Читать книгу Barren Ground онлайн

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With the box under one arm, he was still gazing at her, when the impatient voice of Geneva rang out from the doorway, and the girl came hurrying into the store.

"What are you waiting for, Bob? I thought you were never coming." Then, as her eyes fell on Dorinda, she added apologetically, "Of course I know the things were ready, but Bob is always so slow. I've got to hurry back because Neddy won't stand alone."

She turned away and went out, while Bob followed with a crestfallen air.

"As if I cared!" thought Dorinda proudly. "As if I wanted to talk to him!"

The train to the north had gone by at five o'clock, and the next one, which Miss Seena had just taken to Richmond, was the last that would stop before afternoon. The few farmers who had lounged about the track were now waiting in the store, while Nathan weighed and measured or counted small change into callous palms. Here and there a negro in blue jeans overalls stood patiently, with an expression of wistful resignation which was characteristic less of an individual than of a race. There was little talk among the white farmers, and that little was confined to the crops, or the weather. Rugged, gnarled, earth-stained, these men were as impersonal as trees or as transcendental philosophers. In their rustic pride they accepted silence as they accepted poverty or bad weather, without embarrassment and without humility. If they had nothing to say, they were capable of sitting for hours, dumb and unabashed, over their pipes or their "plugs" of tobacco. They could tell a tale, provided there was one worth the telling, with caustic wit and robust realism; but the broad jest or the vulgar implication of the small town was an alien product among them. Not a man of them would have dared recite an anecdote in Pedlar's store that Dorinda should not have heard. The transcendental point of view, the habit of thought bred by communion with earth and sky, had refined the grain while it had roughened the husk.