Chapter VI: Part 6

He nodded. "I don't doubt it, I don't doubt it. He loved you well enough, I reckon, to want to jilt Geneva; but he found out, when he tried, that she wasn't as easy to jilt as he thought. He'd courted her way back yonder last year, when they were in New York together. Later on he'd have been glad to wriggle out of it; but when Jim and Bob Ellgood came after him, he turned white-livered again. They took him off and married him while he was still shaking from fright. A good boy, a pleasant boy," continued the old man, smacking his dry lips, "but he ain't of my kidney."

When he had finished, she gazed at him in a dumbness which had attacked her like paralysis. She tried to cry out, to tell him that she knew he lied; but her lips would not move in obedience to her will, and her throat felt as if it were petrified. Was this the way people felt when they had a stroke, she found herself thinking. On the surface she was inanimate; but beneath, in the buried jungle of her consciousness, there was the stirring of primitive impulses, and this stirring was agony. All individual differences, all the acquired attributes of civilization, had turned to wood or stone; yet the racial structure, the savage fibre of instinct, remained alive in her.

The room had grown darker. Only the hearth and the evil features of the old man were picked out by the wavering blue light. She saw his face, with its short wagging beard and its fiery points of eyes, as one sees objects under running water. Everything was swimming round her, and outside, where a cloud had drifted over the triangle of clear sky, the box-bush and the white turkeys were swimming too.

"You'll meet 'em on the road if you go by the fork," piped a voice beneath that shifting surface. "They will be well on the way by the time you have started."

Stung awake at last, she thrust out her arm, warding him off. The one thought in her mind now was to escape, to get out of the room before he could stop her, to put the house and its terrors behind her. It couldn't be true. He was drunk. He was lying. He was out of his head. She was foolish even to listen, foolish to let the lie worry her for an instant.

Turning quickly, she ran from him out of the room, out of the house, out of the stagnant air of the place.

At the beginning of the sandy road, where the water had hollowed a basin, she met the coloured woman, Idabella, who said "good evening," after the custom of the country, as she went by. She was a handsome mulatto, tall, deep-bosomed, superb, and unscrupulous, with the regal features that occasionally defy ethnology in the women of mixed blood. Her glossy black hair was worn in a coronet, and she moved with the slow and arrogant grace which springs from a profound immobility.

"The dreadful old man," thought Dorinda, as she hurried in the direction of Gooseneck Creek. "The dreadful, lying old man!"

XIII

The sun had riddled the clouds, and a watery light drenched the trees, the shrubs, and the bruised weeds. This light, which bathed the external world in a medium as fluid as rain, penetrated into her thoughts, and enveloped the images in her mind with a transparent brilliance.

"It isn't true," she repeated over and over, as she went down the sandy slope to Gooseneck Creek, and over the bridge of logs in the willows. When she reached the meadows, rain was still dripping from the golden-rod and life-everlasting. A rabbit popped up from the briers and scuttled ahead of her, with his little white tail bobbing jauntily.

"How funny it looks," she thought, "just as if it were beckoning me to come on and play. The rain is over, but I am soaked through. Even my skin is wet. I'll have to dry all my clothes by the kitchen fire, if it hasn't gone out. What a terrible old man!" Out of nowhere there flashed into her mind the recollection of a day when she had gone to a dentist at the County Courthouse to have an aching tooth drawn. All the way, sitting beside her father, behind Dan and Beersheba, she had kept repeating, "It won't hurt very much." Strange that she should have thought of that now! She could see the way Dan and Beersheba had turned, flopping their ears, and looked round, as if they were trying to show sympathy; and how the bunches of indigo, fastened on their heads to keep flies away, had danced fantastically like uprooted bushes. "It isn't true;" she said now, seeking to fortify her courage as she had tried so passionately on the drive to the dentist. "When Jason comes back, we will laugh over it together. He will tell me that I was foolish to be worried, that it proved I did not trust him. But, of course, I trust him. When we are married, I will stand between him and the old man as much as I can. I am not afraid of him. No, I am not afraid," she said aloud, stopping suddenly in the road as if she had seen a snake in her path. "When Jason comes back, everything will be right. Yes, everything will be right," she repeated. "Perhaps the old man suspected something, and was trying to frighten me. Doctors always know things sooner than other people. . . . What a dirty place it is! Ma would call it a pig sty. Well, I can clean it up, bit by bit. Even if the old man doesn't let anybody touch his den, I can clean the rest of the house. I'll begin with the porch, and some day, when he is out, I can make Jemima wash that dreadful floor and the window-panes. The outside is almost as bad too. The walk looks as if it had never been swept." In order to deaden this fear, which was gnawing at her heart like a rat, she began to plan how she would begin cleaning the place and gradually bring system out of confusion. "A little at a time," she said aloud, as if she were reciting a phrase in a foreign language. "A little at a time will not upset him."

