Part Third Life-everlasting
“For the next few years....”
I
For the next few years she gave herself completely to Five Oaks. Only by giving herself completely, only by enriching the land with her abundant vitality, could she hope to restore the farm. Reclaiming the abandoned fields had become less a reasonable purpose than a devouring passion in her mind and heart. Old Farm was managed by Nathan now, and since he had let his own place to a thrifty German tenant, he had, as Dorinda frequently reminded him, “all the time in the world on his hands.” The dairy work, which had prospered when three trains a day were run between Washington and the South, still remained under her supervision; but all the hours that she could spare were spent on the freshly ploughed acres of Five Oaks. Over these acres she toiled as resolutely as the pioneer must have toiled when he snatched a home from the wilderness. Though she had installed Martin Flower in the house, she had rejected Nathan’s idea of letting the farm “on shares” to the tenant. This was the only disagreement she had ever had with Nathan, and he had yielded at last to the habit of, command which had fastened upon her. As she grew older she clung to authority as imperiously as a king who refuses to abdicate. There were moments in these years when, arrested by some sudden check on her arrogance, she stopped to wonder if any man less confirmed in humility than Nathan could have stood her as a wife. But, immediately afterwards, she would reflect, with the faint bitterness which still flavoured her opinion of love, that if she had married another man, he might not have found her overbearing.
Though the gentleness of mood which had stolen over her that August evening had not entirely departed, it lingered above the bare reason of her mind as a tender flush might linger over the austere pattern of the landscape. After that evening she had drawn no nearer to her husband, yet she had felt no particular impulse to stand farther away. Their association had touched its highest point in the soft darkness of that night, and she knew that they could never again reach the peak of consciousness together. But the quiet friendliness of their intercourse was not disturbed by Dorinda’s interest in Five Oaks; and when, after a longer pursuit and a fiercer capture than usual, Lena finally married young Jim Ellgood, the days at Old Farm assumed the aspect of bright serenity which passes so often for happiness. Though Dorinda was not happy in the old thrilling sense of the word, she drifted, as middle age wore on, into a philosophy of acquiescence. John Abner was still her favourite companion, and he shared her ardent interest in Five Oaks. In time, she hoped he would marry some girl whom she herself should select, and that they would live with their children at Old Farm. When she suggested this to Nathan, he chuckled under his breath.
“It wouldn’t surprise me if he wanted his head when he comes to marrying,” he observed.
“Of course you think I am high-handed,” she rejoined.
“Well, it don’t make any difference to me what you are. And as long as you can manage me,” he added, “you needn’t worry about not keeping your hand in.”
“It’s for your own good anyway,” she retorted. “You’re too easy-going with everybody.”
“I know it, honey. I ain’t complaining.”
He was refilling his pipe from his shabby old pouch of tobacco, and while he prodded the bowl with his thumb, he lifted his eyes and looked at her with his sheepish smile.
“I heard ’em talking about Jason Greylock yesterday at the store,” he said.
She made a gesture of aversion. “What did they say?”
“Not much that I can recollect. Only that he is too lazy to come for his mail. He has buried himself in that house in the woods across Whippernock River, and he sometimes lets a whole month go by without coming to the post office.”
“Perhaps he hasn’t any way of getting over.”
“He’s still got his horse and buggy. I doubt if he’s really as poor as he makes out. He hires Aunt Mehaley Plumtree to cook for him and look after the poultry. She comes every morning and stays till dark.”
“To think of coming down to that after Five Oaks!”
“Well, the country goes against you when you ain’t cut out for a farmer. Since the old man brought him back from the North, I reckon Jason has had a hard row to hoe.”
“He wasn’t obliged to stay here,” she observed scornfully.
“No, but he was always too easy-going. A pleasant enough fellow when he was a boy; but soon ripe, soon rotten.”
“Oh, I give it up.” Dorinda was untying her apron while she answered. “He isn’t worth all the time we’ve wasted talking about him.”
“Good Lord, Dorinda! You haven’t been sitting here ten minutes.”
“Well, ten minutes will pick a bushel, as Ebenezer says. They are waiting for me over at Five Oaks.”
This was the secret of her contentment, she knew, breathless activity. If she was satisfied with her life, it was only because she never stopped long enough in her work to imagine the kind of life she should have preferred. While her health was good and her energy unimpaired, she had no time for discontent. If she had looked for it, she sometimes told herself, she could have found sufficient cause for unhappiness; but she was careful not to look for it.
