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.