Читать книгу Gone to Earth - Mary Gladys Meredith Webb - Страница 10

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The chapel and minister's house at God's Little Mountain were all in one—a long, low building of grey stone surrounded by the graveyard, where stones, flat, erect, and askew, took the place of a flower-garden. Away to the left, just over a rise, the hill was gashed by the grey steeps of the quarries. 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; and he had an instinctive pleasure in clean and healthy things. But on winter nights at the mountain, when the tingling stars sprang in and out of their black ambush and frost cracked the tombstones; in summer, when lightning crackled in the woods and ripped along the hillside like a thousand devils, the need of a God grew ever more urgent. He spoke of this to his mother.

'No, dear, I can't say I have more need of our Lord here than in Crigton,' she said. 'In Crigton there was the bus to be afraid of, and bicycles. Here I just cover my ears for wind, put on an extra flannel petticoat for frost, and sit in the coal-house for thunder. Not that I'm forgetting God. God with us, of course, coal-house or elsewhere.'

'But don't you feel something ominous about the place, mother? I feel as if something awful would happen here, don't you?'

'No, dear. Nor will you when you've had some magnesia. Martha!' (Martha was the general who came in by the day from the first cottage in the batch)—'Martha, put on an extra chop for the master. You aren't in love, are you, my dear?'

'Gracious, no! Who should I be in love with, mother?'

'Quite right, dear. There is no one about here with more looks than a brussels sprout. Not that I say anything against sprouts. Martha, just go and see if there are any sprouts left. We'll have them for dinner.' Edward looked at the woods across the batch, and wondered why the young fresh green of the larches and the elm samaras was so sad, and why the cry of a sheep from an upper slope was so forlorn.

'I hope, Edward,' said Mrs. Marston, 'that it won't be serious music. I think serious music interferes with the digestion. Your poor father and I went to the "Creation" on our honeymoon, and thought little of it; then we went to the "Crucifixion," and though it was very pleasant, I couldn't digest the oysters afterwards. And then, again, these clever musicians allow themselves to become so passionate, one almost thinks they are inebriated. Not flutes and cornets, they have to think of their breath, but fiddlers can wreak their feelings on the instrument without suffering for it.'

Edward laughed.

'I hope the gentleman that's coming to-day is a nice quiet one,' she went on, as if Abel were a pony. 'And I hope the lady singer is not a contralto. Contralto, to my mind,' she went on placidly, stirring her porter in preparation for a draught, 'is only another name for roaring, which is unseemly.' She drank her porter gratefully, keeping the spoon in place with one finger.

If she could have seen father and daughter as they set forth, hilarious, to superimpose tumult on the peace of God's Little Mountain, she would have been a good deal less placid.

It was restful to sit and look at her kind old face, soft and round beneath her lace cap, steeped in a peace deeper than lethargy. She was one of nature's opiates, and she administered herself unconsciously to everyone who saw much of her. Edward's father, having had an overdose, had not survived. Mrs. Marston always spoke of him as 'my poor husband who fell asleep,' as if he had dozed in a sermon. Sleep was her fetish, panacea and art. Her strongest condemnation was to call a person 'a stirring body.' She sat to-day, while preparations raged in the kitchen, placidly knitting. She always knitted—socks for Edward and shawls for herself. She had made so many shawls, and she so felt the cold, that she wore them in layers—pink, grey, white, heather mixture, and a purple cross-over.

When Martha and the friend who had come to help quarrelled shrilly, she murmured, 'Poor things! putting themselves in such a pother!' When, after a crash, Martha was heard to say, 'There's the cream-jug now! Well, break one, break three!' she only shook her head, and murmured that servants were not what they used to be. When Martha's friend's little boy dropped the urn—presented to the late Mr. Marston by a grateful congregation, and as large as a watering-can—and Martha's friend shouted, 'I'll warm your buttons!' and proceeded to do so, Mrs. Marston remained self-poised as a sun.

At last supper was set out, the cloths going in terraces according to the various heights of the tables; the tea-sets—willow and Coalport, the feather pattern, and the seaweed—looking like a china-shop; the urn, now rakishly dinted, presiding. People paid for their supper on these occasions, and expected to have as much as they could eat. Mrs. Marston had rashly told Martha that she could have what was left as a perquisite, which resulted later in stormy happenings.

* * * * *

From the nook on the hillside where the chapel stood, as Abel ran hastily down the slope—the harp jogging on his shoulders and looking like some weird demon that clung round his neck and possessed him—came a roar of sound. The brass band from Black Mountain was in possession of the platform. The golden windows shone comfortably in the cold spring evening, and Hazel ran towards them as she would have run towards the wide-flung onyx doors of faery.

