The Great Meadow E-Book

Elizabeth Madox Roberts

• Herausgeber: Hesperus Press Ltd.
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 405

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

First published in 1930 and shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize, The Great Meadow is a historical novel set in the early days of the settling of Kentucky. Intertwined with a flowing romantic sage of young love on the Kentucky trail are richly painted scenes of colonial America.

Leseprobe

The Great Meadow

Elizabeth Madox Roberts

CONTENTS

Title Page

Introduction

The Great Meadow

Biographical note199

Copyright

‘UNCOVER A CLASSIC’ COMPETITION WINNER

Well known for unearthing neglected and long-unavailable books and bringing them back into print for a new generation of readers, Hesperus Press launched a special ‘Uncover a Classic’ competition in June 2012 to celebrate our tenth anniversary. Members of the public were invited to nominate one out-of-print book they considered worthy of reprinting, and to write an introduction of no more than 500 words explaining why.

The winning entry came from Michael Wynne, a Dublin-based writer originally from Sligo. He studied philosophy at Trinity College, Dublin, and has written various short stories and essays which have been anthologised in a range of publications.

INTRODUCTION

The Wisconsin novelist Glenway Wescott, to whom The Great Meadow was dedicated, had previously declared of Elizabeth Madox Roberts that ‘no other author will ever have the right to call his place Kentucky’. This was in reference to Roberts’s first book, The Time of Man (1926), a novel treating of the unkind fate of impoverished hill-dwelling Kentuckians which immediately established her as a formidable lyrical regionalist. Her reputation was further substantiated with the appearance of her finest work, The Great Meadow, the material of which might be described as a fully realised variation on that of its predecessor. Indeed, the British critic Martin Seymour-Smith designates it ‘the most achieved of all the versions of the settling of Kentucky’.

Last available in its native land in 2005 courtesy of Kessinger Publishing, an outfit specialising in reprints of rare or hard to find titles, The Great Meadow is a valuable, if almost entirely neglected classic that provides a comprehensively imagined documentation, expressed in a language of impeccably sober grandeur, of the often savagely brutal day-to-day struggles of pioneering folk who make their way from the Virginian holdings of their origins to claim what they can of the rich land of Caintuk or Kentuk (originally an indigenous word denoting the vast fertile tracts of that specific region) during the earliest tumults of the American Revolution. The novel is transmitted through the sensibility of young Diony Hall who at the outset lives with her family in a large log house in the Albemarle County district of Virginia. When we first encounter her, Diony is a thoughtful girl of sixteen. Her spiritual imagination is enlivened by her father’s reading of the idealist philosopher Bishop Berkeley’s The Principles of Human Knowledge, which espouses the theory that all reality is generated by a divine mind and is, therefore, in essence mental, and by reports filtering through to the homestead that are tinged with idealism of another kind: reports of the ‘promised land’ of Kentuk, ‘a well-nigh sort of Eden’, as a visiting hunter rapturously describes it – where thousands upon thousands of acres offer ‘soil rich like cream’. When we leave her she is long-settled in this legendary land along with a hopeful band of others. In the process, through prose of an astonishing ease and immediacy, the reader experiences the pain and the beauty of the inevitability of life’s purposive push and momentum, as well as that ever-pressing sense of the mysterious that we all carry within us – no matter how much we may wish to shirk or deny it.

It is Roberts’ own commitment to her remarkable heroine’s interior world that makes this powerful novel so rewarding; it is one, moreover, permeated by a fierce, natural courage that issues from the unshowy lyricism with which it communicates virtually incommunicable inner truths.

– Michael Wynne, 2012

The Great Meadow

I

1774, and Diony, in the spring, hearing Sam, her brother, scratching at a tune on the fiddle, hearing him break a song over the taut wires and fling out with his voice to supply all that the tune lacked, placed herself momentarily in life, calling mentally her name, Diony Hall. ‘I, Diony Hall,’ her thought said, gathering herself close, subtracting herself from the diffused life of the house that closed about her. Sam was singing, flinging the song free of the worried strings, making a very good tune of it:

There was a ship sailed for the North Amer-i-kee–

Crying, O the lonesome lowlands low–

There was a ship sailed for the North Amer-i-kee,

And she went by the name of the Golden Van-i-tee,

And she sailed from the lowlands low…

‘I, Diony Hall,’ her hands said back to her thought, her fingers knitting wool. Beyond her spread the floor which was of hard smooth wood, and beyond again arose the walls of the house, and outside reached the clearings of the plantation, Five Oaks the name her father called it by. Then came the trees and the rolling hills of Albemarle County and the upper waters of the James – Rockfish Creek, the Tye, Fluvanna, Rivanna. The world reached straight then, into infinity, laid out beyond the level of herself in a far-going horizontal, although report said of it that it bent to a round and made a globe. She was aware of infinity outward going and never returning. ‘I, Diony,’ she said, throwing the little strand of wool over her needle and making a web. Back then from infinity, having recovered herself, and the house stood close, intimately sensed. Sam’s music:

There was a ship sailed for the North Amer-i-kee–

Crying, O the lonesome lowlands low…

The house was of two log parts standing near together, a covered passage lying between which the boys of the family had named the dog alley because the dogs lay there to sleep. One of the buildings was called the ‘old house’ and this was used now for the kitchen and for the weaving. There was a loft above this room, reached by a corner stairway, and above in the loft were two rooms where the boys and their visitors slept. The dog alley was closed overhead and floored beneath. Beyond it lay the ‘new house’, a building of equal size with the old and flanked by a great chimney at the front as the other was flanked by a similar chimney at the rear. Below in the new house was the great room where the heads of the family slept, where the elegant life of the plantation was enacted, where Thomas Hall, the father of the house, kept his books on a shelf. A corner stairway led to rooms above, two chambers. When the dogs, hearing a wildcat or a fox, would run through the dog alley on their way to the edge of the clearing, the boards of the puncheoned floor of the passage would rattle with a great clatter and then lie still. Thus the house stood about Diony.

1774, a blustering evening in the spring, and they sat together by the fire in the new room, Thomas Hall, Polly, his wife, and Reuben, Sam, Diony, and Betty, their children. Sam teased the fiddle to make it yield a song, but Reuben sat in idleness, resting from a hard day in the field where he had driven the plow among stumpy furrows. Diony and Betty knitted stockings of woolen yarn, and Thomas would settle himself to his book when he had trimmed the candle flame and over his face would flow a weariness that he must endure this slight interruption.

Diony leaped swiftly into the outer margins of each being and back then, thinking with the return, ‘I, Diony am one, myself.’ Polly found wool for the girls to knit, winding strands into balls. Diony looked at her as she sat slightly bent above the yarns in her lap and she saw that she was beautiful although she had passed the first of youth by and had become large and hearty. Her back touched the chair lightly and her body moved from moment to moment with the minute sway of the wool as it mounted on the ball, as it flowed through her fingers, but if one spoke to her or if two spoke together her subtle response was more infinite than speech. By the light of the fire as Sam had replenished it, Diony looked down at her own limbs as she sat swiftly knitting, at her moving fingers, at the roundness of her growing frame. She was like her mother, as had always been said in the house. ‘Diony favors her mother, Polly,’ had been said, or again, ‘She’s the liven image of her mammy.’ Betty was a small shadow at the end of the bench, knitting half-heartedly, favoring nobody but herself. ‘I, Diony, myself,’ thought said, recovering. Thomas Hall was reading his philosopher, Berkeley, The Principles of Human Knowledge being spread now in his hands, or his right hand would be faintly lifted and stayed in its act, as if the inner reader would share the thought with some other but refrained, being lonely and discreet.

‘Somebody comes here,’ Sam said. ‘My thumb has got an itch on the knuckle place.’

Diony had heard a distant coming of horses along the creek way and she knew that Sam had heard. But Reuben spoke before she had formed her taunt.

‘Your thumb, it’s a scholar,’ Reuben began his thrust. ‘It can tell, sometimes, what way the wind blows, iffen you wet it and hold it out. Your thumb has been to Oxford to study amongst the priests there. Your thumb knows a power of astronomical learnen and mathematicks.’

‘I asked Rover today would somebody come tonight,’ Betty said. ‘And he said hit was a fact. He wagged his tail yea-yea.’

‘I dropped a knife today whilst I cut the duck pie,’ Diony said. ‘A sure sign somebody will come. Never fails.’

‘Silence,’ Thomas, their father, called out, his hand lifted, the act of listening. ‘I think I hear a horse on the road.’

There was a disturbance outside and an outcry among the horses in the barn behind the house. The dogs leaped through the dog alley and made off toward the creek road that ran before the garden. Reuben opened the window to the right of the chimney and looked out.

‘Nate Jones,’ a voice called outside. ‘It’s Nate Jones…’

Cries of welcome were given from the house and there was laughter within. Diony turned back to the knitting, making a few stitches to finish the thumb place before she put the yarns aside, although her mother signified that no further work would be required of her. Nathan Jones entered then, bringing a stranger who trod over the boards in a fine way and who wore tidewater finery.

Three weeks had passed since any from the outside had come to the plantation. Nathan Jones was well known to Diony, for he lived six miles up the stream with his family. Presently she saw that the man in the fine clothes signified nothing. Beyond his finery he was of no consequence. But these strangers at the hearthside, wearing strange clothes, made the people of the house shrink and flatten to homely everyday objects of which she was scarcely aware, all their looks and ways foretold. The strangers stood now in swift vividness, changing each instant to richer life until her breath quickened and her body seemed renewed. The fine stranger wore a long-waisted coat that was wide in the skirt below and narrow in the collar above. There was a wonder of great buttons spread up and down the front and his yellow smallclothes were bright in the firelight. Nathan wore the clothes of the plantation. His coarse gray coatee was of mixed wool and cotton and his linsey-woolsey trousers were of the same home-made sort that Sam and Reuben wore. His hair was cut without ceremony and lay on his brow in the natural way of hair, being unhindered. Seeing this hair, Diony looked back toward her father’s graying hair that was gathered in a club behind and tied with a black ribbon and her eyes took some new report of it.

