Gone to Earth

by Mary Gladys Meredith Webb

At the parsonage everything was ready early. Edward, restless after his rough awakening, had risen at three and finished his own preparations, being ready to help Mrs. Marston when she came down, still a good deal upset. Whenever she passed Hazel's room, or saw Edward take flowers there, she said, 'Oh, my dear!' and shook her head sadly. For the kind of life that seemed to be mapped out by Edward would, she feared, not include grandchildren. And grandchildren had acquired, through long cogitations, the glamour of the customary. She was also ruffled by Martha, who, unlike her own pastry, was 'short.' What with the two women, angry and grieved, and the fact that his wedding-day held only half the splendour that it should have held, Edward's spirits might have been expected to be low; but they were not. He ran up and down, joked with Martha, soothed his mother, and sang until Martha, who thought that a minister's deportment at a wedding should be only a little less grandiloquent than at a funeral, said:

'He'm less like a minister than a nest of birds.' She and Mrs. Marston were setting out the feather-cups in the best parlour.

At that moment Edward stood at the door of Hazel's room, and realized that he would enter it no more. He must not see the sweet disarray of her unpacking, nor rest night by night in the charmed circle of her presence. Almost he felt, in this agony of loss—loss of things never possessed, the most bitter loss of all—that, if he could have had these things, even the ruddy-haired, golden-eyed children of his dreams might go. He knelt by Hazel's bed and laid his dark head on the pillow, torn by physical and spiritual passion. His hair was clammy, and a new line marked his forehead from that day. Anyone seeing him would have thought that he was praying; he was so still. It was Edward's fate to be thought 'so quiet,' because the fires within him made no sound, burning at a still-white heat.

He was not praying. Prayer had receded to a far distance, like a signpost long passed. Perhaps he would come round to it again; but now he was in the trackless desert. 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. Never before had the gracious intimacy of marriage so shone in his eyes. And he was going to have just the amount of intimacy that his mother would have, perhaps rather less. Every night he would stand on the threshold, kiss Hazel with a brotherly kiss, and turn away. His life would be a cold threshold. Month by month, year by year, he would read the sweet, frank love-stories of the Bible—stories that would, if written by a novelist, be banned, so true are they; year by year he would see nest and young creatures, and go into cottages where babies in fluffy shawls gazed at him anciently and caught his fingers in a grip of tyrannous weakness. And always there would be Hazel, alluring him with an imperishable magic even stronger than beauty, startling him from his hard-won calm by the turn of a wrist, the curve of a waist-ribbon, a wave of her hair. And then the stern hour of crisis rode him down, and a great voice cried, not with the cunning that he would have expected of a temper, but with the majesty of morning on the heights:

'Take her. She is yours.'

He knew that it was true. Who would gainsay him? She was his. In a few hours she would be his wife, in his own house, giving him every law of creed and race. In fact, by not pleasing himself he would be outraging creed and race. The latch of her door was his to lift at any time. That chamber of roses and gold, rainbows and silver cries like the dawn-notes of birds, was there for him like the open rose for the bee. His mother, too, would be pleased. She had expostulated gelatinously about 'this marriage which was no marriage.' He would be that companionable and inspiring thing—the norm. He would be one of the world-wide company of men that work, marry, bring up children, maybe see their grandchildren, and then, in the glory of fulfilment, lay their silver heads on the pillow of sleep. He had always loved normal things. He was not one of those who are set apart by the strange aloofness of genius, whose souls burn with a wild light, instead of with the comfortable glow of the hearth fire. He was an ordinary man, loved ordinary things. Neither was he effeminate or a celibate by instinct, though he had not Reddin's fury of masculinity. Sex would never have awakened in him but at the touch of spiritual love. But the touch had come; it had awakened; it threatened to master him.

Pictures came dimly and yet radiantly before him: Hazel as she would stand to-night brushing out her hair; this room as it would be when she had put the light out and only starlight illuminated it; the flowery scent, the sound of her soft breathing; and then, in a tempestuous rush, the emotions he would feel as he laid his hand on the latch—love, triumph, intoxication.

How would she look? What would she say? She could not forbid him. She would, perhaps, when she awoke to the sweetness of marriage, love him as passionately as he loved her.

A wild mastery possessed him. He would have what he wanted of life. What need was there to renounce? And then, like a minor chord, soft and plaintive, he heard Hazel's voice in bewildered accents murmur: