathan had hurried to
the cabin to wake him, while John Abner had harnessed the horses to the
wagon. Even then the coloured boy had had to take his breakfast with him
and eat it at the station. If the train had been delayed, the butter
would not have reached Washington until the day was well advanced.
All the morning and afternoon the flakes were driven in the high wind.
Though Dorinda could see only a few feet in front of her, she knew that
the dim fleecy shapes huddled on the lawn were not sheep but lilac
bushes and flower-beds. The animals and the birds had long ago fled to
shelter. As soon as the snow stopped falling the crows would begin
flying over the fields; but now the world appeared as deserted as if it
were the dawn of creation. In the kitchen, where she stayed when she was
not obliged to be in the dairy, there was an ashen light which gave
everything, even the shining pots and pans, an air of surprise.
Fluvanna, who was stirring the mixture for the plum pudding, sat as
close to the stove as she could push her chair, and shivered beneath her
shawl of knitted grey wool.
"Well, I reckon I'll be glad to get it over," Nathan said in a mournful
voice. "I've stood it' about as long as I can."
He had dropped disconsolately into a chair by the table, and sat with
his hands hanging helplessly between his knees. His face was tied up in
a white silk handkerchief which Dorinda had given him at Christmas, and
while she looked at him with sympathy, she could not repress a smile at
the comical figure he made. Like a sick sheep! That was the way he
always looked when anything hurt him. He was a good man; she was
sincerely attached to him; but there was no use denying that he looked
like a sick sheep.
"Nimrod can drive you over with the butter in the morning," she
rejoined. "Then you can have your tooth pulled before you have to go to
court."
Afterwards, when she recalled this conversation, the ashen light of the
kitchen flooded her mind. A small thing like that to decide all one's
future! Yet it seemed to her that it was always the little things, not
the big ones, that influenced destiny; the fortuitous occurrence instead
of the memorable occasion. The incident of his going was apparently as
trivial as her meeting with Jason in the road, as the failure of her aim
when the gun had gone off, as the particular place and moment when she
had fallen down in Fifth Avenue. These accidents had changed utterly the
course of her life. Yet none of them could she have foreseen and
prevented; and only once, she felt, in that hospital in New York, had
the accident or the device of fortune been in her favour.
"Yes, I'll do it," Nathan repeated firmly. "Ebenezer or Nimrod can meet
the evening train. That ought to get me home in time for supper."
"If this keeps up," Dorinda observed, "everything will be late."
In the morning, as she had foreseen, everything was an hour later than
usual. "The train is obliged to be behindhand," she thought, "so it
won't really matter." Though it was still snowing, the wind had dropped
and the stainless white lay like swan's-down over the country. All that
Dorinda could see was the world within the moving circle of the lantern;
but imagination swept beyond to the desolate beauty of the scene. "I'd
like to go over with you," she said, when they had finished breakfast,
"only the roads will be so heavy I oughtn't to add anything on the
horses."
"It will be pretty hard driving," Nathan returned. "I hope I shan't take
cold in my tooth."
"Oh, I can wrap up your face in a shawl, and I've got out that old
sheepskin Pa used to use. You couldn't suffer more than you did last
night. Doctor Stout says the trouble isn't from cold but from
infection."
He shook his head dolefully. "No, I couldn't stand another night as bad
as that. The train will be warm anyhow, and even the drive won't be much
worse than the barn was this morning. Jim Ellgood has his barn heated. I
wonder if it wouldn't be a good idea for us to heat ours next year.
Milking ain't much fun when your hands are frostbitten."
"Yes, it would be a good idea," she conceded inattentively, while she
brought a pencil and a piece of paper and made a list of the things she
wished him to buy in town. "You may hear something about the war in
Europe," she added, in the hope of diverting his mind from the pain in
his tooth. Nathan was the only man at Pedlar's Mill who had taken the
trouble to study the battles in France, and even Dorinda, though she
made no comment, thought he was going too far when he brought home an
immense new map of Europe and spent his evenings following the march of
the German Army. Already lie had prophesied that we should be drawn into
the war before it was over; but like his other prophecies, this one was
too farsighted to be heeded by his neighbours.
When it was time for him to start, and Nimrod had brought the wagon to
the door, she wrapped Nathan's face in her grey woollen scarf and tied
the ends in a knot at the back of his head. "You can get somebody to
undo you at the station."
He smiled ruefully. "No, I don't reckon I'd better get on the train tied
up like this. I must look funny."
"It doesn't matter how you look," she responded; but she could not keep
back a laugh.
As the wagon ploughed through the snow, she stood there, with her shawl
wrapped tightly over her bosom and the lantern held out into the
blackness before dawn. The air was alive with a multitude of whirling
flakes, which descended swiftly and sped off into the space beyond the
glimmer of her lantern. After the wagon had disappeared the silence was
so profound that she could almost hear the breathless flight of the
snow-flakes from the veiled immensity of the sky. By the glow of the
lantern she could just distinguish the ghostly images of trees rising
abruptly out of the shrouded stillness of the landscape. While she
lingered there it seemed to her that the earth and air and her own being
were purified and exalted into some frigid zone of the spirit. Humanity,
with its irksome responsibilities and its unprofitable desires, dropped
away from her; but when she turned and entered the house, it was waiting
in the ashen light to retard her endeavours.
II
In the kitchen John Abner was lingering over his breakfast, and Fluvanna
was frying bacon and eggs, while she complained of the weather in a
cheerful voice.
"Are the cows all right?" Dorinda inquired of her stepson. Until the
storm was over, the cows must be kept up, and John Abner, who was a
diligent farmer, had been out to feed and water them.
"Yes, but it's rough on them. It's still as black as pitch, but the
sooner we get the milking over the better. The hands are always late on
a morning like this."
Dorinda glanced at the tin clock on the shelf. "It isn't five o'clock
yet. We'll start as soon as you finish breakfast whether the other
milkers have come or not. The cows can't wait on the storm."
"It's a pity Father had to go to town to-day."
"It may be fortunate that something decided him. The doctor said he
wouldn't be any better until he had that tooth out. He walked the floor
all night with whiskey in his mouth."
The smile that came into Dorinda's eyes when she looked at her stepson
made her face appear girlish, in spite of its roughened skin and the
lines which were deeper in winter. "I see the lanterns outside now," she
added. "The women must be on the way to the milking." Wrapping her shawl
over her head, she took down a coat of raccoon skins, which was hanging
behind the door, and slipped her arms into the shapeless sleeves. Then
going out on the back porch, she felt under a snow-laden bench for the
overshoes she had left there last evening. Dawn was still far away, and
in the opaque darkness she could see the lanterns crawling like frozen
glowworms through the whirling snow, which was blown and scattered in
the glimmering circles of light.
In one of the long low buildings where the milk cows were sheltered, she
found a few grotesquely arrayed milkers. From the beginning she had
employed only women milkers, inspired by a firm, though illogical,
belief in their superior neatness. Yet she had supplemented faith with
incessant admonition, and this was, perhaps, the reason that the women
wore this morning neat caps and aprons above a motley of borrowed or
invented raiment. When she entered, stepping carefully over the mixture
of snow and manure on the threshold, they greeted her with grumbling
complaints of the weather; but before the work was well started they had
thawed in the contagious warmth of her personality, and were chattering
like a flock of blackbirds in a cherry tree. Since it is the law of
African nature to expand in the sunshine, she was particular never to
wear a dismal face over her work.
For the first minute, while she hung the lantern on the nail over her
head, she felt that the meadow-scented breath of the cows was woven into
an impalpable vision of summer. Though she shivered outwardly in the
harsh glare of light, a window in her mind opened suddenly, and she saw
Jason coming toward her through the yellow-green of August evenings. As
with her mother's missionary dream, these visitations of the past
depended less upon her mood, she had discovered, than upon some fugitive
quality in time or place which evoked them from the shadows of memory.
Concealing a shiver of distaste, she turned away and bent over a
milk pail.
"Your fingers are stiff, Jessie, let me try her a moment."
Hours later, when light had come and the work of the dairy was over for
the morning, she went back into the house, and the ashen light went with
her over the threshold. Fluvanna was busy with dinner, and a pointer
puppy named Pat was fast asleep by the stove. Young Ranger, the son of
old Ranger, lay on a mat by the door, and though many Flossies had
passed away, there was always a grey and white cat bearing the name to
get under one's feet between the stove and the cupboard. The room,
Dorinda told herself, was more cheerful than it had ever been. She
remembered that her mother could never afford curtains for the windows,
and that Fluvanna had laughed at her when she had bought barred muslin
and edged it with ruffles. "Good Lord, Miss Dorinda, who ever heard
tell!" the girl exclaimed. Yet, in the end, the curtains, with other
innovations, had become a part of the established order of living. Why
was it so difficult, she wondered, to bring people to accept either a
new idea or a new object? Nathan was the only man at Pedlar's Mill who
lived in the future, and Nathan had always been ridiculed by his
neighbours. The telephone, the modern churn, and the separator, what a
protracted battle he had fought for each of these labour-saving
inventions! He was talking now of the time when they would have an
electric plant on the farm and all the cows would be milked and the
cream separated by electricity. Was this only the fancy of a visionary,
or, like so many of Nathan's imaginary devices, would it come true in
the end?
At twelve o'clock John Abner came in for dinner, and, after a hurried
meal, went out to help clear away the snow from the outbuildings. As
there was no immediate work to be done, Dorinda sat down before the fire
in her bedroom and turning to her workbasket, slipped her darning-egg
into one of Nathan's socks. She disliked darning, and because she
disliked it she never permitted herself to neglect it. Her passionate
revolt from the inertia of the land had permeated the simplest details
of living. The qualities with which she had triumphed over the abandoned
fields were the virtues of the pioneers who had triumphed over life.
The room was quiet except for the crackling of the flames and the
brushing of an old pear-tree against the window. In the warmth of the
firelight the glimpse of the snow-covered country produced a sensation
of physical comfort, which stole over her like the Sabbath peace for
which her mother had yearned. Lifting her eyes from her darning, she
glanced over the long wainscoted room, where the only changes were the
comforts that Nathan had added. The thick carpet, the soft blankets, the
easy chair in which she was rocking,--if only her mother had lived long
enough to enjoy these things! Then the thought came to her that, if her
parents had been denied material gifts, they had possessed a spiritual
luxury which she herself had never attained. She had inherited, she
realized, the religious habit of mind without the religious heart; for
the instinct of piety had worn too thin to cover the generations.
Conviction! That, at least, they had never surrendered. The glow of
religious certitude had never faded for them into the pallor of moral
necessity. For them, the hard, round words in her great-grandfather's
books were not as hollow as globes. Her gaze travelled slowly over the
rows of discoloured bindings in the bookcases, and she remembered the
rainy days in her childhood when, having exhausted the lighter treasures
of adventure, she had ploughed desperately in the dry and stubborn acres
of theology. After all, was the mental harvest as barren as she had
believed? Firmness of purpose, independence of character, courage of
living, these attributes, if they were not hers by inheritance, she had
gleaned from those heavy furrows of her great-grandfather's sowing.
"Once a Presbyterian, always a Presbyterian," her mother had said when
she was dying.
As the afternoon wore on she grew restless from inaction, and the ruddy
firelight, which had been so pleasant after the cold morning, became
oppressive. Putting her work basket aside, she went out into the hall
and opened the back door, where Ebenezer, with a comforter of crimson
wool tied over his head and ears, was shovelling the snowdrifts away
from the angle of the porch. At a distance other men were digging out
the paths to the barn, and the narrow flagged walk to the dairy was
already hollowed into a gully between high white banks.
Ebenezer, a big, very black negro, with an infinite capacity for rest
and the mournful gaze of an evangelist, wielded his shovel vigorously at
the sound of the opening door, while he hummed in a bass voice which was
like the drone of a tremendous beehive. He was subject to intervals of
dreaminess when he would stop work for ten minutes at a time; but the
only attention Dorinda had bestowed on his slackness was a mild wonder
if he could be thinking.
"Try to get that snow away before dark, Ebenezer," she said, "and tell
Nimrod he must start earlier than usual to meet the evening train."
Turning back into the empty hall, she was surprised to find that she had
begun to miss Nathan. It was the first time since her marriage that he
had spent a whole day away from the farm, and she realized that she
should be glad to have him in the house again. The discovery was so
unexpected that it startled her into gravity, and passing the kitchen,
where she saw Fluvanna poking wood into the open door of the stove, she
walked slowly into her room and stood looking about her as if a fresh
light had fallen across her surroundings. Yes, incredible as it was, she
really missed Nathan! Though she had never loved him, after nine years
of marriage she still liked him with a strong and durable liking. It was
a tribute, she realized, to her husband's character that this negative
attachment should have remained superior to the universal law of
diminishing returns. No woman, she told herself, could have lived for
nine years with so good a man as Nathan and not have grown fond of him.
She recognized his disadvantages as clearly as ever; yet recognizing
them made little difference in her affection. She liked him because, in
spite of his unattractiveness, he possessed a moral integrity which she
respected and a magnanimity which she admired. He had accepted her
austerity of demeanour as philosophically as he accepted a bad season;
and to love but to refrain from the demands of love, was the surest way
he could have taken to win her ungrudging esteem.
When she went out to remind Nimrod that he must start earlier to meet
the six o'clock train, the snow was light and feathery on the surface,
and the air was growing gradually milder. At sunset the sky was
shattered by a spear of sunshine which pierced the wall of clouds in the
west. Between that golden lance and the solitary roof under which she
stood swept the monotonous fields of snow.
"If it clears, there'll be a good moon to-night," she thought.
When the milking hour came she yielded to the persuasions of John Abner
and did not go out to the barn. "It is time you learned that nobody is
indispensable," he said, half sternly, half jestingly. "There are mighty
few jobs that a full-grown man can't do as well as a woman, and loafing
round a cow-barn in wintertime isn't one of them."
"The negroes get so careless," she urged, "if they aren't watched."
He was standing in front of the fire, and while he held out his stout
boots, one by one, to the flames, the snow in the creases of the leather
melted and ran down on the hearth. The smell of country life in
winter--a mingled odour of leather, manure, harness oil, tobacco, and
burning leaves--was diffused by the heat and floated out with a puff of
smoke from the chimney. His features, seen in profile against the
firelight, reminded her of Jason. John Abner was not really like him,
she knew; but there were traits in every man, tricks of expression, of
gesture, of movement, which brought Jason to life again in her thoughts.
Twenty-two years ago she had known him! Twenty-two years filled to
overflowing with dominant interests; and yet she could see his face as
distinctly as she had seen it that first morning in the russet glow of
the broomsedge. Dust now, she told herself, nothing more. Her memories
of him were no better than deserted wasps' nests; but these dry and
brittle ruins still clung there amid the cobwebs, in some obscure corner
of her mind, and she could not brush them away. Neither regret nor
sentiment had preserved them, and yet they had outlasted both sentiment
and regret.
With a start of exasperation, she tore her mind from the past and
glanced down at John Abner's clubfoot. "Are those boots comfortable?"
she asked gently.
"Oh, they do as well as any," he replied irritably. Though any reference
to his deformity annoyed him, there were times when she felt obliged to
allude to it as a factor in his career. For good or ill, that clubfoot,
like the mark of Jason in her life, had been his destiny. With his
unusual gifts and without the sensitive shrinking from crowds which his
lameness had developed into a disease, he might have achieved success in
any profession that he had chosen. "You stay by the fire," he added,
"while I take a turn at the bossing."
She nodded. "Very well, I'll be in the dairy when you are ready for me."
"I'll manage the whole business if you'll let me."
"But I shan't let you." She was smiling as she answered, and she
perceived from his face that he was big enough to respect her for her
inflexible purpose. While authority was still hers she would cling to it
as stubbornly as she had toiled to attain it.
He went out laughing, and she dropped back in her chair to wait until
the hour came for her work in the dairy. John Abner was right, of
course. One of the exasperating things about men, she reflected, was
that they were so often right. It was perfectly true that she could not
stay young for ever, and at forty-two, after twenty years of arduous
toil, she ought to think of the future and take the beginning of the
hill more gradually. Though she was as strong, as vital, as young, in
her arteries at least, as she had ever been, she could not, she
realized, defend herself from the inevitable wearing down of the years.
Her eyes wandered to the mirror in the bureau which had belonged to her
mother, and it seemed to her that, sitting there in the ruddy firelight,
the magic of youth enveloped her again with a springtime freshness. Her
eyes looked so young in the dimness that they bathed her greying hair,
her weatherbeaten skin, and her tall, strong figure, which was becoming
a little dry, a trifle inelastic, in the celestial blueness of a May
morning.
"I wonder if it is because I've missed everything I really wanted that I
cannot grow old?" she asked herself with a start.
It was seven o'clock when she returned from the dairy, and John Abner
was already in the kitchen demanding his supper.
"The train is certain to be hours late," he said. "There's no use
waiting any longer for Father."
"Yes, we might as well have supper. I can cook something for him when he
comes."
"I saw Mr. Garlick going over a few minutes ago. His daughter, Molly,
went down yesterday with young Mrs. Ellgood to a concert. Mrs. Ellgood
has always been crazy about music. Did you ever hear her play on the
violin?"
"No, I never went anywhere even before I was married. I'm glad she's
coming up with your father. He always liked her in spite of the fact
that she despises the country."
When supper was over, and John Abner had eaten with an amazing appetite,
they went back into her bedroom and sat down to wait before the fire.
Though she had never been what Nathan called "an easy talker," she could
always find something to say to her stepson; and they talked now, not
only of the farm, the spring planting, the new tractor-plough they had
ordered, but of books and distant countries and the absurd illustrations
in the Lives of the Missionaries, which John Abner was reading for the
fourth time.
"Alfalfa has been the making of Five Oaks," Dorinda said. "It's a shame
Pa never knew of it."
"I wonder if Doctor Greylock ever comes back to his farm. If he does, he
must be sorry he lost it."
"Well, he ruined the place, he and his father before him. It was no
better than waste land when we bought it."
John Abner bent over to caress the head of the pointer. "I can't blame
anybody for wanting to quit," he said. "There's a lot to be said for
those missionary chaps. They were the real adventurers, I sometimes
think."
He rose from his chair and shook himself. "Why, it's almost ten o'clock.
There's no use staying up any longer. If we've got to wake before five,
it is time we were both asleep."
"I believe I hear the buggy now." Dorinda bent her ear listening. "Isn't
that a noise on the bridge? Or is it only another branch cracking?"
"You can't hear wheels in this snow. But I'll go out and take a look
round. There's a fine moon coming up."
