IV
Waking in the blackness before dawn, she heard John Abner come downstairs and stop in the hall to light his lantern.
“I ought to go out to the milking,” she thought, and then more slowly, “I can’t believe that Nathan is dead.”
Would the idea ever grow familiar to her? Could she ever live with the fact, acknowledged and yet unregarded, as she had lived with the fact of her marriage? “There never was a better man in the world,” she said aloud. Here on the farm she found herself missing him with the first vague sense of loss. The insensibility which had protected her at the station disappeared when her mind dwelt on his good qualities,—his kindness, his charity, his broad tolerance of her prejudices. She knew that she should miss him more and more in all the details of the farm, and that she should begin to sorrow for him as soon as she had time to realize that she had lost him for ever. Yesterday was a void in her mind. When she thought of the long day after her return from the station, she could remember only the incredible tenderness of John Abner, and the visit in the afternoon from James Ellgood, who had told her that the news of the wreck had just travelled as far as the farms beyond Whippernock River, and that the absent minister was returning at midnight.
On this, the second day after Nathan’s death, the primitive ceremonies of the funeral began. The earliest and one of the most depressing signs of mourning was the loud demoralization of the negroes, who rose to the funeral as fish to bait, and became immediately incapable of any work except lamenting the dead. As long as there was hope left in tragedy, they were able to brace themselves to Herculean exertions; but superstition enslaved them as soon as death entered the house. The cows, of course, had to be milked; but with the exception of the milking and the necessary feeding of the stock, the place was like an abandoned farm until the burial was over. Though Nathan’s charred body remained at Pedlar’s Mill, the pall of mourning extended to Old Farm. John Abner had even suggested sending a telegram to the hotel and the dairy in Washington and letting the milk spoil; but the thought of all the good cream that would be thrown away was too much for Dorinda’s economical instincts, and she had checked the impulse with the reminder that Nathan had hated a waste. Yes, he had hated a waste, it is true, but he had also loved a funeral. She remembered her mother’s death, and the completeness, the perfection, of his arrangements.
“Am I too hard?” Dorinda asked herself. “Ought I not to see that everything gets so upset? After all, as Fluvanna says, a person does not die but once.” The small ironic demon of her sagacity concluded, in spite of her will: “It is a good thing, or there wouldn’t be any room left for life.”
Breakfast was no sooner over than she was engulfed in a continuous deluge of sympathy. She was up in the attic with Fluvanna, going over the black things which had been left from the mourning of her parents, when the coloured woman glanced out of the dormer-window and gasped breathlessly. “Thar they are, Miss Dorinda. You hurry up and get into that black bombazine befo’ they catch you out of mournin’.”
She held up a dingy dress which had once belonged to Mrs. Oakley, and Dorinda slipped into it with the feeling that she was preparing for her own coffin. As she was about to go down to meet her callers, Fluvanna unfolded and shook out before her the crape veil which had been worn by two generations of widows. Her grandmother had bought it in more affluent circumstances, and after her death, for she had been one of the perpetual widows of the South, it had lain packed away in camphor until Mrs. Oakley was ready for it. Now it was Dorinda’s turn, and a shiver went through her heart as she inhaled the rusty smell of bereavement.
“You’ll have to get a new veil after the burial,” Fluvanna observed, “but I reckon you can make out with this crape until that is over. It has turned real brown, but there won’t many people notice it in church.”
Putting the proffered veil aside, Dorinda hastened downstairs, after reminding Fluvanna that she must make coffee in case the visitors expected something to eat.
“If only they would leave the dignity and take away the sordidness of death,” she thought.
At the foot of the staircase, Miss Seena Snead was waiting for her with a black serge dress that she had borrowed from one of the neighbours.
