Gone to Earth

by Mary Gladys Meredith Webb

He would win her fairly or not at all. So, though to glance into her empty white room set him trembling, though the touch of her hand set his pulses going, he never schemed to touch her, never made pretexts to go into her room. A stormed citadel was in his eyes a thing spoilt in the capturing. So he waited for the gates to open. The irony was that if he had listened to sex—who spoke to him with her deep beguiling voice, like a purple-robed Sibyl—if he had for once parted company with his exacting spiritual self, Hazel would have loved him. We cannot love that in which is nothing of ourselves, and there was no white fire of spiritual exaltation in Hazel. The nearest she approached to that was in her adoration of sensuous beauty, a green flame of passionless devotion to loveliness as seen in inanimate things. But that there should be anything between a man and a woman except an obvious affection, a fraternal sort of thing, or an uncomfortable excitement such as she felt with Reddin, was quite beyond her ideas. She did not know that there could be a fervour of mind for mind, a clasp more frantic than that of the arms, a continuous psychic state more passionate than the great moments of physical passion. If Edward had told her, she could not at this time have understood it. She would have gazed up at him trustingly out of her autumn-tinted eyes; she would have embodied all the spiritual glories of which he dreamed; and she would have understood nothing. Once he tried to share with her a passage in Drummond's 'Natural Law in the Spiritual World.' He was reading it with young delight a good many years behind the times, for books had usually grown very out of date before they percolated through the country libraries to him. He had read it in his pleasant, half-educated voice, dramatically and tenderly; his cheeks had flushed; he had challenged her criticism with keen, attentive eyes. She had said: 'I wonder if that's our Foxy barking, or a strange 'un?'

Hazel looked long from her window that night.

'Oh, I canna go! I canna go! Ed'ard setting store by me and all!' she said. 'Maybe the other signs wunna come.'

* * * * *

On Friday she waited until after the others had gone to bed, and then slipped out. She went into the silent woods as the moths went, purposeless, yet working out destiny. It was a very warm, wet evening, and glow-worms shone incandescently in the long grass, each with her round, wonderful, greenish lamp at its brightest. They beckoned on to faery, though they glowed in perfect stillness. They spoke of marvellous things, though they lit the night in silence. It was a very grave, a very remote personality, surely, that lit those lamps. A more intent eye, a more careful hand were needed, one thinks, to make these than to make the planets, and a mind more vast, big enough to include minuteness. But Hazel felt no awe of them; she was too bounded and earthly a creature to be afraid of mystery. It is the spirit that maketh afraid. She was sure that they were not the Holy Sign, for she had seen them often. The Holy Sign was quite different.

'If I be to go to Hunter's Spinney,' she said, looking up through the black branches and twigs that were like great fowling-nets spread over her—'if I be to go, show me the Holy Sign.'

She wandered down the narrow paths. It was very dark and warm and damp. Once the moon came out, and she saw a long pool startle the woods with its brightness, like lightning on steel. The yellow irises that stood about its marges held a pale radiance, and were like butterflies enchanted into immobility. Huge toadstools, vividly tawny as leopards, clumps of ladyfern not yet their full height and thick with curled fronds, stood proudly on their mossy lawns.

But none of these was the Sign.

'If it dunna come soon I'll go home-along,' she said.

And then, round the next bend, she saw it. At first she thought it was an angel just beginning to appear. The phantom was of a man's height, and it shone as the glow-worms did, only its light would have been enough to read by. It had a strange effect, standing there bathed in its own light in the black unbroken silence. It had a look of life—subdued, but passionate—as a spirit might have when it has just reintegrated its body out of the air. Hazel was terrified. As a rule, she was never afraid in the woods and fields, but only in the haunts of men. But from this, after one paralysed moment, she fled in panic. So she never knew that her second sign was only a rotten tree, shining with the phosphorescence of corruption.