It was the Friday after Hazel's coming, and Reddin was away, much
against his will, at a horse fair. He was quite surprised at the hurt
it gave him to be away from Hazel. So far he had never been, in the
smallest sense, any woman's lover. He had taken what he wanted of them
in a kind of animal semi-consciousness that amounted to a stark
innocence. Virility, he felt, was not of his seeking. There it was, and
it must be satisfied. Now he was annoyed to find that he felt guilty
when he remembered these women, and that he wanted Hazel, not, as with
them, occasionally, but all the time. He had been accustomed to say at
farmers' dinners, after indulging pretty freely:
'Oh, damn it! what d'you want with women between sun-up and sun-down?'
His coarseness had been received with laughter and reproof. Now he felt
that the reproof was juster than the laughter. It was curious, too, how
dull things became when Hazel was not there. Hazel had something fresh
to say about everything, and their quarrels were the most invigorating
moments he had known. Hazel was primitive enough to be feminine,
original enough to be boyish, and mysterious enough to be exciting. As
Vessons remarked to the drake, 'Oh, maister! you ne'er saw the like.
It's 'Azel, 'Azel, 'Azel the day long, and a good man spoilt as was
only part spoilt afore.'
Vessons and Hazel were spending the afternoon quarrelling about the
bees. When Reddin was away, Hazel put off her new dignity and was
Vessons' equal, because it was so dull to be anything else. Vessons
tolerated her presence for the sake of the subacid remarks it enabled
him to make, but chiefly because of the sardonic pleasure it gave him
to remember how soon his resolve would be put into action.
They were in the walled garden, and the bees were coming and going so
fast that they made, when Hazel half closed her eyes, long black
threads swaying between the hive doors and the distant fields and the
hill-top. They hung in cones on the low front walls, and lumped on the
hive-shelves in that apparently purposeless unrest that precedes
creation. But whether they intended, any of them, to create a new city
that day, none might know. Vessons said not. Hazel, always for
adventure, said they would, and said also that she could hear the queen
in one hive 'zeep-zeeping'--that strange music which, like the
maddeningly soft skirl of bagpipes or the fiddling of Ned Pugh, has
power to lure living creatures away from comfort and full hives into
the unknown--so darkly sweet.
'I canna hear it,' said Vessons obstinately.
'Go on! You're deaf, Mr. Vessons.'
'Deaf, am I? Maybe I hear as much as I want to, and more. Ah! that I
do!'
'Well, then, why canna you hear 'em? Listen at 'em now. D'you know the
noise I mean?'
'Do I know the noise?' Vessons' voice grew almost tearful with rage.
'Do I know? Me! As can make a thousand bees go through the neck of a
pint bottle each after other, like cows to the milking! Me! Maybe you'd
like to learn me beekeeping?' he continued with salty humility. 'Maybe
you would! Never will I!'
He began to tear off the tops of the hives.
'Oh, Mr. Vessons, dunna be so cross!' Hazel was afraid there would be
another scene like Monday's. 'You take 'em off very neat,' she added,
with a pathetic attempt to be tactful--'as neat as my dad.'
'I'd have you know,' said Vessons, 'as I take 'em off neater--ah! a
deal neater. Bees and cows and yew-tree swans,' he went on
reflectively, 'I can manage better than any married man. For what he
puts into matrimony I put into my work. Now I ask you'--he fixed his
eyes on her with the expression of a fanatic--'I ask you, was there
ever a beekeeper or a general or a sea-captain as was anything to boast
of, being married? Never! Marriage kills the mind! Why's bees clever?
Why's the skip allus full of honey at summer's end? Because they're all
old maids!'
'The queen inna. They all come from her.'
Vessons glared for a moment; then, realizing defeat, turned on his heel
and went to feed the calves. He had an ingenious way of getting the
calves in. He had no dog; it was one of his dreams to have one. But he
managed very well. First he opened the calfskit door; then he loosed
the pigs; then he fetched a bucket and went to the field where the
calves were, followed by a turbulent, squealing, ferocious crowd of
pigs. He walked round the calves, and the calves fled homewards, far
more afraid of the pigs than of a dog. This piece of farm economy
pleased Vessons, and, peace being restored, they laid tea amicably.
