Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Nature -- Fiction; Triangles (Interpersonal relations) -- Fiction; Wales -- Fiction; Women -- Fiction
'Now, up you get, Hazel!' said Reddin, who wanted his supper badly, and
no longer wanted Hazel. 'Up you get and tidy yourself, and then home.'
He felt rather sorry for her.
She made no comment, no demur. Instinctively she felt that she belonged
to Reddin now, though spiritually she was still Edward's. She looked at
Reddin, passive, doubtful; the past evening had become unreal to her.
So they regarded one another mistrustfully, like two creatures taken in
a snare. They both felt as if they had been trapped by something vast
and intangible. Reddin was dazed. For the first time in his life he had
felt passion instead of mere lust. The same ideas that had striven
within him on his way here uplifted their voices again.
Staring dully at Hazel, he felt a smarting at the back of his eyes and
a choking in his throat.
'What ails you, catching your breath?' she asked.
He could not speak.
'You've got tears in your eyne.'
Reddin put his hand up.
'Tell us what ails you?'
He shook his head.
'What for not, my--what for not?'
She never called Reddin 'my soul.'
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.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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