Nathan had a power over spoken words. He jerked his hand now and then as he talked, a gesture that gave vehemence to the word over which it fell. He was a strong man of a great size, a hunter who went back into the farther woods of Fincastle where the mountains stood high and the game was still plentiful. Now he told of a surveyor he had met on the farther trail, one who had been far into the continent beyond the mountains and down into the valleys. Diony’s gaze rested a moment on Sam’s familiar person and her mind lay down to a brief season of rest as it hovered over his easily predicted facial changes, a richness and warmth of self rushing back to fill the vacuum the coming of the strangers had made in her thinking part, but her feeling part was awake again to leap about the presences of the newcomers. There was talk of the Quaker provinces to the north, of the fish in the river, of the mansion Mr Jefferson was building on a mountain higher up in Albemarle, bricks being burned there. Reuben wanted to hear more of the surveyor who had measured land beyond the mountains.

‘What did he say, the surveyor you named a while ago?’

‘He told about a promise land. I never before in all my time heard tell of a land so smooth and good, a well-nigh sort of Eden.’

 ‘Kentuck, I mought lay a pretty piece of money,’ Sam said, with pleasure. ‘Ever since I was borned I never hear e’er other country so be praised as Caintuck.’

‘He said a buffalo road goes north and south through the land, where the beasts go to salt themselves at the great licks. Then war roads, ways for the Indians, go up and down through the whole place.’

‘Canelands. What did he say about the cane?’ Sam asked. ‘Is hit true, what they tell about the cane?’

‘He surveyed, he said, twenty thousand acres in a fine cane country, and ne’er a tree in the whole boundary, but now and then one beside a watercourse or maybe in the uplands. Cane from eight feet high and upwards to twelve feet. The soil rich like cream. Fat bears, the fattest ever he did see, he said. A prime place to fatten hogs. The cane a wild growth, and you wouldn’t have to raise a hand to cultivate. Twenty thousand acres he surveyed for a company of men down the James towards Williamsburg.’

‘Oh, why wouldn’t we go there, Pap?’ Reuben turned toward his father, but he turned quickly back to let the speaker continue.

‘And this cane country spreads out past miles, a great content of land, but between here and there are a power of rough mountains.’

‘How are these mountains named, these you tell of?’

‘He said they were the Ou-as-i-o-tos.’

‘Ou-as-i-o-tos,’ all saying it, trying the syllables on their lips, breaking them apart and fitting them together again, each time with a different music.

‘There’s a river through the land, he told us, a deep river with banks that make a sharp cliff in the white limestone, trees and growth over the hills. He said it was one of the wonders of the world, a river you might travel halfway over the earth to see, a wonder. He said it was called Chenoa, or Cho-na-no-no. Or some called it Millewakane.’

These words were tried on all their tongues, chanted apart and together as all or one after another spoke them in all their possible ways. ‘Chenoa, Cho-na-no-no, Millewakane,’ as a chant went over the fireside. Then Nathan spoke through the chant.

‘Some call it Louisa and call the land the same, and some call it Kentuck. It’s said the rivers run together and flow apart again. It’s a wonder how the rivers flow there.’

‘Chenoa. I like best Chenoa,’ Sam said. His eyes were bright and his bright red hair had broken from its binding string.

‘He said he saw ten thousand buffaloes at the lower Blue Licks at one time, and they tramped one another under foot, mad to get at the salt,’ Nathan speaking.

‘Do you, Sam, keep a flyen coach drawn by two horses, and do you take passengers to Kentuck every Monday and Wednesday? I’ve heard it said there’s such a coach in Philadelphia.’ Reuben was teasing Sam’s bright eyes and his falling hair. Nathan lifted quickly his hand as if he caught a new wonder out of the air and the other voices before the hearth were stilled.

‘He told more. He told about a man, Dan’l Boone, a master hand to hunt and discover new countries. Boone has been over the whole of Kentuck and he lived there one winter season through, with his brother. Spring-o’-the-year, and Squire Boone, brother to Dan’l, went back to the settlements to get what was needed, powder and lead and some more horses, and Dan’l stayed. All by his lone self, he was, three months, and never once saw a white face. Not even a dog for company. Nights, and he lay in the cane or in a thicket, hid. Not even a fire, so the Indians wouldn’t find out where he stayed.’

‘There was ne’er another soul but himself, ne’er another white man nohow, in the whole country of Kentuck.’ A voice made a summary of this new wonder.

‘I reckon Dan’l Boon is right well seasoned with Kentuck now,’ Polly said, speaking sadly, ‘by the time he stayed there three months withouten company. I reckon he’s Kentuck-made to the bone marrow by now.’

