Gone to Earth

Gone to Earth, by Mary Webb

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Title: Gone to Earth
Author: Mary Webb
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GONE TO EARTH

by Mary Webb
1917

[Dedication] To him whose presence is home.
Chapter 1
Small feckless clouds were hurried across the vast untroubled
sky--shepherdless, futile, imponderable--and were torn to fragments on
the fangs of the mountains, so ending their ephemeral adventures with
nothing of their fugitive existence left but a few tears.
It was cold in the Callow--a spinney of silver birches and larches that
topped a round hill. A purple mist hinted of buds in the tree-tops, and a
fainter purple haunted the vistas between the silver and brown boles.
Only the crudeness of youth was here as yet, and not its triumph--only
the sharp calyx-point, the pricking tip of the bud, like spears, and not

the paten of the leaf, the chalice of the flower.
For as yet spring had no flight, no song, but went like a half-fledged
bird, hopping tentatively through the undergrowth. The bright springing
mercury that carpeted the open spaces had only just hung out its pale
flowers, and honeysuckle leaves were still tongues of green fire.
Between the larch boles and under the thickets of honeysuckle and
blackberry came a tawny silent form, wearing with the calm dignity of
woodland creatures a beauty of eye and limb, a brilliance of tint, that
few-women could have worn without self-consciousness. Clear-eyed,
lithe, it stood for a moment in the full sunlight--a year-old fox,
round-headed and velvet-footed. Then it slid into the shadows. A shrill
whistle came from the interior of the wood, and the fox bounded
towards it.
'Where you bin? You'm stray and lose yourself, certain sure!' said a
girl's voice, chidingly motherly. 'And if you'm alost, I'm alost; so come
you whome. The sun's undering, and there's bones for supper!'
With that she took to her heels, the little fox after her, racing down the
Callow in the cold level light till they came to the Woodus's cottage.
Hazel Woodus, to whom the fox belonged, had always lived at the
Callow. There her mother, a Welsh gipsy, had born her in bitter
rebellion, hating marriage and a settled life and Abel Woodus as a wild
cat hates a cage. She was a rover, born for the artist's joy and sorrow,
and her spirit found no relief for its emotions; for it was dumb. To the
linnet its flight, to the thrush its song; but she had neither flight nor
song. Yet the tongueless thrush is a thrush still, and has golden music
in its heart. The caged linnet may sit moping, but her soul knows the
dip and rise of flight on an everlasting May morning.
All the things she felt and could not say, all the stored honey, the black
hatred, the wistful homesickness for the unfenced wild--all that other
women would have put into their prayers, she gave to Hazel. The whole
force of her wayward heart flowed into the softly beating heart of her
baby. It was as if she passionately flung the life she did not value into
the arms of her child.

When Hazel was fourteen she died, leaving her treasure--an old, dirty,
partially illegible manuscript-book of spells and charms and other gipsy
lore--to her daughter.
Her one request was that she might be buried in the Callow under the
yellow larch needles, and not in a churchyard. Abel Woodus did as she
asked, and was regarded askance by most of the community for not
burying her