On Sunday evening, as usual, the little bell began to sound plaintively
in the soft air which was like a pale wild-rose. Mrs. Marston had
betaken herself out of her own door into that of the chapel with a good
many sighs at the disturbance of her nap, and with injunctions to
Martha to put a bit of fire in the parlour. Edward had gone with his
sermon to the back of the house where the tombstones were fewer and it
was easier to walk while he read. Hazel ran up to her room and put on
her white dress, which was considered by Mrs. Marston 'too flighty' for
chapel. She leant out of her window and looked away up the purple hill.
Then she gathered a bunch of the tea-roses that encircled it. They were
deep cream flushed with rose. She pinned them into her breast, and they
matched her flushed face. She was becoming almost dainty in her ways;
this enormously increased her attraction for both men. She put on her
broad white wedding-hat, and slipped downstairs and out by the kitchen
door while Martha was in the parlour. She shut the door behind her like
a vanished life. She felt, she did not know why, a sense of excitement,
of some great happening, something impending, in her appointment with
Reddin.
She met no one as she ran down the batch, for the chapel-goers were all
inside. The hedges were full of white 'archangel' and purple vetch.
When she came to the beginning of Hunter's Spinney she felt frightened;
the woods were so far-reaching, so deep with shadow; the trees made so
sad a rumour, and swayed with such forlorn abandon. In the dusky places
the hyacinths, broken but not yet faded, made a purple carpet, solemn
as a pall. Woodruff shone whitely by the path and besieged her with
scent. Early wild-roses stood here and there, weighed down with their
own beauty, set with rare carmine and tints of shells and snow, too
frail to face the thunderstorm that even now advanced with unhurrying
pomp far away beyond the horizon. She hurried along, leaving the beaten
track, creeping under the broad skirts of the beeches and over the
white prostrate larch-boles where the resin ran slowly like the dark
blood of creatures beautiful, defeated, dying. She began to climb,
holding to the grey, shining boles of mountain ash-trees. The bracken,
waist-high at first, was like small hoops at the top of the wood, where
the tiny golden tormentil made a carpet and the yellow pimpernel was
closing her eager eyes.
Hazel came out on the bare hill-top where gnarled may-trees, dropping
spent blossom, were pink-tinted as if the colours of the sunsets they
had known had run into their whiteness. Hazel sat down on the hilltop
and saw the sleek farm-horses far below feeding with their shadows,
swifts flying with their shadows, and hills eyeing theirs stilly. So
with all life the shadow lingers--incurious, mute, yet in the end
victorious, whelming all. As Hazel sat there her own shadow lay darkly
behind her, growing larger than herself as the sun slipped lower.
Bleatings and lowings, the evening caw of the rooks ascended to her; a
horse neighed, aggressively male. From some distance came the loud,
crude voice of a man singing. He sang, not in worship, not for the sake
of memory or melody or love, but for the same reason that people sing
so loudly in church--in the urgent need of expending superabundant
vitality. His voice rolled out under the purple sky as if he were the
first man, but half emerged from brutishness, pursuing his mate in a
world all fief to him, a world that revealed her as she fled through
the door of morning and the door of evening, rolling its vaporous
curtains back as she went through. It was Reddin, come forth from his
dark house, as his foraging ancestors had done, to take his will of the
weaponless and ride down the will of others. He did not confess even to
himself why he had come. His thoughts on sex were so prurient that, in
common with many people, he considered any frankness about it most
indecent. Sex was to him a thing that made the ears red. It is hard for
them that have breeding-stables to enter the kingdom of heaven. Too
often the grave, the majestic significance of the meeting of the
sexes--holding as it does the fate of the golden pageantry of life,
sacrificially spending as it does the present for the future--is
nothing to them. They see it only as a fillip to appetite. So Sally
Haggard usually spent most of the money earned by Reddin's stallion,
'The Pride of Undern.'
He put the horse to a gallop as he came up Hunter's Spinney, to quench
the voice that spoke within him, saying things he would not hear, that
spoke of love, and the tenderness and humility of love, and of how
these did not detract from the splendour of manhood, the fine rage of
passion, but rather glorified them. Something in his feeling for Hazel
answered that voice, and it worried him. By heredity and upbringing he
had been taught to dislike and mistrust everything that savoured of
emotion or ideas, to consider unmanly all that was of the spirit.
