Alwynne left the garden behind her and crossed the stretch of grass,
half lawn, half paddock, that lay between kitchen-garden and wood. It
was fenced with riotous hedges, demure for the moment in dove-grey
honeysuckle and star of Bethlehem, with no hint in their puritan apparel
of the brionies and eglantines that were to follow. About the hedge
borders the grass grew tall and rank, and, as she watched, the wind
would stir it into a sea of emerald and the parsley-blossoms sway above
it like snatches of drifting foam. Beyond the hedge shadow, "Nicholas
Nye," the one-eyed donkey, reposed Celestially among the buttercups,
which, making common cause with the afternoon sun, had turned his
grazing ground into a Field of the Cloth of Gold.
For a moment she was minded to content herself with all the buttercups
on earth to gather, and to go no further that day; but staring down the
dazzling slope, her eyes rested once more upon the pleasant darkness of
the goal for which she had been bound. Among the nearer tree trunks were
stripes and chequerings of blue--the blue that is lovelier than the sea,
the one blue in the world to the flower-lover. At once, indifferently,
she left the buttercups to Nicholas Nye and hurried on and into the
wood.
There were hyacinths everywhere, hyacinths by the million. It was as if
the winds had torn her robes from the faint, spring sky, and had flung
them to earth, and she now bent above them naked and shivering.
Alwynne wandered from patch to patch in an ecstasy of delight. As usual,
her pleasure shaped itself into exclamations, phrases, whole sentences
of the letters she would write to Clare Hartill of her experiences. If
only she could have Clare with her, she thought, to see and hear and
touch and smell--to share the loveliness she was enjoying. Her thoughts
flew to Italy, to their crowded month of beautiful sights together. She
laughed--she would discard all those memories for love of this present
vision.... If only Clare could see it.... She could never describe it
properly ... adjectives welled up in her mind and dispersed again, like
bubbles in a glass of water. The stalks and the hoarse ring of the
hyacinth bells fascinated her. Clare was forgotten. She began to pick
for the sake of picking.
The hot silence of early afternoon lay upon tree and bird and air.
Alwynne, moving from blue clump to blue clump, grew ashamed of the
rustle of her dress and the scrunch of twigs and soaked leaves beneath
her feet, and trod softly; even her own calm breathing sounded too
loudly for the perfect peace of the place and the hour.
She picked steadily, greedily--she had never before had as many flowers
as she wanted, and there was inexpressible pleasure in filling her arms
till she could hold no more; yet, some twenty minutes later, as she
straightened herself at last, a little giddily, and looked about her
over the pile of azure bells, there was no sign of bareness, for all she
had gathered; she still stood to her knees in a lake of blue and green
and gold.
She stretched herself lazily as she considered the flowers about her and
wondered at their luxuriance. They were thicker and longer-stemmed than
the mass of those she carried: the leaves were juicy and shining like
dark swords: the last dozen of her armful had flecked her hands and
dress with milky syrup. The ground, too, was black and boggy, and sucked
at her feet as she moved. Suddenly she realised that the trees grew
thick and close together--that the patches of sunlight were far
apart--and that she had wandered farther into the wood than she had
intended. She thought that she had picked enough, more than enough for
Elsbeth as well as Clare; that it was time to be getting home. She had
no idea of the hour.... It would not do to risk being late....
She moved forward uncertainly.
She had had a blessed afternoon: she had surrendered herself to the
sounds and sights and smells of the spring, to the warmth of the sun and
the touch of the wind, till every sense was drunken with pleasure. But
her ecstasy had been impersonal and thoughtless: she had enjoyed too
completely to have had knowledge of her enjoyment. With the return to
realisation of place and time, her mood was changing. She was no longer
of the wood, but in it merely; wandering in the dark heart of it, no
dryad returned and welcome, but a stranger, one Alwynne Durand, in thin
shoes and an unsuitable dress, with the wood's flowers, not her own, in
her hands. Stolen flowers--their weight was suddenly a burden to her.
She felt guilty, and had an odd, sudden wish to put them down tenderly
at the foot of a tree, hide them with grasses and run for her life. She
laughed at the idea as she looked for the path--what were flowers for,
but picking? Yet she could not get rid of the feeling that she had been
doing wrong, and that even now she was being watched, and would, in due
time, be caught and punished, her stolen treasures still in her hands.
But wild flowers are free to all--and the wood was Roger Lumsden's wood!
He had told her that he rented it.
She moved backwards and forwards, turning hurriedly hither and thither,
trampling the hyacinths and stumbling on the uneven ground, unreasonably
flurried that she could not find any path. She could not even track her
own footsteps.
It was very strange, she thought, when she had penetrated so easily the
depths of the wood, that the return should be so difficult. She had
thought it a mere copse. She put her free hand to her eyes, scanning the
wall of greenery in all directions. She fancied that at one point the
trees grew less densely, and set out, scrambling over rough ground
towards the faint light.
But in spite of her hurry she advanced slowly. The thin switches of the
undergrowth whipped her as she pushed them aside, and the huge briars
twisted themselves about her like live things. Twice the slippery moss
brought her to her knees, and the faint light grew no stronger as she
pressed forward. She began to feel frightened, though she knew the
sensation to be absurd. It was impossible to be lost in a little wood,
half a mile across.... It was merely a question of walking straight on
till one emerged on open fields....