They arrived breathless and panting in the graveyard, where the tombstones seemed to elbow each other outside the shining windows, looking into this cave of saffron light and rosy joy as sardonically as if they knew that those within its shelter would soon be without, shelterless in the storm of death; that those who came in so gaily by twos and threes would go out one by one without a word. Hazel peered in.

'Fine raps they're having!' she whispered. 'All the band's there, purple with pleasure, and sweating with the music like chaps haying.'

Abel looked in.

'Eh, dear,' he said, 'they're settled there for the neet. We'll ne'er get a squeak in. There's nought for Black Mountain Band'll stop at when they're elbow to elbow; they eggs each other on cruel, so they do! Your ears may be dinned and deafened for life, and you lost to the bee-keeping (for hear you must, or you'm done, with bees), but the band dunna care! There! Now they've got a hencore—that's to say, do it agen; and every time they get one of them it goes to their yeads, and they play louder.'

'Ah, but you play better,' said Hazel comfortingly; for Abel's voice had trembled, and Hazel must comfort grief wherever she found it, for grief implied weakness.

'I know I do,' he assented; 'but what can I do agen ten strong men?'

At the mountain, as in the world of art and letters, it seemed that the artist must elbow and push, and that if he did not often stop his honeyed utterances to shout his wares he would not be heard at all.

'Dunna they look funny!' said Hazel with a giggle. 'All sleepy and quiet, like smoked bees. Is that the Minister? Him by the old sleepy lady—she's had more smoke than most!'

'Where?'

'There. He's got a black coat on and a kind face, sad-like.'

'Maybe if you took an axed him, he'd marry you—when the moon falls down the chapel chimney and rabbits chase the bobtailed sheep-dog!'

'I'm not for marrying anybody. Let's go in,' said Hazel.

She took off her hat and coat, to enter more splendidly. On her head, resting softly among the coils of ruddy hair, she put a wreath of violets, which grew everywhere at the Callow; a big bunch of them was at her throat like a cameo brooch.

When she entered the band faltered, and the cornet, a fiery young man whom none could tire, wavered into silence. Edward, turning to find out what had caused this most desirable event, saw her coming up the room with the radiant fatefulness of a fairy in a dream. His heart went out to her, not only for her morning air, her vivid eyes, her coronet of youth's rare violets, but for the wistfulness that was not only in her face, but in her poise and in every movement. He felt as he would to a small bright bird that had come, greatly daring, in at his window on a stormy night. She had entered the empty room of his heart, and from this night onwards his only thought was how to keep her there.

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.

Abel sat down in the middle of the platform and began to play, quite regardless of Hazel, who had to start when she could.

'Harps in heaven played for you;

Played for Christ with his eyes so blue;

Played for Peter and for Paul,

But never played for me at all!

Harps in heaven, made all of glass,

Greener than the rainy grass.

Ne'er a one but is bespoken,

And mine is broken—mine is broken!

Harps in heaven play high, play low;

In the cold, rainy wind I go

To find my harp, as green as spring—

My splintered harp without a string!'

She sang with passion. The wail of the lost was in her voice. She had not the slightest idea what the words meant (probably they meant nothing), but the sad cadence suited her emotional tone, and the ideas of loss and exile expressed her vague mistrust of the world. Edward imagined her in her blue-green dress and violet crown playing on a large glass harp in a company of angels.

'Poor child!' he thought. 'Is it mystical longing or a sense of sin that cries out in her voice?'

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. 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. We know, too, echoes of things outside our ken—the thought that shapes itself in the bee's brain and becomes a waxen box of sweets; the tyranny of youth stirring in the womb; the crazy terror of small slaughtered beasts; 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. We, in whom the pollen and the dust, sprouting grain and falling berry, the dark past and the dark future, cry and call—we ask, Who is this Singer that sends his voice through the dark forest, and inhabits us with ageless and immortal music, and sets the long echoes rolling for evermore?

The audience, however, did not notice that there were echoes in Hazel, and would have gaped if you had proclaimed God in her voice. They looked at her with critical eyes that were perfectly blind to her real self. Mrs. Marston thought what a pity it was that she looked so wild; Martha thought it a pity that she did not wear a chenille net over her hair to keep it neat; and Abel, peering up at her through the strings of the harp and looking—with his face framed in wild red hair—like a peculiarly intelligent animal in a cage, did not think of her at all.

But Edward made up for them, because he thought of her all the time. Before the end of the concert he had got as far as to be sure she was the only girl he would ever want to marry. His ministerial self put in a faint proviso, 'If she is a good girl'; but it was instantly shouted down by his other self, who asserted that as she was so beautiful she must be good.

During the last items on the programme—two vociferous glees rendered by a stage-full of people packed so tightly that it was marvellous how they expanded their diaphragms—Edward was in anguish of mind lest the cornet should monopolize Hazel at supper. The said cornet had become several shades more purple each time Hazel sang, so Edward was prepared for the worst. He was determined to make a struggle for it, and felt that though his position denied him the privilege of scuffling, he might at least use finesse—that has never been denied to any Church.