Therefore he sang more loudly as he saw on the hill-top the flutter of
Hazel's white dress, to quench the voice that steadfastly spoke of
mutual love as the one reason, the one consecration of passion in man
and woman. The hoof-beats thudded like a full pulse.
Hazel got up. Suddenly she was afraid of the place, more afraid than
she had ever been of the death-pack, which, this evening, she had
forgotten.
But before she could move away Reddin shouted to her and came up the
bridle-path. Hazel hesitated, swayed like the needle of a compass, and
finally stood still.
'What'n you wanting me for, Mr. Reddin?'
'Don't you know?'
'If I knew, I shouldna ask.'
'What do men generally want women for?'
'I'm not a woman. I dunna want to be. But what be it, anyway?'
He felt in his pocket and drew out a small parcel.
'There! Don't say the giving's all on your side,' he remarked.
She opened the parcel. It contained two heavy old-fashioned gold
bracelets. Each was set with a large ruby that stared unwinkingly from
its setting of pale gold.
'Eh! they'm like drops of blood!' said Hazel. 'Like when fayther starts
a-killing the pig. He's a hard un, is fayther, hard as b'rytes. I'm
much obleeged to you, Mr. Reddin, but I dunna want 'em. I canna'd abear
the sight of blood.'
'Little fool!' said Reddin. 'They're worth pounds.'
He caught her wrists and fastened one bracelet on each. She struggled,
but could not get free or undo the clasps.
She began to cry, loudly and easily, as she always did. All her
emotions were sudden, transparent and violent. She also, since her
upbringing had not been refined, began to swear.
'Damn your clumsy fists and your bloody bracelets!' she screamed. 'Take
'em off, too! I 'unna stay if you dunna!'
Reddin laughed, and in his eyes a glow began; nothing could have so
suited his mood.
'You've got to wear 'em,' he said, 'to show you're mine.'
'I binna!'
'Yes.'
'I won't never be!'
'Yes, you will, now.'
She raved at him like a little wild-cat, pulling at the bracelets like
a kitten at its neck ribbon.
He laughed again, stilly.
He knew there was not a soul near, for the people from the farm at the
foot of the spinney had all gone to church.
'Look here, Hazel,' he said, not unkindly; 'you've got to give in,
see?'
'I see nought.'
'You've got to come and live with me at Undern. You can wear those fine
dresses.'
'I'm a-cold,' said Hazel; 'the sun's undering; I'd best go home-along.'
'Come on, then. Up you get. We'll be there in no time. You shall have
some supper and--'
'What'n I want trapsing to Undern when I live at the Mountain?'
'You'll be asking to come soon,' he said, with the crude wisdom of his
kind. 'You like me better than that soft parson even now.'
She shook her head.
'I'm a man, anyway.'
She looked him over, and owned he was. But she did not want him; she
wanted freedom and time to find out how much she liked Edward.
'Well, good neet to you,' she said. 'I'm off.'
She ran downhill into the wood.
Reddin hitched the reins to a tree and followed. He caught her and
flung her into the bracken, and suddenly it seemed to her that the
whole world, the woods, herself, were all Reddin. He was her sky, her
cloak. The tense silence of the place was heavy on her.
Away at God's Little Mountain Edward preached his sermon on the power
of prayer--how he could plant a hedge of prayer round the beloved to
keep them from all harm.
The clock at Alderslea down the valley struck eight in muffled tones.
They were burnt into Hazel's brain. The plovers wheeled and cried sadly
like the spirits of creatures too greatly outnumbered.
Edward was a dream; God's Little Mountain was an old tale--something
forgotten, mist-begirt.
Twilight thickened, and birds began to shrill in the dew. Voices came
up from the farm. They were back from church. Hazel felt crushed,
bruised, robbed.
'Now, up you get, Hazel!' said Reddin, who wanted his supper badly, and
no longer wanted Hazel. 'Up you get and tidy yourself, and then home.'
He felt rather sorry for her.
