Mary Gladys Meredith Webb

“ So with all life the shadow lingers—incurious, mute, yet in the end victorious, whelming all. As Hazel sat there her own shadow lay darkly behind her, growing larger than herself as the sun slipped lower.
Bleatings and lowings, the evening caw of the rooks ascended to her; a horse neighed, aggressively male. From some distance came the loud, crude voice of a man singing. He sang, not in worship, not for the sake of memory or melody or love, but for the same reason that people sing so loudly in church—in the urgent need of expending superabundant vitality. ”

“ It was neither of those things; it was nothing that Edward could have understood at that time, though later he did. It was the grief of rainy forests, and the moan of stormy water; the muffled complaint of driven leaves; the keening—wild and universal—of life for the perishing matter that it inhabits.
Hazel expressed things that she knew nothing of, as a blackbird does. For, though she was young and fresh, she had her origin in the old, dark heart of earth, full of innumerable agonies, and in that heart she dwelt, and ever would, singing from its gloom as a bird sings in a yew-tree. ”

“ You'm stray and lose yourself, certain sure!' said a girl's voice, chidingly motherly. 'And if you'm alost, I'm alost; so come you whome. The sun's undering, and there's bones for supper!'
With that she took to her heels, the little fox after her, racing down the Callow in the cold level light till they came to the Woodus's cottage.
Hazel Woodus, to whom the fox belonged, had always lived at the Callow. There her mother, a Welsh gipsy, had born her in bitter rebellion, hating marriage and a settled life and Abel Woodus as a wild cat hates a cage. ”

“ Ed'ard! Mr. Ed'ard! Nineteen six! Nineteen nine! Jam!'
'What for's Martha cursing?' asked Hazel.
Edward, looking round, saw his mother's face in the doorway, dismayed, surprised, wounded. He jumped out and ran up the path.
'Oh, mother! How could I?' he said miserably.
Mrs. Marston looked up; her mouth, that had fallen in a little, trembling pitifully, and her eyes smarting with the thick, painful tears of age.
'It wasn't you, my dear,' she said; 'you never forget; it was—the young woman.'
One's god must at all hazards go clear of blame. ”

“ Yet the tongueless thrush is a thrush still, and has golden music in its heart. The caged linnet may sit moping, but her soul knows the dip and rise of flight on an everlasting May morning.
All the things she felt and could not say, all the stored honey, the black hatred, the wistful homesickness for the unfenced wild—all that other women would have put into their prayers, she gave to Hazel. The whole force of her wayward heart flowed into the softly beating heart of her baby. It was as if she passionately flung the life she did not value into the arms of her child. ”

“ Miss Clomber, outraged and furious, strode away.
Hazel was again left to the hills. The taciturnity of winter was upon them still, and in the sky beyond was the cynical aloofness that comes with frost after sunset.
She turned from them to the lighted tent. The golden glow was like some bright creature imprisoned. Abel had prorogued an interminable argument with the old man with the elf-locks, and now began thrumming inside the tent.
Young men and women converged upon it at the sound of the music, as flies flock to the osier blossom. They went in, as the blessed to Paradise. ”

“ It was settled that they were to go on the day before the flower-show, and Hazel was to stay the night. It would be the last night but one before the wedding.
Meanwhile, the bark-stripping continued, and fate went on leading Jack Reddin's horse in every direction but the right one. Edward went to Hunter's Spinney every day. He began to find a new world among the budding hyacinths on the soft leafy soil, breaking up on every side with the push of eager lives coming through, and full of those elusive, stimulating scents that only spring knows. ”

“ Hazel, quite intoxicated with excitement, danced between the slender boles till her hair fell down and the long plait swung against her shoulder.
'If folks came by, maybe they'd think I was a fairy!' she cried.
'Dunna kick about so!' said Abel, emerging from his abstraction. 'It inna decent, now you're an 'ooman growd.'
'I'm not an 'ooman growd!' cried Hazel shrilly. 'I dunna want to be, and I won't never be.'
The pine-tops bent in the wind like attentive heads, as gods, sitting stately above, might nod thoughtfully over a human destiny. ”

“ Hazel and Reddin crept from window to window, silent, watching his movements. Undern grew ghostlier than ever, seeming, as the shots rang out startlingly loud in the quiet, like a moribund creature electrified by blows.
'He'd liefer it was me than the birds!' said Hazel. 'Wheresoever I go, folk kill things. What for do they?'
'Things must be killed.'
'It seems like the earth's all bloody,' said Hazel. 'And it's allus the little small uns. There! He's got a jenny-wren. Oh, dearie me! it's like I've killed 'em; it's all along of me coming to Undern.'
'Hush!' said Reddin sharply. ”

“ Hazel heard him.
'For good.' Did she want to be in this whispering house for good? Who did she want to be with for good? Not Reddin. Edward? But he had not the passion of the greenwood in him, the lust of the earth. He was not of the tremulously ecstatic company of wild, hunted creatures. If Reddin was definitely antagonistic, a hunter, Edward was neutral, a looker-on. They were not her comrades. They did not live her life. She had to live theirs. She wished she had never seen Reddin, never gone to Hunter's Spinney. Edward's house was at least peaceful. ”

“ Almost she wished that Reddin had awakened.
But she soon forgot everything in delight; for the snow shone, the long slots of the rabbits and hares, the birds' tracks in orderly rows, the deep footprints of sheep, all made her laugh by their vagaries, for they ran in loops and in circles, and appeared like the crazy steps of a sleep-walker to those who had not the key of their activity. Hazel's own doings were like that; everyone's doings are like it, if one sees the doings without the motive. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Marston.'
Edward was so startled at this unhesitating frankness that he said nothing. But he silently buried several sweet hopes that had been pushing up like folded hyacinths for a week. The old madness was upon him, but it was a larger, more spiritual madness than Reddin's, as the sky is larger and more ethereal than the clouds that obscure it. He was always accustomed to think more of giving than receiving, so now he concentrated himself on what he could do for Hazel. He felt that her beauty would be an ample return for anything he could do as her husband to make her happy. ”

