Gone to Earth quotes

[Dedication] To him whose presence is home.

Small feckless clouds were hurried across the vast untroubled sky—shepherdless, futile, imponderable—and were torn to fragments on the fangs of the mountains, so ending their ephemeral adventures with nothing of their fugitive existence left but a few tears.

It was cold in the Callow—a spinney of silver birches and larches that topped a round hill. A purple mist hinted of buds in the tree-tops, and a fainter purple haunted the vistas between the silver and brown boles.

Only the crudeness of youth was here as yet, and not its triumph—only the sharp calyx-point, the pricking tip of the bud, like spears, and not the paten of the leaf, the chalice of the flower.

For as yet spring had no flight, no song, but went like a half-fledged bird, hopping tentatively through the undergrowth.

The bright springing mercury that carpeted the open spaces had only just hung out its pale flowers, and honeysuckle leaves were still tongues of green fire.

She was a rover, born for the artist's joy and sorrow, and her spirit found no relief for its emotions; for it was dumb.

To the linnet its flight, to the thrush its song; but she had neither flight nor song.

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.

She was a rover, born for the artist's joy and sorrow, and her spirit found no relief for its emotions; for it was dumb. To the linnet its flight, to the thrush its song; but she had neither flight nor song.

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.

for it was dumb. To the linnet its flight, to the thrush its song; but she had neither flight nor song. 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 cottage was very low, one-storied, and roofed with red corrugated iron. The three small windows had frames coloured with washing-blue and frills of crimson cotton within. There seemed scarcely room for even Hazel's small figure.

The house was little larger than a good pigsty, and only the trail of smoke from its squat chimney showed that humanity dwelt there.

Hazel gave Foxy her supper and put her to bed in the old washtub where she slept. Then she went into the cottage with an armful of logs from the wood heap. She threw them on the open fire.

She connected it also with her own mother's death. Hounds symbolized everything she hated, everything that was not young, wild and happy.

She identified herself with Foxy, and so with all things hunted and snared and destroyed.

Night, shadow, loud winds, winter—these were inimical; with these came the death pack, stealthy and untiring, following for ever the trail of the defenceless. Sunlight, soft airs, bright colours, kindness—these were beneficent havens to flee into.

All his means of livelihood were joys to him.

He had the art of perpetual happiness in this, that he could earn as much as he needed by doing the work he loved.

He played at flower shows and country dances, revivals and weddings. He sold his honey, and sometimes his bees.

'You ought to be as glad to take after one parent as another, if you were jutiful,' she said.

'I dunna want to take after anybody but myself.'

Hazel flushed indignantly.

'That he never will!' The fierce egoism of the consciously weak flamed up in her.

'I keep myself to myself,' she finished.

'If such things come to pass, mother,' Albert said, and his eyes looked suddenly vivid, so that Hazel clapped her hands and said, 'Yer lamps are lit! Yer lamps are lit!' and broke into peals of laughter.

At this point the argument ended, because Albert had to go back after tea to finish some work. As he stamped innumerable swans on the yielding material, he never doubted that his mother had also yielded.

He forgot that life had to be shaped with an axe till the chips fly.

As soon as he had gone, Mrs. Prowde shut the door on Hazel hastily, for fear the weather might bring relenting. She had other views for Albert.

She could see the golden light stream through its gates. She could hear the songs of joy—joy unattained and therefore immortal; she could see the bright figures of her dreams go to and fro. But heaven was shut.

The wind ran up and down the narrow streets like a lost dog, whimpering.

Hazel hurried on, for it was already twilight, and though she was not afraid of the Callow and the fields at night, she was afraid of the high roads. For the Callow was home, but the roads were the wide world.

The wind ran up and down the narrow streets like a lost dog, whimpering. Hazel hurried on, for it was already twilight, and though she was not afraid of the Callow and the fields at night, she was afraid of the high roads.

For the Callow was home, but the roads were the wide world.

On the fringe of the town she saw lights in the bedroom windows of prosperous houses.

She cried again at this. The pain of a blister, unnoticed in the morning journey, now made itself felt; she tried walking without her boots, but the ground was cold and hard.

The icy, driving wind leapt across the plain like a horseman with a long sword, and stealthily in its track came the melancholy whisper of snow.