‘Tell more about this Boone,’ Thomas Hall spoke then, speaking anxiously over Polly’s sadness and hushing it away. ‘Did your surveyor hold speech with the discoverer?’

The talk sank and flowed about strong men who made brave journeys into the country beyond the barrier, or it lifted and sparkled with the rise of Nathan’s hand that set forth a more bold hunter or a more daring exploit with one sharp gesture. The bright yellow smallclothes of the tidewater stranger were a mere ornament in the scene. ‘Such a country would breed up a race of heroes, men built and knitted together to endure…’ and another voice, ‘A new race for the earth.’ Betty became weary and she fell asleep. She was but thirteen years old and not even the wonders of Kentuck could hold her against the powers of rest. The phrase, ‘great immense quantity of buffaloes…’ stood under the power of Nathan’s hand, or again, ‘To call up a buck he made a bleat like the cry of a doe…’ Or, ‘Made the long journey around through the French cities to the south…’ Somewhere beyond the rich canelands lay other rivers running down into a region beyond, running down into other seas. Tall grass waved in the winds that blew in half-mythical, half-reported caverns, an underground country. The men who had gone there for this long hazard, Boone and his company, had been called the Long Hunters. It was all far apart from her now, behind unwieldy mountains.

Diony knew what name she bore, knew that Dione was a great goddess, taking rank with Rhea, and that she was the mother of Venus by Jupiter, in the lore of Homer, an older report than that of the legendary birth through the foam of the sea. She knew that Dione was one of the Titan sisters, the Titans being earth-men, children of Uranus and Terra. She had a scattered account of this as it came from between her father’s ragged teeth as he bit at his quid and spat into the ashes, an elegant blending of tobacco and lore and the scattered dust of burnt wood, the man who limped about before the hearth arising superior to his decay. She could scarcely piece the truths together to make them yield a thread of a story, but she held all in a chaotic sense of grandeur, being grateful for a name of such dignity. Her brothers called her Diny, and they were indeed earth-men, delving in the soil to make it yield bread and ridding the fields of stumps, plowing and burning the brush. Thomas had been wounded by the falling of a tree so that the muscles of one of his legs were drawn and the limb shortened. This mishap had given the burden of the farm to Reuben, and with the burden of the labor had gone the burden of management.

A friendless woman named Sallie Tolliver helped their mother prepare the food at the kitchen fireplace, a woman who had come to them, walking back from the frontier of Fincastle County where her husband and her children had been killed in some Indian raid. She went silently about the work, but sometimes she was heard to mutter as she passed, asking a question, as if she questioned invisibles. Released from service at the kitchen fire, Diony milked the cows at the gap in the fence beside the barn. Betty would mind the gap, keeping back the calves, attending on her, and when the milk-taking was done, Diony walked away with the pails while Betty closed the gap with the wooden bars. She made nothing of the milk pails; she was tall and strong, being past sixteen. She strained the milk in the cool stone milk-house toward the creek and to the left of the kitchen. Here a spring ran out of a ledge of rock and made a pool in the hard floor. She would pour the fluid into brown earthen bowls, pouring it through a fine linen cloth, Betty attending her.

Diony could remember the building of the new house, but the old house had been built before she was born. Beyond the creek the land rose to a hill, and from this high place she could see the Blue Ridge as a wall across the west. Sam and Reuben had hunted through the mountain ridges and they knew the valley that stretched out beyond, where the Shenandoah took its beginning and flowed north. Diony went with the memories of this hunt, into the range of mountains and down into the valley. Her mother’s people had come out of this valley, and thus she had two memories of it from which to borrow. Polly Brook with her parents had washed back over the Blue Ledge, as she called the barrier, in some movement of people. Earlier they had come out of England into Pennsylvania. They were a lonely people, being Methodists, given to simple living and humility. They were but a few in Albemarle. Their preacher came after long intervals from beyond the Ledge, and when he came there was a loud chanting of humility and holiness in the house.

Near at hand, the land touching their own, lying along the creek, was surveyed and owned, but no house was built there and no one came to claim it. A clearing five miles away down the stream made the plantation of the Jarvis men and their mother, Mistress Elvira Jarvis. Out along the river and the larger watercourses there were other families, the plantations better advanced and the clearings larger, the work done by black slaves. Thus the tilled land and the unbroken forests touched their parts about Diony. She came and went through the spring, milking, spinning at the large wheel. Sam would cry out some song he had learned from their mother, an ancient song that carried a strange monotonous tune:

He found her in a ditch and he thought he had her there,

And by and by I’ll tell you how Moss caught his mare.

Sam was making Betty a swing. He was hanging a long rope from a limb of the largest oak tree. Reuben stood by smoking his midday pipe.

‘I’ll cut this old tree when the saplen by the far milk-house gets a growth,’ Reuben said. ‘Five trees I’ll still have then, and in a broader reach. And this one here will be in a manner dead with old age against ten years more…There’s rot already at the root.’ He spoke of what he would do when Five Oaks, the place, came to him. It was well known that it would be his because he was the eldest and a son.

