II
In the kitchen John Abner was lingering over his breakfast, and Fluvanna was frying bacon and eggs, while she complained of the weather in a cheerful voice.
“Are the cows all right?” Dorinda inquired of her stepson. Until the storm was over, the cows must be kept up, and John Abner, who was a diligent farmer, had been out to feed and water them.
“Yes, but it’s rough on them. It’s still as black as pitch, but the sooner we get the milking over the better. The hands are always late on a morning like this.”
Dorinda glanced at the tin clock on the shelf. “It isn’t five o’clock yet. We’ll start as soon as you finish breakfast whether the other milkers have come or not. The cows can’t wait on the storm.”
“It’s a pity Father had to go to town to-day.”
“It may be fortunate that something decided him. The doctor said he wouldn’t be any better until he had that tooth out. He walked the floor all night with whiskey in his mouth.”
The smile that came into Dorinda’s eyes when she looked at her stepson made her face appear girlish, in spite of its roughened skin and the lines which were deeper in winter. “I see the lanterns outside now,” she added. “The women must be on the way to the milking.” Wrapping her shawl over her head, she took down a coat of raccoon skins, which was hanging behind the door, and slipped her arms into the shapeless sleeves. Then going out on the back porch, she felt under a snow-laden bench for the overshoes she had left there last evening. Dawn was still far away, and in the opaque darkness she could see the lanterns crawling like frozen glowworms through the whirling snow, which was blown and scattered in the glimmering circles of light.
In one of the long low buildings where the milk cows were sheltered, she found a few grotesquely arrayed milkers. From the beginning she had employed only women milkers, inspired by a firm, though illogical, belief in their superior neatness. Yet she had supplemented faith with incessant admonition, and this was, perhaps, the reason that the women wore this morning neat caps and aprons above a motley of borrowed or invented raiment. When she entered, stepping carefully over the mixture of snow and manure on the threshold, they greeted her with grumbling complaints of the weather; but before the work was well started they had thawed in the contagious warmth of her personality, and were chattering like a flock of blackbirds in a cherry tree. Since it is the law of African nature to expand in the sunshine, she was particular never to wear a dismal face over her work.
For the first minute, while she hung the lantern on the nail over her head, she felt that the meadow-scented breath of the cows was woven into an impalpable vision of summer. Though she shivered outwardly in the harsh glare of light, a window in her mind opened suddenly, and she saw Jason coming toward her through the yellow-green of August evenings. As with her mother’s missionary dream, these visitations of the past depended less upon her mood, she had discovered, than upon some fugitive quality in time or place which evoked them from the shadows of memory. Concealing a shiver of distaste, she turned away and bent over a milk pail.
“Your fingers are stiff, Jessie, let me try her a moment.”
Hours later, when light had come and the work of the dairy was over for the morning, she went back into the house, and the ashen light went with her over the threshold. Fluvanna was busy with dinner, and a pointer puppy named Pat was fast asleep by the stove. Young Ranger, the son of old Ranger, lay on a mat by the door, and though many Flossies had passed away, there was always a grey and white cat bearing the name to get under one’s feet between the stove and the cupboard. The room, Dorinda told herself, was more cheerful than it had ever been. She remembered that her mother could never afford curtains for the windows, and that Fluvanna had laughed at her when she had bought barred muslin and edged it with ruffles. “Good Lord, Miss Dorinda, who ever heard tell!” the girl exclaimed. Yet, in the end, the curtains, with other innovations, had become a part of the established order of living. Why was it so difficult, she wondered, to bring people to accept either a new idea or a new object? Nathan was the only man at Pedlar’s Mill who lived in the future, and Nathan had always been ridiculed by his neighbours. The telephone, the modern churn, and the separator, what a protracted battle he had fought for each of these labour-saving inventions! He was talking now of the time when they would have an electric plant on the farm and all the cows would be milked and the cream separated by electricity. Was this only the fancy of a visionary, or, like so many of Nathan’s imaginary devices, would it come true in the end?
At twelve o’clock John Abner came in for dinner, and, after a hurried meal, went out to help clear away the snow from the outbuildings. As there was no immediate work to be done, Dorinda sat down before the fire in her bedroom and turning to her workbasket, slipped her darning-egg into one of Nathan’s socks. She disliked darning, and because she disliked it she never permitted herself to neglect it. Her passionate revolt from the inertia of the land had permeated the simplest details of living. The qualities with which she had triumphed over the abandoned fields were the virtues of the pioneers who had triumphed over life.
