Elizabeth Madox Roberts

“ And swift I am gone where the hill-streams flow,
Where the pit-lark soars and the gentians blow.
The tapers of blossoms flame under the tree
And the pilgrim road unfolds for me,
Lifting away where the hill-folk keep
The gardens and cloisters and shrines of the Steep.
———
In charmed ways my feet are set:
By what fair host is the palmer met
And borne away to the great white stills?
Is it only the wind that comes down from the hills? ”

“ Conway calling alone would talk of himself, sitting happily in the dim light of the parlor and enjoying his heightened self, his ease, his good looks, Theodosia’s beauty, all the delights of remembered being. Albert coming alone would grow heavily reminiscent, self-appraising, romantic, planning his future, laying his plans before her, eager for acquiescence. He was broad and strong, filling his chair with his man’s frame. Another, Frank Railey, would stop casually on his way up or down the street, or he would take her to row on the pool beyond the town. ”

“ THREE Catherine Lovell’s face was dim in Theodosia’s memory now that it was gone from the town. To her this was something to contemplate, this sure loss of a face when it had passed beyond the sight of the eye. The face would be recognized instantly anywhere upon the earth, in any crowd, but it could not be restored to a vivid image in waking thought. Theodosia pursued all vanishing faces with moments of wonder and amazement, for Jane Moore, out of sight, was but dimly seen although the flavor of her being, of her way, her smile, was keenly discerned. ”

“ The music must come out of your soul, out of your soul.”
Theodosia would wake from the deep first sleep of the night and see the rectangles of the high windows turn to pale silver with the winter dawn. She would move in her bed, opening her eyes briefly upon the familiar furniture of the room, the long glass between the windows, the high dresser, the deep sofa beside the fireplace. Then she would settle to the lighter sleep of the morning, hearing the steps of early passers on the pavement of the street and hearing the click of the gate latch when Siver came to his work. ”

“ Theodosia stirred a little in her chair and her own part in the room troubled her, in the house. “What am I here? What to them?” she was asking herself. She sat in the stiff chair, in the middle of the floor, facing Americy, feeling Lethe’s hate. “Her hate pushes me back, but it does not push me out at the door,” she was thinking. She began to play some melody on the fiddle, a melody which she broke and distorted, rubbing the bow softly over the gut, making a thin, distracted music, unjointed, without logic. ”

“ It is nobody’s useless old cat, having been stoned three times to death and left by boys in a tin-can heap at the bottom of a gully in Dee Young’s pasture, arising, one eye hanging by a thread, to cry “meauw” [28] on a woman’s kitchen doorstep and to drink warm milk from a brown saucer.
It is the wide-opened jaw of a hound blowing hot breath on a little field beast and crying a howled curse on the perfidy of escape. It is a wave of hard shadows running over dried grass and winter stubble under a vast warted sky, the rabbit having taken to the brush heap at the field’s end. ”

“ Every day or two Theodosia would ask her aunt if she and Annie might go to see Aunt Deesie. The walk across the pasture and the cornfield was long, but the pleasure of Aunt Deesie’s yard was sweet. Aunt Deesie ironed the clothes, heating the irons on the open embers of the fire that burned in the yard. The baby always lay on the quilt and the small girls stood bashfully about. One day Theodosia took them some of the candy Tom Singleton had brought from the store. She could scarcely endure the joy of her loathing as she touched their fingers in giving them the sweets. ”

“ Horace Bell had been on the side of the half-wit and he had made a long speech in defense of her rights as one of the innocents of the earth, rhetoric flowing richly. People had gone in groups to look at the cabin behind the jail and Dolly Brown had met them with smiles and giggling laughter until these visits had wearied her. Then she had thrown boiling water at groups to drive them off. Theodosia could not remember when Stiggins had not stayed in the livery stable and she had always thought of him as being somehow related to the horses and mules there. ”

“ Jane Moore laughed a great deal as she played, and she played many notes wrong, but she offered Theodosia a steady tinkle-tinkle of piano rhythms against which to set her fiddle. Over the chimney hung a steel engraving of Henry Clay in some congressional pose, and the insignia of the Trotters and the Montfords, done in color by some artist and neatly framed, hung near together on the north wall. Through the freshly curtained windows the scent of locust blossoms would come, and outside, from garden to garden, up the street, the locust trees had their flower. ”

“ Americy had had many men, that she knew. Did she have more than one at a time, she would wonder, and again she would [144] plead with the brown veins at the wrist above the smoothing iron, with the swaying gestures of the hand above the board, to know what was the quality of the passion that bent Americy to her way of life, pity and pride and tenderness making within herself an emotion which might have been called love. Lethe was usually gone from the house, for she was working as a cook somewhere. ”

“ The child gave the rattle to the baby, and in the act Theodosia knew a sweet loathing of the small dark infant and knew that she herself could not be brought to touch it or to touch Katie. She knew the half-pleasant disgust felt for the young of another kind, a remote species. Their acts sent little stabs of joy over her, sickly stabs of pleasant contempt and pride.
The week at the farm was always full of enhanced being. She would see her grandfather under the wooden pillars of the portico and see him in his joyous encounters with his old friend. ”

