The Time of Man

by Elizabeth Madox Roberts

  ‘And while they were a-sayen it,’ Ellen spoke in her turn, ‘She was even then a-thinken about a rope… Had it in mind that Scott MacMurtrie had gone away with Mandy Cain.’

  Her own hour gathered with the old event, identified with it, standing over her. She could not be the same, could never go back and be the same she had been before Jonas. She would take him out of her mind. She would tear him out if she had to tear out her very entrails, if she had to gut herself and brain herself with her own hands.

  She could never do it; he had run in very deep upon her life. She would kill him with her terrible hands. She would strangle him with one strong grip. He had run into her blood and into her very breath. She hated him. She would take him out of herself if she had to tear him out with a gun or with a knife. She would kill him where he stood when she saw him again.

  She tried to be aware of the dark, to free herself of the spectres, to push aside the old event and disentangle her own, to govern her own. She left the bed and sat on the floor before the window, placing her arms slowly along the narrow sill. She would go back very slowly and firmly and be what she was before. The return, she reflected, would come if she would be quiet. She would go after the turkeys and cut the wood and gather the beans and milk the cows, always looking for something that had not yet come, and be glad if a stranger passed and wonder who this one was and who that. She would go to bed thinking about a vague after-a-while or she would gather the blackberries for Miss Tod and be thinking that the money she would get would help buy her winter shoes. She would make her breath come quietly in and out, for she was still herself, Ellen Chesser.

  ‘I’m Ellen Chesser. And I’m here, in myself,’ she said. She turned her mind upon some happenings of her infancy. She had lived in a house under nut trees. The rinds of the nuts broke off in beautiful smooth segments and inside was the pale yellow hickory nut to be laid away to dry for the winter. One day she got a fish bone in her throat and Henry carried her a long way down the road, so far that she fell asleep in his arms as he walked. Then she was awake, in some strange house, and there a woman took out the bone with a bright tool.

  She arose from the floor and sat on the bed again, flinging down hard. She could never be the same, could never go back. What had some withered, ancient past, tenderly remembered but dry, flat, apart, to do with this life she had now? Let it get out. Let it go. She could never be the same as before. Jonas had been in her thought too long so that her very breath had grown up around him. He was even then tearing a pain through her breast. She saw even more vividly the face on the floor, two men leaning over it, one preparing it for life and the other for death; and then the coroner, ‘Yes, she tied the rope herself, that’s plain,’ and to herself, sworn to speak the truth, ‘Do you know any reason why Cassie MacMurtrie would hang herself?’ Every human relation faded out and every physical tie. Up was no more than down and out undistinguished from in. Friends and possessions and relatives were gone, and hunger and need. She was leaning over Miss Cassie as she lay on the floor – Ellen and Miss Cassie and no other. She leaned over the dead face until she was merged with its likeness, looking into the bulging eyes, the blackened mouth, and the fallen jaw. She went down the stairs and out the door of the house, walking slowly, standing a little while in her tracks, going on. In her eyes, in the very core of her vision, was still the face. She was still merged with the face. Once she stopped by the pond and once she waited awhile by the mule barn. She wandered over the rise of the pasture hill; there was a turmoil in the fog of the earth, in the dew of the soil, in the sweat of the planet. Her feet wandered to the old barn and over into the edge of the marsh. Her tracks were seen the next day along the edge of the tobacco field and up the rise toward the old plant bed where the stone piles stood in the brambles.

  Ellen was sick for several days, unable to go to the field or the milking pen for her throat was swollen and her skin fevered and dry. Then Henry began to talk of going to another place, saying that he thought he would make a change before spring, fearing, as he said, that he had been at Wakefield’s long enough, he not wanting to take root anywhere. He dropped hints of his intentions as the summer was passing.

  ‘You’re well enough off here,’ Nellie said. ‘You better stay one place awhile.’

