It was the night of the great storm. Undern rattled and groaned; its
fireless chimneys roared, and doors in unused passages banged so often
that the house took on an air of being inhabited. It seemed as if all
the people that had ever lived here had come back, ignoring in their
mournful dignity of eternal death these momentary wraiths of life.
Hazel had always been afraid of the place, and had sat up until Reddin
wanted to go to bed, so that she need not traverse the long passages
alone. But to-night she was afraid of Reddin also--not just a little
afraid, as she had always been, but full of unreasoning terror.
All things were confused in her mind, like the sounds that were in the
wind; Reddin's face, distorted with rage, as he advanced on Sally with
his arm raised; the howling of the baby; the sound of her bees
burning--going off like apple-pips. A scene came back to her from
the week before--it seemed years ago. They had gone into the
harvest-field after a hot, yellow day haunted by the sound of
cutting. Only a small square of orange wheat was left; the rest
of the field lay in the pale disorder of destruction. The two great
horses stood at one corner, darkly shining in the level light. The men
who had been tying sheaves stood about, some women and children were
coming over the stubble, and several dogs lay in the shadow. They all
seemed to be waiting. They were, in fact, waiting for Reddin, who was
always present at the dramatic finish of a field. Hazel knew what drama
was to be enacted; knew what the knobbled sticks were for; knew who
crouched in the tall, kindly wheat, palpitant, unaware that escape
was impossible.
'Plenty o' conies, sir!' called one of the men, whose face was a good
deal more brutal than that of his mongrel dog.
Hazel knew that the small square must be packed with rabbits, stark-eyed
and still as death, who had, with a fated foolishness, drawn in from the
outer portions of the field all day as the reaper went round.
'Jack,' she said, 'I hanna asked for a present ever.'
'No. You didn't want the bracelets, you silly girl.'
'I want one now.'
'You do, do you?'
'Ah! If you'll give it me, Jack, I'll do aught you want. What'd you
like best in the 'orld?'
He considered. He was feeling very fit and almost too much alive.
'Hunter's Spinney over again--up to when we got so gloomy.'
Hazel never wanted to think of that night, nor see the Spinney again.
There had been many times since, in the grey-tinted room, that had been
nearly as bad. But for evoking a shuddering, startled horror in her
mind, nothing came up to that Sunday night.
The reaper was moving again. Soon the rabbits would begin to bolt.
'I'll do ought and go anywhere if you'll do this as I want, Jack.'
'Well?'
'Call 'em off! Leave the last bit till morning. Let 'em creep away in
the dark and keep living a bit longer!'
'What nonsense!'
'Call 'em off, Jack! You can. You'm maister!'
'No.'
She sobbed. 'I be going, then.'
'No. You're to stay. You'll have to be cured of this damned silliness,
and learn to be sensible.'
While she struggled to wrench herself free, two rabbits bolted, and
hell broke loose. One would not have thought that the great calm
evening under its stooping sky, the peaceful, omniscient trees, the
grave, contented colours, could have tolerated such hideousness. The
women and children shrieked with the best, and Hazel stood alone--the
single representative, in a callous world, of God. Or was the world His
representative, and she something alien, a dissentient voice to be
silenced?
Such scenes, infinitely multiplied, bring that question to one's mind.
A rabbit had dashed across the field close to them, and Reddin,
relaxing his grip of her, had slashed at it with his stick. The look of
its eye, white and staring, as it fled past her with insensate speed,
came back to her now, and its convulsive roll over and recovery under
the blow; and then the next blow--She had fled from the place.
She thought again of what Sally had said, and a deep, smouldering rage
was in her at this that he had done to her--this torture to which,
according to Sally, he had quite consciously condemned her.
Now that she knew him better, his daily acts of callousness tormented
her. She would go. She was not wanted here. Sally had said so. There
had been letters from her aunt, from Reddin's vicar, from the eldest
Miss Clomber. In them all she was spoken of as the culprit for being at
Undern. Well, she did not want to be at Undern. She would go.