At the fork of the road, approaching the red gate, where the thick belt of woods began, her legs gave way under her, and she knew that she could go no farther. "I'll have to stop," she thought, "even if the ground is so wet, I'll have to sit down." Then the unconscious motive, which had guided her ever since she left Five Oaks, assumed a definite form. "If he came on that train, he ought to be here in a few minutes," she said. "The whistle blew a long time ago. Even if he waited for the mail, he ought to be here in a little while."

Stepping over the briers into the woods, she looked about for a place to sit down. An old stump, sodden with water, pushed its way up from the maze of creepers, and she dropped beside it, while she relapsed into the suspense that oozed out of the ground and the trees. As long as her response to this secret fear was merely physical, she was able to keep her thoughts fixed on empty mechanical movements; but the instant she admitted the obscure impulse into her mind, the power of determination seemed to go out of her. She felt weak, unstrung, incapable of rational effort.

A thicket of dogwood and redbud trees made a close screen in front of her, and through the dripping branches, she could see the red gate, and beyond it the blasted oak and the burned cabin on the other side of the road. Farther on, within range of her vision, there were the abandoned acres of broomsedge, and opposite to them she imagined the Sneads' pasture, with the white and red splotches of cows and the blurred patches of huddled sheep.

While she sat there the trembling passed out of her limbs, and the strength that had forsaken her returned slowly. Removing her hat, she let the branches play over her face, like the delicate touch of cool, moist fingers. She felt drenched without and within. The very thoughts that came and went in her mind were as limp as wet leaves, and blown like leaves in the capricious stir of the breeze. For a few minutes she sat there surrounded by a vacancy in which nothing moved but the leaves and the wind. Without knowing what she thought, without knowing even what she felt, she abandoned herself to the encompassing darkness. Then, suddenly, without warning from her mind, this vacancy was flooded with light and crowded with a multitude of impressions.

Their first meeting in the road. The way he looked at her. His eyes when he smiled. The red of his hair. His hand when he touched her. The feeling of his arms, of his mouth on hers, of the rough surface of his coat brushing her face. The first time he had kissed her. The last time he had kissed her. No. It isn't true. It isn't true. Deep down in her being some isolated point of consciousness, slow, rhythmic, monotonous, like a swinging pendulum, was ticking over and over: It isn't true. It isn't true. True. True. It isn't true. On the surface other thoughts came and went. That horrible old man. A fire in summer. The stench of drunkenness. Tobacco stains on his white beard. A rat watching her from a hole. How she hated rats! Did he suspect something, and was he trying to frighten her? Trying to frighten her. But she would let him see that she was too strong for him. She was not afraid. . . . The thoughts went on, coming and going like leaves blown in the wind, now rising, now fluttering down again. But far away, in a blacker vacancy, the pendulum still swung to and fro, and she heard the thin, faint ticking of the solitary point of consciousness: _True. True. It isn't true. It isn't true--true--true_--

No, he couldn't frighten her. She was too sure of herself. Too sure of Jason, too sure of her happiness. "Too sure of Jason," she repeated aloud.

The little sad, watery sun sputtered out like a lantern, and after a few minutes of wan greyness, shone more clearly, as if it had been relighted and hung up again in the sky. Colour flowed back into the landscape, trickling in shallow streams of blue and violet through the nearer fields and evaporating into dark fire where the broomsedge enkindled the horizon. She started up quickly, and fell back. When she put her hand on the slimy moss it felt like a toad.

Far down the road, somewhere in the vague blur of the distance, there was the approaching rumble of wheels. She heard the even rise and fall of the hoofs, the metallic clink of horseshoes striking together, the jolting over the rock by the Sneads' pasture, the splash of mud in the bad hole near the burned cabin, and the slip and scramble of the mare as she stumbled and then, recovering herself, broke into a trot.

_It isn't true. It isn't true_, ticked the pin point of consciousness. Her mind was still firm; but her limbs trembled so violently that she slipped from the stump to the carpet of moss and soaked creepers. Shutting her eyes, she held fast to the slimy branch of a tree. "When he turns at the fork, I will look. I will not look until he turns at the fork."

The rumble was louder, was nearer. An instant of silence. The buggy was approaching the fork. It was at the fork. She heard close at hand the familiar clink of the steel shoes and the sharper squeak of a loosened screw in the wheel. Rising on the sodden mould, she opened her eyes, pushed aside the curtain of branches, and looked out through the leaves. She saw Jason sitting erect, with the reins in his hands. She saw his burnished red hair, his pale profile, his slightly stooping shoulders, his mouth which was closed in a hard straight line. Clear and sharp, she saw him with the vividness of a flash of lightning, and beside him, she saw the prim, girlish figure and the flaxen head of Geneva Ellgood.