In these years there were brief periods when her old dreams awakened. Beauty that seemed too fugitive to be real was still more a torment than a delight to her. The moon rising over the harp-shaped pine; the shocked corn against the red sunsets of autumn; the mulberry-coloured twilights of winter;—while she watched these things the past would glow again with the fitful incandescence of memory. But the inner warmth died with the external beauty, and she dismissed the longing as weakness. “You know where that sort of thing leads you,” she would tell herself sternly. “Three months of love, and you pay for it with all the rest of your life.”
Looking round at other women, she could not see that they were better off in the matter of love than she was herself. Even the few who had married the men they had chosen had paid for it—or so it appeared to her—with a lifetime of physical drudgery or emotional disappointment. She supposed they had compensations that she could not discover—otherwise how could they have borne with their lives?—but there was lot one among them with whom she would have changed places. Those who had been most deeply in love appeared to her to have become most bitterly disenchanted.
“I’ve a lot to be thankful for,” she would repeat, while she went out to struggle against he scrub pine or broomsedge.
At Five Oaks, during those first seasons, she converted her repressed energy into the work of destruction. She would watch the reclaiming of the waste places, the burning of the broomsedge, the grubbing up of the pin and the sassafras, as if the fire and smoke were clearing her life of its illusions. Her nightmare dream of ploughing under the thistles was translated into the actual event. Perhaps, as the years went by, the reality would follow the dream into oblivion. At thirty she had looked forward to forty, as the time of her release from van expectation; but when forty came, she pushed the horizon of her freedom still farther away. “Perhaps at fifty I shall be rid of it for ever,” she thought.
The winter had begin with a heavy snowstorm in December, and the week before Christmas Nathan went to bed with a cold which left him with at abscess in one of his teeth. There was no dental surgeon nearer than Richmond, and Doctor Stout had advised him to go to the city and have the tooth out as quickly as possible. “You won’t lave a minute’s peace until you do,” the doctor added decisively.
That was weeks ago, for Nathan had deferred the evil day until the twentieth of January when he was required as a witness in a lawsuit Bob Ellgood was bringing against the railroad. “As long as I’ve got to go to Richmond anyway, I might as well wait and kill two birds with one store,” he said.
A few days before the case was called his toothache began again with violence, and for two nights he had walked the floor in agony.
“You will be so thankful afterwards that it is over!” Dorinda assured him encouragingly.
She was busily seeding raisins for a plum pudding, and she paused long enough in her task to glance out of the window and shake her head. Though her forty-second birthday had just gone, the wintry flush in her cheeks and the imperious carriage of her head still created, at a little distance, the aspect of youth. There was a white lock on her forehead; but the premature greyness appeared theatrical rather than elderly above the intense blue of her eyes. “You look as good to me as you ever did,” Nathan had said to her on her birthday.
As she turned from the window and put down the bowl of raisins, a frown wrinkled her forehead. “I wonder if it will ever stop snowing?” she said.
For days the weather had been bitterly cold, and the bare country had frozen under a leaden sky. Then at sunset the evening before a red fire had streamed over the rim of the horizon, and in the night snow had begun to fall. When Dorinda had gone out to the barn at five o’clock, she had found the landscape covered with a white blanket and deep drifts at the corners of the house and on the north side of the well and the woodpile. The blackness had been so thick that she had been obliged to walk in the flitting circle of light her lantern had cast on the ground. She had already sent off the butter to meet the five o’clock train to Washington; but Nimrod had overslept himself, and Nathan had hurried to the cabin to wake him, while John Abner had harnessed the horses to the wagon. Even then the coloured boy had had to take his breakfast with him and eat it at the station. If the train had been delayed, the butter would not have reached Washington until the day was well advanced.
All the morning and afternoon the flakes were driven in the high wind. Though Dorinda could see only a few feet in front of her, she knew that the dim fleecy shapes huddled on the lawn were not sheep but lilac bushes and flower-beds. The animals and the birds had long ago fled to shelter. As soon as the snow stopped falling the crows would begin flying over the fields; but now the world appeared as deserted as if it were the dawn of creation. In the kitchen, where she stayed when she was not obliged to be in the dairy, there was an ashen light which gave everything, even the shining pots and pans, an air of surprise. Fluvanna, who was stirring the mixture for the plum pudding, sat as close to the stove as she could push her chair, and shivered beneath her shawl of knitted grey wool.
