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

dimly but passionately felt, that made Hazel shrink from Reddin. For unless Reddin was without this impulse to save, and had the mind of a fiend without pity, how could he in the mere pursuit of pleasure inflict wholly unnecessary torture, as in fox-hunting?

She watched Venus shrink from a silver pool to a silver point. She was full of trouble and unrest. Would she dream of Reddin? Would she go to sleep at all? Mrs. Marston's armchair loomed in the gathering light, and she felt guilty again.

The east quickened, as if someone had turned up a light there. She opened the window, and in rushed the inexpressible sweetness of dawn. The bush of syringa by the kitchen window swept in its whole fragrance, heady and sensuous. She took long breaths of it, and thought of Reddin's green dress, of the queer look in his eyes when he stared long at her. A curious passivity quite foreign to her came over her now at the thought of Reddin. What would he look like, what would he say, would he hold her roughly, if she went to Hunter's Spinney? An unwilling elation possessed her as she thought of it. It did not occur to her to wonder why Edward did not kiss her as Reddin did. She took him as much for granted as a child takes its parents.

Suddenly the first bird called silverly, startling the dusk. It was a woodlark, and its song seemed even more vacillating than usual in the vast hush. At the first note all Hazel's thoughts of Reddin fled. It seemed that clarity, freshness, and music were bound up in her mind with Edward. She thought only of him as she ran up the hill over the minute starry carpet of mountain bedstraw.

'Maybe there'll be no flower, and then the charm's broke,' she thought hopefully. 'If the charm's broke, I canna dream, and I shanna go.'

But when she came to the white garment lying wet and pale in the half-light she drew a sharp breath. There in the centre lay one minute blue petal. Its very smallness proved to her its magic. It was a faery flower. She took it up reverently and went home solemn as a child in church. When, with blue petal under her pillow, she lay down, she fell asleep in a moment. She dreamt of Reddin, for he had more control over her thoughts than Edward, who appealed to her emotions, while Reddin stirred her instincts. Waking at Martha's knock, she said to herself, with mingled heart-sickness and elation:

'The signs say go. I mun go. Foxy wants me to go.' She would not have believed that her third sign was no faery flower, but only a petal of blue milk-wort--little sister of the bracken--loosened by her own nervous hands the night before.


Chapter 25

On Sunday evening, as usual, the little bell began to sound plaintively in the soft air which was like a pale wild-rose. Mrs. Marston had betaken herself out of her own door into that of the chapel with a good many sighs at the disturbance of her nap, and with injunctions to Martha to put a bit of fire in the parlour. Edward had gone with his sermon to the back of the house where the tombstones were fewer and it was easier to walk while he read. Hazel ran up to her room and put on her white dress, which was considered by Mrs. Marston 'too flighty' for chapel. She leant out of her window and looked away up the purple hill. Then she gathered a bunch of the tea-roses that encircled it. They were deep cream flushed with rose. She pinned them into her breast, and they matched her flushed face. She was becoming almost dainty in her ways; this enormously increased her attraction for both men. She put on her broad white wedding-hat, and slipped downstairs and out by the kitchen door while Martha was in the parlour. She shut the door behind her like a vanished life. She felt, she did not know why, a sense of excitement, of some great happening, something impending, in her appointment with Reddin.

She met no one as she ran down the batch, for the chapel-goers were all inside. The hedges were full of white 'archangel' and purple vetch. When she came to the beginning of Hunter's Spinney she felt frightened; the woods were so far-reaching, so deep with shadow; the trees made so sad a rumour, and swayed with such forlorn abandon. In the dusky places the hyacinths, broken but not yet faded, made a purple carpet, solemn as a pall. Woodruff shone whitely by the path and besieged her with scent. Early wild-roses stood here and there, weighed down with their own beauty, set with rare carmine and tints of shells and snow, too frail to face the thunderstorm that even now advanced with unhurrying pomp far away beyond the horizon. She hurried along, leaving the beaten track, creeping under the broad skirts of the beeches and over the white prostrate larch-boles where the resin ran slowly like the dark blood of creatures beautiful, defeated, dying. She began to climb, holding to the grey, shining boles of mountain ash-trees. The bracken, waist-high at first, was like small hoops at the top of the wood, where the tiny golden tormentil made a carpet and the yellow pimpernel was closing her eager eyes.

Hazel came out on the bare hill-top where gnarled may-trees, dropping spent blossom, were pink-tinted as if the colours of the sunsets they had known had run into their whiteness. Hazel sat down on the hilltop and saw the sleek farm-horses far below feeding with their shadows, swifts flying with their shadows, and hills eyeing theirs stilly. So with all life the shadow lingers--incurious, mute, yet in the end victorious, whelming all. As Hazel sat there her own shadow lay darkly behind her, growing larger than herself as the sun slipped lower.