When he had unbarred the front door, she slipped into her raccoon coat
and overshoes, and flung her knitted shawl over her head. After a minute
or two, she saw John Abner's figure moving among the shrouded trees to
the gate, and descending the steps as carefully as she could, she
followed slowly in the direction he had taken. By the time she was
midway down the walk, he had disappeared up the frozen road. Except for
the lighted house at her back she might have been alone in a stainless
world before the creation of life. A cold white moon was shedding a
silver lustre over the landscape, which appeared as transparent as glass
against the impenetrable horizon. Even the house, when she glanced round
at it, might have been only a shadow, so unreal, so visionary, it looked
in the unearthly light of the snow. While she lingered there it seemed
to her that the movement of the air, the earth, and the stars, was
suspended. Substance and shadow melted into each other and into the
vastness of space. Not a track blurred the ground, not a cloud trembled
in the sky, not a murmur of life broke the stillness.
Presently, as she drew nearer the gate, a moving shape flitted in from
the trees by the road, and John Abner called to her that the buggy was
in sight. "I'll wait and bed down the mare," he said. "Nimrod will be
pretty hungry, I reckon, and he won't look after her properly."
"Well, I'll go right in and fix supper for both of them."
Without waiting for the vehicle, she hurried into the house and
replenished the fire in the stove. Thin, while she broke the eggs and
put on water to boil for coffee, she told herself that Nathan's coffee
habit was as incurable as a taste for whiskey. The wood had caught and
the fire was burning well when John Abner appeared suddenly in the
doorway. He looked sleepy and a trifle disturbed.
"That wasn't Father after all," he said. "They told Nimrod there wasn't
any use waiting longer. He was shaking with cold, so I sent him to bed.
As soon as I've made the mare comfortable, I'll come and tell you all
about it."
"I was just scrambling some eggs. I wish you'd eat them. I hate to waste
things."
"All right. I'll be back in a jiffy."
He ran out as quickly as his lameness would permit, and she arranged the
supper on the table. After all, if Nathan wasn't coming home to-night,
John Abner might as well eat the eggs she had scrambled. There was no
sense in wasting good food.
After attending to the mare the boy came in and began walking up and
down the floor of the kitchen. He did not sit down at the table, though
Dorinda was bringing the steaming skillet from the stove. "It's a
nuisance all the wires are down," he said presently.
"Yes, but for that we might telephone."
"The telegraph wires have fallen too. Nimrod said they didn't know much
more at the store than we do."
"Well, you'd better sit down and eat this while it's hot. It doesn't do
any good to worry about things."
"One of the coloured men, Elisha Moody, told Nimrod he would be coming
home in an hour, and he would stop and tell us the news. Mr. Garlick is
going to wait at the station until his daughter comes."
"The news?" she asked vaguely. For the first time the idea occurred to
her that John Abner was holding back what he had heard. "Doesn't Nimrod
know when the train is expected?"
"Nobody knows. The wires are broken, but the train from Washington went
down and came up again with news of a wreck down the road. I don't know
whether it is Father's train or another, Nimrod was all mixed up about
it. He couldn't tell me anything except that something had happened. The
thing that impressed Nimrod most was that all the freight men carried
axes. He kept repeating that over and over."
"Axes?" Dorinda's mind had stopped working. She stood there in the
middle of the kitchen floor, with the coffee-pot in her hand, and
repeated the word as if it were strange to her. Behind her the fire
crackled, and the pots of rose-geraniums she had brought away from the
window-sill stood in an orderly row on the brick hearth.
"I suppose they had to cut the coaches away from the track," replied
John Abner indefinitely. "Elisha will tell us more when he stops by.
He's got more sense than Nimrod, who was scared out of his wits."
"I would have given him some supper. Why didn't he come in?"
"He said his wife was waiting for him and he wanted to get to his
cabin."
Dorinda poured out the coffee and carried the pot back to the stove.
"I'm afraid your father will catch his death of cold," she said
anxiously, "and with that tooth out!"
She was fortified by a serene confidence in Nathan's ability to take
care of himself. The only uneasiness she felt was on account of the
abscess. With all his good judgment, when it came to toothache he was no
braver than a child.
John Abner seemed glad to get the hot coffee. "You might as well keep
some for Elisha," he suggested. "It's almost time he was coming and I
know he'll be thankful for something hot."
Though he ate and drank as if he were hungry, there was a worried look
in his face, and he kept turning his head in the direction of the road.
"I don't suppose it's anything really serious," Dorinda remarked
reassuringly. "If it had been, we should certainly have heard it
sooner."
Dropping into a chair beside him, she raised a cup of coffee and drank
it slowly in sips. Presently, notwithstanding her effort to minimize the
cause for alarm, she became aware that anxiety was stealing over her as
if it emanated from her surroundings. She felt it first in the creeping
sensation which ran like spiders over her flesh; then in an almost
imperceptible twitching of her muscles; and at last in a delicate
vibration of her nerves, as if a message were passing over electric
wires in her body. Then, suddenly, the fear mounted to her brain, and
she found herself listening like John Abner for the crunching of wheels
in the snow.
"Do you hear anybody, John Abner?"
"A branch snapped, that was all. I'll make up the fire in your chamber.
It's more comfortable in there."
After he had gone into the bedroom, she fed the two dogs and the cat
before she washed the dishes and placed the coffee where it would keep
hot for Elisha. As she was leaving the kitchen she noticed the
rose-geraniums and moved the pots farther away from the heat. "If we are
going to keep up the fire, it will be too warm for them there," she
thought.
III
The log fire was blazing in her bedroom, and John Abner stood before the
window which looked on the gate and the road.
"The panes are so frosted you can't see your hand before you," he said,
as she entered.
Standing there beside him, she gazed through the leafless boughs of the
lilac bushes. "No, even the moonlight doesn't help you," she answered.
"It must be bitterly cold in the road. I hope the mare got warm again."
"Yes, I covered her up. Nimrod had some whiskey and he was going to make
a hot toddy." John Abner shivered in the icy draught that crept in
through the loose window sashes. "Hadn't you better lie down?" he asked,
turning back to the fire. "It won't be long now."
She shook her head. "That coffee will keep me awake. Lie down on the
couch, and I'll listen for Elisha. I drew up the shades, so he will know
we haven't gone to bed."
For a few minutes he resisted her, his eyes blinking in the firelight
while he struggled to bite back a yawn. Then he gave up and flung
himself down on the big soft couch. "It would take something stronger
than coffee to keep me awake to-night," he said. "If I drop off, will
you wake me?"
"If there is any news. But you will hear Elisha when he comes." He
laughed drowsily. "I believe I could sleep straight through Judgment
Day."
Taking the quilt from the bed, she covered him carefully from head to
foot. As she tucked him in, she remembered her wedding night when she
had found Nathan asleep on the couch in front of the fire. "If he hadn't
been like that, I couldn't have stood him," she thought.
Sinking into the easiest chair by the flames, she picked up the sock she
had partly darned in the afternoon. Then, observing that the lamp was
shining in John Abner's face, she lowered the wick and folding the sock,
replaced it in her work basket. The chair creaked gently as she rocked,
and fearing the noise might disturb him, she sat motionless, with her
eyes on the hickory logs and her foot touching the neck of the pointer.
While she sat there she recalled, with one of the irresponsible flashes
of memory which revived only when she was inactive, the afternoon when
she had waited in the dripping woods to see Jason drive home with
Geneva. She was a girl then; now she was a woman and middle-aged; yet
there was an intolerable quality in all suspense which made it alike.
Compared to those moments, this waiting was as the dead to the living
agony. "Suppose I had married Jason and he was on that train, could I
sit here like this?" she asked herself. "Suppose I had married Jason
instead of Nathan, would marriage have been different?"
Then, because the question was useless and she had no room for useless
things in her practical mind, she put it sternly away from her, and
rising, slipped into her coat and went out of the house. Closing the
door softly, she passed out on the porch and down the frozen steps to
the lawn. The snow was slippery in thin places, and she knew that Elisha
would try to keep to the road where the deep drifts were less dangerous.
Advancing cautiously, she moved in the direction of the gate, but she
had gone only a few steps when she saw Elisha's old spring wagon rolling
over the bridge. Quickening her steps dangerously, she ran over the
slippery ground.
"I've kept some hot coffee for you, Uncle Elisha. Can't you come into
the kitchen and get something to eat?"
"Naw'm, I reckon I'd better be gittin' erlong home. My ole grey mare,
she's had jes' about enuff er dis yeah wedder, en she's kinder hankerin'
fur de stable."
"We can keep her here. There's plenty of room in the stable, and you can
spend the night with Ebenezer."
"Thanky, Miss Dorindy, bofe un us sutney would be glad uv er spell er
res'. My son Jasper, he's on dat ar train dat's done been stalled down
de track, an' I'se gwine out agin about'n sunup."
"Have they heard anything yet?" asked Dorinda, while the wagon crawled
over the snags of roots in the direction of the stable.
Elisha shook his muffled head. "Dey don' know nuttin', Miss Dorindy,
dat's de Gospel trufe, dey don' know nuttin' 'tall. Dar's a train done
come down Pom de Norf, en hit's gwine on wid whatevah dey could git
abo'd hit. Hi! Dey's got axes erlong, en I 'low dar ain' nary a one un
um dat kin handle an axe like my Jasper."
"I'm afraid it's a bad wreck," Dorinda said uneasily.
"Yas'm, dar's a wreck somewhar, sho 'nuff, but dey don' know nuttin'
out dar at de station. All de wires is down, ev'y las' one un um, en dar
ain' nobody done come erlong back dat went down de road. Ef'n you'll
lemme res' de night heah, me en de mare'll go out agin befo' sunup."
"There's all the room in the world, Uncle Elisha. Wait, and I'll give
you a lantern to take to the stable." She went indoors and returned in a
few minutes with a light swinging from her hand. "As soon as you've
attended to your mare, come in and I'll have something for you to eat."
As she passed her bedroom on the way to the kitchen she saw that John
Abner was still sleeping, and she did not stop to arouse him. Why should
she disturb his slumber when there was nothing definite that she could
tell him? Instead, she hastened about her preparations for Elisha's
supper, and by the time the old negro came in from bedding the mare, the
bacon and eggs were on the table. Withdrawing to a safe distance from
the stove, he thawed his frostbitten hands and feet, while his grizzled
head emerged like some gigantic caterpillar from the chrysalis of shawls
he had wound about him.
"Were there many people at the station?" she inquired presently.
"Naw'm, hit was too fur fur mos' folks. Marse John Garlick, he wuz
spendin' de night in de sto', en so was Marse Jim Ellgood. Young Marse
Bob en his wife wuz bofe un um on de train."
"Well, make a good supper. Then you can go up to Ebenezer's. I saw smoke
coming out of his chimney, so it will be warm there."
Because she knew that he would enjoy his supper more if he were
permitted to eat it alone, she went back to the fire in her bedroom
where John Abner was still sleeping. She watched there in the silence
until she heard Elisha exclaim, "Good night, Miss Dorindy!" and go out,
shutting the back door behind him. Then she locked up the house, and
after lowering the wick of the hall lamp, touched John Abner on the
shoulder.
"You'd better go to bed. In a little while you will have to be up
again."
He opened his eyes and sat up, blinking at the firelight. "I could have
slept on into next week."
"Well, don't wake up. Go straight upstairs."
"Did Elisha ever come?"
"Yes, he put his mare in the stable and went up to spend the night with
Ebenezer."
"What did he tell you?"
"Only that they haven't found out anything definite at the station. You
know how cut off everything is when the wires are down. Mr. Garlick and
James Ellgood are both waiting out there all night."
"Then it was Father's train. It must have been a bad wreck."
"I'm afraid so. This suspense is so baffling. Anything in the world
might happen, and we shouldn't know of it until the next day."
Her face was pale and drawn, and while she spoke, she shivered, not from
cold but from anxiety. She saw John Abner glance quickly toward the
front window and she knew that he, like herself, was feeling all the
terror of primitive isolation. How did people stand it when they were
actually cut off by the desert or the frozen North from communication
with their kind?
"You know now what it must have been like in the old days before we had
the telegraph and the telephone," she said. "Pedlar's Mill was scarcely
more than a stopping place in the wilderness, and my mother would be
shut in for days without a sign from the outer world."
"I never thought of it before," said John Abner, "but it must have been
pretty rough on her. The roads were no better than frozen bogs, so she
couldn't get anywhere if she wanted to."
"That was why she got her mania for work. The winter loneliness; she
said, was more than she could endure without losing her mind. She had to
move about to make company for herself. There were weeks at a time, she
told me once, when the roads were so bad that nobody went by, not even
Mr. Garlick, or an occasional negro. During the war the trains stopped
running on this branch road, and afterwards there were only two trains
passing a day."
"I suppose it was always better on the other side of the railroad."
"They're nearer the highway, of course, though that was bad enough when
Ma was first married. Over here the roads were never mended unless a few
of the farmers agreed to give so much labour, either of slaves or free
negroes. Then, after the contract was made, something invariably got in
the way and it fell through. Somebody died or fell ill or lost all his
crops. You know how indisposed tenant farmers are to doing their share
of work."
"And there wasn't even a store at Pedlar's Mill until Father started
one?"
"Nothing but the mill. That was there as far back as anybody could
remember, and there was always a Pedlar for a miller. The farmers from
this side took corn there to be ground, and sometimes they would trade
it for sugar or molasses. But the only store was far up at the
Courthouse. People bought their winter supplies when they went to town
to sell tobacco. All the tobacco money went for coffee and sugar and
clothes. That was why Pa raised a crop every year to the end of his
life."
John Abner rose and stretched himself. "Well, I'm precious glad I live
in the days of the telephone and the telegraph, with the hope of owning
an automobile when they get cheaper." Going over to the window, he held
his hand over his eyes and peered out. "You can't see a thing but snow.
We might as well be dead and buried under it. Shall I take the butter
over in the morning?"
"No, I'd like to go myself. You'd better stay and look after the
milking." How inexorable were the trivial necessities of the farm!
Anxieties might come and go, but the milking would not wait upon life or
death. Not until John Abner had gone upstairs did she perceive that she
had been talking, as her mother would have said, "to make company for
herself." "I've almost lost my taste for books," she thought, "and I
used to be such a hungry reader."
After putting a fresh log on the fire, she flung herself on the bed,
without undressing, and lay perfectly still while a nervous tremor, like
the suspension of a drawn breath, crept over her. Toward daybreak, when
the crashing of a dead branch on one of the locust trees sounded as if
it had fallen on the roof, she realized that she was straining every
sense for the noise of an approaching vehicle in the road. Then, rising
hurriedly, she threw open the window and leaned out into the night.
Nothing there. Only the lacquered darkness and the moon turning to a
faint yellow-green over the fields of snow!
At four o'clock she went into the kitchen and began preparations for
breakfast. When the coffee was ground, the water poured over it in the
coffee-pot, and the butterbread mixed and put into the baking dish, she
returned to her room and finished her dressing. By the time John Abner
came down to go out to the cow-barn, she was waiting with her hat on and
a pile of sheepskin rugs at her feet.
"I suppose we might as well send the butter out. Fluvanna has it ready,"
she said, watching him while he lighted his lantern from the lamp on the
breakfast table. "If the trains have begun running again, they will
expect it in Washington."
"It won't hurt anyway to take it along. I'll tell Nimrod to hitch up."
They both spoke as if the wreck had been merely a temporary
inconvenience which was over. Vaguely, there swam through Dorinda's mind
the image of her mother cooking breakfast in her best dress before she
went to the Courthouse. The old woman had worn the same expression of
desperate hopefulness that Dorinda felt now spreading like a mask of
beeswax over her own features. Already, though it was still dark, the
life of the farm was stirring. As John Abner went out, she saw the stars
of lanterns swinging away into the night, and when he returned to
breakfast, Fluvanna was in the kitchen busily frying bacon and eggs.
Before they had finished the meal, Nimrod appeared to say that the wagon
was waiting, and rising hastily Dorinda slipped on her raccoon-skin
coat.
"We'd better start," she said. "Give Uncle Elisha his breakfast, and
tell him we will bring Jasper back with us. Keep the kettle on, so you
can make coffee for Mr. Nathan as soon as he gets here."
Hurrying out, she climbed into the heavy wagon, and they started
carefully down the slippery grade to the road. As they turned out of the
gate, the wheels slid over the embedded rocks to the frozen ruts in the
snow. Only a circle of road immediately in front of them was visible,
and while the wagon rolled on, this spot of ground appeared to travel
with them, never changing and never lingering in its passage. Into this
illuminated circle tiny tracks of birds drifted and vanished like magic
signs.
Presently, as they drew nearer Pedlar's Mill, a glimmer, so faint that
it was scarcely more than a ripple on the surface of black waters,
quivered in the darkness around them. With this ripple, a formless
transparency floated up in the east, as a luminous mist swims up before
an approaching candle. Out of this brightness, the landscape dawned in
fragments, like dissolving views of the Arctic Circle. The sky was
muffled overhead, but just as they reached the station a pale glow
suffused the clouds beyond the ruined mill on the horizon.
"If the train was on time, it must have gone by an hour ago," Dorinda
said, but she knew that there was no chance of its having gone by.
"Hit's gwinter thaw, sho' nuff, befo' sundown," Nimrod rejoined,
speaking for the first time since they started.
"Yes, it's getting milder."
At that hour, in the bitter dawn, the station looked lonelier and more
forsaken than ever. Hemmed in by the level sea of ice, the old warehouse
and platform were flung there like dead driftwood. Even the red streak
in the sky made the winter desolation appear more desolate.
At first she could distinguish no moving figures; but when they came
nearer, she saw a small group of men gathered round an object which she
had mistaken in the distance for one of the deserted freight cars.
Now she saw that this object was a train of a single coach, with an
engine attached, and that the men were moving dark masses from the car
to crude stretchers laid out on the snow.
"The trains are running again," Dorinda said hoarsely. "They must have
got the track cleared."
"I hope dey's gwinter teck dis yeah budder," Nimrod returned. "Git up
heah, hosses! We ain' got no mo' time to poke."
A chill passed down Dorinda's spine; but she was unaware of the cause
that produced it, and her mind was vacant of thought. Then, while the
wagon jolted up the slope, some empty words darted into her
consciousness. "Something has happened. I feel that something has
happened."
"Do you see anybody that you know, Nimrod?"
"Naw'm, I cyarn see nobody." Then he added excitedly, "But dar's
somebody a-comin'. Ain' he ole Marse Jim Ellgood?"
The horses stopped by the fence and began nuzzling the snow,
while Nimrod dropped the reins and jumped down to lift out the
butter. Standing up in the wagon, Dorinda beat her chilled hands
together. Her limbs felt stiff with cold, and for a moment they
refused to obey her will. Then recovering control of herself,
she stepped down from the wagon and followed Nimrod in the
direction of the store. Immediately, she was aware of a bustle about the
track, and she thought, "How much human beings are like turkeys!" The
group of men had separated as she approached, and two figures came
forward to meet her across the snow. One was a stranger; the other,
though it took her an instant to recognize him, was Bob Ellgood. "Why,
he looks like an old man," she said to herself. "He looks as old as his
father." The ruddy, masterful features were scorched and smoke-stained,
and the curling fair hair was burned to the colour of singed broomsedge.