“ It is the will to say, the power never being sufficient, the reach toward the last word—less than word, half-word, quarter-word, minimum of a word—that shrinks more inwardly and farthest toward its center when it is supplicated, that cries back, “Come,” or “Here, here I am,” when it is unsought. It is the act of looking when the mirror of the earth looks back into a creature, back into quickened nerves and raw sensitive feelers that run to the ends of a town, gray and white threads, living threads, knotted into a net and contrived to catch and to hold pleasure and pain, chiefly to hold pain. ”

“ The ragged chrysanthemums bloomed along the front of the house where the south sun shone, and the fallen leaves made every footstep clatter. The fields beyond the town, where they arose on the hills and were seen from the windows of the house, had lost their rough lines as they were turned under by the plow for the winter grains, were set in order for the next growing year. Her eyes, lifted from the strings, would rest far away on the hill field where the earth had been made new and where it ran perpetually now with her singing legato, the brown earth laid out brown in the autumn sun. ”

“ She was playing scales all morning in her room, using difficult intervals, her content running now with the cry of the tone and settling to the grace of her fingers as they crumpled over the strings. Her hands were pliant but narrow, not good fiddle hands, the teacher had said. They were her mother’s hands much diminished. She was hearing the words of the teacher, her master, as they discoursed of vibration. She was, the teacher, herself an epitome of the fiddle, her quick graceful standing figure, her hand that was broad and flexible in the palm. ”

“ Florence Agnew’s lips had the ripples of water. “The flesh beside her mouth is a pearl with life in it,” Theodosia was thinking, and the event was gathering swiftly. Florence rested continually upon her beauty, luxuriating upon it, and her quick eyes went frequently to Albert’s eyes where they continued some former contact and some growing knowledge. They were telling of the day before, of the afternoon spent among the growers, and they had many incidents to recall, droll sayings, laughter, droll prejudices, caricatures of close-handed men. ”

“ This theme, a pastoral from some central-European rolling plain, is ours as we sit in the heart of this land where the seasons rise and fall in waves, a melancholy procession, and men mark their time with their labor as they roll the soil over from year to year endlessly plowing. Conway was with her in these articulations, in the breath of her throat, in the beat of her right hand over the gut wires. The people went by, fluttering to the county fair and back, and August was over. ”

“ The town stretched away to an immeasurable distance, and the song of the mockingbird became the atmosphere one breathed, a touched substance, giving life to the breath of man, set about the earth to flow [149] with the winds. The tall swaying grass with its sunlight was the people of the earth, the reason for the continuance of the world. When Frank spoke she folded his words together, having subtracted from them their meaning, and dropped them over the brow of the hill beyond the reach of the grass, beyond the mockingbird’s song. ”

“ Theodosia said. “I want to learn to do that. I intend to learn it. Give it to me for an exercise. It can’t get away from me. I will have it. I want it.”
“You will never do that in this world,” she said. “Your hand wasn’t made for that. You couldn’t do successive octaves, Miss. Don’t cry for the moon. Artificial harmonics will always be beyond you. It’s no great matter.” ”

“ The harvesters came to the wheat, and the cut field, laid up in orderly bundles, row after row, was increased in size, multiplied or enhanced by the elasticity of lines spreading two ways over a rolling land. The harvest hands were lusty feeders, sitting heartily to the food Midi and Rowena and Susan prepared, pouring great goblets of soured milk from the tall white pitcher or helping themselves again to the roasted meat that was piled high on the platter. Some voice at the cattle barns beyond the road and the pasture sang from mid-summer forward. ”

“ Jane Moore came sometimes to practise with the instruments, inaccurate as before but pretty in her gray fur and bright blue dress. She would laugh at the precision of the music teacher and clatter amiably on the piano, her eyes misty with her own prettiness and tender with the devotion of youth to youth. “You’re too sweet for words,” she would say to Theodosia as she touched the keys lightly, smiling over her shoulder. ”

“ Steps came off the farther slope, man’s steps, sublimated and hollowed by the distance, feet walking through the grass, about the barns, off to the farther end of the pasture. They were lost then and denied as being delusion, an impossible. The night was warm and all but herself were asleep, drugged by the heat indoors. She saw them laid out to sleep or crumpled into relaxed postures, in their beds, up and down the countryside, from farm to farm, abstracted, a man asleep. Man lies down to rest, but the cows rest half kneeling, their crumpled forefeet ready to arise. She saw Caleb Burns asleep. ”

“ All creatures living beneath the sun.
First Voice, arguing: Tell him how it is here. Say, “As an old friend, Frank, I’ll tell you my situation....”
Theodosia: I’ll say nothing. Shut your blabber.
Second Voice: Last night while you were asleep a great black face, a man’s face, mouth open, teeth wide, bloody throat, came swimming, tonight will come swimming close into your eyes, into the very light of your brain. Swims up into your sight.
She turned quickly toward the window to dispel the too-vivid dream and looked at the boughs of the trees as they stood as cold lace against the sky. ”

“ The fiddle was stilled that she might not awaken those asleep in the house, but her mind played at a crooked phrase, a distressed lack-melody that mounted with a perpetual question toward the constellations in the open sky above and in the grass below, Midi turned momentarily back upon herself in intense departure, and she reflected that a woman’s life is short and full of peril. ”