‘Where will my land be, for my house?’ Diony asked. It came to her now, as a sudden disaster, that Five Oaks would not be her place. Other land higher up toward the Ledge would belong to Sam. ‘Where mought be my place?’

‘You’d have to marry to get a place,’ Reuben answered her.

‘But suppose I mought not,’ she said.

‘Then God help you! Iffen a woman isn’t married she has a poor make-out of a life,’ Sam said. He was bending over the rope, his hands making a knot, his face earnest in what he said.

‘But God’s sake! I never knew a woman that wasn’t married,’ Reuben said, as if his saying were final, half muttering, as if it were no matter. ‘Come to think, I never knew one.’

‘Crazy Abbie, over at the court-house,’ Sam spoke after a moment of careful search. ‘She carries out slops in the ordinary, the tavern place. I never heard it said she ever had anybody marry with her.’

‘But iffen Diony turns out biddable we’ll likely be able to find her a husband. There’s a sign already on her…’ Reuben was speaking.

‘What sign?’

‘Hit’s on her mouth. She’s got the marryen mouth.’

‘She must be careful not to get scarred with a pox or scalded with lye soap.’

‘And I’ll make her a dower,’ Reuben said. ‘Iffen crops are good. Five hundred pounds of prime good baccer.’

Diony walked in anger toward the creek, pressing her light feet hard against the ground at each step. She crossed on the stepping stones and went up the hill beyond, and presently Betty had overtaken her, ready to share whatever it was that troubled her spirit. From the hilltop she could look down over the cleared acres of Five Oaks and see the house spreading its two parts to each side of the dog alley, could see the shop and the barns behind it and see the farther woods that reached back into the running hills. The pattern of the place beneath made a form that was marked as eternal in her mind. The five oaks stood in a placid fraternity about the log walls and gave shelter to the roof. The little stream lay as a ribbon of silver curling lightly through its stony banks. In mind she went down the slope and passed swiftly, like a wraith, across the ribbon of the creek, being weary now of the indefinite flowing of the farther earth, and she rested under the shade of the oaks and went then within the house and up the stair to her own sleeping place, where she lay down on her own soft bed and drew the coverlet over her, as one goes acutely home to his own. There, surrounded, she passed more inwardly, wrapped in the warm throb of her blood, her brown hair drawn over her face. Shut securely within, wrapped in a garment of sense, she went within again and yet again, a hushed voice farther within saying some mute word, as ‘come’, or ‘here you will find me’.

Sam and Reuben sheared the sheep in April, working in the barn-shed beyond the milking place, ripping the coats from the backs of the sheep with great shears. Diony helped wash the fleeces at the wash place, making a rich hot lye suds in the great iron washing pot, and each fleece was beaten about in the hot foam with battling sticks of wood. Then the wool was drained of the water and rinsed once and hung to dry on scaffolds. Her thought penetrated the wool and went with the fleece through the hot foamy bath and lay stretched with it on the scaffolds in the shade of the greatest oak. In the night she dreamed of planes of white frothy matter which the sheep had shed and of the sheep going back to their pasture, their yield gone beyond their power to recall. When the wool was dry Polly called her to help pick it free of sticks and burrs, and if one of the fleeces was of a richer whiteness and softness than the rest she had a peculiar pride in it, as if she shared of some right with the flock. Sam would be singing a song, his falsetto voice that he used among the barns and cow-pens:

Many hist’ries have been read and many stories told

How Moss caught his mare. It was in the days of old…

In summer the cloth-making was of the wool, making garments for winter wear; in winter it was of the linen, the wear of the summer. Now, soon after the first meal of the day, Diony would be busy with the wool, and Polly’s plans for it would run forward even while they sat at breakfast in the great kitchen room where Sallie Tolliver had put a trencher of ham and a fine wheat loaf on the board. Spinning the wool, she would work in the west end of the room, running back and forth to the rhythms of the great wheel. Out the small window she could see the garden patch along the creek, the flowing water beyond, and the hill. Stepping back and forth in the dance of spinning, she would recall words from her father’s books, from one book: ‘It is evident to anyone who takes a survey of the objects of human knowledge, that they are either ideas actually imprinted on the senses or else such as are perceived by attending to the passions and operations of the mind…’ This would blend anew with the flow of the wool in her hands until the words and the wool were spun together and all stood neatly placed in her thought ready to be woven into some newer sort…‘It is evident to anyone who takes a survey…’ She would hear Betty and Sam in a rough frolic in the dog alley, Sam’s voice:

‘I’m a torn-down Virginian. I’m a Long Knife. And iffen Virginia goes to war on Pennsylvania I’ll offer Lord Dunmore my sword….’