“Well, I reckon I’ll be glad to get it over,” Nathan said in a mournful voice. “I’ve stood it’ about as long as I can.”
He had dropped disconsolately into a chair by the table, and sat with his hands hanging helplessly between his knees. His face was tied up in a white silk handkerchief which Dorinda had given him at Christmas, and while she looked at him with sympathy, she could not repress a smile at the comical figure he made. Like a sick sheep! That was the way he always looked when anything hurt him. He was a good man; she was sincerely attached to him; but there was no use denying that he looked like a sick sheep.
“Nimrod can drive you over with the butter in the morning,” she rejoined. “Then you can have your tooth pulled before you have to go to court.”
Afterwards, when she recalled this conversation, the ashen light of the kitchen flooded her mind. A small thing like that to decide all one’s future! Yet it seemed to her that it was always the little things, not the big ones, that influenced destiny; the fortuitous occurrence instead of the memorable occasion. The incident of his going was apparently as trivial as her meeting with Jason in the road, as the failure of her aim when the gun had gone off, as the particular place and moment when she had fallen down in Fifth Avenue. These accidents had changed utterly the course of her life. Yet none of them could she have foreseen and prevented; and only once, she felt, in that hospital in New York, had the accident or the device of fortune been in her favour.
“Yes, I’ll do it,” Nathan repeated firmly. “Ebenezer or Nimrod can meet the evening train. That ought to get me home in time for supper.”
“If this keeps up,” Dorinda observed, “everything will be late.”
In the morning, as she had foreseen, everything was an hour later than usual. “The train is obliged to be behindhand,” she thought, “so it won’t really matter.” Though it was still snowing, the wind had dropped and the stainless white lay like swan’s-down over the country. All that Dorinda could see was the world within the moving circle of the lantern; but imagination swept beyond to the desolate beauty of the scene. “I’d like to go over with you,” she said, when they had finished breakfast, “only the roads will be so heavy I oughtn’t to add anything on the horses.”
“It will be pretty hard driving,” Nathan returned. “I hope I shan’t take cold in my tooth.”
“Oh, I can wrap up your face in a shawl, and I’ve got out that old sheepskin Pa used to use. You couldn’t suffer more than you did last night. Doctor Stout says the trouble isn’t from cold but from infection.”
He shook his head dolefully. “No, I couldn’t stand another night as bad as that. The train will be warm anyhow, and even the drive won’t be much worse than the barn was this morning. Jim Ellgood has his barn heated. I wonder if it wouldn’t be a good idea for us to heat ours next year. Milking ain’t much fun when your hands are frostbitten.”
“Yes, it would be a good idea,” she conceded inattentively, while she brought a pencil and a piece of paper and made a list of the things she wished him to buy in town. “You may hear something about the war in Europe,” she added, in the hope of diverting his mind from the pain in his tooth. Nathan was the only man at Pedlar’s Mill who had taken the trouble to study the battles in France, and even Dorinda, though she made no comment, thought he was going too far when he brought home an immense new map of Europe and spent his evenings following the march of the German Army. Already lie had prophesied that we should be drawn into the war before it was over; but like his other prophecies, this one was too farsighted to be heeded by his neighbours.
When it was time for him to start, and Nimrod had brought the wagon to the door, she wrapped Nathan’s face in her grey woollen scarf and tied the ends in a knot at the back of his head. “You can get somebody to undo you at the station.”
He smiled ruefully. “No, I don’t reckon I’d better get on the train tied up like this. I must look funny.”
“It doesn’t matter how you look,” she responded; but she could not keep back a laugh.
As the wagon ploughed through the snow, she stood there, with her shawl wrapped tightly over her bosom and the lantern held out into the blackness before dawn. The air was alive with a multitude of whirling flakes, which descended swiftly and sped off into the space beyond the glimmer of her lantern. After the wagon had disappeared the silence was so profound that she could almost hear the breathless flight of the snow-flakes from the veiled immensity of the sky. By the glow of the lantern she could just distinguish the ghostly images of trees rising abruptly out of the shrouded stillness of the landscape. While she lingered there it seemed to her that the earth and air and her own being were purified and exalted into some frigid zone of the spirit. Humanity, with its irksome responsibilities and its unprofitable desires, dropped away from her; but when she turned and entered the house, it was waiting in the ashen light to retard her endeavours.