When this began, Hazel was in the open, half-way to Wolfbatch. She sat down on the step of a stile, and sighed with relief at the ease it gave her foot.

It came on, and grew in volume and in meaning, became almost ominous in the frozen silence. Hazel rose and stood in the fitful moonlight. She felt that the approaching hoof-beats were for her.

They were the one sound in a dead world, and she nearly cried out at the thought of their dying in the distance.

They must not; they should not.

when soft leaves lipped each other consolingly; when blackbirds sang, fell in their effortless way from the green height to the green depth, and sang again—still, something that haunted the place set the heart fluttering.

No place is its own, and that which is most stained with old tumults has the strongest fascination.

So at Undern, whatever had happened there went on still; someone who had been there was there still. The lawns under the trees were mournful with old pain, or with vanished joys more pathetic than pain in their fleeting mimicry of immortality.

The clipped bushes and the twisted chimneys made inky shadows like steeples on the grass, and great trees of roses, beautiful in desolation, dripped with red and white and elbowed the guelder roses and the elders set with white patens.

Cherries fell in the orchard with the same rich monotony, the same fatality, as drops of blood.

They lay under the fungus-riven trees till the hens ate them, pecking gingerly and enjoyably at their lustrous beauty as the world does at a poet's heart.

The lines of his face were always etched in dirt, and he always had a bit of rag tied round some cut or blister.

He was a lonely soul, as he once said himself when unusually mellow at the Hunter's Arms; he was 'wi'out mother, wi'out father, wi'out descent.'

He preferred it to the ties of family. He liked living with Reddin because they never spoke except of necessity, and because he was quite indifferent to Reddin's welfare and Reddin to his.

Suddenly something happened in Hazel's brain. It was the realization of life in relation to self. It marks the end of childhood.

She no more saw herself throned above life and fate, as a child does.

She saw that she was a part of it all; she was mutable and mortal.

'I'm alost in this grand place.'

'Your hair's grander than anything in the place. And your eyes are like sherry.'

'Yes. Now you'd better change your dress again.'

That bird's ne'er slep without me. He'll miss me. He unna sing for anybody else.' He always asserted this, and the bird always belied it by singing to Reddin and any chance visitor. But Vessons continued to believe it.

There are some things that it is necessary to believe; doubt of them means despair.

Vessons was conscious that he was being generous.

The bird sat in preoccupied silence. He was probably thinking of the woods and seeded dandelions.

He was of the fellowship to which comfort means little and freedom much.

So was Hazel.

… 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.

Plovers wheeled and cried desolately, seeing the soft relentless snow between themselves and their green meadows, sad as those that see fate drawing thick veils between themselves and the meadows of their hope and joy.

Hazel fled in tears to the unrepentant and dignified Foxy.

Some of us find it hard enough to be dignified when we have done right; but Foxy could be dignified when she had done wrong, and the more wrong, the more dignity.

She was very bland, and there was a look of deep content—digestive content, a state bordering on the mystic's trance—in her affectionate topaz eyes.

'She took the chick,' he said. 'Now, would a tarrier do that—a well-trained tarrier? I says 'e would not'

'But it inna fair to make the same law for foxes and terriers.'

'I make what laws suit me,' said Abel. 'And what goes agen me—gets drownded.'

'But it inna all for you!' cried Hazel.

'The world wunna made in seven days only for Abel Woodus,' said Hazel daringly.

'You've come back very peart from Silverton,' said Abel reflectively— 'very peart, you 'ave. How many young fellers told you your 'air was abron this time? That fool Albert said so last time, and you were neither to hold nor to bind. Abron! Carrots!'

Hazel looked at the narrow box, and thought of the active, angular old man for whom it was now considered an ample house.

'It seems like the world's a big spring-trap, and us in it,' she said slowly.

Then she sprang up feverishly. 'Let's practise till we're as hoarse as a young rook!' she cried.

Then Abel threw away the hammer and began to harp madly, till the little shanty throbbed with the sound of the wires and the lament of the voices that rose and fell with artless cunning.

The cottage was like a tree full of thrushes.