'Well, Hazel, child, what's the matter?' asked Reddin, looking up from
doing his quarterly accounts. 'Haven't you got a stocking to mend or a
hair-ribbon to make?'
'A many and a many things be the matter.'
'Come here, and I'll see if I can put 'em right.'
'Harkee!' she said suddenly. 'It's like as if the jeath-pack was i'
full cry down the wind.'
'Anyone would think you were off your head, Hazel. But come and tell me
about the things that are the matter.'
'It's you as makes 'em the matter.'
'Oh, well, sulk as long as you like.'
He returned angrily to his accounts. In the kitchen Vessons, very
spondaic, was singing 'The Three Jolly Huntsmen.'
In a few minutes Hazel rose and lit a candle. She looked, as she walked
to the door in her limp muslin dress, like the spectre of some unhappy
creature of the past.
'Where are you going?' asked Reddin.
'I thought to go to bed.'
'I'm not ready.'
'I'll go by my lonesome.'
'All right, sulk! It doesn't hurt me.'
But it did hurt him. He wanted her to be fond of him, to cling to him.
When at last he went up through the screaming house, he thought she was
asleep. She lay still in the big bed and made no sign.
Reddin was soon snoring, for accounts implied a strenuous intellectual
effort. He would have left them to Vessons, but Vessons always had to
notch sticks when he did them, and the manual labour ensuing on any
accounts running into pounds would have seriously interfered with his
other work. The cheese fair accounts usually took a long time. He could
be heard saying in a stupendous voice, 'One and one and one--' until
the chant ended in, 'Drat it! what _do_ 'em maken?'
So Reddin did the accounts and slept the sleep of the intellectual
worker afterwards.
Hazel looked out from the tent of the bed canopy into the dark,
creaking room and the darker, roaring night. She grew more afraid of
Reddin and Undern as the hours dragged on.
Reddin's presence tore to pieces the things she loved--delicate leafy
things--as if they were tissue-paper and he had walked through it. Her
pleasures seemed to mean nothing when he was with her and before his
loud laughter her wonderful faery-haunted days shrivelled. All she knew
was that, now she lived at Undern, she never went out in the green dawn
or came home wreathed in pansy and wild snapdragon.
Reddin had imposed a deeper change on her than the change from
maid to wife. He had robbed her of a thing frailer and rarer than
maidenhood--the sacramental love of Nature. It is only the fairest,
the highest and fullest matings that do not rob the soul of this,
even when it is an old tried joy. He had wronged her as deeply as
one human being can wrong another. His theft was cruel as that of
one who destroys a man's God. And the strange part of it was that
never, as long as he lived, would he know that he had done so, or
even guess that there had been any treasure to rifle. He would
probably, as an old man, long past desire, repent of the physical
part of the affair. Yet this was so much the lesser of the two.
Indeed, if he had been able to win her love, it would have been,
not wrong-doing, but righteousness. That a woman should, in the
evolution of life, cease to be a virgin and become a mother is a
thing so natural and so purely physical as hardly to need comment;
but that the immortal part of her should be robbed, that she should
cease to be part of an entity in a world where personality is the only
rare and precious thing--this is tragic.
Reddin could not help his over-virility, nor could he help having the
insensitive nature that could enjoy the physical side of sex without
the spiritual; probably he could not help being the kind of man that
supplies the most rabid imperialists, reactionaries, materialists. (He
always spoke of the heathen Chinee, lower orders, beastly foreigners,
mad fanatics, and silly sentimentalists, these last being those who
showed any kind of mercy.) It seemed that he could not help seeing
nothing outside his own narrow views.
But it did seem a pity that he never tried to alter in the least. It
did seem a pity that, after so many centuries, so many matings and
births, all his emblazoned and crested ancestors should have produced
merely--Reddin, a person exactly like themselves.
