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

Edward's absurd determination that she should have clean nails; the ever-renewed argument, 'Foxy's a bad dog!' 'She inna. She's a good fox.' 'In my sight she's a bad dog.'

Now she had floated free of all this. She was out of haven on the high seas. She felt very lonely--as the dead might feel, free of the shackles of life. It was certainly pleasant to wear the green dress. But she missed her little duties--clearing away the supper, Martha being gone; fetching the candles (Mrs. Marston always shook her head at the third, not from economy, but from vicarious philoprogenitiveness).

Edward's reading of the Book last thing had made her restless; she had thought it a bother. Now it seemed a privilege. To most girls, God's Little Mountain would have been purgatory. To her it was wonderful. It was the first time she had shared in the peculiar beauty of home, the daily sacrament of love. Edward never forgot to kiss them both when he came in; brought them flowers; was always carpentering at surprises for them. These last never turned out very well, his technical skill not keeping pace with his enthusiasm; but Hazel was not critical.

She, in common with the other little creatures, sat down in his shadow as in a city of refuge. Mrs. Marston shared this feeling. She always fell asleep at once when Edward was at home in the evening, ceasing to invent alarms about black men creeping through the kitchen window, Foxy getting into the larder, and a great tempest from the Lord blowing them all to perdition because Lord's Day was not kept as it used to be.

Into the parlour, at his own good time, Vessons brought the supper, and dumped it on the large round table, veneered like mahogany, heavily Victorian and ornamented with brass feet. There were bread and cheese, bacon, and a good deal of beer.

Hazel saw nothing amiss with it, for though she had begun to grow accustomed to respectable middle-class meals, life at the Callow still seemed the homelier. Reddin looked up from cutting bacon to say with unwonted thoughtfulness, 'Like some tea and toast?' He felt that toast was a triumph of imagination. He was rather dubious about asking Vessons to do it, so instead he repeated, 'You'll have some tea and toast?'

Vessons went into the kitchen and shut the door. They waited for some time, and Hazel, who, whatever her fate, her faults and sorrows, was always as hungry as Foxy, looked longingly at Reddin's cheese and beer. Physical exhaustion brought tears of appetite to her eyes. At last Reddin went to the kitchen door.

'Where's that tea?' he asked.

'Tay?'

'Yes, you fool!'

'I know nothing about no tay.'

'I said you were to make some.'

'Not to me.'

'And toast.'

'I've douted the fire.'

He had just done so.

'Look here, my man, there's a missus at Undern now. You please her or go. She tells me what she wants. I tell you. You do it.'

'I'll 'ave no woman over me!' said Vessons sullenly. 'Never will I! Never a missus did I take, not for all the pleasures of bed and board--no, ne'er a one I ever took. Maiden I am to my dying day.'

The coupling of the ideas of Vessons and maidenhood was so funny that Reddin burst out laughing and forgot his anger.

'Now, make that tea, Vessons.'

'She unna be here long?' asked Vessons craftily.

'Yes, for good.'

Hazel heard him.

'For good.' Did she want to be in this whispering house for good? Who did she want to be with for good? Not Reddin. Edward? But he had not the passion of the greenwood in him, the lust of the earth. He was not of the tremulously ecstatic company of wild, hunted creatures. If Reddin was definitely antagonistic, a hunter, Edward was neutral, a looker-on. They were not her comrades. They did not live her life. She had to live theirs. She wished she had never seen Reddin, never gone to Hunter's Spinney. Edward's house was at least peaceful.

'And what,' she heard Vessons say, 'will yer lordship's Sally Virtue say?'

She did not hear Reddin's reply; it was fierce and low. She wondered who Sally Virtue was, but she was too tired to think much about it. Afterwards Reddin had some whisky, and Vessons drank his health. Then Reddin picked out 'It's a Fine Hunting Day' on the old piano, and sang it in a rough tenor. Vessons joined in from the kitchen in a voice quite free from any music, and the roaring chorus echoed through the house.

'Eh, stop! I canna abide it!' cried Hazel; but they did not hear.

Vessons came and stood in the doorway with the teapot in one hand and the expression of acute agony he always wore when singing.

'All trouble and care
Will be left far behind us at home!'

'Not for the little foxes!' cried Hazel, and she plucked the music from the piano and ran past Vessons, knocking the teapot out of his hand. She stuffed the music into the kitchen grate.

Vessons was petrified.

'Well,' he said, 'you've got the ways of wild-cats and spinsters the world over.' This was an unwilling compliment. 'And I'll say this for you, whatever else I canna say, you've got sperit enough for the eleven thousand virgins!'

Reddin felt that the scene was hardly festive enough. He wondered that he himself did not feel more jubilant; reaction had set in. He wished that all should be gay as for a bridal, for he felt that this was a bridal in all but the name.

