Hunter's Spinney, a conical hill nearly as high as God's Little
Mountain, lay between that range and Undern. It was deeply wooded; only
its top was bare and caught the light redly. It was a silent and
deserted place, cowled in ancient legends. Here the Black Huntsman
stalled his steed, and the death-pack coming to its precincts, ceased
into the hill. Here, in November twilights, when the dumb birds cowered
in the dark pines, you might hear from the summit a horn blown-very
clearly, with tuneful devilry, and a scattered sound of deep barking
like the noise of sawing timber, and then the blood-curdling tumult of
the pack at feeding time.
To-day, as Hazel began her work, the radiant woods were full of pale
colour, so delicate and lucent that Beauty seemed a fugitive presence
from some other world trapped and panting to be free. The small patens
of the beeches shone like green glass, and the pale spired chestnuts
were candelabras on either side of the steep path. In the bright
breathless glades of larches the willow-wrens sang softly, but with
boundless vitality. On sunny slopes the hyacinths pushed out
close-packed buds between their covering leaves; soon they would
spread their grave blue like a prayer-carpet. Hazel, stooping in her
old multi-coloured pinafore, her bare arms gleaming like the stripped
trees, seemed to Edward as he came up the shady path to be the spirit
of beauty. He quite realized that her occupation was not suited to a
minister's future wife. 'But she may never be that,' he thought
despairingly.
'Have you ever thought, Hazel,' he said later, sitting down on a
log--'have you ever thought of the question of marriage?'
'I ne'er did till Foxy took the chicks.' Edward looked dazed. 'It's
like this,' Hazel went on. 'Father (he's a rum 'un, is father!), he
says he'll drown Foxy if she takes another.'
'Who is Foxy?'
'Oh! Fancy you not knowing Foxy! Her's my little cub. Pretty! you ne'er
saw anything so pretty.'
Edward thought he had.
'But she canna get used to folks' ways.' (This was a new point of view
to Edward.) 'She'm a fox, and she can't be no other. And I'd liefer
she'd _be_ a fox.'
'Foxes are very mischievous,' Edward said mildly.
'Mischievous!' Hazel flamed on him like a little thunderstorm.
'Mischievous! And who made 'em mischievous, I'd like to know? They
didna make theirselves.'
'God made them,' Edward said simply.
'What for did He, if He didna like 'em when they were done?'
'We can't know all His reasons; He walks in darkness.'
'Well, that's no manner of use to me and Foxy,' said Hazel practically.
'So all as I can see to do is to get married and take Foxy where
there's no chicks.'
'So you think of marrying?'
'Ah! And I told father I'd marry the first as come. I swore it by the
Mountain.'
'And who came?' Edward had a kind of faintness in his heart.
'Never a one.'
'Nobody at all?'
'Never a one.'
'And if anyone came and asked for you, you'd take him?'
'Well, I'm bound to, seemingly. But it dunna matter. None'll ever come.
What for should they?'
She herself answered her own question fully as she stood aureoled in
dusky light. His eyes were eloquent, but she was too busy to notice
them.
'And should you like to be married?' he asked gently.
He expected a shy affirmative. He received a flat negative.
'My mam didna like it. And she said it'd be the end of going in the
woods and all my gamesome days. And she said tears and torment, tears
and torment was the married lot. And she said, "Keep yourself to
yourself. You wunna made for marrying any more than me. Eat in company,
but sleep alone"--that's what she said, Mr. Marston.'
Edward was so startled at this unhesitating frankness that he said
nothing. But he silently buried several sweet hopes that had been
pushing up like folded hyacinths for a week. The old madness was upon
him, but it was a larger, more spiritual madness than Reddin's, as the
sky is larger and more ethereal than the clouds that obscure it. He was
always accustomed to think more of giving than receiving, so now he
concentrated himself on what he could do for Hazel. He felt that her
beauty would be an ample return for anything he could do as her husband
to make her happy. If she would confide in him, demands on his time,
run to him for refuge, he felt that he could ask no more of life. The
strength of the ancient laws of earth was as yet hidden from him. He
did not know the fierceness of the conflict in which he was engaging
for Hazel's sake--the world-old conflict between sex and altruism.
If he had known, he would still not have hesitated.
Suddenly Hazel looked round with an affrighted air.
'It's late to be here,' she said.
'Why?'
'There's harm here if you bide late. The jeath pack's about here in the
twilight, so they do say.'
They looked up into the dark steeps, and the future seemed to lower on
them.
'Maybe summat bad'll come to us in this spinney,' she whispered.
'Nothing bad can come to you when you are in God's keeping.'
There canna be many folk in His keeping, then.'
'Do you say your prayers, Hazel?' he asked rather sadly.
'Ah! I say:
"Keep me one year, keep me seven,
Till the gold turns silver on my head;
Bring me up to the hill o' heaven,
And leave me die quiet in my bed."
That's what I allus say.'
'Who taught you?'
'My mam.'
'Ah, well, it must be a good prayer if she taught it you, mustn't it?'
he said.
Suddenly Hazel clutched his arm affrightedly.
'Hark! Galloping up yonder! Run! run! It's the Black Huntsman!'
It was Reddin, skirting the wood on his way home from a search for
Hazel. If he had come into the spinney he would have seen them, but he
kept straight on.
'It's bringing harm!' cried Hazel, pulling at Edward's arm; 'see the
shivers on me! It's somebody galloping o'er my grave!'
Edward resolved to combat these superstitions and replace them by a
sane religion. He had not yet fathomed the ancient, cruel and mighty
power of these exhalations of the soil. Nor did he see that Hazel was
enchained by earth, prisoner to it only a little less than the beech
and the hyacinth--bond-serf of the sod.
When Edward and Hazel burst into the parlour, like sunshine into an old
garden, they were met by a powerful smell of burnt merino. Mrs. Marston
had been for some hours as near Paradise as we poor mortals can hope to
be. Her elastic-sided cloth boots rested on the fender, and her skirt,
carefully turned up, revealed a grey stuff petticoat with a hint of
white flannel beneath. The pink shawl was top, which meant optimism.
With Mrs. Marston, optimism was the direct result of warmth. Her
spectacles had crept up and round her head, and had a rakishly benign
appearance. On her comfortable lap lay the missionary _Word_ and a
large roll of brown knitting which was intended to imitate fur. Edward
noted hopefully that the pink shawl was top.
'Here's Hazel come to see you, mother!'
Mrs. Marston straightened her spectacles, surveyed Hazel, and asked if
she would like to do her hair. This ceremony over, they sat down to
tea.
'And how many brothers and sisters have you, my dear?' asked the old
lady.
'Never a one. Nobody but our Foxy.'
'Edward, too, has none. Who is Foxy?'
'My little cub.'
'You speak as if the animals were a relation, dear.'
'So all animals be my brothers and sisters.'
'I know, dear. Quite right. All animals in conversation should be so.
But any single animal in reality is only an animal, and can't be.
Animals have no souls.'
'Yes, they have, then! If they hanna; _you_ hanna!'
Edward hastened to make peace.
'We don't know, do we, mother?' he said. 'And now suppose we have tea?'
Mrs. Marston looked at Hazel suspiciously over the rim of her glasses.
'My dear, don't have ideas,' she said.
'There, Hazel!' Edward smiled. 'What about your ideas in the spinney?'
'There's queer things doing in Hunter's Spinney, and what for shouldna
you believe it?' said Hazel. 'Sometimes more than other times, and
midsummer most of all.'
'What sort of queer things?' asked Edward, in order to be able to watch
her as she answered.
Hazel shut her eyes and clasped her hands, speaking in a soft monotone
as if repeating a lesson.
'In Hunter's Spinney on midsummer night there's things moving as move
no other time; things free as was fast; things crying out as have been
a long while hurted.' She suddenly opened her eyes and went on
dramatically 'First comes the Black Huntsman, crouching low on his
horse and the horse going belly to earth. And John Meares o' the
public, he seed the red froth from his nostrils on the brakes one
morning when he was ketching pheasants. And the jeath's with him, great
hound-dogs, real as real, only no eyes, but sockets with a light behind
'em. Ne'er a one knows what they's after. If I seed 'em I'd die,' she
finished hastily, taking a large bite of cake.
'Myths are interesting,' said Edward, 'especially nature myths.'
'What's a myth, Mr. Marston?'
'An untruth, my dear,' said Mrs. Marston.
'This inna one, then! I tell you John seed the blood!'
'Tell us more.' Edward would have drunk in nonsense rhymes from her
lips.
'And there's never a one to gainsay 'em in all the dark 'oods,' Hazel
went on, 'except on Midsummer Eve.'
'Midsummer!'--Mrs. Marston's tone was gently wistful--'is the only time
I'm really warm. That is, if the weather's as it should be. But the
weather's not what it was!'
'Tell us more, Hazel!' pleaded Edward.
'What for do you want to hear, my soul?'
Edward flushed at the caressing phrase, and Mrs. Marston looked as
indignant as was possible to her physiognomy, until she realized that
it was a mere form of speech.
'Because I love--old tales.'
'Well, if so be you go there, then'--Hazel leant forward, earnest and
mysterious--'after the pack's gone you'll hear soft feet running, and
you'll see faces look out and hands waving. And gangs of folks come
galloping under the leaves, not seen clear, hastening above a bit. And
others come quick after, all with trouble on 'em. And the place is full
of whispering and rustling and voices calling a long way off. And my mam
said the trees get free that night--or else folk of the trees--creeping
and struggling out of the boles like a chicken from an egg--getting free
like lads out of school; and they go after the jeath-pack like birds
after a cuckoo. And last comes the lady of Undern Coppy, lagging and
lonesome, riding in a troop of shadows, and sobbing, "Lost--lost! Oh, my
green garden!" And they say the brake flowers on the eve of that night,
and no bird sings and no star falls.'
'What a pack of nonsense!' murmured Mrs. Marston drowsily.
'That it inna!' cried Hazel; 'it's the bloody truth!'
Mrs. Marston's drowsiness forsook her. Hazel became conscious for
tension.
'Mother!'--Edward's voice shook with suppressed laughter, although he was
indignant with Hazel's father for such a mistaken upbringing--'mother,
would you give Hazel the receipt for this splendid cake?'
'And welcome, my dear.' The old lady was safely launched on her
favourite topic. 'And if you'd like a seed-cake as well, you shall have
it. Have you put down any butter yet?'
Hazel never put down or preserved or made anything. Her most ambitious
cooking was a rasher and a saucepan of potatoes.
'I dunna know what you mean,' she said awkwardly.
Edward was disappointed. He had thought her such a paragon. 'Well,
well, cooking was, after all, a secondary thing. Let it go.'
'You mean to say you don't know what putting down butter is, my poor
child? But perhaps you go in for higher branches? Lemon-curd, now, and
bottled fruit. I'm sure you can do those?'
Hazel felt blank. She thought it best to have things clear.
'I canna do naught,' she said defiantly.
'Now, mother'--Edward came to the rescue again--'see how right you are
in saying that a girl's education is not what it used to be! See how
Hazel's has been neglected! Think what a lot you could teach her!
Suppose you were to begin quite soon?'
'A batter,' began Mrs. Marston, with the eagerness of a philosopher
expounding her theory, 'is a well-beaten mixture of eggs and flour.
Repeat after me, my dear.'
'Eh, what's the use? _He_ dunna know what he eats no more than a
pig! I shanna cook for 'im.'
'Who's that, dear?' Mrs. Marston inquired.
'My dad.'
Mrs. Marston held up her hands with the mock-fur knitting in them, and
looked at Edward with round eyes.
'She says her father's a--a pig, my dear!'
'She doesn't mean it,' said he loyally, 'do you, Hazel?'
'Ah, and more!'
The host and hostess sighed.
Then Edward said: 'Yes, but you won't always be keeping house for your
father, you know,' and found himself so confused that he had to go and
fetch a pipe.
Afterwards he walked part way home with Hazel, and coming back under
the driving sky--that seemed to move all in a piece like a sliding
window, and showed the moon as a slim lady waiting for unlooked-for
happenings--he could have wept at the crude sweetness of Hazel. She was
of so ruthless an honesty towards herself as well as others; she had
such strange lights and shadows in her eyes, her voice, her soul; she
was so full of faults, and so brimming with fascination.
'Oh, God, if I may have her to keep and defend, to glow in my house
like a rose, I'll ask no more,' he murmured.
The pine-tops bowed in as stately a manner as they had when Hazel
cried, 'I'll never be a woman!' They listened like grown-ups to the
prattle of a child. And the stars, like gods in silver armour sitting
afar in halls of black marble, seemed to hear and disdain the little
gnat-like voice, as they heard Vessons' defiant 'Never will I!' and
Mrs. Marston's woolly prayers, and Reddin's hoof-beats. All man's
desires--predatory, fugitive, or merely negative--wander away into
those dark halls, and are heard no more. Among the pillars of the night
is there One who listens and remembers, and judges the foolishness of
man, not by effects, but by motives? And does that One, in the majesty
of everlasting vitality and resistless peace, ever see how we run after
the painted butterflies of our desires and fall down the dark
precipice? And if He sees and hears the wavering, calamitous life of
all creatures, and especially of the most beautiful and the most
helpless, does He ever sigh and weep, as we do when we see a dead child
or a moth's wing impaled on a thorn?
Our heavy burden is that we cannot know. For all our tears and prayers
and weary dreaming, we cannot know.
Edward lay awake all night, and heard the first blackbird begin,
tentatively, his clear song--a song to bring tears by its golden
security of joy in a world where nothing is secure.
The old madness surged in upon Edward more strongly as the light
grew, and he tried to read the Gospel of St. John (his favourite),
but the words left no trace on his mind. Hazel was there, and like
a scarlet-berried rowan on the sky she held the gaze by the perfection
of the picture she made. The bent of Edward's mind and upbringing was
set against the rush of his wishes and of circumstance. She had said,
'The first that came,' and he was sure that in her state of dark
superstition she would hold by her vow. Suppose some other--some
farm-hand, who would never see the real Hazel--should have been thinking
over the matter, and should go to-day and should be the first? It was
just how things happened. And then his flower would be gone, and the
other man would never know it was a flower. He worked himself into such
a fever that he could not rest, but got up and went out into the lively
air, and saw the sun come lingeringly through aery meadows of pale
green and primrose. He saw the ice slip from the bright pointed lilac
buds, and sheep browsing the frosty grass, and going to and fro in the
unreserved way that animals have in the early hours before the
restraint of human society is imposed on them. He saw, yet noticed
nothing, until a long scarlet bar of cloud reminded him of Hazel by its
vividness, and he found a violet by the graveyard gate.
'Little Hazel!' he whispered. He pondered on the future, and tried to
imagine such an early walk as this with Hazel by his side, and could
not for the glory of it. Then he reasoned with himself. This wild haste
was not right, perhaps. He ought to wait. But that vow! That foolish,
childish vow!
'I could look after her. She could blossom here like a violet in a
quiet garden.'
Giving was never too early.
'And I am asking nothing--not for years. She shall live her own life,
and be mother's daughter and my little sister for as long as she likes.
My little sister!' he repeated aloud, as if some voice had contradicted
him. And, indeed, the whole wide morning seemed to contradict his
scheme--the mating birds, the sheep suckling their lambs, the insistent
neighing and bellowing that rose from the fields and farms, the very
tombstones, with their legends of multitudinous families, and the voice
that cried to man and woman, not in words, but in the zest of the earth
and air, '"Beget, bring forth, and then depart, for I have done with
you!"'
A sharp cold shower stung his cheeks, and he saw a slim rosebud beating
itself helplessly against the wet earth, broken and muddy. He fetched a
stake and tied it up. I think,' he said to himself, 'that I was put
into the world to tie up broken roses, and one that is not broken yet,
thank God! It is miraculous that she has never come to harm, for that
great overgrown boy, her father, takes no care of her. Yes, I was meant
for that. I can't preach.' He smiled ruefully as he remembered how
steadfastly the congregation slept through his best sermons. 'I can't
say the right things at the right time. I'm not clever. But I can take
care of Hazel. And that is my life-work,' he added naively, 'perhaps
I'd better begin at once, and go to see her to-day.'
Ah! the gold and scarlet morning as he came home after finding that
resolve, which, as a matter of fact, he had taken with him! How the
roof of the parsonage shone like the New Jerusalem! And how the fantail
pigeons, very rotund denizens of that city, cooed as they walked
gingerly--tiles being cold to pink feet on a frosty morning--up and
down in the early sun!
Edward so much wanted to keep the violet he had found that he decided
he ought to give it to his mother. So he put it on her plate, and
looked for a suitable passage to read at prayers.
The Song of Solomon seemed the only thing really in tune with the
morning, but he decided rather sadly that 'something in Corinthians'
might please his mother better. So he read, 'The greatest of these is
love,' and his voice was so husky and so unmanageable that Mrs.
Marston, who did not notice the golden undertones that matched their
beauty with the blackbird's song, went straight from the chair she
knelt at in the prayers to her store-room, and produced lemon and
honey, which Edward loathed.
'You're very throaty, my dear, and you must take a level spoonful,' she
said.
It is only in poetry that all the world understands a lover. In real
life he is called throaty, and given a level spoonful of that nauseous
compound known as common sense.