Gone to Earth

by Mary Gladys Meredith Webb

Hazel was up early next morning. She could not sleep, and thought she would go down into the valley and look for spring mushrooms.

She crept out of the house, still as death, except for Mrs. Marston's soft yet all-pervading snores. Out in the graveyard, where as yet no bird sang, it was as if the dead had arisen in the stark hours between twelve and two, and were waiting unobtrusively, majestically, each by his own bed, to go down and break their long fast with the bee and the grass-snake in refectories too minute and too immortal to be known by the living. The tombstones seemed taller, seemed to have a presence behind them; the lush grass, lying grey and heavy with dew, seemed to have been swept by silent passing crowds. A dank smell came up, and the place had at once the unkempt look worn by the scene of some past revelry and the expectant air of a stage prepared for a coming drama.

Foxy barked sharply, urgently alive in the stronghold of the dead, and Hazel went to explain why she could not come. They held a long conversation, Hazel whispering. Foxy eloquent of eye. Foxy had a marked personality. Dignity never failed her, and she could be hilarious, loving, or clamorous for food without losing a jot of it. She was possessed of herself; the wild was her kingdom. If she was in a kennel—so her expression led you to understand—she was there incognito and of her own choice. Hazel, sitting at Edward's table, had the same look.

When the conversation was over, and Foxy had obediently curled herself to sleep with one swift motion like a line of poetry, Hazel went down the hill. She felt courageous; going to the valley was braving civilization. She had Mrs. Marston's skirt-fastener—the golden butterfly, complicated by various hooks—to keep her petticoats up later on. She also had the little bag in which Edward was accustomed to take the Lord's Supper to a distant chapel. To her, mushrooms were as clean as the Lord's Supper, no less mysterious, equally incidental to human needs. In her eyes nothing could be more magical and holy than silken, pink-lined mushrooms placed for her in the meadows overnight by the fairies, or by someone greater and more powerful called God.

As she went down the mountain it seemed that the whole country was snowed over. Mist—soft, woolly, and intensely white—lay across the far plain in drifts, filled the valley, and stood about the distant hills almost to their summits. The tops of Hunter's Spinney, God's Little Mountain, and the hill behind Undern stood out darkly green. The long rose-briars, set with pale coral buds, looked elvish against the wintry scene.

As Hazel descended the mist rose like a wall about her, shutting her off from Undern and the Mountain. She felt like a child out of school, free of everyone, her own for the pearly hours of morning. When she came to the meadows she gathered up her skirts well above her knees, took off her shoes and stockings, and pinned her sleeves to the shoulders. She ran like a tightly swathed nymph, small and slender, with her slim legs and arms shining in the fresh cold dew. She looked for nests and called 'Thuckoo!' to the cuckoos, and found a young one, savagely egotistic, not ready for flight physically, but ready for untold things psychically.

'You'm proud-stomached, you be!' said Hazel. 'You'd ought to be me, with an old sleepy lady drawing her mouth down whatever you do, and a young fellow—' She stopped. She could not even tell a bird about Reddin. She danced among the shut daisies, wild as a fairy, and when the sun rose her shadow mocked her with delicate foolery. In her hand, and in that of the shadow, bobbed the little black Lord's Supper bag.

She went on, regardless of direction. At last she found an old pasture where heavy farm-horses looked round at her over their polished flanks and a sad-eyed foal rose to greet her. There she found button mushrooms to her heart's content. Ancient hedges hung above the field and spoke to her in fragrant voices. The glory of the may was just giving place to the shell-tint of wild-roses. She reached up for some, and her hair fell down; she wisely put the remaining pins in the bag for the return journey. She was intensely happy, as a fish is when it plunges back into the water. For these things, and not the God-fearing comfort of the Mountain, nor the tarnished grandeur of Undern, were her life. She had so deep a kinship with the trees, so intuitive a sympathy with leaf and flower, that it seemed as if the blood in her veins was not slow-moving human blood, but volatile sap. She was of a race that will come in the far future, when we shall have outgrown our egoism—the brainless egoism of a little boy pulling off flies' wings. We shall attain philosophic detachment and emotional sympathy. We have even now far outgrown the age when a great genius like Shakespeare could be so clumsy in the interpretation of other than human life. We have left behind us the bloodshot centuries when killing was the only sport, and we have come to the slightly more reputable times when lovers of killing are conscious that a distinct effort is necessary in order to keep up 'the good old English sports.' Better things are in store for us. Even now, although the most expensively bound and the most plentiful books in the stationers' shops are those about killing and its thousand ramifications, nobody reads them. They are bought at Christmas for necessitous relations and little boys.

Hazel, in the fields and woods, enjoyed it all so much that she walked in a mystical exaltation.

Reddin in the fields and woods enjoyed himself only. For he took his own atmosphere with him wherever he went, and before his footsteps weakness fled and beauty folded.