Even his eyes looked burned, and one of his hands was rolled in a
bandage.
She stopped abruptly and stood motionless. Though she was without
definite fear, an obscure dread was beating against the wall of her
consciousness. "Something has happened. Something has happened.
Something has happened." Her mind seemed to have no relation to herself,
to her feelings, to her beliefs, to her affections. It was only an empty
shed; and the darkness of this shed was filled suddenly with the sound
of swallows fluttering.
When Bob Ellgood reached her, he held out his unbandaged hand. "Father
and I were just going over to your place, Mrs. Pedlar," he said. "We
wanted to be the first to see you. We wanted you to hear of Nathan from
us----"
"Then he is dead," she said quietly. It had never seemed possible to her
that Nathan could die. He had not mattered enough for that. But now he
was dead.
"He died a hero," a stranger, whom she had never seen before, said
earnestly.
"Yes, he died a hero," Bob Ellgood snatched the words away from the
other. "That is what we wish you to know and to feel as long as you
live. He gave his life for others. He had got free, without a scratch,
and he went back into the wreck. The train had gone over the embankment.
It was burning and women were screaming. He went down because he was
strong. He went down and he never came back."
"God! Those shrieks!" exclaimed the strange man. "I'll hear them all my
life. As long as I live, I'll never stop hearing them."
"He got free?" she repeated stupidly.
"But he went back. He got an axe from somebody, and he went back because
he was strong. He was cutting the car away to get a woman out. He did
get her out----" He broke off and added hastily, "When we found him, he
was quite dead. . . ."
Dorinda stared at him vacantly, seeing nothing but his blackened
features and the scorched place on his head. "Will they bring him to the
farm?" she asked.
"If you wish it." Bob's voice was shaken. "But we feel that we should
like him to rest in the churchyard."
Silently, scarcely knowing what he asked, she assented. So Nathan had
forced people to take him seriously, even though he had to die before
they would do it. Was it worth it? she wondered. Would it have pleased
him if he had known?
"May I go to the church? Have they taken him there?"
She saw that Bob hesitated before he answered. "I hope you won't see
him," he replied after a minute. "We believe he was killed instantly,
but----" He broke off and then went on desperately, "If you will go home
and leave the arrangements to us, we promise you that everything shall
be as he would have wished. We should like him to have the funeral of a
hero."
"The funeral of a hero!" she echoed. She did not know, she could not
imagine what kind of funeral that would be; but she felt intuitively
that Nathan would have liked it, and that she had no right to deny him
the funeral that he would have liked.
Without replying in words, she bent her head and turned back to the
wagon, where a completely demoralized Nimrod awaited her. A stunned
sensation held her emotions imprisoned, and a few minutes later, as she
drove homeward, it occurred to her that she was proving unequal again to
one of the supreme occasions of her life. Emotionally, would she always
prove unequal to the demands of life? She was not feeling what she knew
that she ought to feel; she was not feeling what she knew that they
expected of her. Her stern judgment told her that she was a hypocrite;
but it was hypocrisy against which she was inert and helpless. Though
she was overwhelmed by the general tragedy, she was without a keen sense
of widowhood. Something within her soul, that thin clear flame which was
herself, remained unshaken by her loss, as it had remained unshaken by
every tragedy but one in her life. She was leaving Nathan, with regret
but not with grief, to his belated popularity. How could she begrudge
him in death the thing that he had wanted most when he was alive? Yes,
beholding him as she did with compassion but without pretense, she knew
that he would have enjoyed the funeral of a hero.
IV
Waking in the blackness before dawn, she heard John Abner come
downstairs and stop in the hall to light his lantern.
"I ought to go out to the milking," she thought, and then more slowly,
"I can't believe that Nathan is dead."
Would the idea ever grow familiar to her? Could she ever live with the
fact, acknowledged and yet unregarded, as she had lived with the fact of
her marriage? "There never was a better man in the world," she said
aloud. Here on the farm she found herself missing him with the first
vague sense of loss. The insensibility which had protected her at the
station disappeared when her mind dwelt on his good qualities,--his
kindness, his charity, his broad tolerance of her prejudices. She knew
that she should miss him more and more in all the details of the farm,
and that she should begin to sorrow for him as soon as she had time to
realize that she had lost him for ever. Yesterday was a void in her
mind. When she thought of the long day after her return from the
station, she could remember only the incredible tenderness of John
Abner, and the visit in the afternoon from James Ellgood, who had told
her that the news of the wreck had just travelled as far as the farms
beyond Whippernock River, and that the absent minister was returning at
midnight.
On this, the second day after Nathan's death, the primitive ceremonies
of the funeral began. The earliest and one of the most depressing signs
of mourning was the loud demoralization of the negroes, who rose to the
funeral as fish to bait, and became immediately incapable of any work
except lamenting the dead. As long as there was hope left in tragedy,
they were able to brace themselves to Herculean exertions; but
superstition enslaved them as soon as death entered the house. The cows,
of course, had to be milked; but with the exception of the milking and
the necessary feeding of the stock, the place was like an abandoned farm
until the burial was over. Though Nathan's charred body remained at
Pedlar's Mill, the pall of mourning extended to Old Farm. John Abner had
even suggested sending a telegram to the hotel and the dairy in
Washington and letting the milk spoil; but the thought of all the good
cream that would be thrown away was too much for Dorinda's economical
instincts, and she had checked the impulse with the reminder that Nathan
had hated a waste. Yes, he had hated a waste, it is true, but he had
also loved a funeral. She remembered her mother's death, and the
completeness, the perfection, of his arrangements.
"Am I too hard?" Dorinda asked herself. "Ought I not to see that
everything gets so upset? After all, as Fluvanna says, a person does not
die but once." The small ironic demon of her sagacity concluded, in
spite of her will: "It is a good thing, or there wouldn't be any room
left for life."
Breakfast was no sooner over than she was engulfed in a continuous
deluge of sympathy. She was up in the attic with Fluvanna, going over
the black things which had been left from the mourning of her parents,
when the coloured woman glanced out of the dormer-window and gasped
breathlessly. "Thar they are, Miss Dorinda. You hurry up and get into
that black bombazine befo' they catch you out of mournin'."
She held up a dingy dress which had once belonged to Mrs. Oakley, and
Dorinda slipped into it with the feeling that she was preparing for her
own coffin. As she was about to go down to meet her callers, Fluvanna
unfolded and shook out before her the crape veil which had been worn by
two generations of widows. Her grandmother had bought it in more
affluent circumstances, and after her death, for she had been one of the
perpetual widows of the South, it had lain packed away in camphor until
Mrs. Oakley was ready for it. Now it was Dorinda's turn, and a shiver
went through her heart as she inhaled the rusty smell of bereavement.
"You'll have to get a new veil after the burial," Fluvanna observed,
"but I reckon you can make out with this crape until that is over. It
has turned real brown, but there won't many people notice it in church."
Putting the proffered veil aside, Dorinda hastened downstairs, after
reminding Fluvanna that she must make coffee in case the visitors
expected something to eat.
"If only they would leave the dignity and take away the sordidness of
death," she thought.
At the foot of the staircase, Miss Seena Snead was waiting for her with
a black serge dress that she had borrowed from one of the neighbours.
"What in the world have you got on, Dorinda?" she asked, while the tears
brimmed over her kind old eyes. "I declare it looks as if it was made
befo' the Flood. I no sooner heard of po' Nathan's death than I began to
study about where I could find a good black dress for you to wear to the
funeral. I wasn't a bit surprised that Nathan turned out to be such a
hero. I always knew there was a lot mo' in him than some folks
suspected. Then, while I was in the midst of trying to recollect who had
died last year, young Mrs. John Garlick drove into our yard with this
dress and a widow's bonnet in her arms. She told me she's stoutened so
she couldn't make the dress meet on her, and she'd be obliged if you'd
do her the favour to wear it. The bonnet she sent along because it's a
widow's bonnet anyway, and she can't wear it herself until she loses
John. That makes her sort of superstitious about keepin' it put away as
if she were saving it for a purpose. John bought it for her in New York
when she lost her mother. Wasn't that like a man all over again, to go
and buy his wife a bonnet with a widow's ruche when her mother died?"
"I'm much obliged to her," Dorinda replied stiffly, taking the bonnet
out of the bandbox.
"It'll be real becomin' to you," Miss Seena exclaimed consolingly.
Though her tears were still streaming for Nathan, her imagination had
already envisaged Dorinda as a widow in weeds. "It makes you look mo'
strikin' than colours. There ain't nothin' you can wear so conspicuous
as crape, my po' Ma used to say."
Dorinda put on the dress and stood straight and still in the middle of
her bedroom floor while the dressmaker let down the hem and took a pleat
in the belt. "I've never seen anybody keep her figger so well as you've
done," remarked Miss Seena. "It's stayin' out of doors an' movin' about
so much, I reckon. My Ma used to say that when you get on in life, you
have to choose between keepin' yo' face or yo' figger; but it looks as
if you had managed to preserve both of 'em mighty well. You get sort of
chapped and weatherbeaten in the winter time, an' the lines show mo'
than they ought to, but that high colour keeps 'em from bein' too
marked. You're forty now, ain't you, Dorinda?"
"Forty-two. It's hard sometimes for me to believe it."
"Well, you're the hard kind that don't wear away soon. Look at Geneva
Ellgood, poor thing. She broke almost as quick as she grew."
Dorinda sighed. "She needed love too much ever to find it," and she
thought, "The surest way of winning love is to look as if you didn't
need it."
"Everybody knew that it was Jim Ellgood that made Jason marry her, and
folks about here were mighty mad with him for throwing you over. It was
that mo' than drink that ruined his practice because people didn't want
a man to doctor them who hadn't behaved honourable. He began to go
downhill right after that, and he and Geneva lived like cat and dog
befo' she drowned herself. Jason is about as bad off now as she was,
tho' men don't ever seem to get the craze that they're goin' to have a
baby. But he's got a screw loose, or he wouldn't live way back yonder in
the woods, with nobody but an old coloured woman to look after him." She
was kneeling on the floor pinning up Dorinda's skirt, with the help of
the red pincushion, shaped like a tomato, which she wore fastened to the
bosom of her dress. "It was fortunate for you that Geneva got him," she
concluded, "and that you waited and took Nathan instead. You must find a
heap of comfort in feeling that you're the widow of a hero."
The widow of a hero! Already Nathan's spirit, disencumbered of the gross
impediment of the flesh, was an influence to be reckoned with. Alive, he
had been negligible, but once safely dead, he had acquired a tremendous
advantage.
"I believe I'll drop if I have to stand a minute longer," Dorinda said
in a fainting voice.
Miss Seena was immediately solicitous. "Poor child, I reckon the shock
must have unnerved you. You lie right down, and I'll have this dress
ready befo' the minister gets here."
At last the dressmaker stopped talking and settled down to her work, and
in the afternoon, when the Ellgoods came with the minister to tell
Dorinda of the arrangements for the funeral, she received them in the
black serge dress with a bit of crape at her throat. A fire was burning
in the parlour beneath the two black basalt urns on the mantelpiece and
the speckled engraving on the wall above. While she was still shaking
hands with the Ellgoods, a stream of people, led by Minnie May and Bud,
poured into the hall. Minnie May had brought her six children with her,
and the smaller ones immediately began to play with their dolls behind
the rosewood sofa in the corner, while the eldest boy fingered the books
which ran halfway up the walls on three sides of the room.
"Don't you think I ought to make them stop?" Minnie May asked presently.
"They'd be more at home, anyway, in the kitchen where Fluvanna is making
gingerbread for them."
"Tell Fluvanna not to forget to bring in some blackberry wine and cake,"
Dorinda whispered in reply.
Before she had spoken to her first visitors, the parlour was crowded;
and John Abner was obliged to bring chairs from the spare room. "To
think of my having to wear a bonnet with a widow's ruche!" Dorinda found
herself thinking, while she was condoled with in husky accents by the
old minister. "If they'd go away and let me have time to think, I might
feel; but I can't feel anything as long as they're all talking to me."
Though most of the faces were familiar to her, and some of them she had
passed in the road ever since her childhood, there were several persons
whom she did not seem to remember. These, she discovered presently, were
strangers who had been on the wrecked train with Nathan. Two of them he
had rescued from the burning cars at the cost of his life.
Bad as the roads were, only the tenant farmers who lived beyond
Whippernock River had been prevented from coming. The bridge had been
damaged by the storm, and the thawing ice had made the shallow stream
unfordable. Old Mr. Kettledrum, who had given up his practice and become
"the mail rider" for the new rural delivery had been almost swept away
when he had tried to cross at the ford. Even Willow Creek was so high
that the log bridge had been torn to pieces by the flood. Yet neither
flood nor snow had held the neighbouring farmers at home. White and
black, rich and poor, they had turned out to visit the widow of a hero
in her affliction. Even Mr. Kettledrum had sent word that, undaunted by
his narrow escape from drowning, he had driven round the circuit in
order to bring Dorinda the morning papers.
"To think that all this should be about Nathan," Dorinda said to
herself, while she sat there with the newspaper James Ellgood had given
her in her lap.
"HERO ON WRECKED TRAIN GIVES HIS LIFE FOR OTHERS
DESCENDANT OF FIRST MILLER OF PEDLAR'S MILL DIES
AFTER SAVING WOMEN AND CHILDREN.
MONUMENT TO BE ERECTED IN CHURCHYARD AT PEDLAR'S
MILL."
After this there was a list of contributions for the monument,
beginning with one thousand dollars, which had been subscribed by
an anonymous stranger from the North.
Yes, dreadful as it was, she couldn't get over the feeling that there
was something unreal and theatrical in the event. She might have been on
the stage at a school festival, listening to all these people declaiming
selections from Shakespeare. Nathan's heroism sounded to her as
unnatural as the way things happened in Shakespeare. She felt ashamed of
herself. Had she failed Nathan in his death because she could not
recognize him in what she thought of vaguely as his heroic part? Well,
ashamed or not, she simply could not take it in. If you could once take
it in, she said to herself stupidly, the whole of life would be
different; yet, for the moment, she was too stunned, too confused, to
credit the incredible. The tragedy appeared too magnificent to be true.
The minister was an old man. He had known Dorinda's mother when they
were both young; he had known Nathan when he was a child; and he wheezed
now with distress when he talked of him. His face was as grey and
inflexible as a rock, Dorinda thought, though his voice reminded her of
a purling brook. Over his bulging forehead his limp white hair hung in
loose strands which curled at the ends. She had not seen him for years
outside the pulpit, and it embarrassed her that he should stand on a
level with her and wipe his eyes on the shreds of a silk handkerchief.
While he rambled on, she looked beyond him and saw all those persons,
some of whom were unknown to her, moving about the parlour, which was as
sacred to her as a tombstone. They were whispering, too, among
themselves, and she knew that they were speaking of Nathan in the
sanctimonious tone which they had consecrated to missionaries who had
died at their posts or to distinguished generals of the Confederacy. She
observed John Abner go out to help put up the horses, and glancing out
of the window, she saw Fluvanna coming from the henhouse with a bunch
of fowls in her hands. With her usual foresight, the girl, who had kept
her head better than the other negroes, was preparing supper for the
multitude.
The old minister had finished once, but he was beginning again in a
florid oratorical style. How long would he go on, she wondered, and
would it be like this at the funeral? There was much to be said, she
conceded, for the Episcopal service which circumscribed the rhetoric of
clergymen. When at last he sat down, wiping his glasses, in the
cushioned rocking-chair close to the fire, Bob Ellgood stood up and
explained the funeral arrangements as if he wished her to understand
that they were to be worthy of Nathan. This was Wednesday, and the
public funeral, the funeral of a hero, would be held at three o'clock on
Friday afternoon. Then he handed her a list of the pallbearers, many of
them merely "honorary," Dorinda perceived, and among them there were
several names that she did not know.
"They were on the wrecked train," Bob replied to her question, "and wish
to pay this last mark of respect." These were the men, he told her, who
had started the list of contributions. "It is our idea to build a
monument by public subscription," he concluded, "over his grave in the
churchyard. Then future generations will remember his heroism."
"Poor Nathan," she thought, while her eyes filled with tears. "If only
he could hear what they are saying." There had never been a monument
erected by public subscription at Pedlar's Mill, and she could not help
thinking how pleased Nathan would have been if he could have taken an
active part in the plan. Well, some people had to wait until they were
dead to get the things that would have made them happy while they were
living.
As soon as Bob Ellgood stopped speaking, a general droning began in the
room, and she grasped, after an instant of confusion, that everybody was
trying to tell her of some boyish act of generosity which was still
remembered. These recollections, beginning with a single anecdote
related in the cracked voice of the minister, gathered fulness of tone
as they multiplied, until the room resounded with a chorus of praise.
Was it possible that Nathan had done all these noble things and that she
had never heard of them? Was it possible that so many persons had seen
the greatness of his nature, and yet the community in which he lived had
continued to treat him as more or less of a clown? Over and over, she
heard the emphatic refrain, "I always thought there was a heap more in
Nathan Pedlar than people made out."
Sitting there in the midst of the belated appreciation, it seemed to
Dorinda that the shape of an idea emerged gradually out of the fog of
words. All his life Nathan had been misunderstood. Though she was
unaware of the exact moment when the apotheosis occurred, she realized
presently that she had witnessed the transformation of a human being
into a legend. After to-day, it was impossible that she should ever
think of Nathan as unromantically as she thought of him while he was
alive. Death had not only ennobled, it had superbly exalted him. In this
chant of praise, there was no reminder of his insignificance. Could it
be that she alone had failed to recognize the beauty of his character
beneath his inappropriate surface? Had she alone misunderstood and
belittled him in her mind? Her heart swelled until it seemed to her that
she was choking. When she remembered her husband now, it was the inward,
not the outward, man that she recalled.
"I reckon he warn't mo' than eight years old when he took that whipping
for stealing old man Haney's cherries rather than tell on Sandy Moody's
little boy Sam," Ezra Flower, the auctioneer, was reciting. "I can see
the way he stood up and took the lashing without a whimper, and the
other boys teasing him and calling him a clown on account of hid broken
nose. Yes, ma'am, I always knew thar was a heap mo' in Nathan Pedlar
than most folks made out."
The warm room, the firelight, the humming voices, faded into a mist.
Beyond the window-panes, which flamed with a reflected glow, Dorinda saw
the white fields and against the fields there flickered a vision of the
room in which she was sitting. Out of this vision, the prayer of the
minister stole over her like some soporific influence. An inescapable
power of suggestion, as intense yet as diffused as firelight, was
reassembling her thoughts of the past. "Yes, there was more in Nathan
than anybody ever suspected," she found herself repeating.
With one of those sudden changes that come in Virginia, the day of
Nathan's funeral brought a foretaste of spring. The snow had melted so
rapidly that the roads were flowing like brooks, and Whippernock River,
with its damaged bridge, was still impassable. But an April languor was
in the air, and the sky over the wintry fields was as soft as clouds of
blue and white hyacinths. Though a number of farmers who lived beyond
Whippernock River had been unable to come to the funeral, people had
arrived by train from the city and in every vehicle that could roll on
wheels from the near side of the railroad. The little church was crowded
to suffocation while the minister read his short text and preached his
long sermon on the beauty of self-sacrifice. When the last hymn was sung
with gasps of emotional tension, and the congregation flocked out into
the churchyard, with Nathan in his flower-banked coffin and Dorinda
hidden in her widow's weeds, a wave of grief spread like a contagious
affliction over the throng. With her head reverently bowed, Dorinda
tried to attend only to the words of the minister, to see only the open
grave at her feet, with the piles of red clay surrounding the oblong
hole. Yet her senses, according to their deplorable habit in a crisis,
became extraordinarily alive, and every trivial detail of the scene
glittered within her mind. She saw the blanched and harrowed face of the
minister, who prayed with closed eyes and violent gestures as if he were
wrestling with God; she saw the nodding black plumes of Miss Texanna
Snead, and remembered that Nathan had once called her "a plumed hearse."
She saw the gaping mouths of the children, whom their mothers, in the
excitement of the occasion, had neglected to wash; she saw even the
predatory brood of chickens which had invaded the graveyard and was
scratching upon the graves. The ground at her feet was heaped with
flowers, and among the floral crosses and wreaths and pillows, she
observed the design of a railway engine made of red and white
carnations, and tried to recall the names on the card. Long after she
had forgotten every word of the prayer, she could still see that
preposterous floral engine and smell the strong scent of fading
carnations.
Standing there beside the open grave, recollections blew in and out of
her mind like chaff in the wind. Her first sermon. The old minister
praying with eyes so tightly shut that they looked like slits made by a
penknife. The way her feet could not reach the floor. Peppermints in a
paper bag to keep her quiet. Her mother smelling of soap and camphor.
Missionaries in the front pew. The saving of black babies. The way she
had yawned and stretched. Nathan was there then, a big boy who sang,
with a voice as shrill as a grasshopper, in the choir. Rose Emily too.
How pretty she was. Then Rose Emily as she lay dying with the happy
light in her eyes and the flush in her cheeks. Twenty-two years ago!
Well, she had done her best by Rose Emily's children.
Afterwards, when she drove home with John Abner, she found that, though
they had buried the actual Nathan in the churchyard, the legendary
Nathan of prayer and sermon still accompanied them.
"I wish Father could have heard what they said of him," John Abner
remarked, with detached reverence, as he might have spoken of one of the
public characters in the Bible. "It would please him to know what they
thought of him after he was gone."
"Perhaps he does know," Dorinda responded.
For a few moments they talked of this; of the way death so often makes
you understand people better than life; of the sermon and the flowers,
and the general mourning.
"Did you see Jacob Moody there?" asked John Abner presently. "He used to
work for Father before we moved to Old Farm, and Jacob told me he swam
Whippernock River to come to the funeral."
Dorinda wiped her eyes. "Things like that would have touched Nathan. I
never saw any one get on better with the coloured people. It was because
he was so just, I suppose."
"Those were Jacob's very words. 'Mr. Nathan was the justest white man I
ever saw,' he said. Put back that heavy veil, Dorinda. It is enough to
smother you. There now. That's better. Your face looks like the moon
when it comes out of a cloud."
Dorinda smiled. "Even that old German who has just moved into the Haney
place was there. I wonder what he thinks now of Germany? We shan't hear
anything about the war after this. I used to tell your father he
couldn't have felt more strongly if it had been fought at Old Farm."
"I was beginning to get interested myself," John Abner returned. "I'll
try to follow it on the map just as he did in the evenings. Well, it
will be over before next winter, I reckon."
"And all that waste so unnecessary!" Dorinda exclaimed.
They were turning in at the gate by the bridge. Straight ahead, she saw
the house, with the smoke flying like banners from the chimneys. On the
hill beyond, the big pine was dark against the blue and white of the
sky.
V
Although Dorinda would have been astonished had she discovered it, the
years after Nathan's death were the richest and happiest of her life.
They were years of relentless endeavour, for a world war was fought and
won with the help of the farmers; but they were years which rushed over
her like weathered leaves in a storm. To the end, the war came no nearer
to her than a battle in history. There was none of the flame-like
vividness that suffused her mother's memories of the starving years and
the burning houses of the Confederacy. Only when she saw victory in
terms of crops, not battles, could she feel that she was part of it.
In the beginning the Germans had seemed less a mortal enemy than an evil
spirit at large, and she had fought them as her great-grandfather might
have fought a heresy or a pestilence. That men should destroy one
another appeared to her less incredible than that they should
deliberately destroy the resources which made life endurable. That they
should destroy in a day, in an hour, the materials which she was
sacrificing her youth to provide! At night, lying in bed with limbs that
ached so she could not sleep, and a mind that was a blank from
exhaustion, she would hear the rotation of crops drumming deliriously in
her thoughts. Potatoes. Corn. Wheat. Cow-peas. Clover. Alfalfa. And back
again. Alfalfa. Cowpeas. Potatoes. Corn. Wheat. Clover. That was all the
seasons meant to her, one after one. Her youth was going, she knew; but
youth had brought so little that age could take away, why should she
regret it? The hair on her temples had turned from grey to white; her
skin, beneath its warm flush, was creased with lines and roughened from
exposure; but her eyes were still bright and clear, though the caged
look had gone out of them.
What she felt most, as the struggle went on, was the failure of
elasticity. The tyranny of detail was more exacting, and she rebounded
less quickly from disappointment. Notwithstanding what Doctor Faraday
had called her "superb constitution," her health began to cause her
uneasiness. "The war has done this," she thought, "and if it has cost me
my youth, imagine what it has cost the men who are fighting." It was a
necessary folly, she supposed, but it was a folly against which she
rebelled. Had humanity been trying unwisely to hurry evolution, and had
the crust of civilization proved too thin to restrain the outbreak of
volcanic impulses? Her two years with Doctor Faraday had accustomed her
to the biological interpretation of history. "And the worst thing about
the war," she concluded grimly, "is not the fighting. It is not even the
murder and plunder of the weaker. The worst thing about it is the number
of people, both men and women, who enjoy it, who embark upon it as upon
a colossal adventure."
If John Abner had gone to France, the war would have come closer to her;
but John Abner was tied by his clubfoot to the farm. The crowning
humiliation of his life came, she knew, when he watched the other boys
from Pedlar's Mill start off for the training camp. Her pity for him was
stronger than her relief that she could keep him, and she wished with
all her heart that he could have gone. "You will be more useful on the
farm," she said consolingly, as they turned away; but he only shook his
head and stared mutely after the receding train. What John Abner
desired, she saw, was not usefulness but glory.
Of the boys they saw go, a few were killed; but they were boys whom she
knew only by sight. Two of Josiah's sons went, and one died of influenza
after he had been decorated three times; but this boy had lived away so
long that she did not feel close to him. Bob Ellgood's second son
returned a nervous wreck from shell shock, and whenever Dorinda saw him
on the porch at Green Acres, trying to make baskets of straw, she would
feel that her heart was melting in pity. But even then the war did not
actually touch her. Her nearest approach to the fighting was when
Fluvanna's son Jubal died in a French hospital, and she was obliged to
read the later aloud because Fluvanna was too distressed to spell out
the words. Dorinda had known Jubal from his babyhood. He had grows up on
the farm, and she had taught him to read. The day the news came the two
women worked until they were ready to drop from exhaustion. Work had
always been Dorinda's salvation. It was saving her now from the war as
it had once saved her from the memory of Jason.
With the return of
peace, she had hoped that the daily life on the farm would slip back
into orderly grooves; but before the end of the first year she
discovered that the demoralization of peace was more difficult to combat
than the madness of war. There was no longer an ecstatic patriotism to
inspire one to fabulous exploits. The world that had been organized for
destruction appeared to her to become as completely disorganized for
folly. Even at Pedlar's Mill there were ripples of the general
disintegration. What was left now, she demanded moodily, of that
hysterical war rapture, except an aversion from work and the high cost
of everything? The excessive wages paid for unskilled labour were
ruinous to the farmer; for the field hands who had earned six dollars a
day from the Government were not satisfied to drive a plough for the
small sum that had enabled her to reclaim the abandoned meadows of Five
Oaks. One by one, she watched the fields of the tenant farmers drop back
into broomsedge and sassafras. She was using two tractor-ploughs on the
farm; but the roads were almost impassable again because none of the
negroes could be persuaded to work on them. Even when she employed men
to repair the strip of corduroy road between the bridge and the fork, it
was impossible to keep the bad places firm enough for any car heavier
than a Ford to travel over them. Yet these years, which she had believed
would mean the end of her prosperity, passed over her also and were
gone.
After all, the men farmers had suffered more. James Ellgood allowed his
outlying fields to run to waste again because he could not find
labourers to till them. Old John Appleseed gave up his market garden
after he had lost all his vegetables one spring when he was ill and
there was nobody to gather them. It was in such a difficulty that
Dorinda was aided by a gift she had never depended on in the past, and
this was her faculty for "getting on," as she would have called it, with
the negroes. Unlike James Ellgood, who was inclined to truculence, she
had preserved her mother's friendly relations with the established
coloured families at Pedlar's Mill. When the scarcity of labour came,
the clan of Moodys provided the field workers that she required. The
Moodys, the Plumtrees, and the Greens, were scattered on thrifty little
farms from the settlement of Plumtree to the land beyond Whippernock
River; yet, one and all, they were attached by ties of kindred to the
descendants of Aunt Mehitable. In a winter of frozen roads and a
disastrous epidemic of influenza, the relatives of Aunt Mehitable, who
had died long ago, sent pleading messages to Dorinda, and she gave
generously of the peach brandy and blackberry cordial she had inherited
from her mother. There was scarcely a cabin that the pestilence did not
enter, and wherever it passed, Dorinda followed on Snowbird, her big
white horse with the flowing mane and the plaited tail which had never
been docked. That was a ghastly winter. From November to March the
landscape wore the spectral and distraught aspect of one of the
engravings after Doré in her mother's Bible. Doctor Stout was still in
France, and there was no physician but Jason Greylock at Pedlar's Mill.
Dorinda met him sometimes going or returning on horseback from a
desperate case; but he appeared either not to recognize her or to have
forgotten her name. People said that he was still a good doctor when he
had his senses about him. The pity was that he was often too drunk to
know what he was doing. He looked an old man, for his skin was drawn and
wrinkled, the pouches under his eyes were inflamed with purple, and
there were clusters of congested veins in his cheeks.
One afternoon, when the epidemic was at its worst, she rode up to the
door of one of the humbler cabins and met him coming away.
"You ought not to go in there," he said shortly, for he was sober at
last. "Two children have just died of pneumonia, and the others are ill.
They are the worst cases I've seen."
Mounted on her white horse, like some mature Joan of Arc, she glanced
down on him. Her face was expressionless but for its usual look of
dauntless fortitude. She was thinking, "At last I shall have to speak to
him, and it makes no difference to me whether I speak to him or not." It
was a quarter of a century since she had driven home with him that
February afternoon. A quarter of a century, and she had not forgotten!
Well, when you have only the solitude to distract you, your memory is
obliged to be long!
"I am not afraid," she replied in level tones, after she had dismounted
and tethered Snowbird to the branch of a tree. "Are you?"
While he could wrap himself in his professional manner, it occurred to
her that he was not without dignity. Even though there were only the
rags of it left, he was less at her mercy than he would have been in the
character of a remembered lover. For an instant it seemed to her that he
waited for her question to sink in. Then he answered with the sound of a
laugh that had been bitten back.
"I? No. What have I to fear?"
Her smile was as sharp as a blade. "There is always something, isn't
there, even if it is only the memory of fear?"
"You think, then, that I was always a coward?" Yes, he was sober enough
now, restrained by those shreds of professional responsibility which was
the only responsibility he had ever acknowledged.
She laughed. "I stopped thinking of you twenty-five years ago."
"I know." He looked as if he were impressed by her words. "You took the
best man, after all. There was more in Nathan than anybody realized."
"Every one says that now."
"Well, it's true even if every one says it. You married a good man."
It was her hour of triumph; and though it was her hour of triumph, she
knew that, like everything else in her life, it had come too late. A
quarter of a century outlasts expectancy. The old pang was dead now, and
with it the old bitterness. It made no difference any longer. Nothing
that he could say or do would make any difference. She had outlived both
love and hatred. She had outlived every emotion toward him except
disgust. That last scene at Five Oaks returned to her, and her lips
twisted with aversion. "Yes, I married a hero," she rejoined, and she
added to herself, "If only Nathan could hear me!"
"You made your life in spite of me. I'm glad of that."
She laughed again. How little men knew of women! Even Nathan, who had
loved her, had never seen her as she was. "Yes, I made my life in spite
of you."
"It was too much, I suppose, to expect you to understand how I failed. I
never ran after women. That wasn't my weakness. I never wanted to do any
of the things I did. I never wanted to throw you over. I never wanted to
marry Geneva. I never wanted to ruin either of your lives. I never
wanted to stay in this God-forsaken solitude. I never wanted to let
drink get a hold on me. I did not want to do a single one of these
things; but I did them, every one. And you will never understand how
that could be."
She shook her head. "It doesn't matter now. It isn't worth thinking
about."
"All the same I wish you could understand that I was not the kind of man
to do the things that I did. I was a different sort of fellow entirely.
But what I was never seemed strong enough to withstand the pull of what
I was not. Of course, you'll never see that. You'll just go on thinking
I was born rotten inside. Perhaps you're right. I don't know. I can't
work it out."
She looked through him and beyond him to the brown solitude of the
winter fields. The sunken roads were swimming in melted snow; the bushes
were like soaked rags; the trees were dripping with a fluid moisture
which was heavier than rain. From the sodden ground a vapour steamed up
and floated like a miasma on the motionless air.
"Men like you ought to have been sent to the war," she said. "They
wouldn't take me. I was too old, and besides I've got the drink habit."
"And you blame somebody else for that, I suppose?"
"No, I don't blame anybody. I don't blame anybody for anything. Least of
all myself. It was the way things turned out. Strange as it may seem to
you, I always did the best that I could. If Father had died sooner, it
might have been different. But everything happened too late. The
broomsedge grew over me before I could get away."
Exultation flared up and then died down to ashes. "You ruined Five Oaks,
and I saved it," she said.
"Yes, you have done well with the farm." Twenty-five years of toil and
self-denial, and in the end only: "You have done well with the farm!"
"That shows what you can do even with poor land when you put your heart
into it," he added.
"Not the heart, but the head," she retorted sharply, as she went past
him into the cabin.
VI
When the spring came and the epidemic was over, she had won the loyal
friendship of the poorer tenant farmers and the negro landowners; but
her energy and her resilience were less than they had ever been in her
life.
Machinery could not work alone, and even tractor-ploughs were obliged to
be guided. She had installed an electric plant, and whenever it was
possible, she had replaced hand labour by electricity. In the beginning
she had dreaded the cost, but it was not long before she realized that
the mysterious agency had been her safest investment. The separator in
the dairy was run by electricity. With the touch of a button the skimmed
milk was carried by pipes to the calf-yard or the hog-pen. Pumping,
washing, churning, cooling the air in summer and warming it in winter,
all these back-breaking tasks were entrusted to the invisible power
which possessed the energy of human labour without the nerves that too
often impeded it, and made it so uncertain a force.
"What would Pa say if he could see so many cows milked by machinery?"
she asked John Abner, after the first experiment with electricity in the
cow-barn.
"Do you think it will help much in milking?"
"In the end it may. The young cows don't mind it, but you'll never get
the old ones to put up with it."
"Then until the young ones have turned into the old ones, we'll have to
take whatever milkers we can find. Cows must be milked twice a day, and
no darkey wants to work more than three times a week."
"They're still living on their war wages. If I ran this farm the way men
manage the Government, we'd be over head and ears in debt. Perhaps," she
suggested hopefully, "when the negroes have spent all they've saved up,
they'll begin to feel like working."
John Abner grinned. "Perhaps. But it takes a long time to starve a
darkey."
"Well, I'll see what Fluvanna can do about it," Dorinda retorted. She
did not smile at his jest because the problem, she felt, was a serious
one. The negro, who was by temperament a happiness hunter, could pursue
the small game of amusement, she was aware, with an unflagging pace.
Without labourers, the farms she had reclaimed with incalculable effort
would sink again into waste land. "Yes, I'll see what Fluvanna can do,"
she repeated.
In the end, it was Fluvanna who, with the assistance of the patriarchs
among the Moodys, the Greens, and the Plumtrees, drove the inveterate
pleasure-seekers back to the plough. Looking at the coloured woman,
generous, brisk, smiling, with her plump brown cheeks and her bright
slanting eyes, Dorinda would ask herself how she could have managed the
farm without Fluvanna. "Heaven knows what I should have done if I had
not had a pleasant disposition about me," she said. In return for
Fluvanna's sunny sympathy and her cheerful alacrity, which never
faltered, Dorinda had discreetly overlooked an occasional slackening of
industry.
Though the years were hard ones, she was more contented than she had
ever been. The restless expectancy had ceased, and with it the
indefinite longing which had awakened with the scent of spring rains on
the grass, or the sound of the autumn wind in the broomsedge. Even the
vision of something different in the future, that illusion of
approaching happiness which she had believed as indestructible as hope
itself, had dissolved as the glimmer of swamp fires dissolves in the
twilight. She knew now that life would never be different. Experience,
like love, would always be inadequate to the living soul. What the
imperfect actuality was to-day, it would be to-morrow and the day after;
but there was rest now, not disquietude, in the knowledge. The strain
and the hard work of the war had tired her nerves, and she looked
forward to the ample leisure of the time when she could expect nothing.
Since Nathan's death she had lost the feeling that life had cheated her.
It was true that she had missed love; but at the first stir of regret
she would shake her head and remind herself that "you couldn't have
everything," and that, after all, it was something to have married a
hero. Nathan's victorious death had filled the aching void in her heart.
Where the human being had failed her, the heroic legend had satisfied.
As she grew older, it seemed to her that men as husbands and lovers were
scarcely less inadequate than love. Only men as heroes, dedicated to the
service of an ideal, were worthy, she felt, of the injudicious
sentiments women lavished upon them. At twenty, seeking happiness, she
had been more unhappy, she told herself, than other women; but at fifty,
she knew that she was far happier. The difference was that at twenty her
happiness had depended upon love, and at fifty it depended upon nothing
but herself and the land. To the land, she had given her mind and heart
with the abandonment that she had found disastrous in any human
relation. "I may have missed something, but I've gained more," she
thought, "and what I've gained nobody can take away from me."
