Эллен Глазгоу - Barren Ground

Years had passed now, and she had stopped thinking of Jason. Since she never left the farm, she was spared the accident of a meeting, and she had excluded him for so long from her consciousness that his memory had appeared to acquiesce in the banishment. For the first two or three years after her return, she had lived in dread of seeing him again in the flesh, or of having his image awake to life in her mind. She had been afraid to go to sleep, because in her dreams she was still defenseless against him; and after her love for him had died, her fear had remained embedded in hatred. But that had passed also, and she had ceased to remember him, except when Nathan or one of the labourers on the farm mentioned his name.

"Doctor Stout is taking all Jason's practice," Nathan said one day. "That comes, I reckon, of trying to please everybody."

"I thought drink was his ruin," Dorinda rejoined indifferently.

"Of course drink helped it along, though it began farther back with his being so pleasant that you couldn't believe what he said. At first folks liked it, but after a while they began to see through it. By the way, his wife has been acting kind of queer. They say she's got a screw loose somewhere in her brain."

"I know," was all that Dorinda answered, but she thought, "And I once wished I could be in her place!"

She remembered the way Geneva had slipped up behind her one afternoon in an old field where broomsedge was burning, and had talked in a rambling, excited manner about her marriage and how blissfully happy they both were. "Not that we shouldn't like a child," she had continued, with a grimace which had begun as a smile, "but we can't expect to have everything, and we are blissfully happy. Blissfully happy!" she had screamed out suddenly in her high, cracked voice. At the time Dorinda had been puzzled, but now she understood and was sorry. The staring face, with its greenish skin and too prominent eyes, framed in the beautiful flaxen hair, softened her heart. "At least Geneva was not to blame, yet she is the one who is punished most," she thought; and this seemed to her another proof of the remorseless injustice of Destiny. "I suppose the Lord knew what was best for me," she said to herself in the pious idiom her mother had used; but, as the phrase soared in her mind, it was as empty as a balloon. When she remembered her girlhood now, she would think contemptuously, "How could I ever have had so little sense?" Were all girls as foolish, she wondered, or was she exceptional in her romantic ignorance of life?

Without warning, after not thinking of Jason for years, she dreamed of him one night. She dreamed of him, not as she knew that he was to-day, but as she had once believed him to be. For a moment, through the irresistible force of illusion, she was caught again, she was imprisoned in the agony of that old passion. In her dream she saw herself fleeing from some invisible pursuer through illimitable deserts of broomsedge. Though she dared not look back, she could hear the rush of footsteps behind her; she could almost feel the breath of the hunter on her neck. For minutes that were an eternity the flight endured. Then as she dropped to her knees, with her strength exhausted, she was caught up in the arms of the pursuer, and looking up, felt Jason's lips pressed to hers.

There was thunder in her ears when she awoke. Springing out of bed, she ran in her nightgown to the window and threw the shutters wide open. Outside, beneath a dappled sky, she saw the frosted November fields and the dark trees flung off sharply, like flying buttresses, between the hill and the horizon. The wind cut through her gown; far away in the moonlight an owl hooted. Gradually, while she stood shivering in the frosty air, the terror of her dream faded and ice froze again over her heart.

Through ten years of hard work and self-denial the firm, clear surface of her beauty remained unroughened. Then one October morning, Fluvanna, looking at her in the sunlight, exclaimed, "Miss Dorindy, you're too young to have crow's-feet!"

Crow's-feet! She turned with a start from the brood of white turkeys she was counting. Yes, she was too young, she was only thirty-three, but she was already beginning to break. Youth was going! Youth was going, the words echoed and reechoed through the emptiness of the future. Week by week, month by month, year by year, youth was slipping away; and she had never known the completeness, the fulfilment, that she had expected of life. Even now, she could not tell herself, she did not know, what it was that she had missed. It was not love, nor was it motherhood. No, the need went deeper than nature. It lay so deep, so far down in her hidden life, that the roots of it were lost in the rich darkness. Though she felt these things vaguely, without thinking that she felt them, it seemed to her, standing there with her gaze on the brood of white turkeys, that all she had ever hoped for or believed in was eluding her grasp. In a little while, with happiness still undiscovered, she would be as wrinkled and grey as her mother. Only her mother's restless habit of work would remain to fill the vacancy of her days.

"I've been working too hard, Fluvanna," she said, "and what do I get out of it?"

"You oughtn't to let yo'self go, Miss Dorindy. There ain't any use in the world for you to slave and stint the way you do. You ought to go about mo' and begin to take notice."

Dorinda laughed. "You talk as if I were a widower."

"Naw'm, I ain't. No widower ever lived the way you do."

"It's true. I haven't bought a good dress or been anywhere for ten years."

"Thar ain't a particle of use in it. You'll be old and dried up soon enough. What's the use of being young and proud if you don't strut?"

Yes, Fluvanna was right. What was the use? She had made a success of her undertaking; but it was inadequate because there were no spectators of her triumph. She had kept so close to the farm that her neighbours knew her only as a dim figure against the horizon, a moving shape among corn-shocks and hay-ricks in the flat landscape, an image that vanished with these inanimate objects in the lengthening perspective. Even in the thin and isolated community in which she lived, she did not stand out, clearly projected, like James Ellgood; perhaps, for the simple reason, she told herself now, that she had drilled her energy down into the soil instead of training it upward.

"I believe you're right, Fluvanna," she said. "Now that we're out of debt and things are going fairly well, I ought to try to get something out of life while I'm still young."

After the turkeys were counted, she left Fluvanna to turn them out into the woods, and going into her bedroom, looked at herself in the mirror which had once belonged to her mother. While she stared into the glass it seemed to her that another face was watching her beyond her reflection, a face that was drawn and pallid, with a corded neck and the famished eyes of a disappointed dreamer. Well, she would never become like that if she could prevent it. She would never let disappointment eat away the heart in her bosom.

She was still handsome. The grave oval of her face, the fine austerity of its modelling, would remain noble even after she became an old woman and the warm colour of the flesh was mottled and stained with yellow. It was true that lines were forming about her eyes; but the eyes themselves were as deeply blue as the autumn sky, and though her skin had coarsened in the last ten years, the dark red of her cheeks and lips was as vivid as ever. Her black hair was still abundant, though it had lost its gloss in the sunshine. In spite of hard work, or because of it, her tall, straight figure had kept the slender hips and the pointed breasts of a goddess. She did not look young for her age; the sunny bloom, like the down on a peach, had hardened to the glaze of maturity; but she had not lost the April charm of her expression. "For all I've ever had, I might as well have been born plain," she thought.