“What in the world have you got on, Dorinda?” she asked, while the tears brimmed over her kind old eyes. “I declare it looks as if it was made befo’ the Flood. I no sooner heard of po’ Nathan’s death than I began to study about where I could find a good black dress for you to wear to the funeral. I wasn’t a bit surprised that Nathan turned out to be such a hero. I always knew there was a lot mo’ in him than some folks suspected. Then, while I was in the midst of trying to recollect who had died last year, young Mrs. John Garlick drove into our yard with this dress and a widow’s bonnet in her arms. She told me she’s stoutened so she couldn’t make the dress meet on her, and she’d be obliged if you’d do her the favour to wear it. The bonnet she sent along because it’s a widow’s bonnet anyway, and she can’t wear it herself until she loses John. That makes her sort of superstitious about keepin’ it put away as if she were saving it for a purpose. John bought it for her in New York when she lost her mother. Wasn’t that like a man all over again, to go and buy his wife a bonnet with a widow’s ruche when her mother died?”
“I’m much obliged to her,” Dorinda replied stiffly, taking the bonnet out of the bandbox.
“It’ll be real becomin’ to you,” Miss Seena exclaimed consolingly. Though her tears were still streaming for Nathan, her imagination had already envisaged Dorinda as a widow in weeds. “It makes you look mo’ strikin’ than colours. There ain’t nothin’ you can wear so conspicuous as crape, my po’ Ma used to say.”
Dorinda put on the dress and stood straight and still in the middle of her bedroom floor while the dressmaker let down the hem and took a pleat in the belt. “I’ve never seen anybody keep her figger so well as you’ve done,” remarked Miss Seena. “It’s stayin’ out of doors an’ movin’ about so much, I reckon. My Ma used to say that when you get on in life, you have to choose between keepin’ yo’ face or yo’ figger; but it looks as if you had managed to preserve both of ’em mighty well. You get sort of chapped and weatherbeaten in the winter time, an’ the lines show mo’ than they ought to, but that high colour keeps ’em from bein’ too marked. You’re forty now, ain’t you, Dorinda?”
“Forty-two. It’s hard sometimes for me to believe it.”
“Well, you’re the hard kind that don’t wear away soon. Look at Geneva Ellgood, poor thing. She broke almost as quick as she grew.”
Dorinda sighed. “She needed love too much ever to find it,” and she thought, “The surest way of winning love is to look as if you didn’t need it.”
“Everybody knew that it was Jim Ellgood that made Jason marry her, and folks about here were mighty mad with him for throwing you over. It was that mo’ than drink that ruined his practice because people didn’t want a man to doctor them who hadn’t behaved honourable. He began to go downhill right after that, and he and Geneva lived like cat and dog befo’ she drowned herself. Jason is about as bad off now as she was, tho’ men don’t ever seem to get the craze that they’re goin’ to have a baby. But he’s got a screw loose, or he wouldn’t live way back yonder in the woods, with nobody but an old coloured woman to look after him.” She was kneeling on the floor pinning up Dorinda’s skirt, with the help of the red pincushion, shaped like a tomato, which she wore fastened to the bosom of her dress. “It was fortunate for you that Geneva got him,” she concluded, “and that you waited and took Nathan instead. You must find a heap of comfort in feeling that you’re the widow of a hero.”
The widow of a hero! Already Nathan’s spirit, disencumbered of the gross impediment of the flesh, was an influence to be reckoned with. Alive, he had been negligible, but once safely dead, he had acquired a tremendous advantage.
“I believe I’ll drop if I have to stand a minute longer,” Dorinda said in a fainting voice.
Miss Seena was immediately solicitous. “Poor child, I reckon the shock must have unnerved you. You lie right down, and I’ll have this dress ready befo’ the minister gets here.”
At last the dressmaker stopped talking and settled down to her work, and in the afternoon, when the Ellgoods came with the minister to tell Dorinda of the arrangements for the funeral, she received them in the black serge dress with a bit of crape at her throat. A fire was burning in the parlour beneath the two black basalt urns on the mantelpiece and the speckled engraving on the wall above. While she was still shaking hands with the Ellgoods, a stream of people, led by Minnie May and Bud, poured into the hall. Minnie May had brought her six children with her, and the smaller ones immediately began to play with their dolls behind the rosewood sofa in the corner, while the eldest boy fingered the books which ran halfway up the walls on three sides of the room.