Without John Abner, who was much to her, though not so much as she had
once believed he would be, and the indispensable memory of Nathan to
fall back upon, she sometimes wondered what her middle years would have
brought to her. John Abner, it is true, was subject to moods, and
recently he had been warped by a disappointment in love; but even if he
was not always easy to live with, she knew that, in his eccentric
fashion, he was attached to her. With Nathan, it was different. In the
years that had passed since his death, he had provided her with the
single verity which is essential to the happiness of a woman no longer
young, and that is a romantic background for her life. The power of
mental suggestion, which is stronger than all other influences in the
world of emotion, had cultivated around her this picturesque myth of
Nathan. No one spoke to her now of his ugliness, his crudeness, his
reputation as a laughing-stock; but whenever she went to church, she
beheld the imposing monument which public sentiment had placed over his
grave. Every soldier who went from Pedlar's Mill was reminded by
fire-breathing orators that the heroes of war must be worthy of the hero
of peace. Every appeal from the Red Cross in the county bore his name as
an ornament. As time went on this legend, which had sprung from simple
goodness, gathered a patina of tradition as a tombstone gathers moss.
Yes, it was something, Dorinda assured her rebellious heart, to have
been married to a hero.
In these years she might have married again; but a distaste for physical
love, more than the rigid necessity of her lot, kept her a widow. When,
a year after his wife's death, Bob Ellgood began, according to the
custom of the country, to motor over to Old Farm on Sunday, she was at
first flattered, then disturbed, and at last frankly provoked. Walking
through the pasture with him one afternoon in April, she reflected, not
without chagrin, that this also was one of the blessings that had come
at the wrong time. "Thirty years ago, before I knew Jason, I could have
loved him," she thought; and she remembered the Sunday mornings in
church when she had gazed longingly at his profile and had asked
herself, "Can he be the right one, after all?" She had wanted him then
with some sudden cobweb of fancy, which had been spun by an insatiable
hunger for life. If he had turned to her at that moment, she would have
loved him instead of Jason, and the future, which was now the past,
would have been different. But he had not wanted her then; he had first
to make a disappointing marriage, and by the time he had discovered his
mistake, it was too late to begin over again. Well, that was the way
things happened in life!
"Why won't you marry me, Dorinda?" he asked, wheeling abruptly round
from the pasture bars.
Startled, she cast about for a reason which might appear plausible to
his masculine vanity. Was there a reason? Had she any reason behind her
resolve, or was aversion as physical a process as first love? Once he
had been handsome, a young blond giant, and now he was coarsened and
beefy, with a neck like a bull's and a rapidly spreading girth. There
was a purple flush in his face and puckers of flesh between his collar
and his slightly receding chin. This, also, was the way things happened,
she knew. Yet, after a moment's compassionate regard, she discerned that
he wore his unalluring age as easily as he had once worn his engaging
youth. He appeared unaware even that it might be a disadvantage in
courtship.
"Suppose I looked like that?" she said to herself, and then, "Perhaps
women are more fastidious than they used to be, but men have not yet
found it out. Or is it simply because I am independent and don't have to
marry for support that I can pick and refuse?"
"Have you decided why you won't marry me?" he inquired presently.
He was smiling at her, and it seemed to her--or was it only her
imagination?--that a gleam, like the star in the eyes of her prize bull,
flickered and went out in his glance. His face was so close to her that
for an instant she believed he was going to kiss her. Not that look!
something cried in her heart. Oh, never that look again!
"I can't tell," she answered, walking on again. "There isn't any reason.
I've finished with all that."
He was undismayed. "I'll keep on. I'm not in a hurry." Actually at
fifty-five, he was not in a hurry.
"It isn't any use," she replied as firmly as she could. "It isn't the
least use in the world."
"Well, I'll keep on anyway."
In the end, though she had spoken with decision, she had failed to
convince him. That had been two years ago, and he still came in his big
car every Sunday afternoon. But as he had warned her, he was not in a
hurry, and his courtship was as deliberate as his general habit of body.
Although it seemed to her that she had grown wiser with the years, she
had never entirely abandoned her futile effort to find a meaning in
life. Hours had come and gone when she had felt that there was no
permanent design beneath the fragile tissue of experience; but the moral
fibre that had stiffened the necks of martyrs lay deeply embedded in her
character if not in her opinions. She was saved from the aridness of
infidelity by that robust common sense which had preserved her from the
sloppiness of indiscriminate belief. After all, it was not religion; it
was not philosophy; it was nothing outside her own being that had
delivered her from evil. The vein of iron which had supported her
through adversity was merely the instinct older than herself, stronger
than circumstances, deeper than the shifting surface of emotion; the
instinct that had said, "I will not be broken." Though the words of the
covenant had altered, the ancient mettle still infused its spirit.
There were winter nights, in front of her sinking fire, when she would
live over the romantic folly and the thwarted aims of her youth. Then,
through what appeared to be an endless vista, she would survey the
irreconcilable difference between character and conduct. In her own life
she could trace no logical connection between being and behaviour,
between the thing that she was in herself and the things she had done.
She thought of herself as a good woman (there were few better ones, she
would have said honestly) yet in her girlhood she had been betrayed by
love and saved by the simplest accident from murder. Surely these were
both flagrant transgressions according to every code of morality! They
were acts, she knew, which she would have condemned in another; but in
her memory they appeared as inevitable as the rest of her conduct, and
she could not unravel them from the frayed warp-and-woof of the past. And
she saw now that the strong impulses which had once wrecked her
happiness were the forces that had enabled her to rebuild her life out
of the ruins. The reckless courage that had started her on the dubious
enterprise of her life had hardened at last into the fortitude with
which she had triumphed over the unprofitable end Of her adventure. Good
and bad, right and wrong, they were all tangled together. "How can I
tell," she could ask, "what I should have done if I had not been
myself?"
VII
Riding slowly down the road from Five Oaks to Gooseneck Creek, Dorinda
watched the few sheep browsing among the lengthening shadows of the
October afternoon. Beyond them the life-everlasting broke in silver
waves against the dim blue horizon. Over the whole landscape, with its
flat meadows, its low rounded hill in the east, its crawling
rust-coloured roads, hung a faint, hazy drift, as inaudible as the dying
quiver of insects. Passing at a walk on her white horse against the rich
autumn sunset, she reached the log bridge at the creek and kept on
toward the fork of the road. She had taken the longer way home in order
that she might inspect the new gate which William Fairlamb had finished.
Round her, as evanescent as the last flare of day, there was this
quivering haze, which was half dreamlike and half the tremor of
perishing things. Nature drifting into rest; flowers drifting into dust;
grasshoppers drifting into death; faint sunshine drifting into darkness.
And in her own mind shadowy images or impressions drifting into
thoughts.
It was five years now since the war had ended, and in those years she
had recovered both her inward confidence and her outward prosperity. The
misfortunes that had threatened the two farms had passed over her like
wild geese. Even the labour question had been lessened, if not solved,
by the application of electricity and gasoline. She had made a name that
was not unknown among the farmers of the state; she had reclaimed two
unproductive farms from the clutch of broomsedge and sassafras. In
shallow soil, where her father had ploughed only six inches deep, she
was now raising rich and abundant crops. Her dairy, she knew, was as
well managed, her butter as good, as any that could be found in the
country. The products of her dairy, with the name Old Farm stamped under
the device of the harp-shaped pine, were bringing the highest prices in
the market. She could smile now, with her butter selling in the
Washington dairy at a dollar a pound, over the timidity with which she
had, modestly asked thirty cents in the beginning. By that subtle
combination of prudence and imprudence which she called character, she
had turned disappointment into contentment and failure into success.
Riding there in the silver gleams which flashed up from the
life-everlasting, she appeared, after the hard years, to have ripened
into the last mellowness of maturity. Though her figure in the
shirtwaist and knickerbockers of brown corduroy was no longer youthful,
it was still shapely. The texture of her skin was rough and hard like
the rind of winter fruit, but the dark red had not faded, and her eyes
beneath the whitened hair were still as blue as a jay bird's wing.
Though she did not look young for her fifty years, she looked as if the
years had been victorious ones.
As she opened the new gate, and passing through, turned to close it
behind her, she heard the sound of approaching wheels, and saw the
piebald horse and peculiar gig of Mr. Kettledrum ascending from the dip
in the road. When he reached her they stopped to speak, after the manner
of the country, and the old "mail rider," who was just returning on his
circuit of twenty-six miles, described, with sprightliness, the
condition of the roads over which he had travelled.
"Three big trees blew down on the Whippernock road the other night," he
said, "and I reckon they'll lie thar until they rot if the farmers down
that way don't cut them up for logs to burn. The Government sent an
inspector down last week and he rode over my circuit along with me." A
note of pride crept into his quavering voice. "He told me he'd never
seen any worse roads in the whole course of his recollection. No, ma'am,
not in the whole course of his recollection."
"I hope he'll do something about them. After all, the Government is
responsible for the rural delivery."
Mr. Kettledrum shook his head. "I ain't lookin' for nothin' to be done,
at least not in my time. It don't look as if the Government can afford
to inspect and improve too, particularly when they're inspectin' the
roads where mostly Democrats travel. But it was a real comfort to know
he thought it was the worst mail road he'd ever laid eyes on in the
whole course of his recollection."
"I've been trying to get some of the negroes to mend this bad place
before winter. The only way is for the farmers to keep their own roads
in repair. The state started to improve the road between Pedlar's Mill
and Turkey Station, and all it did was to cut down every last one of the
trees. There isn't a patch of shade left there."
"That's true. I know it, ma'am," assented Mr. Kettledrum, who liked to
talk of the road, as a man likes to talk of an affliction. "Don't I
travel that road between ten and two o'clock on hot August days?" Then
his face saddened to the look of stoical resignation with which men
survey the misfortunes of others. "When I come along thar this mornin'
they was bringin' Jason Greylock away from his house in the woods, and I
stopped for a word with him. He was too weak to speak out loud, but he
made a sign to say that he knew me. If thar ever was a wasted life, I
reckon it was Jason's, though he started out with such promise. Bad
blood, bad blood, and nothin' to counteract the taint of it."
"Where were they taking him?" Dorinda inquired indifferently; and
turning, she glanced over the autumn fields to the red chimneys of Five
Oaks. The house was occupied now by Martin Flower, the manager, and
smoke was rising in a slender column from the roof. Mr. Kettledrum
cleared his throat. "I thought perhaps they'd sent word to you. Mr.
Wigfall told me they was comin' over to ask if you could make a place
for Jason at Five Oaks. They seemed to think you owed him a lodgin' on
the farm considerin' you bought it so cheap and made so much money out
of it."
A flush of anger stained Dorinda's forehead and her eyes burned. "I owe
him nothing," she answered. "The place was sold at public auction after
he had let it run to seed, and my husband bought it fairly for what he
bid. If I did well, it is because I toiled like a field-hand to restore
what the Greylocks had ruined." She broke off with a gasp, as if she had
been running away from herself. The old "mail rider," she saw after a
moment, stared at her in surprise.
"Yas'm, I'm sorry I spoke, ma'am," he replied mildly. "You've
earned the right to whatever you have, that thar ain't no disputin'.
I was just thinkin' as I come along what a pleasant surprise
it would be to your Pa if he could come back an' see all those
barns and dairy-houses, to say nothin' of that fine windmill an'
electric plant."
Dorinda sighed. "Poor Pa. My only regret is that he couldn't share in
the prosperity. He worked harder than I did, but he never saw any
results. It has taken me thirty years." Yes, she was fifty now, and it
had taken her thirty years.
"You've kept the old house just as it was in his day. Wall, I favour a
shingled roof, myself, even if it does burn quicker when it ketches
fire. But thar's something unfeeling to me about one of these here slate
roofs. They ain't friendly to swallows, an' I like to see swallows
flyin' over my head at sunset."
"Yes, a slate roof is almost as ugly as a tin one." She regarded him
steadily for a minute while she bent over to stroke Snowbird's neck. The
light struck her face obliquely through the fiery branch of a black-gum
tree, and if Mr. Kettledrum had been gifted with imagination, he would
have seen the look of something winged yet caged flutter into her blue
eyes.
"What is the matter with Doctor Greylock?" she asked.
In Mr. Kettledrum, who was wafted off on waves of agreeable
retrospection, the sudden question produced mental confusion. He was
past the sportive period when one can think without effort of two things
at the same time. "Eh, ma'am?" he rejoined, cupping one gnarled hand
over his ear.
"I asked you what was the matter with Doctor Greylock?"
"Oh, Doctor Greylock! Thar's no disputin', ma'am, that you owe him
nothin' in the matter of Five Oaks."
"I haven't seen him for five years," she said with deliberate slowness.
"I thought he was still living in that house by Whippernock River."
"So he was till this morning; that's what they told me. But it seems
they've heard nothing of him since Aunt Mehaley Plumtree stopped doin'
for him six months ago because he told her he didn't have the money to
pay her wages. He'd put everything he had, which was mighty little, I
reckon, in some wild-cat scheme of oil wells in Mexico, and they'd
either burst or leaked, if they ever was thar in the beginnin', which I
doubt. Everybody knows he never paid his taxes, but that thar little old
place in the backwoods wasn't worth a cent, so nobody troubled about
tryin' to collect 'em. Anyhow, he had to do for himself ever since Aunt
Mehaley left him, an' he's been gittin' sicker an' sicker with
consumption all the time. When Ike Pryde was over that way squirrel
huntin' yesterday, he stopped in thar an' found Jason out of his head,
without a bite to eat in the house. The whole place, henhouse and all,
Ike said, was as bare as the pa'm of his hand. Wall, he ran home an' got
his wife to come over, and she did the best she could till they could
lay hands on the sheriff. Jason had just kept alive on whiskey and some
persimmons he'd managed to pick up from the ground. He must have been
that way for weeks."
The colour had ebbed from Dorinda's cheeks and she looked as if she had
withered. There was no distress in her mind, only a cloud of horror
through which she could not see clearly. She lifted her hand and drew it
across her eyes, brushing away the mist that obscured them. There was
nothing there. Nothing but the drooping shadows over the road, the
shocked corn against the sunset, the blur of scarlet and gold and
wine-colour in the woods. There was no horror in these things; yet while
she looked at them they became alive and struck out at her like a
serpent.
"I have no sympathy to waste on him," she said harshly, and then, "Won't
James Ellgood take care of him?"
Mr. Kettledrum shook his head, vaguely apologetic. "Not James. He hates
him like poison. Maybe thar's something in the notion that Jason drove
his wife crazy. I ain't takin' sides. But like most soft-hearted men
James is like a rock when he gets set against a thing. Thar wa'n't no
place for Jason to go but the poorhouse. The old women thar can look
after him when he needs it."
"Well, you can't blame James Ellgood," Dorinda replied. "As far as I can
see nobody owes Jason Greylock anything but trouble."
She was determined not to make excuses for him simply because he was
dying. Everybody died sooner or later, and the vein of posthumous
sentiment was not, she told herself sharply now, her affliction. Nothing
was altered in the past because Jason had drunk himself into the
poorhouse or the grave. Nothing was altered, she repeated, and yet she
could not see the past any longer because of the present. Neither love
nor hate but the poorhouse was the reality.
"It is a hard thing to have to die in the poorhouse," she said.
"So 'tis, ma'am," assented Mr. Kettledrum, who had stinted himself all
his life in the hope of attaining an honourable old age. "But he's
light-headed most of the time and don't know it. Anyhow," he continued
astutely, "it ain't so hard on him as it would be on a man who had lived
more respectable. He wasted mo' on drink, I reckon, than it would cost
to bury him decently."
"That's the dreadful part of it. It would be easier to help a man you
didn't despise." She rode on a few paces and then turned back to the
side of the gig. "If you see Mr. Wigfall at the station, tell him I'll
give him what he needs for Doctor Greylock, but I cannot have him at
Five Oaks."
"I'll tell him," Mr. Kettledrum rejoined, and he added impulsively for
one of his unhurried observations, "You carry yo' years well, if you
don't mind my remarkin' on it."
She smiled. "That's because I never think of them. Most women want their
youth back again; but I wouldn't have mine at any price. The worst years
of my life are behind me, and my best ones ahead."
"You look it," the old man agreed, and then, without reason, he sighed.
"Ah, I recollect you thirty years ago, when they used to say you had a
face like a May mornin'. Not that you ain't a fine figure of a woman
now; but as we old men get on in years, our thoughts turn backward and
we like to dwell on young things. Thirty years ago you looked as if
sugar wouldn't melt in yo' mouth."
He drove on regretfully, while Dorinda, on Snowbird, trotted homeward.
The light on the shocked corn was so faint that it waned to a shadow
while she looked at it. A flock of wild geese curved like blown smoke in
the afterglow. Immersed in this twilight as in the sadness of memory,
she gazed at the autumn scene, with the small gold leaves on the locust
trees, the windmill beyond the house, and the flickering of firelight in
the west wing. A prosperous farm to-day, a casual observer would have
remarked; but to Dorinda, who never forgot, the whole place wore the
look of wistful brooding which she remembered whenever she thought of
her father.
Her exultation over Jason's ruinous end had diminished now into an
impersonal pity. She had longed to punish him for his treachery; she had
hated him for years, until she had discovered that hatred is energy
wasted; but in all her past dreams of retribution, she had never once
thought of the poorhouse. Even as a question of justice, it seemed to
her that the poorhouse was excessive. That terror of indigence which is
inherent in self-respecting poverty was deeply bred in her nature, and
she knew that her humbler neighbours were haunted by fear of charity as
one is haunted by fear of smallpox in a pestilence. Yes, whatever he
deserved, the poorhouse was too much. Though the horror of his fate did
not lessen the wrong he had done, by some curious alchemy of imagination
it reduced the sum of human passions to insignificance. What did
anything invisible matter at the gate of the poorhouse?
Though her first impulse, derived from Presbyterian theology, was to
regard his downfall as a belated example of Divine vengeance, her
invincible common sense reminded her that Divine vengeance is seldom so
logical in its judgments. No, he had not ended in the poorhouse because
he had betrayed her. On the contrary, she saw that he had betrayed her
because of that intrinsic weakness in his nature which would have
brought him to disaster even if he had walked in the path of exemplary
virtue. "His betrayal of me was merely an incident," she thought. "Drink
was an incident. If he had been stronger, he might have done all these
things and yet have escaped punishment." For it was not sin that was
punished in this world or the next; it was failure. Good failure or bad
failure, it made no difference, for nature abhorred both. "Poor Jason,"
she said to herself, with contemptuous pity. "He was neither good enough
nor bad enough, that was the trouble."
VIII
As she stepped on the porch, the door opened and John Abner came out,
accompanied by Amos Wigfall and one of the tenant farmers, Samuel Larch,
who lived on the far side of Pedlar's Mill. John Abner looked morose,
but this had become his habitual expression since he had been crossed in
love, and she was less disturbed by it than she was by the anxious
suavity on the face of the sheriff.
"I was admirin' yo' improvements," Mr. Wigfall remarked. "Thar's been a
heap of changes since the old days when yo' Pa an' Ma lived here."
She met his wandering glance and held it firmly. "I saw Mr. Kettledrum
and he gave me your message."