The room was quiet except for the crackling of the flames and the brushing of an old pear-tree against the window. In the warmth of the firelight the glimpse of the snow-covered country produced a sensation of physical comfort, which stole over her like the Sabbath peace for which her mother had yearned. Lifting her eyes from her darning, she glanced over the long wainscoted room, where the only changes were the comforts that Nathan had added. The thick carpet, the soft blankets, the easy chair in which she was rocking,—if only her mother had lived long enough to enjoy these things! Then the thought came to her that, if her parents had been denied material gifts, they had possessed a spiritual luxury which she herself had never attained. She had inherited, she realized, the religious habit of mind without the religious heart; for the instinct of piety had worn too thin to cover the generations. Conviction! That, at least, they had never surrendered. The glow of religious certitude had never faded for them into the pallor of moral necessity. For them, the hard, round words in her great-grandfather’s books were not as hollow as globes. Her gaze travelled slowly over the rows of discoloured bindings in the bookcases, and she remembered the rainy days in her childhood when, having exhausted the lighter treasures of adventure, she had ploughed desperately in the dry and stubborn acres of theology. After all, was the mental harvest as barren as she had believed? Firmness of purpose, independence of character, courage of living, these attributes, if they were not hers by inheritance, she had gleaned from those heavy furrows of her great-grandfather’s sowing. “Once a Presbyterian, always a Presbyterian,” her mother had said when she was dying.
As the afternoon wore on she grew restless from inaction, and the ruddy firelight, which had been so pleasant after the cold morning, became oppressive. Putting her work basket aside, she went out into the hall and opened the back door, where Ebenezer, with a comforter of crimson wool tied over his head and ears, was shovelling the snowdrifts away from the angle of the porch. At a distance other men were digging out the paths to the barn, and the narrow flagged walk to the dairy was already hollowed into a gully between high white banks.
Ebenezer, a big, very black negro, with an infinite capacity for rest and the mournful gaze of an evangelist, wielded his shovel vigorously at the sound of the opening door, while he hummed in a bass voice which was like the drone of a tremendous beehive. He was subject to intervals of dreaminess when he would stop work for ten minutes at a time; but the only attention Dorinda had bestowed on his slackness was a mild wonder if he could be thinking.
“Try to get that snow away before dark, Ebenezer,” she said, “and tell Nimrod he must start earlier than usual to meet the evening train.”
Turning back into the empty hall, she was surprised to find that she had begun to miss Nathan. It was the first time since her marriage that he had spent a whole day away from the farm, and she realized that she should be glad to have him in the house again. The discovery was so unexpected that it startled her into gravity, and passing the kitchen, where she saw Fluvanna poking wood into the open door of the stove, she walked slowly into her room and stood looking about her as if a fresh light had fallen across her surroundings. Yes, incredible as it was, she really missed Nathan! Though she had never loved him, after nine years of marriage she still liked him with a strong and durable liking. It was a tribute, she realized, to her husband’s character that this negative attachment should have remained superior to the universal law of diminishing returns. No woman, she told herself, could have lived for nine years with so good a man as Nathan and not have grown fond of him. She recognized his disadvantages as clearly as ever; yet recognizing them made little difference in her affection. She liked him because, in spite of his unattractiveness, he possessed a moral integrity which she respected and a magnanimity which she admired. He had accepted her austerity of demeanour as philosophically as he accepted a bad season; and to love but to refrain from the demands of love, was the surest way he could have taken to win her ungrudging esteem.
When she went out to remind Nimrod that he must start earlier to meet the six o’clock train, the snow was light and feathery on the surface, and the air was growing gradually milder. At sunset the sky was shattered by a spear of sunshine which pierced the wall of clouds in the west. Between that golden lance and the solitary roof under which she stood swept the monotonous fields of snow.
“If it clears, there’ll be a good moon to-night,” she thought.
When the milking hour came she yielded to the persuasions of John Abner and did not go out to the barn. “It is time you learned that nobody is indispensable,” he said, half sternly, half jestingly. “There are mighty few jobs that a full-grown man can’t do as well as a woman, and loafing round a cow-barn in wintertime isn’t one of them.”
“The negroes get so careless,” she urged, “if they aren’t watched.”
He was standing in front of the fire, and while he held out his stout boots, one by one, to the flames, the snow in the creases of the leather melted and ran down on the hearth. The smell of country life in winter—a mingled odour of leather, manure, harness oil, tobacco, and burning leaves—was diffused by the heat and floated out with a puff of smoke from the chimney. His features, seen in profile against the firelight, reminded her of Jason. John Abner was not really like him, she knew; but there were traits in every man, tricks of expression, of gesture, of movement, which brought Jason to life again in her thoughts. Twenty-two years ago she had known him! Twenty-two years filled to overflowing with dominant interests; and yet she could see his face as distinctly as she had seen it that first morning in the russet glow of the broomsedge. Dust now, she told herself, nothing more. Her memories of him were no better than deserted wasps’ nests; but these dry and brittle ruins still clung there amid the cobwebs, in some obscure corner of her mind, and she could not brush them away. Neither regret nor sentiment had preserved them, and yet they had outlasted both sentiment and regret.