But the old house, like a being lethargic after long revelry, clad in torn and stained garments, seemed unready for mirth. Andrew was highly antagonistic. The hound had bristled, growling, at the intruder; and Hazel--?

He looked at Hazel under half-closed lids. Did she know what had happened? He thought not. Perhaps intuition whispered to her. Certainly she avoided his eyes. She sat drinking the tea, which Reddin, with much exertion of authority, at last caused to appear. She was wan, and her face looked very thin. Panic lingered about her eyes, at the corner of her lips.

He realized that she was afraid of him--his look, his touch. Immediately he wanted to exercise his power. He went across and took her chin in his hand, laying the other on her shoulder.

Her eyelids trembled.

'What'n you after, mauling me?' she said.

Then a passion of tears shook her.

'Oh, I want Ed'ard and the old lady! I want to go back to the Mountain, I do! Ed'ard'll be looking me up and down the country.'

'Good Lord, so he will!' said Reddin, 'and rousing the whole place. You must write a letter, Hazel, to say you're safe and happy, and he's not to worry.'

'But I amna.'

Reddin frowned at the spontaneity of this. But he made her write the note.

'Saddle the mare, Vessons, and take this to the Mountain.'

'You dunna mind how much--' began Vessons. But Reddin cut him short.

'Get on,' he said, and Vessons knew by the tone that he had better. 'Push it under the parson's door, knock, and make yourself scarce, Vessons,' Reddin ordered.

'You can go up to bed if you like, Hazel.'

Left alone, he walked up and down the room, puzzled and uneasy.

According to his idea, he had done Hazel the greatest honour a man can pay to a woman. He could not see in what he had failed. He was irritated with his conscience for being troublesome. He had, as he put it, merely satisfied a need of his nature--a need simple and urgent as eating and drinking. He did not understand that in failing to find out whether it was also a need of Hazel's nature--and in nothing else at all--lay his unpardonable crime.

That he had offended against the views of his Church did not worry him. For, like many churchmen, he had the happy gift of keeping profession and practice, dogma and deeds, in airtight compartments. How many of the most fervent churchmen are not, or have not been at some period of their lives, exactly like Reddin?

'Of course, I've been a bit of a beast in the past,' he thought. 'But that's done with. Besides, she doesn't know.'

He reflected again.

'I suppose I was a bit rough, but she ought to have forgotten that by now. I do wish she wouldn't keep on so about the parson.'

He ran upstairs.

'Sorry I was rough, Hazel,' he said shamefacedly.

Hazel stood at the open window in a nightdress that she had found in one of the chests--a frail, yellowish thing with many frills of cobwebby lace made and worn by some dead woman on a forgotten bridal. It was symbolic of Hazel's whole life that she came in this way both to Undern and the Mountain--as bare of woman's regalia as a winter leaf is of substance.

Hazel was speaking when he entered. He stood still, astonished and suspicious.

'Who are you talking to?' he asked.

She turned. 'Him above,' she said. 'I was saying the prayer Ed'ard learnt me. I said it three times, it being Midsummer, and ghosses going to-and-agen and the death-pack about. He'll be bound to hearken to Ed'ard's prayer.'

She looked small and pitiful standing in the flickering candlelight. She turned again to the window, and Reddin went downstairs, quite overwhelmed and abashed.

The house seemed eerier than ever, full of subdued complaints and whisperings. The faces of the roses round the window were woe-begone in the lamplight. The rustle of the leaves had an expostulatory sound. The wan poplars down the meadow looked accusing. It was almost as if the freemasonry of the green world was up in arms for Hazel. She had its blood in her veins, and shared with it the silent worship of freedom and beauty, and had now been plunged so deeply into human life that she was lost to it. It was as if every incarnation of perfection that she had seen in leaf and flower (and she had seen much, though remaining without expression of it), every moment of deep comradeship with earthy, dewy things, every illumined memory of colours and lights that her vivid mind had gathered and cherished in its rage of love and rapture, had come now, pacing disdainfully through this old haunt of crude humanity; passing up the stairs; standing about the great four-poster where so many Reddins had died and been born; gazing upon this face that had known dreams (however childish) of their eternal magic; grieving as the tree for the leaf that has fallen. They grieved, but they did not forgive. For the spirits of beauty and magic are (as the bondsman of colour knows and the bondsman of poetry) inimical to the ordinary life and destiny of man. They break up homes. They lead a thousand wanderers into the unknown. They brook no half service.

It is only the rarest exception when a man loves a woman and yet excels in his art, and a woman must have an amazing genius if she is still a poet after childbirth.

But though sometimes these proud spirits will tolerate, will even be sworn companions of human love, it is only when it is a passion pure and burning that they know it for a sister spirit. In the sexual meeting of Hazel and Reddin there was nothing