VI
When the spring came and the epidemic was over, she had won the loyal friendship of the poorer tenant farmers and the negro landowners; but her energy and her resilience were less than they had ever been in her life.
Machinery could not work alone, and even tractor-ploughs were obliged to be guided. She had installed an electric plant, and whenever it was possible, she had replaced hand labour by electricity. In the beginning she had dreaded the cost, but it was not long before she realized that the mysterious agency had been her safest investment. The separator in the dairy was run by electricity. With the touch of a button the skimmed milk was carried by pipes to the calf-yard or the hog-pen. Pumping, washing, churning, cooling the air in summer and warming it in winter, all these back-breaking tasks were entrusted to the invisible power which possessed the energy of human labour without the nerves that too often impeded it, and made it so uncertain a force.
“What would Pa say if he could see so many cows milked by machinery?” she asked John Abner, after the first experiment with electricity in the cow-barn.
“Do you think it will help much in milking?”
“In the end it may. The young cows don’t mind it, but you’ll never get the old ones to put up with it.”
“Then until the young ones have turned into the old ones, we’ll have to take whatever milkers we can find. Cows must be milked twice a day, and no darkey wants to work more than three times a week.”
“They’re still living on their war wages. If I ran this farm the way men manage the Government, we’d be over head and ears in debt. Perhaps,” she suggested hopefully, “when the negroes have spent all they’ve saved up, they’ll begin to feel like working.”
John Abner grinned. “Perhaps. But it takes a long time to starve a darkey.”
“Well, I’ll see what Fluvanna can do about it,” Dorinda retorted. She did not smile at his jest because the problem, she felt, was a serious one. The negro, who was by temperament a happiness hunter, could pursue the small game of amusement, she was aware, with an unflagging pace. Without labourers, the farms she had reclaimed with incalculable effort would sink again into waste land. “Yes, I’ll see what Fluvanna can do,” she repeated.
In the end, it was Fluvanna who, with the assistance of the patriarchs among the Moodys, the Greens, and the Plumtrees, drove the inveterate pleasure-seekers back to the plough. Looking at the coloured woman, generous, brisk, smiling, with her plump brown cheeks and her bright slanting eyes, Dorinda would ask herself how she could have managed the farm without Fluvanna. “Heaven knows what I should have done if I had not had a pleasant disposition about me,” she said. In return for Fluvanna’s sunny sympathy and her cheerful alacrity, which never faltered, Dorinda had discreetly overlooked an occasional slackening of industry.
Though the years were hard ones, she was more contented than she had ever been. The restless expectancy had ceased, and with it the indefinite longing which had awakened with the scent of spring rains on the grass, or the sound of the autumn wind in the broomsedge. Even the vision of something different in the future, that illusion of approaching happiness which she had believed as indestructible as hope itself, had dissolved as the glimmer of swamp fires dissolves in the twilight. She knew now that life would never be different. Experience, like love, would always be inadequate to the living soul. What the imperfect actuality was to-day, it would be to-morrow and the day after; but there was rest now, not disquietude, in the knowledge. The strain and the hard work of the war had tired her nerves, and she looked forward to the ample leisure of the time when she could expect nothing. Since Nathan’s death she had lost the feeling that life had cheated her. It was true that she had missed love; but at the first stir of regret she would shake her head and remind herself that “you couldn’t have everything,” and that, after all, it was something to have married a hero. Nathan’s victorious death had filled the aching void in her heart. Where the human being had failed her, the heroic legend had satisfied.
As she grew older, it seemed to her that men as husbands and lovers were scarcely less inadequate than love. Only men as heroes, dedicated to the service of an ideal, were worthy, she felt, of the injudicious sentiments women lavished upon them. At twenty, seeking happiness, she had been more unhappy, she told herself, than other women; but at fifty, she knew that she was far happier. The difference was that at twenty her happiness had depended upon love, and at fifty it depended upon nothing but herself and the land. To the land, she had given her mind and heart with the abandonment that she had found disastrous in any human relation. “I may have missed something, but I’ve gained more,” she thought, “and what I’ve gained nobody can take away from me.”
Without John Abner, who was much to her, though not so much as she had once believed he would be, and the indispensable memory of Nathan to fall back upon, she sometimes wondered what her middle years would have brought to her. John Abner, it is true, was subject to moods, and recently he had been warped by a disappointment in love; but even if he was not always easy to live with, she knew that, in his eccentric fashion, he was attached to her. With Nathan, it was different. In the years that had passed since his death, he had provided her with the single verity which is essential to the happiness of a woman no longer young, and that is a romantic background for her life. The power of mental suggestion, which is stronger than all other influences in the world of emotion, had cultivated around her this picturesque myth of Nathan. No one spoke to her now of his ugliness, his crudeness, his reputation as a laughing-stock; but whenever she went to church, she beheld the imposing monument which public sentiment had placed over his grave. Every soldier who went from Pedlar’s Mill was reminded by fire-breathing orators that the heroes of war must be worthy of the hero of peace. Every appeal from the Red Cross in the county bore his name as an ornament. As time went on this legend, which had sprung from simple goodness, gathered a patina of tradition as a tombstone gathers moss. Yes, it was something, Dorinda assured her rebellious heart, to have been married to a hero.