“Don’t you think I ought to make them stop?” Minnie May asked presently. “They’d be more at home, anyway, in the kitchen where Fluvanna is making gingerbread for them.”
“Tell Fluvanna not to forget to bring in some blackberry wine and cake,” Dorinda whispered in reply.
Before she had spoken to her first visitors, the parlour was crowded; and John Abner was obliged to bring chairs from the spare room. “To think of my having to wear a bonnet with a widow’s ruche!” Dorinda found herself thinking, while she was condoled with in husky accents by the old minister. “If they’d go away and let me have time to think, I might feel; but I can’t feel anything as long as they’re all talking to me.” Though most of the faces were familiar to her, and some of them she had passed in the road ever since her childhood, there were several persons whom she did not seem to remember. These, she discovered presently, were strangers who had been on the wrecked train with Nathan. Two of them he had rescued from the burning cars at the cost of his life.
Bad as the roads were, only the tenant farmers who lived beyond Whippernock River had been prevented from coming. The bridge had been damaged by the storm, and the thawing ice had made the shallow stream unfordable. Old Mr. Kettledrum, who had given up his practice and become “the mail rider” for the new rural delivery had been almost swept away when he had tried to cross at the ford. Even Willow Creek was so high that the log bridge had been torn to pieces by the flood. Yet neither flood nor snow had held the neighbouring farmers at home. White and black, rich and poor, they had turned out to visit the widow of a hero in her affliction. Even Mr. Kettledrum had sent word that, undaunted by his narrow escape from drowning, he had driven round the circuit in order to bring Dorinda the morning papers.
“To think that all this should be about Nathan,” Dorinda said to herself, while she sat there with the newspaper James Ellgood had given her in her lap.
“HERO ON WRECKED TRAIN GIVES HIS LIFE FOR OTHERS
DESCENDANT OF FIRST MILLER OF PEDLAR’S MILL DIES
AFTER SAVING WOMEN AND CHILDREN.
MONUMENT TO BE ERECTED IN CHURCHYARD AT PEDLAR’S
MILL.”
After this there was a list of contributions for the monument, beginning with one thousand dollars, which had been subscribed by an anonymous stranger from the North.
Yes, dreadful as it was, she couldn’t get over the feeling that there was something unreal and theatrical in the event. She might have been on the stage at a school festival, listening to all these people declaiming selections from Shakespeare. Nathan’s heroism sounded to her as unnatural as the way things happened in Shakespeare. She felt ashamed of herself. Had she failed Nathan in his death because she could not recognize him in what she thought of vaguely as his heroic part? Well, ashamed or not, she simply could not take it in. If you could once take it in, she said to herself stupidly, the whole of life would be different; yet, for the moment, she was too stunned, too confused, to credit the incredible. The tragedy appeared too magnificent to be true.
The minister was an old man. He had known Dorinda’s mother when they were both young; he had known Nathan when he was a child; and he wheezed now with distress when he talked of him. His face was as grey and inflexible as a rock, Dorinda thought, though his voice reminded her of a purling brook. Over his bulging forehead his limp white hair hung in loose strands which curled at the ends. She had not seen him for years outside the pulpit, and it embarrassed her that he should stand on a level with her and wipe his eyes on the shreds of a silk handkerchief. While he rambled on, she looked beyond him and saw all those persons, some of whom were unknown to her, moving about the parlour, which was as sacred to her as a tombstone. They were whispering, too, among themselves, and she knew that they were speaking of Nathan in the sanctimonious tone which they had consecrated to missionaries who had died at their posts or to distinguished generals of the Confederacy. She observed John Abner go out to help put up the horses, and glancing out of the window, she saw Fluvanna coming from the henhouse with a bunch of fowls in her hands. With her usual foresight, the girl, who had kept her head better than the other negroes, was preparing supper for the multitude.