* * * * *
Rain rustled on the window and the wind roared in the elms. The trees
round Undern Pool stooped and swung in the attitude of mowers. Hazel
knew that the Mountain would be even wilder to-night. Yet the Mountain
shone in paradisic colours--her little garden; her knitting; the quiet
Sundays; the nightly prayers; above all, Edward's presence, in the aura
of which no harm could come--for all these things she passionately
longed.
They were not home as the wild was, but they were a haven. They were
not ecstasy, but they were peace.
In her revulsion from Reddin and her terror of Undern, she forgot
everything except the sense of protection that Edward gave her. She
forgot Mrs. Marston's silent, crushing criticism and Martha's rude
righteousness. She forgot that she had sinned against the Mountain so
deeply that the old life could never return.
She remembered it as on the night of her wedding--the primroses, red
and white and lilac; the soothing smell of the clean sheets, that made
her feel religious; the reassuring tick of the wall clock; Mrs.
Marston's sliding tread; Foxy and the rabbit, the blackbird, and the
one-eyed cat.
She struck a match softly and crept across the room to the old mahogany
tallboy. From beneath a drawerful of clothes she took out Edward's
letter. She read it slowly, for she was, as Abel said, no scholar.
Edward wanted her, that was quite clear. Comfort flowed from the
half-dozen lines.
The ethics of the thing held no place in her mind.
She was not made for the comforts or the duties of social life,
and it was not in her-nor would it have been, however she had been
educated--to consider what effect her actions might have on the race.
Humanity did not interest her.
The ever-circling wheels of birth, mating, death, so all-absorbing to
most women, were nothing to her. Freedom, green ways, childlike
pleasures of ferny, mossy discoveries, the absence of hunger or pain,
and the presence of Foxy and other salvage of her great pity--these
were the great realities. She had a deeper fear than most people of
death and any kind of violence or pain for herself or her following.
Her idea of God had always been shadowy, but it now took shape as a
kind of omnipotent Edward.
When she had read the letter, she went to the window. A tortured dawn
crept up the sky. Vast black clouds, shaped like anvils for some
terrific smithy-work, were ranged round the horizon, and, later, the
east glowed like a forge. The gale had not abated, but was rising in a
series of gusts, each one a blizzard. Hazel was not afraid of it, or of
the shrieking woods. The wind had always been her playmate. The wide
plain that lay before the Undern windows was shrouded in rain--not
falling, but driving. Willows, comely in the evening with the pale
gold of autumn, had been stripped in a moment like prisoners of a
savage conqueror for sacrifice. The air was full of leaves, whirling,
boiling, as in a cauldron. From every field and covert, from the lone
hill-tracts behind the house, from garden and orchard, came the wail
of the vanquished.
Even as she watched, one of the elms by the pool fell with a grinding
crash. Reddin stirred in his sleep and muttered restlessly. She waited,
frozen with suspense, until he was quiet again.
She could hear the hound baying, terrified at the noise of the tree.
She dressed hurriedly, crept downstairs and went out by the back way,
leaving the house, with its watchful windows, its ancient quiet which
was not peace, and the grey, flapping curtains of the rain closed in
behind her.
She found a little shelter in the deep lanes, but when she came to the
woods leading up to the Mountain the wind was reaping them like corn.
Larches lay like spellicans one on another. Some leant against those
that were yet standing, and in the tops of these last there was a
roaring like an incoming tide on rocks. Crackings and groanings,
sudden crashes, loud reports like gun-fire, were all about her as
she climbed--a tiny figure in chaos.
When she came to the graveyard, havoc was there also. Several crosses
had fallen, and were smashed; the laburnum-tree, rich with grey
seed-vessels, lay prone, and in its fall it had carried half the
tomb away with it, so that it yawned darkly, but not as a grave from
which one has risen from the dead. A headstone lay in the path, and
the text, 'In sure and certain hope of the resurrection,' was half
obliterated.
Hazel crept into the porch of the chapel to shelter, utterly exhausted.
She went to sleep, and was awakened by the breakfast bell. She went to
the front door and knocked.