After their twelve o'clock dinner, Abel cut holly for the wreaths, and Hazel began to make them. For the first time home seemed dull. She thought wistfully of the green silk dress and the supper in the old, stately room.

But Hazel's idea of music continued to be that of a bird.

She was a wild thing, and she sang according to instinct, and not by rule, though her good ear kept her notes true.

They set out early, for they had a good walk in front of them, and the April sun was hot. Hazel, under the pale green larch-trees, in her bright dress, with her crown of tawny hair, seemed to be an incarnation of the secret woods.

In front rose another curve covered with thick woods. To the right was the batch, down which a road—in winter a water-course—led into the valley. Behind the house God's Little Mountain sloped softly up and away apparently to its possessor.

Not the least of the mysteries of the place, and it was tense with mystery, was the Sunday congregation, which appeared to spring up miraculously from the rocks, woods and graves.

When the present minister, Edward Marston, came there with his mother he detested it; but after a time it insinuated itself into his heart, and gave a stronger character to his religion. He had always been naturally religious, taking on trust what he was taught;

When she went up to sing, his eyes dwelt on her.

She was the most vital thing he had ever seen.

The tendrils of burnished hair about her forehead and ears curled and shone with life; her eyes danced with life; her body was taut as a slim arrow ready to fly from life's bow.

the upward push of folded grass, and how the leaf feels in all its veins the cold rain; the ceremonial that passes yearly in the emerald temples of bud and calyx—we have walked those temples; we are the sacrifice on those altars.

And the future floats on the current of our blood like a secret argosy.

We hear the ideals of our descendants, like songs in the night, long before our firstborn is begotten.

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.

Her being was more full of echoes than the hearts of those that live further from the soil; and we are all as full of echoes as a rocky wood—echoes of the past, reflex echoes of the future, and echoes of the soil (these last reverberating through our filmiest dreams, like the sound of thunder in a blossoming orchard).

The echoes are in us of great voices long gone hence, the unknown cries of huge beasts on the mountains; the sullen aims of creatures in the slime; the love-call of the bittern.

Edward seized the moment, when there was a hush of surprise, to say grace, during which the invincible voice murmured:

'I've not received tartlets. I'm not thankful.'

'Mother,' Edward said, when the last unruly guest had disappeared in the wild April night, and Hazel's vivid presence and violet fragrance and young laughter had been taken by the darkness, 'I've asked Hazel Woodus to tea on Wednesday.'

'God made them,' Edward said simply.

'What for did He, if He didna like 'em when they were done?'

'We can't know all His reasons; He walks in darkness.'

'You speak as if the animals were a relation, dear.'

'So all animals be my brothers and sisters.'

'I know, dear. Quite right. All animals in conversation should be so. But any single animal in reality is only an animal, and can't be. Animals have no souls.'

Mrs. Marston looked at Hazel suspiciously over the rim of her glasses.

'My dear, don't have ideas,' she said.

'There, Hazel!' Edward smiled. 'What about your ideas in the spinney?'

… if He sees and hears the wavering, calamitous life of all creatures, and especially of the most beautiful and the most helpless, does He ever sigh and weep, as we do when we see a dead child or a moth's wing impaled on a thorn?

Our heavy burden is that we cannot know. For all our tears and prayers and weary dreaming, we cannot know.

Edward lay awake all night, and heard the first blackbird begin, tentatively, his clear song—a song to bring tears by its golden security of joy in a world where nothing is secure.

'I could look after her. She could blossom here like a violet in a quiet garden.'

Giving was never too early.

'And I am asking nothing—not for years. She shall live her own life, and be mother's daughter and my little sister for as long as she likes. My little sister!' he repeated aloud, as if some voice had contradicted him.

'You're very throaty, my dear, and you must take a level spoonful,' she said.

It is only in poetry that all the world understands a lover. In real life he is called throaty, and given a level spoonful of that nauseous compound known as common sense.

The garden at the Callow was full of old, sad-coloured flowers that had lost all names but the country ones. Chief among them, by reason of its hardihood, was a small plant called virgin's pride.

She went, hand to cheek, and frowning, off the potato patch. But she did not stop dancing.

Neither of them ever let such things as anger, business, or cleanliness interfere with their pleasures.

So Hazel danced on, though on a smaller area among the virgin's pride.

