Undern was in its June mood. Pinks frothed over the edges of the
borders, and white bush-roses flung their arms high over the porch. All
was heavily fragrant, close, muffling the senses. The trees brooded;
the house brooded; the hill hung above, deeply recollected; the bats
went with a lagging flight. It was like one of those spell-bound places
built for an hour or an aeon or a moment on the borders of elfdom, full
of charms and old wizardry, ready to fall inwards at a word, but
invincible to all but that word. The hot scent of the trees and the
garden mingled with the smell of manure, pigsties, cooking pig-wash and
Vessons' 'Tom Moody' tobacco. It made Hazel feel faint--a strange
sensation to her.
Vessons stood surveying them as he had done on the bleak night of
Hazel's first coming.
'Where,' he said at last, the countless fine lines that covered his
upper lip from nostril to mouth deepening--'where's the reverent?'
Receiving no reply but a scowl from his master, he led the horse away.
Reddin, with a kind of gauche gentleness, said: 'I'll show you the
house.'
They went through the echoing rooms, and looked out of the low,
spider-hung casements, where young ivy-leaves, soft and vivid, had
edged their way through the cracks. They stood under ceilings dark
with the smoke of fires and lamps that had been lit unnumbered years
ago for some old pathetic revelry. In cupboards left ajar by a hurried
hand that had long been still, hung gowns with flower-stains or
wine-stains on their faded folds. The doors creaked and sighed after
them, the floors groaned, and all about the house, though the summer
air was so light and low, there was a moaning of wind. It was as if
all the storms that had blown round it, the terror that had been felt
in it, the tears that had fallen in it, had crept like forgotten spirits
into its innermost recesses and now made complaint there for ever. A
lonely listener on a stormy night might hear strange voices uplifted--the
sobbing of children; songs of feasters; cries of labouring women; young
men's voices shouting in triumph; the long intonations of prayer; the
death-rattle.
And as Reddin and Hazel--surely the most strangely met of all couples
that had owned and been owned by this house--went through the darkening
rooms, they were not, it seemed, alone. A sense of witnesses perturbed
Hazel, a discomfort as from surveillance. A soft rumour, as of a mute
but moving multitude crept along the passages in their wake.
'Be there ghosses?' she whispered. 'I'd liefer sleep under the blue
roof-tree. I feel like corn under a millstone in this dark place.'
'It's said to be haunted, but I don't believe it.' He glanced over his
shoulder.
'Who by?'
'People that failed. Weaklings. Men that lost their money or their
women, and wives and daughters of the family that died young.'
'What for did they fail?'
'Silly ideas. Not knowing what they wanted.'
'Dear now! Foxy and me, we dunna allus know what we want.'
'You want me.'
'Maybe.'
'If you don't, you must learn to. And if you don't know what you want,
you'll come to smash.'
'But when I do know, folk take it off me.'
A long, mournful cry came down the passages.
Hazel screamed.
'Be that the lady as no gold comforts?' she whispered.
'No, you silly girl. It's a barn owl. But she's said to cry in the
coppy on Midsummer night.'
'Things crying out as have been a long while hurted,' murmured Hazel.
'To-night's Midsummer. Was she little, like me?'
'I don't know.'
'Did summat strong catch a holt of her?'
'A man did.' He laughed.
'Did she go young?'
'Yes, she died at nineteen.'
'And so'll it be with me!' she cried suddenly. 'So'll it be with me!
Dark and strong in the full of life.'
She flung herself on a faded blue settee and wept.
The impression of companionship--of whisperers breaking out, hands
stretched forth, the steady magnetism of countless unseen eyes--was so
strong that Hazel could not bear it, and even Reddin was glad to follow
her back to the inhabited part of the house.
'This is the bedroom,' Reddin said, opening the door of a big room
papered in faded grey, and full of the smell of bygone days. The great
four-poster, draped with a chintz of roses on a black ground, awed her.
Reddin opened a chest and took out the green dress. He watched her with
an air of proud proprietorship as she put it on. She went down the
shallow stairs like a leaf loosened from the tree.