_It isn't true. It isn't true._ The pendulum was swinging more slowly; and suddenly the ticking stopped, and then went on in jerks like a clock that is running down. _It isn't true. It isn't true--true--true._

She felt cold and wet. Though she had not lost the faculty of recollection, she was outside time and space, suspended in ultimate darkness. There was an abyss around her, and through this abyss wind was blowing, black wind, which made no sound because it was sweeping through nothingness. She lay flat in this vacancy, yet she did not fall through it because she also was nothing. Only her hands, which clutched wood mould, were alive. There was mould under her finger nails, and the smell of wet earth filled her nostrils. Everything within her had stopped. The clock no longer ticked; it had run down. She could not think, or, if she thought, her thoughts were beyond her consciousness, skimming like shadows over a frozen lake. Only the surface of her could feel, only her skin, and this felt as if it would never be warm again.

"So it is true," she said aloud, and the words, spoken without a thought behind them, startled her. The instant afterwards she began to come back to existence; she could feel life passing through her by degrees, first in her hands and feet, where needles were pricking, then in her limbs, and at last in her mind and heart. And while life fought its way into her, something else went out of her for ever--youth, hope, love--and the going was agony. Her pain became so intolerable that she sprang to her feet and started running through the woods, like a person who is running away from a forest fire. Only she knew, while she ran faster and faster, that the fire was within her breast, and she could not escape it. No matter how far she ran and how fast, she could not escape it.

Presently the running shook her senses awake, and her thoughts became conscious ones. In the silence the shuddering beats of her heart were like the unsteady blows of a hammer--one, two, one, one, two, two. Her breath came with a whistling sound, and for a minute she confused it with the wind in the tree-tops.

"So this is the end," she said aloud, and then very slowly, "I didn't know I could feel like this. I didn't know anybody could feel like this." A phrase of her mother's, coloured with the barbaric imagery of a Hebrew prophet, was driven, as aimlessly as a wisp of straw, into her mind: "Your great-grandfather said he never came to Christ till he had thirsted for blood." Thirsted for blood! She had never known what that meant. It had seemed to her a strange way to come to Christ, but now she understood.

The wet briers tore her legs through her stockings. Branches whipped her face and bruised its delicate flesh. Once, when she came out of the woods, she slipped and fell on her hands and knees. The splinters of the fence pierced her skin when she climbed over the rails. But still she ran on, trying to escape from the fire within her breast.

XIV

On the front porch, with her hand shielding her eyes from the sunset, her mother stood and looked out for her.

"I was watching for you, Dorinda. You must have got caught in the storm."

"Just at the beginning. I stopped at Five Oaks."

"Was anybody there?"

"Nobody but the old doctor. Jemima was off."

"Did he say when he expected Jason?"

"Yes, he told me he might come back this evening."

Once, long ago, she had heard a ventriloquist at a circus, and her voice was like the voice that had come out of the chair, the table, or the wax doll. As she stepped on the porch, her mother examined her closely. "Well, you're as white as a sheet. Go up and take off your wet things as quick as you can, and bring 'em down to the fire. Supper'll be ready in a minute."

Dorinda tried to smile when she hurried by, but her muscles, she found, eluded the control of her will, and the smile was twisted into a smirking grimace. Without trusting herself to meet her mother's eyes, she went upstairs to her room and took off her rain-soaked clothes, hanging her skirt and shirtwaist in the closet, and putting her muddy shoes side by side, as if they were standing at attention on the edge of the rug. Pushing back the curtain over the row of hooks, she selected an old blue gingham dress which she had discarded, and put it on, carefully adjusting the belt, from which the hooks and eyes, were missing, with the help of a safety pin. All the time, while she performed these trivial acts, she felt that her intimate personal self had stepped outside her body, and was watching her from a distance. When she went downstairs, it was only a marionette, like one of the figures she had seen as a child in a Punch and Judy show, that descended the stairs and sat down at the table. She looked at her father and mother, her father eating so noisily, her mother pouring buttermilk, without spilling a drop, into the row of glasses, and wondered what she had to do with these people? Why had she been born in this family and not in another? Could she have been a changeling that they had picked up?

"Dorinda stopped at Five Oaks until the storm was over," she heard her mother say to the others; and suddenly, as if the sound had touched some secret spring in her mind, she became alive again, and everything was bathed in the thin blue light of that room at Five Oaks. The pain was more than she could bear. It was more than anybody could be expected to bear. In a flash of time it became so violent that she jumped up from her chair, and began walking up and down as if she were in mortal agony.

"What's the matter, daughter? Did you come down on your tooth?" inquired Mrs. Oakley solicitously.

"No, it isn't that. I don't want any supper," replied the girl, hurrying out of the room and walking the length of the hall to the front door. "I must do something," she thought. "If I don't do something, this pain will go on for ever."

