Gone to Earth, Mary Webb [fiction novels to read txt] 📗

more lagging step, the same horror came over her.

'I'm frit!' she cried; 'canna we be quick?'

But speed was not in Mrs. Marston. She came clinging to Edward's arm, very cautiously, like a cat on ice.

Martha, her stout red arms bare, her blue gingham dress and white apron flying in the wind, was directed to hold on to Mrs. Marston's mantle behind--as one tightens the reins downhill--to keep her on her feet. Edward was carrying a kitchen chair for his mother to sit on during the journey.

Hazel felt that they were none of them any good; they none of them knew what it was like to be frit. So she ran away, and left the hot, secretive, omniscient place with its fierce white and its crafty shadows.

She reached a tiny field that ran up to the woods, and there, among the brilliantly varnished buttercups, the bees sounded like the tides coming in on the coasts of faery. Hazel forgot her dread--an inexplicable sickening dread of the quarry. She chased a fat bumble-bee all across the golden floor--one eager, fluffy, shining head after the other. They might have been, in the all-permeating glory on their hill terrace, with the sapphire-circled plain around--they might have been the two youngest citizens of Paradise, circled in for ever from bleak honeyless winter, bleak honeyless hearts.

The slow cortege came down the path, Martha being obliged, as the descent grew steeper, to fling herself back like a person in a tug-of-war, for Mrs. Marston gathered way as she went, and uttered little helpless cries.

'I'm going, Martha! I'm losing control! Not by the bugles, Martha! Not by the braid!'

When they reached the road, the traction engine was not in sight, so they sat in the bank and waited, Mrs. Marston regal in the chair; and Hazel held a buttercup under Edward's chin to see if he liked butter.

'Very warm and pleasant,' murmured Mrs. Marston, and dropped into a doze.

Edward listened to the thrushes; they were flinging their voices--as jugglers fling golden balls--against the stark sides of the quarry. Up went a rush of bright notes, pattered on the gloomy wall, and returned again defeated.

To Edward, as he watched Hazel, they seemed like people thanking God for blessings, and being heard and blessed again. To Hazel, they seemed so many other Hazels singing because it was a festal day. To Mrs. Marston they were 'noisy birds, and very disturbing.' Martha crotcheted. She was making edging, hundreds of yards of it, for wedding garments. This was all the more creditable, as it was an act of faith, for no young man had as yet seemed at all desirous of Martha.

At last the traction engine appeared, and Mrs. Marston was hoisted into the trailer--a large truck with scarlet-painted sides, and about half full of stone. This had been shovelled away from the front to make room for Mrs. Marston and Hazel. A flap in the scarlet side was let down, and with the help of one of the traction men Edward and Martha got her safely settled. She really was a very splendid old lady. Her hat, a kind of spoon-shape, was trimmed lavishly with black glass grapes, that clashed together softly when she moved. There was also a veil with white chenille spots. The hat was tied under her chin with black ribbons, and her kind old face, very pink and plump and charming, looked out pleasantly upon, the world. She wore her best mantle, heavily trimmed with jet bugles, and her alpaca skirt was looped up uncompromisingly with an old-fashioned skirt-hook made like a butterfly. Hung on one arm was her umbrella, and she carried her reticule in both hands for safety. So, with all her accoutrements on, she sat, pleasantly aware that she was at once self-respecting and adventurous.

They started in a whirl of good-byes, shrieks of delight from Hazel, and advice of Mrs. Marston to the driver to put the brake on and keep it on. Hazel was perched on the side of the truck near her. They rounded a turn with great dignity, the trailer, with Mrs. Marston as its figure-head--wearing an expression of pride, fear, and resignation--swinging along majestically.

'Please, Mrs. Marston, can I buy a green silk gown wi' yellow roses on?'

'Certainly not, my dear. It would be most unsuitable. So very far from quiet.'

'What's quiet matter?'

'Quietness is the secret of good manners. The quieter you are, the more of a lady you'll be thought. All truly good people are quiet in manners, dress, and speech, just as all the best horses are advertised as quiet to ride and drive, but few are really so.'

'Han you got to be ever and ever so quiet to be a lady?'

'Yes.'

'What for have you?'

'Because, dear, it is the proper thing. Now my poor husband was quiet, so quiet that you never knew if he was there or not. And Edward is quiet too,--as quiet as--'

'Oh! dunna, dunna!' wailed Hazel.

'Is a pin sticking into you dear?'

'No. Dunna say Ed'ard's quiet!'

Mrs. Marston looked amicably over her spectacles.

'My dear, why not?' she asked.

'I dunna like that sort.'

'Could you explain a little, dear?'

'I dunna like quiet men--nor quiet horses. My mam was quiet when she was dead. Everybody's quiet when they're dead.'

'Very, very quiet,' crooned Mrs. Marston. 'Yes, we all fall asleep in our turn.'

'I like,' went on Hazel in her rather crude voice, harsh with youth like a young blackbird's--'I like things as go quick and men as talk loud and stare hard and drive like the devil!'

She broke off, flushing at Mrs. Marston's expression, and at the sudden knowledge that she had been describing Reddin.

'It doesn't signify very much,' said Mrs. Marston (severely for her), 'what you like, dear. But I suppose'--she softened--'that you do really like Edward, since he has chosen you and you are pledged?'

Hazel shook her shoulders as if she wanted to get rid of a yoke. They fell into silence, and as Mrs. Marston dozed, Hazel was able to fulfil her desire that had sprung into being at the moment of seeing Mrs. Marston's hat--namely, to squash one of those very round and brittle grapes.

Her quick little hand, gleaming in the sun, hovered momentarily above the black hat like a darting dragon-fly, and the mischief was done--bland respectability smashed and derided.


Chapter 12

They went gallantly, if slowly, on through narrow ways, lit on either side by the breath-taking freshness of new hawthorn leaves. Primroses, wet and tall, crisply pink of stalk and huge of leaf, eyed them, as Madonnas might, from niches in the isles of grass and weed.

Carts had to back into gates to let them go by, and when they came into the main road horses reared and had to be led past. Hazel found it all delightful. She liked, when the driver pulled up outside little wayside inns, to peer into the brown gloom where pewter pots and rows of china jugs shone, and from which, over newly washed floors of red tiles, landlords advanced with foaming mugs.

Mrs. Marston strongly disapproved of these proceedings, but did not think it polite to expostulate, as she was receiving a favour.

In Silverton Mrs. Marston lingered a long while before any shop where sacred pictures were displayed. The ones she looked at longest were those of that peculiarly seedy and emasculated type which modern religion seems to produce. Hazel, all in a fidget to go and buy her clothes, looked at them, and wondered what they had to do with her. There was one of an untidy woman sitting in a garden of lilies--evidently forced--talking to an anaemic-looking man with uncut hair and a phosphorescent head. Hazel did not know about phosphorus or haloes, but she remembered how she had gone into the kitchen one night in the dark and screamed at sight of a sheep's head on the table, shining with a strange greenish light. This picture reminded her of it. She hastily looked at the others. She liked the one with sheep in it best, only the artist had made them like bolsters, and given the shepherd saucer eyes. Then she came to one of the Crucifixion, a subject on which the artist had lavished all the slumbering instincts of torture that are in so many people.

'Oh! what a drodsome un! I dunna like this shop,' said Hazel tearfully. 'What'm they doing to 'im? Oh, they'm great beasts!'

Perhaps she had seen in her dim and childish way the everlasting tyranny of the material over the abstract; of bluster over nerves; strength over beauty; States over individuals; churches over souls; and fox-hunting squires over the creatures they honour with their attention.

'What is it, my dear?' Mrs. Marston looked over her spectacles, and her eyes were like half moons peering over full moons.

'That there picture! They'm hurting Him so cruel. And Him fast and all.'

'Oh!' said Mrs. Marston wonderingly, 'that's nothing to get vexed about. Why, don't you know that's Jesus Christ dying for us?'

'Not for me!' flashed Hazel.

'My dear!'

'No, what for should He? There shall none die along of me, much less be tormented.'

'Needs be that one man die for the people,' quoted Mrs. Marston easily. 'Only through blood can sin be washed white.'

'Blood makes things raddled, not white; and if so be any's got to die; I'll die for myself.'

The old gabled houses, dark and solemn with heavy carved oak, the smart plate-glass windows of the modern shops, the square dogmatic church towers and the pointed insinuating spires--all seemed to listen in surprise to this being who was not content to let another suffer for her. For civilization as it now stands is based solely on this one thing--vicarious suffering. From the central doctrine of its chief creed to the system of its trade; from the vivisection-table to the consumptive genius dying so that crowds of fat folk may get his soul in a cheap form, it is all built up on sacrifice of other creatures.

'What'd you say if Ed'ard died for yer?' queried Hazel crudely.

'My dear! How unseemly! In the street!'

'And what'd I do if Foxy died for me?'

'Well, well, Foxy's only an animal.'

'So're you and me animals!' said Hazel so loudly that poor Mrs. Marston flushed all over her gentle old face.

'So indecent!' she murmured. 'My dear,' she said, when she had steered Hazel past the shop, 'you want a nice cup of tea. And I do hope,' she went on softly, putting a great deal of cream in Hazel's cup as she would have put lubricating oil on a stiff sewing-machine--'I do hope, my dear, you'll become more Christian as time goes on.'

'If Foxy died along of me,' said Hazel stubbornly--for, although grateful for the festive meal, she could not let her basic rule of life slip--'if Foxy died along of me, I'd die too. I couldna do aught else.'

'Things are very different,' said Mrs. Marston, flustered, flushed and helpless--'very different from what they used to be.'

'What for are they, Mrs. Marston?'

But that question Mrs. Marston was quite unable to answer. If she had known the answer--that the change was in herself, and that the world was not different, but still kept up its ancient war between love and respectability, beauty and mass--she would not have liked it, and so she would not have believed it.

It