Vessons, a beer-bottle in either hand, was so aghast at the pale
apparition that he nearly dropped them.
'I thought it was a ghost,' he said--'a comfortless ghost.'
'So I be comfortless,' Hazel said to Reddin when Vessons had retired.
Her voice had a sound of tears in it, like a dark tide broken on rocks.
'And when I was comfortless at the Mountain Ed'ard was used to read
"Comfort ye, my people," as nice as nice.'
'Are you fonder of Marston than of me?'
'I dunno.'
She sat down sadly in the home that was not home. She remembered the
half-finished collar she was knitting for Foxy. Also, a custom had
grown up that she sang hymns in the evenings to Edward's accompaniment.
She missed these things. She missed the irritations of that peaceful
life--Mrs. Marston's way of clearing her throat softly and
pertinaciously; Martha's habit of tidying all her little treasures into
the kitchen grate; Edward's absurd determination that she should have
clean nails; the ever-renewed argument, 'Foxy's a bad dog!' 'She inna.
She's a good fox.' 'In my sight she's a bad dog.'
Now she had floated free of all this. She was out of haven on the high
seas. She felt very lonely--as the dead might feel, free of the
shackles of life. It was certainly pleasant to wear the green dress.
But she missed her little duties--clearing away the supper, Martha
being gone; fetching the candles (Mrs. Marston always shook her head at
the third, not from economy, but from vicarious philoprogenitiveness).
Edward's reading of the Book last thing had made her restless; she had
thought it a bother. Now it seemed a privilege. To most girls, God's
Little Mountain would have been purgatory. To her it was wonderful. It
was the first time she had shared in the peculiar beauty of home, the
daily sacrament of love. Edward never forgot to kiss them both when he
came in; brought them flowers; was always carpentering at surprises for
them. These last never turned out very well, his technical skill not
keeping pace with his enthusiasm; but Hazel was not critical.
She, in common with the other little creatures, sat down in his shadow
as in a city of refuge. Mrs. Marston shared this feeling. She always
fell asleep at once when Edward was at home in the evening, ceasing to
invent alarms about black men creeping through the kitchen window, Foxy
getting into the larder, and a great tempest from the Lord blowing them
all to perdition because Lord's Day was not kept as it used to be.
Into the parlour, at his own good time, Vessons brought the supper, and
dumped it on the large round table, veneered like mahogany, heavily
Victorian and ornamented with brass feet. There were bread and cheese,
bacon, and a good deal of beer.
Hazel saw nothing amiss with it, for though she had begun to grow
accustomed to respectable middle-class meals, life at the Callow still
seemed the homelier. Reddin looked up from cutting bacon to say with
unwonted thoughtfulness, 'Like some tea and toast?' He felt that toast
was a triumph of imagination. He was rather dubious about asking
Vessons to do it, so instead he repeated, 'You'll have some tea and
toast?'
Vessons went into the kitchen and shut the door. They waited for some
time, and Hazel, who, whatever her fate, her faults and sorrows, was
always as hungry as Foxy, looked longingly at Reddin's cheese and beer.
Physical exhaustion brought tears of appetite to her eyes. At last
Reddin went to the kitchen door.
'Where's that tea?' he asked.
'Tay?'
'Yes, you fool!'
'I know nothing about no tay.'
'I said you were to make some.'
'Not to me.'
'And toast.'
'I've douted the fire.'
He had just done so.
'Look here, my man, there's a missus at Undern now. You please her or
go. She tells me what she wants. I tell you. You do it.'
'I'll 'ave no woman over me!' said Vessons sullenly. 'Never will I!
Never a missus did I take, not for all the pleasures of bed and
board--no, ne'er a one I ever took. Maiden I am to my dying day.'
The coupling of the ideas of Vessons and maidenhood was so funny that
Reddin burst out laughing and forgot his anger.
'Now, make that tea, Vessons.'
'She unna be here long?' asked Vessons craftily.
'Yes, for good.'
Hazel heard him.
