Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Nature -- Fiction; Triangles (Interpersonal relations) -- Fiction; Wales -- Fiction; Women -- Fiction
She went on, regardless of direction. At last she found an old pasture
where heavy farm-horses looked round at her over their polished flanks
and a sad-eyed foal rose to greet her. There she found button mushrooms
to her heart's content. Ancient hedges hung above the field and spoke
to her in fragrant voices. The glory of the may was just giving place
to the shell-tint of wild-roses. She reached up for some, and her hair
fell down; she wisely put the remaining pins in the bag for the return
journey. She was intensely happy, as a fish is when it plunges back
into the water. For these things, and not the God-fearing comfort
of the Mountain, nor the tarnished grandeur of Undern, were her life.
She had so deep a kinship with the trees, so intuitive a sympathy with
leaf and flower, that it seemed as if the blood in her veins was not
slow-moving human blood, but volatile sap. She was of a race that will
come in the far future, when we shall have outgrown our egoism--the
brainless egoism of a little boy pulling off flies' wings. We shall
attain philosophic detachment and emotional sympathy. We have even now
far outgrown the age when a great genius like Shakespeare could be so
clumsy in the interpretation of other than human life. We have left
behind us the bloodshot centuries when killing was the only sport, and
we have come to the slightly more reputable times when lovers of
killing are conscious that a distinct effort is necessary in order to
keep up 'the good old English sports.' Better things are in store for
us. Even now, although the most expensively bound and the most
plentiful books in the stationers' shops are those about killing and
its thousand ramifications, nobody reads them. They are bought at
Christmas for necessitous relations and little boys.
Hazel, in the fields and woods, enjoyed it all so much that she walked
in a mystical exaltation.
Reddin in the fields and woods enjoyed himself only. For he took his
own atmosphere with him wherever he went, and before his footsteps
weakness fled and beauty folded.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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