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Gone to Earth

<h2 id="id00946" style="margin-top: 4em">Chapter 12</h2> They went gallantly, if slowly, on through narrow ways, lit on either side by the breath-taking freshness of new hawthorn leaves. Primroses, wet and tall, crisply pink of stalk and huge of leaf, eyed them, as Madonnas might, from niches in the isles of grass and weed. Carts had to back into gates to let them go by, and when they came into the main road horses reared and had to be led past. Hazel found it all delightful. She liked, when the driver pulled up outside little wayside inns, to peer into the brown gloom where pewter pots and rows of china jugs shone, and from which, over newly washed floors of red tiles, landlords advanced with foaming mugs. Mrs. Marston strongly disapproved of these proceedings, but did not think it polite to expostulate, as she was receiving a favour. In Silverton Mrs. Marston lingered a long while before any shop where sacred pictures were displayed. The ones she looked at longest were those of that peculiarly seedy and emasculated type which modern religion seems to produce. Hazel, all in a fidget to go and buy her clothes, looked at them, and wondered what they had to do with her. There was one of an untidy woman sitting in a garden of lilies—evidently forced—talking to an anaemic-looking man with uncut hair and a phosphorescent head. Hazel did not know about phosphorus or haloes, but she remembered how she had gone into the kitchen one night in the dark and screamed at sight of a sheep's head on the table, shining with a strange greenish light. This picture reminded her of it. She hastily looked at the others. She liked the one with sheep in it best, only the artist had made them like bolsters, and given the shepherd saucer eyes. Then she came to one of the Crucifixion, a subject on which the artist had lavished all the slumbering instincts of torture that are in so many people. 'Oh! what a drodsome un! I dunna like this shop,' said Hazel tearfully. 'What'm they doing to 'im? Oh, they'm great beasts!' Perhaps she had seen in her dim and childish way the everlasting tyranny of the material over the abstract; of bluster over nerves; strength over beauty; States over individuals; churches over souls; and fox-hunting squires over the creatures they honour with their attention. 'What is it, my dear?' Mrs. Marston looked over her spectacles, and her eyes were like half moons peering over full moons. 'That there picture! They'm hurting Him so cruel. And Him fast and all.' 'Oh!' said Mrs. Marston wonderingly, 'that's nothing to get vexed about. Why, don't you know that's Jesus Christ dying for us?' 'Not for me!' flashed Hazel. 'My dear!' 'No, what for should He? There shall none die along of me, much less be tormented.' 'Needs be that one man die for the people,' quoted Mrs. Marston easily. 'Only through blood can sin be washed white.' 'Blood makes things raddled, not white; and if so be any's got to die; I'll die for myself.' The old gabled houses, dark and solemn with heavy carved oak, the smart plate-glass windows of the modern shops, the square dogmatic church towers and the pointed insinuating spires—all seemed to listen in surprise to this being who was not content to let another suffer for her. For civilization as it now stands is based solely on this one thing—vicarious suffering. From the central doctrine of its chief creed to the system of its trade; from the vivisection-table to the consumptive genius dying so that crowds of fat folk may get his soul in a cheap form, it is all built up on sacrifice of other creatures. 'What'd you say if Ed'ard died for yer?' queried Hazel crudely. 'My dear! How unseemly! In the street!' 'And what'd I do if Foxy died for me?' 'Well, well, Foxy's only an animal.' 'So're you and me animals!' said Hazel so loudly that poor Mrs. Marston flushed all over her gentle old face. 'So indecent!' she murmured. 'My dear,' she said, when she had steered Hazel past the shop, 'you want a nice cup of tea. And I do hope,' she went on softly, putting a great deal of cream in Hazel's cup as she would have put lubricating oil on a stiff sewing-machine—'I do hope, my dear, you'll become more Christian as time goes on.' 'If Foxy died along of me,' said Hazel stubbornly—for, although grateful for the festive meal, she could not let her basic rule of life slip—'if Foxy died along of me, I'd die too. I couldna do aught else.' 'Things are very different,' said Mrs. Marston, flustered, flushed and helpless—'very different from what they used to be.' 'What for are they, Mrs. Marston?' But that question Mrs. Marston was quite unable to answer. If she had known the answer—that the change was in herself, and that the world was not different, but still kept up its ancient war between love and respectability, beauty and mass—she would not have liked it, and so she would not have believed it. It was seven o'clock when they were put down, tired and laden with parcels, at the quarry half-way up God's Little Mountain. Edward had been there for more than an hour, tormented with fears for Hazel's safety, angry with himself for letting her go. All afternoon he had fidgeted, worried Martha with suggestions about tea, finally gone to the shop several miles away for some of Hazel's favourite cake, quite forgetting that he ought to be in the house breathing. It all resulted in a most beautiful tea, as Hazel thought when they had pushed and pulled Mrs. Marston home. What with the joy of staying the night and the wonder of her new clothes, Hazel was as radiant and talked so fast that Edward could do nothing but watch her. In her short life there had not been many moments of such rose and gold. It was the happiest hour of Edward's life also; for she looked to him as flowers to warm heaven, as winter birds to a fruited tree. As he watched her opening parcel after parcel with frank innocence and little bird-like cries of rapture, he knew the intolerable sweetness of bestowing delight on the beloved—a sweetness only equalled by the intolerable agony of seeing helpless and incurable pain on the loved face. 