'For good.' Did she want to be in this whispering house for good? Who
did she want to be with for good? Not Reddin. Edward? But he had not
the passion of the greenwood in him, the lust of the earth. He was not
of the tremulously ecstatic company of wild, hunted creatures. If
Reddin was definitely antagonistic, a hunter, Edward was neutral, a
looker-on. They were not her comrades. They did not live her life. She
had to live theirs. She wished she had never seen Reddin, never gone to
Hunter's Spinney. Edward's house was at least peaceful.
'And what,' she heard Vessons say, 'will yer lordship's Sally Virtue
say?'
She did not hear Reddin's reply; it was fierce and low. She wondered
who Sally Virtue was, but she was too tired to think much about it.
Afterwards Reddin had some whisky, and Vessons drank his health. Then
Reddin picked out 'It's a Fine Hunting Day' on the old piano, and sang
it in a rough tenor. Vessons joined in from the kitchen in a voice
quite free from any music, and the roaring chorus echoed through the
house.
'Eh, stop! I canna abide it!' cried Hazel; but they did not hear.
Vessons came and stood in the doorway with the teapot in one hand and
the expression of acute agony he always wore when singing.
'All trouble and care
Will be left far behind us at home!'
'Not for the little foxes!' cried Hazel, and she plucked the music from
the piano and ran past Vessons, knocking the teapot out of his hand.
She stuffed the music into the kitchen grate.
Vessons was petrified.
'Well,' he said, 'you've got the ways of wild-cats and spinsters the
world over.' This was an unwilling compliment. 'And I'll say this for
you, whatever else I canna say, you've got sperit enough for the eleven
thousand virgins!'
Reddin felt that the scene was hardly festive enough. He wondered that
he himself did not feel more jubilant; reaction had set in. He wished
that all should be gay as for a bridal, for he felt that this was a
bridal in all but the name.
But the old house, like a being lethargic after long revelry, clad in
torn and stained garments, seemed unready for mirth. Andrew was highly
antagonistic. The hound had bristled, growling, at the intruder; and
Hazel--?
He looked at Hazel under half-closed lids. Did she know what had
happened? He thought not. Perhaps intuition whispered to her. Certainly
she avoided his eyes. She sat drinking the tea, which Reddin, with much
exertion of authority, at last caused to appear. She was wan, and her
face looked very thin. Panic lingered about her eyes, at the corner of
her lips.
He realized that she was afraid of him--his look, his touch.
Immediately he wanted to exercise his power. He went across and took
her chin in his hand, laying the other on her shoulder.
Her eyelids trembled.
'What'n you after, mauling me?' she said.
Then a passion of tears shook her.
'Oh, I want Ed'ard and the old lady! I want to go back to the Mountain,
I do! Ed'ard'll be looking me up and down the country.'
'Good Lord, so he will!' said Reddin, 'and rousing the whole place. You
must write a letter, Hazel, to say you're safe and happy, and he's not
to worry.'
'But I amna.'
Reddin frowned at the spontaneity of this. But he made her write the
note.
'Saddle the mare, Vessons, and take this to the Mountain.'
'You dunna mind how much--' began Vessons. But Reddin cut him short.
'Get on,' he said, and Vessons knew by the tone that he had better.
'Push it under the parson's door, knock, and make yourself scarce,
Vessons,' Reddin ordered.
'You can go up to bed if you like, Hazel.'
Left alone, he walked up and down the room, puzzled and uneasy.
According to his idea, he had done Hazel the greatest honour a man can
pay to a woman. He could not see in what he had failed. He was
irritated with his conscience for being troublesome. He had, as he put
it, merely satisfied a need of his nature--a need simple and urgent as
eating and drinking. He did not understand that in failing to find out
whether it was also a need of Hazel's nature--and in nothing else at
all--lay his unpardonable crime.
That he had offended against the views of his Church did not worry him.
For, like many churchmen, he had the happy gift of keeping profession
and practice, dogma and deeds, in airtight compartments. How many of
the most fervent churchmen are not, or have not been at some period of
their lives, exactly like Reddin?
