They hastened away. Käte turned her head once more when she reached the threshold. She would have to cast a glance at the woman who remained behind so stiff and silent. Even if she were incomprehensible to her, a compassionate glance was her due.
Then ... a short cry, but loud, penetrating, terrible in its brevity, a cry that went through nerve and bone. One single inarticulate cry that agony and hatred had wrung from her.
The woman had stooped down. She had snatched up the axe with which she had chopped the wood. She raised her arm as though to throw something--the sharp edge flashed past the lady's head as she hurried away, and buried itself in the door-post with a crash.
CHAPTER V
They had hastened away with the child as though they were running away. They had bundled it into the carriage--quick, quick--the coachman had whipped up the horses, the wheels had turned round with a creaking noise. The village in the Venn remained behind them, buried like a bad dream one wants to forget.
A dull grey lay over the Venn. The sun, which had been shining in the morning, had quite disappeared, as though not a single beam had ever been seen there. The Venn mist, which rises so suddenly, was there covering everything. There was a wall now where there had been a wide outlook before. A wall not of stone and not of bricks, but much stronger. It did not crack, it did not burst, it did not totter, it did not give way before the hammer wielded by the strongest hand. It shaped itself out of the morasses, powerful and impenetrable, and stretched from the moor up to the clouds--or was it the clouds that had lowered themselves to the earth?
The heavens and the Venn, both alike. Nothing but grey, a tough, damp, cold, liquid and still firm, unfathomable, mysterious, awful grey. A grey from which those who lose themselves on the moor never find their way out. The mist is too tenacious. It has arms that grip, that embrace so tightly, that one can neither see forward nor backward any more, neither to the left nor to the right, that the cry that wants to escape from a throat that is well-nigh choked with terror is drowned, and that the eye becomes blind to every road, every footprint.
The driver cursed and beat his horses. There was nothing more to be seen of the road, nothing whatever, no ditch at the side of it, no telegraph poles, no small rowan trees. The broad road that had been made with such difficulty had disappeared in the grey that enfolded the Venn. It was fortunate that the horses had not lost their way as yet. They followed their noses, shook their long tails, neighed shrilly and trotted courageously into the sea of mist.
Käte shuddered as she wrapped herself and the child up more tightly; they required all the warm covering now which they had taken with them so providently. Her husband packed her up still more securely, and then laid his arm round her as though to protect her. It was a terrible journey.
They had had the carriage closed, but the cold grey forced its way in notwithstanding. It penetrated through all the crevices, through the window-panes, filled the space inside so that their faces swam in the damp twilight like pale spots, and laid itself heavily, obstructively on their breath.