She had crossed the threshold to the porch, when, wheeling abruptly, she went back into the hall and from the hall into her mother's chamber, where the family Bible lap open on the table and the big fly was still knocking against the ceiling. She had not known that flies lived so long! It seemed an eternity, not a few hours ago, when her mother had sat there reading the Psalms and the fly had buzzed in the stillness. The peaceful room, pervaded by the Sabbath lethargy, with the open Bible waiting for family prayers, and the battered old furniture arranged in changeless order, seemed to close over her like a trap. "I must do something, or this misery will never end," she thought again. But there was nothing that she could do. There would never be anything that she could do in her life. It was over. Everything was over, and she might live to be ninety. "And the child coming too." There also she could find no escape. "No matter what I do, I can change nothing." Something had caught her. Life had caught her. She could not get away, no matter how hard she struggled. A drop of blood fell on her fingers, and glancing into the mirror, she saw that she had bitten her lip until it bled, yet she had not felt it. Nothing like that, nothing on the outside of herself, could ever hurt her again. "If I could only do something," she said in a whisper, and walked from the chamber to the spare room, and from the spare room, which looked as if it were hiding something, out into the hall. Suddenly, like a person moving in delirium, she walked out of the house, and along the path between the pear orchard and the vegetable garden. The green afterglow had faded; but a sallow moon was riding high over the big pine, and gave light enough for her to see her way. Like a wet sheet the twilight folded about her, clinging to her arms and legs when she tried to shake herself free from it. She would have moonlight in the woods, and besides she had nothing to fear. A dry sob broke from her, hurting her throat. You had reached the worst, she realized, when you had nothing to fear.

She followed the path rapidly. By the pear orchard, by the big pine on the hill, by the tobacco field, through the pasture, and into the dark belt of woods. Here the smell of wet earth stifled her, and she lived over again the moment when she had waited there, listening, in the suspense which was more terrible than any certainty. "I didn't know what it was when I went through with it," she thought. "I didn't know what it was until afterwards." Memory, she felt, was gathering like an ulcer in her mind. If she could not let out the pain, the sore would burst from its own swelling. "If I don't do something, I shall die," she said aloud, standing there, on the edge of the woods, among the wet leaves and rotting mould. Then, swift as an inspiration, there came to her the knowledge of what she must do. She must find Jason. Yes, she must find Jason. This knowledge, which was as infallible as instinct, went no further than the imperative necessity of seeing him. Beyond this, the impulse gave way, like a bridge that breaks in the middle of a stream. It left her there, without prop, without direction, hanging over the black current of emptiness.

As she hurried on, a bough struck her so sharply that it bruised her cheek, but she did not feel it. With the act of decision her body had become so airy and transparent that she was no longer conscious of it as a drag on her spirit. Though she ought to have been tired, she felt instead amazingly strong and fresh, amazingly full of vitality. Only now and then, as she walked rapidly through the willows and over the log bridge, lights flickered and vanished and flickered again before her eyes. At first she thought that a million sparks glittered out there in the moist purple twilight; then she realized that they were not there at all but within her brain. And these lights, which flitted round her as she went on, illumined the blind impulse that directed her movements. It was as if she were harnessed to this impulse and driven by it toward some end of which she was ignorant, but which she would presently discern in the fog.

She moved quickly, with her gaze fixed straight in front of her. The dusk was gilded with fireflies, but she could not distinguish these vagrant insects from the roving lights in her brain. The earth underfoot gave out, when it was crushed, a strong, warm, vital odour. Very near and loud, there was the hoot of an owl, followed presently by another; but the cries seemed to be a part of the inner voice which was urging her on. Her feet slipped on the logs. She recovered herself and went on more quickly, more lightly, as if her body did not exist, or existed merely as a cloud. Now she could see the lamps glimmering in the lower windows of the house. There were lights in the hall, in the dining room, in the old doctor's retreat; but all the upstairs windows were dark except for the reflected rays of the moonbeams. Was the old man still crouching over his fire, she wondered, with his rat eyes watching out of a hole?

Around the house there were puddles of water and the piles of trash that she had seen in the afternoon. Like a fawn, she sped over them and stopped, unaware of her panting breath, with her eyes on the back door, which was open. She could see within the hall, where a kerosene lamp was fastened in a bracket near the staircase. The same heaps of bagging and boxes and empty bottles were scattered about; the same collection of rusty guns and broken fishing-poles. For the first time she thought clearly, while her gaze travelled over these ordinary objects, "Why did I come? What is the meaning of it? Why am I waiting out here in the night?" But there was no answer to her question. She could not remember why she had come, why she was standing there alone, with her eyes on the open door, watching. Vacancy was around her, was within her; she was drowning in vacancy. Looking away from the house, she saw that there was a light in the barn, and that the big musty place was deserted. The buggy, from which the horse had been taken, was standing near the door, and one of those formless thoughts which she could not distinguish from feeling told her that Jason would come out to put it under the shed. "If I wait here long enough, I shall see him." Though the words were spoken outside her brain, she knew that she must wait there all night if he did not come.

Stepping over the loosened boards of the threshold of the barn, she glanced about at the disorder, which was like the disorder of the house, only it seemed to her cleaner because it was less human. Wheat, corn, fodder. Farming implements. A reaping machine. Medicine for stock. A jumble of odds and ends that had been thrown out of a tool house. Against a barrel by the door there was the gun with which the old doctor had shot the hawk in the afternoon. Her hands moved over it caressingly, wonderingly. A good gun, not rusty, like everything else on the place. Jason's probably. Far away over the fields a voice was speaking, and the sound floated to her, thin and clear as distant chimes. "_He never came to Christ till he had thirsted for blood._" A strange way--but she knew now, she understood.