She told herself so, and tried to be amused at her adventure, and hummed
a confident little tune as she plodded on, very careful not to look
behind her. Her shoes, thudding and squelching in the wet mess of mould
and green stuff, made more noise than one would have thought possible
for one pair of feet, and woke the oddest echoes.
Of course, it was impossible that any one could be following her.... But
the wood was so horribly silent that her own breathing and clumsy
footfalls (there could be nothing else) counterfeited the noises of
pursuit.... She could have sworn there was a presence at her elbow, in
her rear, moving as she moved, stumbling as she stumbled. Twice she
faced round abruptly, standing still--but she saw nothing but the wall
of vegetation, motionless, silent, yet insistently alive. She felt that
every tree, every leaf, every blade of grass, was watching her with
green, unwinking eyes. There was nothing more in the wood than there had
been a pleasant hour ago--less indeed, for she realised suddenly that
the sun had gone in and that it was cold; yet she owned to herself at
last that she was nervous, vaguely uneasy. Instantly, by that mere act
of recognition, fright was born in her--unreasonable and unreasoning
fright, that, in the length of a thought, pervaded her entire
personality, crisping her hair, catching at her throat, paralysing her
mind. The wood-panic had her in its grip--the age-old terror that still
lies in wait where trees are gathered together, though the god that
begot it be dead these nineteen hundred years.
She began to run.
It was impossible to pass quickly through the tangled undergrowth; but
sheer fright gave her skill to avoid real obstacles, strength to crash
over and through the mere wreckage of the wood. She turned and doubled
like a hare, yet desperately, with the hare's terror of the sudden turn
that might confront her with the presence at her heels. She could endure
its pursuit, but she knew that its revelation would be more than she
could bear. She was so far merely and indefinitely frightened, but to
face the unknown would be to confront fear itself. And she was more
frightened of fear than of any evil she knew. She could, she thought,
meet pain or sickness, or any mere misery, with sufficient calmness, but
the fear of fear was an obsession. She tore through the wood, shaken and
gasping with terror of the greater terror she every moment expected to
be forced to undergo; for almost the only clear thought remaining to
her, in that onrush of panic, was the realisation that there was, at her
elbow, in her heart, physical or metaphysical, she knew not which, some
as yet veiled fact waiting to be revealed, in view of which her present
agitation was trivial and meaningless.
She ran on, blind and blundering; yet her feet were so clogged by the
weight of earth and wet, her thoughts by the sweat of the fear that was
on them, that neither seemed to move for all her willing. And all the
while, another part of her consciousness sat aloof, critical and
detached, laughing at her for an excitable fool, analysing, in Clare's
crispest accents, the illusions which were bewildering her, and
wondering coolly that any girl of her age could so let her imagination
run away with her.
She pulled herself together with an immense effort of will.
That was the truth.... It was her own imagination that was literally
and physically running away with her, whipping her tired body into
unnecessary exertion, flogging her into mad flight from this pleasant,
harmless place, with its hideous and horrible suggestion of evil at
hand.... But the evil was in her own mind.... There was nothing pursuing
her, no vague ghost at her elbow.... The horror was in herself, to be
faced, and fought, and trampled.... Running would not help her ... she
would only carry her terror with her.... For an instant she had a
lightning glimpse of the reasons of the Sadducean attitude to
personality, and its desperate denials of future existence. She was
suddenly appalled at the hideous possibility of existing eternally with
her own undying thoughts for company. She wondered if there were really
such a thing as soul suicide, and thought that, if so, many must have
chosen to commit it.
Here her shifting, crowding thoughts blotted out the glimmer of
understanding, as flies clustering on a window-pane can blot out light;
yet the word _suicide_ remained in her mind, disturbing, vaguely
suggestive. It was connected with something terrible--she could not
remember what--that in its turn was one with the vague horror at her
elbow, that walked with the echo of her footsteps and panted with the
echoes of her breaths, and yet was not real at all, but only in her
mind.
She did not believe she should ever find her way out of the wood.... The
hyacinths in her arms were so heavy--a queerly familiar weight: and the
sun had gone in, which had, somehow, something to do with the
trouble.... She felt the black depression of the winter months that she
had left Utterbridge to escape settling down on her once more. She
turned hopelessly to elude it, but it surrounded her like a fog, as
indeed she half believed it to be. She supposed they had sudden fogs in
the country, when the sun went in.... And the sun had gone in because
she had picked all the hyacinths.... She remembered the story clearly
enough now.... The sun had played at quoits with a child, and had
thrown amiss, and killed it, and the purple blood had trickled down from
the child's forehead.... So the sun had turned it into purple
hyacinths.... But she, Alwynne, had been gathering all the hyacinths,
and they were a heavy bunch, heavy as a dead child's body ... and in
another minute they would be disenchanted, and she would be carrying a
dead child's body in her arms....
She stood still, gazing down at the flowers, white and glassy-eyed with
terror, wondering that she was still alive and not yet mad. For she knew
that the fear she had feared was upon her at last. She dared not blink
lest in that second the change should take place, and she should find
Louise, long buried, in her arms. Because, of course, it was Louise who
had been following her all the while.... Louise--who had committed
suicide.... She was following Alwynne, because it was Alwynne's
fault.... Clare had said so.... Well--at least she could tell Louise
that she had meant no harm....
She waited, swayed back against a tree trunk, the flowers a dead weight
over her arm. She held them gently, lest a rough movement should wake
the horror they hid. With what was left of sanity she prayed.
The trees encircled her, watching. From far away there came once more a
sound of footsteps.