Эллен Глазгоу - Barren Ground

"You'll eat some supper?"

"Yes, I'll eat some supper."

"You're not in pain now?"

"No, I'm not in pain now."

He spoke in a dazed way, like a child that is repeating words it does not understand. Had he forgotten that he had known her? Or had he reached the depths from which all memories appear as frail as the bloom on a tree? She did not know. She would never know probably. She had lost even the wish to know. Whether he had loved her or not made no difference. It made no difference whether or not he remembered. In that instant beside the poorhouse wall, the old Jason had been submerged and lost in this new Jason who was a stranger. Not in thirty years but in a single minute, she had lost him. Stripped of associations, stripped of sentiment, this new Jason was protected only by the intolerable pathos of life. How futile, how unnecessary, it had all been, — her love, her suffering, her bitterness.

He opened his eyes and looked at her.

"This isn't Five Oaks?"

"No, it is Old Farm."

"Old Farm? That is the Oakley place. Am I going to stay here?"

"Until you are better."

"Until I am better," he repeated.

"Are you comfortable now?"

He closed his eyes again. "Yes, it feels good."

"In a little while I'll give you some veronal and you will sleep."

A change passed over his face and he sighed, "I'd like to sleep." She drew back and turned to go out of the room. Yes, the connection between youth and middle age was broken for ever.

In the night she heard him coughing, and slipping into her flannel wrapper, she went into the kitchen and beat up an egg with milk and brandy. When she took it into his room, he appeared feverish and asked for veronal. "But the brandy will undo it," he added mechanically. His face was flushed and when she touched his hand it was burning. "Is it near day?" he inquired.

"No, it is only one o'clock. I thought you were sleeping."

"I was, but I wake up this way. I've done it every night for months."

She gave him veronal, and then raised his head while he sipped the eggnog. "An owl has been hooting so loud I thought it was at the window," he said, looking up at her over the rim of the glass.

"It's up in the big pine. You've been dreaming."

The fire had burned down to a few embers, which flickered out when she tried to stir them to life. A dim light from the screened lamp on the floor behind the chintz-covered chair left the bed and his uncovered face in shadow.

"Do you feel better?" she asked, as she was turning away.

"Yes, I feel better." His eyes followed her from the shadow with a glance of mute interrogation.

"I'll put this stick by your bed." She went out into the hall and came back with one of John Abner's hickory sticks. "If you want anything or feel nervous, knock on the wall. I am a light sleeper, and Mirandy is in the room off the kitchen."

She waited, but he did not answer. Had he understood her, or was he incapable of grasping the meaning of sounds? It was like the inconsistency of life, she thought, that he, who once had been so voluble, should have become almost inarticulate at the end. She knew that he was trying to give as little trouble as possible, yet he seemed unable to put his wish into words.

Before going out, she made one last effort with the embers, but the wood she threw into the fireplace did not catch. When she went over to the bed again, Jason was lying with closed eyes. "He doesn't look as if he could last much longer," she thought dispassionately.

The still October days drifted by, hazy, mellow, declining into the rich light of the sunsets. With the dry weather and sufficient food after starvation, Jason appeared to improve. The old wheelchair which had once belonged to Rose Emily was brought down from the attic, and he sat out, muffled in rugs, on bright afternoons. He liked his meals, though he never asked for them. Sometimes, after a hard spell of coughing, he would say, "How long is it before I have my eggnog?"; yet he never attempted to hasten the hour, Twice, after a severe haemorrhage, they believed he was dying, but he recovered and was wheeled out again on the lawn. Day after day, he sat there in the sunshine, passive, silent, wrapped in a curious remoteness which was like the armour of an inscrutable reserve. Yet it was not reserve, she felt instinctively. It was something thinner; vaguer, something as impalpable as a shadow. It was, she realized suddenly one day, an emptiness of spirit. He was silent because there was nothing left in him to be uttered. He was remote because he had lost all connection with his surroundings, with events, with the material structure of living. Through the autumn days he would sit there, propped on pillows, in his wheelchair between the half-bared lilac bushes and the "rockery," where Mrs. Oakley had planted portulaca over an old stump. His head would sink down into the rugs, and his unseeing eyes would gaze up the road to the starry fields of the life-everlasting. Behind him there was the porch and the long grey roof where swallows were wheeling. From the locust trees by the wings a rain of small yellow leaves fell slowly and steadily in the windless air, turning once as they left the stem, and drifting down to the flagged walk and the borders of sheepmint and wire-grass. His figure, bowed under the rugs, seemed to her to become merely another object in the landscape. He was as inanimate as the fields or the trees; and yet he made the solitude more lonely and the autumn dreaminess more pensive. His features had the scarred and seared look that is left in the faces of men who had fought their way out of a forest fire. Only the look that Jason wore now had passed from struggle into defeat. He appeared to be waiting, without fear and without hope, for whatever might happen. "I've seen so many people die," she thought, and then, "In fifty years many people must die."

She had come home this afternoon a little earlier than usual, and, still in riding breeches, she stood by the porch and looked down on the inert figure in the wheel-chair. Jason's eyes were open, but she could not tell whether he saw her or not. The mask of his features was as blank as if an indestructible glaze were spread over his face; and he stared straight before him, searching the road and the distant fields of life-everlasting for something that was not there. Though his helplessness was his only hold on her, she felt that it had become too poignant for her to bear. If only he would speak! If only he would complain! If only he would say what he was seeking! In the faint sunshine, beneath the ceaseless rain of leaves, he gathered, a deeper meaning, a fresher significance. A glamour of sadness enveloped him. For an instant the memory of the Jason she had first known flickered over him like a vanishing ray of sunlight. As the gleam faded, she felt that he was passing with it into some unearthly medium where she could not follow. It was, she told herself, only the endless riddle of mortality, renewed again and yet again in each human being. It was the old baffling sense of a secret meaning in the universe, of a reality beneath the actuality, of a deep profounder than the deeps of experience. The reserve of even one human being was impenetrable; the reserve of every human being was impenetrable. Of what was he thinking? she wondered, and knew that she could never discover. Had he loved her in the past, or had his desire for her been merely a hunger? Would he have been faithful to her if stronger forces had not swept him away? Which was the accident, his love or his faithlessness? When it was over, had she dropped out of his life, or had she continued to exist as a permanent influence? Was he better or worse than she had believed him to be? She had never known, and now she could never know. The truth would always elude her. She could never wring his secret from this empty shell which was as unfathomable as the sea. She felt that the mystery was killing her, and she knew that it was a mystery which could never be solved.