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Gone to Earth

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<h2 id="id01818" style="margin-top: 4em">Chapter 24</h2> In the early morning of Midsummer Eve, Hazel wandered up the hill-slopes. There the sheep, golden, and gospel-like in the early light, fed on wet lawns pale and unsubstantial as gauze. She did not, as the more self-conscious creatures of civilization would have done, envy their peace in so many words. But she did say wistfully to a particularly ample and contented one, 'You'm pretty comfortable, binna you?' When she went in to breakfast she thought the same of Mrs. Marston. Afterwards they picked black currants, Mrs. Marston seated on a camp-stool and wearing her large mushroom hat, which always tilted slightly and made her look rakish. Whenever a blackbird dashed out of the grove of half-ripe red currants, scolding with demoniac vitality, she would look up and say, 'Naughty bird.' She picked with deliberation, and placed the currants in the basket with an air of benediction. The day was hot and splendid, a day to make the leaves limp and crack the flower-beds. But it was cool in the shadow of the mountain-ash that grew near the currants, and a breeze laden with wild thyme and moss fragrance played about the garden like an invisible child. At eleven Martha appeared with cake and milk, and Edward returned from old Solomon's bedside. Then they went on picking, while Edward read them snatches of 'Natural Law.' Hazel was soothed by the reading, to the sense of which she paid no heed. It mingled with the drone of the hot bees falling in and out of the big red peonies, the far-off sound of grass-cutting, the grave, measured soliloquy of a blackbird hidden in the flame-flowered chestnut. Hazel felt that she would like to go on picking currants for ever, growing more and more like Mrs. Marston every day, and at least becoming (possibly through sheer benignity) a grandmother. There seemed no place in her life for Reddin, no time for Hunter's Spinney. She thought, 'I wunna go. I'll stay along of Ed'ard, and no harm'll come to me.' But a peremptory voice said that she must go, and once more her soul became the passive battleground of strange emotions of which she had never even dreamed. While they fought there like creatures in the dark, Hazel, sitting in the aromatic shadow of the currants, fell fast asleep; and as Mrs. Marston could never bring herself to wake anyone, she slept until Martha rang the dinner-bell. So the peaceful, golden day wore on to green evening. It was a day that Hazel always remembered. When the shadows grew long and dew fell, and the daisies on the graves filled the house with their faint, innocent fragrance, and closed their pink-lined petals for the night, Hazel felt very miserable. This very night she was going to work the last charm—the charm of the bracken flower—and whoso she dreamed of with that flower beneath her pillow must be her lover. She felt traitorous to Edward in doing this. She and Edward were handfasted. How, then, could she have any lover but Edward? Why should she work the charm? She puzzled over this during prayers, but no answer came to her questioning. Life is a taciturn mother, and teaches not so much by instruction as by blows. Edward was reading the twenty-third Psalm, which always affected his mother to tears, and in reading which his voice was very tender, '… And lead thee forth beside the waters of comfort.' The room was full of a deep exaltation, a passion of trustfulness. 'I went along by the water,' Hazel thought, 'and watched the piefinches and the canbottlins flying about. And I thought it was the waters of comfort. Only Mr. Reddin came and frit the birds and made the water muddy.' She did not feel as sure as the others did of the waters of comfort. 'So beautiful, dear,' murmured Mrs. Marston, 'so like your poor dear father.' Edward's good night to Hazel was more curt than usual. She was looking so mysteriously lovely. Her stress of mind had given a touch of spirituality to her face, and there is nothing that stirs passion as spirituality does. She had on a print frock of a neat design reminiscent of old-fashioned china, and she had pinned a posy of daisies on her shoulder. For one second, as she held up her cheek to be kissed, standing on the threshold of her moonlit room, Edward hesitated. Then he abruptly turned and shut his door. His hour had struck. His hour had passed. Hazel stood in the window reading the charm. 