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

'em as Edward bought me. Holes as _ought_ to be there, I mane. They show my legs mother-naked, and they look right nice.'

'Don't say that word, dear.'

'What 'un?'

Mrs. Marston was silent for a moment. 'The sixth from the end,' she said; 'it's not nice for a minister's wife.'

'What mun I say?'

Mrs. Marston was in a difficulty. 'Well,' she said at last, 'Edward should not have given you any cause to say anything.'

Hazel blazed into loyalty.

'I'm sure I'm very much obleeged to Ed'ard,' she said, 'and I like 'em better for showing my legs. Oh, here _be_ Ed'ard! Ed'ard, these be proper stockings, inna they?'

Edward glanced at them, and said indifferently that they were. As he did so, a line that had lately appeared on his forehead became very apparent.

In her room upstairs, papered with buttercups and daisies by Edward himself, and scented by a bunch of roses he had given her, Hazel thought about Hunter's Spinney. Edward would not like her to go, and Edward had been kind--kinder than anyone had ever been. He had extended his kindness to Foxy also. 'I'm sure Foxy's much obleeged,' she thought. 'No, she could never tell Edward about Hunter's Spinney. If he questioned her, she knew that she would lie. He would certainly not be pleased. He might be very angry. Mrs. Marston would not like it at all; she would talk about a minister's wife. Reddin had said she must go, but she must not.' She smelt the roses.

'No,' she said, 'I must ne'er go to the Hunter's Spinney--not till doom breaks!' She said her prayers under the shelter of that resolve, with a supplementary one written out very neatly in gold ink by Edward, who wrote, as his mother said, 'a parchment script.'

But when she lay down she could not keep her mind clear of Reddin; during each meeting with him she had been more perturbed. His personality dragged at hers. Already he was stronger than her fugitive impulses, her wilding reserve. He was like a hand tearing open a triplet of sorrel leaves folded for rain, so strong in their impulse for self-protection that they could only be conquered by destruction. She was afraid of him, yet days without him were saltless food. There was a ruthlessness about him--the male instinct unaccompanied by humility, the patrician instinct unaccompanied by sympathy, the sportsman's instinct unaccompanied by pity. Whatever he began he would finish. What had he now begun?

Innocence and instinct, ignorance and curiosity, struggled in her mind. The attitude of civilization and the Churches towards sex is not one to help a girl in such an hour. For while approving of, and even insisting on, children, they treat with a secrecy that implies disapproval the necessary physical factors that result in children. Tacitly, though not openly, they consider sex disgraceful. Though Hazel had come in contact with the facts of life less than most cottage girls, she was not completely ignorant. But the least ignorant woman knows nothing at all about sex until she has experienced it. So Hazel was dependent on intuition. Intuition told her that if the peaceful life at the parsonage was to continue, she must keep away from Hunter's Spinney. But she could not keep away. It was as if someone had spun invisible threads between her and Reddin, and was slowly tightening them.

Long after Edward had locked the house up and shut his door, after the ticking of the clock had ceased to be incidental and become portentous, Hazel lay and tried to think. But she only heard two voices in endless contradiction, 'I munna go. I mun go.' At last she got up and fetched the book of charms, written in a childish, illiterate hand, and nearly black with use.

'I'll try a midsummer 'un, for it's Midsummer Eve come Saturday,' she thought.

She searched the book and found a page headed 'The Flowering of the Brake.' That one she decided to work on Saturday.

'And to-morrow the Harpers, and Friday the Holy Sign,' she said. 'And if they say go, I'll go, and if they say stay, I'll stay.'

She fell asleep, feeling that she had shifted the responsibility.

Her mother had said that before any undertaking you should work the Harper charm. The book directed that on a lonely hill, you must listen with your eyes shut for the fairy playing. If the undertaking was good you would hear, coming from very far away, a sound of harping. Silver folk with golden harps, so the book said, keep on a purple hill somewhere beyond seeing, and there they play the moon up and the moon down. And at sun-up they cry for those that have not heard them. If you hear them ever so faintly, you can go on to the end of your undertaking, and there'll be no tears in it. But you must never tire of waiting, nor tell anyone what you have heard.

The next night Hazel stole out in the heavy dew to a hummock of the mountain, and sat down there to wait for moonrise. But when the moon came--the thinnest of silver half-hoops, very faint in the reflected rose from the west--there was no sound except the song of the wood-larks. They persevered, although the sun was gone. Soon they, too, were hushed, and Hazel was folded in silence.

She waited a long while. The chapel and the minister's house sank into the deepening night as into water. The longer the omen tarried, the more she wanted it to come. Then fatalism reasserted itself, and she relapsed into her usual state of mind.

'I dunna care,' she said. 'It inna no use to tarry. They unna play. I'll bide along of Ed'ard at chapel on Sunday, and sing higher than last time.' She turned home.

