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

wind. On a January night the house seemed to lie outside time and space; slow, ominous movement began beyond the blind windows, and the inflexible softness of snow, blurred on the vast background of night, buried summer ever deeper with invincible, caressing threats.

The front door was half glass, so that a wandering candle within could be seen from outside, and it looked inexpressibly forlorn, like a glow-worm seeking escape from a chloroform-box or mankind looking for the way to heaven. Only four windows were ever lit, and of these two at a time. They were Jack Reddin's parlour, Andrew Vessons' kitchen, and their respective bedrooms.

Reddin of Undern cared as little for the graciousness of life as he did for its pitiful rhapsodies, its purple-mantled tragedies. He had no time for such trivialities. Fox-hunting, horse-breeding, and kennel lore were his vocation. He rode straight, lived hard, exercised such creative faculties as he had on his work, and found it very good. Three times a year he stated in the Undern pew at Wolfbatch that he intended to continue leading a godly, righteous, and sober life. At these times, with amber lights from the windows playing over his well-shaped head, his rather heavy face looked, as the Miss Clombers from Wolfbatch Hall said, 'so chivalrous, so uplifted.' The Miss Clombers purred when they talked, like cats with a mouse. The younger still hunted, painfully compressing an overfed body into a riding-habit of some forgotten cut, and riding with so grim a mouth and such a bloodthirsty expression that she might have had a blood-feud with all foxes. Perhaps, when she rode down the anxious red-brown streak, she thought she was riding down a cruel fate that had somehow left her life vacant of joy; perhaps, when the little creature was torn piece-meal, she imagined herself tearing so the frail unconquerable powers of love and beauty. Anyway, she never missed a meet, and she and her sister never ceased their long silent battle for Reddin, who remained as unconscious of them as if they were his aunts. He was, of course, beneath them, very much beneath them--hardly more than a farmer, but still--a man.

Reddin went on his dubious and discreditable way, and the woman Sally Haggard, of the cottage in the hollow, gained by virtue of a certain harsh beauty what the ladies Clomber would have given all their wealth for.

The other inhabitant of Undern, Andrew, revolved in his own orbit, and was entirely unknown to his master. He cut the yews--the peacocks and the clipped round trees and the ones like tables--twice a year. He was creating a swan. He had spent twenty years on it, and hoped to complete it in a few more, when the twigs that were to be the beak had grown sufficiently. It never occurred to him that the place was not his, that he might have to leave it. He had his spring work and his autumn work; in the winter he ordained various small indoor jobs for himself; and in the summer, in common with the rest of the place, he grew somnolent. He sat by the hacked and stained kitchen-table (which he seldom scrubbed, and on which he tried his knife, sawed bones, and chopped meat) and slept the afternoons away in the ceaseless drone of flies.

When Reddin called him he rarely answered, and only deigned to go to him when he felt sure that his order was going to be reasonable.

Everything he said was non-committal, every movement was expostulatory. Reddin never noticed. Vessons suited his needs, and he always had such meals as he liked. Vessons was a bachelor. Monasticism had found, in a countryside teeming with sex, one silent but rabid disciple. If Vessons ever felt the irony of his own presence in a breeding stable, he never said so. He went about his work with tight disapproving lips, as if he thought that Nature owed him a debt of gratitude for his tolerance of her ways. Ruminative and critical, he went to and fro in the darkly lovely domain, with pig buckets or ash buckets or barrows full of manure. The lines of his face were always etched in dirt, and he always had a bit of rag tied round some cut or blister. He was a lonely soul, as he once said himself when unusually mellow at the Hunter's Arms; he was 'wi'out mother, wi'out father, wi'out descent.' He preferred it to the ties of family. He liked living with Reddin because they never spoke except of necessity, and because he was quite indifferent to Reddin's welfare and Reddin to his.

But to Undern itself he was not indifferent. Ties deep as the tangled roots of the bindweed, strong as the great hawsers of the beeches that reached below the mud of Undern Pool, held him to it, the bondslave of a beauty he could not understand, a terror he could not express. When he trudged the muddy paths, 'setting taters' or earthing up; when he scythed the lawn, looking, with a rose in his hat, weirder and more ridiculous than ever; and when he shook the apples down with a kind of sour humour, as if to say, 'There! that's what you trees get by having apples!'--at all these times he seemed less an individual than a blind force. For though his personality was strong, that of the place was stronger. Half out of the soil, minded like the dormouse and the beetle, he was, by virtue of his unspoken passion, the protoplasm of a poet.


Chapter 4

Vessons took up the pose of one seeing a new patient.

'This young lady's lost her way,' Reddin remarked.

'She 'as, God's truth! But you'll find it forra I make no doubt, sir. "There's a way"' (he looked ironically at the poultry-basket behind the trap, from which peered anxious, beaky faces)--'"a way as no fowl knoweth, the way of a man with a maid."'

'Fetch the brood mares in from the lower pasture. They should have been in this hour.'