'On Midsummer Eve, when it wants a little of midnight, spread your smock where the bracken grows. For this is the night of the flowering of the brake, that beareth a blue flower on the stroke of midnight. But it is withered afore morning. Come you again about the time of the first bird-call. If aught is in the smock, take it; it is the dust of the flower. Sleep above it, and he you dream of is your lover. This is a sure charm, and cannot be broke.' * * * * * She took a clean chemise from the drawer, and when the landing clock struck the half-hour she slipped out on to the hillside and laid it under a clump of bracken. As she stooped to set it smooth and straight, the moon swam out of cloud and flung her shadow, black and gigantic, up the hillside. Frightened, she ran home, raked the fire together, and made herself a cup of tea to keep her awake. Sipping it in the dim parlour, where familiar things looked eerie, she thought of Reddin and his strange doings since her wedding. 'Eh, but it ud anger Ed'ard sore if he came to know,' she thought. 'What for does Mr. Reddin come, when he can see I dunna want him?' A slow flush crept over neck and temples as she half guessed the answer. She waited in the dove-grey hour that precedes dawn—an hour pregnant with the future. It is full of hope; for what great deed may not be done, what ethereal idea caged in music or poetry or colour, what rare emotion struck out of pain in the coming day? It is full of grief; for how many beautiful things will be trampled, great dreams torn, sensitive spirits crucified in the time between dusk and dusk? For the death-pack hunts at all hours, light and dark; it is no pale phantom of dreams. It is made not of spirit hounds with fiery eyes—a ghastly 'Melody,' a grisly 'Music'—, but of our fellows, all that have strength without pity. Sometimes our kith and kin, our nearest intimates, are in the first flight; give a view-hallo as we slip hopefully under a covert; are in at the death. It is not the killing that gives horror to the death-pack so much as the lack of the impulse not to kill. One flicker of merciful intention amid relentless action would redeem it. For the world is founded and built up on death, and the reality of death is neither to be questioned nor feared. Death is a dark dream, but it is not a nightmare. It is mankind's lack of pity, mankind's fatal propensity for torture, that is the nightmare. When a man or woman, confronted by helpless terror, is without the impulse to save, the world becomes hell. It was this, dimly but passionately felt, that made Hazel shrink from Reddin. For unless Reddin was without this impulse to save, and had the mind of a fiend without pity, how could he in the mere pursuit of pleasure inflict wholly unnecessary torture, as in fox-hunting? She watched Venus shrink from a silver pool to a silver point. She was full of trouble and unrest. Would she dream of Reddin? Would she go to sleep at all? Mrs. Marston's armchair loomed in the gathering light, and she felt guilty again. The east quickened, as if someone had turned up a light there. She opened the window, and in rushed the inexpressible sweetness of dawn. The bush of syringa by the kitchen window swept in its whole fragrance, heady and sensuous. She took long breaths of it, and thought of Reddin's green dress, of the queer look in his eyes when he stared long at her. A curious passivity quite foreign to her came over her now at the thought of Reddin. What would he look like, what would he say, would he hold her roughly, if she went to Hunter's Spinney? An unwilling elation possessed her as she thought of it. It did not occur to her to wonder why Edward did not kiss her as Reddin did. She took him as much for granted as a child takes its parents. Suddenly the first bird called silverly, startling the dusk. It was a woodlark, and its song seemed even more vacillating than usual in the vast hush. At the first note all Hazel's thoughts of Reddin fled. It seemed that clarity, freshness, and music were bound up in her mind with Edward. She thought only of him as she ran up the hill over the minute starry carpet of mountain bedstraw. 'Maybe there'll be no flower, and then the charm's broke,' she thought hopefully. 'If the charm's broke, I canna dream, and I shanna go.' But when she came to the white garment lying wet and pale in the half-light she drew a sharp breath. There in the centre lay one minute blue petal. Its very smallness proved to her its magic. It was a faery flower. She took it up reverently and went home solemn as a child in church. When, with blue petal under her pillow, she lay down, she fell asleep in a moment. She dreamt of Reddin, for he had more control over her thoughts than Edward, who appealed to her emotions, while Reddin stirred her instincts. Waking at Martha's knock, she said to herself, with mingled heart-sickness and elation: 'The signs say go. I mun go. Foxy wants me to go.' She would not have believed that her third sign was no faery flower, but only a petal of blue milk-wort—little sister of the bracken—loosened by her own nervous hands the night before. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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