'Of course, I've been a bit of a beast in the past,' he thought. 'But
that's done with. Besides, she doesn't know.'
He reflected again.
'I suppose I was a bit rough, but she ought to have forgotten that by
now. I do wish she wouldn't keep on so about the parson.'
He ran upstairs.
'Sorry I was rough, Hazel,' he said shamefacedly.
Hazel stood at the open window in a nightdress that she had found in
one of the chests--a frail, yellowish thing with many frills of
cobwebby lace made and worn by some dead woman on a forgotten bridal.
It was symbolic of Hazel's whole life that she came in this way both to
Undern and the Mountain--as bare of woman's regalia as a winter leaf is
of substance.
Hazel was speaking when he entered. He stood still, astonished and
suspicious.
'Who are you talking to?' he asked.
She turned. 'Him above,' she said. 'I was saying the prayer Ed'ard
learnt me. I said it three times, it being Midsummer, and ghosses going
to-and-agen and the death-pack about. He'll be bound to hearken to
Ed'ard's prayer.'
She looked small and pitiful standing in the flickering candlelight.
She turned again to the window, and Reddin went downstairs, quite
overwhelmed and abashed.
The house seemed eerier than ever, full of subdued complaints and
whisperings. The faces of the roses round the window were woe-begone in
the lamplight. The rustle of the leaves had an expostulatory sound. The
wan poplars down the meadow looked accusing. It was almost as if the
freemasonry of the green world was up in arms for Hazel. She had its
blood in her veins, and shared with it the silent worship of freedom
and beauty, and had now been plunged so deeply into human life that she
was lost to it. It was as if every incarnation of perfection that she
had seen in leaf and flower (and she had seen much, though remaining
without expression of it), every moment of deep comradeship with
earthy, dewy things, every illumined memory of colours and lights that
her vivid mind had gathered and cherished in its rage of love and
rapture, had come now, pacing disdainfully through this old haunt
of crude humanity; passing up the stairs; standing about the great
four-poster where so many Reddins had died and been born; gazing upon
this face that had known dreams (however childish) of their eternal
magic; grieving as the tree for the leaf that has fallen. They grieved,
but they did not forgive. For the spirits of beauty and magic are
(as the bondsman of colour knows and the bondsman of poetry) inimical
to the ordinary life and destiny of man. They break up homes. They lead
a thousand wanderers into the unknown. They brook no half service.
It is only the rarest exception when a man loves a woman and yet excels
in his art, and a woman must have an amazing genius if she is still a
poet after childbirth.
But though sometimes these proud spirits will tolerate, will even be
sworn companions of human love, it is only when it is a passion pure
and burning that they know it for a sister spirit. In the sexual
meeting of Hazel and Reddin there was nothing of this. Though it
brought out the best in Reddin, the best was so very poor. And Hazel
was merely passive.
So they stood and wept above her, and they foreswore her company for
ever. She might regard the primrose eye to eye, but she would receive
no dewy look of comprehension.
No lift of the heart would come with the lifting leaves, no pang of
mysterious pain with bird-song, star-set, dewfall. Even her love of
Foxy would become a groping thing, and not any longer would she know,
when her blind bird made its tentative music, all it meant and all it
dreamed. This very night she had forgotten to lean out and listen as of
old to the soft voices of the trees. She had said her prayer, and then
she had been so tired, and pains had shot through her, and her back had
ached, and she had cried herself to sleep.
'What for did I go to the Hunter's Spinney?' she asked herself. But the
answer was too deep for her, the traitorous impulse of her whole being
too mysterious. She could not answer her question.
Reddin, pacing the room downstairs, drinking whisky, and fuming at his
own compunction, at last grew tired of his silent house.
'Damn it! Why shouldn't I go up?' he said.
He opened Hazel's door.
'Look here,' he said; 'the house is mine, and so are you. I'm coming to
bed.' He was met by that most intimidating reply to all bluster--silence.
She was asleep; and all night long, while he snored, she tossed in her
sleep and moaned.