My heart and my flesh

by Elizabeth Madox Roberts

“Drive those devils away,” he shouted after her. “You drive those dogs off. I’m here now. I’ve come.”

She was pushed by the great bodies of the dogs until she glided along the wall, but she moved upward, and the dogs came with her, a part of her ascending motion now. She took the dogs to her room and closed the door. The tumult in her mind had increased, for Frank had brought a newer quality of argument, of rational approach to himself. Pity for Frank worked in her now. He had called after her, “I want to marry you, Theodosia. That’s what I want now in life.” Frank was still below; the front door was yet open; she knew this by the draught under her door that sang a loud thin cry as the air rushed through the wide crevice and made for the loosely fitted window. Trembling, knowing that Frank was below, she began to hiss at Tilly, the more evil-tempered of the brutes, until the dog growled and barked in great anger, until she ran to the window and leaped again and again at the door. There was nothing left now but to walk out at the door when the menace of Frank should depart. She hissed up Tilly’s anger whenever it abated. She sat relaxed in her chair, her muscles indifferent to their functions. Below-stairs other dogs were in an uproar now, the whole house of dogs in a mad stir. She passed into the remote barkings of the dogs, already as dead, indifferent to the air she continued to suck in and out with her habitual breathing, indifferent to the icy water of the pond where it would lay pain about her. Her hissing was continuous with the anger of the dogs.

The crying of the draught under the door had ceased now, and the cold had ceased to rush along the floor. Then it seemed that a long while since she had heard the door below when it slammed and she heard the motor start. She continued to hiss Tilly’s anger. Sitting indifferently in her chair, relaxed in every fiber, she lived only where the hissing breath came from her lips to stir the dogs. 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; it was a darkened mass among the shadows of the table, holding a remote kindness for some being far apart from herself, identical with some abstract goodness that would never be stated. It gathered to a dim shadow that concentrated to a dull point and receded through elastic space to infinite depths of remoteness. She stared at the wall to the left of the fireplace, her vision having no function. Only one fact held truth in the singleness of prophecy. She saw herself leap from the chair suddenly and rush out at the door; a sudden start and she would be gone. She stared at the wall; the picture of her going, a felt picture, spread downward through her limbs that lay relaxed now, ready for the sudden spasm of movement.

At once a vivid appearance entered her mind, so brilliant and powerful that her consciousness was abashed. Larger than the world, more spacious than the universe, the new apparition spread through her members and tightened her hands so that they knotted suddenly together. It tightened her spine until she sat erect. Her recognition settled to a word, groped with words, settled again about a word, some word, catching at words with a net. The word was vivid, was like a new flower in a sunny place, and unable to say it she knew it with a rush of thanksgiving that out-ran all her recognition of it. The word she could not say, could only approach with reaching tentacles of memory and thought, erected a joy throughout her senses. Her body spread widely and expanded to its former reach, and the earth came back, herself acutely aware of it. A pleasure that she still lived to participate in this recognition caught her throat with a deep sob. She had shifted her gaze so that she looked now into the fire. She sat leaned forward, tense with new life, with the new world, and she penetrated the embers with her gaze and saw into the universe of the fire, the firmament of dimly glowing heat that receded, worlds on worlds, back into infinities, atoms, powers, all replete with their own abundance. She laughed in her joy and went with the fire, more living now than the coals in the heart of the red ash. The word let a happy substitute stand for itself, a delegate appearing clearly defined, a word experienced as a glow of pride in life and joy. “Tomorrow” was the utterance, clearly placed then. On the next day the peddler would come along the road. This homely, habitual fact had been the Arise-ye of her resurrection. “I’m still alive,” she sang under her breath, “I’m alive, I’m alive.” She leaned tensely near the hearth and spoke, or she smiled without speaking. Her eyes were dim with the new birth and the bloom of renascence slightly blurred her consciousness as yet. The loaned word grew more vivid, “Tomorrow,” substituted now for the unsaid word that receded, its mission accomplished. She leaned near the hearth.

Then she arose quickly and gathered her wraps and some clothing to a chair. She shut her fiddle into its case and placed the music in a pile beside it. Then she went below and hung a white cloth on the pillar of the portico, for she thought that the peddler might pass early. In her room again she found a piece of the coarse bread under her pillow and of this she ate sitting wrapped in the blanket of the bed, the room being cold now, the fire almost gone. Without undressing she lay in the bed, ready for her departure, a gladness singing through her thin blood where life still beat. Presently she was aware that it was morning and that she had slept happily. She bathed in the cold water, shaking with cold and joy, and she ate the last of the bread. When the peddler brought his car along the driveway she took her things into her arms and went down to the portico.

“I’d be plumb pleased to death,” he said when she asked her favor, although she told him she would have to ask him to wait for his pay. “I wouldn’t charge a young lady e’er a cent to ride along with me. Pay? Don’t say e’er word about pay. Would I charge a young lady to go a-riden with me? Sakes-alive!”

When he asked her where she wanted to go she had no answer ready, but she was joyous in her evasions, making questions and replies that kept the destination delicately poised at the brink of an answer. He would go here and stop there, naming farms, and he could come to Spring Run Valley by noon of the day, he said. Then he stopped at a farm, the house near the roadway, and called his wares to the farmer’s wife, who bought. She peered curiously at the front of the truck but she made no comment.

“Where did you say you aimed to go?” he asked when they were on the road again, and she answered, “Spring Run Valley.” Then he told her of the origin of the name, she having asked. “Spring Run is a creek that rises in a spring off a way to the north there.” He told the news of the countryside, of the dead, the sick, the new-born, the lucky. Along the roadside men were clearing the ditches, shoveling out drains for the roadway, and over the tops of the hills some crows were flying. The winter had blown the last leaf from every bush and every vine and the earth stood ready to be remade, the streams running cold under the little bridges, the water quick and yellow. The truck ran swiftly, and there were few sales made, for the people were busy with other matters, with the plant beds, the hen-houses, the early gardening or fencing. They would wave the liniment-man away with a greeting. “You know somebody in Spring Valley?” he asked. She did not know what she would say to that, and she waited for a reply to find its way to her mouth, her humor that of a bird waiting for its song. She saw her strange happiness going its unknown ways and she looked from afar, quaintly amused, as if place were a humorous adjunct to being, for if one is happy in being alive he has to have a place to be happy in. They could never take that away from happiness in being. That control of places kept in the hands of men, certain men, this seemed exquisitely droll.

“Miss Hettie, she up and married awhile back, took and married and went off right in the middle of the school. They haven’t got a teacher yet to the best of my belief and knowledge. Doc Bradley said to me they would be right put-to to find one so late in the term.” Bradley was the school trustee for the district, and the appointment of the teacher was his duty, he said.

She was weary in body, aching from the long ride, and a vertigo seized her now and then, induced by the unaccustomed motion of the truck and the swift passage, but her pleasure ran still with the slipping countryside as it opened before her and with the flocking of the crows as they made off toward some farther hill. She had waited for her replies as a bird might wait, but finally she made known her mission as it appeared to her. She would ask to be allowed to teach the Spring Run Valley school for the three months remaining. “So that’s were you’re bound for,” he said. “Well I vum! They’ll be right glad to get you, that I know.” He would let her down at Dr. Bradley’s house, he said. “I’m bound straight for that very place.”