The old minister had finished once, but he was beginning again in a florid oratorical style. How long would he go on, she wondered, and would it be like this at the funeral? There was much to be said, she conceded, for the Episcopal service which circumscribed the rhetoric of clergymen. When at last he sat down, wiping his glasses, in the cushioned rocking-chair close to the fire, Bob Ellgood stood up and explained the funeral arrangements as if he wished her to understand that they were to be worthy of Nathan. This was Wednesday, and the public funeral, the funeral of a hero, would be held at three o’clock on Friday afternoon. Then he handed her a list of the pallbearers, many of them merely “honorary,” Dorinda perceived, and among them there were several names that she did not know.
“They were on the wrecked train,” Bob replied to her question, “and wish to pay this last mark of respect.” These were the men, he told her, who had started the list of contributions. “It is our idea to build a monument by public subscription,” he concluded, “over his grave in the churchyard. Then future generations will remember his heroism.”
“Poor Nathan,” she thought, while her eyes filled with tears. “If only he could hear what they are saying.” There had never been a monument erected by public subscription at Pedlar’s Mill, and she could not help thinking how pleased Nathan would have been if he could have taken an active part in the plan. Well, some people had to wait until they were dead to get the things that would have made them happy while they were living.
As soon as Bob Ellgood stopped speaking, a general droning began in the room, and she grasped, after an instant of confusion, that everybody was trying to tell her of some boyish act of generosity which was still remembered. These recollections, beginning with a single anecdote related in the cracked voice of the minister, gathered fulness of tone as they multiplied, until the room resounded with a chorus of praise. Was it possible that Nathan had done all these noble things and that she had never heard of them? Was it possible that so many persons had seen the greatness of his nature, and yet the community in which he lived had continued to treat him as more or less of a clown? Over and over, she heard the emphatic refrain, “I always thought there was a heap more in Nathan Pedlar than people made out.”
Sitting there in the midst of the belated appreciation, it seemed to Dorinda that the shape of an idea emerged gradually out of the fog of words. All his life Nathan had been misunderstood. Though she was unaware of the exact moment when the apotheosis occurred, she realized presently that she had witnessed the transformation of a human being into a legend. After to-day, it was impossible that she should ever think of Nathan as unromantically as she thought of him while he was alive. Death had not only ennobled, it had superbly exalted him. In this chant of praise, there was no reminder of his insignificance. Could it be that she alone had failed to recognize the beauty of his character beneath his inappropriate surface? Had she alone misunderstood and belittled him in her mind? Her heart swelled until it seemed to her that she was choking. When she remembered her husband now, it was the inward, not the outward, man that she recalled.
“I reckon he warn’t mo’ than eight years old when he took that whipping for stealing old man Haney’s cherries rather than tell on Sandy Moody’s little boy Sam,” Ezra Flower, the auctioneer, was reciting. “I can see the way he stood up and took the lashing without a whimper, and the other boys teasing him and calling him a clown on account of hid broken nose. Yes, ma’am, I always knew thar was a heap mo’ in Nathan Pedlar than most folks made out.”
The warm room, the firelight, the humming voices, faded into a mist. Beyond the window-panes, which flamed with a reflected glow, Dorinda saw the white fields and against the fields there flickered a vision of the room in which she was sitting. Out of this vision, the prayer of the minister stole over her like some soporific influence. An inescapable power of suggestion, as intense yet as diffused as firelight, was reassembling her thoughts of the past. “Yes, there was more in Nathan than anybody ever suspected,” she found herself repeating.