The sheriff's flabby face stiffened. "My message, ma'am?"
"About Doctor Greylock. I cannot have him at Five Oaks. He has no claim
on me." Hesitating an instant, she repeated slowly, weighing each
separate syllable, "He has no claim on me, but I will pay you whatever
you need to keep him out of the poorhouse."
Mr. Wigfall uttered an obsequious noise which might have been either a
bray or a cough. "I don't reckon thar's a mo' charitable-minded lady in
the county, ma'am. It ain't often that you refuse to help an' when you
do, you're likely to have a good reason."
"Well, I'm ready to help Doctor Greylock," Dorinda rejoined impatiently,
"but there's no sense in the notion that I owe him something because he
ruined Five Oaks and I saved it."
"Naw'm, thar cert'n'y ain't no sense in that," Mr. Wigfall conceded with
suspicious alacrity.
"He thinks we might let him live in one of the unused wings," John Abner
explained. "Of course that will mean we'll have to provide for him too,
and as you say he hasn't really the shadow of a claim on us. Poor
devil!"
"The idea has got about that he's dangerous from drink," said Mr.
Wigfall, "and thar wouldn't nobody take him in, pay or no pay. The
choice was between the county gaol an' the poorhouse, an' considerin'
everything the poorhouse seemed mo' hospitable. Doctor Stout can look
after him thar, and a bunch of female paupers can take turns at the
nursing."
"If he's still out of his head, you can hardly expect Martin Flower to
want him at Five Oaks," John Abner suggested.
"Oh, he's come to himself now," Samuel Larch rejoined before the sheriff
could reply. "I was the first to git to him after Ike Pryde brought
word, an' when I first clapped eyes on him he was clean out of his
senses. But even then he was as weak as a baby an' he couldn't have
lifted a finger against you. Soon as he had a few swallows of soup and a
little brandy, he began to pick up, an' by the time he'd been fed
regular he could talk like himself again. Doctor Stout thinks he'll hang
on a few months longer if he gets plenty of milk an' fresh eggs."
"Well, I imagine he isn't likely to get them in the poorhouse," John
Abner observed, with his sarcastic smile.
"Of course there isn't the slightest reason why we should help him,"
Dorinda insisted, as if the deprecating sheriff had started an argument.
After a moment's silence she added in a sharper tone, "But you can't
possibly let him die in the poorhouse."
Mr. Wigfall, who had occupied a position of authority long enough to
feel uncomfortable when he was displaced, shuffled his feet in the rocky
path while he fingered uneasily the brim of his hat. "Naw'm," he replied
with as much dignity as he could command, and a few minutes later, he
repeated in a louder voice, "Naw'm."
Dorinda looked over his head at John Abner.
"It isn't human," she began, and, correcting herself, continued more
deliberately: "It isn't Christian to let a man die in the poorhouse
because he has lost all he had."
The two men nodded vacantly, and only John Abner appeared unimpressed by
her piety.
"Naw'm, it cert'n'y ain't Christian," Mr. Wigfall agreed, with a
promptness that was disconcerting.
"He can't possibly be looked after there," Dorinda resumed, as if she
had not been interrupted.
"Naw'm, he can't be looked after thar."
For an instant she hesitated. Though she understood that her decision
was a vital one, she felt as remote and impersonal to it as if it were
one of those historic battles in France, which cost so much and yet were
so far away. It even occurred to her, as it had occurred so often during
the war, that men were never happy except when they were making trouble.
Of course Jason could not be left in the poorhouse. Having acknowledged
this much, she, to whom efficiency had become a second nature, was
irritated because these slow-witted country officials appeared helpless
to move in the matter.
"There isn't any call to worry Martin Flower's wife," she said. "She's
ailing, anyway, and it would put her out to have a sick man, even if he
were sober, in the house. You'll have to bring him here until you can
make some other arrangement. It is true," she repeated harshly, "that he
hasn't the shadow of a claim on us; but we have plenty of milk and eggs,
and for a few weeks he may have the spare room on the first floor."
Mr. Wigfall gasped before he could articulate. Though he had prayed
fervently to have the burden of an extra pauper, especially a pauper who
had known better days and acquired the habit of drink, removed from his
shoulders, he had never imagined, from his acquaintance with the
leisurely methods of Providence, that his prayer would be so speedily
answered. While he stared at Dorinda, his mute relief was as obvious as
if he had uttered it at the top of his voice.
"He's glad to wash his hands of him," she thought, and then: "Who
wouldn't be?"
"I don't reckon anybody will dispute yo' charity, Mrs. Pedlar," Samuel
Larch was wheezing out. "Thar ain't nobody stands any higher to-day in
this here community than you do. You're hard on the surface, as my wife
says, but you're human enough when you're whittled down to the core."
Dorinda smiled, but her eyes were tired and wrinkles showed in her ruddy
skin. If they knew! If only they knew! she reflected; and she wondered
if many other reputations were founded like hers upon a flattering
ignorance of fact.
"Tell your wife it is hard things that wear well," she responded. "After
all, somebody has to bear the burden, and I am better able to do it than
any of the rest of you, except perhaps," she concluded indifferently,
"James Ellgood."
"Yas'm. I'm downright glad you take that sensible view of it," the
sheriff replied, as soon as he was capable of speaking. "Everybody about
here knows that when they come to you, they'll get justice."
Justice! That was Nathan's favourite word, she remembered. She could
hear him saying as plainly as if he were present, "Any man has a right,
Dorinda, to demand justice." Strange how often Nathan's words, which she
had scarcely heeded when he was alive, returned to her in moments of
difficulty or indecision. Only in the last few years had she begun to
realize her mental dependence upon Nathan.
"I reckon we can manage to get him over here to-morrow evening," Samuel
Larch was saying. "Thar ain't no call for you to send all the way to the
poorhouse. Maybe Reuben Fain will let us have that auto-wagon of his."
"Oh, I'll come for him in the big car in the morning," Dorinda replied.
"It isn't my way to do things by halves."
The sheriff nodded. "Naw'm, it ain't yo' way to do things by halves," he
echoed thankfully.
After the two men were out of sight, she turned apologetically to John
Abner. Although he said little, for he was never a great talker, she had
observed that his face wore a look of severe disapprobation.
"There wasn't anything else to do, was there, John Abner?" she asked, in
the deferential tone she reserved for a crisis. It was not often that
Dorinda deferred, and on the rare occasions when she did so, she was
able to administer a more piquant flattery than the naturally clinging
woman has at her command.
"It looks to me as if they were letting you down," John Abner rejoined
moodily; but his face cleared under her persuasion. After all, what he
liked best was to be treated as an authority not only on farming, but on
human nature as well. The fact that he had lived as a recluse, and knew
nothing whatever of life, did not interfere with the sincerity of his
claim to profound wisdom. Men were so immature, she found herself
thinking; and they were never so immature as when they strutted most
with importance. Since the emotional disaster of her youth, she had been
incapable of either loving or hating without a caustic reservation; and
she felt that the hidden flaw in her relations with men was her
inability to treat a delusion of superiority as if it were a moral
principle. This was a small indulgence, she imagined, to a woman who
loved passionately; but to one who had safely finished with love and
attained the calm judgment of the disillusioned, it was an indulgence
which might prove to be particularly irksome.
Slipping her arm through John Abner's, she walked with him into the
house. "Well, of course, in a way you're right; but after all, even if
they are imposing on us, we couldn't very well refuse to do anything."
Though the two farms would go to John Abner at her death, there were
moments when, notwithstanding his affection for her, she suspected
uncomfortably that he would like complete authority while she was
living. Not that he was ever disagreeable or ungenerous about the way
she managed him. He was, she knew, honestly devoted to her, and he
admired her without the pity that had always tempered her admiration for
him. But he shared, she told herself, with all males who were not
milksops, the masculine instinct to domineer over the opposite sex.
"Well, if it's anybody's business, it's James Ellgood's," he protested.
She raised her straight grey eyebrows with a quizzical smile. "All the
same you can hardly blame James Ellgood for not making it his business.
Nothing will ever let him forget that Jason drove Geneva out of her
mind."
"Well, perhaps he did, but there was no law to punish him."
"That's what James Ellgood feels, of course, and I suppose he is right.
If it were simply a question of punishment----"
"You mean it's more than that?"
"Well, isn't it?" She had learned that she could always win him to her
point of view by disguising a naked fact in the paraphernalia of
philosophy. "From our side, I suppose it's one of humanity." Though she
despised sophistry as heartily as she despised indirectness, she could
bend both to her purpose when it was a matter of compulsion.
"If you mean that our humanity is more important than his punishment?"
he returned in a mollified tone.
"Yes, I do mean that. You have said it so often yourself." That would
finish his opposition, she knew, and without his opposition, life on the
farm would be easier for the next two or three weeks.
"Won't it make a lot of trouble?" he inquired.
She frowned. "I'm afraid it will. Of course, if he gets better, he can
move over to Five Oaks, and anyway the authorities ought to make some
kind of provision for him. We can't be expected to take over the
poor farm." Her tone was suddenly bitter with memory; but she concluded
hastily: "In the meantime, I'll warm the spare room and get it ready. If
the doctor says he must have fresh air, we can move his bed out on the
back porch."
John Abner looked resentful. "I'm sorry for the poor devil, of course,
even if he did drive his wife crazy; but I don't see the sense in
turning the place upside down for somebody who hasn't the slightest
claim on you. He isn't even a poor relation."
"He isn't anybody's poor relation, that's the trouble."
"I'm not so sure." John Abner could be brutally candid at times. "There
are a lot of Idabella's mulatto children still hanging about Five Oaks."
She shivered with disgust. "What the law doesn't acknowledge, I suppose
it doesn't bother about."
"Well, it isn't any business of mine," John Abner said, after
deliberation. "If you choose to bring him here, of course you have the
right. But I hope you aren't going to wear yourself out waiting on him.
You've got no moderation in such things. After Snowbird's sickness last
winter, you didn't look like yourself."
She shook her head. "I'd do much more for Snowbird. But I shan't wait on
him. I'll get Fluvanna's sister, Mirandy. She's an old woman, and a good
hand with sick people, even if she hasn't any sense in the dairy." As
she finished, she heard a voice in her mind asking distinctly, "Why am I
doing this? Why should I take the trouble?" And there wasn't any answer.
Even when she dragged her mind for an excuse or even an idea, she could
not unearth one. She had stopped loving Jason thirty years ago; she had
stopped hating him at an indefinite period; she had stopped even
remembering that he was alive; yet she could not, without doing violence
to her own nature, let him die in the poorhouse. After all, it was not
her feeling or lack of feeling for him, it was the poorhouse and her
horror of the poorhouse that decided his fate.
"I'll have to go with you," John Abner was saying. "You can't manage it
by yourself."
"No. I'd rather have you. If we start right after dinner, that ought to
bring us back before the milking is over. The road is rough, I'm afraid.
We'll have to take some pillows in the back of the car."
"If he's bad off, perhaps Doctor Stout won't let him come," John Abner
suggested hopefully.
"Well, we'll stop at the doctor's house on the way. That's why I want to
start early."
That night, after the last of the day's work was over, they sat in front
of Dorinda's fire and talked as they used to talk when John Abner was a
boy and had not been warped by disappointment. Their thoughts were in
the future, not in the past, and Dorinda's visions were coloured by the
optimism which she had won more from perseverance than from any
convincing lesson of experience. Because of the very defects of his
qualities, John Abner suited her. It was true that his companionship had
its imperfections; but she would not have exchanged his sullen reticence
for the golden fluency of the new minister at Pedlar's Mill. Her
stepson's personality was attractive to her, for he gave an impression
of inexhaustible strength in reserve; and in the matter of disposition
he influenced her less as an example than as a warning, which, after
all, she reflected, was the kind of influence she needed.
"When all is said, we are as contented as we could expect to be," she
remarked, when he rose to go upstairs. "If you don't marry, we'll have a
pleasant old age by the fireside."
He laughed shortly, for he was in one of his gentler moods. There was a
charm, she thought, in his long thin features, his sallow skin with
bluish shadows about the mouth, his squinting eyes, and his straight
black hair which fell in stringy locks over his forehead.
"You may marry again yourself," he said abruptly. "You aren't as
handsome as you used to be, but you're still better-looking than anybody
about here."
She shook her head obstinately. "With white hair and wrinkles!"
"Well, there's more than white hair and wrinkles. I don't know what it
is, but it's there," he answered, as he turned away and went out of the
room.
In the morning she awoke with a feeling of despondency. Dread had come
over her while she slept, and she felt it dragging at her memory after
she had opened her eyes. Why had she yielded to that erratic impulse the
evening before? Why had she allowed those two men to impose on her? "If
is because I am a woman," she thought. "If I were a man, they would
never have dared." Yes, John Abner was right (here was another instance
of how right he so often was) and the county authorities had taken
advantage of her weakness. "Well, I've let myself in for it now, and
I'll have to go through with it," she said aloud, as she got out of bed
and began dressing.
At breakfast, while she tried to eat and could not because of the lump
in her throat, she reminded herself of her mother on the day of her
journey to the Courthouse. "All I need is a crape veil and a
handkerchief scented with camphor," she said, with a laugh.
"What are you talking about, Dorinda?" John Abner asked, with a frown.
"I was thinking of my mother. Poor Ma! She'd be living now if she hadn't
worried so."
"Well, she'd be nearly a hundred, I reckon. And don't you begin
worrying. Are you out of temper because you let those men put something
over on you?"
"I don't know. It seems different this morning. I can't see why I did
it."
"I heard the men talking about it in the barn. Somebody, the sheriff, I
reckon, had told Martin Flower, and he said you'd bitten off more than
you could chew."
Dorinda flushed angrily. "When I want Martin Flower's interference, I'll
ask for it."
Already a message had gone to Mirandy, and the old negress was waiting
outside for directions when breakfast was over. The floor and the
woodwork of the spare room must be scrubbed; the bed thoroughly aired
before it was made up; a fire kindled in the big fireplace; and the
red-bordered towels, which her mother had reserved for the visiting
elder, must be hung on the towel-rack. Last of all, Mirandy must
remember to keep a kettle boiling day and night on the brass footman.
"I wonder why I am doing all this?" Dorinda asked herself. Was it, as
she believed, from impersonal compassion? Or was it because her first
lover, merely because he had been the first, was impressed eternally on
the unconscious cells of her being? "No, I'm not doing it for Jason,"
she answered. "Even if I had never loved him, I couldn't let the man who
had owned Five Oaks die in the poorhouse."
"Before we bring him here," John Abner said, "you'd better warn Aunt
Mirandy that consumption is catching." He shook his head with a sardonic
smile. "I'm afraid he's going to be a nuisance; but I believe you would
have done the same thing if it had been smallpox."
She looked at him with inscrutable eyes. "I was never afraid of taking
things."
"But you don't even like Jason Greylock."
"Like him? Who could? What has that to do with the poorhouse?"
A look of rare tenderness, for he was not often tender, came into John
Abner's eyes while he squinted at her over the table. "Well, you're a
big woman, Dorinda, even if you're trying at times. There's an extra
dimension in you somewhere."
Though praise from John Abner was one of the things that pleased her
most, she was incapable, she knew, of draining the sweetness of the
moment before it escaped her. When happiness came to her she had always
the feeling that she was too dull or too slow to realize it completely
until it was, over, when she responded to the memory as she had never
responded to the actual occurrence.
"You're very good to me, John Abner," she answered. Her words were
insufficient, but the habit of reticence was, as usual, too strong for
her.
For hours she went about her work with the thoroughness that she exacted
of herself on days of mental disturbance. Not until the car was waiting
at the door, and Fluvanna was hastening out with robes and pillows, did
Dorinda turn aside from her ordinary activities, and go into the room
she had selected for Jason. Yes, everything was in order. The floor and
walls were clean; the windows had been closed after an airing; and the
fire burned brightly on the sunken stones in the fireplace. Even the big
iron kettle steamed away on the footman. There was soap in the soap-dish
on the washstand; an abundance of soft warm blankets covered the bed; on
the candlestand stood a blue thermos bottle, and her mother's Bible lay
beside it, with the purple bookmarker she had embroidered marking a
favourite text. "It ought to seem pleasant," she thought, "after the
poorhouse."
Outside, she found John Abner at the wheel of the car and Fluvanna
arranging the pillows on the back seat.
"Would you like to drive, Dorinda?"
"No, but I'll sit in front with you. When we come back, one of us will
have to sit with him, and I'd rather it would be you."
IX
They talked little on the long drive. John Abner was intent on the
wheel, and Dorinda held her cape closely about her, and gazed straight
ahead at the twisted road and the hazy brightness of the October
landscape. A veil of glittering dust drifted up from the meadows of
life-everlasting; in the underbrush by the fences, sumach and sassafras
made splashes of crimson and wine-colour; farther away, the changing
woods were tossed in broken masses against the cloudless arch of the
sky.
As they approached the Courthouse, the country was less thinly settled,
and throngs of barefooted children ran beside the car and offered
bunches of prince's feather and cockscomb. In some of the fields men
were ploughing, and among them Dorinda observed the phlegmatic faces of
Swedes or Germans. As the car sped by, they stopped in their ploughing
or cutting, and turned to stare curiously like slow-witted animals. Over
all was the blue haze of October and the drifting silver pollen of
life-everlasting.
At Doctor Stout's, a new green and white cottage near the road, which
looked as trivial as a butterfly on the edge of the autumnal solitude,
they were told that the doctor had already gone to the poorhouse.
"He was that upset he couldn't sleep last night," said Mrs. Stout, a
pretty, plump, deep-bosomed woman, in a pink and white gingham dress and
a starched apron. "It seemed to prey on him to think of Doctor Greylock,
who used to have the best practice around here, dying up yonder in the
poorhouse. He was so promising, too, they say, when he came back, and
his people owned that big place over near Pedlar's Mill. Drink was his
ruin, I reckon, and that made it so hard, for everybody was afraid to
take in a man that was out of his head. I couldn't have had him here on
account of the children and measles just broken out yesterday. But there
ought to be some way of caring for sick and crazy people without sending
them to the poorhouse. And now with all the poorhouses going, there soon
won't be any place for them but the gaol." She was a voluble person, but
at last the flow of words stopped, and they drove on between dusty
borders of sassafras.
"Is it true that Doctor Stout was born in a poorhouse?" Dorinda asked
presently.
"Nobody knows. It doesn't surprise me to hear that he was."
"And now Jason is dying in one. Is that the result of character or
merely accident, I wonder?"
"Of both probably," John Abner rejoined. "I've read of too many decent
human beings going on the rocks to believe the fable that virtue alone
will get you anywhere, unless it is to the poorhouse instead of the
gaol."
"There it must be now," Dorinda exclaimed, pointing to the right of the
road. "Do we turn in over that ditch?"
"It seems to be the only way. Hey! Get out of the road there!" shouted
John Abner to a skulking black and tan foxhound.
