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

seized him. Perhaps he ought not to have brought Hazel here or to the Spinney. An older code than those of Church and State began to flame before him, condemning him.

Suddenly he wanted reassurance. 'You did want to come, didn't you? I didn't take advantage of you very much, did I?' he asked. 'You want to stay?'

'No, I didna want to come till you made me. You got the better of me. But maybe you couldna help it. Maybe you were druv to it.'

'Who by?' he asked, with an attempt at flippancy.

Hazel's eyes were dark and haunted.

'Summat strong and drodsome, as drives us all,' she said.

She had a vision of all the world racing madly round and round, like the exhausted and terrified horse Reddin had that morning lunged. But what power it was that stood in the centre, breaking without an effort the spirit of the mad, fleeing, tethered creature, she could not tell.

Reddin sat brooding until Hazel, recovering first in her mercurial way, said:

'Now I've come, I mun bide. D'you think the old fellow'd let me cook summat for supper? It's been pig-food for us to-day.'

But when they went to investigate, they found Vessons preparing a tremendous meal, hot and savoury as a victorious and penitent old man could make it. He showed in his manner that bygones were to be bygones, and night came down in peace on Undern. But it was a curious, torrid peace, like the hush before thunder.


Chapter 28

It was the Friday after Hazel's coming, and Reddin was away, much against his will, at a horse fair. He was quite surprised at the hurt it gave him to be away from Hazel. So far he had never been, in the smallest sense, any woman's lover. He had taken what he wanted of them in a kind of animal semi-consciousness that amounted to a stark innocence. Virility, he felt, was not of his seeking. There it was, and it must be satisfied. Now he was annoyed to find that he felt guilty when he remembered these women, and that he wanted Hazel, not, as with them, occasionally, but all the time. He had been accustomed to say at farmers' dinners, after indulging pretty freely:

'Oh, damn it! what d'you want with women between sun-up and sun-down?' His coarseness had been received with laughter and reproof. Now he felt that the reproof was juster than the laughter. It was curious, too, how dull things became when Hazel was not there. Hazel had something fresh to say about everything, and their quarrels were the most invigorating moments he had known. Hazel was primitive enough to be feminine, original enough to be boyish, and mysterious enough to be exciting. As Vessons remarked to the drake, 'Oh, maister! you ne'er saw the like. It's 'Azel, 'Azel, 'Azel the day long, and a good man spoilt as was only part spoilt afore.'

Vessons and Hazel were spending the afternoon quarrelling about the bees. When Reddin was away, Hazel put off her new dignity and was Vessons' equal, because it was so dull to be anything else. Vessons tolerated her presence for the sake of the subacid remarks it enabled him to make, but chiefly because of the sardonic pleasure it gave him to remember how soon his resolve would be put into action.

They were in the walled garden, and the bees were coming and going so fast that they made, when Hazel half closed her eyes, long black threads swaying between the hive doors and the distant fields and the hill-top. They hung in cones on the low front walls, and lumped on the hive-shelves in that apparently purposeless unrest that precedes creation. But whether they intended, any of them, to create a new city that day, none might know. Vessons said not. Hazel, always for adventure, said they would, and said also that she could hear the queen in one hive 'zeep-zeeping'--that strange music which, like the maddeningly soft skirl of bagpipes or the fiddling of Ned Pugh, has power to lure living creatures away from comfort and full hives into the unknown--so darkly sweet.

'I canna hear it,' said Vessons obstinately.

'Go on! You're deaf, Mr. Vessons.'

'Deaf, am I? Maybe I hear as much as I want to, and more. Ah! that I do!'

'Well, then, why canna you hear 'em? Listen at 'em now. D'you know the noise I mean?'

'Do I know the noise?' Vessons' voice grew almost tearful with rage. 'Do I know? Me! As can make a thousand bees go through the neck of a pint bottle each after other, like cows to the milking! Me! Maybe you'd like to learn me beekeeping?' he continued with salty humility. 'Maybe you would! Never will I!'

He began to tear off the tops of the hives.

'Oh, Mr. Vessons, dunna be so cross!' Hazel was afraid there would be another scene like Monday's. 'You take 'em off very neat,' she added, with a pathetic attempt to be tactful--'as neat as my dad.'

'I'd have you know,' said Vessons, 'as I take 'em off neater--ah! a deal neater. Bees and cows and yew-tree swans,' he went on reflectively, 'I can manage better than any married man. For what he puts into matrimony I put into my work. Now I ask you'--he fixed his eyes on her with the expression of a fanatic--'I ask you, was there ever a beekeeper or a general or a sea-captain as was anything to boast of, being married? Never! Marriage kills the mind! Why's bees clever? Why's the skip allus full of honey at summer's end? Because they're all old maids!'

'The queen inna. They all come from her.'

