Roberts / Wynne The Great Meadow

1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-1-78094-185-1
Verlag: Hesperus Press Ltd.
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 208 Seiten

First published in 1930 and shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize, The Great Meadow is a historical novel set in the early days of the settling of Kentucky. Intertwined with a flowing romantic sage of young love on the Kentucky trail are richly painted scenes of colonial America.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Roberts, Elizabeth Madox

Wynne, Michael

Leseproben

The clock of the season had run around the year and the herbs were growing, even under the frost. Polly was searching out the garden seeds, turning out drawers and cupboards, putting a plague on the mice if they had destroyed any. Diony felt the coming of the spring as she flung the shuttle through the web to weave the tow linen for the summer wear. ‘Not one of the heavenly bodies nor any part of the furniture of the earth can have being without mind to think it. Mind,’ the shuttle said, beating time against the pound of the reeds as she whipped the threads into cloth, and now the Thinking Part turned slowly to prepare a spring for the world.

Warm days eased slowly out of the south. The boys went to the creek with a handful of soft soap for each put into an old stoneware mug, and they carried a towel of coarse tow. They were swimming behind the screen of willow bushes and the sun was falling down warm on the surface of the pool. They had flung their clothes on the bank and leaped bravely into the pool, laughing and shivering and plunging about, the pool being shallow and the water dimpling here and there over stones. Then they came to the sand and rubbed their bodies over with the soft soap that Diony had made, a fine cleansing jelly of a soft gray texture, and it ran as a salve or an ointment over their flesh and was worked into a soft lather with the smooth water of the creek. Back then to the pool, their heads plunged under and the soap washed free, the plovers flying about overhead and filling the air with plaintive cries. At mid-afternoon the boys came from the water, flinging their discarded clothes in a high-spirited return, telling of the joy of the bath, retelling their exhilaration, winter put by and spring being come.

Then Diony carried water above to her room in a wooden keeler in a fine anticipation, soft soap in the same little earthen mug the boys had used, and a smooth strong towel. The breeze came in at the open window, spring. A house bird out on the ridge of the roof, a starling, made a pleasant bird-clatter, and another and another, following or calling all together. A soft delicate lather of foamy content was spread over her strong full body, her round slender limbs and her small round trunk, and she saw the whole of herself at one time, a revelation. She washed then away the spongy coat of foam that the soap made, dipping one foot and then the other in the keeler and letting the drops fly off into the cool moving air. The bath has come near an end and she stands free in a fine chill and a drunken afterglow, a token of spring. She rubbed her flesh into a rich flame and her mind leaped and started with the drunkenness of excessive health and a fine day.

The year was going around, like the hands of the clock in the new house, leaving themselves, the people, as still as the dial, making seasons and hours over them. Diony felt the year go past and once, for a moment, she heard the great ticking. There was war in Boston, the colony fighting the King’s men. Some said that all the colonies would snatch themselves free.

Diony’s dress was made now like a woman’s dress, but smaller, for she was past sixteen. In one of the upper rooms alone she put on her mother’s dress and it swallowed her into its folds. The drooping roundness of the dress made her afraid to know that she would come to a stature that would fill it. She was fearful of the dress, and she turned herself about in the upper room, looking down on the large limp masses of printed cloth which had come long before from the tidewater. It was her mother’s one fine garment; it was the one fine garment of the whole plantation. When Polly wore it, it covered her ample roundness and buttoned down across her round bosom and fitted smoothly over her fine arms. Diony stared at herself within the mold of the cloth and she shuddered and snatched the dress from her body, flinging it on Sallie Tolliver’s bed. But when she had stood a moment beside the bed, a change spread over her knowledge of the dress, and she took up the garment with a sweet loathing that turned all to joy as she put it on anew. She brushed the folds of the cloth with her hands, slowly, accepting her new self and being ready to run to meet all that would come to her. Standing in the garment, she felt herself burgeon slowly to a roundness and firmness that satisfied it, that lifted its limp folds and swelled the shoulders and arms, that poised the skirt to a fine point of grace. Then she took the dress gravely from her body and hung it on its peg in the corner beside Betty’s childish little frock, and she took her own garment to her body again, buttoning the front opening gravely, and she went gravely down the stair, being no longer in awe of adult being. Her mind sank into a maze, both ways, Betty’s way and Polly’s way, being equally known to her, and the year continued to make seasons over her.

