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.”