Withdrawn from the road, behind the fallen planks which had once made a
fence, the poorhouse sprawled there, in the midst of the
life-everlasting, like the sun-bleached skeleton of an animal which
buzzards had picked clean of flesh. The walls and roof were covered with
whitewash; there was whitewash on the smooth, round stones that bordered
the path to the door; and the few starved cedar trees in the yard were
whitewashed to the thin foliage at their tops. At one side, a few coarse
garments were fluttering from clothes-lines, and several decrepit
paupers were spreading wet things on the bushes that grew by the back
porch.
Like other relics of an abruptly changing era, the county poorhouse
possessed both the advantages and the disadvantages of desuetude. The
seven aged paupers and the one indigent young mother who now accepted
its charity were neglected, it is true, but they were neglected in
freedom. Where there was no system there was less room for interference.
If the coarse clothes were thin, they were as varied as the tempers or
the inclinations of the paupers. Though the fare was mean, the
complaints over it were bountiful. It is hard to be a pauper; it is
particularly hard to be an aged pauper; but if these nine inmates
(including the week-old infant) could have chosen between liberty and
fraternity, they would probably have preferred the scant food and the
rough clothes to the neat livery of dependence. Dorinda, however,
perceived none of the varied blessings attendant upon orderless
destitution. All she saw was the ramshackle building and the whitewashed
cedars, which reminded her vaguely of missionary stories of the fences
of dry bones surrounding the huts of Ethiopian kings. "It looks as bare
as the palm of my hand," she said aloud.
The doctor's Ford car was standing in front of the door, with one wheel
in a mudhole and one in a pile of trash; and when they stopped, an old
woman, who was hanging the wash to dry on the bushes, put down the wet
clothes and came over to meet them. She was so old that her skin was
like bark; her mouth was closed as tight as a nutcracker over her
toothless gums; and her small red eyes flickered between eyelids which
looked as if they had worn away. As she mumbled at them, she wiped her
steaming wet hands on her skirt.
"You ain't got any sweet stuff, is you, honey?" she whined, until the
doctor appeared at the door and beckoned them round the corner of the
house where the sunshine was falling. As usual he looked brisk, kind,
incurably sanguine.
"There is no longer any question. These county poorhouses must go," he
said, as they followed the beaten track which wound by the side of the
building. "It costs the county not a cent under two thousand dollars a
year to keep this place open for these eight inmates. It would be
cheaper in the end to board them at the City Home where there is some
system about the way things are managed." Then he lowered his voice,
which had been high and peremptory, as if he wished to be overheard. "We
brought Doctor Greylock here because he couldn't be left alone, and none
of the negroes would go near him. There's a scare about him, though he's
perfectly harmless. A little out of his dead now and then, but too weak
to hurt anybody even if he tried."
"Is he delirious now?"
"No, he's in his senses this morning, and quiet--you'll find him as
quiet as you could wish. Is there anybody to look after him at Five
Oaks?"
"We're not taking him to Five Oaks. There's no place for him there. But
I've got a nurse for him, Aunt Mirandy Moody. She knows how to take care
of the sick, and I believe the can manage him."
"Oh, anybody can manage him now," Doctor Stout said reassuringly.
A tremor of weakness passed over Dorinda. She felt that her knees and
elbows were shaking, and there was a meaningless noise in her ears. Was
it Jason of whom they were speaking? No, it was not Jason, for it seemed
to her that Jason had died long ago, so long ago that she couldn't
remember him. She was standing by the wall of the poorhouse, and an
obscure pauper, somebody who could be "easily managed," was dying
within. She dropped her eyelids to shut out the brown cloud, as thick as
the smoke of burning leaves, which rolled up from the meadows. When she
opened her eyes again the sunshine on the whitewashed wall dazzled her.
If only she had known! If only she could have looked ahead to this
moment! Those summer evenings thirty years ago, and this autumn day
beside the wall of the poorhouse! The whitewashed cedars, the sunken
road, the flat fields, the ridged earth where labourers moved slowly,
and over all the glittering dust of life-everlasting.
"He ought to drink as much milk as he can," Doctor Stout was saying in
his professional voice. "And eggs when he will take them. Every two
hours he should have nourishment in some form, and an eggnog with
whiskey three or four times a day. You can't expect him to do without
whiskey. I've got a bottle for you to take back with you. He may need
some on the way if he seems to be losing strength."
She nodded. "I learned a little when I was a girl in a doctor's office
in New York; but everything has changed since the war. You'll come over
to-morrow?"
"I'll drop in whenever I am called that way. If he gets much worse, you
can telephone me. I feel that he has a professional claim on me."
The weakness had gone now. She felt courageous and full of vitality, as
if the rich blood had surged up through her veins. With the return of
strength, her self-reliance, her calm efficiency, revived. She was
facing the present now, not the past, and she faced it imperiously.
"You think he is able to be moved?" she asked.
"Even if it is a risk,"--he met her gaze candidly,--"wouldn't anything
be better than to die in this place?"
She acquiesced by a gesture. Then, threading her way between the stunted
rosebushes, she spoke in a smothered voice, "Is he ready to go with
us?"
"He is waiting on the back porch. It's sunny there."
"The car is open, you know, but John Abner is putting up the top."
"Fresh air won't hurt him. You've plenty of rugs, I suppose, and he'll
need pillows."
"I've thought of that. You can fix the back seat like a bed. Of course
we shall drive very slowly." Glancing up at the sun, she concluded in
her capable manner: "It's time we were starting. John Abner and I both
have work to do on the farm."
Doctor Stout bent an admiring gaze on her, and she knew from his look
that he was thinking, "Sensible woman. No damned mushiness about her."
Aloud, he said, "He is ready to go. You'll find that he doesn't say
much. When a man has touched the bottom of things, there isn't much talk
left in him. But I think he'll be glad to get away."
"Well, I'll see what I can do." Stepping in front of him, she turned the
sharp angle of the wall and saw Jason lying on a shuck mattress in the
sunshine. Beneath his head there was a pile of cotton bags stuffed with
feathers and tied at the ends. Several patchwork quilts were spread over
him, and one of the old women was covering his feet as Dorinda
approached. His eyes were closed, and if he heard her footsteps on the
ground, he made no sign. A chain of shadows cast by the drying clothes
on the line fell over him, and these intangible fetters seemed to her
the only bond linking him to existence. While she looked down on him,
all connection between him and the man she had once loved was severed as
completely as the chain of shadows when the wind moved the clothesline.
He lay straight and stiff under the quilts, and above the variegated
pattern his features protruded, shrivelled, inanimate, expressionless,
like the face of a mummy that would crumble to dust at a touch. His eyes
beneath his closed lids were sunk in hollows from which the yellow
stains spilled over on his bluish cheeks. The chin under the short
stubble of beard was thrust out as if it would pierce the withered skin.
It was not the face of Jason Greylock. What she looked on was merely a
blank collection of features from which poverty and illness had drained
all human intelligence. Turning away, she saw through a mist the
doddering old woman who was fussing about the mattress and the decrepit
manager who was too ancient and incompetent for more serious employment.
"They've come for you. We'll get you away," Doctor Stout said in his
cheerful tones which rang with an artificial resonance. Then he turned
to Dorinda. "The stimulant is wearing off. He'll need something stronger
before he is able to start."
At the words, Jason opened his eyes and looked straight up at the sky.
"I am thirsty," he said, while his hand made an empty claw-like gesture.
If he were aware of their figures, she realized that they meant nothing
to him. He had withdrawn from the external world into the darkness of
some labyrinth where physical sensations were the only realities. While
she watched him it came over her with a shock that the last thing to die
in a human being is not thought, is not even spirit, but sensation.
One of the old women, who appeared to be in authority, brought a glass
of blue milk, and taking a flask from his pocket the doctor added a
measure of whiskey. Then lifting Jason's head, he held the glass to his
lips.
Suddenly, it seemed to Dorinda that her impressions of the actual scene
dissolved and slipped like quicksilver from her mind. She ceased to
look, ceased to think, overcome by an emotion which was not grief,
though it was the very essence of sadness. Closing her eyes, she waited
for some sound or touch that would restore the fading glow of her
reason. Why was she here? Where was it leading her? What was the meaning
of it all?
She heard a strangled voice gasp, "You're hurting me," and looking round
she saw that the doctor and John Abner were carrying Jason to the car.
"You'll feel better presently," the doctor said soothingly. "I'll give
you something for the pain."
Like an automaton, she followed them; like an automaton, she stepped
into the car and took her place by Jason's side on the back seat. She
had intended to drive home, but she knew that she was incapable of
controlling the big car. "Some one had better be back here with him,"
the doctor had insisted, and she had obeyed his directions in silence.
"I've put the whiskey under the rug. Give him an eggnog as soon as you
put him to bed."
The car started slowly, and they had driven for some miles before she
found sufficient courage to turn and look at the figure beside her.
Dazed by the sedative, he was staring straight in front of him,
oblivious of the autumn sunshine, oblivious of the uninteresting
country, oblivious of her presence, lost beyond reach in that dark
labyrinth of sensation. His face was the face of one who had come to the
edge of the world and looked over. It expressed not pain, not despair
even, but nothingness. A grey woollen comforter was tied over his head,
and his features appeared to have fallen away beneath the mummy-like
covering. He was neither young nor old, she saw; he was over and done
with, a thing with which time had finished. And he was a stranger to
her! She had never loved him; she had never known him until to-day. The
weight on her heart was so heavy that it was suffocating her. Again she
thought: "Why am I here? What is the meaning of it all?" Again she felt
as she had felt at her father's death: "The pathos of life is worse than
the tragedy."
They drove on in silence; but it was a silence that reverberated like
thunder in her brain. Nothing and everything was over. Ahead of her the
road sank between the autumn fields and the brilliant patches of woods.
The blue haze swam before her in the direction of the river. They passed
the same ragged white and black children, who held up the same withered
flowers. The same labourers were at work in the fields, bent in the same
gestures of ploughing. As they went by a house set far back from the
road, with a little crooked path leading up to a white wicket-gate, she
imagined herself walking up the path and through the wicket-gate into
another life.
John Abner looked back. "Am I going too fast? He coughs as if he were
choking."
She turned to Jason and replaced a pillow which had slipped from under
his head. His boots, with lumps of red clay still clinging to them, were
stretched out stiffly on the pile of rugs. And those worn boots with the
earth on the soles seemed to her so poignantly moving that her eyes
filled with tears. His cough stopped, and she spoke to him in a raised
voice as if he were at a distance, "Are you suffering now?"
If he heard her, he made no response. It seemed to her while she looked
at him that he was in reality at a distance, that everything but the
shell of physical pain in which he was imprisoned had already perished.
She wondered if he remembered her, or if her image had dropped from him,
with other material objects, in that blind wilderness. From his apathy,
she might have been no more to him than one of the old women in the
poorhouse. A shiver ran over her, as if she had been touched by a dead
hand. Youth, beauty, victory, revenge,--what did any of these things
signify before the inevitable triumph of time?
Yes, time had revenged her. If she had stood still, if she had not
lifted a finger to help, time would still have revenged her; for time,
she saw, always revenges one. She thought of the hot agony of that other
October afternoon. Of the patter of rain on the roof. Of the smell of
wet grass underfoot. Of the sodden sky. Of the branches whipping her
face.
They passed the station, where a train had just gone by; they passed the
old Haney place, where the new German tenant was ploughing; they passed
Honeycomb Farm and the fork of the road, where the burned cabin and the
blasted oak used to be. The new gate stood there now, and beyond it,
there was the sandy road through the meadows of Joe-Pyeweed and
life-everlasting. Against the sky, she could still see unchanged the
chimneys of Five Oaks. Then they spun easily down the wooded slope,
crawled over the patch of corduroy road, and, turning in at the bridge,
rolled up to the front porch of Old Farm.
"Well, we got him here," John Abner said, with a breath of relief.
As they helped Jason to alight, it seemed to Dorinda that his bones were
crumbling beneath her touch. If she had awakened to find that the whole
afternoon had been a nightmare, she would have felt no surprise. Even
the quiet house, with its air of patient expectancy, startled her by its
strangeness.
Mirandy, a big, strong, compassionate old negress, who was born for a
nurse but had missed her vocation until she was too old to profit by it,
came out to help, and among them they carried Jason into the spare room
and put him to bed. His clothes were so soiled and ragged that John
Abner went upstairs and brought down some woollen things of his own. A
fire blazed in the cavernous fireplace. Ripples of light and shadow
danced over the yellow walls. The whole room smelt of burning logs and
of the branches of pine on the mantelpiece. Warmth, peace, comfort,
enfolded them as they entered.
When they had undressed Jason and covered him up warmly, Dorinda brought
the eggnog, and Mirandy slipped her arm under the pillow and raised his
head while he drank it. The tormented look had gone from his face. About
his mouth the outline of a smile flickered.
"It feels good," he said, and closed his eyes as the glass was taken
away.
"You'll eat some supper?"
"Yes, I'll eat some supper."
"You're not in pain now?"
"No, I'm not in pain now."
He spoke in a dazed way, like a child that is repeating words it does
not understand. Had he forgotten that he had known her? Or had he
reached the depths from which all memories appear as frail as the bloom
on a tree? She did not know. She would never know probably. She had lost
even the wish to know. Whether he had loved her or not made no
difference. It made no difference whether or not he remembered. In that
instant beside the poorhouse wall, the old Jason had been submerged and
lost in this new Jason who was a stranger. Not in thirty years but in a
single minute, she had lost him. Stripped of associations, stripped of
sentiment, this new Jason was protected only by the intolerable pathos
of life. How futile, how unnecessary, it had all been,--her love, her
suffering, her bitterness.
He opened his eyes and looked at her.
"This isn't Five Oaks?"
"No, it is Old Farm."
"Old Farm? That is the Oakley place. Am I going to stay here?"
"Until you are better."
"Until I am better," he repeated.
"Are you comfortable now?"
He closed his eyes again. "Yes, it feels good."
"In a little while I'll give you some veronal and you will sleep."
A change passed over his face and he sighed, "I'd like to sleep."
She drew back and turned to go out of the room. Yes, the connection
between youth and middle age was broken for ever.
X
In the night she heard him coughing, and slipping into her flannel
wrapper, she went into the kitchen and beat up an egg with milk and
brandy. When she took it into his room, he appeared feverish and asked
for veronal. "But the brandy will undo it," he added mechanically. His
face was flushed and when she touched his hand it was burning. "Is it
near day?" he inquired.
"No, it is only one o'clock. I thought you were sleeping."
"I was, but I wake up this way. I've done it every night for months."
She gave him veronal, and then raised his head while he sipped the
eggnog. "An owl has been hooting so loud I thought it was at the
window," he said, looking up at her over the rim of the glass.
"It's up in the big pine. You've been dreaming."
The fire had burned down to a few embers, which flickered out when she
tried to stir them to life. A dim light from the screened lamp on the
floor behind the chintz-covered chair left the bed and his uncovered
face in shadow.
"Do you feel better?" she asked, as she was turning away.
"Yes, I feel better." His eyes followed her from the shadow with a
glance of mute interrogation.
"I'll put this stick by your bed." She went out into the hall and came
back with one of John Abner's hickory sticks. "If you want anything or
feel nervous, knock on the wall. I am a light sleeper, and Mirandy is in
the room off the kitchen."
She waited, but he did not answer. Had he understood her, or was he
incapable of grasping the meaning of sounds? It was like the
inconsistency of life, she thought, that he, who once had been so
voluble, should have become almost inarticulate at the end. She knew
that he was trying to give as little trouble as possible, yet he seemed
unable to put his wish into words.
Before going out, she made one last effort with the embers, but the wood
she threw into the fireplace did not catch. When she went over to the
bed again, Jason was lying with closed eyes. "He doesn't look as if he
could last much longer," she thought dispassionately.
The still October days drifted by, hazy, mellow, declining into the rich
light of the sunsets. With the dry weather and sufficient food after
starvation, Jason appeared to improve. The old wheel-chair which had once
belonged to Rose Emily was brought down from the attic, and he sat out,
muffled in rugs, on bright afternoons. He liked his meals, though he
never asked for them. Sometimes, after a hard spell of coughing, he
would say, "How long is it before I have my eggnog?"; yet he never
attempted to hasten the hour. Twice, after a severe hæmorrhage, they
believed he was dying, but he recovered and was wheeled out again on the
lawn. Day after day, he sat there in the sunshine, passive, silent,
wrapped in a curious remoteness which was like the armour of an
inscrutable reserve. Yet it was not reserve, she felt instinctively. It
was something thinner; vaguer, something as impalpable as a shadow. It
was, she realized suddenly one day, an emptiness of spirit. He was
silent because there was nothing left in him to be uttered. He was
remote because he had lost all connection with his surroundings, with
events, with the material structure of living. Through the autumn days
he would sit there, propped on pillows, in his wheel-chair between the
half-bared lilac bushes and the "rockery," where Mrs. Oakley had planted
portulaca over an old stump. His head would sink down into the rugs, and
his unseeing eyes would gaze up the road to the starry fields of the
life-everlasting. Behind him there was the porch and the long grey roof
where swallows were wheeling. From the locust trees by the wings a rain
of small yellow leaves fell slowly and steadily in the windless air,
turning once as they left the stem, and drifting down to the flagged
walk and the borders of sheepmint and wire-grass. His figure, bowed
under the rugs, seemed to her to become merely another object in the
landscape. He was as inanimate as the fields or the trees; and yet he
made the solitude more lonely and the autumn dreaminess more pensive.
His features had the scarred and seared look that is left in the faces
of men who had fought their way out of a forest fire. Only the look that
Jason wore now had passed from struggle into defeat. He appeared to be
waiting, without fear and without hope, for whatever might happen. "I've
seen so many people die," she thought, and then, "In fifty years many
people must die."
She had come home this afternoon a little earlier than usual, and, still
in riding breeches, she stood by the porch and looked down on the inert
figure in the wheel-chair. Jason's eyes were open, but she could not
tell whether he saw her or not. The mask of his features was as blank as
if an indestructible glaze were spread over his face; and he stared
straight before him, searching the road and the distant fields of
life-everlasting for something that was not there. Though his
helplessness was his only hold on her, she felt that it had become too
poignant for her to bear. If only he would speak! If only he would
complain! If only he would say what he was seeking! In the faint
sunshine, beneath the ceaseless rain of leaves, he gathered, a deeper
meaning, a fresher significance. A glamour of sadness enveloped him. For
an instant the memory of the Jason she had first known flickered over
him like a vanishing ray of sunlight. As the gleam faded, she felt that
he was passing with it into some unearthly medium where she could not
follow. It was, she told herself, only the endless riddle of mortality,
renewed again and yet again in each human being. It was the old baffling
sense of a secret meaning in the universe, of a reality beneath the
actuality, of a deep profounder than the deeps of experience. The
reserve of even one human being was impenetrable; the reserve of every
human being was impenetrable. Of what was he thinking? she wondered, and
knew that she could never discover. Had he loved her in the past, or had
his desire for her been merely a hunger? Would he have been faithful to
her if stronger forces had not swept him away? Which was the accident,
his love or his faithlessness? When it was over, had she dropped out of
his life, or had she continued to exist as a permanent influence? Was he
better or worse than she had believed him to be? She had never known,
and now she could never know. The truth would always elude her. She
could never wring his secret from this empty shell which was as
unfathomable as the sea. She felt that the mystery was killing her, and
she knew that it was a mystery which could never be solved.