'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.

It would be an opportunity for using the multitude of things that were stored in every cupboard and never used, being thought too good for every day. Mrs. Marston was one of those that, having great possessions, go sadly all their days.

It is strange how generation after generation spends its fleeting years in this fetish-worship, never daring to make life beautiful by the daily use of things lovely, but for ever being busy about them.

Mrs. Marston's china glowed so, and was so stainless and uncracked that it seemed as if the lives of all the beautiful young women in her family must have been sacrificed in its behalf.

People often wondered how Mrs. Marston did it. No one ever saw her hurried or busy, yet the proofs of her industry were here.

She worked like the coral insect, in the dark, as it were, of instinct unlit by intellect, and, like the coral insect, she raised a monumental structure that hemmed her in.

They had to start early, driven by Edward's one substantial parishioner, who was principal judge, chief exhibitor, and organizer of the show. The exhibits must be there by ten; but Edward did not care in the least how many hours he spent there.

'Merciful God!' he thought, 'that such things should be!'

'And when I've heard things screaming and crying to be loosed, and them in traps, and never a one coming to 'em but me, it's come o'er me to won'er who'd loose me out if I was in a trap.'

'I dunna think so. He ne'er lets the others out.'

When Abel played, they remained stoical and silent, however madly or mournfully the harp cried.

They took good music as their right.

Then Hazel sang, gazing up at the purple ramparts of the hills that hung above the show-ground, and Edward's eyes were full of tears.

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!'

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. The canvas began to sway and billow in the wind of the dancing. Hazel felt that life was going on gaily without her—she shut away in the dark. Her feet began to dance.

Abel's harp beat upon them, and the soft thudding of feet on the turf, like sheep stamping, had grown in volume as the shyest were gradually drawn into the revelry.

A rainstorm, shaped like a pillar, walked slowly along the valley, skirting the base of the hills. It was like a grey god with folded arms and head aloof in the sky.

As it drew slowly nearer to the two who stood there like lovers and were not lovers, and as it lashed them across the eyes, it might have been fate.

He was angry and enthralled with Hazel, and the two emotions together were intoxicating.

Hazel was a flower in a gale when she danced, a slim poplar tremulous and swaying in the dawn, a young beech assenting to the wind's will.

Abel watched her with pride. She was turning out a credit to him, after all. It was astonishing.

'She was made for me.'

Both men saw her as what they wanted her to be, not as she was.

Many thoughts darkened Reddin's face as he stood there hour after hour in the cold May night.

He suddenly detested himself for the rosy pictures he had seen. He was utterly abased at the knowledge that he had really meant at one moment to enforce his rights, to lift the latch.

The selfish use of strength always seemed to him a most despicable thing.

From all points he surveyed his crisis with shame. He had made his decision; but he knew how easy it would have been to make the opposite one. How easy and how sweet!

She did not notice that the earnestness was unnatural; intense earnestness in household matters was her normal state.

The stately May morning, caparisoned in diamonds, full of the solemnity that perfect beauty wears, had come out of the purple mist and shamed the hovel where Hazel dressed for her bridal.

The cottage had sunk almost out of recognition in the foam of spring. Ancient lilacs stood about it and nodded purple-coroneted heads across its one chimney.

The cottage had sunk almost out of recognition in the foam of spring. Ancient lilacs stood about it and nodded purple-coroneted heads across its one chimney.

Their scent bore down all other scents like a strong personality and there was no choice but to think the thoughts of the lilac.

Two laburnums, forked and huge of trunk, fingered the roof with their lower branches and dripped gold on it. The upper branches sprang far into the blue.

Edward's colleague turned away, hand to mouth. He was obliged to contemplate the ivy outside the window while the altercation lasted.

'Whoever made you,' Hazel said, 'made Foxy. Where you can come, Foxy can come. You'm deacon, Foxy's bridesmaid!'

'That's heathen talk,' said Mr. James.

'He is love,' he said to himself.

The blue sky received his certainty, as it had received Hazel's questioning, in regardless silence.

Mrs. Marston observed Edward narrowly. Then she wrote in her hymn-book: 'Mem: Maltine; Edward.'

