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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!