She tried to ask, "How much did I mean in your life?" an found herself
reciting, parrot-like, "Do you feel any pain?"
He shook his head, without looking at her. His gaze was still on the
road where it dipped at the bridge and travelled upward into the dreamy
distance.
"Are you ready for your eggnog?" The effort to make her voice sound
light and natural brought tears to her eyes.
At last she had touched him. The quiver of appetite stole over his face,
and he turned his eyes, which were dark with pain, away from the road.
"Is it almost time?" This was what he lived for now, an egg with milk
and whiskey every four hours.
"It must be nearly. I'll go and see." As she still lingered, the quiver
on his face deepened into a look of impatience, and he repeated eagerly,
"You will go and see?"
"In a minute. Has the doctor been here?"
"Nobody has been here. A few people went by in the road, but they did not
stop."
"Something must have prevented the doctor. He will come to-morrow."
"It makes no difference. I am a doctor."
A thought occurred to her while she watched him. "Would you rather be at
Five Oaks? It might be managed."
He shook his head. "It doesn't matter. You are good to me here. I don't
know why." He broke off with a rough, grating cough which sounded like
the blows of a hammer. A few minutes afterwards, when the spell of
coughing was over, he repeated, so mechanically that the words seemed to
reach no deeper than his lips, "I don't know why."
He had not said as much as this since she had brought him to Old Farm,
and while she listened a piercing light flashed into her mind, as if a
lantern had been turned without warning on a dark road. In this light,
all the hidden cells of her memory were illuminated. Things she had
forgotten; things she had only dimly perceived when they were present;
swift impulses; unacknowledged desires; flitting impressions like the
shadow of a bird on still water,--all these indefinite longings started
out vividly from the penumbra of darkness. As this circle of light
widened, she saw Jason as she had first seen him more than thirty years
ago, on that morning in winter. She saw his dark red hair, his
brown-black eyes, his gay and charming smile with its indiscriminate
friendliness. Time appeared to stand still at that instant. Beyond this
enkindled vision there was only the fall of the locust leaves, spinning
like golden coins which grew dull and tarnished as soon as they reached
the ground. Then, as suddenly as it had come, the vision faded and the
light flickered out. There remained this stranger, huddled beneath the
rugs in the wheel-chair, and around him the melancholy stillness of the
October afternoon.
"People have to be kind to each other sometimes," she answered.
His brief animation had passed. He seemed to have forgotten his words as
soon as he had uttered them. The blank despair was in his eyes again as
he fixed them on the empty road, searching--searching. His face, so
scarred and burned out by an inner fire, wore a lost and abstracted
look, as if he were listening for some sound at a distance.
"I'll bring the eggnog in a minute," she added hastily, and went into
the house. She felt embarrassed by her rugged health, and by her firm
and energetic figure when she contrasted it with his diminished frame.
Yet her pity, she knew, could make no impression on vacancy.
As the weeks passed, she grew to look for his chair when she returned
from work in the fields. There was no eagerness, no anxiety even. There
was merely the wonder if she should still find him in the pale afternoon
sunshine, watching the road for something that never came. If he had
been absent, she would scarcely have missed him; yet, in a way, his
wheel-chair made the lawn, or the fireside on wet days, more homelike.
He was a poor thing, she felt, to look forward to, but at least he was
dependent upon her compassion.
Then one afternoon in November, when she returned, riding her white
horse through the flame and dusk of the sunset, she saw that the
wheel-chair was not in its accustomed place between the porch and the
"rockery." When she had dismounted at the stable door and watched the
bedding down of Snowbird, she walked slowly back to the house. Even
before she met Mirandy running to look for her, she knew that Jason was
dead.
"He 'uz settin' out dar de hull evelin'," began Mirandy, who being old
still spoke the vivid dialect of her ancestors. "He sot out dar jes' lak
he's done day in an' day out w'ile I wuz gittin' thoo wid de ironin'.
Den w'en de time come fuh his eggnog, I beat it up jes' ez light, en
tuck it out dar ter de cheer, en dar he wuz layin' back, stone daid, wid
de blood all ovah de rugs en de grass. He died jes' ez quick ez ern he
ain' nevah ketched on ter w'at wuz gwinter happen. 'Fo' de Lawd, hit
wa'n't my fault, Miss Dorindy. I 'uz jes' gittin' erlong thoo wid de
ironin', lak you done tole me."
"No, it wasn't your fault, Mirandy. Have you telephoned for the doctor?"
"Yas'm, Fluvanna, she done phone fuh 'im right straight away. We is done
laid 'im out on de baid. You'd 'low jes' ter look at 'im dat hit wuz a
moughty pleasant surprise ter find out dat he wuz sholy daid."
Turning away from her, Dorinda went into the spare room, where the fire
was out, and in deference to one of Aunt Mehitable's superstitions,
Mirandy had draped white sheets over the furniture and the pictures. The
windows were wide open. In the graveyard on the curve of the hill, she
could see the great pine towering against the evening sky. A stray sheep
was bleating somewhere in the meadow, and it seemed to her that the
sound filled the universe.
So at last he was dead. He was dead, and she could never know whether or
not he remembered. She could never know how much or how little she had
meant in his life. And more tragic than the mystery that surrounded him
at the end, was the fact that neither the mystery nor his end made any
difference. The passion that had ruined her life thirty years ago was
nothing, was less than nothing, to her to-day. She was not glad that he
was dead. She was not sorry that he had died alone.
Turning back the end of the sheet, she looked down on his face. Despair
had passed out of it. The scarred and burned look of his features had
faded into serenity. Death had wiped out the marks of the years, and had
restored, for an instant, the bright illusion of youth. He wore, as he
lay there with closed eyes, an expression that was noble and generous,
as if he had been arrested in some magnanimous gesture. This was what
death could do to one. He had wasted his life, he had destroyed her
youth; yet, in a few hours, death had thrown over him an aspect of
magnanimity.
She was standing there when John Abner came in from milking and joined
her. "Poor devil," he said. "I suppose it's the best thing that could
have happened."
"Yes, it's the best thing."
"Is there anybody we'd better get a message to?"
"No one I can remember. He had lost all his friends."
"Has the doctor been here?"
"Not yet, but Fluvanna telephoned for him."
"Then we might as well have the funeral to-morrow. There is no reason to
postpone it. He's been dying for months."
Yes, he had been dying for months; yet, she realized now, his death had
come to her with a shock. Though the moment had been approaching so
long, she felt that it had taken her by surprise, that she had not had
sufficient time to prepare.
"Of course, it isn't as if we could be expected to feel it," John Abner
said, reasonably enough, and she repeated vacantly: "No, of course it
isn't."
XI
The next afternoon, standing beneath an inclement sky in the overgrown
graveyard at Five Oaks, she wondered how, even after thirty years, she
could have become so insensible.
There had been rain in the night, and the weather was raw and wintry,
with a savage wind which prowled at a distance in the fields and woods.
Over the graveyard, where the sunken graves were almost obliterated by
periwinkle, the dead leaves were piled in sodden drifts which gave like
moss underfoot. The paling fence had rotted away, and white turkeys were
scratching in the weeds that edged the enclosure. Dampness floated down
in a grey vapour from the boughs of the trees. When the new minister
opened his mouth to speak his breath clung like frost to his drooping
moustache. Yet, bad as the day was, either compassion or curiosity had
drawn the nearer farmers and their families to Five Oaks, and a little
gathering of men and women who remembered the Greylocks in their
prosperity watched the lowering of Jason's body into the earth. In the
freshly ploughed field beyond, Mirandy and Fluvanna stood among an
inquisitive crowd of white and coloured children.
More than thirty years ago. More than thirty years of effort and
self-sacrifice--for what? Was there an unfulfilled purpose, or was it
only another delusion of life? The moaning wind plunged down on the dead
leaves and drove them in eddying gusts over the fields, over the road,
and into the open grave. It seemed to her that the sound of the autumn
wind, now rising, now sinking, now almost dying away, was sweeping her
also into the grave at her feet. She had no control over her memories;
she had no control over her thoughts. They stirred and scattered, as
aimless, as inanimate, as the dead leaves on the ground. Memories that
had outlived emotions, as empty as withered husks, were released from
their hidden graves, and tossed wildly to and fro in her mind. Little
things that she had forgotten. Little things that mean nothing when they
happen and break the heart when they are remembered. She felt no sorrow
for Jason. He was nothing to her; he had always been nothing; yet her
lost youth was everything. What she mourned was not the love that she
had had and lost, but the love that she had never had. Impressions
drifted through her thoughts, vague, swift, meaningless, without form or
substance. . . .
Out of this whirling chaos in her mind, Jason's face emerged like the
face of a marionette. Then dissolving as quickly as it had formed, it
reappeared as the face of Nathan, and vanished again to assume the
features of Richard Burch, of Bob Ellgood, and of every man she had ever
known closely or remotely in her life. They meant nothing. They had no
significance, these dissolving faces; yet as thick and fast as dead
leaves they whirled and danced there, disappearing and reassembling in
the vacancy of her thoughts. Faces. Ghosts. Dreams. Regrets. Old
vibrations that were incomplete. Unconscious impulses which had never
quivered into being. All the things that she might have known and had
never known in her life.
The minister's voice ceased at last. Since he had never seen Jason he
had trusted, perhaps imprudently, to his imagination, and Dorinda
wondered how he could have found so much to say of a life that was so
empty. She bent her head in prayer, and a few minutes afterwards, she
heard the thud of earth falling from the spade to the coffin. The red
clay fell in lumps, dark, firm, heavy, smelling of autumn. It fell
without breaking or scattering, and it fell with the sound of
inevitableness, of finality. For an eternity, she heard the thuds on the
coffin. Then the voice of the minister rose again in the benediction,
and she watched, as in a trance, John Abner bring the two flat stones
from the edge of the ploughed field and place them at the head and foot
of the grave.
She turned away, and became aware presently that the clergyman had
followed her and was speaking. "It is a sad occasion, Mrs. Pedlar," he
said, and coughed because her blank face startled the end of his remark
out of his mind. "A sad occasion," he repeated, stammering.
"All funerals are sad occasions," she responded, and then asked: "Will
you come to the house for a cup of coffee?"
She hoped he would refuse, and he did refuse after a brief hesitation.
He had a sick call to make near by, and already the day was closing in.
While he held her hand he spoke with unction of her generosity. Wherever
he went, he said, he heard of her good works. This, he realized, was a
concrete example of her many virtues, and he reminded her hopefully that
the greatest of these is charity. Then he went off in his Ford car, and
Dorinda stood where he had left her and stared after him as if she were
rooted there in the damp periwinkle.
"The wind is cutting. Come away," John Abner urged, taking her arm.
"Funerals are always depressing, but you did what you could." It was
true. She had done what she could, and she realized that this, also,
would not make any difference.
She walked away very slowly because she found that her knees were stiff
when she attempted to move. It was while she was treading on the spongy
earth at the edge of the ploughed field that she saw life crumble like a
mountain of cinders and roll over her. She was suffocated, she was
buried alive beneath an emptiness, a negation of effort, beside which
the vital tragedy of her youth appeared almost happiness. Not pain, not
disappointment, but the futility of all things was crushing her spirit.
She knew now the passive despair of maturity which made her past
suffering seem enviable to her when she looked back on it after thirty
years. Youth can never know the worst, she understood, because the worst
that one can know is the end of expectancy.
Smothered in this mountain of cinders, she walked to the old buggy and
stepped between the wheels to the front seat. A minute later they drove
past the barn where she would have killed Jason if her hand had not
wavered. Past the house where she had felt her heart crouching in animal
terror before the evil old man. Through the woods where the wet boughs
had stung her face. Rain. Rain. The sound of rain beating into her
memory. Rain on the shingled roof, pattering like the bare feet of
children. Rain on the hunched box-bush and the white turkeys. Rain on
the sandy road. Rain on the fork of the road, on the crushed leaves
smelling of autumn. Everything was before her then. There is no finality
when one is young. Though they had been unendurable while she had passed
through them, those years of her youth were edged now with a flame of
regret. She felt that she would give all the future if she could live
over the past again and live it differently. How small a thing her life
appeared when she looked back on it through the narrow vista of time! It
was too late now, she knew, for her youth was gone. Yet because it was
too late and her youth was gone, she felt that the only thing that made
life worth living was the love that she had never known and the
happiness that she had missed.
When she reached the house she went to her room in silence, and sank on
a couch in front of the fire as if she were sinking out of existence.
Fluvanna, finding her there a little later, helped to undress her and
went to tell John Abner that she was ill enough to have the doctor
summoned. Hearing her from the hall, Dorinda did not take the trouble to
contradict. The doctor did not matter. Illness did not matter. Nothing
mattered but the things of which life had cheated her.
Lying there in the shadowy firelight of the room, she heard the wind
wailing about the corners of the house and rustling in the old chimneys.
She saw the crooked shape of a bough etched on the window-panes, and she
listened for the soft thud of the branches beneath the sobbing violence
of the storm. Though the room was bright and warm, a chill was striking
through her flesh to the marrow of her bones. Shivering by the fire, she
drew the blankets close to her chin.
The door opened and John Abner came in. "Can't you eat any supper,
Dorinda?"
Behind him, in the glare of lamplight, she saw Fluvanna with a tray in
her hands. The blue and white china and the Rebekah-at-the-well tea-pot
lunged toward her.
"No, I can't eat a mouthful." Then changing her mind, she sat up on the
couch and asked for tea. When they poured it out for her, she drank
three cups.
"You got a chill, Dorinda. It was raw and wet out there."
"Yes, I got a chill," she replied; but it was the chill of despair she
meant.
"The wind is rising. We are going to have a bad storm. I suppose I'd
better go out again and take a look."
After he had gone, she lay there still shivering beneath the blankets,
with her eyes on the low white ceiling, where the firelight made
shimmering patterns. Outside, the wind grew louder. She heard it now at
a distance, howling like a pack of wolves in the meadow. She heard it
whistling round the eaves of the house and whining at the sills of the
doors. All night the gusts shook the roof and the chimneys, and all
night she lay there staring up at the wavering shadows of the flames.
And the youth that she had never had, the youth that might have been
hers and was not, came back, in delusive mockery, to torment her. It was
as if the sardonic powers of life assumed, before they vanished for
ever, all the enchanting shapes of her dreams. She remembered the past,
not as she had found it, but as she had once imagined that it might be.
She saw Jason, not as she had seen him yesterday or last year, but as he
was when she had first loved him. Though she tried to think of him as
broken, ruined, and repellent, through some perversity of recollection,
he returned to her in the radiance of that old summer. He returned to
her young, ardent, with the glow of happiness in his eyes and the smile
of his youth, that smile of mystery and pathos, on his lips. In that
hour of memory the work of thirty years was nothing. Time was nothing.
Reality was nothing. Success, achievement, victory over fate, all these
things were nothing beside that imperishable illusion. Love was the only
thing that made life desirable, and love was irrevocably lost to her.
Toward morning she fell asleep, and when she awoke at dawn the wind had
lulled and a crystal light was flooding the room. Within herself also
the storm was over. Life had washed over her while she slept, and she
was caught again in the tide of material things. Rising from the couch,
she bathed and dressed and went out of doors into the clear flame of the
sunrise.
Around her the earth smelt of dawn. After the stormy night the day was
breaking, crisp, fair, windless, with the frost of a mirage on the
distant horizon. The trees were bare overhead. Bronze, yellow, crimson
and wine-colour, the wet leaves strewed the flagged walk and the grass.
Against the eastern sky the boughs of the harp-shaped pine were
emblazoned in gold.
Turning slowly, she moved down the walk to the gate, where, far up the
road, she could see the white fire of the life-everlasting. The storm
and the hag-ridden dreams of the night were over, and the land which she
had forgotten was waiting to take her back to its heart. Endurance.
Fortitude. The spirit of the land was flowing into her, and her own
spirit, strengthened and refreshed, was flowing out again toward life.
This was the permanent self, she knew. This was what remained to her
after the years had taken their bloom. She would find happiness again.
Not the happiness for which she had once longed, but the serenity of
mind which is above the conflict of frustrated desires. Old regrets
might awaken again, but as the years went on, they would come rarely and
they would grow weaker. "Put your heart in the land," old Matthew had
said to her. "The land is the only thing that will stay by you." Yes,
the land would stay by her. Her eyes wandered from far horizon to
horizon. Again she felt the quickening of that sympathy which was deeper
than all other emotions of her heart, which love had overcome only for
an hour and life had been powerless to conquer in the end, the living
communion with the earth under her feet. While the soil endured, while
the seasons bloomed and dropped, while the ancient, beneficent ritual of
sowing and reaping moved in the fields, she knew that she could never
despair of contentment.
Strange, how her courage had revived with the sun! She saw now, as she
had seen in the night, that life is never what one dreamed, that it is
seldom what one desired; yet for the vital spirit and the eager mind,
the future will always hold the search for buried treasure and the
possibilities of high adventure. Though in a measure destiny had
defeated her, for it had given her none of the gifts she had asked of
it, still her failure was one of those defeats, she realized, which are
victories. At middle age, she faced the future without romantic glamour,
but she faced it with integrity of vision. The best of life, she told
herself with clear-eyed wisdom, was ahead of her. She saw other autumns
like this one, hazy, bountiful in harvests, mellowing through the blue
sheen of air into the red afterglow of winter; she saw the coral-tinted
buds of the spring opening into the profusion of summer; and she saw the
rim of the harvest moon shining orange-yellow through the boughs of the
harp-shaped pine. Though she remembered the time when loveliness was
like a sword in her heart, she knew now that where beauty exists the
understanding soul can never remain desolate.
A call came from the house, and turning at the gate, she went back to
meet John Abner, who was limping toward her over the dead leaves in the
walk. His long black shadow ran ahead of him, and while he approached
her, he looked as if he were pursuing some transparent image of himself.
"You are yourself again," he said, as he reached her. "Last night I was
disturbed about you. I was afraid you'd got a bad chill."
"It went in the night. The storm wore on my nerves, but it was over by
morning." Then before he could reply, she added impulsively, "Bear with,
my fancies now, John Abner. When I am gone, both farms will be yours."
"Mine?" John Abner laughed as he looked at her. "Why, you may marry
again. They are saying at Pedlar's Mill that you may have Bob Ellgood
for the lifting of a finger."
Dorinda smiled, and her smile was pensive, ironic, and infinitely wise.
"Oh, I've finished with all that," she rejoined. "I am thankful to have
finished with all that."
THE END
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