Before long Hazel brought out the bird-cage and hung it in the sun. And surprisingly, almost alarmingly, the ancient bird began to sing.

It was like hearing an old man sing a love-song.

The bird sat there, rough and purblind, and chanted youth with the magic of a master.

'You were meant for me. You're mine.'

'Folk allus says I'm theirs. I'd liefer be mine.'

'As you wouldn't marry me, Hazel, the least you can do is to come and talk to me sometimes.'

Edward tried to keep his attention on the prayers, and wished he was an Episcopalian, and had his prayers ready-made for him. He once mentioned this to his mother, who was much shocked.

She said home-made prayers and home-made bread and home-made jam were the best.

'As for manufactured jam, it's a sloven's refuge, and no more to be said. And prayer's the same. The best printed prayer's no better than bought mixed at four-pence the pound, and a bit gone from keeping.'

He had no qualms about Hazel. He was going, if Hazel would be sensible, to give her a life she would like, and things her instincts cried out for. Possibly he was right in imagining that her instincts were traitors to her personality.

For Nature—that sardonic mother—while she cries with the silver cadence of ten thousand nightingales, 'Take what you want, my children,' sees to it, in the dark of her sorcery-chamber, that her children want what she intends.

'Is it to your liking, Mr.—? I didn't quite catch your name,' said Mrs. Marston.

She looked up at him, quiescent, and smiled. Reddin eyed them for a moment, construing their attitudes in his own way.

To the unclean mind all frankness of word or action is suspect.

Then he turned sharply to Mrs. Marston.

Eating and sleeping; hearing grave, sedulous men read out of grave, sedulous book what we have heard a hundred times; besieging God (whom we end by imagining as a great ear) for material benefits; amassing property—these, the world says, are not waste of time.

But to drink at the stoup of beauty; to lift the leafy coverlet of earth and seek the cradled God (since here, if anywhere, He dwells), this in the world's eye is waste of time.

Oh, filthy, heavy-handed, blear-eyed world, when will you wash and be clean?

amassing property—these, the world says, are not waste of time. But to drink at the stoup of beauty; to lift the leafy coverlet of earth and seek the cradled God (since here, if anywhere, He dwells), this in the world's eye is waste of time.

Oh, filthy, heavy-handed, blear-eyed world, when will you wash and be clean?

Hazel came to a place where the white water crossed the road in a glittering shallow ford. Here she stayed, leaning on the wooden bridge, hearing small pebbles grinding on one another;

He turned home, accompanied by that most depressing companion—the sense of his own meanness.

He was unable to help knowing that the exercise of force against weakness is the most cur-like thing on earth.

Hazel was picking wimberry-flowers from their stalks. She sucked out the drop of honey from each flower like a bee. The blossoms were like small, rose-coloured tulips upside down, very magical and clear of colour.

The blossoms were like small, rose-coloured tulips upside down, very magical and clear of colour. The sky also was like a pink tulip veined and streaked with purple and saffron. In its depth, like the honey in the flowers, it held the low, golden sun.

Evening stood tiptoe upon the windy hill-top.

Hazel had eaten quite a quantity of honey, and had made an appreciable difference in the wimberry yield of half an acre, for she sipped hastily like a honey-fly.

Hazel had eaten quite a quantity of honey, and had made an appreciable difference in the wimberry yield of half an acre, for she sipped hastily like a honey-fly.

She was one of those who are full of impatience and haste through the sunny hours of day, clamorous for joy, since the night cometh.

Some prescience was with her. She snatched what her eyes desired, and wept with disappointment. For it is the calm natures, wrapt in timeless quiet, taking what comes and asking nothing, that really enjoy.

She was one of those who are full of impatience and haste through the sunny hours of day, clamorous for joy, since the night cometh. Some prescience was with her. She snatched what her eyes desired, and wept with disappointment.

For it is the calm natures, wrapt in timeless quiet, taking what comes and asking nothing, that really enjoy.

Hazel ate the fairy tulips as a pixie might, sharp-toothed, often consuming them whole.

Already he was stronger than her fugitive impulses, her wilding reserve. He was like a hand tearing open a triplet of sorrel leaves folded for rain, so strong in their impulse for self-protection that they could only be conquered by destruction.

