But he could not or would not speak.
Hazel's eyes were red also, with tears of pain. Now she wept again in sympathy with a grief she could not understand.
So they sat beneath the black, slow-waving branches under the threat of the oncoming night, weeping like children. They cowered, it seemed, beneath a hand raised to strike. All that they did was wrong; all that they did was inevitable. Two larches bent by the gales kept up a groaning as bole wore on bole, wounding each other every time they swayed. In the indifferent hauteur of the dark steeps, the secret arcades, the avenues leading nowhere, crouched these two incarnations of the troubled earth, sentient for a moment, capable of sadness, cruelty, terror and revolt, and then lapsed again into the earth.
Forebodings of that lapse—forebodings that follow the hour of climax as rooks follow the plough—haunted them now, though they found no words for what they felt, but only knew a sense of the pressure of night. It appeared to stoop nearer, blind, impassive, but intensely aware of them under their dark canopy of leaves. Some Being, it seemed, was listening there, and not only listening, but imposing in an effortless but inevitable way its veiled purpose. Hazel and Reddin—he no less than she—appeared to be deprived of identity, like hypnotic mediums. His hardness and strength took on a pitiful dolt-like air before this prescient power.
When he at last stopped choking and licking the tears away surreptitiously as they rolled down his cheeks, he was very angry—with himself for crying, with Hazel for witnessing his disgrace. That she should cry was nothing, he thought. Women always cried at these times. Nor did he distinguish between her tears of pain and of sympathy.
'You needn't stare,' he snapped. 'If I've got a cold, there's no reason to gape.'
'What for be you—'
'Shut up! I'm not.'
They climbed the crackling wood, ghastly with a sound as of feet passing tiptoe into silence—the multitudinous soft noises of a wood, cones falling, twigs snapping, the wind in old driven leaves, the subdued rustle of the trees. They passed the place where she had talked with Edward at the bark-stripping. The prostrate larches shone as whitely as her shoulder did through her torn gown. She remembered Edward's look, and wept again.
'What is it now?' he asked.