Эллен Глазгоу - Barren Ground

When it was time for him to start, and Nimrod had brought the wagon to the door, she wrapped Nathan's face in her grey woollen scarf and tied the ends in a knot at the back of his head. "You can get somebody to undo you at the station."

He smiled ruefully. "No, I don't reckon I'd better get on the train tied up like this. I must look funny."

"It doesn't matter how you look," she responded; but she could not keep back a laugh.

As the wagon ploughed through the snow, she stood there, with her shawl wrapped tightly over her bosom and the lantern held out into the blackness before dawn. The air was alive with a multitude of whirling flakes, which descended swiftly and sped off into the space beyond the glimmer of her lantern. After the wagon had disappeared the silence was so profound that she could almost hear the breathless flight of the snow-flakes from the veiled immensity of the sky. By the glow of the lantern she could just distinguish the ghostly images of trees rising abruptly out of the shrouded stillness of the landscape. While she lingered there it seemed to her that the earth and air and her own being were purified and exalted into some frigid zone of the spirit. Humanity, with its irksome responsibilities and its unprofitable desires, dropped away from her; but when she turned and entered the house, it was waiting in the ashen light to retard her endeavours.

In the kitchen John Abner was lingering over his breakfast, and Fluvanna was frying bacon and eggs, while she complained of the weather in a cheerful voice.

"Are the cows all right?" Dorinda inquired of her stepson. Until the storm was over, the cows must be kept up, and John Abner, who was a diligent farmer, had been out to feed and water them.

"Yes, but it's rough on them. It's still as black as pitch, but the sooner we get the milking over the better. The hands are always late on a morning like this."

Dorinda glanced at the tin clock on the shelf. "It isn't five o'clock yet. We'll start as soon as you finish breakfast whether the other milkers have come or not. The cows can't wait on the storm."

"It's a pity Father had to go to town to-day."

"It may be fortunate that something decided him. The doctor said he wouldn't be any better until he had that tooth out. He walked the floor all night with whiskey in his mouth."

The smile that came into Dorinda's eyes when she looked at her stepson made her face appear girlish, in spite of its roughened skin and the lines which were deeper in winter. "I see the lanterns outside now," she added. "The women must be on the way to the milking." Wrapping her shawl over her head, she took down a coat of raccoon skins, which was hanging behind the door, and slipped her arms into the shapeless sleeves. Then going out on the back porch, she felt under a snowladen bench for the overshoes she had left there last evening. Dawn was still far away, and in the opaque darkness she could see the lanterns crawling like frozen glowworms through the whirling snow, which was blown and scattered in the glimmering circles of light.

In one of the long low buildings where the milk cows were sheltered, she found a few grotesquely arrayed milkers. From the beginning she had employed only women milkers, inspired by a firm, though illogical, belief in their superior neatness. Yet she had supplemented faith with incessant admonition, and this was, perhaps, the reason that the women wore this morning neat caps and aprons above a motley of borrowed or invented raiment. When she entered, stepping carefully over the mixture of snow and manure on the threshold, they greeted her with grumbling complaints of the weather; but before the work was well started they had thawed in the contagious warmth of her personality, and were chattering like a flock of blackbirds in a cherry tree. Since it is the law of African nature to expand in the sunshine, she was particular never to wear a dismal face over her work.

For the first minute, while she hung the lantern on the nail over her head, she felt that the meadow-scented breath of the cows was woven into an impalpable vision of summer. Though she shivered outwardly in the harsh glare of light, a window in her mind opened suddenly, and she saw Jason coming toward her through the yellow-green of August evenings. As with her mother's missionary dream, these visitations of the past depended less upon her mood, she had discovered, than upon some fugitive quality in time or place which evoked them from the shadows of memory. Concealing a shiver of distaste, she turned away and bent over a milk-pail.

"Your fingers are stiff, Jessie, let me try her a moment."

Hours later, when light had come and the work of the dairy was over for the morning, she went back into the house, and the ashen light went with her over the threshold. Fluvanna was busy with dinner, and a pointer puppy named Pat was fast asleep by the stove. Young Ranger, the son of old Ranger, lay on a mat by the door, and though many Flossies had passed away, there was always a grey and white cat bearing the name to get under one's feet between the stove and the cupboard. The room, Dorinda told herself, was more cheerful than it had ever been. She remembered that her mother could never afford curtains for the windows, and that Fluvanna had laughed at her when she had bought barred muslin and edged it with ruffles. "Good Lord, Miss Dorinda, who ever heard tell!" the girl exclaimed. Yet, in the end, the curtains, with other innovations, had become a part of the established order of living. Why was it so difficult, she wondered, to bring people to accept either a new idea or a new object? Nathan was the only man at Pedlar's Mill who lived in the future, and Nathan had always been ridiculed by his neighbours. The telephone, the modern churn, and the separator, what a protracted battle he had fought for each of these laboursaving inventions! He was talking now of the time when they would have an electric plant on the farm and all the cows would be milked and the cream separated by electricity. Was this only the fancy of a visionary, or, like so many of Nathan's imaginary devices, would it come true in the end?

At twelve o'clock John Abner came in for dinner, and, after a hurried meal, went out to help clear away the snow from the outbuildings. As there was no immediate work to be done, Dorinda sat down before the fire in her bedroom and turning to her workbasket, slipped her darning-egg into one of Nathan's socks. She disliked darning, and because she disliked it she never permitted herself to neglect it. Her passionate revolt from the inertia of the land had permeated the simplest details of living. The qualities with which she had triumphed over the abandoned fields were the virtues of the pioneers who had triumphed over life.

The room was quiet except for the crackling of the flames and the brushing of an old pear tree against the window. In the warmth of the firelight the glimpse of the snow-covered country produced a sensation of physical comfort, which stole over her like the Sabbath peace for which her mother had yearned. Lifting her eyes from her darning, she glanced over the long wainscoted room, where the only changes were the comforts that Nathan had added. The thick carpet, the soft blankets, the easy chair in which she was rocking, — if only her mother had lived long enough to enjoy these things! Then the thought came to her that, if her parents had been denied material gifts, they had possessed a spiritual luxury which she herself had never attained. She had inherited, she realized, the religious habit of mind without the religious heart; for the instinct of piety had worn too thin to cover the generations. Conviction! That, at least, they had never surrendered. The glow of religious certitude had never faded for them into the pallor of moral necessity. For them, the hard, round words in her great-grandfather's books were not as hollow as globes. Her gaze travelled slowly over the rows of discoloured bindings in the bookcases, and she remembered the rainy days in her childhood when, having exhausted the lighter treasures of adventure, she had ploughed desperately in the dry and stubborn acres of theology. After all, was the mental harvest as barren as she had believed? Firmness of purpose, independence of character, courage of living, these attributes, if they were not hers by inheritance, she had gleaned from those heavy furrows of her great-grandfather's sowing. "Once a Presbyterian, always a Presbyterian," her mother had said when she was dying.