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!