There was a noise at the house. A figure darkened the lamplight on the porch; she heard a familiar step; she saw a shadow approaching. It was Jason, she knew, and as he came toward her, she left the barn and went out into the moonlight to meet him. She felt calm now, fresh, strong, relentless; but the ulcer in her mind throbbed as if it were bursting. Yes, it was Jason. He was coming down the steps. He was coming along the path to the barn. In a minute he would see her standing there, another shadow in the moonlight. In a minute he would speak to her.

Suddenly, while she stood there in silence, the gun went off in her hands. She saw the flash; she heard the sound, as if the discharge were miles away; she smelt the powder. The next instant she felt the tremor of the shock as the weapon, recoiled in her hands; and she thought quietly and steadily, "I tried to do it. I wanted to do it."

"Dorinda," he called out, while the smoke drifted past him, and she saw his face go as white as paper in the dimness.

Then, as swiftly as it had come, her resolution went out of her. The gun slipped from her hands to the ground, and lay there in the mud at her feet. Her will, with all its throbbing violence, urged her to shoot him and end the pain in her mind. But something stronger than her conscious will, stronger than her agony, stronger than her hate, held her motionless. Every nerve in her body, every drop of her blood, hated him; yet because of this nameless force within the chaos of her being, she could not compel her muscles to stoop and pick up the gun at her feet. Like a dream, like a fantasy of delirium, her resolution vanished, and she knew that it would not return. "Why am I here? What is the meaning of it all?" she asked wildly of the emptiness within her soul.

"Dorinda!" he said again. He had seen her; he had called her name. They were alone together in the moonlight as they had been when she loved him. If only she had the power to stoop and pick up the gun! If only she had the power to make her muscles obey the wish in her heart! If only she had the power to thrust him out of her life! It was not love, it was not tenderness, it was not pity even, that held her back. Nothing but this physical inability to bring her muscles beneath the control of her will.

"Dorinda!" he said again incoherently, as if he had been drinking. "So you know. But you can't know all. Not what I've been through. Not what I've suffered. Nobody could. It is hell. I tell you I've been through hell since I left you. I never wanted to do it. You are the one I care for. I never wanted to marry her. It was something I couldn't help. They brought pressure on me that I couldn't bear. They made me do it. I was engaged to her before I came back. It was in New York last summer. She showed she liked me and it seemed a good thing. Then I met you. I didn't want to marry her. Before God, Dorinda, I never meant to do it. But I did it. You will never understand. I told you that I funked things. I have ever since I can remember. It's the way my mother funked things with my father. Well, I'm like that, so you oughtn't to blame me so much. God knows I'd help it if I could. I never meant to throw you over. It was their fault. They oughtn't to have brought that pressure to bear on me. They oughtn't to have threatened me. They ought to have let me do the best I could. Speak to me. Say something, Dorinda----"

He went on endlessly, overcome by the facile volubility of a weak nature. Was it in time or in eternity that he was speaking? She thought that he would never stop; but his words made as little impression on her as the drip, drip of rain from the eaves. Nothing that he said made any difference to her. Nothing that he could ever say in the future would make any difference. In that instant, with a piercing flash of insight, she saw him as he was, false, vain, contemptible, a coward in bone and marrow. He had wronged her; he had betrayed her; he had trampled her pride in the dust; and he had done these things not from brutality, but from weakness. If there had been strength in his violence, if there had been one atom of genuine passion in his duplicity, she might have despised him less even while she hated him more. But weak, vain, wholly contemptible as she knew him to be, she had given him power over her. She had placed her life in his hands, and he had ruined it. With the fury of a strong nature toward a weak one that has triumphed over it, she longed to destroy him and she knew that she was helpless. Nothing that she could do would alter a single fact in his future. Even now he excused himself. Even now he blamed others.

"I swear I never meant to do it, Dorinda," he repeated more vehemently, encouraged by her silence. "You won't give me up, will you?"

Thoughts wheeled like a flight of bats in her mind, swift, vague, dark, revolving in circles. They were pressing upon her from every side, but she could distinguish nothing clearly in the thick palpitating darkness. Impressions skimmed so swiftly over her consciousness that they left no visible outline. Before she was aware of them they had wheeled away from her into ultimate chaos. Bats, nothing more. And outside, against the lighted door of the barn, other bats were revolving.

While she stood there without thinking, her perceptions of external objects became acutely alive. She saw Jason's face, chalk-white in the moonlight; she saw the jerking of his muscles while he talked; she saw his arm waving with a theatrical gesture, like the arm of an evangelist. _Drip, drip_, like water from the eaves, she heard the fall of his words, though the syllables were as meaningless as the rain or the wind.

