Elizabeth Madox Roberts

“ Theodosia knew the intensities of Midi as she walked up the pasture toward the rise of the low hill, going now to view Prudence, two years old, not yet come to the age of milk, but beautifully marked and deeply characterized by the qualities her author had devised for her. The intensities of Midi contrasted the quiet of the herd at this hour, the hour before milking time, when the lush plenty of the grass and the filled rumen induced quiet, but the force of intense life lay back of the animals in the power of their great bodies and of the young that were gathered in the calf pens. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ She had no relation to the bed in which she had lain formerly and no need or thought or memory of it, no possessive sense of it. The world became more and more dim as the fire sank lower, the air colored with a pink afterglow, and the dark crept nearer, a fact which she held somehow but to which she was indifferent. Old Tilly barked fitfully now, or lay exhausted in a corner of the room. She kept no relation to the fiddle as it lay on the table beyond the hearth, beyond the reach of the firelight ”

“ They eluded her, unnamed, receding down a long vista into her inner sight. She recalled particular occasions when the surrounding world had seemed good, a good place in which to be. Admiring words from others, caresses, gifts, all the people singing in the church—in the seed of each happening an insufficiency. There was never enough.
[53]
They were on the portico again, the mottled shadows of the boughs falling on their faces. The voices became sharp and firm, pleasantly outlined, immense, governed by some relation to the vine on the wall and its great reach from the soil of the ground. ”

“ The infant had been still-born and after a little all but the richly tragic parts of the drama would be forgotten.
Passing in her room, Theodosia observed that she had removed Conway’s picture from her shelf although she scarcely remembered the act. It had been put into a box of photographs, taken up without passion and slipped inside the cover of the box at some casual moment between coming and going. She laughed once a swift, cruel laughter that bent downward the corners of her mouth at the spectacle of two women quarreling over a dead man, herself one. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If he bent over a printed page, his earnest eyes lowered to their drooping, his mouth caught in its relaxed, searching pose, his studious moment would give him back to his boyhood, even to childhood, and Theodosia would smile faintly beside her eyes, deeply under the flesh, in a moment of tenderness. Sometimes she would play for him the light music he desired, bent rhythms that paused over brinks and leaped with spasmodic passion to its fulfilment in another twisted measure, any sort so that it moved swiftly to its consummation and readily fulfilled its promises. ”

“ 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. ”