“ Marston.'
'Edward.'
'Ed'ard.'
Abel came round the house.
'You can come and see the bees, if you've a mind,' he said forgivingly. In his angers and his joys he was like a child. He was, in fact, what he looked—a barbaric child, prematurely aged. He was aged and had lines on his face because he enjoyed life so much, for joy bites as deep as sickness or grief or any other physical strain. Hazel would age soon, for she lived in an intenser world than most people, as if she saw everything through magnifying glass and coloured glass.
Edward went to the bees as he would have gone to the dogs—sadly. ”

“ The Master was a big fleshy man with white eyelashes and little pig's eyes that might conceal a soul—or might not. Miss Amelia Clomber admired him, and had just ridden up to say, 'A good field. Everybody's here.' Then she saw Reddin in the distance, and waited for him to come up. She was flushed and breathless and quite silent—an extraordinary thing for her. He certainly was looking his best, with the new zest and youth that Hazel had given him heightening the blue of his eyes and giving an added hauteur of masculinity to his bearing. ”

“ Vessons,' Reddin ordered.
'You can go up to bed if you like, Hazel.'
Left alone, he walked up and down the room, puzzled and uneasy.
According to his idea, he had done Hazel the greatest honour a man can pay to a woman. He could not see in what he had failed. He was irritated with his conscience for being troublesome. He had, as he put it, merely satisfied a need of his nature—a need simple and urgent as eating and drinking. He did not understand that in failing to find out whether it was also a need of Hazel's nature—and in nothing else at all—lay his unpardonable crime. ”

“ When I've done with them we'll go away, far away from hell.'
'I dunna mind 'em,' said Hazel. 'What for should I, my soul?'
Then she saw how dank and livid Edward's face had become, and the anguished rage of the lover against what had hurt her darling flamed up in her.
'Curse you!' she said, letting her eyes, dark-rimmed and large with tears, dwell on each man in turn. 'Curse you for tormenting my Ed'ard, as is the best man in all the country—and you'm nought, nought at all!'
The everlasting puzzle, why the paltry and the low should have power to torment greatness, was brooding over her mind. ”

“ Her voice rang out over the listening pastures, and the sheep looked up in a contemplative, ancient way like old ladies at a concert with their knitting. Hazel had fastened two foxgloves round her head in a wreath, and as she went their deep and darkly spotted bells shook above her, and she walked, like a jester in a grieving world, crowned with madness.
Suddenly a shout rang across the hill and silenced her and the woodlarks. She saw against the full-blown flower of the west—black on scarlet—Reddin on his tall black horse, galloping towards her. Clouds were coming up for night. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We cannot love that in which is nothing of ourselves, and there was no white fire of spiritual exaltation in Hazel. The nearest she approached to that was in her adoration of sensuous beauty, a green flame of passionless devotion to loveliness as seen in inanimate things. But that there should be anything between a man and a woman except an obvious affection, a fraternal sort of thing, or an uncomfortable excitement such as she felt with Reddin, was quite beyond her ideas. ”

“ Foxy barked sharply, urgently alive in the stronghold of the dead, and Hazel went to explain why she could not come. They held a long conversation, Hazel whispering. Foxy eloquent of eye. Foxy had a marked personality. Dignity never failed her, and she could be hilarious, loving, or clamorous for food without losing a jot of it. She was possessed of herself; the wild was her kingdom. If she was in a kennel—so her expression led you to understand—she was there incognito and of her own choice. Hazel, sitting at Edward's table, had the same look. ”

“ It is only those that have suffered moderately that speak of prayer as the sufferer's refuge. By that you know them. Those that have been tortured remember that the worst part of the torture was the breaking of the prayer in their hands, piercing, and not upholding.
Edward knew, kneeling there with his eyes shut, how Hazel's hair would flow sweetly over the pillow; how her warm arm would feel about his neck; how wildly sweet it would be, in some dark hour, to allay dream-fears and hush her to sleep. ”

“ 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 had so deep a kinship with the trees, so intuitive a sympathy with leaf and flower, that it seemed as if the blood in her veins was not slow-moving human blood, but volatile sap. She was of a race that will come in the far future, when we shall have outgrown our egoism—the brainless egoism of a little boy pulling off flies' wings. We shall attain philosophic detachment and emotional sympathy. We have even now far outgrown the age when a great genius like Shakespeare could be so clumsy in the interpretation of other than human life. ”

“ A very old man, smooth-faced, and wondering as a baby, came, leaning on his stick, and stood before Hazel, gazing into her mouth with the steadfast curiosity of a dog at a gramophone. If she moved, he moved, absorbed, his jaw dropped with interest. Hazel did not notice him. She was free on the migratory wings of music. She did not see Vessons looking across the crowd with dismay, nor know that he edged away, muttering, 'That gel agen! Never will I!'
Edward was glad when the singing and collection were over, and he could take Hazel into the shilling tent, where sat the elite, and give her tea. ”

“ 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? ”

“ But Hazel did not mind that, though her boots let in the water, as she minded the atmosphere of gloom at old Samson's blind house. She would never, as Abel always did, 'view the corpse,' and this was always taken as an insult. So she waited in the road, half snow and half water, and thought with regret of Undern and its great fire of logs, and the green rich dress, and Reddin with his force and virility, loud voice, and strong teeth. He was so very much alive in a world where old men would keep dying. ”