'My dear,' whispered Mrs. Marston, 'have you an unwelcome guest?'

This was her polite way of indicating a flea.

'No, mother.'

'Well, dear, there must be something preying on your mind; you have kept up such a feeling of uneasiness that I have hardly had any nap at all.'

'What do you think of her, mother?'

'Who, dear?'

'The beautiful girl.'

'A pretty tune, the first she sang,' said Mrs. Marston, not having heard the others. 'But such wild manners and such hair! Like pussy stroked the wrong way. And there is something a little peculiar about her, for when she sings about heaven it seems somehow improper, and that,' she added drowsily, 'heaven hardly should do.'

Edward understood what she meant. He had been conscious himself of something desperately exciting in the bearing of Hazel Woodus—something that penetrated the underworld which lay like a covered well within him, and, like a ray of light, set all kinds of unsuspected life moving and developing there.

As supper went on Edward kept more and more of Hazel's attention, and the quiet grey eyes met the restless amber ones more often.

'If I came some day—soon—to your home, would you sing to me?' he asked.

'I couldna. I'm promised for the bark-stripping.'

'What's that?'

Hazel looked at him pityingly.

'Dunna you know what that is?'

'I'm afraid not.'

'It's fetching the bark off'n the failed trees ready for lugging.'

'Where are the felled trees?'

'Hunter's Spinney.'

'That's close here.'

'Ah.'

Edward was deep in thought. The cornet whispered to Hazel:

'Making up next Sunday's sermon!'

But Edward turned round disconcertingly.

'As it's on your way, why not come to tea with mother? I might be out, but you wouldn't mind that?'

'Eh, but I should! I dunna want to talk to an old lady!'

'I'll stop at home,' then, he replied, very much amused, and with a look of quiet triumph at the cornet. 'Which day?'

'Wednesday week's the first.'

'Come Wednesday, then.'

'What'll the old sleepy lady say?'

'My mother,' he said with dignity, 'will approve of anything I think right.'

But his heart misgave. So far he had only 'thought right' what her conventions approved. He had seldom acted on his own initiative. She therefore had a phrase, 'Dear Edward is always right.' It was possible that when he left off his unquestioning concordance with her, she would leave off saying 'Dear Edward is always right.' So far he had not wanted anything particularly, and as it was as difficult to quarrel with Mrs. Marston as to strike a match on a damp box, there had never been any friction. She liked things, as she said, 'nice and pleasant.' To do Providence justice, everything always had been. Even when her husband died it had been, in a crape-clad way, nice and pleasant, for he died after the testimonial and the urn, and not before, as a less considerate man would have done. He died on a Sunday, which was 'so suitable,' and at dawn, which was 'so beautiful'; also (in the phrase used for criminals and the dying) 'he went quietly.' Not that Mrs. Marston did not feel it. She did, as deeply as her nature could. But she felt it, as a well-padded boy feels a whacking, through layers of convention. Now, at her age, to find out that life was not so pleasant as she thought would be little short of tragedy.

'Ah, I'll come, and I'm much obleeged,' said Hazel.

'I'll meet you at Hunter's Spinney and see you home.' Edward decided.

To this also Hazel assented so delightedly that the cornet pushed back his chair and went to another table with a sardonic laugh. But his remarks were drowned by a voice which proclaimed:

'All the years I've bin to suppers I've 'ad tartlets! To-night they wunna go round. I've paid the same as others. Tartlets I'll 'ave!'

'But the plate's empty,' said Martha, flushed and determined.

'I've had no finger in the emptying of it. More must be fetched.' Other voices joined in, and Mrs. Marston was heard to murmur, 'Unpleasant.'

Edward was oblivious to it all.

'Shall you,' he asked earnestly, 'like me to come to the Spinney?'

'Ah, I shall that!' said Hazel, who already felt an aura of protection about him. 'It'll be so safe—like when I was little, and was used to pick daisies round grandad.'

Edward knew more definitely than before the relation in which he wished to stand towards Hazel. It was not that of grandad.

Any reply he might have made was drowned by the uproar that broke forth at the cry, 'She's hidden 'em! Look in the kitchen!'

Martha's cousin—in his spare time policeman of a distant village—felt that if Martha was detected in fraud it would not look well, and therefore put his sinewy person in the kitchen doorway. 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.'

'She is not of your class, Edward.'

'What does class matter?'

'Martha's brother calls you "sir," and Martha looks down on this young person.'

'Don't call her "young person," mother.'

'Whether it is mistaken kindness, dear, or a silly flirtation, it will only do you harm with the congregation.'

'Young men and women,' soliloquized Mrs. Marston as she hoisted herself upstairs with the candlestick very much aslant in a torpid hand, 'are not what they used to be.'