She had not spoken since he approached her; and she realized, standing there in the mud, that she was silent because she could find no words to utter. There was no vehicle strong enough to endure the storm of pain and bitterness in her mind. Dumbness had seized her, and though she struggled to pour out all that she suffered, when she opened her lips to speak, she could make no audible sound. No, there was nothing that she could say, there was nothing that she could do.

"You won't give me up, will you, Dorinda?" he pleaded.

Turning away, she started back again as rapidly as she had come. Though he called after her in a whisper, though he followed her as far as the end of the yard, she did not slacken her pace or look back at him. Swiftly and steadily, like a woman walking in her sleep, she went down the narrow sandy road to the creek and over the bridge of logs. There was a stern beauty in her face and in her tall, straight figure, which passed, swiftly and unearthly as a phantom, through the moonlight. An impulse was driving her again, but it was the impulse to escape from his presence. She was flying now from the vision she had seen of his naked soul.

She walked in the moonlight without seeing it; past the frogs in the bulrushes without hearing them; through the moist woods without smelling them. Time had stood still for her, space had vanished; there was no beginning and no end to this solitary aching nerve of experience. She was aware of nothing outside herself until she entered the house and saw her mother's chamber, with the open Bible and the big blue fly, which still buzzed against the ceiling.

"We're waiting prayers for you, Dorinda. Ain't you coming?"

"No, I'm not coming. I've got a headache."

"Why did you go out again?"

"I thought I heard a coon or something in the henhouse."

"It might make your head better to hear a chapter of the Bible."

"No, it won't. I'm not coming. I'm never coming to prayers again."

XV

In the morning she awoke with the feeling that she was lying under a stone. Something was pressing on her, holding her down when she struggled to rise, and while she came slowly back to herself, she realized that this weight was the confused memory of all that had happened. Yes, it was life. She was caught under it and she couldn't escape.

So far only, her muscles had awakened. Sensation was returning by slow degrees to her limbs; she could feel the quiver of despair in her knees and elbows; but her mind was still drugged by the stupor of exhaustion. Recollection was working its way upward to her brain. Deadened as she was, it astonished her that her muscles should remember more accurately than her mind, that they should record a separate impression. "Something dreadful has happened," she found herself saying mechanically. "It will all come back in a minute."

While she dragged herself out of bed, she tried to fix her thoughts on insignificant details. Her shoes were still damp, and she changed them for a pair her mother had given her a few weeks ago because they drew her ankles. There was a broken lace. She must remember to buy a new one at the store. Beyond the window she could see the orchard and the graveyard, with the big pine on the hill, and farther away the shallow ripples of the broomsedge. All these things seemed to her fantastic and meaningless, as if they were painted on air. She recalled now what had happened last evening; but this also appeared meaningless and unreal, and she felt that the whole flimsy situation would evaporate at the first touch of an actual event. She could remember now; but it was a recollection without accompanying sensation, as inanimate as the flitting picture cast by a lantern. Some, terrible mistake seemed to have occurred to her. Just as if she had stepped, for a few dreadful moments, into a life that was not her own. And all the past, when she looked back upon it, wore this aspect of unreality. The world in which she had surrendered her being to love--that world of spring meadows and pure skies--had receded from her so utterly that she could barely remember its outlines. By no effort of the imagination could she recapture the ecstasy. Colours, sounds, scents, she could recall; the pattern of the horizon; evening skies the colour of mignonette; the spangled twilight over the bulrushes; but she could not revive a single wave, a single faint quiver, of emotion. Never would it come back again. The area of feeling within her soul was parched and blackened, like an abandoned field after the broomsedge is destroyed. Other things might put forth; but never again that wild beauty. Around this barren region, within the dim border of consciousness, there were innumerable surface impressions, like the tiny tracks that birds make in the snow. She could still think, she could even remember; but her thoughts, her memories, were no deeper than the light tracks of birds.

"Why did it happen? What was the meaning of it?" she asked dully, sitting on the side of her bed, with her shoe in her hand. A few hours ago she had loved Jason; now she loved him no longer. All that had drawn her to him seemed now to drive her away; all that had been desire had turned into loathing; all that was glowing with flame was now burned out to cinders. There were women, she knew, who could love even when they hated; but she was not one of these. The vein of iron in her nature would never bend, would never break, would never melt completely in any furnace. "He is weak and a coward," she thought. "How could I love a coward?" Yes, how could she love a coward? And, strangely enough, when she despised him most bitterly, she thought not of the wrong he had done her, not of his treachery and his betrayal of her love, but of the way he had looked in the moonlight, with his chalk-white face, his jerking muscles, and his arm waving with the gestures of an evangelist.