Then several from down the stream came to look at Thomas’s horses and to buy. ‘Horses will be needed in the army,’ one said. Four men came to buy from first to last, among them a young man, known to Thomas, a man who came in a fine style. ‘We live humbly here,’ Thomas said, bringing the young man over the threshold to the large common room in the new house, where the visitor talked gayly of the life in Williamsburg and Richmond. Diony walked demurely before the stranger, as a young woman should. He was a man of dignity, coated and combed in the tidewater manner, wearing settlement finery everyday. A black groom rode with him to tend his horses. Polly gave the groom a bed in one of the out-buildings beside the smith’s shop, a little fearful of his dark skin, and Betty kept apart, but she listened well to all the dressed-up young man said and repeated much of it after he was gone. While he stayed Diony was not let milk the cows, but she and Betty stayed indoors and occupied themselves with the nice tasks of gentlewomen.

Again a visitor, a girl from a plantation down the river, brought by Thomas when he came back from one of his journeys. Her name was Nancy Webb; she was the daughter of one of Thomas’s friends. On her first day at Five Oaks she taught Diony and Betty new ways to try fortunes to find out who would be their lovers and to discover if they would have husbands. She was a quick little black-eyed girl, and presently she was teasing with Sam, who liked to push and pull a girl’s words about. In secret she put a four-leafed clover in her shoe, known only to Diony, so that whatever young man she met thereafter would be her future husband. It was summer. Diony slighted the weaving while Nancy stayed, but no one minded, for there were bolts of cloth put by.

The year had spun round; war on the coast; Nancy Webb with a clover leaf in her shoe, meeting Sam in a path. All had danced in the kitchen room, the men taking turns at the fiddle. Autumn had come then, the fire popping snow and snow following. Nancy Webb had been a long time gone, but she had caused new ideas to be imprinted on the mind. She was full of little secret ways of knowing. ‘You are pretty,’ she had said to Diony, a new learning, a new way of thinking of oneself.

‘How am I pretty?’ Diony asked.

‘You’ll find out against a man comes along that’s got a tongue to tell you with. They’re a tongue-tied set, not to ’a’ told you sooner. Those boys down the creek, the Jarvises, they’ll tell you, only they are a slow-spoken lot, little to say.’

Nathaniel Barlow came again to look at horses, bringing his groom as before, and there was bright talk before the fire. Diony sang three songs to Sam’s fiddling, two ballad songs and a hymn, singing:

Come, all ye fair and tender ladies,

Take warning how you court young men.

They’re like a star in the summer morning.

They first appear and then they’re gone.

Barlow seemed to care little for the war, now he was far from it, but pressed to speak of it he told of the flight of Dunmore, the governor, and made a rambling story of gunpowder and a new legislative body sitting. He talked with Thomas about the families living in New Kent and gave news of recent marriages there. He was a lover of music and must needs have Sam play again and Diony sing:

Lord Beichan was a noble lord,

He thought himself of high degree;

He could not rest nor be content

Until he had voyaged across the sea.

‘She could play on the spinet,’ he said. ‘Mistress Diony could make tunes on the harpsichord in no time. She’d learn off fine.’

Diony had a picture of herself sitting at a piece of musical furniture and she felt her fingers tripping lightly over the little white keys, making a tinkle to accompany her song. The tunes tingled in her arms and in her shoulders, wanting an outlet by way of her hands, and she went swiftly in mind down into the lower country with this Nathaniel Barlow to sit there on elegant chairs and bow and curtsey at strange doorways, herself settled, at home there, on land she owned for her own home. But she let him pass finally, and let the low countries be diffused, taking their spinets into fogs of unknown ways. But she smiled no less and went on with her singing:

She has got rings on every finger,

And on one hand she has got three;

And she’s as much gold around her middle,

As would buy Northumberland of thee.

They were back at their home-ways again, Barlow being gone. Sam pounded hominy in the mortar, working in the sheltered sunny place beside the house wall through...