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

he reflected. 'Yes, it'll all come right.'

He was upheld in this by the fact that Hazel's manner next day was much as usual, only rather quiet.


Chapter 33

It was the night of the great storm. Undern rattled and groaned; its fireless chimneys roared, and doors in unused passages banged so often that the house took on an air of being inhabited. It seemed as if all the people that had ever lived here had come back, ignoring in their mournful dignity of eternal death these momentary wraiths of life. Hazel had always been afraid of the place, and had sat up until Reddin wanted to go to bed, so that she need not traverse the long passages alone. But to-night she was afraid of Reddin also--not just a little afraid, as she had always been, but full of unreasoning terror.

All things were confused in her mind, like the sounds that were in the wind; Reddin's face, distorted with rage, as he advanced on Sally with his arm raised; the howling of the baby; the sound of her bees burning--going off like apple-pips. A scene came back to her from the week before--it seemed years ago. They had gone into the harvest-field after a hot, yellow day haunted by the sound of cutting. Only a small square of orange wheat was left; the rest of the field lay in the pale disorder of destruction. The two great horses stood at one corner, darkly shining in the level light. The men who had been tying sheaves stood about, some women and children were coming over the stubble, and several dogs lay in the shadow. They all seemed to be waiting. They were, in fact, waiting for Reddin, who was always present at the dramatic finish of a field. Hazel knew what drama was to be enacted; knew what the knobbled sticks were for; knew who crouched in the tall, kindly wheat, palpitant, unaware that escape was impossible.

'Plenty o' conies, sir!' called one of the men, whose face was a good deal more brutal than that of his mongrel dog.

Hazel knew that the small square must be packed with rabbits, stark-eyed and still as death, who had, with a fated foolishness, drawn in from the outer portions of the field all day as the reaper went round.

'Jack,' she said, 'I hanna asked for a present ever.'

'No. You didn't want the bracelets, you silly girl.'

'I want one now.'

'You do, do you?'

'Ah! If you'll give it me, Jack, I'll do aught you want. What'd you like best in the 'orld?'

He considered. He was feeling very fit and almost too much alive. 'Hunter's Spinney over again--up to when we got so gloomy.'

Hazel never wanted to think of that night, nor see the Spinney again. There had been many times since, in the grey-tinted room, that had been nearly as bad. But for evoking a shuddering, startled horror in her mind, nothing came up to that Sunday night.

The reaper was moving again. Soon the rabbits would begin to bolt.

'I'll do ought and go anywhere if you'll do this as I want, Jack.'

'Well?'

'Call 'em off! Leave the last bit till morning. Let 'em creep away in the dark and keep living a bit longer!'

'What nonsense!'

'Call 'em off, Jack! You can. You'm maister!'

'No.'

She sobbed. 'I be going, then.'

'No. You're to stay. You'll have to be cured of this damned silliness, and learn to be sensible.'

While she struggled to wrench herself free, two rabbits bolted, and hell broke loose. One would not have thought that the great calm evening under its stooping sky, the peaceful, omniscient trees, the grave, contented colours, could have tolerated such hideousness. The women and children shrieked with the best, and Hazel stood alone--the single representative, in a callous world, of God. Or was the world His representative, and she something alien, a dissentient voice to be silenced?

Such scenes, infinitely multiplied, bring that question to one's mind.

A rabbit had dashed across the field close to them, and Reddin, relaxing his grip of her, had slashed at it with his stick. The look of its eye, white and staring, as it fled past her with insensate speed, came back to her now, and its convulsive roll over and recovery under the blow; and then the next blow--She had fled from the place.

She thought again of what Sally had said, and a deep, smouldering rage was in her at this that he had done to her--this torture to which, according to Sally, he had quite consciously condemned her.

Now that she knew him better, his daily acts of callousness tormented her. She would go. She was not wanted here. Sally had said so. There had been letters from her aunt, from Reddin's vicar, from the eldest Miss Clomber. In them all she was spoken of as the culprit for being at Undern. Well, she did not want to be at Undern. She would go.

'Well, Hazel, child, what's the matter?' asked Reddin, looking up from doing his quarterly accounts. 'Haven't you got a stocking to mend or a hair-ribbon to make?'

'A many and a many things be the matter.'

'Come here, and I'll see if I can put 'em right.'

'Harkee!' she said suddenly. 'It's like as if the jeath-pack was i' full cry down the wind.'

'Anyone would think you were off your head, Hazel. But come and tell me about the things that are the matter.'

'It's you as makes 'em the matter.'

'Oh, well, sulk as long as you like.'

