The chapel and minister's house at God's Little Mountain were all in
one--a long, low building of grey stone surrounded by the graveyard,
where stones, flat, erect, and askew, took the place of a flower-garden.
Away to the left, just over a rise, the hill was gashed by the grey
steeps of the quarries. In front rose another curve covered with thick
woods. To the right was the batch, down which a road--in winter a
water-course--led into the valley. Behind the house God's Little
Mountain sloped softly up and away apparently to its possessor.
Not the least of the mysteries of the place, and it was tense with
mystery, was the Sunday congregation, which appeared to spring up
miraculously from the rocks, woods and graves.
When the present minister, Edward Marston, came there with his mother
he detested it; but after a time it insinuated itself into his heart,
and gave a stronger character to his religion. He had always been
naturally religious, taking on trust what he was taught; and he had an
instinctive pleasure in clean and healthy things. But on winter nights
at the mountain, when the tingling stars sprang in and out of their
black ambush and frost cracked the tombstones; in summer, when
lightning crackled in the woods and ripped along the hillside like a
thousand devils, the need of a God grew ever more urgent. He spoke of
this to his mother.
'No, dear, I can't say I have more need of our Lord here than in
Crigton,' she said. 'In Crigton there was the bus to be afraid of, and
bicycles. Here I just cover my ears for wind, put on an extra flannel
petticoat for frost, and sit in the coal-house for thunder. Not that
I'm forgetting God. God with us, of course, coal-house or elsewhere.'
'But don't you feel something ominous about the place, mother? I feel
as if something awful would happen here, don't you?'
'No, dear. Nor will you when you've had some magnesia. Martha!' (Martha
was the general who came in by the day from the first cottage in the
batch)--'Martha, put on an extra chop for the master. You aren't in
love, are you, my dear?'
'Gracious, no! Who should I be in love with, mother?'
'Quite right, dear. There is no one about here with more looks than a
brussels sprout. Not that I say anything against sprouts. Martha, just
go and see if there are any sprouts left. We'll have them for dinner.'
Edward looked at the woods across the batch, and wondered why the young
fresh green of the larches and the elm samaras was so sad, and why the
cry of a sheep from an upper slope was so forlorn.
'I hope, Edward,' said Mrs. Marston, 'that it won't be serious music. I
think serious music interferes with the digestion. Your poor father and
I went to the "Creation" on our honeymoon, and thought little of it;
then we went to the "Crucifixion," and though it was very pleasant, I
couldn't digest the oysters afterwards. And then, again, these clever
musicians allow themselves to become so passionate, one almost thinks
they are inebriated. Not flutes and cornets, they have to think of
their breath, but fiddlers can wreak their feelings on the instrument
without suffering for it.'
Edward laughed.
'I hope the gentleman that's coming to-day is a nice quiet one,' she
went on, as if Abel were a pony. 'And I hope the lady singer is not a
contralto. Contralto, to my mind,' she went on placidly, stirring her
porter in preparation for a draught, 'is only another name for roaring,
which is unseemly.' She drank her porter gratefully, keeping the spoon
in place with one finger.
If she could have seen father and daughter as they set forth,
hilarious, to superimpose tumult on the peace of God's Little Mountain,
she would have been a good deal less placid.
It was restful to sit and look at her kind old face, soft and round
beneath her lace cap, steeped in a peace deeper than lethargy. She was
one of nature's opiates, and she administered herself unconsciously to
everyone who saw much of her. Edward's father, having had an overdose,
had not survived. Mrs. Marston always spoke of him as 'my poor husband
who fell asleep,' as if he had dozed in a sermon. Sleep was her fetish,
panacea and art. Her strongest condemnation was to call a person 'a
stirring body.' She sat to-day, while preparations raged in the
kitchen, placidly knitting. She always knitted--socks for Edward and
shawls for herself. She had made so many shawls, and she so felt the
cold, that she wore them in layers--pink, grey, white, heather mixture,
and a purple cross-over.
When Martha and the friend who had come to help quarrelled shrilly, she
murmured, 'Poor things! putting themselves in such a pother!' When,
after a crash, Martha was heard to say, 'There's the cream-jug now!
Well, break one, break three!' she only shook her head, and murmured
that servants were not what they used to be. When Martha's friend's
little boy dropped the urn--presented to the late Mr. Marston by a
grateful congregation, and as large as a watering-can--and Martha's
friend shouted, 'I'll warm your buttons!' and proceeded to do so, Mrs.
