IX
They talked little on the long drive. John Abner was intent on the wheel, and Dorinda held her cape closely about her, and gazed straight ahead at the twisted road and the hazy brightness of the October landscape. A veil of glittering dust drifted up from the meadows of life-everlasting; in the underbrush by the fences, sumach and sassafras made splashes of crimson and wine-colour; farther away, the changing woods were tossed in broken masses against the cloudless arch of the sky.
As they approached the Courthouse, the country was less thinly settled, and throngs of barefooted children ran beside the car and offered bunches of prince’s feather and cockscomb. In some of the fields men were ploughing, and among them Dorinda observed the phlegmatic faces of Swedes or Germans. As the car sped by, they stopped in their ploughing or cutting, and turned to stare curiously like slow-witted animals. Over all was the blue haze of October and the drifting silver pollen of life-everlasting.
At Doctor Stout’s, a new green and white cottage near the road, which looked as trivial as a butterfly on the edge of the autumnal solitude, they were told that the doctor had already gone to the poorhouse.
“He was that upset he couldn’t sleep last night,” said Mrs. Stout, a pretty, plump, deep-bosomed woman, in a pink and white gingham dress and a starched apron. “It seemed to prey on him to think of Doctor Greylock, who used to have the best practice around here, dying up yonder in the poorhouse. He was so promising, too, they say, when he came back, and his people owned that big place over near Pedlar’s Mill. Drink was his ruin, I reckon, and that made it so hard, for everybody was afraid to take in a man that was out of his head. I couldn’t have had him here on account of the children and measles just broken out yesterday. But there ought to be some way of caring for sick and crazy people without sending them to the poorhouse. And now with all the poorhouses going, there soon won’t be any place for them but the gaol.” She was a voluble person, but at last the flow of words stopped, and they drove on between dusty borders of sassafras.
“Is it true that Doctor Stout was born in a poorhouse?” Dorinda asked presently.
“Nobody knows. It doesn’t surprise me to hear that he was.”
“And now Jason is dying in one. Is that the result of character or merely accident, I wonder?”
“Of both probably,” John Abner rejoined. “I’ve read of too many decent human beings going on the rocks to believe the fable that virtue alone will get you anywhere, unless it is to the poorhouse instead of the gaol.”
“There it must be now,” Dorinda exclaimed, pointing to the right of the road. “Do we turn in over that ditch?”
“It seems to be the only way. Hey! Get out of the road there!” shouted John Abner to a skulking black and tan foxhound.
Withdrawn from the road, behind the fallen planks which had once made a fence, the poorhouse sprawled there, in the midst of the life-everlasting, like the sun-bleached skeleton of an animal which buzzards had picked clean of flesh. The walls and roof were covered with whitewash; there was whitewash on the smooth, round stones that bordered the path to the door; and the few starved cedar trees in the yard were whitewashed to the thin foliage at their tops. At one side, a few coarse garments were fluttering from clothes-lines, and several decrepit paupers were spreading wet things on the bushes that grew by the back porch.
Like other relics of an abruptly changing era, the county poorhouse possessed both the advantages and the disadvantages of desuetude. The seven aged paupers and the one indigent young mother who now accepted its charity were neglected, it is true, but they were neglected in freedom. Where there was no system there was less room for interference. If the coarse clothes were thin, they were as varied as the tempers or the inclinations of the paupers. Though the fare was mean, the complaints over it were bountiful. It is hard to be a pauper; it is particularly hard to be an aged pauper; but if these nine inmates (including the week-old infant) could have chosen between liberty and fraternity, they would probably have preferred the scant food and the rough clothes to the neat livery of dependence. Dorinda, however, perceived none of the varied blessings attendant upon orderless destitution. All she saw was the ramshackle building and the whitewashed cedars, which reminded her vaguely of missionary stories of the fences of dry bones surrounding the huts of Ethiopian kings. “It looks as bare as the palm of my hand,” she said aloud.
The doctor’s Ford car was standing in front of the door, with one wheel in a mudhole and one in a pile of trash; and when they stopped, an old woman, who was hanging the wash to dry on the bushes, put down the wet clothes and came over to meet them. She was so old that her skin was like bark; her mouth was closed as tight as a nutcracker over her toothless gums; and her small red eyes flickered between eyelids which looked as if they had worn away. As she mumbled at them, she wiped her steaming wet hands on her skirt.