She was afraid of him, yet days without him were saltless food.

There was a ruthlessness about him—the male instinct unaccompanied by humility, the patrician instinct unaccompanied by sympathy, the sportsman's instinct unaccompanied by pity. Whatever he began he would finish. What had he now begun?

The book directed that on a lonely hill, you must listen with your eyes shut for the fairy playing. If the undertaking was good you would hear, coming from very far away, a sound of harping.

Silver folk with golden harps, so the book said, keep on a purple hill somewhere beyond seeing, and there they play the moon up and the moon down.

And at sun-up they cry for those that have not heard them. If you hear them ever so faintly, you can go on to the end of your undertaking, and there'll be no tears in it.

She was stubbornly determined that the world bore her a grudge because she loved Foxy.

Perhaps she had discovered that the world has a sharp sword for the vulnerable, and that love is easily wounded.

'Don't call mother the old lady, dear.'

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.

She did not know that there could be a fervour of mind for mind, a clasp more frantic than that of the arms, a continuous psychic state more passionate than the great moments of physical passion.

If Edward had told her, she could not at this time have understood it. She would have gazed up at him trustingly out of her autumn-tinted eyes; she would have embodied all the spiritual glories of which he dreamed; and she would have understood nothing.

But Hazel felt no awe of them; she was too bounded and earthly a creature to be afraid of mystery.

It is the spirit that maketh afraid.

She was sure that they were not the Holy Sign, for she had seen them often. The Holy Sign was quite different.

It had a strange effect, standing there bathed in its own light in the black unbroken silence. It had a look of life—subdued, but passionate—as a spirit might have when it has just reintegrated its body out of the air. Hazel was terrified.

As a rule, she was never afraid in the woods and fields, but only in the haunts of men.

But from this, after one paralysed moment, she fled in panic. So she never knew that her second sign was only a rotten tree, shining with the phosphorescence of corruption.

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.'

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.

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.

'If you don't, you must learn to. And if you don't know what you want, you'll come to smash.'

'But when I do know, folk take it off me.'

A long, mournful cry came down the passages.

Mrs. Marston quailed a little.

There is nothing in the world so pure, so wonderful, so strong, as a young man's love can be—nothing so spiritual, nothing so brave.

Mrs. Marston, in her own words, 'shed tears.'

Edward could not do much more than defend himself, and Reddin's eyes shone triumphantly. Within, Hazel leaned against the glass faintly. It was as if evil and good, angels and devils, fought for her. And whichever won, she was equally forlorn.

She did not want heaven; she wanted earth and the green ways of earth.

'Oh, he'll kill Ed'ard!' she moaned.

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?

Hazel wished more and more that she had stayed at Undern.

She found a man's roughness preferable to women's velvet slaps, his most masterful demands less wearing than their silent criticism.

At Undern she could not call her physical self her own. Here, her heart and mind were attacked. She could not explain to Mrs. Marston that something had made her go. Mrs. Marston would simply have said 'Fiddlesticks!'

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.

'Like a jacksnipe fetches his mate out o' the grass,' she said.

'There's things harder than words; words be nought.'

'It was like as if there was a secret atween us, and I'd got to find it out. Dunna look so fierce, Ed'ard!'

'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!'

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.

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.

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.

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.

There is no other God. Your last suggestion (he looked at them with a smile of so peculiar a quality and such strange eyes that the old beeman afterwards said "It took you in the stomach") was worthy of you.

It's not enough that unselfish love can't save.

It's not enough (his face quivered horribly) that love is allowed to torture the loved one; but you must come with your foul minds and eyes to "view the corpse." And you know nothing—nothing.'

James hesitated.

Filthy thoughts were all very well, but it was awkward to get them into righteous words.

'Well, dear me! they're saying as there was an arrangement betwixt you and 'im—on the gel's account—(the old beeman tried to hush him)—and as cheques signed "John Reddin" went to your bank. Dear me!'

'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.

'The best!' said James, avoiding her eyes, as they all did. 'A hinfidel!'

'

The beauty of the world isn't for the beautiful people.

It's for beef-witted squires and blear-eyed people like yourselves—brutish, callous. Your God stinks like carrion, James.' Nunc Dimittis.