Gone to Earth | Page 2

in Chrissen-ground. But this did not trouble him. He had
his harp still, and while he had that he needed no other friend. It had
been his absorption in his music that had prevented him understanding
his wife, and in the early days of their marriage she had been wildly
jealous of the tall gilt harp with its faded felt cover that stood in the
corner of the living-room. Then her jealousy changed to love of it, and
her one desire was to be able to draw music from its plaintive strings.
She could never master even the rudiments of music, but she would sit
on rainy evenings when Abel was away and run her thin hands over the
strings with a despairing passion of grieving love. Yet she could not
bear to hear Abel play. Just as some childless women with all their
accumulated stores of love cannot bear to see a mother with her child,
so Maray Woodus, with her sealed genius, her incapacity for
expression, could not bear to hear the easy self-expression of another.
For Abel was in his way a master of his art; he had dark places in his
soul, and that is the very core of art and its substance. He had the
lissom hands and cheerful self-absorption that bring success.
He had met Maray at an Eisteddfod that had been held in days gone by
on a hill five miles from the Callow, called God's Little Mountain, and
crowned by a chapel. She had listened, swaying and weeping to the
surge and lament of his harp, and when he won the harper's prize and
laid it in her lap she had consented to be married in the chapel at the
end of the Eisteddfod week. That was nineteen years ago, and she was
fled like the leaves and the birds of departed summers; but God's Little
Mountain still towered as darkly to the eastward; the wind still leapt
sheer from the chapel to the young larches of the Callow; nothing had
changed at all; only one more young, anxious, eager creature had come
into the towering, subluminous scheme of things. Hazel had her
mother's eyes, strange, fawn-coloured eyes like water, and in the large

clear irises were tawny flecks. In their shy honesty they were akin to
the little fox's. Her hair, too, of a richer colour than her father's, was
tawny and foxlike, and her ways were graceful and covert as a wild
creature's.
She stood in the lane above the cottage, which nestled below with its
roof on a level with the hedge-roots, and watched the sun dip. The red
light from the west stained her torn old dress, her thin face, her eyes,
till she seemed to be dipped in blood. The fox, wistfulness in her
expression and the consciousness of coming supper in her mind, gazed
obediently where her mistress gazed, and was touched with the same
fierce beauty. They stood there fronting the crimson pools over the far
hills, two small sentient things facing destiny with pathetic courage;
they had, in the chill evening on the lonely hill, a look as of those
predestined to grief, almost an air of martyrdom.
The small clouds that went westward took each in its turn the
prevailing colour, and vanished, dipped in blood.
From the cottage, as Hazel went down the path, came the faint
thrumming of the harp, changing as she reached the door to the air of
'The Ash Grove.' The cottage was very low, one-storied, and roofed
with red corrugated iron. The three small windows had frames coloured
with washing-blue and frills of crimson cotton within. There seemed
scarcely room for even Hazel's small figure. The house was little larger
than a good pigsty, and only the trail of smoke from its squat chimney
showed that humanity dwelt there.
Hazel gave Foxy her supper and put her to bed in the old washtub
where she slept. Then she went into the cottage with an armful of logs
from the wood heap. She threw them on the open fire.
'I'm a-cold,' she said; 'the rain's cleared, and there'll be a duck's frost
to-night.'
Abel looked up absently, humming the air he intended to play next.
'I bin in the Callow, and I've gotten a primmyrose,' continued Hazel,

accustomed to his ways, and not discouraged. 'And I got a bit of
blackthorn, white as a lady.'
Abel was well on in 'Ap Jenkyn' by now.
Hazel moved about, seeing to supper, for she was as hungry as Foxy,
talking all the time in her rather shrilly sweet voice, while she dumped
the cracked cups and the loaf and margarine on the bare table. The
kettle was not boiling, so she threw some bacon-grease on the fire, and
a great tongue of