“You ain’t got any sweet stuff, is you, honey?” she whined, until the doctor appeared at the door and beckoned them round the corner of the house where the sunshine was falling. As usual he looked brisk, kind, incurably sanguine.
“There is no longer any question. These county poorhouses must go,” he said, as they followed the beaten track which wound by the side of the building. “It costs the county not a cent under two thousand dollars a year to keep this place open for these eight inmates. It would be cheaper in the end to board them at the City Home where there is some system about the way things are managed.” Then he lowered his voice, which had been high and peremptory, as if he wished to be overheard. “We brought Doctor Greylock here because he couldn’t be left alone, and none of the negroes would go near him. There’s a scare about him, though he’s perfectly harmless. A little out of his dead now and then, but too weak to hurt anybody even if he tried.”
“Is he delirious now?”
“No, he’s in his senses this morning, and quiet—you’ll find him as quiet as you could wish. Is there anybody to look after him at Five Oaks?”
“We’re not taking him to Five Oaks. There’s no place for him there. But I’ve got a nurse for him, Aunt Mirandy Moody. She knows how to take care of the sick, and I believe the can manage him.”
“Oh, anybody can manage him now,” Doctor Stout said reassuringly.
A tremor of weakness passed over Dorinda. She felt that her knees and elbows were shaking, and there was a meaningless noise in her ears. Was it Jason of whom they were speaking? No, it was not Jason, for it seemed to her that Jason had died long ago, so long ago that she couldn’t remember him. She was standing by the wall of the poorhouse, and an obscure pauper, somebody who could be “easily managed,” was dying within. She dropped her eyelids to shut out the brown cloud, as thick as the smoke of burning leaves, which rolled up from the meadows. When she opened her eyes again the sunshine on the whitewashed wall dazzled her. If only she had known! If only she could have looked ahead to this moment! Those summer evenings thirty years ago, and this autumn day beside the wall of the poorhouse! The whitewashed cedars, the sunken road, the flat fields, the ridged earth where labourers moved slowly, and over all the glittering dust of life-everlasting.
“He ought to drink as much milk as he can,” Doctor Stout was saying in his professional voice. “And eggs when he will take them. Every two hours he should have nourishment in some form, and an eggnog with whiskey three or four times a day. You can’t expect him to do without whiskey. I’ve got a bottle for you to take back with you. He may need some on the way if he seems to be losing strength.”
She nodded. “I learned a little when I was a girl in a doctor’s office in New York; but everything has changed since the war. You’ll come over to-morrow?”
“I’ll drop in whenever I am called that way. If he gets much worse, you can telephone me. I feel that he has a professional claim on me.”
The weakness had gone now. She felt courageous and full of vitality, as if the rich blood had surged up through her veins. With the return of strength, her self-reliance, her calm efficiency, revived. She was facing the present now, not the past, and she faced it imperiously.
“You think he is able to be moved?” she asked.
“Even if it is a risk,”—he met her gaze candidly,—“wouldn’t anything be better than to die in this place?”
She acquiesced by a gesture. Then, threading her way between the stunted rosebushes, she spoke in a smothered voice, “Is he ready to go with us?”
“He is waiting on the back porch. It’s sunny there.”
“The car is open, you know, but John Abner is putting up the top.”
“Fresh air won’t hurt him. You’ve plenty of rugs, I suppose, and he’ll need pillows.”
“I’ve thought of that. You can fix the back seat like a bed. Of course we shall drive very slowly.” Glancing up at the sun, she concluded in her capable manner: “It’s time we were starting. John Abner and I both have work to do on the farm.”
Doctor Stout bent an admiring gaze on her, and she knew from his look that he was thinking, “Sensible woman. No damned mushiness about her.” Aloud, he said, “He is ready to go. You’ll find that he doesn’t say much. When a man has touched the bottom of things, there isn’t much talk left in him. But I think he’ll be glad to get away.”