‘Don’t be so antic with that-there cut-tool,’ Betty cried out in defense. ‘I’m not Pennsylvany. Keep off, keep offen my head…’

The wool was soft in her fingers, but heavy in bulk, being great in quantity and requiring much service of her. She would return to the words of the book and heed what they said, in substance: that all knowledge is of three sorts, that derived by way of the senses, that by way of the passions, and lastly, quoting now the words of the text, ‘ideas formed by help of memory and imagination.’ She could easily see the truth of this since she had discussed all fitfully with her father and had turned again to the book for renewal of faith when the words grew dim in memory. The whirr of the wheel came into her thought of the book as she fitfully remembered. ‘And beside all that, there is likewise something which knows or perceives them and exercises divers operations, as willing, imagining, remembering…This perceiving, active being is what I call mind, spirit, soul, MYSELF…Some truths there are so near and obvious to the mind that man need only open his eyes to see them. Such I take this important one to be, namely, that all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth, in a word, all those bodies that compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any substance without a mind, that their being is to be perceived or known… that, consequently, as long as they are not actually perceived by me, or do not exist in my mind, or that of any other created spirit, they must either have no existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some Eternal Spirit.’

She could hear her mother walking in the room above where she had gone to search out the dye pots to make ready for coloring the yarn, and she heard her calling to Sallie Tolliver down the stairway to ask after the logwood, Sallie Tolliver going mutely up the steps by way of reply. In the smith-shop behind the house some strong hand hammered, blow after blow, her father mending a plow. She clung rather to the words of the book, letting the iron shriek pass, Sam outside singing:

Many hist’ries have been read and many stories told

How Moss caught his mare. It was in the days of old.

He got up early one morning thinking he’d find her asleep,

And all about the barnyard so slyly he did creep…

She turned the thought of the words that the book used over and over with a pleasure in knowledge, restating all for her own delight. ‘They, these things, or any small part of the whole mighty frame of the world, are withouten any kind or sort or shape until somebody’s mind is there to know. Consequently, all the ways you wouldn’t know, all you forgot or never yet remembered, mought have a place to be in Mind, in some Mind far off, and he calls this Eternal Spirit.’ Her thought leaped then beyond articulation and settled to a vast passion of mental desire. Oh, to create rivers by knowing rivers, to move outward through the extended infinite plane until it assumed roundness. Oh, to make a world out of chaos. The passion spread widely through her and departed and her hands were still contriving the creamy fibers of a fleece.

Polly moved about among the dye pots, stirring mixtures, or she cooked dyes over the open fire in the yard, dipping the wool in and out, making bright reds or dull blues of the spun yarn. She stirred madder for yellow, or mixed a brown, standing beside the kitchen press. Betty came in from the yard and sat dejectedly by the fireplace.

‘Did you see was the old hen on the nest, like I told you?’ Polly asked.

‘That old door to the hen-house, set hit’s head not to open and ne’er a thing could I do to budge hit. Stuck fast against the door jamb, and looks like the more I pulled the tighter she got a grip on the jamb, just to spite me.’

‘You’re in too big a hurry,’ Polly said. ‘Push down on hit, a gentle push, and hit comes right open. You have to be gentle with hit.’

‘Do I have to spend my time to humor the old henhouse door?’ Betty asked. ‘So spoiled hit’s rotten.’

Betty went to see after the hen as her mother required, and presently she returned to sit near Diony and she softened to the wool and yielded to it, offering help. ‘Talk to me, Diony,’ she begged, making a pretty light come to her eyes. Then Diony’s heart swelled to a great size and seemed of a fullness that would burst, and a pity for Betty closed her eyes until the tears washed backward over her mind and eased her heart of its power, for Betty loved her with idolatry and clung to her. Betty lived in her words from hour to hour and came back to her again and again for renewing of life. To amuse her she had built imagined visits to the cities of the tidewater, preparing imagined welcomes at the homes of their cousins and uncles, the Montfords, down in the valleys below.

‘Tell again what a city would be,’ Betty said. ‘Tell what would come to me iffen I went there, and all how hit would be.’

‘I never see cities,’ Diony answered. ‘I reckon I mought be a right outland person to my cousin Isobel and to Rufus and Anne. Isobel mought be right shamed to see me come that way. I never saw a city and you know it.’

‘Tell what would be, Diny. You can make all seem so…in your talk, and you said we could go, maybe, some day. We must go. You could take me there. Hit seems so likely!’

‘Then we mought begin to go right now, to get the dresses ready. That would be first. A long scarlet cloak with a cape doubled over, for you, Betty Hall. Capes would become you right well because you are a small-built lady. Then a gown outen print cotton, brocade print, the ground dark with big red roses, a little blue inside some of the flowers for a shadow, and yellow for sunlight on the buds. A fine sight this gown would make when you took off the cape in a fine company, gentlemen and ladies. Then to tell the rest of your clothes, a pair of stays covered with white tabby before and dove-colored tabby behind. Some bibs and ruffles, some flounces and graduated falbalas of silk, pinked maybe. Some kid mitts and some silk shoes. A lead-colored habit, open, with a lilac lutestring skirt. A beautiful cushion to go on your head to hold out your hair. A taffety apron and some handkerchiefs…’

‘For yourself, Diny. Now name your new linens and clothes.’