Well, it was all over now. Everything was over but the immediate trouble that she must face. Memories, impressions, undeveloped sensations that led to nothing, swarmed upon her from the hidden crevices of her being. The Old Stage Road. The way it branched at the burned cabin. The blasted oak with the Gospel sign on it. The clink of the mare's shoes. The benign faces of Dan and Beersheba as they looked back at her under bunches of indigo. Work. Never anything but work. Her mother's voice nagging, always nagging. Coral strands and palm trees and naked black babies. What was the meaning of it? Jason as he looked last night. Weak, whining, apologetic, blaming everything and everybody except himself. His hair plastered in damp streaks on his forehead. His eyes, red and blinking, as if he had wept. His hands that were never still; nervous hands, without a firm grip on anything. How she hated him. What had she ever seen in him to love? Cinders. Nothing left of it but cinders. Not so much as a spark. Life. That was what it meant. Then, suddenly, the way he used to look. His eyes when he smiled, crinkling at the corners. His straight eyebrows brooding like a storm over his brown-black eyes. The feeling of his hand on her arm. His charm. Yes, his charm that she had forgotten. Like a breath of air, or a subtle fragrance, she felt his charm stealing back through her senses, as if minute waves of aromatic incense were blowing over her nerves. Though she hated him, could so slight a thing as the memory of his smile awake the familiar vibrations? Though her mind had broken away from him, was her body still held a prisoner? And would his power come back always, without warning of its approach, like the aching of a tooth that one has touched in a sensitive spot? A few minutes ago she was deadened into the emotional stupor she called peace. Now, because of a single external image, because of so trivial a recollection as the way his eyebrows drew down over his eyes, all the agony of life was beginning again.

She thrust her foot into the shoe and stood up, flinging back her head as she went to the mirror to shake out her hair. The stubborn resolution, which was the controlling motive in her character, shot through her like a bolt. "Well, there's no use thinking," she said aloud. "I've got to go through with it." While she combed her hair back from her forehead, and twisted it into its usual compact knot on her head, she gazed wonderingly at her face in the mirror. After all she had suffered it seemed strange to her that her face had not withered and her hair turned white in a night. But there was scarcely a perceptible change in her appearance. The line of her hair was still dark and waving; her eyes were still clear and blue; the velvety colour still flowed beneath the few golden freckles on her cheeks. Only there was something in her eyes that had not been there until yesterday. She knew life now, she reflected, and that showed in her eyes.

Fastening her dress as she left the room, she hurried downstairs and into the kitchen where her mother was already busy about breakfast.

"What do you want me to do, Ma?"

"Everything's 'most ready. You can call your father and the boys and then pour out the coffee."

"Why didn't you wake me?"

"You're always tired Monday morning, so I thought I'd let you sleep. I don't see how it is. Sermons rest me. Why didn't you bring your wet things down to the kitchen last night?"

"I was so tired I forgot." Would her mother never stop nagging? Would there never be any quiet?

She called the men to breakfast, poured out their coffee, and helped her mother serve the cornbread and bacon. Then she sat down and ate slowly and deliberately, forcing herself to swallow, as she had forced herself to take gruel when she had had measles. The agony had died down; she felt bruised and sore as if she had been beaten; but the intensity of the pain had settled into a hard substance like lead in her breast. There was not a ripple of emotion surrounding this island of bitterness into which her love had resolved; there was only a vast sea of indifference. The torture would return, she supposed. She was accustomed now to the fact that it came and went, without reason, like one of her mother's attacks of neuralgia; but, for the moment, at least, her nerves had ceased their intolerable vibration.

After breakfast, when she walked along the road to the store, it seemed to her that the landscape had lost colour, that the autumn glow had gone out of the broomsedge. When she came to the fork she found herself listening for the clink of the mare's shoes, and she resolved that she would run into the woods or cower down in the brushwood if she heard the buggy approaching. Never would she see him again, if she could prevent it. Her mind played with absurd fancies. She imagined him dying, and she saw herself looking on without pity, refusing to save him, standing motionless while he drowned before her eyes, or was trampled to death by steers. No, she would never see him again.

There was no sound at the fork. She walked on past the burned cabin, past the Sneads' farm, where the cows looked at her pensively, past the second belt of woods, and up the bone-white slope to the station. Here she found the usual sprinkling of passengers for the early train, and in order to avoid them she went into the store and began arranging the shelves. In a minute Minnie May came to fetch her, and following the little girl into the bedroom, Dorinda found Mrs. Pedlar lying flat in bed, with the pink sacque, which she was too weak to slip on, spread over her breast. The summer had drained the last reserve of her strength. She was growing worse every hour, and she was so fragile that her flesh was like paper. Yet she still kept her vivacity and her eager interest in details.

"Oh, Dorinda," she breathed. "It isn't true, is it?"

Dorinda picked up the sacque and slipped it over the meagre shoulders. "If you aren't careful, you'll take cold," she said quietly, and then, after an imperceptible pause. "Yes, it is true."

"You don't mean he has married Geneva?"

"Yes, he has married Geneva."

