Fidelity: A Novel

by Susan Glaspell

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Ruth Holland stood at the window looking out at Colorado in January. The wide valley was buried under snow. It was late afternoon and the sun was passing behind the western mountains. From the window where she stood she could not see the western mountains, but the sunset colors had been thrown over to the eastern range, some fifty miles away. When she first came there, five years before, it had seemed strange to find the east lighted at sunset, more luminous than the west. The eastern range was a mighty one. Now there was snow down to its feet and there was no warmth in the colors that lighted it. They only seemed to reveal that the mountains were frozen. It would not have seemed possible for red—those mountains had been named Sangre de Cristo because they went red at sunset—to be so dazzling cold. The lighted snow brought out the contour of the mountains. They were wonderfully beautiful so, but the woman looking out at them was not thinking of them as beautiful. She was thinking of them as monuments of coldness. To her it was as if they had locked that valley in to merciless cold.

But it was not the sunset colors that really marked coming night for her. All through that winter something else had marked night, something she tried to keep from looking out at, but which she was not able to hold away from. She was looking at it now, looking off into the adjoining field where the sheep were huddling for the night.

They had begun their huddling some time before. With the first dimming of the light, the first wave of new cold that meant coming night, a few of them would get together; others would gather around them, then more and more. Now there was the struggle not to be left on the outside. The outer ones were pushing toward the center; they knew by other nights that this night would be frigid, that they could only keep alive by that warmth they could get from one another. Yet there were always some that must make that outer rim of the big circle, must be left there to the unbroken cold. She watched them; it had become a terrible thing for her to see, but she could not keep from looking. Many of those unprotected sheep had died that bitter winter; others would die before spring came. It was a cruel country, a country of cold.

That was their flock of sheep. They had been driven there the summer before from the lambing grounds in the mountains. The day they got there the lambs were exhausted from the long journey. One of them had dropped before the house and died right there beside the field it had come the long way to gain. Her efforts to revive it were useless; the little thing was worn out. They were all of them close to worn out. And now they had the winter to fight; night after night she watched them huddling there, the big pitiful mass of them out in the bitter cold. It was the way of the country to leave them so; the only way, the sheep men said, that sheep could be made to pay. They estimated that the loss by freezing was small compared with what would be the cost of shelter for droves that ran into thousands, into tens of thousands.

Ruth would wake at night and think of them huddled out there, would lie thinking of them as she drew the covers around herself, think of them when the wind drove against the house, and often, as tonight, when it was every instant growing colder, she wondered if what was before them filled them with terror. Sometimes she could not keep away and went nearer and looked at them; they were unbearably pitiful to her, their necks wrapped around each other's necks, trying to get from one another the only warmth there was for them, so helpless, so patient, they, play-loving creatures, gentle things, bearing these lives that men might finally use them for clothing and for food. There were times when the pathos of them was a thing she could not bear. They seemed to represent the whole cruelty of life, made real to her the terrible suffering of the world that winter of the war.

She watched the sheep until the quick dusk had fallen, and then stood thinking of them huddled over there in the frigid darkness. When she found that her face was wet and realized that she had sobbed aloud she turned from the window to the stove, drew a chair up close to it and put her feet on the fender. It was so bitterly cold that the room was warm only near the stove; over there by the window she had grown chilled. And as the heat enveloped her ankles she thought of the legs of those poor frightened things that had been the last comers and not able to get to the inside of the circle—that living outer rim which was left all exposed to the frigid January night in that high mountain valley. She could feel the cold cutting against their legs, could see their trembling and their vain, frantic efforts to get within the solidly packed mass. She was crying, and she said to herself, her fingers clenched down into her palm, "Stop that! Stop that!" She did not know what might not happen to her if she were unable to stop such thinking as that.

To try and force herself away from it she got up and lighted a lamp. She looked about on her desk for a magazine she had put there. She would make herself read something while waiting for Stuart. He had had to drive into town. He would be almost frozen when he got back from that two-mile drive. She paused in her search for the magazine and went into the kitchen to make sure that the fire there was going well. Then she put some potatoes in to bake; baked potatoes were hot things—they would be good after that drive. The heat from the oven poured out to her, and it swept her again to the thought of the living huddled mass out there in the frigid darkness. The wind beat against the house; it was beating against them. She bit her lip hard and again she said to herself—"No!"

She made some other preparations for supper. She had those things to do herself now. The Chinaman Ted had brought home with him in the fall had left in December. He had appeared before her ready for leaving and had calmly said, "Cold here, missis. And too all alone. Me go where more others are." She had said nothing at all in reply to him, in protest, too held by what he had said—"Cold here, and too all alone!" She had stood at the window and watched him going up the road toward town, going where "more others" were.

She went back now into their main room; it was both living and dining room these days, for since the extreme cold had fastened on them they had abandoned their two little upstairs bedrooms and taken for sleeping the room which in summer was used as living-room. That could be heated a little by leaving the door open, and it had seemed out of the question to go to bed in those upstairs rooms where the cold had been left untouched. Since they had been doing their own work all extra things had had to be cut down; an upstairs fire would mean more work, and it seemed there was already more work than Ruth could get done and have time for anything else. She was tired all the time these days; she would think during the day of the good time she was going to have with a book that evening, and then night would find her so tired she could scarcely keep awake, and she would huddle there before the fire, dreading the cold of the night.