"Now came still evening on." The fading light, warm and faintly glowing
from the last rays of the May sun, lay with a lingering mellowness upon
the fields, upon the light green of leafing trees, upon a white froth of
late blackthorn blossoming in the hedges, upon the straggling township
nestling in the hollow, and upon the tall red-brick chimneys dominating
Wortheton--dominating the souls sheltering beneath the clustering
roofs--dominating and subjugating brain and mind and body by the might
of their crushing omnipotence, by the strength of wealth and industry
and established order--gaunt chimneys, rising out of the green mist of
the trees, grotesque, symbolic landmarks--index fingers witnessing in
obelisk-like ugliness to the power and importance of successful
commercial enterprise, to the dignity of capital and the drab necessity
of labour, to, in short, the disproportionate values in most existing
things.
In the evening light, between the lengthening shadows flung by the
hedges along the dusty road that leads to Wortheton, a girl walked
listlessly, a girl whose youth was marred by a look of world-weary
wisdom, as much at variance with the young face as the tall brick
chimneys with the harmonious beauty of the landscape. But for that
look, and the sullen expression in the brown eyes, the girl would have
been beautiful, as the scene was beautiful, and the soft primrose light
upon the uplands; but the buoyant elasticity, the hope, and the
freshness of youth, these were lacking; there remained only the pitiful
fact that in years the girl was in the springtime of life and in
experience more matured.
As she walked, her sullen gaze shifted furtively from the township below
to the fair open country, growing momentarily dimmer and greyer as the
light in the sky paled. A gap in the hedge revealed a narrow path
between giant elms, and a cool shadowed coppice where the bracken fronds
rose stiff and closely curled, and dark ivy twined thickly about the
tree trunks. The girl turned aside into the coppice and, with the
fugitive instinct of hiding from the light, penetrated its shaded
depths, and paused and leaned her arms against the gnarled trunk of a
sheltering beech tree, and rested her head upon her arms in dry-eyed
tragic sorrow.
In a fork of the leafy branches overhead a bird had its nest, sitting in
brooding satisfaction upon its delicate speckled eggs. The intrusion
startled it from slumber: the round eyes betrayed a suspicious
uneasiness, and the soft warm body nestled closer over the eggs it
protected. Quaint thing of feathers and bright-eyed watchfulness and
maternal instinct, with no sense of anything beyond the supreme
importance of hatching those little speckled eggs--drawing its
unconscious comparison by the pride of elemental right to the
disproportion in values in this as in other matters, happy in its
prospective motherhood, peering timorously through the green tracery
sheltering it, home at the unhappy prospective human mothers with
resentful eyes lifted curiously to observe its brooding content.
So still the girl remained, gazing upward into the deepening shadows
that the little feathered mother lost her fear; the sharp anxiety faded
from the round bright eyes, which never relaxed their unwavering
vigilance even when the shadows, gathering closer, enveloped the still
figure of the girl and wrapped her about with a hazy indistinctness that
made her one with the landscape, a thing of indefinite outline and
colouring, breathing, sentient nature in harmony with inanimate nature,
immovable and silent as the tree against which she leaned.
So night settled silently over Wortheton, and a wanderer stole home in
its kindly shade.