Эллен Глазгоу - Barren Ground

"Well, Jason won't say that," Dorinda had protested. "It would cost less if I were married in my blue nun's veiling; but Miss Seena thinks a figured challis would be more suitable."

"Well, I reckon Miss Seena knows," Mrs. Oakley had agreed. "It ain't lucky not to have a new dress to be married in, and though I don't set a bit of store by superstition, it won't do any harm not to run right up against it." Glancing round at her daughter, she had continued in a tone of anxiety: "Ain't you feeling well, daughter? You've been looking right peaked the last day or two, and I noticed you didn't touch any breakfast."

"Oh, I'm all right," Dorinda had responded. "I've been worrying about not hearing from Jason, that's all." As she answered, she had turned away and dropped into a chair. "I've been bending over all day," she had explained, "and the weather has been so sultry. It makes me feel kind of faint."

"Take a whiff of camphor," Mrs. Oakley had advised. "There's the bottle right there on the bureau. I get a sinking every now and then myself, so I like to have it handy. But there ain't a bit of use worrying 'yourself sick about Jason. It ain't much more than two weeks since he went away."

"Two weeks to-morrow, but I haven't heard since the day after he left. I am worried for fear something has happened."

"Your father could ask the old doctor?"

Frowning over the bottle of camphor, Dorinda had pondered the suggestion. "No, he doesn't like us," she had replied at last. "I doubt if he'd tell us anything. Jason told me once he wanted him to marry Geneva Ellgood."

"You might send a telegram," Mrs. Oakley had offered as the final resource of desperation.

Dorinda had flushed through her pallor. "I did yesterday, but there hasn't been any answer." After a minute's reflection, she had added, "If it's a good day to-morrow, I think I'll walk down to Whistling Spring in the evening and see Aunt Mehitable Green. Her daughter Jemima works over at Five Oaks, and she may have heard something."

"Then you'd better start right after dinner, and you can get back before dark," Mrs. Oakley had returned. The word "afternoon" was never used at Pedlar's Mill, and any hour between twelve o'clock and night was known as "evening."

That was yesterday, and standing now on the front porch, Dorinda considered the prospect. Scorched and blackened by the long summer, the country was as bare as a conquered province after the march of an invader. "I'll start anyway," she repeated, and turning, she called out, "Ma, is there anything I can take Aunt Mehitable?"

"Doesn't it look as if it were getting ready to rain, Dorinda?"

"I don't care. If it does, I'll stop somewhere until it is over."

Entering the hall, the girl paused on the threshold of the room where her mother sat reading her Bible.

"Where would you stop?" Mrs. Oakley was nothing if not definite. "There ain't anybody living on that back road between Five Oaks and Whistling Spring. It makes me sort of nervous for you to walk down there by yourself, Dorinda. Can't you get Rufus to go with you?"

"No, he's gone over to see the Garlick girls, and I don't want him anyway. I'd rather walk down by myself. Anybody I'd meet on the road would know who I am. I see them all at the store. May I take a piece of the molasses pudding we had for dinner?"

"Yes, there's some left in the cupboard. I was saving it for Rufus, but you might as well take it. Then there are the last scuppernong grapes on the shelf. Aunt Mehitable was always mighty fond of scuppernong grapes."

Going into the kitchen, Dorinda put the molasses pudding into the little willow basket, and then, covering it with cool grape leaves, laid the loose grapes on top. A slip of the vine had been given to her great-grandfather by a missionary from Mexico, and had grown luxuriantly at Old Farm, clambering over the back porch to the roof of the house. It was a peculiarity of the scuppernong that the large, pale grapes were not gathered in a bunch, but dropped grape by grape, as they ripened. "Is there any message you want to send Aunt Mehitable?" she asked, returning through the hall.

On a rag carpet in the centre of her spotless floor, Mrs. Oakley rocked slowly back and forth while she read aloud one of the Psalms. It was the only time during the week that she let her body relax; and now that the whip of nervous energy was suspended, her face looked old, grey, and hopeless. The dreary afternoon light crept through the half-closed shutters, and a large blue fly buzzed ceaselessly, with a droning sound, against the ceiling.

"Tell her my leg still keeps poorly," she said, "and if she's got any more of that black liniment, I'd be glad of a bottle. You ain't so spry, to-day yourself, daughter."

"I got tired sitting in church," the girl answered, "but the walk will make me feel better."

"Be sure you come back if you hear thunder. I don't like your setting out in the face of a storm. Can you take Rambler?"

"No, he's old and rheumatic, and it's too far. But I'm all right." Without waiting for more advice or remonstrance, Dorinda hastened through the hall and out of the house.

For the first quarter of a mile, before she reached the red gate at the fork and turned into the sandy road leading to Five Oaks, her naturally level spirits drooped under an unusual weight of depression. Then, as she lifted the bar and passed through the gate, she felt that the solitude, which had always possessed a mysterious sympathy with her moods, reached out and received her into itself. Like a beneficent tide, the loneliness washed over her, smoothing out, as it receded, the vague apprehensions that had ruffled her thoughts. The austere horizon, flat and impenetrable beneath the threatening look of the sky; the brown and yellow splashes of woods in the October landscape; the furtive windings and recoils of the sunken road; the perturbed murmur and movement of the broom-sedge, so like the restless inlets of an invisible sea, — all these external objects lost their inanimate character and became as personal, reserved, and inscrutable as her own mind. So sensitive were her perceptions, while she walked there alone, that the wall dividing her individual consciousness from the consciousness of nature vanished with the thin drift of woodsmoke over the fields.

The road sank gradually to Gooseneck Creek and then ascended as evenly to the grounds of Five Oaks. To reach the back road by the short cut, which saved her a good mile and a half, she was obliged to pass between the house and the barn, where she caught a glimpse of the old doctor and heard the sound of a gun fired at intervals. He was shooting, she surmised, at a chicken hawk, which was hovering low over the barnyard. Why, she wondered, with all the heavens and the earth around him, had he placed the stoop-shouldered rustic barn within call of the dwelling house? The icehouse, three-cornered and red, like all the buildings on the place, was so near the front porch that one might almost have tossed the lumps of ice into the hall. Though the red roof, chimneys, and outbuildings produced, at a distance, an effect of gaiety, she felt that the colour would become oppressive on hot summer afternoons. Dirt, mildew, decay everywhere! White turkeys that were discoloured by mould. Chips, trash, broken bottles littering the yard and the back steps, which were rotting to pieces. Windows so darkened by dust and cobwebs that they were like eyes blurred by cataract. Several mulatto babies crawling, like small, sly animals, over the logs at the woodpile. "Poor Jason," she thought. "No wonder his nerves are giving way under the strain."

She followed the path between the house and the barn, and then, crossing an old corn-field, turned into the back road, which led, through thick woods, to Whistling Spring and Whippernock River. After she had lost sight of the house, she came up with old Matthew Fairlamb, who was trudging sturdily along, with his hickory stick in his hand and a small bundle, tied up in a bandanna handkerchief, swinging from his right arm.