‘A blue cloak, dark sky-blue, like the sky in spring when you see it above trees…’

‘A mantua coat, maybe.’

‘A fashionable calico gown, the ground dark like your gown, but little flowers pieded over it. Ribbon knots here and yon. Then some thread hose and a pair of silk shoes laced up, and three undercoats and a hoop coat and a powdered pompadour with a string of pearls to hang down off it, curls on my neck in the back.’

‘A fan to go in your hand,’ Betty cried out. ‘A golden chain for your neck.’

‘The things in a box on the back of a horse. Then we climb on our horses, a weather-skirt around us to save us from the dust.’

‘And then…?’ Betty asked, unable to wait.

‘Down the creek through the water, past Jarvis’s and on past the mill, night and day and on again. Smooth farms, roads to go, people to meet up and down the way, black slave-men on the road. We meet one with a budget on his back. Rivers to cross at ferries, and there are more black men to haul the boat across, budgets and pokes and parcels. At last it would be hard dark and we mought stay with our cousins that live in King and Queen County. We would come to the York River where it is broad, like a bay. There would be a wharf where ships land, and the house of our cousin William back from the river, a big smooth house, the wharf his wharf. We would be let in at the door and our cousin Anne would kiss us on the cheek and make us welcome. In the house would be fine mahogany chairs and tables and chairs covered with fine leather. Carpets on the floors, and the ladies would be dressed in dimity and silk.’

Betty cried out with delight, but Diony carried forward the telling of the journey, being far away now from Albemarle. She could feel the soft carpet under her, and feel the cushion on her head and the silken shoes on her feet, the fine cool dimity over her body and the pinked falbalas flowing off her frothy skirts.

‘This would be the great house where William lives. It would stand up on a rise of ground above the wharf, under some fine trees that came from France. From the porch we could look down on the York River, so wide it would be blue, and we could see the boats moored to the wharf, some with white sails and some barges. In the house there would be glass in all the windows, and shutters outside to open and shut to shade the windows from the sun and shelter from the rain. There would be a great hall, a dining hall, and all the other rooms with beds a-plenty. A long table would go down the middle of the floor in the great hall, chairs at the sides. Silver spoons to eat with and fine napkins to wipe your fingers on after you dip in your plate. Fine wine to drink, from Italy. Chinaware and silver and salt cellars. Rows of books in the wall, on shelves. Candles made outen myrtle berries, not tallow. To eat, there would be fish caught in the bay, bass and shad, and oysters maybe.

‘When this visit is done we take a ship in the river and go out in the bay and sail to Baltimore. It’s hard to say just what this would be, but maybe the sea would be a good-deal stormy and we’d have a seasickness come over us…’

‘Wouldn’t that be fine!’ Betty cried out.

‘When we’d come to land there would be our cousins on the wharf to fetch us home to their houses. We’d ride in a chariot maybe, a black man to drive and one to ride outside to open the gates. The town would have houses up and down the way and people would come and go in the streets. It’s mighty hard to see all that mought be there. It’s a far piece from here. We would put on our fashionable calicoes and go to church a Sunday, at our father’s church. It would be a church with a name, like St Anne’s, but it would be some other name such as St Stephen’s or St Luke’s. Music would sound and the choir would chant a hymn.  Chapel service, and we would hear a great scholar preach, and sit in a fine pew. Or maybe it’s our cousin Isobel who takes us, then we mought go to St Peter’s, a saint’s day, and a fine service in Latin, all in honor of St Anthony or St John or St Augustine…’

‘Hit makes me have cold shivers down my skin, to think about prayers to St Anthony,’ Betty murmured. ‘I’d be afeared, and afeared of so much Latin, but I’d go. Any chance I got.’

‘Or back at the house, and you’d want to bridle when you go in a door if there’s company inside. You’d hold up your head in a grand style. You’d curtsey at the door and then march across the floor and up to the grandest person in the room and make a bow to whoever ‘tis. You’d have on a stomacher of lace held in, as like as not, with a ribbon tied in a bow. Or maybe there’d be a dance. Or maybe we’d drink tea on a wide grassy place under a beautiful clipped tree out of little silver pitchers and drink with pretty little sups. And read pretty novels. A chariot always stands by the door to take whoever has a mind to go somewheres.’

‘Oh, we’ll go there,’ Betty cried out again. ‘Diny, would you take me? Mought we go some day? Say and tell me, will you take me there, to see Isobel?’

‘Iffen ever I can I will. I mought some day, for a fact.’

‘You can, Diny. Say you’ll take me there. Say you will. Hit’s a great scope of country to cross to go there. I could never go unlessen you could take me. Would you, Diny?’

‘If ever I can I’ll do so. Whenever I can find a way to go ’twould pleasure me as much as you,’ Diony said. ‘We’ll go to the tidewater iffen it’s in human power.’

