Эллен Глазгоу - Barren Ground

Immediately in front of her, the pear orchard had flowered a little late and scattered its frail bloom on the grass. As the sunlight streamed through the trees, they appeared to float between earth and sky in some ineffable medium, while the petals on the ground shone and quivered with a fugitive loveliness, as if a stir or a breath would dissolve the white fire to dew. Above the orchard, where a twisted path ran up to it, there was the family graveyard, enclosed by a crumbling fence which had once been of white palings, and in the centre of the graveyard the big harp-shaped pine stood out, clear and black, on the low crest of the hill. It was the tallest pine, people said, in the whole of Queen Elizabeth County; its rocky base had protected it in its youth; and later on no one had taken the trouble to uproot it from the primitive graveyard. In spring the boughs were musical with the songs of birds; on stormy days the tree rocked back and forth until Mrs. Oakley imagined, in her bad spells, that she heard the creaking of a gallows; and on hot summer evenings, when the moon rose round and orange-red above the hill, the branches reminded Dorinda of the dark flying shape of a witch.

While she sat there she lived over again the incidents of the morning; but the vision in her mind was as different from the actual occurrences as the image of her lover was different from the real Jason Greylock. Nothing had happened to disappoint her. Absolutely nothing. There was no reason why she should have been happy yesterday and miserable to-day; there was no reason except the eternal unreasonableness of love! She had tried to fix her mind on the sermon, which was a little shorter and no duller than usual. Sitting on the hard bench which she called a pew, bending her head over the bare back of the seat in front of her, she had sought to win spiritual peace by driving a bargain with God. "Give me happiness, and I-"

Then before her prayer was completed, the congregation had stood up to sing, and she had met the eyes of Jason Greylock over the row of humble heads and proud voices. He was sitting in the Ellgood pew, and of course it was natural that he should have gone home with the Ellgoods to dinner. It was, she repeated sternly, perfectly natural. It was perfectly natural also that he should have forgotten that he had told her to beg, borrow, or steal a blue dress. In the few minutes when he had stopped to shake hands with her father and mother in the porch of the church, he had turned to her and asked, "How did you know that you ought to wear blue?" Yes, that, like everything else that had happened, was perfectly natural. For the last few weeks he had driven her to the store and back every day; he had appeared to have no happiness except in the hours that he spent with her; he had spoken to her, he had looked at her, as if he loved her; yet, she repeated obstinately, it was natural that he should be different on Sunday. Everything had always been different on Sunday. Since her childhood it had seemed to her that the movement of all laws, even natural ones, was either suspended or accelerated on the Sabbath.

She was thinking of this when the door opened, and Mrs. Oakley, who had resumed her ordinary clothes without disturbing her consecrated expression, thrust her head into the room.

"I've looked everywhere for you, Dorinda. Are you sick?"

"No, I'm not sick."

"Has Rufus been teasing you?"

"No."

"Has anybody said anything to hurt your feelings? Josiah is grouchy; but you mustn't mind what he says."

"Oh, no. He hasn't been any worse than usual. There isn't anything the matter, Ma."

"I noticed you didn't half eat your dinner, and your father kind of thought somebody had hurt your feelings."

Closing the door behind her, Mrs. Oakley crossed the room and sat down near her daughter in the best mahogany rocking-chair. Then, observing that she had disarranged the fall of the purple calico flounce, she rose and adjusted the slip-cover. While she was still on her feet, she went over to the bed and shook the large feather pillows into shape. After that, before sitting down again, she stood for a few moments with her stern gaze wandering about the room, as if she were seeking more dirt to conquer. But such things did not worry her. They drifted like straws on the surface of her mind, while her immortal spirit was preoccupied with a profound and incurable melancholy.

"I hope you ain't upset in your mind, daughter," she said abruptly.

Dorinda turned her lucid gaze on her mother. "Ma, whatever made you marry Pa?" she asked bluntly.

For an instant the frankness of the question stunned Mrs. Oakley. She had inherited the impenetrable Scotch reserve on the subject of sentiment, and it seemed to her, while she pondered the question, that there were no words in which she could answer her daughter. Both her vocabulary and her imagination were as innocent of terms of sex as if she were still an infant learning her alphabet.

"Well, your father's a mighty good man, Dorinda," she replied evasively.

"I know he is, but what made you marry him?"

"He's never given me a cross word in his life," Mrs. Oakley pursued, working herself up, as she went on, until she sounded as if she were reciting a Gospel hymn. "I've never heard a complaint from him. There never was a better worker, and it isn't his fault if things have always gone against him."

"I know all that," said Dorinda, as implacable as truth, "but what made you marry him? Were you ever in love with him?"

Mrs. Oaldey's eyes lost suddenly their look of mystic vision and became opaque with memories. "I reckon I sort of took a fancy to him," she responded.

"Is there ever any reason why people marry?"

A mild regret flickered into the face of the older woman. "I s'pose they think they've got one."

She must have been pretty once, Dorinda thought while she watched her. She must have been educated to refinements of taste and niceties of manner; yet marriage had been too strong for her, and had conquered her.

"I don't see how you've stood it!" she exclaimed, with the indignant pity of youth.

Mrs. Oakley's bleak eyes, from which all inner glory had departed, rested pensively on her daughter. "There ain't but one way to stand things," she returned slowly. "There ain't but one thing that keeps you going and keeps a farm going, and that is religion. If you ain't got religion to lean back on, you'd just as well give up trying to live in the country."

"I don't feel that way about religion," Dorinda said obstinately. "I want to be happy."

"You're too young yet. Your great-grandfather used to say that most people never came to God as long as there was anywhere else for them to go."

"Was that true of great-grandfather?"

"It must have been. He told me once that he didn't come to Christ until he had thirsted for blood."

To Dorinda this seemed an indirect way to divine grace; but it made her great-grandfather appear human to her for the only time in her life.

"But he must have had something else first," she observed logically. "People always seem to have had something else first, or they wouldn't have found out how worthless it is. You must have been in love once, even if you have forgotten it."

Mrs. Oakley shook her head. "I haven't forgotten it, daughter," she answered. "It's time you were knowing things, I reckon, or you wouldn't be asking."

"Yes, it's time I was knowing things," repeated Dorinda. "You told me once that great-grandfather tried to keep you from marrying. Then why did you do it?"

For a minute or two before she replied the muscles in Mrs. Oakley's face and throat worked convulsively. "I was so set on your father that I moped myself into a decline," she said in a voice that was half strangled. "Those feelings have always gone hard in our family. There was your great-aunt Dorinda, the one you were named after," she continued, passing with obvious relief from her personal history. "When she couldn't get the man she'd set her heart on, she threw herself into the mill-race; but after they fished her out and dried her off, she sobered down and married somebody else and was as sensible as anybody until the day of her death. She lived to be upwards of ninety, and your great-grandfather used to say he prized her advice more than that of any man he knew. Then there was another sister, Abigail, who went deranged about some man she hadn't seen but a few times, and they had to put her away in a room with barred windows. They didn't have good asylums then to send anybody to. But she got over it too, and went as a missionary overseas. That all happened in Ireland before your great-grandfather came to this country. I never saw your great-aunt Dorinda, but she corresponded regularly, till the day of her death, with your great-grandfather. I remember his telling me that she used to say anybody could be a fool once, but only a born fool was ever a fool twice."