Seated easily on the mule's back and commanding with her eyes the wide stretch of country, she indulged for a moment in the dark fancy that she was God looking out upon these poor children that he had made in his own image and condemned to a life of toilsome grubbing in the dirt that ended only with the grave. Then a flood of the old nausea swept over her and with it a terror and she faced the abysmal truth that she was not God, but only one of these pitiful, groveling creatures, doomed to the same existence and the same end.
She turned the mule's head and rode toward home slowly and dejectedly. From time to time, mindful of the purpose for which she had come, she tried to urge him into a gallop, to make him take a fence or a ditch. But Pete was tired and his rider's hand had grown listless. She felt herself overcome by a great weariness of all things.
By the time she reached home in the late afternoon, the whole neighborhood knew that she had been out and just how long she had been out. And having satisfied themselves that there was no sickness in the family, the women drew their own conclusions.
When she had given up hope that the ride was going to have any effect, she forced herself to try to use the knitting needle. But she was shrinking and clumsy, and at the first stab of pain she flung the instrument violently to the other end of the room. Afterward she dropped it through a wide crack in the kitchen floor so that she would not be able to find it again.
She searched out pennyroyal and tansy and other noxious herbs in the places where she knew they grew, and took to brewing nasty smelling decoctions over the stove and sipping gingerly at the brackish liquor she poured off from them. But all that these evil brews did was to increase her sickness and lassitude. Drearily she shambled about the kitchen through the dragging days and felt too sick and weary for despair.
One night in late October she woke from her first sleep with a mind preternaturally wide awake. Free for the moment from the nausea and dragging weariness of the day, she was left bare to the attacks of the things that prey upon the mind. It was raining in a fine, slow, steady downpour, and she lay listening to the patter of the drops on the roof, looking blankly at the dimly outlined oblong that was the window. At such times the numberless trivialities that clutter the day are sunk into insignificance, leaving the path to the grave straight and plain.
What real difference did it make after all whether the baby was born and lived to be a hundred or died in the womb?
Nevertheless, the moment after she had asked herself this question, she got out of bed and moving cautiously so as not to waken Jerry gathered together her clothes in the darkness and slipped with them into the kitchen, closing the door behind her. She dressed hastily and without putting on shoes or stockings, jacket or sunbonnet, stepped out into the rainy night.
She shivered and hesitated as the first cold drops fell on her shoulders through her thin cotton dress. But the next moment she plunged out boldly straight across the swimming mud and filth of the cowlot. The moon, far in its third quarter, gave only a feeble glimmer of light from behind the clouds, but it was enough to guide her to the horsepond, which was deep and full from recent heavy rains. There was no slackening of her steps as she came near the tawny pool, but rather an increase of speed; and when she reached the edge she flung herself instantly into the water and disappeared as inconsequentially as if she had been a stone or a clod of dung.