At that moment a note of music, strayed, it seemed, out of space, wandered across the hill-top. Then a few more, thin and silvery, ran down the silence like a spray of water. The air was lost in distance, but the notes were undoubtedly those of a harp.

'It's them!' whispered Hazel. 'I'm bound to go.' Then she remembered her mother's injunctions, and took to her heels. At home in her quiet room, she thought of the strange shining folk playing on their purple mountain.

She never knew that the harper was her father returning by devious roads from one of the many festivals at which he played in summer-time, and having frequent rests by the way, owing to the good ale he had drunk. Her bright galaxy of faery was only a drunken man. Her fate had been settled by a passing whim of his, but so had been her coming into the world.

When she went in, Edward was sitting up for her, anxious, but trying to reason himself into calm, as Hazel was given to roaming.

'Where have you been?' he asked rather sternly, for he had suffered many things from anxiety and from his mother.

'Only up to'erts the pool, Ed'ard.'

'Don't go there again.'

'Canna I go walking on the green hill by my lonesome?'

'No. You can go in the woods. They're safe enough.'

'Foxy's a bad dog!' came Mrs. Marston's voice from upstairs. 'She bit the rope and took the mutton!'

'Eh, I'm main sorry!' cried Hazel. 'But she inna a bad dog, Mrs. Marston; she's a good fox.'

'According to natural history she may be, but in my sight she's a bad dog.' She shut her door with an air of finality.

'The old lady canna'd abear Foxy,' said Hazel. 'Nobody likes Foxy.'

She was stubbornly determined that the world bore her a grudge because she loved Foxy. Perhaps she had discovered that the world has a sharp sword for the vulnerable, and that love is easily wounded.

'Don't call mother the old lady, dear.'

'Well, she is. And she says animals has got no souls. She'm only got a little small 'un herself.'

'Hazel!'

'Well, it's God's truth.'

'Why?'

'If she'd got a nice tidy bit herself, she'd know Foxy'd got one, too. Now I've got a shimmy with lace on, I know lots of other girls sure to have 'em. Afore I couldna have believed it.'

Edward could find no reply to this.

'Are you happy here, Hazel?' he asked.

'Ah! I be.'

'You don't miss--'

'Father? Not likely!' She looked up with her clear golden eyes. 'You'm mother and father both!'

'Only that, dear?'

'Brother.'

'You've forgotten one, Hazel--husband.' His eyes were wistful. 'And lover, perhaps, some day,' he added. 'Good night, dear.'

She lifted a childish mouth, grateful and ready to be affectionate. Too ready, he thought. He looked so eagerly for shyness--a flicker of the eyelids, a mounting flush. He was no fool, nor was he in the least ascetic. In his dreamy life before Hazel came, he had thought of a sane and manly and normal future when he thought of it at all. Now he found that the reality was not like his dreams. The saneness and manliness were still needed, but the joy had gone, or at least was veiled.

'It will come all right,' he told himself, and waited. His face took an expression of suspense. He was like one that watches, rapt, for the sunrise. Only the sun stayed beneath the horizon. He called Hazel in his mind by the country name for wood-sorrel--the Sleeping Beauty. He left her to sleep as long as she would. He kept a hand on himself, and never tried to waken her by easier ways than through the spirit--through the senses, or vanity, or by taking advantages of his superior intellect.

He would win her fairly or not at all. So, though to glance into her empty white room set him trembling, though the touch of her hand set his pulses going, he never schemed to touch her, never made pretexts to go into her room. A stormed citadel was in his eyes a thing spoilt in the capturing. So he waited for the gates to open. The irony was that if he had listened to sex--who spoke to him with her deep beguiling voice, like a purple-robed Sibyl--if he had for once parted company with his exacting spiritual self, Hazel would have loved him. We cannot love that in which is nothing of ourselves, and there was no white fire of spiritual exaltation in Hazel. The nearest she approached to that was in her adoration of sensuous beauty, a green flame of passionless devotion to loveliness as seen in inanimate things. But that there should be anything between a man and a woman except an obvious affection, a fraternal sort of thing, or an uncomfortable excitement such as she felt with Reddin, was quite beyond her ideas. She did not know that there could be a fervour of mind for mind, a clasp more frantic than that of the arms, a continuous psychic state more passionate than the great moments of physical passion. If Edward had told her, she could not at this time have understood it. She would have gazed up at him trustingly out of her autumn-tinted eyes; she would have embodied all the spiritual glories of which he dreamed; and she would have understood nothing. Once he tried to share with her a passage in Drummond's 'Natural Law in the Spiritual World.' He was reading it with young delight a good many years behind the times, for books had usually grown very out of date before they percolated through the country libraries to him. He had read it in