  Returning from the tobacco field one evening Ellen knew by some disorder of the chairs in the cabin room and by some faint odour there, that Dorine had been to see Nellie. And while her mother prepared the supper, although she did not speak, from her hostile movements and rough gestures Ellen knew that Dorine had told her of Jonas and Sallie Lou. Ellen went to the table fearfully, but Nellie was quiet, eating little food as if she were sickened, and she spoke but once, to Henry, rebuking him with great bitterness for some slight comment upon the bread which he enacted by rejecting a burnt piece. She pushed aside her uneaten serving and stared at the lamp light. Afterward when Ellen helped her to gather up the dishes she spoke, her voice trailing half away under some enforced discipline.

  ‘At the store, what kind of goods has he got for fall? I aim for you to have a new fall dress if you are minded. A plaid would be pretty for fall, I always think. A worsted or some kind of wool goods, I’d get you, high price is no matter.’

  ‘I’ll ride over some day to see,’ Ellen said, ‘or you could go yourself.’ She cared nothing for the dress, cared only to help Nellie pass the bitter moment.

  Henry had already begun to search for another place and Ellen dug the potatoes and put them into sacks ready for hauling, two full sacks. Then Miss Tod gave her three geese, two females and a gander. The stripping of the tobacco was hurried so that Henry would be free to go, and all through November this work went forward, John Bradshaw lending a hand, or Mary his wife, or even Mr Al Wakefield. Ellen wore her hair drawn tight or let it hang in a braid, the high coils neglected. She would sit listlessly in her dark dress, her throat unribboned, or she would set herself to the tobacco and work until twilight when the leaves were scarcely visible in the dark stripping room. She would feel the gloom of the barn and of her dingy dress and the limp weariness of the tobacco, and if she continued to move in life it was as if she were some vague memory in some careless mind. She hated Jonas now as being unfit for her regret, as feeble, in him a blending of weakness and appealing friendliness which he had in part and which she had lent him. But working in the stripping room she would often listen for his step in the outer barn, for his voice there joking the men, coming nearer to her, or inside the cabin she would imagine she heard his voice calling to her from the pasture road, herself ready to go, listening intently for confirmation of her wish. Under this confusion she sank as under the dirt of the grave, and thus she sat endlessly stripping the leaves from the tobacco stems, but in her dreams in the night she often arose to a great quiet beauty. There a deep sense of eternal and changeless well-being suffused the dark, a great quiet structure reported of itself, and sometimes out of this wide edifice, harmonious and many-winged, floating back into blessed vapours, released from all need or obligation to visible form, a sweet quiet voice would arise, leisured and backward-floating, saying with all finality, ‘Here I am.’

  In December Henry said that he would go to a farm behind the St Lucy country, to the southeast. It was a damp morning, the air mild and wet, the horizon standing close, when they were preparing to leave. Ellen was to start her cow on the way and then come back to help pack the things into the wagon, leaving the cow grazing along the road. She found the heifer unwilling to leave the herd, loath to pass through the gate and quit the pasture she had always known. Ellen could lay her hand on the animal’s neck and lead her forward a short distance, but she would stand uncertain, gazing about at the road in bewilderment, and turn back toward the farm gate. Ellen was so occupied with getting the cow forward that she passed the farm with no thought of farewell and no sense of this as the last passing. There was no looking backward at the cabin, at the barns or pens, at the pond, and no pang at seeing acutely the pasture brow where sh
e had last seen Jonas, and the paths and roads along which she had walked often with him in her mind. The little cow was a year and nine months old, delicately formed as yet, a mere heifer, but her calf would come before the summer. She had never known life except the life of the herd, she drifting across the pasture with the other cows, feeding on the pasture grass or on the fodder at the ricks, surrounded by the comfort of companions. Ellen passed beyond the reach of Wakefield’s land and beyond Gowan’s stone wall, intent upon the heifer. She thought that she would put the animal inside some small enclosure, some pasture she might pass, and go back for a rope to make a lending line, but before a convenient place appeared the wagon came, Henry driving and Nellie beside him on the seat, with all the furniture piled on the wagon frame and a coop holding the hens and geese tied on behind.