With one of those sudden changes that come in Virginia, the day of Nathan’s funeral brought a foretaste of spring. The snow had melted so rapidly that the roads were flowing like brooks, and Whippernock River, with its damaged bridge, was still impassable. But an April languor was in the air, and the sky over the wintry fields was as soft as clouds of blue and white hyacinths. Though a number of farmers who lived beyond Whippernock River had been unable to come to the funeral, people had arrived by train from the city and in every vehicle that could roll on wheels from the near side of the railroad. The little church was crowded to suffocation while the minister read his short text and preached his long sermon on the beauty of self-sacrifice. When the last hymn was sung with gasps of emotional tension, and the congregation flocked out into the churchyard, with Nathan in his flower-banked coffin and Dorinda hidden in her widow’s weeds, a wave of grief spread like a contagious affliction over the throng. With her head reverently bowed, Dorinda tried to attend only to the words of the minister, to see only the open grave at her feet, with the piles of red clay surrounding the oblong hole. Yet her senses, according to their deplorable habit in a crisis, became extraordinarily alive, and every trivial detail of the scene glittered within her mind. She saw the blanched and harrowed face of the minister, who prayed with closed eyes and violent gestures as if he were wrestling with God; she saw the nodding black plumes of Miss Texanna Snead, and remembered that Nathan had once called her “a plumed hearse.” She saw the gaping mouths of the children, whom their mothers, in the excitement of the occasion, had neglected to wash; she saw even the predatory brood of chickens which had invaded the graveyard and was scratching upon the graves. The ground at her feet was heaped with flowers, and among the floral crosses and wreaths and pillows, she observed the design of a railway engine made of red and white carnations, and tried to recall the names on the card. Long after she had forgotten every word of the prayer, she could still see that preposterous floral engine and smell the strong scent of fading carnations.
Standing there beside the open grave, recollections blew in and out of her mind like chaff in the wind. Her first sermon. The old minister praying with eyes so tightly shut that they looked like slits made by a penknife. The way her feet could not reach the floor. Peppermints in a paper bag to keep her quiet. Her mother smelling of soap and camphor. Missionaries in the front pew. The saving of black babies. The way she had yawned and stretched. Nathan was there then, a big boy who sang, with a voice as shrill as a grasshopper, in the choir. Rose Emily too. How pretty she was. Then Rose Emily as she lay dying with the happy light in her eyes and the flush in her cheeks. Twenty-two years ago! Well, she had done her best by Rose Emily’s children.
Afterwards, when she drove home with John Abner, she found that, though they had buried the actual Nathan in the churchyard, the legendary Nathan of prayer and sermon still accompanied them.
“I wish Father could have heard what they said of him,” John Abner remarked, with detached reverence, as he might have spoken of one of the public characters in the Bible. “It would please him to know what they thought of him after he was gone.”
“Perhaps he does know,” Dorinda responded.
For a few moments they talked of this; of the way death so often makes you understand people better than life; of the sermon and the flowers, and the general mourning.
“Did you see Jacob Moody there?” asked John Abner presently. “He used to work for Father before we moved to Old Farm, and Jacob told me he swam Whippernock River to come to the funeral.”
Dorinda wiped her eyes. “Things like that would have touched Nathan. I never saw any one get on better with the coloured people. It was because he was so just, I suppose.”
“Those were Jacob’s very words. ‘Mr. Nathan was the justest white man I ever saw,’ he said. Put back that heavy veil, Dorinda. It is enough to smother you. There now. That’s better. Your face looks like the moon when it comes out of a cloud.”
Dorinda smiled. “Even that old German who has just moved into the Haney place was there. I wonder what he thinks now of Germany? We shan’t hear anything about the war after this. I used to tell your father he couldn’t have felt more strongly if it had been fought at Old Farm.”
“I was beginning to get interested myself,” John Abner returned. “I’ll try to follow it on the map just as he did in the evenings. Well, it will be over before next winter, I reckon.”
“And all that waste so unnecessary!” Dorinda exclaimed.
They were turning in at the gate by the bridge. Straight ahead, she saw the house, with the smoke flying like banners from the chimneys. On the hill beyond, the big pine was dark against the blue and white of the sky.