With a start of exasperation, she tore her mind from the past and glanced down at John Abner’s clubfoot. “Are those boots comfortable?” she asked gently.
“Oh, they do as well as any,” he replied irritably. Though any reference to his deformity annoyed him, there were times when she felt obliged to allude to it as a factor in his career. For good or ill, that clubfoot, like the mark of Jason in her life, had been his destiny. With his unusual gifts and without the sensitive shrinking from crowds which his lameness had developed into a disease, he might have achieved success in any profession that he had chosen. “You stay by the fire,” he added, “while I take a turn at the bossing.”
She nodded. “Very well, I’ll be in the dairy when you are ready for me.”
“I’ll manage the whole business if you’ll let me.”
“But I shan’t let you.” She was smiling as she answered, and she perceived from his face that he was big enough to respect her for her inflexible purpose. While authority was still hers she would cling to it as stubbornly as she had toiled to attain it.
He went out laughing, and she dropped back in her chair to wait until the hour came for her work in the dairy. John Abner was right, of course. One of the exasperating things about men, she reflected, was that they were so often right. It was perfectly true that she could not stay young for ever, and at forty-two, after twenty years of arduous toil, she ought to think of the future and take the beginning of the hill more gradually. Though she was as strong, as vital, as young, in her arteries at least, as she had ever been, she could not, she realized, defend herself from the inevitable wearing down of the years. Her eyes wandered to the mirror in the bureau which had belonged to her mother, and it seemed to her that, sitting there in the ruddy firelight, the magic of youth enveloped her again with a springtime freshness. Her eyes looked so young in the dimness that they bathed her greying hair, her weatherbeaten skin, and her tall, strong figure, which was becoming a little dry, a trifle inelastic, in the celestial blueness of a May morning.
“I wonder if it is because I’ve missed everything I really wanted that I cannot grow old?” she asked herself with a start.
It was seven o’clock when she returned from the dairy, and John Abner was already in the kitchen demanding his supper.
“The train is certain to be hours late,” he said. “There’s no use waiting any longer for Father.”
“Yes, we might as well have supper. I can cook something for him when he comes.”
“I saw Mr. Garlick going over a few minutes ago. His daughter, Molly, went down yesterday with young Mrs. Ellgood to a concert. Mrs. Ellgood has always been crazy about music. Did you ever hear her play on the violin?”
“No, I never went anywhere even before I was married. I’m glad she’s coming up with your father. He always liked her in spite of the fact that she despises the country.”
When supper was over, and John Abner had eaten with an amazing appetite, they went back into her bedroom and sat down to wait before the fire. Though she had never been what Nathan called “an easy talker,” she could always find something to say to her stepson; and they talked now, not only of the farm, the spring planting, the new tractor-plough they had ordered, but of books and distant countries and the absurd illustrations in the Lives of the Missionaries, which John Abner was reading for the fourth time.
“Alfalfa has been the making of Five Oaks,” Dorinda said. “It’s a shame Pa never knew of it.”
“I wonder if Doctor Greylock ever comes back to his farm. If he does, he must be sorry he lost it.”
“Well, he ruined the place, he and his father before him. It was no better than waste land when we bought it.”
John Abner bent over to caress the head of the pointer. “I can’t blame anybody for wanting to quit,” he said. “There’s a lot to be said for those missionary chaps. They were the real adventurers, I sometimes think.”
He rose from his chair and shook himself. “Why, it’s almost ten o’clock. There’s no use staying up any longer. If we’ve got to wake before five, it is time we were both asleep.”
“I believe I hear the buggy now.” Dorinda bent her ear listening. “Isn’t that a noise on the bridge? Or is it only another branch cracking?”
“You can’t hear wheels in this snow. But I’ll go out and take a look round. There’s a fine moon coming up.”
When he had unbarred the front door, she slipped into her raccoon coat and overshoes, and flung her knitted shawl over her head. After a minute or two, she saw John Abner’s figure moving among the shrouded trees to the gate, and descending the steps as carefully as she could, she followed slowly in the direction he had taken. By the time she was midway down the walk, he had disappeared up the frozen road. Except for the lighted house at her back she might have been alone in a stainless world before the creation of life. A cold white moon was shedding a silver lustre over the landscape, which appeared as transparent as glass against the impenetrable horizon. Even the house, when she glanced round at it, might have been only a shadow, so unreal, so visionary, it looked in the unearthly light of the snow. While she lingered there it seemed to her that the movement of the air, the earth, and the stars, was suspended. Substance and shadow melted into each other and into the vastness of space. Not a track blurred the ground, not a cloud trembled in the sky, not a murmur of life broke the stillness.