Thomas Hall came to the weaving end of the kitchen, limping forward from the opened door. He took his surveying instruments down from the shelf and moved away as if he would work with them outside. Then Betty made her wheel purr prettily for him, turning it fast and setting the wool off in a swiftly running strand, stepping daintily back and forth and winding the reed with a great show, a crescendo in each measure.

‘You’re a right pretty spinner,’ he said. ‘You could almost hold a candle to Diony. But you lack enlightenment. Your head, it’s not apace with your hand. I wish, Diony, you would teach this big ignorant wench here, your sister Betty, to read in a book.’

‘I tried to make her want to be learned, but she would not. I tried fifty times.’

‘Mammy, she won’t read inside of books and Mammy, she makes out right well,’ Betty said. ‘I mought probably want to be like Mammy.’

‘Your mammy is a beauty,’ Thomas said. ‘And she don’t have to read in books if she’s not a mind to. Whenever you see the day you’d be half the beauty your mother Polly Brook is, you’d be free to let letters go by, Betty Hall. Teach her the letters, Diony.’

‘I read her a part of every book on the shelf and desired her to name which one she would like best to read, and she said not one suited her taste.’

‘Who wants to read in a book that goes, “Secondly substance combination weight hardness subsisting, thirdly delight in the beholder, degree degree degree. Several simple ideas, modes, relishes.” Betty made a little flutter as if she would spin again, but she enjoyed her situation, and she bent her head in a mock shame.

‘You are a pretty case, on my honor,’ Thomas said. ‘I’d be right frighted to have you read. You’d out-do the Matchless Dorinda before a year is out. God’s own sake!’

‘Another book reads such a way as this,’ Betty continued. ‘“We are nowhere out of the reach of Providence either to punish or protect us.  An elk having accidentally gored a lion, the monarch was so exasperated…”’

‘You liked the piece about the butterfly,’ Diony said. ‘She almost gave consent to learn to read it.’

‘Hit did well enough,’ Betty admitted. ‘“A butterfly proudly perched on the gaudy leaves of a French marigold…” Hit wasn’t worth the pains to learn to read in books just to have that one piece. Diny read hit to me a many is the time. Hit says, “I have wandered into regions of Eglantine and Honeysuckle. I have reveled in kisses on beds of Violets and Cowslips and I have enjoyed the delicious fragrance of Roses and Carnations.”’

‘I might box your years,’ Thomas said.

‘I liked better, unknown to Diny, one that goes, “A tuberose in a bow-window on the north side of a stately villa, addressed a sunflower…”’

‘I might box your years,’ Thomas said. He went away laughing. ‘Teach her to read, Diny,’ he called back from the door, ‘and I’ll give you a pretty present, and tend her with copies until she learns how to write. Egad, the outland wench is my own blood. Could read pretty in a week if she would get her consent, but her head is set contrary and what, God’s own sake, ’s to do?’

Diony would find her father’s letters in the desk beneath his bookshelf in the new house, would search them out and read them again. He had come to the wilderness to survey a great tract of land for a company of men in Maryland, and he had taken his pay in land. He had brought the letters when he came, for they went back into some earlier life. The books on the shelf were above her head as she sat to read, the light falling from the high window that was like a port-hole, falling over her hands and over the opened letters, lighting the fading inks that had been put upon the page in pride and youthful daring. The letters were from Rufus Montford, their cousin. A young mind spoke out of the written pages, and she would read the proud words and turn the paper about, searching it for tokens of the cities of the world.

‘You never had a letter, and little are you likely ever to have one,’ Thomas would say to her, had said to her, finding her there. ‘Read the letters of a gentleman. Wild manners she hath, this Diony, born in the back-country, but who’s to teach her wantonness the manners of gentlefolk? Read then the letters of a gentleman till you know what ’tis to touch minds with his kind. Very remarkable! Thomas Hall, son of Luce Montford, has fathered a whole brood of back-country bumpkins!’

Left with the letters, Diony would imagine leisure and letter-writing, a courier waiting at the door, his horse tied to a post but impatient to be off. Often the letters flowed lightly over remembered visits, cities, trinkets, a new dance figure, smallclothes, vests, silk stockings, bows for the knees, the buying of riding horses. Having imagined leisure, she would imagine cities where were houses close along a traveled way, but the trees would not evacuate, the forest would not utterly yield, so that back of each house stood the timber, a girl in linsey, her strong light body unstayed, her face unmasked from the sun, herself going down to take the milk from the cows. The people of the cities would be earnest, and they would meet one another with some deeply serious speech that entered into the searchings of the mind and penetrated the mysteries that lay beyond it, unafraid. They would greet one another with some beautiful words of welcome she could never name, or they would stop to take counsel together of this or that high purpose, or if they laughed together their wit was as rich as the sparkle of sunlight on frost. She would dream thus, under the high casement. Or she would turn again to the letters, asking assistance of them. Sometimes they were openly mocking. Rufus had married a wife. He wrote then: