Эллен Глазгоу - Barren Ground

"Dorinda! Dorinda, let me speak to you!"

She raised her eyes from the road and looked beyond the waving broomsedge to the topaz-coloured light on the western horizon. The longing to look in his face, to turn and rend him with her scorn, was as sharp as a blade; but some deep instinct told her that if she yielded to the impulse, the struggle was lost. To recognize his existence was to restore, in a measure, his power over her life. Only by keeping him outside her waking moments could she win freedom.

"Dorinda, you are hard. Dorinda-"

They were side by side now in the road. If he had reached out his hand, he could have touched her. If she had turned her head, she might have looked into his eyes. But she did not turn; she did not withdraw her gaze from the landscape; she did not relax in the weakest muscle from her attitude of unyielding disdain. Though he were to ride all the way home with her, she told herself, he could not force her to speak to him. No matter what he did, he could never make her speak to him or look at him again!

The sunken places in the road retarded him, and when he reached her side again, they were passing the burned cabin. For an instant, when they approached the fork, he hesitated, as if he were tempted to follow her still farther. Then, deciding abruptly, he wheeled about and alighted to open the red gate of Five Oaks.

"I'll see you again," he called back.

For a few minutes after he had disappeared, she sat rigidly erect, as if she had been frozen into her attitude of repulsion. Then, suddenly, she gave way; a shudder seized her limbs, and the reins slipped from her hands to the bottom of the buggy. She was like a person who has escaped some fearful calamity, and who has not realized the danger until it is over. When the trembling had passed, she stooped and picked up the reins. "It will be easier next time," she said, and a moment later, "I suppose I've got to get used to it. You can get used to anything if you have to." A dull misery stupefied her thoughts, and she was without clear perception of what the meeting had meant to her. "I can't understand why I suffer so," she pondered. "I can't understand how a person you despise can `make you so unhappy."

As she drew nearer home, Dan quickened his pace, and the buggy rattled over the bridge and up the rocky slope to the stable. The glow had faded from the west, and the long white house glimmered through the twilight, which was settling like silver dust over the landscape. A banner of smoke drooped low over a single chimney. Beyond the roof the budding trees appeared as diaphanous as mist against the greenish-blue of the sky. In the window of the west wing a lamp was shining. So she had seen it on innumerable evenings in the past; so she would see it, if she lived, on innumerable evenings in the future.

Then, just as she was about to drive on to the stable, she observed that shadows were moving to and fro beyond the single lighted window. Though the outward aspect of the house was unchanged, there was, nevertheless, a subtle alteration in its spirit. For an instant, while she hesitated, there seemed to her an ominous message in these hurried shadows and this absence of noise. Her throat tightened, and she sprang from the buggy as the door opened and Rufus came out.

"He died a few minutes ago," he said.

A few minutes ago! "I'll never know now what he tried to tell me," she thought. "No matter how long I live, I shall never know."

After the last prayer, the earth was shovelled back into the hollow beneath the great pine in the graveyard, and the movement of the farm began again with scarcely a break in its monotony. Joshua Oakley had sacrificed his life to the land, and yet, or so it seemed to Dorinda, his death made as little difference as if a tree had fallen and rotted back into the soil. Even her own sorrow was a sense of pity rather than a personal grief.

When the neighbours had driven solemnly out of the gate, the family assembled in Mrs. Oakley's chamber and gazed through the window to the graveyard on the hill, as if they were waiting expectantly for the dead man to rise and return to his work. The 'only change would be, they acknowledged, that two hired labourers would grumble over a division of the toil which Joshua had performed alone and without a complaint. The farm had always belonged to Mrs. Oakley; but in order that her authority might be assured, Joshua had made a will a few months before his death and had left her the farm implements and the horses. Dissimilar as her parents had appeared to be, there was a bond between them which Dorinda felt without comprehending. This was the growth of habit, she supposed, or the tenacious clinging of happy memories which had survived the frost of experience. In his dumb way, Joshua had been proud of his wife, and Eudora had depended upon her husband for more substantial qualities than those of sentiment. He had been useful to her in the practical details of living, and she was feeling his loss as one feels the loss of a faculty. Here was another proof, Dorinda reflected, of the varied texture of life, another reminder of her folly in attempting to weave durable happiness out of a single thread of emotion.

"I don't see how we'll manage to get on without him," said Mrs. Oakley, who looked gaunt and bleached in the old mourning she had worn for her dead children.

"I reckon it means I'll have to stay on here," Rufus muttered in a tone of sullen rebellion. "I'll have to give up that job Tom Garlick promised me next winter in New York. It's darn luck, that's what I call it."

"Oh, no, you mustn't stay," Dorinda urged. "Ma and I can get on perfectly by ourselves. It won't make any difference if you go in the fall."

"You'd better take Dorinda's advice and get away, Rufus." Though Mrs. Oakley spoke in a quiet voice, her face had gone grey at the thought of losing Rufus also.

"Well, I'm afraid I can't help you now," said Josiah, glancing furtively at his wife, who had proved to be a termagant with generous impulses which were brief but explosive.

"Of course your Ma could always come to live with us," suggested Elvira, obeying the briefest of these impulses. "She'd find plenty to do looking after the chickens, and the children would keep her from being lonesome."

Mrs. Oakley's eyes filled with tears. The old hound, having outlived his master, lay at her feet, and stooping over she stroked his head with a trembling hand. "But what would become of the farm?" she asked in a voice that quavered. "I want to die on the farm where I was born."

"We'll stay here alone, Ma and I," Dorinda declared, with the stern integrity she had won from transgression. "The farm belongs to Ma, and she and I can take care of it. We don't need a man," she added crisply. "If I couldn't do better than the men about here, I'd be a mighty poor farmer."

Elvira breathed more freely, and the wrinkles vanished from Josiah's forehead. As for Rufus, he had lost interest in the discussion as soon as it was decided that he might leave the farm in the autumn.

"I'm sure none of us would want to take Ma against her will," Elvira said, relieved and conciliatory because her generosity had been wasted. "The place belongs to her anyway, so the rest of us haven't anything to say about what she does with it." With a habitual jerk, which had annoyed Dorinda the first moment she saw her, the girl adjusted the belt of her skirt and rested her hands on her rapidly spreading hips.

"You needn't worry about Ma," Dorinda rejoined firmly. "I am going to take care of her." Her one wish, she felt, was to get Elvira and Josiah out of the house. Even Rufus was less depressing. Rufus at least had good looks; but Josiah and Elvira existed in her mind only as appalling examples of inherent futility. While she looked at Josiah, it seemed to her that failure oozed out of the very pores of his skin. Though he worked from morning till night, he was hampered by a fumbling slowness which reminded Dorinda of the efforts of a half-witted person. Yet her father, in spite of his ignorance, had possessed an industry that was tireless, while her mother was afflicted by a veritable mania of energy. Was it a matter of circumstances, after all, not of heredity? Had the more active strain succumbed at last to the climatic inertia? Well, if the fight had narrowed down to one between herself and her surroundings, she was determined to conquer. Beneath her sombre brows her eyes looked out like caged bluebirds. She was wearing a black calico dress which had once belonged to Miss Seena Snead, and the mourning brought out vividly the dusk of her hair and the bright red of her lips. "There's no use talking to me. I've made up my mind," she said.