Autumn | Page 7

as sleepy as its mistress. She tossed her hair back from her face; it spread broad and gold across her shoulders, and the wide sleeves of her nightdress, falling down her arms, bared her round, brown elbows as she caught it up again.
In the kitchen, the two hired men, their faces wet and clean, poured sugar over their lettuce, and talked with their mouths full.
"I hear tell of a borer, like an ear-worm, spoiling the corn. . . . But there's none in our corn, so far as I can see."
"Never been so much rain since I was born."
"A bad year."
"Well," said Mrs. Barly, "that's no wonder, either, with prices what they are, and you two eating your heads off, for all the work you do."
"Now, then," said her husband hastily, "that's all right, too, mother."
Anna stood at the sink, and washed the dishes. Her hands floated through the warm, soapy water like lazy fish, curled around plates, swam out of pots; while her thoughts, drowsy, sunny in her head, passed, like her hands, from what was hardly seen to what was hardly felt.
"Look after the milk, Anna," said her mother, "while I go for some kindlings." She went out, thin, stooped, her long, lean fingers fumbling with her apron; and she came back more bent than before. She put the wood down with a sigh. "A body's never done," she said.
Anna looked after the milk, all in a gentle phlegm. Her mother cooked, cleaned, scrubbed, carried water, fetched wood, set the house to rights; in order to keep Anna fresh and plump until she was married. Anna, plump and wealthy, was a good match for any one: old Mr. Frye used to smile when he saw her. "Smooth and sweet," he used to say: "molasses . . . hm . . ."
Now she stood dreaming by the stove, until her mother, climbing from the cellar, woke her with a clatter of coal. "Why, you big, awkward girl," cried Mrs. Barly, "whatever are you dreaming about?"
Anna thought to herself: "I was dreaming of a thousand things. But when I went to look at them . . . there was nothing left."
"Nothing," she said aloud.
"Then," said her mother doubtfully, "you might help me shell peas."
The two women sat down together, a wooden bowl between them. The pods split under their fingers, click, cluck; the peas fell into the bowl like shot at first, dull as the bowl grew full. Click, cluck, click, cluck . . . Anna began to dream again. "Oh, do wake up," said her mother; "one would think . . ."
Anna's hands went startled into the peas. "I must be in love," she said with half a smile.
Mrs. Barly sighed. "Ak," she said.
Anna began to laugh. After a while she asked, "Do you think I'm in love?"
"Like as not," said her mother.
"Well, then," Anna cried, "I'm not in love at all--not now."
Mrs. Barly let her fingers rest idly along the rim of the bowl. "When I was a girl . . ." she began. Then it was Anna's turn to sigh.
"It seems like yesterday," remarked Mrs. Barly, who wanted to say, "I am still a young woman."
Anna split pods gravely, her eyes bent on her task. The tone of her mother's voice, tart and dry, filled her mind with the sulky thoughts of youth. "There's fewer alive to-day," she said, "than when you were a girl."
Mrs. Barly knew very well what her daughter meant. "Be glad there's any left," she replied, as she turned again to her shelling.
Anna's round, brown finger moved in circles through the peas. "I'm too young to marry," she said, at last.
"No younger than what I was."
But it seemed to Anna as though life had changed since those days. For every one was reaching for more. And Anna, too, wanted more . . . more than her mother had had. "If I wait," she said in a low voice, "to . . . see a bit of life . . . what's the harm?"
The pod in Mrs. Barly's hand cracked with a pop, and trembled in the air, split open like the covers of a book. "I declare," she exclaimed, "I don't know what to think . . . well . . . wait . . . I suppose you want to be like Mrs. Wicket?"
"No, I don't," said Anna.
"Yes," said Mrs. Barly, in a shaking voice, "yes . . . wait . . . you'll see a bit of something . . . a taste of the broom, perhaps. . . ."
While the two women looked after the house, the hired men worked in the fields, under the hot sun, their wet, cotton shirts open at the neck, their faces shaded with wide straw hats. Farmer Barly leaned against one side of a