  ‘I allowed to go back and help,’ Ellen said, surprised at the appearance, but the cow had given more trouble than they had expected and Henry had no word of blame for her. She had been cut free by the accident, and now, her attention upon the beast as before, she followed the slowly moving wagon and fell far behind it although it moved as a lodestar ahead of her, the shifting goal toward which she centred, for her thought could not go beyond it. She knew nothing of their destination, having been too listless to ask. ‘Over behind St Lucy,’ Henry had said. The place was as remote to her as some uncharted land beyond unmeasured floes and lying out white on a map. Mile after mile she followed the slim heifer or led her gently along, letting her eat the dry winter grass by the road and drink as she pleased at any stream. The farms receded and strange roadsides closed about her, and she no longer knew the lay of the hills and meadows. There were herself and the cow, passing forward toward a moving destiny, the wagon, all moving down the turning roads and crossing lanes, going by some genius forward and on. She would watch the rise and fall of the cow’s hips and the sway of her back, the slow undulations of her horns, until she was herself identified with the drifting beast. The heifer was a pale brown with darker shadings about her feet and darker clouds of brown lying over her face. She had no knowledge of the calf that was in her side. After the many turnings she had made no further resistance, but went slowly rising and falling, drifting along the roads, taking guidance from Ellen’s hand on her hip.

  They passed a wide road on which there were frequent travellers, drifting with this a short way along a valley beside a creek. When they left the great road they turned to the south and passed along a soft clay road that lifted up among rougher hills. The cow’s feet made little two-toed tracks in the clay and her footfalls sounded less sharp. Henry stopped frequently to let Ellen rest, or he would offer to drive the cow and let her take his place on the wagon, but the beast knew Ellen’s guidance best, and the journey soon moved forward as before, the wagon far ahead and dimly seen up a long vista or lost around a curve, but still the forward-drawing force, and she walked quietly on, bound in the immediate certainty of herself alive and of the little cow moving evenly before her.

  They went by scattered farms, taking hill after hill and winding about along valleys, rising always a little higher. There was much uncultivated land grown over with brush that was now leafless, the colour of these patches red and brown because of the December twigs and buds. A long hill lifted slowly from rise to rise, so gently that the cow scarcely slackened her gait, and Ellen came evenly after, her hand now and then resting on the animal’s back and herself rising and falling with the movements of the beast. Near the top of a hill Ellen lifted her eyes and, rising out of the near-lying road, far away against the sky, rolled a great land, space after space and hill floating after hill to the south where a chain of low mountains hung embedded in the mesh of the air. A few steps further and the whole landscape had lifted, a far rolling land but little marked by farms for there were few houses visible, although here and there the cleared places were green with winter wheat. The mountains grew more definite as she looked back to them, their shapes coming upon her mind as shapes dimly remembered and recognised, as contours burnt forever or carved forever into memory, into all memory. With the first recognition of their fixity came a faint recognition of those structures which seemed everlasting and undiminished within herself, recurring memories, feelings, responses, wonder, worship, all gathered into one final inner motion which might have been called spirit; this gathered with another, an acquired structure, fashioned out of her experience of the past years, out of her passions and the marks put upon her by the passions of others, this structure built up now to its high maturity. There was no name to come to her lips in this moment of faint recognition, a moment which dispersed itself in an emotion, for the word Jonas had been denied her, had been subtracted from the emotion it had caused and signified and with which it had been made one for many reasons. She stood very still on the top of the rise, the heifer standing beside her and biting at the low dry herbs.