He returned angrily to his accounts. In the kitchen Vessons, very spondaic, was singing 'The Three Jolly Huntsmen.'

In a few minutes Hazel rose and lit a candle. She looked, as she walked to the door in her limp muslin dress, like the spectre of some unhappy creature of the past.

'Where are you going?' asked Reddin.

'I thought to go to bed.'

'I'm not ready.'

'I'll go by my lonesome.'

'All right, sulk! It doesn't hurt me.'

But it did hurt him. He wanted her to be fond of him, to cling to him. When at last he went up through the screaming house, he thought she was asleep. She lay still in the big bed and made no sign.

Reddin was soon snoring, for accounts implied a strenuous intellectual effort. He would have left them to Vessons, but Vessons always had to notch sticks when he did them, and the manual labour ensuing on any accounts running into pounds would have seriously interfered with his other work. The cheese fair accounts usually took a long time. He could be heard saying in a stupendous voice, 'One and one and one--' until the chant ended in, 'Drat it! what _do_ 'em maken?'

So Reddin did the accounts and slept the sleep of the intellectual worker afterwards.

Hazel looked out from the tent of the bed canopy into the dark, creaking room and the darker, roaring night. She grew more afraid of Reddin and Undern as the hours dragged on.

Reddin's presence tore to pieces the things she loved--delicate leafy things--as if they were tissue-paper and he had walked through it. Her pleasures seemed to mean nothing when he was with her and before his loud laughter her wonderful faery-haunted days shrivelled. All she knew was that, now she lived at Undern, she never went out in the green dawn or came home wreathed in pansy and wild snapdragon.

Reddin had imposed a deeper change on her than the change from maid to wife. He had robbed her of a thing frailer and rarer than maidenhood--the sacramental love of Nature. It is only the fairest, the highest and fullest matings that do not rob the soul of this, even when it is an old tried joy. He had wronged her as deeply as one human being can wrong another. His theft was cruel as that of one who destroys a man's God. And the strange part of it was that never, as long as he lived, would he know that he had done so, or even guess that there had been any treasure to rifle. He would probably, as an old man, long past desire, repent of the physical part of the affair. Yet this was so much the lesser of the two. Indeed, if he had been able to win her love, it would have been, not wrong-doing, but righteousness. That a woman should, in the evolution of life, cease to be a virgin and become a mother is a thing so natural and so purely physical as hardly to need comment; but that the immortal part of her should be robbed, that she should cease to be part of an entity in a world where personality is the only rare and precious thing--this is tragic.

Reddin could not help his over-virility, nor could he help having the insensitive nature that could enjoy the physical side of sex without the spiritual; probably he could not help being the kind of man that supplies the most rabid imperialists, reactionaries, materialists. (He always spoke of the heathen Chinee, lower orders, beastly foreigners, mad fanatics, and silly sentimentalists, these last being those who showed any kind of mercy.) It seemed that he could not help seeing nothing outside his own narrow views.

But it did seem a pity that he never tried to alter in the least. It did seem a pity that, after so many centuries, so many matings and births, all his emblazoned and crested ancestors should have produced merely--Reddin, a person exactly like themselves.

* * * * *

Rain rustled on the window and the wind roared in the elms. The trees round Undern Pool stooped and swung in the attitude of mowers. Hazel knew that the Mountain would be even wilder to-night. Yet the Mountain shone in paradisic colours--her little garden; her knitting; the quiet Sundays; the nightly prayers; above all, Edward's presence, in the aura of which no harm could come--for all these things she passionately longed.

They were not home as the wild was, but they were a haven. They were not ecstasy, but they were peace.

In her revulsion from Reddin and her terror of Undern, she forgot everything except the sense of protection that Edward gave her. She forgot Mrs. Marston's silent, crushing criticism and Martha's rude righteousness. She forgot that she had sinned against the Mountain so deeply that the old life could never return.

She remembered it as on the night of her wedding--the primroses, red and white and lilac; the soothing smell of the clean sheets, that made her feel religious; the reassuring tick of the wall clock; Mrs. Marston's sliding tread; Foxy and the rabbit, the blackbird, and the one-eyed cat.

She struck a match softly and crept across the room to the old mahogany tallboy. From beneath a drawerful of clothes she took out Edward's letter. She read it slowly, for she was, as Abel said, no scholar. Edward wanted her, that was quite clear. Comfort flowed from the half-dozen lines.

The ethics of the thing held no place in her mind.

She was not made for the comforts or the duties of social life, and it was not in her-nor would it have been, however she had been educated--to consider what effect her actions