Poor Harriet spent many lonely days in the cottage. Richard was not
interested in her now. He was only interested in John Thomas and the
farm people, and he was growing more like a labourer every day. And the
farm people didn’t mind how long _she_ was left alone, at night too, in
that lonely little cottage, and with all the tension of fear upon her.
Because she felt that it was _she_ whom these authorities, these
English, hated, even more than Somers. Because she made them feel she
despised them. And as they were really rather despicable, they hated her
at sight, her beauty, her reckless pride, her touch of derision. But
Richard--even he neglected her and hated her. She was driven back on
herself like a fury. And many a bitter fight they had, he and she.
The days grew shorter before the corn was all down from the moors.
Sometimes Somers alone lay on the sheaves, waiting for the last wain to
come to be loaded, while the others were down milking. And then the
Cornish night would gradually come down upon the dark, shaggy moors,
that were like the fur of some beast, and upon the pale-grey granite
masses, so ancient and Druidical, suggesting blood-sacrifice. And as
Somers sat there on the sheaves in the underdark, seeing the light swim
above the sea, he felt he was over the border, in another world. Over
the border, in that twilight, awesome world of the previous Celts. The
spirit of the ancient, pre-Christian world, which lingers still in the
truly Celtic places, he could feel it invade him in the savage dusk,
making him savage too, and at the same time, strangely sensitive and
subtle, understanding the mystery of blood-sacrifice: to sacrifice one’s
victim, and let the blood run to the fire, there beyond the gorse upon
the old grey granite: and at the same time to understand most
sensitively the dark flicker of animal life about him, even in a bat,
even in the writhing of a maggot in a dead rabbit. Writhe then, Life, he
seemed to say to the things--and he no longer saw its sickeningness.
The old Celtic countries have never had our Latin-Teutonic
consciousness, never will have. They have never been Christian, in the
blue-eyed, or even in the truly Roman, Latin sense of the word. But they
have been overlaid by our consciousness and our civilisation,
smouldering underneath in a slow, eternal fire, that you can never put
out till it burns itself out.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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