In these years she might have married again; but a distaste for physical love, more than the rigid necessity of her lot, kept her a widow. When, a year after his wife’s death, Bob Ellgood began, according to the custom of the country, to motor over to Old Farm on Sunday, she was at first flattered, then disturbed, and at last frankly provoked. Walking through the pasture with him one afternoon in April, she reflected, not without chagrin, that this also was one of the blessings that had come at the wrong time. “Thirty years ago, before I knew Jason, I could have loved him,” she thought; and she remembered the Sunday mornings in church when she had gazed longingly at his profile and had asked herself, “Can he be the right one, after all?” She had wanted him then with some sudden cobweb of fancy, which had been spun by an insatiable hunger for life. If he had turned to her at that moment, she would have loved him instead of Jason, and the future, which was now the past, would have been different. But he had not wanted her then; he had first to make a disappointing marriage, and by the time he had discovered his mistake, it was too late to begin over again. Well, that was the way things happened in life!
“Why won’t you marry me, Dorinda?” he asked, wheeling abruptly round from the pasture bars.
Startled, she cast about for a reason which might appear plausible to his masculine vanity. Was there a reason? Had she any reason behind her resolve, or was aversion as physical a process as first love? Once he had been handsome, a young blond giant, and now he was coarsened and beefy, with a neck like a bull’s and a rapidly spreading girth. There was a purple flush in his face and puckers of flesh between his collar and his slightly receding chin. This, also, was the way things happened, she knew. Yet, after a moment’s compassionate regard, she discerned that he wore his unalluring age as easily as he had once worn his engaging youth. He appeared unaware even that it might be a disadvantage in courtship.
“Suppose I looked like that?” she said to herself, and then, “Perhaps women are more fastidious than they used to be, but men have not yet found it out. Or is it simply because I am independent and don’t have to marry for support that I can pick and refuse?”
“Have you decided why you won’t marry me?” he inquired presently.
He was smiling at her, and it seemed to her—or was it only her imagination?—that a gleam, like the star in the eyes of her prize bull, flickered and went out in his glance. His face was so close to her that for an instant she believed he was going to kiss her. Not that look! something cried in her heart. Oh, never that look again!
“I can’t tell,” she answered, walking on again. “There isn’t any reason. I’ve finished with all that.”
He was undismayed. “I’ll keep on. I’m not in a hurry.” Actually at fifty-five, he was not in a hurry.
“It isn’t any use,” she replied as firmly as she could. “It isn’t the least use in the world.”
“Well, I’ll keep on anyway.”
In the end, though she had spoken with decision, she had failed to convince him. That had been two years ago, and he still came in his big car every Sunday afternoon. But as he had warned her, he was not in a hurry, and his courtship was as deliberate as his general habit of body.
Although it seemed to her that she had grown wiser with the years, she had never entirely abandoned her futile effort to find a meaning in life. Hours had come and gone when she had felt that there was no permanent design beneath the fragile tissue of experience; but the moral fibre that had stiffened the necks of martyrs lay deeply embedded in her character if not in her opinions. She was saved from the aridness of infidelity by that robust common sense which had preserved her from the sloppiness of indiscriminate belief. After all, it was not religion; it was not philosophy; it was nothing outside her own being that had delivered her from evil. The vein of iron which had supported her through adversity was merely the instinct older than herself, stronger than circumstances, deeper than the shifting surface of emotion; the instinct that had said, “I will not be broken.” Though the words of the covenant had altered, the ancient mettle still infused its spirit.
There were winter nights, in front of her sinking fire, when she would live over the romantic folly and the thwarted aims of her youth. Then, through what appeared to be an endless vista, she would survey the irreconcilable difference between character and conduct. In her own life she could trace no logical connection between being and behaviour, between the thing that she was in herself and the things she had done. She thought of herself as a good woman (there were few better ones, she would have said honestly) yet in her girlhood she had been betrayed by love and saved by the simplest accident from murder. Surely these were both flagrant transgressions according to every code of morality! They were acts, she knew, which she would have condemned in another; but in her memory they appeared as inevitable as the rest of her conduct, and she could not unravel them from the frayed warp-and-woof of the past. And she saw now that the strong impulses which had once wrecked her happiness were the forces that had enabled her to rebuild her life out of the ruins. The reckless courage that had started her on the dubious enterprise of her life had hardened at last into the fortitude with which she had triumphed over the unprofitable end Of her adventure. Good and bad, right and wrong, they were all tangled together. “How can I tell,” she could ask, “what I should have done if I had not been myself?”