Marston remained self-poised as a sun.
At last supper was set out, the cloths going in terraces according to
the various heights of the tables; the tea-sets--willow and Coalport,
the feather pattern, and the seaweed--looking like a china-shop; the
urn, now rakishly dinted, presiding. People paid for their supper on
these occasions, and expected to have as much as they could eat. Mrs.
Marston had rashly told Martha that she could have what was left as a
perquisite, which resulted later in stormy happenings.
* * * * *
From the nook on the hillside where the chapel stood, as Abel ran
hastily down the slope--the harp jogging on his shoulders and looking
like some weird demon that clung round his neck and possessed him--came
a roar of sound. The brass band from Black Mountain was in possession
of the platform. The golden windows shone comfortably in the cold
spring evening, and Hazel ran towards them as she would have run
towards the wide-flung onyx doors of faery.
They arrived breathless and panting in the graveyard, where the
tombstones seemed to elbow each other outside the shining windows,
looking into this cave of saffron light and rosy joy as sardonically as
if they knew that those within its shelter would soon be without,
shelterless in the storm of death; that those who came in so gaily by
twos and threes would go out one by one without a word. Hazel peered
in.
'Fine raps they're having!' she whispered. 'All the band's there,
purple with pleasure, and sweating with the music like chaps haying.'
Abel looked in.
'Eh, dear,' he said, 'they're settled there for the neet. We'll ne'er
get a squeak in. There's nought for Black Mountain Band'll stop at
when they're elbow to elbow; they eggs each other on cruel, so they
do! Your ears may be dinned and deafened for life, and you lost to the
bee-keeping (for hear you must, or you'm done, with bees), but the band
dunna care! There! Now they've got a hencore--that's to say, do it
agen; and every time they get one of them it goes to their yeads, and
they play louder.'
'Ah, but you play better,' said Hazel comfortingly; for Abel's voice
had trembled, and Hazel must comfort grief wherever she found it, for
grief implied weakness.
'I know I do,' he assented; 'but what can I do agen ten strong men?'
At the mountain, as in the world of art and letters, it seemed that the
artist must elbow and push, and that if he did not often stop his
honeyed utterances to shout his wares he would not be heard at all.
'Dunna they look funny!' said Hazel with a giggle. 'All sleepy and
quiet, like smoked bees. Is that the Minister? Him by the old sleepy
lady--she's had more smoke than most!'
'Where?'
'There. He's got a black coat on and a kind face, sad-like.'
'Maybe if you took an axed him, he'd marry you--when the moon falls
down the chapel chimney and rabbits chase the bobtailed sheep-dog!'
'I'm not for marrying anybody. Let's go in,' said Hazel.
She took off her hat and coat, to enter more splendidly. On her head,
resting softly among the coils of ruddy hair, she put a wreath of
violets, which grew everywhere at the Callow; a big bunch of them was
at her throat like a cameo brooch.
When she entered the band faltered, and the cornet, a fiery young man
whom none could tire, wavered into silence. Edward, turning to find out
what had caused this most desirable event, saw her coming up the room
with the radiant fatefulness of a fairy in a dream. His heart went out
to her, not only for her morning air, her vivid eyes, her coronet of
youth's rare violets, but for the wistfulness that was not only in her
face, but in her poise and in every movement. He felt as he would to a
small bright bird that had come, greatly daring, in at his window on a
stormy night. She had entered the empty room of his heart, and from
this night onwards his only thought was how to keep her there.
When she went up to sing, his eyes dwelt on her. She was the most vital
thing he had ever seen. The tendrils of burnished hair about her
forehead and ears curled and shone with life; her eyes danced with
life; her body was taut as a slim arrow ready to fly from life's bow.
Abel sat down in the middle of the platform and began to play, quite
regardless of Hazel, who had to start when she could.
'Harps in heaven played for you;
Played for Christ with his eyes so blue;
Played for Peter and for Paul,
But never played for me at all!
Harps in heaven, made all of glass,
Greener than the rainy grass.
Ne'er a one but is bespoken,
And mine is broken--mine is broken!
Harps in heaven play high, play low;
In the cold, rainy wind I go
To find my harp, as green as spring--
My splintered harp without a string!'
