Gone to Earth | Page 8

is most stained with old tumults has the strongest fascination.
So at Undern, whatever had happened there went on still; someone who
had been there was there still. The lawns under the trees were mournful
with old pain, or with vanished joys more pathetic than pain in their
fleeting mimicry of immortality.
It was only at midsummer that the windows were coloured by dawn
and sunset; then they had a sanguinary aspect, staring into the delicate
skyey dramas like blind, bloodshot eyes. Secretly, under the heavy
rhododendron leaves and in the furtive sunlight beneath the yew-trees,
gnats danced. Their faint motions made the garden stiller; their
smallness made it oppressive; their momentary life made it infinitely
old. Then Undern Pool was full of leaf shadows like multitudinous
lolling tongues, and the smell of the mud tainted the air--half sickly,
half sweet. The clipped bushes and the twisted chimneys made inky
shadows like steeples on the grass, and great trees of roses, beautiful in
desolation, dripped with red and white and elbowed the guelder roses
and the elders set with white patens. Cherries fell in the orchard with

the same rich monotony, the same fatality, as drops of blood. They lay
under the fungus-riven trees till the hens ate them, pecking gingerly and
enjoyably at their lustrous beauty as the world does at a poet's heart. In
the kitchen-garden also the hens took their ease, banqueting sparely
beneath the straggling black boughs of a red-currant grove. In the
sandstone walls of this garden hornets built undisturbed, and the thyme
and lavender borders had grown into forests and obliterated the path.
The cattle drowsed in the meadows, birds in the heavy trees; the golden
day-lilies drooped like the daughters of pleasure; the very principle of
life seemed to slumber. It was then, when the scent of elder blossom,
decaying fruit, mud and hot yew brooded there, that the place attained
one of its most individual moods--narcotic, aphrodisiac.
In winter the yews and firs were like waving funeral plumes and
mantled, headless goddesses; then the giant beeches would lash
themselves to frenzy, and, stooping, would scourge the ice on Undern
Pool and the cracked walls of the house, like beings drunken with the
passion of cruelty. This was the second mood of Undern--brutality.
Then those within were, it seemed, already in the grave, heavily
covered with the prison of frost and snow, or shouted into silence by
the wind. On a January night the house seemed to lie outside time and
space; slow, ominous movement began beyond the blind windows, and
the inflexible softness of snow, blurred on the vast background of night,
buried summer ever deeper with invincible, caressing threats.
The front door was half glass, so that a wandering candle within could
be seen from outside, and it looked inexpressibly forlorn, like a
glow-worm seeking escape from a chloroform-box or mankind looking
for the way to heaven. Only four windows were ever lit, and of these
two at a time. They were Jack Reddin's parlour, Andrew Vessons'
kitchen, and their respective bedrooms.
Reddin of Undern cared as little for the graciousness of life as he did
for its pitiful rhapsodies, its purple-mantled tragedies. He had no time
for such trivialities. Fox-hunting, horse-breeding, and kennel lore were
his vocation. He rode straight, lived hard, exercised such creative
faculties as he had on his work, and found it very good. Three times a

year he stated in the Undern pew at Wolfbatch that he intended to
continue leading a godly, righteous, and sober life. At these times, with
amber lights from the windows playing over his well-shaped head, his
rather heavy face looked, as the Miss Clombers from Wolfbatch Hall
said, 'so chivalrous, so uplifted.' The Miss Clombers purred when they
talked, like cats with a mouse. The younger still hunted, painfully
compressing an overfed body into a riding-habit of some forgotten cut,
and riding with so grim a mouth and such a bloodthirsty expression that
she might have had a blood-feud with all foxes. Perhaps, when she rode
down the anxious red-brown streak, she thought she was riding down a
cruel fate that had somehow left her life vacant of joy; perhaps, when
the little creature was torn piece-meal, she imagined herself tearing so
the frail unconquerable powers of love and beauty. Anyway, she never
missed a meet, and she and her sister never ceased their long silent
battle for Reddin, who remained as unconscious of them as if they were
his aunts. He was, of course, beneath them, very much beneath
them--hardly more than a farmer, but still--a man.
Reddin went on his dubious and discreditable way, and the woman
Sally Haggard, of the cottage in the hollow, gained by virtue of a
certain harsh beauty what the ladies Clomber would have given