'And late love's worse than lad's love, so they do say,' concluded Vessons.

'There's nothing of love between us,' Reddin snapped.

'I dunna wonder at it!' Andrew cast an appraising look at his master's flushed face and at Hazel's tousled hair, and withdrew.

Hazel went into the elaborately carved porch. She looked round the brown hall where deep shadows lurked. Oak chests and carved chairs, all more or less dusty, stood about, looking as if disorderly feasters had just left them. In one corner was an inlaid sideboard piano.

Hazel did not notice the grey dust and the hearth full of matches and cigarette ends. She only saw what seemed to her fabulous splendour. A foxhound rose from the moth-eaten leopard-skin by the hearth as they came in. Hazel stiffened.

'I canna-d-abear the hound-dogs,' she said. 'Nasty snabbing things.'

'Best dogs going.'

'No, they kills the poor foxes.'

'Vermin.'

Hazel's face became tense. She clenched her hands and advanced a determined chin.

'Keep yer tongue off our Foxy, or I unna stay!' she said.

'Who's Foxy?'

'My little small cub as I took and reared.'

'Oh! you reared it, did you?'

'Ah. She didna like having no mam. I'm her mam now.'

Reddin had been looking at her as thoughtfully as his rather maudlin state allowed.

He had decided that she should stay at Undern and be his mistress.

'You'll be wanting something better than foxes to be mothering one of these days,' he remarked to the fire, with a half embarrassed, half jocose air, and a hand on the poker.

'Eh?' said Hazel, who was wondering how long it would take her to learn to play the music in the corner.

Reddin was annoyed. When one made these arch speeches at such cost of imagination, they should be received properly.

He got up and went across to Hazel, who had played three consecutive notes, and was gleeful. He put his hand on hers heavily, and a discord was wrung from the soft-toned notes that had perhaps known other such discords long ago.

'Laws! what a din!' said Hazel. 'What for d'you do that, Mr. Reddin?'

Reddin found it harder than ever to repeat his remark, and dropped it.

'What's that brown on your dress?' he asked instead.

'That? Oh, that's from a rabbit as I loosed out'n a trap. It bled awful.'

'Little sneak, to let it out.'

'Sneak's trick to catchen un, so tiny and all,' replied Hazel composedly.

'Well, you'd better change your dress; it's very wet, and there's plenty here,' said he, going to a chest and pulling out an armful of old-fashioned gowns. 'If you lived at Undern you could wear them every day.'

'If ifs were beans and bacon, there's few'd go clemmed,' said Hazel. 'That green un's proper, like when the leaves come new, and little small roses and all.'

Put it on while I see what Vessons is doing.'

'He's grumbling in the kitchen, seemingly,' said Hazel.

Vessons always grumbled. His mood could be judged only by the _piano_ or _forte_ effects.

Hazel heard him reply to Reddin.

'No. Supper binna ready; I've only just put 'im on.'

He always spoke of all phases of his day's work in the masculine gender.

Hazel stopped buttoning her dress to hear what Reddin was saying.

'Have you some hot water for the lady?' ('The lady! That's me!' she thought.)

'No, sir, I anna. Nor yet I anna got no myrrh, aloes, nor cassher. There's nought in my kitchen but a wold useless cat and an o'erdruv man of six-and-sixty, a pot of victuals not yet simmering, and a gentleman as ought to know better than to bring a girl to Undern and ruin her--a poor innocent little creature.'

'Me again,' said Hazel. She pondered on the remark and flushed. 'Maybe I'd best go,' she thought. Yet only vague instinct stirred her to this, and all her soul was set on staying. 'Never shall it be said'--Andrew's voice rose like a preacher's--'never shall it be said as a young female found no friend in Andrew Vessons; never shall it be said'--his voice soared over various annoyed exclamations of Reddin's--'as a female went from this 'all different from what she came.'

'Shut up, Vessons!'

But Vessons was, as he would have phrased it himself, 'in full honey-flow,' and not to be silenced.

'Single she be, and single she'd ought to stay. This 'ere rubbitch of kissing and clipping!'

'But, Vessons, if there were no children gotten, the world'd be empty.'

'Let 'un be. 'Im above'll get a bit of rest, nights, from their sins.'

'Eh, I like that old chap,' thought Hazel.

The wrangle continued. It was the deathless quarrel of the world and the monastery--natural man and the hermit. Finally Vessons concluded on a top note.

'Well, if you take this girl's good name off'n her--'

Suddenly something happened in Hazel's brain. It was the realization of life in relation to self. It marks the end of childhood. She no more saw herself throned above life and fate, as a child does. She saw that she was a part of it all; she was mutable and mortal.

She had seen life go on, had heard of funerals, courtings, confinements and weddings in their conventional order--or reversed--and she had remained, as it were, intact. She had starved and slaved and woven superstitions, loved Foxy, and tolerated her father.

Girl friends had hinted of a wild revelry that went on somewhere-- everywhere--calling like a hidden merry-go-round