She sang with passion. The wail of the lost was in her voice. She had
not the slightest idea what the words meant (probably they meant
nothing), but the sad cadence suited her emotional tone, and the ideas
of loss and exile expressed her vague mistrust of the world. Edward
imagined her in her blue-green dress and violet crown playing on a
large glass harp in a company of angels.
'Poor child!' he thought. 'Is it mystical longing or a sense of sin
that cries out in her voice?'
It was neither of those things; it was nothing that Edward could have
understood at that time, though later he did. It was the grief of rainy
forests, and the moan of stormy water; the muffled complaint of driven
leaves; the keening--wild and universal--of life for the perishing
matter that it inhabits.
Hazel expressed things that she knew nothing of, as a blackbird does.
For, though she was young and fresh, she had her origin in the old,
dark heart of earth, full of innumerable agonies, and in that heart she
dwelt, and ever would, singing from its gloom as a bird sings in a
yew-tree. Her being was more full of echoes than the hearts of those that
live further from the soil; and we are all as full of echoes as a rocky
wood--echoes of the past, reflex echoes of the future, and echoes of
the soil (these last reverberating through our filmiest dreams, like
the sound of thunder in a blossoming orchard). The echoes are in us of
great voices long gone hence, the unknown cries of huge beasts on the
mountains; the sullen aims of creatures in the slime; the love-call of
the bittern. We know, too, echoes of things outside our ken--the
thought that shapes itself in the bee's brain and becomes a waxen box
of sweets; the tyranny of youth stirring in the womb; the crazy terror
of small slaughtered beasts; the upward push of folded grass, and how
the leaf feels in all its veins the cold rain; the ceremonial that
passes yearly in the emerald temples of bud and calyx--we have walked
those temples; we are the sacrifice on those altars. And the future
floats on the current of our blood like a secret argosy. We hear the
ideals of our descendants, like songs in the night, long before our
firstborn is begotten. We, in whom the pollen and the dust, sprouting
grain and falling berry, the dark past and the dark future, cry and
call--we ask, Who is this Singer that sends his voice through the dark
forest, and inhabits us with ageless and immortal music, and sets the
long echoes rolling for evermore?
The audience, however, did not notice that there were echoes in Hazel,
and would have gaped if you had proclaimed God in her voice. They
looked at her with critical eyes that were perfectly blind to her real
self. Mrs. Marston thought what a pity it was that she looked so wild;
Martha thought it a pity that she did not wear a chenille net over her
hair to keep it neat; and Abel, peering up at her through the strings
of the harp and looking--with his face framed in wild red hair--like a
peculiarly intelligent animal in a cage, did not think of her at all.
But Edward made up for them, because he thought of her all the time.
Before the end of the concert he had got as far as to be sure she was
the only girl he would ever want to marry. His ministerial self put in
a faint proviso, 'If she is a good girl'; but it was instantly shouted
down by his other self, who asserted that as she was so beautiful she
must be good.
During the last items on the programme--two vociferous glees rendered
by a stage-full of people packed so tightly that it was marvellous how
they expanded their diaphragms--Edward was in anguish of mind lest the
cornet should monopolize Hazel at supper. The said cornet had become
several shades more purple each time Hazel sang, so Edward was prepared
for the worst. He was determined to make a struggle for it, and felt
that though his position denied him the privilege of scuffling, he
might at least use finesse--that has never been denied to any Church.
'My dear,' whispered Mrs. Marston, 'have you an unwelcome guest?'
This was her polite way of indicating a flea.
'No, mother.'
'Well, dear, there must be something preying on your mind; you have
kept up such a feeling of uneasiness that I have hardly had any nap at
all.'
'What do you think of her, mother?'
'Who, dear?'
'The beautiful girl.'
'A pretty tune, the first she sang,' said Mrs. Marston, not having
heard the others. 'But such wild manners and such hair! Like pussy
stroked the wrong way. And there is something a little peculiar about
her, for when she sings about heaven it seems somehow improper, and
that,' she added drowsily, 'heaven hardly _should_ do.'
Edward understood what she meant. He had been conscious himself of
something desperately exciting in the bearing of Hazel Woodus--something
that penetrated the underworld which lay like a covered well within him,
and, like a ray of light, set all kinds of unsuspected life moving and
developing there.
As supper went on Edward kept more and more of Hazel's attention, and
the quiet grey eyes met the restless amber ones more often.
'If I came some day--soon--to your home, would you sing to me?' he
asked.
'I couldna. I'm promised for the bark-stripping.'
'What's that?'
Hazel looked at him pityingly.
'Dunna you know what that is?'
'I'm afraid not.'
'It's fetching the bark off'n the failed trees ready for lugging.'
'Where are the felled trees?'
'Hunter's Spinney.'
'That's close here.'
'Ah.'
Edward was deep in thought. The cornet whispered to Hazel:
'Making up next Sunday's sermon!'
But Edward turned round disconcertingly.
'As it's on your way, why not come to tea with mother? I might be out,
but you wouldn't mind that?'
'Eh, but I should! I dunna want to talk to an old lady!'
'I'll stop at home,' then, he replied, very much amused, and with a
look of quiet triumph at the cornet. 'Which day?'
'Wednesday week's the first.'
'Come Wednesday, then.'
'What'll the old sleepy lady say?'
'My mother,' he said with dignity, 'will approve of anything I think
right.'
But his heart misgave. So far he had only 'thought right' what her
conventions approved. He had seldom acted on his own initiative. She
therefore had a phrase, 'Dear Edward is always right.' It was possible
that when he left off his unquestioning concordance with her, she would
leave off saying 'Dear Edward is always right.' So far he had not
wanted anything particularly, and as it was as difficult to quarrel
with Mrs. Marston as to strike a match on a damp box, there had never
been any friction. She liked things, as she said, 'nice and pleasant.'
To do Providence justice, everything always had been. Even when her
husband died it had been, in a crape-clad way, nice and pleasant, for
he died after the testimonial and the urn, and not before, as a less
considerate man would have done. He died on a Sunday, which was 'so
suitable,' and at dawn, which was 'so beautiful'; also (in the phrase
used for criminals and the dying) 'he went quietly.' Not that Mrs.
Marston did not feel it. She did, as deeply as her nature could. But
she felt it, as a well-padded boy feels a whacking, through layers of
convention. Now, at her age, to find out that life was not so pleasant
as she thought would be little short of tragedy.
'Ah, I'll come, and I'm much obleeged,' said Hazel.
'I'll meet you at Hunter's Spinney and see you home.' Edward decided.
To this also Hazel assented so delightedly that the cornet pushed back
his chair and went to another table with a sardonic laugh. But his
remarks were drowned by a voice which proclaimed:
'All the years I've bin to suppers I've 'ad tartlets! To-night they
wunna go round. I've paid the same as others. Tartlets I'll 'ave!'
'But the plate's empty,' said Martha, flushed and determined.
'I've had no finger in the emptying of it. More must be fetched.' Other
voices joined in, and Mrs. Marston was heard to murmur, 'Unpleasant.'
Edward was oblivious to it all.
'Shall you,' he asked earnestly, 'like me to come to the Spinney?'
'Ah, I shall that!' said Hazel, who already felt an aura of protection
about him. 'It'll be so safe--like when I was little, and was used to
pick daisies round grandad.'
Edward knew more definitely than before the relation in which he wished
to stand towards Hazel. It was not that of grandad.
Any reply he might have made was drowned by the uproar that broke forth
at the cry, 'She's hidden 'em! Look in the kitchen!'
Martha's cousin--in his spare time policeman of a distant village--felt
that if Martha was detected in fraud it would not look well, and
therefore put his sinewy person in the kitchen doorway. Edward seized
the moment, when there was a hush of surprise, to say grace, during
which the invincible voice murmured:
'I've not received tartlets. I'm not thankful.'
'Mother,' Edward said, when the last unruly guest had disappeared in
the wild April night, and Hazel's vivid presence and violet fragrance
and young laughter had been taken by the darkness, 'I've asked Hazel
Woodus to tea on Wednesday.'
'She is not of your class, Edward.'
'What does class matter?'
'Martha's brother calls you "sir," and Martha looks down on this young
person.'
'Don't call her "young person," mother.'
'Whether it is mistaken kindness, dear, or a silly flirtation, it will
only do you harm with the congregation.'
'Young men and women,' soliloquized Mrs. Marston as she hoisted herself
upstairs with the candlestick very much aslant in a torpid hand, 'are
not what they used to be.'