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Gone to Earth

<h2 id="id02789" style="margin-top: 4em">Chapter 35</h2> Martha met them on the doorstep, crying, hiccoughing, and enraged. 'Why, Martha!' Edward looked at her in astonishment. It is usually the supers, and not the principals, that raise lamentation in the midst of tragedy—'why, Martha, have you lost someone dear to you?' He knew all about that loss. 'I've lost nought, sir; thank God my good name's my own, and not gone like some folk's; but I'm bound to give notice, sir, not having fault to find, being as good a master as ever stepped. But seeing the missus is going—' 'The missus?' 'Ah. The mother as God give you, sir, the very next time the trailer goes by, and the letter wrote and all. And when she goes, I go. For I've kep' myself respectable, and I'll serve no light woman, nor yet live in a house give over to sin.' Edward saw Martha in a new light, as he now saw all things. 'What a filthy mind you have, Martha!' he said in a strange, weary voice. 'The minds of all respectable people are obscene. You are a bad woman!' But Martha, setting up a shriek, had fled from the house. She told her brother that the master was mad, bewitched. She never entered the house again. Edward found his mother in the kitchen. 'Mother, you are not really going?' 'Yes, Edward, unless'—a flicker of hope lit her eyes—'unless you have sent her away.' 'Let me explain, mother. It is not as it seems in the world's eyes.' 'She is an adulteress. And you—oh, Edward, I thought you were a good man, like your father! Not even the common decency to wait till the other man's child is born. Why, the merest ploughman would do that!' If any face could have expressed despair, torture and horror, Edward's face did now. He looked at her for a long while, until she said: 'Don't fix your eyes so, Edward! What are you looking at?' 'The world. So that is what you think of me?' 'What else can I think? Why do you say "The world" so strangely?' 'The world!' he said again. 'A place of black mud and spawning creatures. No soul, no God, no grace. Nothing but lust and foul breath and evil thoughts.' 'I will not hear such talk. I will keep my room till I go.' Mrs. Marston rose and went upstairs. She would not have his arm. And though for the next two days he waited on her with his old tenderness, she barely spoke, and there was between them an estrangement wider than death. She prayed for him night and day, but not as one that had much hope. Meanwhile, Hazel managed the house. She put all her worship of Edward into it, all her passion of tenderness. And she, who had hitherto spoilt all the food she touched, now cooked almost with genius. She found an apron of Martha's and washed it; she read Mrs. Marston's receipts till her head ached; she walked over God's Little Mountain each day to buy dainties. When she asked Edward for money, he gave her the keys of his desk. Four times a day appetizing meals went up to Mrs. Marston, and were brought down again barely touched. Hazel ate them, for the urgent necessity of coming maternity was on her, and she would not waste Edward's money. Four times a day Edward's favourite dishes were set in the parlour by a bright hearth. Edward, as soon as Hazel had returned to the kitchen, threw them into the fire. It was Hazel who packed Mrs. Marston's boxes while the old lady slept, and made up the fire in her room in the middle of the night. Then, closing her own door, she would fling herself on her bed in passionate weeping as she thought what might have been if, when Edward had said, 'To-night is my bridal,' she had had a different reply to make. She knew that nothing except what she had said would have made any impression on Edward; she knew he would not have listened to her. She was glad to know this. The momentary fear of him was gone. All was right that he said and did. The whole love of her being was his now. He had filled the place of nature and joy and childish pleasures. She was not meant for human love. But through her grief she loved better than those that were meant for it. All the sweet instincts of love and wifehood; the beauty of passion; the pride of surrender; the forgetfulness of self that creates self; the crying of the spirit from its delicate marble minaret to the flesh in its grassy covert, and the wistful, ascending answer of flesh to spirit—all these were hers. And as she lay and wept, and remembered how many a time Edward had stood on her threshold and hastily, though gently, shut her door upon her, she realized what Edward meant to her, and what he was. Then she would rise and stand at her window, fingered and shaken by the autumn winds, and look up at the hard-eyed stars. 