“Well, I’ll see what I can do.” Stepping in front of him, she turned the sharp angle of the wall and saw Jason lying on a shuck mattress in the sunshine. Beneath his head there was a pile of cotton bags stuffed with feathers and tied at the ends. Several patchwork quilts were spread over him, and one of the old women was covering his feet as Dorinda approached. His eyes were closed, and if he heard her footsteps on the ground, he made no sign. A chain of shadows cast by the drying clothes on the line fell over him, and these intangible fetters seemed to her the only bond linking him to existence. While she looked down on him, all connection between him and the man she had once loved was severed as completely as the chain of shadows when the wind moved the clothesline.
He lay straight and stiff under the quilts, and above the variegated pattern his features protruded, shrivelled, inanimate, expressionless, like the face of a mummy that would crumble to dust at a touch. His eyes beneath his closed lids were sunk in hollows from which the yellow stains spilled over on his bluish cheeks. The chin under the short stubble of beard was thrust out as if it would pierce the withered skin. It was not the face of Jason Greylock. What she looked on was merely a blank collection of features from which poverty and illness had drained all human intelligence. Turning away, she saw through a mist the doddering old woman who was fussing about the mattress and the decrepit manager who was too ancient and incompetent for more serious employment.
“They’ve come for you. We’ll get you away,” Doctor Stout said in his cheerful tones which rang with an artificial resonance. Then he turned to Dorinda. “The stimulant is wearing off. He’ll need something stronger before he is able to start.”
At the words, Jason opened his eyes and looked straight up at the sky. “I am thirsty,” he said, while his hand made an empty claw-like gesture. If he were aware of their figures, she realized that they meant nothing to him. He had withdrawn from the external world into the darkness of some labyrinth where physical sensations were the only realities. While she watched him it came over her with a shock that the last thing to die in a human being is not thought, is not even spirit, but sensation.
One of the old women, who appeared to be in authority, brought a glass of blue milk, and taking a flask from his pocket the doctor added a measure of whiskey. Then lifting Jason’s head, he held the glass to his lips.
Suddenly, it seemed to Dorinda that her impressions of the actual scene dissolved and slipped like quicksilver from her mind. She ceased to look, ceased to think, overcome by an emotion which was not grief, though it was the very essence of sadness. Closing her eyes, she waited for some sound or touch that would restore the fading glow of her reason. Why was she here? Where was it leading her? What was the meaning of it all?
She heard a strangled voice gasp, “You’re hurting me,” and looking round she saw that the doctor and John Abner were carrying Jason to the car.
“You’ll feel better presently,” the doctor said soothingly. “I’ll give you something for the pain.”
Like an automaton, she followed them; like an automaton, she stepped into the car and took her place by Jason’s side on the back seat. She had intended to drive home, but she knew that she was incapable of controlling the big car. “Some one had better be back here with him,” the doctor had insisted, and she had obeyed his directions in silence. “I’ve put the whiskey under the rug. Give him an eggnog as soon as you put him to bed.”
The car started slowly, and they had driven for some miles before she found sufficient courage to turn and look at the figure beside her. Dazed by the sedative, he was staring straight in front of him, oblivious of the autumn sunshine, oblivious of the uninteresting country, oblivious of her presence, lost beyond reach in that dark labyrinth of sensation. His face was the face of one who had come to the edge of the world and looked over. It expressed not pain, not despair even, but nothingness. A grey woollen comforter was tied over his head, and his features appeared to have fallen away beneath the mummy-like covering. He was neither young nor old, she saw; he was over and done with, a thing with which time had finished. And he was a stranger to her! She had never loved him; she had never known him until to-day. The weight on her heart was so heavy that it was suffocating her. Again she thought: “Why am I here? What is the meaning of it all?” Again she felt as she had felt at her father’s death: “The pathos of life is worse than the tragedy.”
They drove on in silence; but it was a silence that reverberated like thunder in her brain. Nothing and everything was over. Ahead of her the road sank between the autumn fields and the brilliant patches of woods. The blue haze swam before her in the direction of the river. They passed the same ragged white and black children, who held up the same withered flowers. The same labourers were at work in the fields, bent in the same gestures of ploughing. As they went by a house set far back from the road, with a little crooked path leading up to a white wicket-gate, she imagined herself walking up the path and through the wicket-gate into another life.