Presently, as she drew nearer the gate, a moving shape flitted in from the trees by the road, and John Abner called to her that the buggy was in sight. “I’ll wait and bed down the mare,” he said. “Nimrod will be pretty hungry, I reckon, and he won’t look after her properly.”
“Well, I’ll go right in and fix supper for both of them.”
Without waiting for the vehicle, she hurried into the house and replenished the fire in the stove. Thin, while she broke the eggs and put on water to boil for coffee, she told herself that Nathan’s coffee habit was as incurable as a taste for whiskey. The wood had caught and the fire was burning well when John Abner appeared suddenly in the doorway. He looked sleepy and a trifle disturbed.
“That wasn’t Father after all,” he said. “They told Nimrod there wasn’t any use waiting longer. He was shaking with cold, so I sent him to bed. As soon as I’ve made the mare comfortable, I’ll come and tell you all about it.”
“I was just scrambling some eggs. I wish you’d eat them. I hate to waste things.”
“All right. I’ll be back in a jiffy.”
He ran out as quickly as his lameness would permit, and she arranged the supper on the table. After all, if Nathan wasn’t coming home to-night, John Abner might as well eat the eggs she had scrambled. There was no sense in wasting good food.
After attending to the mare the boy came in and began walking up and down the floor of the kitchen. He did not sit down at the table, though Dorinda was bringing the steaming skillet from the stove. “It’s a nuisance all the wires are down,” he said presently.
“Yes, but for that we might telephone.”
“The telegraph wires have fallen too. Nimrod said they didn’t know much more at the store than we do.”
“Well, you’d better sit down and eat this while it’s hot. It doesn’t do any good to worry about things.”
“One of the coloured men, Elisha Moody, told Nimrod he would be coming home in an hour, and he would stop and tell us the news. Mr. Garlick is going to wait at the station until his daughter comes.”
“The news?” she asked vaguely. For the first time the idea occurred to her that John Abner was holding back what he had heard. “Doesn’t Nimrod know when the train is expected?”
“Nobody knows. The wires are broken, but the train from Washington went down and came up again with news of a wreck down the road. I don’t know whether it is Father’s train or another, Nimrod was all mixed up about it. He couldn’t tell me anything except that something had happened. The thing that impressed Nimrod most was that all the freight men carried axes. He kept repeating that over and over.”
“Axes?” Dorinda’s mind had stopped working. She stood there in the middle of the kitchen floor, with the coffee-pot in her hand, and repeated the word as if it were strange to her. Behind her the fire crackled, and the pots of rose-geraniums she had brought away from the window-sill stood in an orderly row on the brick hearth.
“I suppose they had to cut the coaches away from the track,” replied John Abner indefinitely. “Elisha will tell us more when he stops by. He’s got more sense than Nimrod, who was scared out of his wits.”
“I would have given him some supper. Why didn’t he come in?”
“He said his wife was waiting for him and he wanted to get to his cabin.”
Dorinda poured out the coffee and carried the pot back to the stove. “I’m afraid your father will catch his death of cold,” she said anxiously, “and with that tooth out!”
She was fortified by a serene confidence in Nathan’s ability to take care of himself. The only uneasiness she felt was on account of the abscess. With all his good judgment, when it came to toothache he was no braver than a child.
John Abner seemed glad to get the hot coffee. “You might as well keep some for Elisha,” he suggested. “It’s almost time he was coming and I know he’ll be thankful for something hot.”
Though he ate and drank as if he were hungry, there was a worried look in his face, and he kept turning his head in the direction of the road.
“I don’t suppose it’s anything really serious,” Dorinda remarked reassuringly. “If it had been, we should certainly have heard it sooner.”
Dropping into a chair beside him, she raised a cup of coffee and drank it slowly in sips. Presently, notwithstanding her effort to minimize the cause for alarm, she became aware that anxiety was stealing over her as if it emanated from her surroundings. She felt it first in the creeping sensation which ran like spiders over her flesh; then in an almost imperceptible twitching of her muscles; and at last in a delicate vibration of her nerves, as if a message were passing over electric wires in her body. Then, suddenly, the fear mounted to her brain, and she found herself listening like John Abner for the crunching of wheels in the snow.
“Do you hear anybody, John Abner?”
“A branch snapped, that was all. I’ll make up the fire in your chamber. It’s more comfortable in there.”
After he had gone into the bedroom, she fed the two dogs and the cat before she washed the dishes and placed the coffee where it would keep hot for Elisha. As she was leaving the kitchen she noticed the rose-geraniums and moved the pots farther away from the heat. “If we are going to keep up the fire, it will be too warm for them there,” she thought.