'If there's anybody there,' she would say, 'please let the time go quickly till the baby comes, and let Ed'ard have his bridal like he said, and see his little uns running up and down the batch.' And, looking round the room at all the signs of his love, she would suddenly find unbearable the innocent stare of the buttercups and daisies on the walls, and would bury her face, flushed red with fluttering possibilities of unearthly rapture. Then she would sleep and dream that once more Edward stood upon the threshold and kissed her and turned to his cold room; but she—she had made a noble fire in her little grate; and the room was full of primroses, red and white and lilac; and the wall-clock chimed instead of striking—an intoxicating fairy chime; and there were clear sheets as of old. She forgot her shyness; she forgot to be afraid of his criticism; she caught his hands. He turned. And at the marvel of his face she woke, trembling and happy. Mrs. Marston went without any farewell to Hazel. Edward carried her box down the quarry and helped her into the trailer. He stood and watched it bump away round the corner, Mrs. Marston sitting, as she had done on that bright May morning, majestic in her grape-trimmed hat and the mantle with the bugles. Her face and her attitude expressed the deep though unformulated conviction that God was 'not what He was.' Then he turned and went home, numb, without vitality or hope. A new Hazel met him on the threshold, no longer timorous, deprecating, awkward, but gravely and sweetly maternal. She led him in. Tea was laid with the meticulous reverence of a sacrament. 'Now draw your stockinged foot along the floor!' Hazel commanded. At this remembrance of his mother and at Hazel's careful love, he broke down and wept, his face in her lap. 'Now see!' she whispered. 'She'll come back, Ed'ard, when the anger's overpast.' 'The anger of good people is never overpast, Hazel.' 'See, I'll write her a letter, Ed'ard, and I'll say I'm a wicked girl, and she's to teach me better ways. She'll come like Foxy for bones, Ed'ard.' Comfort stole into Edward's heart. 'And see, my dear, I'll send his baby to him, and maybe, after—' She stumbled into silence. 'What, Hazel?' 'Maybe, Ed'ard, after—a long and long while after—' She began to cry, covering her face. 'Oh, what for canna you see, my soul,' she whispered, 'as I love you true?' Edward looked into her eyes, and he did see. Strangely as an old forgotten tale, there came to him the frail hope of the possibility of joy. And with it some faith, storm-tossed and faint, but still living, in Hazel's ultimate beauty and truth. He did not know this could be. He only knew it was so. He did not know how it was that she, whom all reviled, was pure and shining to him again, while the world grovelled in slime. But so it was. 'Harkee, Ed'ard!' she said; 'I'm agoing to mother you till she comes back. And some day, when you've bin so kind as to forgive me, maybe I unna be mother to you, but—anything you want me to be. And, maybe, there'll be a—a—bridal for you yet, my soul, and your little uns running down the batch.' 'Yes, maybe. But don't let's talk of such things yet, not for many years. They are so vile.' She was cut to the heart, but she only said softly: 'Not for many years, my soul! I'm mothering of you now!' 'That's what I want,' he said, and fell asleep while she stroked' his tired head. Peace settled again on the chapel and parsonage, and a muted happiness. Summer weather had returned for a fleeting interval. The wild bees were busy again revelling in the late flowers, but taking their pleasure sadly; for the flowers were pale and rain-washed, and the scent and the honey were fled. 'Eh! I wish I could bring 'em all in afore the frosses, and keep 'em the winter long,' Hazel said. 'But they've seen good times. It inna so bad for folks to die as have seen good times. Afore I'm old and like to die, I want to see good times, Ed'ard—good times along with you.' 'What sort of good times?' 'Oh, going out of a May morning, you and me—and maybe Foxy on a string—and looking nests, and us with cobwebs on our boots, and setting primmyroses, red and white and laylac, in my garden as you made, and then me cooking the breakfast, and you making the toast and burning it along of reading some hard book, and maybe us laughing over a bit o' fun. And then off to read to somebody ill, and me waiting outside, pleased as a queen, and hearkening to your voice coming quiet through the window. And picking laylac, evenings, and going after musherooms at the turn of the year. Them days be coming, Ed'ard, inna they? I dunna mind ought if I know they're coming.' 'Yes, perhaps they are,' he said, smiling a little at her simple hopes, and even beginning himself to see the possibility of a future for them. Two days went by in this calm way, for no one came near them, and while they were alone there was peace. They did not go beyond the garden, except when Hazel went to the shop. Edward did not go with her; he felt sensitive about meeting anyone. In the evenings, by the parlour fire, Edward read aloud to her. He did not, however, read prayers, and she wondered in silence at the change. She felt a great peace in these evenings, with Foxy on the hearthrug at her feet. They neither of them looked either backward or forward, but lived in the moated present, that turreted heaven whose defences so soon fall. On the third morning Reddin came. Hazel had gone to the shop, and, coming back, she had lingered a little to watch with a sense of old comradeship the swallows wheeling in hundreds about the quarry cliffs. Their breasts were dazzling in the clear hot air. They had no thought for her, being so filled with a rage of joy, dashing up and down the smooth white sides of the quarry, multiplied by their blue shadows. They would nestle in crevices, like bits of thistledown caught in a grass-tuft, and would there sun themselves and chirrup. So many hundreds were there, and their shadows so multiplied them, that they seemed less like birds than like some dream of a bird heaven—essential birdhood. They were so quick with life, so warm, with their red-splashed breasts and blue flashing bodies; they wove such a tireless, mazy pattern, like bobbins weaving invisible lace, that they put winter far off. They comforted Hazel inexpressibly. Yet to-morrow they would, in all likelihood, be gone, not even a shadow left. Hazel wished she could catch them as they swept by, their shining breasts brushing the grasses. She knew they were sacred birds, 'birds with forkit tails and fire on 'em.' If sacredness is in proportion to vitality and joy, Hazel and the swallow tribe should be red-letter saints. It was while she was away that Reddin knocked at the house door, and Edward answered the knock. Something in his look made Reddin speak fast. He had triumphed at their last encounter through muscle. Edward triumphed in this through despair. 