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.”