Эллен Глазгоу - Barren Ground

At the foot of the staircase, Miss Seena Snead was waiting for her with a black serge dress that she had borrowed from one of the neighbours.

"What in the world have you got on, Dorinda?" she asked, while the tears brimmed over her kind old eyes. "I declare it looks as if it was made befo' the Flood. I no sooner heard of po' Nathan's death than I began to study about where I could find a good black dress for you to wear to the funeral. I wasn't a bit surprised that Nathan turned out to be such a hero. I always knew there was a lot mo' in him than some folks suspected. Then, while I was in the midst of trying to recollect who had died last year, young Mrs. John Garlick drove into our yard with this dress and a widow's bonnet in her arms. She told me she's stoutened so she couldn't make the dress meet on her, and she'd be obliged if you'd do her the favour to wear it. The bonnet she sent along because it's a widow's bonnet anyway, and she can't wear it herself until she loses John. That makes her sort of superstitious about keepin' it put away as if she were' saving it for a purpose. John bought it for her in New York when she lost her mother. Wasn't that like a man all over again, to go and buy his wife a bonnet with a widow's ruche when her mother died?"

"I'm much obliged to her," Dorinda replied stiffly, taking the bonnet out of the bandbox.

"It'll be real becomin' to you," Miss Seena exclaimed consolingly. Though her tears were still streaming for Nathan, her imagination had already envisaged Dorinda as a widow in weeds. "It makes you look mo' strikin' than colours. There ain't nothin' you can wear so conspicuous as crape, my po' Ma used to say."

Dorinda put on the dress and stood straight and still in the middle of her bedroom floor while the dressmaker let down the hem and took a pleat in the belt. "I've never seen anybody keep her figger so well as you've done," remarked Miss Seena. "It's stayin' out of doors an' movin' about so much, I reckon. My Ma used to say that when you get on in life, you have to choose between keepin' yo' face or yo' figger; but it looks as if you had managed to preserve both of 'em mighty well. You get sort of chapped and weather-beaten in the wintertime, an' the lines show mo' than they ought to, but that high colour keeps 'em from bein' too marked. You're forty now, ain't you, Dorinda?"

"Forty-two. It's hard sometimes for me to believe it."

"Well, you're the hard kind that don't wear away soon. Look at Geneva Ellgood, poor thing. She broke almost as quick as she grew."

Dorinda sighed. "She needed love too much ever to find it," and she thought, "The surest way of winning love is to look as if you didn't need it."

"Everybody knew that it was Jim Ellgood that made Jason marry her, and folks about here were mighty mad with him for throwing you over. It was that mo' than drink that ruined his practice because people didn't want a man to doctor them who hadn't behaved honourable. He began to go downhill right after that, and he and Geneva lived like cat and dog befo' she drowned herself. Jason is about as bad off now as she was, tho' men don't ever seem to get the craze that they're goin' to have a baby. But he's got a screw loose, or he wouldn't live way back yonder in the woods, with nobody but an old coloured woman to look after him." She was kneeling on the floor pinning up Dorinda's skirt, with the help of the red pincushion, shaped like a tomato, which she wore fastened to the bosom of her dress. "It was fortunate for you that Geneva got him," she concluded, "and that you waited and took Nathan instead. You must find a heap of comfort in feeling that you're the widow of a hero."

The widow of a hero! Already Nathan's spirit, disencumbered of the gross impediment of the flesh, was an influence to be reckoned with. Alive, he had been negligible, but once safely dead, he had acquired a tremendous advantage.

"I believe I'll drop if I have to stand a minute longer," Dorinda said in a fainting voice.

Miss Seena was immediately solicitous. "Poor child, I reckon the shock must have unnerved you. You lie right down, and I'll have this dress ready befo' the minister gets here."

At last the dressmaker stopped talking and settled down to her work, and in the afternoon, when the Ellgoods came with the minister to tell Dorinda of the arrangements for the funeral, she received them in the black serge dress with a bit of crape at her throat. A fire was burning in the parlour beneath the two black basalt urns on the mantelpiece and the speckled engraving on the wall above. While she was still shaking hands with the Ellgoods, a stream of people, led by Minnie May and Bud, poured into the hall. Minnie May had brought her six children with her, and the smaller ones immediately began to play with their dolls behind the rosewood sofa in the corner, while the eldest boy fingered the books which ran halfway up the walls on three sides of the room.

"Don't you think I ought to make them stop?" Minnie May asked presently. "They'd be more at home, anyway, in the kitchen where Fluvanna is making gingerbread for them."

"Tell Fluvanna not to forget to bring in some blackberry wine and cake," Dorinda whispered in reply.

Before she had spoken to her first visitors, the parlour was crowded; and John Abner was obliged to bring chairs from the spare room. "To think of my having to wear a bonnet with a widow's ruche!" Dorinda found herself thinking, while she was condoled with in husky accents by the old minister. "If they'd go away and let me have time to think, I might feel; but I can't feel anything as long as they're all talking to me." Though most of the faces were familiar to her, and some of them she had passed in the road ever since her childhood, there were several persons whom she did not seem to remember. These, she discovered presently, were strangers who had been on the wrecked train with Nathan. Two of them he had rescued from the burning cars at the cost of his life.

Bad as the roads were, only the tenant farmers who lived beyond Whippernock River had been prevented from coming. The bridge had been damaged by the storm, and the thawing ice had made the shallow stream unfordable. Old Mr. Kettledrum, who had given up his practice and become "the mail rider" for the new rural delivery had been almost swept away when he had tried to cross at the ford. Even Willow Creek was so high that the log bridge had been torn to pieces by the flood. Yet neither flood nor snow had held the neighbouring farmers at home. White and black, rich and poor, they had turned out to visit the widow of a hero in her affliction. Even Mr. Kettledrum had sent word that, undaunted by his narrow escape from drowning, he had driven round the circuit in order to bring Dorinda the morning papers.

"To think that all this should be about Nathan," Dorinda said to herself, while she sat there with the newspaper James Ellgood had given her in her lap.

"HERO ON WRECKED TRAIN GIVES HIS LIFE FOR OTHERS DESCENDANT OF FIRST MILLER OF PEDLAR'S MILL DIES AFTER SAVING WOMEN AND CHILDREN. MONUMENT TO BE ERECTED IN CHURCHYARD AT PEDLAR'S MILL."

After this there was a list of contributions for the monument, beginning with one thousand dollars, which had been subscribed by an anonymous stranger from the North.

Yes, dreadful as it was, she couldn't get over the feeling that there was something unreal and theatrical in the event. She might have been on the stage at a school festival, listening to all these people declaiming selections from Shakespeare. Nathan's heroism sounded to her as unnatural as the way things happened in Shakespeare. She felt ashamed of herself. Had she failed Nathan in his death because she could not recognize him in what she thought of vaguely as his heroic part? Well, ashamed or not, she simply could not take it in. If you could once take it in, she said to herself stupidly, the whole of life would be different; yet, for the moment, she was too stunned, too confused, to credit the incredible. The tragedy appeared too magnificent to be true.