'I felt I ought to come, Marston. As things are, the straight thing is for me to marry her—if you'll divorce her.' He looked at Edward questioningly, but Edward stared beyond him with a strange expression of utter nausea, hopeless loss, and loathing of all created things. Reddin went on: 'Her place is with me. It's my duty to look after her now, as it's my child she's going to have.' He could not resist this jibe of the virile to the non-virile. Besides, if he could make Marston angry, perhaps he would fight again, and fighting was so much better than this uncomfortable silence. 'I should naturally pay all expenses and maintenance wherever she was; I never mind paying for my pleasures.' Edward's eyes smouldered, but he said nothing. 'Of course, she can't expect either of us to see to her in her position' (Edward clenched his hands), 'but I intend to do the decent thing. I'm never hard on a woman in that state; some fellows would be; but I've got a memory, hang it, and I'm grateful for favours received.' Why he should be at his very worst for Edward's benefit was not apparent, except that complete silence acts on the nerves, and nervousness brings out the real man. 'Well, think it over,' he concluded. 'You seem to be planning a sermon to-day. I shall be round here on Saturday—the meet's in the woods. I'll call then, and you can decide meanwhile. I don't mind whether she comes or not—at present. Later on, if I can't get on without her, I can no doubt persuade her to come again. But if you say divorce, I'll fetch her at once, and marry her as soon as you've got your decree. Damn you, Marston! Can't you speak? Could I say fairer than that, man to man?' Edward looked at him, and it was such a look that his face and ears reddened. 'You are not a man,' Edward said, with complete detachment; 'you are nothing but sex organs.' He went in and shut the door. Edward said nothing to Hazel of Reddin's visit. He forgot it himself when she came home; it slipped into the weary welter of life as he saw it now—all life, that is, other than Hazel's. Brutality, lust, cruelty—these summed up the world of good people and bad people. He rather preferred the bad ones; their eyes were less awful, and had less of the serpent's glitter and more of the monkey's leer. He did not shrink from Reddin as he shrank from his mother. Hazel came running to him through the graves. She had a little parcel specially tied up, and she wrote on it in the parlour with laborious love. It was tobacco. She had decided that he ought to smoke, because it would soothe him. They sat hand in hand by the fire that evening, and she told him of her aunt Prowde, and how she first came to know Reddin, and how he threatened to tell Edward of her first coming to Undern. She was astonished at the way his face lit up. 'Why didn't you tell me that before, dear? It alters everything. You did not go of your own choice at first, then. He had you in a snare.' 'Seems as if the world's nought but a snare, Ed'ard.' 'Yes. But I'm going to spend my life keeping you safe, little Hazel. I hope it won't make you unhappy to leave the Mountain?' 'Leave the Mountain?' 'Yes. I must give up the ministry.' 'Why ever?' 'Because I know now that Jesus Christ was not God, but only a brave, loving heart hunted to death.' 'Be that why you dunna say prayers now?' 'Yes. I can't take money for telling lies.' 'What'll you do if you inna a minister, Ed'ard?' 'Break stones—anything.' Hazel clapped her hands. 'Can I get a little 'ammer and break, too?' 'Some day. It will only be poor fare and a poor cottage, Hazel.' 'It'll be like heaven!' 'We shall be together, little one.' 'What for be your eyes wet, Ed'ard?' 'At the sweetness of knowing you didn't go of your own accord.' 'What for did you shiver?' 'At the dark power of our fellow-creatures set against us.' 'I inna feared of 'em now, Ed'ard. Maybe it'll come right, and you'll get all as you'd lief have.' 'I only want you.' 'And me you.' They both had happy dreams that night. Outside, the stars were fierce with frost. The world hardened. In the bitter still air and the greenish moonlight the chapel and parsonage took on an unreal look, as if they were built of wavering, vanishing material, and stood somewhere outside space on a pale, crumbling shore. Without, the dead slept, each alone, dreamless. Within, the lovers slept, each alone, but dreaming of a day when night should bring them home each to the other. As the moon set, the shadows of the gravestones lengthened grotesquely, creeping and creeping as if they would dominate the world. In the middle of the night Foxy awoke, and barked and whimpered in some dark terror, and would not be comforted. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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