'And what's that one?' he asked, like a mother helping in a child's game. He pointed to a parcel which contained chemises and nightdresses. 'That,' said Mrs. Marston, frowning portentously at Hazel, who was tearing it open—'that is other useful garments.' 'What for canna I show 'em Ed'ard? I want to show all. The money was his'n.' It was a tribute to Edward's self-control that she was so entirely lacking in shyness towards him. 'My dear! A young man!' whispered Mrs. Marston. Suddenly, by some strange necromancy, there was conjured in Hazel's mind a picture of Reddin—flushed, hard-eyed, with an expression that aroused in her misgiving and even terror. So she had seen him just before she fled to Vessons. At the remembrance she flushed so deeply that Mrs. Marston congratulated herself on the fact that her daughter-in-law had some modesty and right feeling. If she had known who caused the flush, who it was that had awakened the love of pretty clothes which Edward was satisfying, she would have thought very different thoughts, and would have been utterly miserable. For her love for Edward was deep enough to make her wish him to have what he wanted, and not what she thought he ought to want, as long as he did not clash with her religion. For Edward to know it, though so early in his love for Hazel, would have meant a rocking of heaven and earth around him. Even she, with her childish egotism like a shell about her, realized that this was a thing that could not be. 'But it be all right,' she thought, as she curled up luxuriously in the strangely clean and comfortable bed, 'it'll be all right. Him above'll see as Mr. Reddin ne'er shows his face here; for the old lady said Him above looked after good folks, and Ed'ard's good. But I wish some un 'ud look after the bad uns,' she thought, looking across the room to the north where Undern lay. * * * * * 'My dear, wait a moment!' said Mrs. Marston to Edward downstairs, as he was lighting her candle. I have something to tell you. I fear you must brace yourself.' 'Well, mother?' Edward smiled. 'Hazel's not a Christian!' She spoke in a sepulchral whisper, and looked at him afterwards, as if to say, 'There, now, I have surprised you!' 'And how do you make that out, mother?' Edward found in his heart this fact, that it made no difference to his love whether Hazel were a Christian or not; this troubled him. 'No. She's not a Christian, my dear,' said Mrs. Marston in a kind of gasp; 'she refuses to be died for!' Upstairs, Hazel was saying her orisons at the window. 'If there's anybody there,' she murmured, staring out into the consuming darkness that had absorbed every colour, every form, except the looming outline of God's Little Mountain against a watery moon-rise—'if there's anybody there, I'd be obleeged if you'd give an eye to our Foxy, as is lonesome in tub. It dunna matter about me, being under Ed'ard's roof.' Hazel had never felt so like a child in its mother's lap. Her own mother had not made her feel so. She had been a vague, abstracted woman with an air of bepuzzlement and lostness. She looked so long out of the door—never shut, except when Abel insisted on it—that there was no time for Hazel. Only occasionally she would catch her by the shoulders and look into her eyes and tell her strange news of faery. But now she felt cared for as she looked round the low room with its chair-bed and little dressing-table hung with pink glazed calico. There was a text over the fireplace: '"Not a hair of thy head shall perish."' It seemed particularly reassuring to Hazel as she brushed her long shining coils before the hanging mirror. There was a bowl of double primroses—red, mauve and white—on the window-sill, and a card 'with Edward's love.' Flowers in a bedroom were something very new. To her, as to so many poor people, a bedroom was a stuffy place to crawl into at night and get out of as quickly as possible in the morning. 'Eh! it'll be grand to live here,' she thought drowsily, as she lay down in the cool clean sheets and heard the large clock on the wall of the landing ticking slumbrously in a measured activity that deepened the peace. She heard Mrs. Marston slide past in her soft slippers with her characteristic walk, rather like skating. Then Edward came up (evidently in stockinged feet, for he was only heralded by creakings). Hazel never dreamt that he had taken his shoes off for her sake. The moon, riding clear of cloud, flung the shadow of Edward's primroses on the bed—a large round posy like a Christmas-pudding with outstanding leaves and flowers clearly defined, all very black on the counterpane. Undern seemed very far off. 'I like this better'n that old dark place, green dress or no green dress,' she thought, 'and I'll ne'er go back there. It inna true what he said, "Have her he will for certain sure," for I'm going to live along of Ed'ard, and the old sleepy lady'll learn me to make batter for ever and ever. Batter's a well-beaten mixture of eggs and summat.' She fell asleep. * * * * * In his room Edward walked up and down, too happy to go to bed. 'My little one! my little one!' he whispered. And he prayed that Hazel might have rosy and immortal happiness, guarded by strong angels along a path of flowers all her life long, and at last running in through the celestial gates as a child runs home. The spring wind, rainy and mournful, came groping out of the waste places and cried about the house like a man mourning for his love. The cavern of night, impenetrable and vast, was full of echoes, as if some voice, terrible and violent, had shouted there a long while since, and might, even before the age-long reverberations had died away, be uplifted again, if it was the will of the Power (invisible but so immanent that it pressed upon the brain) that inhabited the obscure, star-dripping cavern. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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