Эллен Глазгоу - Barren Ground

When the three of them gathered about Rose Emily's bed, and the yards of bright, clear blue unrolled on the counterpane, it seemed to Dorinda that they banished the menacing thought of death. Though she pitied her friend, she could not be unhappy. Her whole being was vibrating with some secret, irrepressible hope. A blue dress, nothing more. The merest trifle in the sum of experience; yet, when she looked back in later years, it seemed to her that the future was packed into that single moment as the kernel is packed into the nut.

"May I leave it here?" she asked, glancing eagerly out of the window. "The sun has gone down, and I must hurry." Would he wait for her or had he already gone on without her?

"We'll start cuttin' the first thing in the mornin'," said Miss Seena, gloating over the nun's veiling. "Jest try the hat on, Dorinda, before you go. I declar her own Ma wouldn't know her," she exclaimed, with the pride of creation. "Nobody would ever have dreamed she was so good-lookin', would they, Rose Emily? Ain't it jest wonderful what clothes can do?"

With that "wonderful" tingling in her blood, Dorinda threw the orange shawl over her head, and hastened out of the house. She felt as if the blue waves were bearing her up and sweeping her onward. In all her life it was the only thing she had ever had that she wanted. Yesterday there had been nothing, and to-day the world was so rich and full of beauty that she was dizzy with happiness. It was like a first draught of wine; it enraptured while it bewildered.

"I was a little late, and I was afraid you would have gone," Jason said.

What did he mean by that, she asked herself. Ought she not to have waited? She had no experience, no training, to guide her. Nothing but this blind instinct, and how could she tell whether instinct was right or wrong?

"Something kept me. I couldn't get away earlier," she answered. "Have you worked all day?"

"Yes, but it isn't steady work. For hours at a time the store is empty. Then they all come together. Of course we have to tidy up in the off hours," she added, "and when there's nothing else to do I read aloud to Rose Emily."

"Are you content? You look happy."

He was gazing straight ahead of him, and it seemed to her that he was as impersonal as the Shorter Catechism. She suffered under it, yet she was powerless, in her innocence, to change it.

"I don't know. There isn't any use thinking." Were there always these fluctuations of hope and disappointment? Did nothing last? Was there no stability in experience?

"Well, I got caught too," he said presently, as if he had not heard her. "That's the rotten part of a doctor's life, everything and everybody catches him. Good Lord! Is there never any end to it? I'd give my head to get away. I'm not made for the country. It depresses me and lets me down too easily. I suppose I'm born lazy at bottom, and I need the contact with other minds to prod me into energy. This is the critical time too. If I can't get away, I'm doomed for good. Yet what can I do? I'm tied hand and foot as long as Father is alive."

"Couldn't you sell the farm?" Her voice sounded thin and colourless in her ears.

"How can I? Who would buy? And it isn't only the farm. I wouldn't let that stand in my way. Father has got into a panic about dying, and he is afraid to be left alone with the negroes. He made me promise, when I thought he was on his death-bed, that I wouldn't leave him as long as he lived. He's got a will of iron-that's the only thing that keeps him alive-and he's always had his way with me. He broke my spirit, I suppose, when I was little. And it was the same way with Mother. She taught me to be afraid of him, and to dodge and parry before I was old enough to know what I was doing. When a fear like that gets into the nerves, it's like a disease." He broke off moodily, and then went on again without waiting for her response. "There's medicine now. I never wanted to study medicine. I knew I wasn't cut out for it. What I wanted to do was something entirely different, — but Father had made up his mind, and in the end he had his way with me. He always gets his way with me. He's thwarted everything I ever wanted to do as far back as I can remember. For my good of course. I understand that. But you can ruin people's lives-especially young people's lives-from the best motives."

His bitterness welled out in a torrent. It seemed to Dorinda that he had forgotten her; yet, even though he was unaware of her sympathy, she felt that she longed to reach out her hand and comfort him.

"I'm sorry," she said softly, "I'm sorry."

He looked at her with a laugh. "I oughtn't to have let that out," he returned. "Something happened to upset me. I'm easy-going enough generally, but there are some things I can't stand."

She was curious to know what had happened, what sort of things they were that he couldn't stand; but after his brief outburst, he did not confide in her. He was engrossed, she saw, in a recollection he did not divulge; and, manlike, he made no effort to assume a cheerfulness he did not feel. The drive was a disappointment to her; yet, in some inexplicable way, the disappointment increased rather than diminished his power over her. While she sat there, with her lips closed, she was, shedding her allurement as prodigally as a flower sheds its fragrance. Gradually, the afterglow thinned into dusk; the road darkened, and the broomsedge, subdued by twilight, became impenetrable.

It was Easter Sunday, and Dorinda, wearing her new clothes with outward confidence but a perturbed mind, stood on the front porch while she waited for the horses to be harnessed to the spring wagon.

Though she was far less handsome in her blue dress and her straw hat with the wreath of cornflowers than she was in her old tan ulster and orange shawl, neither she nor Almira Pryd her father's niece, who was going to church with them, was aware of the fact. Easter would not be acknowledged-in the austere service of the church at Pedlar's Mill; but both women knew that spring would blossom on the head of every girl who could afford a new hat. Joshua had gone to harness the horses; and while Mrs. Oakley put on her bonnet and her broadcloth mantle trimmed with bugles, which she had worn to church ever since Dorinda could remember, Almira babbled on in a rapture of admiration.

She was a pink, flabby, irresponsible person, adjusting comfortably the physical burden of too much flesh to the spiritual repose of too little mind. All the virtues and the vices of the "poor white" had come to flower in her. Married at fifteen to a member of a family known as "the low-down Prydes," she had been perfectly contented with her lot in a two-room log cabin and with her husband, a common labourer, having a taste for whiskey and a disinclination for work, who was looked upon by his neighbours as "not all there." As the mother of children so numerous that their father could not be trusted to remember their names, she still welcomed the yearly addition to her family with the moral serenity of a rabbit.

"I declar, Dorrie, I don't see how you got such a stylish flare," she exclaimed now, without envy and without ambition. "That bell skirt sets jest perfect!"

"I hope we got it right," said Dorinda, anxiously, as she turned slowly round under Almira's gaze. "Is Ike staying with the children?"

"Yes, we couldn't both leave 'em the same day. Is Uncle Josh hitching up?"

"He's coming round right now," said Mrs. Oakley, wafting a pungent, odour of camphor before her as she appeared. "I'm glad you came over, Almira. There's plenty of room in the wagon since we've put in the back seat. Ain't you coming to church with us, Josiah?"

"No, I ain't," Josiah replied, stubbornly. "When I get a day's rest, I'm goin' to take it. It don't rest me to be preached to."