Vessons glared for a moment; then, realizing defeat, turned on his heel and went to feed the calves. He had an ingenious way of getting the calves in. He had no dog; it was one of his dreams to have one. But he managed very well. First he opened the calfskit door; then he loosed the pigs; then he fetched a bucket and went to the field where the calves were, followed by a turbulent, squealing, ferocious crowd of pigs. He walked round the calves, and the calves fled homewards, far more afraid of the pigs than of a dog. This piece of farm economy pleased Vessons, and, peace being restored, they laid tea amicably.

When Reddin came home to a pleasant scent of toast and the sight of Hazel's shining braids of hair, new brushed and piled high on her head, he felt very well pleased with himself. He stretched in the red armchair and flung an arm round her. His hard blue eyes, his hard mouth, smiled; he felt that he could make a success of marriage, though the parson (as he called Edward) could not. Women, he reflected, were quite easy to manage. 'Just show them who's master straight off, and all's well.' Here was Hazel, radiant, soft, submissive, all the rough prickly husk gone since Sunday. Why had he behaved so strangely in the Spinney?

Well, well, he must forget about that.

The hot tea ran very comfortably down his throat; the toast was pleasantly resistant to his strong teeth. He felt satisfied with life. Later on, no doubt, Hazel would have a child. That, too, would be a good thing. Two possessions are better than one, and he could well afford children. It never occurred to him to wonder whether Hazel would like it, or to be sorry for the pain in store for her. He felt very unselfish as he thought, 'When she can't go about, I'll sit with her now and again.' It really was a good deal for him to say. He had never taken the slightest notice of Sally Haggard at such times.

'Got something for you,' he said, pulling at his pocket.

'Oh! It's an urchin!' cried Hazel delightedly.

Reddin began bruising and pulling at its spines with his gloved hands.

'Dunna!' cried Hazel.

Reddin pulled and wrenched until at last the hedgehog screamed--a thin, piercing wail, most ghastly and pitiful and old, ancient as the cry of the death's-head moth, that faint ghostly shriek as of a tortured witch. Centuries of pain were in it, the age-long terror of weakness bound and helpless beneath the knife, and that something vindictive and terrifying that looks up at the hunter from the eyes of trapped animals and sends the cuckoo fleeing in panic before the onset of little birds. Hazel knew the sound well. It was the watchword of the little children of despair, the password of the freemasonry to which she belonged.

Before the cry had ceased to horrify the quiet room, she had flung herself at Reddin, a pattern of womanly obedience no longer, but a desperate creature fighting in that most intoxicating of all crusades, the succouring of weakness.

On Reddin's head, a moment ago so smooth, on his face, a moment ago so bland, rained the blows of Hazel's hard little fists. Her blows were by no means so negligible as most women's, for her hands were muscular and strong from digging and climbing, and in her heart was the root of pity which nerves the most trembling hands to do mighty deeds.

'What the devil!' spluttered Reddin. 'Here, stop it, you little vixen!'

He caught one of her hands, but the other was too quick for him.

'Give over tormenting of it, then!'

The hedgehog rolled on the floor, and the foxhound came and sniffed it. Reddin had her other hand now.

'What d'you mean by it?' he asked, very angry, and tingling about the ears.

'Leave it be! It's done you no harm. Lookee! The hound-dog!' she cried. 'Drive him off!'

'I'm going to have some fun seeing the dog kill it.'

Hazel went quite white.

'You shanna! Not till I'm jead,' she said. 'It's come to me to be took care of, and took care of it shall be.' She reached a foot out and kicked the hound.

Reddin's mood changed. He burst out laughing.

'You're a sight more amusing than hedgehogs,' he said; 'the beast can go free, for all I care.'

He pulled her on to his knee and kissed her.

'Send the hound-dog out, then.'

When the hound had gone, resentfully, the hedgehog--a sphinx-like, protestant ball--enjoyed the peace, and Hazel became again (as Reddin thought) quite the right sort of girl to live with.

During the uproar they had not heard wheels in the drive, so they were startled by Vessons' intrigue insertion of himself into a small opening of the door, his firm shutting of it as if in face of a beleaguering host, and his stentorian whisper:

'Ere's Clombers now!' as if to say, 'When you let a woman in you never know what'll become of it.'

'Tell 'em I'm ill--dead!' said his master. 'Tell 'em I'm in the bath--anything, only send them away!'

They heard Vessons recitative.

'The master's very sorry, mum, but he's got the colic too bad to see you. It's heave, curse, heave, curse, till I pray for a good vomit!'

The Clombers, urgent upon his track, shouldered past and strode in.

'What the devil do they want?' muttered Reddin. He rose sulkily.

'I hear,' said the eldest Miss Clomber, who had read Bordello and was very clever, 'that young Lochinvar has taken to himself a bride.'

This was quite up to her usual standard, for not only had it the true literary flavour, but it was ironic, for she knew who Hazel was.