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

of this. Though it brought out the best in Reddin, the best was so very poor. And Hazel was merely passive.

So they stood and wept above her, and they foreswore her company for ever. She might regard the primrose eye to eye, but she would receive no dewy look of comprehension.

No lift of the heart would come with the lifting leaves, no pang of mysterious pain with bird-song, star-set, dewfall. Even her love of Foxy would become a groping thing, and not any longer would she know, when her blind bird made its tentative music, all it meant and all it dreamed. This very night she had forgotten to lean out and listen as of old to the soft voices of the trees. She had said her prayer, and then she had been so tired, and pains had shot through her, and her back had ached, and she had cried herself to sleep.

'What for did I go to the Hunter's Spinney?' she asked herself. But the answer was too deep for her, the traitorous impulse of her whole being too mysterious. She could not answer her question.

Reddin, pacing the room downstairs, drinking whisky, and fuming at his own compunction, at last grew tired of his silent house.

'Damn it! Why shouldn't I go up?' he said.

He opened Hazel's door.

'Look here,' he said; 'the house is mine, and so are you. I'm coming to bed.' He was met by that most intimidating reply to all bluster--silence.

She was asleep; and all night long, while he snored, she tossed in her sleep and moaned.


Chapter 27

Early next morning Vessons was calling the cows in for milking. He leant over the lichen-green gate contemplatively.

All the colours were so bright that they were grotesque and startling. Above the violently green fields the sky shone like blue glass, and across the east were two long vermilion clouds. Behind the black hill the sun had shouldered up, molten, and the shadow of Vessons, standing monkey-like on the lowest bar of the gate, lay on the stretch of wet clover behind him--a purple, elfin creature, gifted with a prehensile dignity. The cows did not appear after his first call. He lifted his head and called again in a high plaintive tone, as one reasons with a fretful child. 'Come o-on, come o-on!' Then he sank into the landscape again. After an interval, a polished red and white cow appeared at a distance of five fields, coming serenely on at her own pace. A white one and a roan followed her at long distances. They advanced through the shadows, each going through the exact middle of the many gateways, always kept open like doors in a suite of rooms at a reception. Vessons waited patiently--more as a slave than a ruler--only uttering his plaintive 'Come o-on!' once, when the last cow dallied overlong with a tuft of lush grass in the hedge. This was the daily ritual. Every morning he appeared, neutral-tinted, from the house, and cried upon an apparently empty landscape; every morning they meandered through the seven gates from the secret leafy purlieus where they spent the night.

Mysterious of eye, leisured, vividly red and white, they followed the old man as queens might follow an usher.

Hazel was coming down the path from the house. With morning, her abundant vitality had returned. The outer world was new and bright, and she wanted, shyly, to be up and dressed before Reddin awoke.

She was full of merriment at the subservience of Vessons to the cows.

'D'you say "mum" to 'em?' she inquired.

Vessons looked her up and down. He was very angry, not only at her criticism, but at the difficulty of retort, since he supposed she was now 'missus.' His friendliness for her had entirely gone, not, as would have seemed natural, since her last night's instalment at Undern, but since her marriage with Edward. He felt that she had 'gone back on him.' He had taken her as a comrade, and now she had gone over to the enemy. He was also injured at having been kept up so late last night.

He chumbled his straw for some time, until the last cow had disappeared. Then he said: 'You'm up early for a married 'ooman, or whatever you be, missus.'

Hazel laughed. She had lived so completely outside the influence of the canons of society that the taunt had no sting.

'Ha! you're jealous!' she said.

Then, with a mercilessly accurate imitation of his voice and face, she added:

'A missus at Undern! Never will I!'

He quailed under her mocking amber eyes, her impish laughter. Then, looking from side to side with suppressed fury, he said: 'Them birds is after the cherries! I'll get a gun. I'll shoot 'em dead!'

'If you shoot a blackbird, the milk'll turn bloody,' said Hazel; but Vessons paid no heed.

All morning, at any spare moment, and after dinner (which he brought in in complete silence, and which was exceedingly unpalatable), he lurked behind trees and crept along hedges, shooting birds. Even Reddin felt awed and could not gather courage to expostulate with him. In and out of the stealthy afternoon shadows, black and solemn, went the shambling old figure with his relentless face and outraged heart. He shot thrushes as they fluted after a meal of wild raspberries; he shot tiny silky willow-wrens, robins, and swallows--their sacredness did not awe him--a pigeon on its nest, blackbirds, a dipper, a goldfinch, and a great many sparrows. The garden and fields were struck into silence because of him; only a flutter of terrified wings showed his whereabouts. He piled his trophies--all the delicate ruffled plumage of summer's prime--on the kitchen table, draggled and bloody.

Hazel and Reddin crept from window to window, silent, watching his movements. Undern grew ghostlier than ever, seeming, as the shots rang out startlingly loud in the quiet, like a moribund creature electrified by blows.