When Reddin came home to a pleasant scent of toast and the sight of
Hazel's shining braids of hair, new brushed and piled high on her head,
he felt very well pleased with himself. He stretched in the red
armchair and flung an arm round her. His hard blue eyes, his hard
mouth, smiled; he felt that he could make a success of marriage, though
the parson (as he called Edward) could not. Women, he reflected, were
quite easy to manage. 'Just show them who's master straight off, and
all's well.' Here was Hazel, radiant, soft, submissive, all the rough
prickly husk gone since Sunday. Why had he behaved so strangely in the
Spinney?
Well, well, he must forget about that.
The hot tea ran very comfortably down his throat; the toast was
pleasantly resistant to his strong teeth. He felt satisfied with life.
Later on, no doubt, Hazel would have a child. That, too, would be a
good thing. Two possessions are better than one, and he could well
afford children. It never occurred to him to wonder whether Hazel would
like it, or to be sorry for the pain in store for her. He felt very
unselfish as he thought, 'When she can't go about, I'll sit with her
now and again.' It really was a good deal for him to say. He had never
taken the slightest notice of Sally Haggard at such times.
'Got something for you,' he said, pulling at his pocket.
'Oh! It's an urchin!' cried Hazel delightedly.
Reddin began bruising and pulling at its spines with his gloved hands.
'Dunna!' cried Hazel.
Reddin pulled and wrenched until at last the hedgehog screamed--a thin,
piercing wail, most ghastly and pitiful and old, ancient as the cry of
the death's-head moth, that faint ghostly shriek as of a tortured
witch. Centuries of pain were in it, the age-long terror of weakness
bound and helpless beneath the knife, and that something vindictive and
terrifying that looks up at the hunter from the eyes of trapped animals
and sends the cuckoo fleeing in panic before the onset of little birds.
Hazel knew the sound well. It was the watchword of the little children
of despair, the password of the freemasonry to which she belonged.
Before the cry had ceased to horrify the quiet room, she had flung
herself at Reddin, a pattern of womanly obedience no longer, but a
desperate creature fighting in that most intoxicating of all crusades,
the succouring of weakness.
On Reddin's head, a moment ago so smooth, on his face, a moment ago so
bland, rained the blows of Hazel's hard little fists. Her blows were by
no means so negligible as most women's, for her hands were muscular and
strong from digging and climbing, and in her heart was the root of pity
which nerves the most trembling hands to do mighty deeds.
'What the devil!' spluttered Reddin. 'Here, stop it, you little vixen!'
He caught one of her hands, but the other was too quick for him.
'Give over tormenting of it, then!'
The hedgehog rolled on the floor, and the foxhound came and sniffed it.
Reddin had her other hand now.
'What d'you mean by it?' he asked, very angry, and tingling about the
ears.
'Leave it be! It's done you no harm. Lookee! The hound-dog!' she cried.
'Drive him off!'
'I'm going to have some fun seeing the dog kill it.'
Hazel went quite white.
'You shanna! Not till I'm jead,' she said. 'It's come to me to be took
care of, and took care of it shall be.' She reached a foot out and
kicked the hound.
Reddin's mood changed. He burst out laughing.
'You're a sight more amusing than hedgehogs,' he said; 'the beast can
go free, for all I care.'
He pulled her on to his knee and kissed her.
'Send the hound-dog out, then.'
When the hound had gone, resentfully, the hedgehog--a sphinx-like,
protestant ball--enjoyed the peace, and Hazel became again (as Reddin
thought) quite the right sort of girl to live with.
During the uproar they had not heard wheels in the drive, so they were
startled by Vessons' intrigue insertion of himself into a small opening
of the door, his firm shutting of it as if in face of a beleaguering
host, and his stentorian whisper:
'Ere's Clombers now!' as if to say, 'When you let a woman in you never
know what'll become of it.'
'Tell 'em I'm ill--dead!' said his master. 'Tell 'em I'm in the
bath--anything, only send them away!'
They heard Vessons recitative.
'The master's very sorry, mum, but he's got the colic too bad to see
you. It's heave, curse, heave, curse, till I pray for a good vomit!'
