Hazel was up early next morning. She could not sleep, and thought she
would go down into the valley and look for spring mushrooms.
She crept out of the house, still as death, except for Mrs. Marston's
soft yet all-pervading snores. Out in the graveyard, where as yet no
bird sang, it was as if the dead had arisen in the stark hours between
twelve and two, and were waiting unobtrusively, majestically, each by
his own bed, to go down and break their long fast with the bee and the
grass-snake in refectories too minute and too immortal to be known by
the living. The tombstones seemed taller, seemed to have a presence
behind them; the lush grass, lying grey and heavy with dew, seemed to
have been swept by silent passing crowds. A dank smell came up, and the
place had at once the unkempt look worn by the scene of some past
revelry and the expectant air of a stage prepared for a coming drama.
Foxy barked sharply, urgently alive in the stronghold of the dead, and
Hazel went to explain why she could not come. They held a long
conversation, Hazel whispering. Foxy eloquent of eye. Foxy had a marked
personality. Dignity never failed her, and she could be hilarious,
loving, or clamorous for food without losing a jot of it. She was
possessed of herself; the wild was her kingdom. If she was in a
kennel--so her expression led you to understand--she was there
incognito and of her own choice. Hazel, sitting at Edward's table,
had the same look.
When the conversation was over, and Foxy had obediently curled herself
to sleep with one swift motion like a line of poetry, Hazel went down
the hill. She felt courageous; going to the valley was braving
civilization. She had Mrs. Marston's skirt-fastener--the golden
butterfly, complicated by various hooks--to keep her petticoats up
later on. She also had the little bag in which Edward was accustomed to
take the Lord's Supper to a distant chapel. To her, mushrooms were as
clean as the Lord's Supper, no less mysterious, equally incidental to
human needs. In her eyes nothing could be more magical and holy than
silken, pink-lined mushrooms placed for her in the meadows overnight by
the fairies, or by someone greater and more powerful called God.
As she went down the mountain it seemed that the whole country was
snowed over. Mist--soft, woolly, and intensely white--lay across the
far plain in drifts, filled the valley, and stood about the distant
hills almost to their summits. The tops of Hunter's Spinney, God's
Little Mountain, and the hill behind Undern stood out darkly green. The
long rose-briars, set with pale coral buds, looked elvish against the
wintry scene.
As Hazel descended the mist rose like a wall about her, shutting her
off from Undern and the Mountain. She felt like a child out of school,
free of everyone, her own for the pearly hours of morning. When she
came to the meadows she gathered up her skirts well above her knees,
took off her shoes and stockings, and pinned her sleeves to the
shoulders. She ran like a tightly swathed nymph, small and slender,
with her slim legs and arms shining in the fresh cold dew. She looked
for nests and called 'Thuckoo!' to the cuckoos, and found a young one,
savagely egotistic, not ready for flight physically, but ready for
untold things psychically.
'You'm proud-stomached, you be!' said Hazel. 'You'd ought to be me,
with an old sleepy lady drawing her mouth down whatever you do, and a
young fellow--' She stopped. She could not even tell a bird about
Reddin. She danced among the shut daisies, wild as a fairy, and when
the sun rose her shadow mocked her with delicate foolery. In her hand,
and in that of the shadow, bobbed the little black Lord's Supper bag.
She went on, regardless of direction. At last she found an old pasture
where heavy farm-horses looked round at her over their polished flanks
and a sad-eyed foal rose to greet her. There she found button mushrooms
to her heart's content. Ancient hedges hung above the field and spoke
to her in fragrant voices. The glory of the may was just giving place
to the shell-tint of wild-roses. She reached up for some, and her hair
fell down; she wisely put the remaining pins in the bag for the return
journey. She was intensely happy, as a fish is when it plunges back
into the water. For these things, and not the God-fearing comfort
of the Mountain, nor the tarnished grandeur of Undern, were her life.
She had so deep a kinship with the trees, so intuitive a sympathy with
leaf and flower, that it seemed as if the blood in her veins was not
slow-moving human blood, but volatile sap. She was of a race that will
come in the far future, when we shall have outgrown our egoism--the
brainless egoism of a little boy pulling off flies' wings. We shall
attain philosophic detachment and emotional sympathy. We have even now
far outgrown the age when a great genius like Shakespeare could be so
clumsy in the interpretation of other than human life. We have left
behind us the bloodshot centuries when killing was the only sport, and
we have come to the slightly more reputable times when lovers of
killing are conscious that a distinct effort is necessary in order to
keep up 'the good old English sports.' Better things are in store for
us. Even now, although the most expensively bound and the most
plentiful books in the stationers' shops are those about killing and
its thousand ramifications, nobody reads them. They are bought at
Christmas for necessitous relations and little boys.
Hazel, in the fields and woods, enjoyed it all so much that she walked
in a mystical exaltation.
Reddin in the fields and woods enjoyed himself only. For he took his
own atmosphere with him wherever he went, and before his footsteps
weakness fled and beauty folded.
The sky blossomed in parterres of roses, frailer and brighter than the
rose of the briar, and melted beneath them into lagoons greener and
paler than the veins of a young beech-leaf. The fairy hedges were so
high, so flushed with beauty, the green airy waters ran so far back into
mystery, that it seemed as if at any moment God might walk there as
in a garden, delicate as a moth. Down by the stream Hazel found tall
water-plantains, triune of cup, standing above the ooze like candelabras,
and small rough-leaved forget-me-nots eyeing their liquid reflections
with complaisance. She watched the birds bathe--bullfinches, smooth-coated
and well-found; slim willow-wrens; thrushes, ermine-breasted; lusty
blackbirds with beaks of crude yellow. They made neat little tracks
over the soft mud, drank, bathed, preened, and made other neat little
tracks. Then they 'took off,' as Hazel put it, from the top of the bank,
and flew low across the painted meadow or high into the enamelled tree,
and piped and fluted till the air was full of silver.
Hazel stood as Eve might have stood, hands clasped, eyes full of
ecstasy, utterly self-forgetful, enchanted with these living toys.
'Eh, yon's a proper bird!' she exclaimed, as a big silken cuckoo
alighted on the mud with a gobble, drank with dignity, and took its
vacillating flight to a far ash-tree. 'Foxy ought to see that,' she
added.
Silver-crested peewits circled and cried with their melancholy
cadences, and a tawny pheasant led out her young. Now that the dew was
gone, and cobwebs no longer canopied the field with silver, it was blue
with germander speedwell--each flower painted with deepening colour,
eyed with startling white, and carrying on slender stamens the round
white pollen-balls--worlds of silent, lovely activity. Every
flower-spike had its family of buds, blue jewels splashed with white,
each close-folded on her mystery. To see the whole field not only
bright with them, but brimming over, was like watching ten thousand
saints rapt in ecstasy, ten thousand children dancing. Hazel knew
nothing of saints. She had no words for the wonder in which she walked.
But she felt it, she enjoyed it with a passion no words could express.
Mrs. Marston had said several times, 'I'm almost afraid Hazel is
a great one for wasting her time.' But what is waste of time? Eating
and sleeping; hearing grave, sedulous men read out of grave,
sedulous book what we have heard a hundred times; besieging God
(whom we end by imagining as a great ear) for material benefits;
amassing property--these, the world says, are not waste of time.
But to drink at the stoup of beauty; to lift the leafy coverlet of
earth and seek the cradled God (since here, if anywhere, He dwells),
this in the world's eye is waste of time. Oh, filthy, heavy-handed,
blear-eyed world, when will you wash and be clean?
Hazel came to a place where the white water crossed the road in a
glittering shallow ford. Here she stayed, leaning on the wooden bridge,
hearing small pebbles grinding on one another; seeing jewel-flashes of
ruby, sapphire and emerald struck from them by the low sunlight;
smelling the scent that is better than all (except the scent of air on
a barren mountain, or of snow)--the scent of running water. She watched
the grey wagtails, neat and trim in person, but wild in bearing, racing
across the wet gravel like intoxicated Sunday-school teachers. Then, in
a huge silver-willow that brooded, dove-like, over the ford, a blackcap
began to sing. The trills and gushes of perfect melody, the golden
repetitions, the heart-lifting ascents and wistful falls drooping
softly as a flower, seemed wonderful to her as an angel's song. She and
the bird, sheltered under the grey-silver feathers of the trees, lived
their great moments of creation and receptivity until suddenly there
was a sharp noise of hoofs, the song snapped, the willow was
untenanted, and Reddin's horse splashed through the ford.
'Oh!' cried Hazel, 'what for did you break the song? A sacred bird, it
was. And now it's fled!'
He had been riding round the remnant of his estate, a bit of hill
sheep-walk that faced the Mountain and overlooked the valley. He had
seen Hazel wander down the road, white-limbed and veiled in tawny hair.
He thought there must be something wrong with his sight. Bare legs!
Bare arms! Hair all loose, and no hat! As a squire-farmer, he was very
much shocked. As a man, he spurred downhill at the risk of a bad fall.
Hazel, unlike the women of civilization, who are pursued by
looking-glasses, was apt to forget herself and her appearance. She
had done so now. But something in Reddin's face recalled her. She
hastily took the butterfly out of her skirt and put on her shoes
and stockings.
'What song?' asked Reddin.
'A bird in the tree. What for did you fritten it?'
Reddin was indignant. Seeing Hazel wandering thus so near his own
domain, he thought she had come in the hope of seeing him. He also
thought that the strangeness of her dress was an effort to attract him.
To the pure all things are pure.
'But you surely wanted to see me? Wasn't that why you came?' he asked.
'No, it wasna. I came to pick the little musherooms as come wi' the
warm rain, for there's none like spring musherooms. And I came to see
the flowers, and hearken at the birds, and look the nesses.'
'You could have lots of flowers and birds at Undern.'
'There's plenty at the Mountain.'
'Then why did you come here?'
'To be by my lonesome.'
'Snub for me!' he smiled. He liked opposition. 'But look here, Hazel,'
he reasoned. 'If you'd come to Undern, I'd make you enjoy life.'
'But I dunna want to. I be Ed'ard's missus.'
'Be missus!' At the phrase his weather-coarsened face grew redder. It
intoxicated him.
He slipped off his horse and kissed her.
'I dunna want to be anybody's missus!' she cried vexedly. 'Not yourn
nor Ed'ard's neither! But I Ed'ard's, and so I mun stay.' She turned
away.
'Good morning to you,' she said in her old-fashioned little way. She
trudged up the road. Reddin watched her, a forlorn, slight figure armed
with the black bag, weary with the sense of reaction. Reddin was angry
and depressed. The master of Undern had been for the second time
refused.
'H'm,' he said, considering her departing figure, 'it won't be asking
next time, my lady! And it won't be for you to refuse.'
He turned home, accompanied by that most depressing companion--the
sense of his own meanness. He was unable to help knowing that the
exercise of force against weakness is the most cur-like thing on earth.