'He'd liefer it was me than the birds!' said Hazel. 'Wheresoever I go, folk kill things. What for do they?'

'Things must be killed.'

'It seems like the earth's all bloody,' said Hazel. 'And it's allus the little small uns. There! He's got a jenny-wren. Oh, dearie me! it's like I've killed 'em; it's all along of me coming to Undern.'

'Hush!' said Reddin sharply. 'What I'm afraid of is that he'll shoot himself, he's so damned queer.'

The last cow had sauntered to the gate before Vessons opened it and milked them that night. Afterwards he went in with the pails, set them on the parlour floor, and said with fury to Hazel: 'Bloody, is it?'

She owned, faintly, that it was not.

'And now,' said Vessons, turning on Reddin, 'it's notice. Notice has been give--one month--by Andrew Vessons to John Reddin, Esquire, of Undern.'

With tragic dignity he turned to go.

He saw neither Hazel nor Reddin, but only the swan, the yew-tree swan, his creation, now doomed to be for ever unfinished. The generations to come would look upon a beakless swan, and would think he had meant it so. Tears came into his eyes--smarting, difficult tears. The room was full of brooding misery. Reddin felt awkward and astounded.

'Why, Vessons?' he said in rather a sheepish tone.

Vessons did not turn. He fumbled with the door-handle. Reddin got up and went across to him.

'Why, Vessons?' he said again, with a hand on his shoulder. 'You and I can't part, you know.'

'We mun.'

'But why, man? What's up with you, Andrew?'

The rare Christian name softened Vessons. He deigned to explain. 'She is,' he said, with a sidelong nod at Hazel. 'She mocked me.'

'Did you, Hazel?'

'Now then, missus!' Vessons glared at her.

'I only said--'

'Her said, "Never will I!"' shouted Vessons. 'Ah, that's what her said--"Never will I!" That's what _I_ say,' he added with the pride of a phrase-maker.

Reddin could make nothing of them, one so red and angry, the other in tears.

'I'll do no 'ooman's will!' said Vessons.

'Look here, Vessons! Be reasonable. Listen to me. I'm your master, aren't I?'

'Ah! Till a month.'

'Well, you take orders from me; that's all that matters. I'm master here.'

The tones of his ancestry were in his voice--an ancestry that ruled over and profited by men and women as good as themselves, or better.

'So we'll say no more about it,' he finished, with the frank and winning smile that was one of his few charms.

Vessons stared at him for some time, and, as he stared, an idea occurred to him. It was, he felt, a good idea. It would enable him to keep his swan and his self-respect and to get rid of Hazel. As he pondered it, his face slowly creased into smiles. He touched his forelock--a thing only done on pay-days--and withdrew, murmuring, 'Notice is took back.'

They saw him go past the window with the steps and the shears, evidently to attend to the swan.

Reddin thought how easy it was to manage these underlings--a little authority, a little tact. He turned to Hazel, crying in the high armchair of black oak with its faded rose-coloured cushions. She was crying not only because Vessons had come off victorious, but because her position was now defined, and was not what she would have liked, but also because Reddin's manner to her jarred after last night.

Last night, in the comfortless darkness of Hunter's Spinney, he had seemed for a little while to be a fellow-fugitive of hers, one of the defenceless, fleeing from the vague, unknown power that she feared. Then she had pitied him--self-forgetfully, fiercely--gathered his head to her breast as she so often gathered Foxy's. But now he seemed to have forgotten--seemed once more to be of the swift and strong ones that rode down small creatures.

She sobbed afresh.

'Look here, Hazel,' said he, in a tone that he intended to be kind but firm--'look here: I'm not angry with you, only you must leave Vessons alone, you know.'

'You want that old fellow more than you want me!'

'Don't be silly! He has his uses; you have yours.'

He spoke with a quite unconscious brutality; he voiced the theory of his class and his political party, which tacitly or openly asserted that woman, servants, and animals were in the world for their benefit.

'I'm not grass to be trod on,' said Hazel, 'and if you canna be civil-spoken, I'll go.'

'You can't,' he replied, 'not now.'

She knew it was true, and the knowledge that her own physical nature had proved traitorous to her freedom enraged her the more.

'You can't go,' he went on, coming towards her chair to caress her. 'Shall I tell you why?'

Hazel sat up and looked at him, her eyes gloomy, her forehead red with crying. He thought she was awaiting for his answer; but Hazel seldom did or said what he expected. She let him kneel by her chair on one knee; then, frowning, asked: 'Who cried in Hunter's Spinney?' He jumped up as if he had knelt on a pin. He had been trying to forget the incident, and hoped that she had. He was bitterly ashamed of that really fine moment of his life.

'Don't Hazel!' he said.

He felt quite frightened when he remembered how he had behaved. A strange doubt of himself, born that night, stirred again. Was he all he had thought? Was the world what he had thought? Misgivings