She made no comment, no demur. Instinctively she felt that she belonged
to Reddin now, though spiritually she was still Edward's. She looked at
Reddin, passive, doubtful; the past evening had become unreal to her.
So they regarded one another mistrustfully, like two creatures taken in
a snare. They both felt as if they had been trapped by something vast
and intangible. Reddin was dazed. For the first time in his life he had
felt passion instead of mere lust. The same ideas that had striven
within him on his way here uplifted their voices again.
Staring dully at Hazel, he felt a smarting at the back of his eyes and
a choking in his throat.
'What ails you, catching your breath?' she asked.
He could not speak.
'You've got tears in your eyne.'
Reddin put his hand up.
'Tell us what ails you?'
He shook his head.
'What for not, my--what for not?'
She never called Reddin 'my soul.'
But he could not or would not speak.
Hazel's eyes were red also, with tears of pain. Now she wept again in
sympathy with a grief she could not understand.
So they sat beneath the black, slow-waving branches under the threat of
the oncoming night, weeping like children. They cowered, it seemed,
beneath a hand raised to strike. All that they did was wrong; all that
they did was inevitable. Two larches bent by the gales kept up a
groaning as bole wore on bole, wounding each other every time they
swayed. In the indifferent hauteur of the dark steeps, the secret
arcades, the avenues leading nowhere, crouched these two incarnations
of the troubled earth, sentient for a moment, capable of sadness,
cruelty, terror and revolt, and then lapsed again into the earth.
Forebodings of that lapse--forebodings that follow the hour of climax
as rooks follow the plough--haunted them now, though they found no
words for what they felt, but only knew a sense of the pressure of
night. It appeared to stoop nearer, blind, impassive, but intensely
aware of them under their dark canopy of leaves. Some Being, it seemed,
was listening there, and not only listening, but imposing in an
effortless but inevitable way its veiled purpose. Hazel and Reddin--he
no less than she--appeared to be deprived of identity, like hypnotic
mediums. His hardness and strength took on a pitiful dolt-like air
before this prescient power.
When he at last stopped choking and licking the tears away
surreptitiously as they rolled down his cheeks, he was very angry--with
himself for crying, with Hazel for witnessing his disgrace. That she
should cry was nothing, he thought. Women always cried at these times.
Nor did he distinguish between her tears of pain and of sympathy.
'You needn't stare,' he snapped. 'If I've got a cold, there's no reason
to gape.'
'What for be you--'
'Shut up! I'm not.'
They climbed the crackling wood, ghastly with a sound as of feet
passing tiptoe into silence--the multitudinous soft noises of a wood,
cones falling, twigs snapping, the wind in old driven leaves, the
subdued rustle of the trees. They passed the place where she had talked
with Edward at the bark-stripping. The prostrate larches shone as
whitely as her shoulder did through her torn gown. She remembered
Edward's look, and wept again.
'What is it now?' he asked.
'I was i' this place afore the bluebells died, along with--Ed'ard.'
'Why d'you say the man's name like that? It's no better than other
names.'
She had no reply for that, and they came in silence to the tormented
may-tree where the horse was tied, his black mane and smooth back
strown with faded, faintly coloured blossom.
Reddin lifted her on and swung into the saddle.
She leant against him, silent and passive, as with one arm round her he
guided the horse down the difficult path.
A star shone through the trees, but it was not a friendly star. It was
more like a stare than a tear.
When the rest of them sprang out like an army at the reveille, they
were aloof and cold, and they rode above in an ironic disdain too
terrible to be resented.
Reddin put the horse to a gallop. He wanted fierce motion to still the
compunction that Hazel's quiet crying brought.
A sense of immanent grief was on her, grey loneliness and fear of the
future. He tried to comfort her.
'Dunna say ought!' she sobbed. 'You canna run the words o'er your
tongue comfortable like Ed'ard can!'
'What do you want me to say?'
'I dunno. I want our Foxy.'
'I'll fetch her in the morning.'
'No, you munna. She'm safe at Ed'ard's. Let her bide. I want to be at
Ed'ard's, too.'
'Who comes wailing in the black o' night?' said the voice of Vessons as
they neared the hall door. 'I thought it was the lady as no gold
comforts--her as hollas "Lost! Alost!" in the Undern Coppy.'