"Oh, why? But, Dorinda----"

While Rose Emily was still talking, the girl turned away and went back into the store. If she didn't work and deaden thought, she couldn't possibly go through with it. All this numbness was on the surface of her being, like the insensibility that is produced by a narcotic. It didn't lessen a single pang underneath, nor alter a solitary fact of existence. At any minute, without premonition, the effects of the narcotic might wear off, and she might come back to life again. Coming back to life, with all that she had to face, would be terrible. Taking the broom from the corner behind the door, she began sweeping the floor in hard, long strokes, as if she were sweeping away a mountain of trash; and into these strokes she put as much as she could of her misery. When she had finished sweeping the store, she brushed the mud from the platform and the steps to the pile of refuse which had accumulated at the back of the house. Then she brought a basin of water and a cake of soap, and scrubbed the counter and the shelves where the dry goods were kept. She worked relentlessly, with rigid determination, as if to clean the store were the one absorbing purpose of her life.

"What's got into you, Dorinda?" asked Nathan, while he watched her. "You look as if you'd gone dirt crazy." Dirt crazy! That was what the boys said of her mother.

"I get so tired looking at dust," she replied.

"Dust? I didn't know there was a speck of dust anywhere around. Old Jubilee swept and dusted this morning."

With her dripping brush in her hand, Dorinda turned from the shelves she was washing and looked at him over the counter. She wondered why he had not spoken of Jason, and some dormant instinct, buried in the morass of her consciousness, was grateful to him because he had avoided the subject. He must know. Everybody knew by this time. Yet he had not alluded by word or look to the wreck of her happiness. Though she did not think of it at the moment, long afterwards she realized that this was one of the occasions when Nathan had shown a tactfulness which she had never imagined that he possessed.

She finished the shelves, going scrupulously into each crack and corner. Then, putting the basin and the cake of soap aside, she wiped the dampness off with a cloth, and arranged the bolts of figured calico and checked gingham in orderly rows. When this was over she attacked the pasteboard boxes on the adjoining shelf, cleaning, dusting, reassorting the contents of each separate box. It was amazing the way dust collected. Old Jubilee had cleaned the store. Yet here was dirt poked away in the corners.

She had made herself cheap, that was the trouble. If you are going to cheapen yourself, her mother had said, be sure first that the man is not cheap also. Then, even if you are sure, it pays to be prudent. Prudence builds no poorhouses--that was her mother again. Oh, if only she had known when knowledge could have been useful! If only you could live your life after experience and not before! She knew now how to face things. . . .

At that instant, with a stab of anguish, she became alive. Her pain, which had been merely a dull ache, was suddenly as keen as if a blade had been driven into her wound. She couldn't bear it. Nobody could bear it. In a kind of daze she picked up the cloth, the dust pan, the cake of soap, and carried them to the end of the room. Then, taking down her hat from a peg behind the door, she put it on and went out of the store and across the yard to the gate and the road. It seemed to her that if only she could reach home quickly, she should find that it had all been a mistake, that something had happened to make the situation less terrible than it appeared from a distance. What this something was she tried to imagine. Perhaps the old man had lied. Perhaps Jason was not really married. Perhaps he hadn't meant her to understand that he was married. There were so many possibilities, she told herself, that she could not think of them all. A hundred accidents--anything might have occurred. Only at the store she felt smothered and shut away, as if she were left behind by the hours. A deep instinct, like the instinct that drives a wounded animal to flight, was urging her to go somewhere--anywhere--as long as it was to a different place. She had made a mistake, she saw now, to come to the store. At home it would be easier. At home she should be able to think of some way out of her misery.

She walked as fast as she could, panting for breath, hurrying over the bad places in the road, as if the thing she feared were pursuing her. Down the long slope; through the thin pines; over the mile of red clay road, broken with mud holes; past the Sneads' pasture, where the sourish smell of cattle hung perpetually in the air; by the burned cabin at the fork; and on into the edge of Hoot Owl Woods at the beginning of Old Farm. When, at last, she struggled over the sagging bridge and up the rocky grade to the porch, she was almost surprised to find that the house was not on fire. There was an unnatural aspect, she felt, in the familiar scene, as of a place that had suffered beneath a tornado and yet remained unchanged on the surface. And this smiling October serenity appeared to her to be unendurable. Trembling like a blade of grass, she stood hesitating on the threshold. "Why did I come?" she asked in amazement. "What did I expect to find?"

"Is that you, Dorinda?" called her mother from the kitchen, where she was washing clothes. A kettle of "sour pickle" was simmering on the stove, and the air was laden with the pungent aroma. "What on earth is the matter?"

"I forgot something."

"It must have been mighty important. What was it you forgot?"

The trembling had passed from Dorinda's limbs to her thoughts. She felt as if she should drop. "I--I can't remember," she answered.

"Well, I never!" Mrs. Oakley appeared in the doorway, her bare arms glazed with soapsuds and her face beaded with steam. "You ain't sick, are you?"

"No, I remember now. It was a piece of embroidery Rose Emily was doing. She asked me to bring it."

"Embroidery? I should think she might have managed to wait till to-morrow."

"I didn't mind the walk. It is better than being in the store."