Эллен Глазгоу - Barren Ground

It took him a quarter of an hour of hard hunting to catch the horses; but by the time Lena was ready, he appeared at the dour with the surrey.

"If you don't hurry up and come on, the sale will be over before we get there," he remarked in the casual tone of a man who is not interested in the result.

"Why, I thought we had plenty of time," Dorinda replied; but she hurred Lena down the steps and into the vehicle, in spite of the girl's complaint that the ruffles on her skirt would be ruined if she did not spread a robe over the seat. Not until they had started off at a brisk pace and were well on the road, did Dorinda's heart stop its rapid pulsation. Suppose her own stupid folly in withstanding Nathan should cost her the possession of Five Oaks!

Up the long shady slope; into the branch road by the fork; between the wastes of joepye-weed and life-everlasting; over the rotting bridge across Gooseneck Creek, where the dragon-flies swarmed above the partly dried stream; up the rutted track through last year's corn-stubble; and past the broken fences of the farm-yard to the group of indifferent farmers gathered on benches, chairs, and upturned cracker-boxes, under the fine old oaks. All through the drive something invisible was whipping her on, as if the memory of wet branches stung her face in the blue August weather. A question was beating unanswered at the back of her brain. Why, since she neither loved nor hated Jason, should she long so passionately to own the place where he lived? Was it merely that the possession of Five Oaks would complete her victory and his degradation? Or was it simply that feeling like hers never died, that it returned again and again, in some changed form, to the place where it had first taken root?

When she reached the lawn, Ezra Flower, the auctioneer, was intoning from the front porch to the gathering under the trees. He was a fat little man, with a beard which stood out like ruffled grey feathers and the impudent manner of a bedraggled sparrow. From his scolding tone, Dorinda inferred that the bidding had been fainthearted. Nobody wanted land, for land was the one thing that everybody owned and could not give away. While Nathan drove on to the side of the house, Dorinda walked quickly over to a chair a farmer was relinquishing. Only after she had seated herself between John Appleseed and William Fairlamb, did she glance round and observe that Lena had not followed her, but had stopped among the younger men and boys who were sprawling over the grass. Already the girl was rolling her eyes and giggling without modesty. Well, what did it matter? Dorinda had tried, she felt sincerely, to do her duty by Nathan and his children; but it was impossible for any stepmother to be responsible for the character of a girl who possessed none. A stern expression forced her lips together, and she looked away to the twitching figure of Ezra Flower.

Still the auctioneer droned on, eliciting now and then responses as curt as oaths. Presently she heard Nathan's dry cough and his slow emphatic voice rasping out the words, "Three thousand dollars!" The bidding was about to begin in earnest, she saw, and a chill sensation ran over her as she settled her flaring skirt in the rush-bottomed chair.

While she sat there, listening to the rise and fall of the bidding, she tried to keep her mind firmly fixed on the objects before her. Overhead, the sky was of larkspur blue. Far away in the glittering fields, she heard the shrill chorus of grasshoppers chiming in with the monotonous hum of the auctioneer's voice. In the nearer meadow clouds of golden pollen were drifting like swarms of devouring insects. Over the grass on the lawn a flock of white turkeys moved in a sedate procession.

Yes, what had happened had happened, she told herself, and was over. Her affair was not with the past; it was not with the future. The only thing that concerned her vitally was the moment in which she was living. Only by keeping her mind close to the immediate present could she prevent her thoughts from slipping back into the abyss. Even now there were hours when memory seemed to be dragging her into the past; and when this occurred, a sense of weakness, of futility, of distaste for living, would sweep over her like a malady. To look back, she knew, meant the frustration of effort. To go on, taking the moment as it came, surmounting the obstacles, one by one, as they confronted her; to lavish her vital energy on permanent, not fugitive, endeavours, — these were the resolves which had carried her triumphantly over the years.

"Six thousand dollars," sang the auctioneer. "Going-goinggoing for six thousand dollars. Only six thousand dollars. Will nobody bid more? Not a quarter of what it is worth. Will nobody bid more for this fine old farm? Going-going-what? Nobody bids more? Going-going-gone for six thousand dollars!"

She rose and went over to where Nathan stood surrounded by a few farmers, who were trying in vain to pretend that they did not think him a fool. "Should have thought you had as much land as you knew what to do with," John Appleseed was saying, as she approached. "What are you going to do with Five Oaks, now you've got it? Eat it, I reckon?"

"It ain't mine. I bid on it for my wife," Nathan replied stubbornly. "She was so set on it I couldn't hold out against her."

Yes, Nathan was a good man, there was no denying it. Feeling nearer to him than she had ever felt in her life, she moved over to his side and slipped her hand through his arm.

"Wall, she got it dirt-cheap," the auctioneer declared. "Dirt-cheap, if I do say so."

"I don't see what you want with two farms, ma'am," chuckled Mr. Kettledrum, the veterinarian. "It looks as if you was goin' to live on one an' let Nathan live by himself on the other."

Then the faint-hearted bidders mounted their horses or stepped into their buggies, while Ezra Flower invited the new owners into the house. "Come right in an' clinch the sale with Doctor Greylock. He's settin' right there now with the papers to draw up," he added persuasively, as Dorinda hung back.

Beckoning Lena to follow them, Dorinda went up the steps with Nathan and entered the hall. Only once before had she been inside the house; but every detail of the interior had bitten into her memory. She knew the bend in the staircase down which the old man had roamed with his whip at night. She had never forgotten the litter of dust in the corners; the guns and fishing-poles crowded behind the door; the collection of hats on the table and sofa; the empty whiskey-bottles arranged in a row by the wainscoting. Above all, she remembered the stale odour of degeneration, of mingled whiskey and tobacco, which saturated the walls. Eighteen years ago, and nothing, not even that odour, had changed! In those eighteen years she had spent her youth and had restored dead land to life; but this house in which Jason had lived was still sunk in immovable sloth and decay.

Ezra Flower passed, with his sprightly sparrow-like twitter, through the hall, and flung open the door of a room on the right-the room in which she had sat with the drunken old man while the storm broke outside. Jason, she saw, was standing on the very spot in the rug where his father had stood that afternoon in November.

As she crossed the threshold, it seemed to her that the room shifted and came forward to meet her. She heard Nathan's voice saying meaningless words. Then Jason took her hand and dropped it so limply that it might have been a dead leaf.

"Won't you sit down?" he asked courteously, for he had evidently kept sober until the sale could be concluded. "So you've bought Five Oaks," he continued, as indifferently as if he were speaking of corn or wheat. "Well, it's never been any use to me, and I'm not sorry to get rid of it. But I don't see what you're going to do with it. Isn't one farm as much as you're able to manage?" As he finished, he pushed a decanter of whiskey in the direction of Nathan. "We might as well have a drink over it anyway."