John Abner looked back. “Am I going too fast? He coughs as if he were choking.”
She turned to Jason and replaced a pillow which had slipped from under his head. His boots, with lumps of red clay still clinging to them, were stretched out stiffly on the pile of rugs. And those worn boots with the earth on the soles seemed to her so poignantly moving that her eyes filled with tears. His cough stopped, and she spoke to him in a raised voice as if he were at a distance, “Are you suffering now?”
If he heard her, he made no response. It seemed to her while she looked at him that he was in reality at a distance, that everything but the shell of physical pain in which he was imprisoned had already perished. She wondered if he remembered her, or if her image had dropped from him, with other material objects, in that blind wilderness. From his apathy, she might have been no more to him than one of the old women in the poorhouse. A shiver ran over her, as if she had been touched by a dead hand. Youth, beauty, victory, revenge,—what did any of these things signify before the inevitable triumph of time?
Yes, time had revenged her. If she had stood still, if she had not lifted a finger to help, time would still have revenged her; for time, she saw, always revenges one. She thought of the hot agony of that other October afternoon. Of the patter of rain on the roof. Of the smell of wet grass underfoot. Of the sodden sky. Of the branches whipping her face.
They passed the station, where a train had just gone by; they passed the old Haney place, where the new German tenant was ploughing; they passed Honeycomb Farm and the fork of the road, where the burned cabin and the blasted oak used to be. The new gate stood there now, and beyond it, there was the sandy road through the meadows of Joe-Pyeweed and life-everlasting. Against the sky, she could still see unchanged the chimneys of Five Oaks. Then they spun easily down the wooded slope, crawled over the patch of corduroy road, and, turning in at the bridge, rolled up to the front porch of Old Farm.
“Well, we got him here,” John Abner said, with a breath of relief.
As they helped Jason to alight, it seemed to Dorinda that his bones were crumbling beneath her touch. If she had awakened to find that the whole afternoon had been a nightmare, she would have felt no surprise. Even the quiet house, with its air of patient expectancy, startled her by its strangeness.
Mirandy, a big, strong, compassionate old negress, who was born for a nurse but had missed her vocation until she was too old to profit by it, came out to help, and among them they carried Jason into the spare room and put him to bed. His clothes were so soiled and ragged that John Abner went upstairs and brought down some woollen things of his own. A fire blazed in the cavernous fireplace. Ripples of light and shadow danced over the yellow walls. The whole room smelt of burning logs and of the branches of pine on the mantelpiece. Warmth, peace, comfort, enfolded them as they entered.
When they had undressed Jason and covered him up warmly, Dorinda brought the eggnog, and Mirandy slipped her arm under the pillow and raised his head while he drank it. The tormented look had gone from his face. About his mouth the outline of a smile flickered.
“It feels good,” he said, and closed his eyes as the glass was taken away.
“You’ll eat some supper?”
“Yes, I’ll eat some supper.”
“You’re not in pain now?”
“No, I’m not in pain now.”
He spoke in a dazed way, like a child that is repeating words it does not understand. Had he forgotten that he had known her? Or had he reached the depths from which all memories appear as frail as the bloom on a tree? She did not know. She would never know probably. She had lost even the wish to know. Whether he had loved her or not made no difference. It made no difference whether or not he remembered. In that instant beside the poorhouse wall, the old Jason had been submerged and lost in this new Jason who was a stranger. Not in thirty years but in a single minute, she had lost him. Stripped of associations, stripped of sentiment, this new Jason was protected only by the intolerable pathos of life. How futile, how unnecessary, it had all been,—her love, her suffering, her bitterness.
He opened his eyes and looked at her.
“This isn’t Five Oaks?”
“No, it is Old Farm.”
“Old Farm? That is the Oakley place. Am I going to stay here?”
“Until you are better.”
“Until I am better,” he repeated.
“Are you comfortable now?”
He closed his eyes again. “Yes, it feels good.”
“In a little while I’ll give you some veronal and you will sleep.”
A change passed over his face and he sighed, “I’d like to sleep.”
She drew back and turned to go out of the room. Yes, the connection between youth and middle age was broken for ever.