Bleatings and lowings, the evening caw of the rooks ascended to her; a horse neighed, aggressively male. From some distance came the loud, crude voice of a man singing. He sang, not in worship, not for the sake of memory or melody or love, but for the same reason that people sing so loudly in church--in the urgent need of expending superabundant vitality. His voice rolled out under the purple sky as if he were the first man, but half emerged from brutishness, pursuing his mate in a world all fief to him, a world that revealed her as she fled through the door of morning and the door of evening, rolling its vaporous curtains back as she went through. It was Reddin, come forth from his dark house, as his foraging ancestors had done, to take his will of the weaponless and ride down the will of others. He did not confess even to himself why he had come. His thoughts on sex were so prurient that, in common with many people, he considered any frankness about it most indecent. Sex was to him a thing that made the ears red. It is hard for them that have breeding-stables to enter the kingdom of heaven. Too often the grave, the majestic significance of the meeting of the sexes--holding as it does the fate of the golden pageantry of life, sacrificially spending as it does the present for the future--is nothing to them. They see it only as a fillip to appetite. So Sally Haggard usually spent most of the money earned by Reddin's stallion, 'The Pride of Undern.'

He put the horse to a gallop as he came up Hunter's Spinney, to quench the voice that spoke within him, saying things he would not hear, that spoke of love, and the tenderness and humility of love, and of how these did not detract from the splendour of manhood, the fine rage of passion, but rather glorified them. Something in his feeling for Hazel answered that voice, and it worried him. By heredity and upbringing he had been taught to dislike and mistrust everything that savoured of emotion or ideas, to consider unmanly all that was of the spirit. Therefore he sang more loudly as he saw on the hill-top the flutter of Hazel's white dress, to quench the voice that steadfastly spoke of mutual love as the one reason, the one consecration of passion in man and woman. The hoof-beats thudded like a full pulse.

Hazel got up. Suddenly she was afraid of the place, more afraid than she had ever been of the death-pack, which, this evening, she had forgotten.

But before she could move away Reddin shouted to her and came up the bridle-path. Hazel hesitated, swayed like the needle of a compass, and finally stood still. 'What'n you wanting me for, Mr. Reddin?'

'Don't you know?'

'If I knew, I shouldna ask.'

'What do men generally want women for?'

'I'm not a woman. I dunna want to be. But what be it, anyway?'

He felt in his pocket and drew out a small parcel.

'There! Don't say the giving's all on your side,' he remarked.

She opened the parcel. It contained two heavy old-fashioned gold bracelets. Each was set with a large ruby that stared unwinkingly from its setting of pale gold.

'Eh! they'm like drops of blood!' said Hazel. 'Like when fayther starts a-killing the pig. He's a hard un, is fayther, hard as b'rytes. I'm much obleeged to you, Mr. Reddin, but I dunna want 'em. I canna'd abear the sight of blood.'

'Little fool!' said Reddin. 'They're worth pounds.'

He caught her wrists and fastened one bracelet on each. She struggled, but could not get free or undo the clasps.

She began to cry, loudly and easily, as she always did. All her emotions were sudden, transparent and violent. She also, since her upbringing had not been refined, began to swear.

'Damn your clumsy fists and your bloody bracelets!' she screamed. 'Take 'em off, too! I 'unna stay if you dunna!'

Reddin laughed, and in his eyes a glow began; nothing could have so suited his mood.

'You've got to wear 'em,' he said, 'to show you're mine.'

'I binna!'

'Yes.'

'I won't never be!'

'Yes, you will, now.'

She raved at him like a little wild-cat, pulling at the bracelets like a kitten at its neck ribbon.

He laughed again, stilly.

He knew there was not a soul near, for the people from the farm at the foot of the spinney had all gone to church.

'Look here, Hazel,' he said, not unkindly; 'you've got to give in, see?'

'I see nought.'

'You've got to come and live with me at Undern. You can wear those fine dresses.'

'I'm a-cold,' said Hazel; 'the sun's undering; I'd best go home-along.'

'Come on, then. Up you get. We'll be there in no time. You shall have some supper and--'

'What'n I want trapsing to Undern when I live at the Mountain?'

'You'll be asking to come soon,' he said, with the crude wisdom of his kind. 'You like me better than that soft parson even now.'

She shook her head.

'I'm a man, anyway.'

She looked him over, and owned he was. But she did not want him; she wanted freedom and time to find out how much she liked Edward.

'Well, good neet to you,' she said. 'I'm off.'

She ran downhill into the wood.

Reddin hitched the reins to a tree and followed. He caught her and flung her into the bracken, and suddenly it seemed to her that the whole world, the woods, herself, were all