  The land lying out before her was rugged and brush-grown, sparsely inhabited and but little farmed. Here and there were stony rises and bluffs of torn stones, and while she looked up and down the expanse a grey tower appeared, rising out of the hills toward the east. The tower was of stone like the stone of the hills, an eight-sided tower with eight high indentures in its crown topped by eight stone crosses. The tower would be St Lucy, for ‘Beyond St Lucy’ had been the legend by which she had walked all day through the roads and lanes. She would live, she reflected, somewhere down within that rugged stretch of land. She would sink down into the land, turning through the hills as the road went; she would go into the place. She laid her hand again on the heifer’s side and together they walked down the sloping road. The near aspects of the land, hummocks and scrubby hills, stones and gullies, closed around them.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The farm Henry had rented was called the Orkeys place, a mere patch of land, twenty-five acres, small indeed beside Wakefield’s two hundred or more, but here Henry was a renting tenant and full proprietor for the time. Many of the neighbouring farms were small and poor and stony, and of the larger tracts much lay uncultivated and was used as rough pasturage. Off to the north stood St Lucy, the abbey house and church, and the bell in the tower rang often during the day and the night. In still weather the notes came slowly and sweetly across the hills, beating on the stones and clods, each blow distinct, belonging to itself; but in high winds they came like a wailing horn, the beating falling into the midst of a continuous rising and sinking note. The house at the Orkeys place had once been a toll house. It stood at the roadside, a stoop reaching out onto the road for the convenience of the toll-taker. Now few travellers passed, for this was a partly abandoned road, and no tolls were gathered. Ellen’s room lay beside the family room, both extending along the road and both opening onto the stoop, and behind these two rooms lay the kitchen. The walls inside had been whitewashed the year before and the roof was tight so that there were no leaks. During the first rains of her stay there Ellen felt the snugness of the night, the dark outside, the falling wet, the dry security of the indoors, so that in her room, shut away from the elements, she felt the security to be within herself as if she were detached by the prison-like whiteness of the dry walls from her own memories, to begin her being anew; she had never before known this detachment from the immediacy of the weather. A small high shelf extended along one of her walls, and the print of a clock was shadowed above, a low rounded clock. She could even see the print of ghostly springs and a dial. This was the only mark which had meaning on the dull white walls.

  The road came down a hill just before it reached the toll house and then turned away toward the south. Horses and vehicles coming from the east were unheard until they were almost at the door, making a great sudden clatter as if travellers were riding into the very walls inside. The sounds fell away slowly from the south road, and thus, if vehicles approached from that direction, the noise came first faint and shallow. The hoofs would beat lightly on the distance and grow nearer under a running crescendo of wheels; the sound would arise to
great clatter as it passed the door; then suddenly, like a clap of high thunder, it was gone, swallowed into the hill. Ellen found a delight in the snug dry room into which the rain could not come. She would go through the door with a keen rush of sense and, closing the door behind her, she would look about at the enclosing walls while a quiver of content would sweep over her nerves and gather deep in her mind. Her bed stood along one wall and a small wooden trunk which she had bought from the peddler stood along another. The key of the trunk lay on the shelf before the clock print. Names would play in her mind as she moved about in the tight little room in the midst of a stone-tight land surrounded by steep hills, the people speaking but little and that little in a close hard speech. ‘I wouldn’t know what to be thinking,’ one had said, or another, ‘I think myself he was bragging. He’s a bold one.’ The names, Regina Donahue, Pius Donahue, Pius, Pius, Regina, Old Mrs Wingate, Leo Shuck, Mag Mudd, Kate Bannan, she would say them in mind, thinking nothing. It was a pleasure to lock the chest and slip the key onto the high shelf where it lay out of sight. She felt very young in her delight in the locked chest and the closed door although her shadow was tall on the white wall and her dress was a woman’s dress, brushing the door as she passed. Sometimes in the field she felt the same, when she sang with a loud shout and remembered a little girl she had played with – it seemed only a little while ago – a girl named Fanny B., when she had lived beside a river. Fanny B. could climb any tree in the school yard, clinging with her little bare toes, going always a little higher and singing a song her granny had taught her.