The Clombers, urgent upon his track, shouldered past and strode in.
'What the devil do they want?' muttered Reddin. He rose sulkily.
'I hear,' said the eldest Miss Clomber, who had read Bordello and was
very clever, 'that young Lochinvar has taken to himself a bride.'
This was quite up to her usual standard, for not only had it the true
literary flavour, but it was ironic, for she knew who Hazel was.
''Er?' queried Reddin, shaking hands in his rather race-course manner.
'Introduce me, Mr. Reddin!' simpered Amelia Clomber. It was painful
when she simpered; her mouth was made for sterner uses.
They surveyed Hazel, who shrank from their gaze. Something in their
eyes made her feel as if they were her judges, and as if they knew all
about Hunter's Spinney.
They looked at her with detestation. They thought it was detestation
for a sinner. Really, it was for the woman who had, in a few weeks
after meeting him, found favour in Reddin's eyes, and attained that
defeat which, to women even so desiccated as the Clombers, is the one
desired victory.
They had come, as they told each other before and after their visit, to
snatch a brand from the burning. What was in the heart of each--the
frantic desire to be mistress of Undern--they did not mention.
Miss Clomber had taken exception to Amelia's tight dress. For Amelia
had a figure, and Miss Clomber had not. She always flushed at the text,
'We have a little sister, and she hath no breasts.'
Amelia was aware of her advantage as she engaged Reddin in
conversation. He fell in with the arrangement, for he detested her
sister, who always prefaced every remark with 'Have you read--?'
As he never read anything, he thought she was making fun of him.
'And what,' asked Miss Clomber of Hazel, lowering her lids like blinds,
'was your maiden name?'
'Woodus.'
'Where were you married?'
'The Mountain.'
'Shawly there's no charch there?'
'Ah! Ed'ard's church.'
'Edward?'
'Ah! He's minister.'
'You mean the chapel. So that's your persuasion. Now Mr. Reddin is such
a sta'nch Charchman.'
Reddin looked exceedingly discomfited.
'And when did this happy event take place?'
A cat with a mouse was nothing to Miss Clomber with a sinner.
At this point Reddin saw, as he put it, what she was driving at. He was
very sleepy, having been out all day and eaten a large tea, and he
never combated a physical desire. So he cut across a remark of Amelia's
to the effect that marriage with the _right_ woman so added to a
man's comfort, and said:
'I'm not married if that's what you mean.'
'Then who--' said Miss Clomber, feeling that she had him now.
'My keep,' he said baldly. He thought they would go at that. But they
sat tight. They had, as Miss Clomber said afterwards, a soul to save.
They both realized how pleasant might be the earthly lot of one engaged
in this heavenly occupation.
'Hah! You call a spade a spade, Mr. Reddin,' said Miss Clomber, with a
frosty glance at Hazel; 'you are not, as our dear Browning has it,
"mealy mouthed".'
'In the breast of a true woman,' said Amelia authoritatively, as a
fishmonger might speak of fish, 'is no room for blame.'
'True woman be damned!'
Miss Clomber saw that for to-day the cause was lost.
At this point Miss Amelia uttered a piercing yell. The hedgehog,
encouraged by being left to itself, and by the slight dusk that had
begun to gather in the northerly rooms of Undern--where night came
early--had begun to creep about. Surreptitiously guided by Hazel's
foot, it had crept under Amelia's skirt and laid its cold inquiring
head on her ankle, thinly clad for conquest.
Hazel went off into peals of laughter, and Miss Amelia hated her more
than before.
Vessons, in the kitchen, shook his head.
'I never heerd the like of the noise there's been since that gel come.
Never did I!' he said.
'Leave him!' said Miss Clomber to Hazel on the doorstep. She was going
to add 'for my sake,' but substituted 'his.' 'You are causing him to
sin,' she added.
'Be I?' Hazel felt that she was always causing something wrong. Then
she sighed. 'I canna leave 'im.'
'Why not?'
'He wunna let me.'
With that phrase, all unconsciously, she took a most ample revenge on
the Clombers; for it rang in their ears all night, and they knew it was
true.