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Gone to Earth

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<h2 id="id02350" style="margin-top: 4em">Chapter 30</h2> As the horse trotted along the hard road, rabbits scuttled across in the momentary lamplight. Hazel tied her handkerchief round Edward's head. All the windows were dark in Alderslea, except one faint dormer where an old woman was dying. They began to climb the lane that led up to the Mountain. Cattle looked over hedges, breathing hard with curiosity. In an upland field a flock of horned sheep were racing to and fro through a gap in the hedge, coughing and stamping at intervals, and looking, as the moon rose, like fantastic devils working sorcery with their own shadows. The lamps dimmed in the moonlight and the world seemed to widen infinitely, like life at the coming of love. The country lay below like a vast white mere, and the hill sloped vaguely to a silver sky. Vessons walked up the batch to ease the cob, and Edward looked down at Hazel and murmured: 'My little child!' 'Dunna talk,' said Hazel quickly; 'it's bad for 'ee!' She was afraid to break the magical silence, afraid that the new peace that came with Marston's presence would vanish like the moon in driving cloud, and that she would feel the dragging chain that pulled her back to Reddin. Edward was silent, puzzling over the question, Why had not Hazel asked for his help? Reddin must have seen her at least several times, must have persecuted her. He grew very uneasy. He must ask Hazel. They drew up before the white-sentried graveyard. Vessons went up the path and knocked at the silent house. Then he threw handfuls of white spar off a grave at the windows. The Minorca cockerel crew reedily. 'That's unlucky,' said Hazel. Mrs. Marston put her head out, very sleepy, and asked who it was. 'The conquering 'ero!' said Vessons, as Edward and Hazel came up the path, deeply shadowed. He got into the trap and drove off. 'Well, Undern'll be summat like itself again now,' he thought. 'It was a deal more peaceable without her, naughty girl!' thought Mrs. Marston as she sadly and lethargically put on her clothes. 'Well, Edward!' she exclaimed, when she came down in her crimson shawl with the ball fringe, 'here's a to-do! A minister of grace with a pocket-handkerchief round his head coming to his house in the dead of night with a wild old man. What's happened? Oh, my dear, is it your arteries? We wondered where you were, Hazel Marston!' 'I'm very shivery, mother,' Edward said. 'Something hot and sweet!' She bustled off. They were alone for the first time. 'Hazel, why didn't you tell me about this man? It was not kind or right of you.' 'There was nought to tell.' She fidgeted. 'But he must have seen you several times.' 'I was near telling you, but I thought you'd be angered.' 'Angry! With you! Oh, to think of you in such danger!' 'What danger?' 'Of things that, thank God, you never dream of. He forged that letter, I suppose? Or did he frighten you into writing it?' 'Ah.' 'But why did you ever go?' 'He pulled me up on the horse and took me.' 'The man's a savage.' Hazel checked a hasty denial that was on her lips. 'What a pity you happened to meet him!' Edward said. 'Ah!' 'But why didn't you want to come at once when I came to fetch you? Were you so afraid of him as that?' 'Ah!' 'Well, it's over now. He won't show his face here again; we've done with him.' Hazel sighed. But whether it was her spiritual self sighing with relief at being with Edward, or her physical self longing for Reddin, she could not have said. 'Only you could come through such an experience unchanged, my sweet,' Edward said. 'I mun go to Foxy!' she cried desperately. 'Foxy wants me.' 'Foxy wants a good beating,' said Mrs. Marston benignly, looking mercifully over her spectacles. Her wrath was generally like the one drop of acid in a dell of honey, smothered in loving-kindness and embonpoint. When Hazel had gone, she said: 'You will send her away from here, of course?' Edward went out into the graveyard without a word. He sat on one of the coffin-shaped stones. 'God send me some quiet!' he said. Mrs. Marston came and draped her shawl round him. He got up, despairing of peace, and said he would go to bed. 'There's a good boy! So will I. You'll be as bright as ever in the morning.' Then she whispered: 'You won't keep her here?' 'Keep her! Who? Hazel? Of course Hazel will stay here.' 'It's hardly right.' 'Pleasant, you mean, mother. You never liked her. You want to be rid of her. But how you can so misjudge a beautiful soul I cannot think. I tell you she's as pure as a daisy. Why, she could not even bear, in her maidenly reserve, the idea of marriage. It is sheer blasphemy to say such things.' 'Blasphemy, my dear, is not a thing you can do against people. It is disagreeing with the Lord that is blasphemy.' 'I must ask you, anyway, never to mention Hazel's name to me until you can think of her differently.' When, after saying good night to Hazel and Foxy, Edward had gone to bed, Mrs. Marston shook her head. 'Edward,' she said, 'is not what he was.' She waited till Hazel came in. 'You're no wife for my son,' she said, 'you've sinned with another man.' 'I hanna done nought nor said nought; it's all other folk's doing and saying, so I dunna see as I've sinned. And I never could abear 'ee,' Hazel cried; 'I'd as lief you was dead as quick!' She rushed up to her room and flung herself on her bed sobbing. She felt dazed, like a child taken into a big toy-shop and told to choose quickly. Life had been too hasty with her. There were things, she knew, that she would have liked; but she had so far not had time to find out what they were. She wished she could tell Edward all about it. But how could she explain that strange inner power that had driven her to Hunter's Spinney? How could she make him understand that she did not want to go, and was yet obliged to go? She could not tell him that. Although she was furious with Reddin on his behalf, although she hated Reddin for the coarseness and cruelty in him, yet parting with him had hurt her. How could this be? She did not know. She only knew that as she lay in her little bed she wanted Reddin, his bodily presence, his kisses or his blows. He had betrayed her utterly, bringing to his aid forces he could not gauge or understand. His crime was that he had made of a woman who could not be his spiritual bride (since her spirit was unawakened, and his was to seek) his body's bride. All the divine paradoxes of sex—the mastery of the lover and his deep humility, his idealization of his bride and her absolute surrender—these he had dragged in the mud. So instead of the mysterious, transcendant illumination that passion brings to a woman, she had only confusion, darkness, and a sense of something dragging at the roots of her being in the darkness. Her eyes needed his eyes to stare them down. The bruises on her arms ached for his hard hands. Her very tears desired his roughness to set them flowing. 'Oh, Jack Reddin! Jack Reddin! You've put a spell on me!' she moaned. 'I want to be along of Ed'ard, and you've bound me to be along of you. I dunna like you, but I canna think of ought else!' She fought a hard battle that night. The compulsion to get up and go straight to Undern was so strong that it could only be compared to the pull of matter on matter. She tried to call up Edward's voice—quiet, tender, almost religious in its tone to her. But she could only hear Reddin's voice, forceful and dictatorial, saying, 'I'm master here!' And every nerve assented, in defiance of her wistful spirit, that he was master. That, when morning came, she was still at the Mountain showed an extraordinary power of resistance, and was simply owing to the fact that Reddin had, in what he called 'giving the parson a good hiding,' opened her eyes very completely to his innate callousness, and to his temperamental and traditional hostility to her creed of love and pity. Soon, in the mysterious woods, the owls turned home—mysterious as the woods—strong creatures driven on to the perpetual destruction of the defenceless, destroyed in their turn and blown down the wind—a few torn feathers. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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