Silhouettes
Reading edition
HARRIET DEAN
Barn-Yarding
I cannot joyously write little things. Perhaps that is why I write none at all. The little people about me fill me with disgust. They are cocksure bantam hens, loose and fertile, laying egg-thoughts carelessly. The crack of shells is loud, but tiny wet chicks roll out, smaller than the rest. God forbid that I am of the same breed! If I must linger in the barn-yard for a few days, studying the swagger of these hens and silently measuring my own, may I in the end fly away to my mountain-top—alone in the night. Strut, if I must, but quite alone.
Their voices are splinters of sound which prick my desolation to shreds. My one great fear is that clumsily they may stumble against my loneliness. What matter if the tongue be unknown to me! These tone arrows beat at my door like undesired rain; they hurl themselves against my tissue walls until I shall go mad with their urgence.
The only true friendliness near me is the blank brick wall of the house next door. I wrap myself in its unresponsiveness and stop up my ears with its cold silence that I may have courage to go on with my work.
Flame curtains flap in my grate and send grey indistinctness shivering and stumbling over my walls.
A dusty mirror in a lonely house waits....
Departure
“And now you, too, must go,” she said to me; I who had already gone, silently, tenderly lest my steps break the stairs of her heart.