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Regiment of Women

<h2>CHAPTER XXXII</h2> Alwynne left the garden behind her and crossed the stretch of grass, half lawn, half paddock, that lay between kitchen-garden and wood. It was fenced with riotous hedges, demure for the moment in dove-grey honeysuckle and star of Bethlehem, with no hint in their puritan apparel of the brionies and eglantines that were to follow. About the hedge borders the grass grew tall and rank, and, as she watched, the wind would stir it into a sea of emerald and the parsley-blossoms sway above it like snatches of drifting foam. Beyond the hedge shadow, "Nicholas Nye," the one-eyed donkey, reposed Celestially among the buttercups, which, making common cause with the afternoon sun, had turned his grazing ground into a Field of the Cloth of Gold. For a moment she was minded to content herself with all the buttercups on earth to gather, and to go no further that day; but staring down the dazzling slope, her eyes rested once more upon the pleasant darkness of the goal for which she had been bound. Among the nearer tree trunks were stripes and chequerings of blue—the blue that is lovelier than the sea, the one blue in the world to the flower-lover. At once, indifferently, she left the buttercups to Nicholas Nye and hurried on and into the wood. There were hyacinths everywhere, hyacinths by the million. It was as if the winds had torn her robes from the faint, spring sky, and had flung them to earth, and she now bent above them naked and shivering. Alwynne wandered from patch to patch in an ecstasy of delight. As usual, her pleasure shaped itself into exclamations, phrases, whole sentences of the letters she would write[280] to Clare Hartill of her experiences. If only she could have Clare with her, she thought, to see and hear and touch and smell—to share the loveliness she was enjoying. Her thoughts flew to Italy, to their crowded month of beautiful sights together. She laughed—she would discard all those memories for love of this present vision.... If only Clare could see it.... She could never describe it properly ... adjectives welled up in her mind and dispersed again, like bubbles in a glass of water. The stalks and the hoarse ring of the hyacinth bells fascinated her. Clare was forgotten. She began to pick for the sake of picking. The hot silence of early afternoon lay upon tree and bird and air. Alwynne, moving from blue clump to blue clump, grew ashamed of the rustle of her dress and the scrunch of twigs and soaked leaves beneath her feet, and trod softly; even her own calm breathing sounded too loudly for the perfect peace of the place and the hour. She picked steadily, greedily—she had never before had as many flowers as she wanted, and there was inexpressible pleasure in filling her arms till she could hold no more; yet, some twenty minutes later, as she straightened herself at last, a little giddily, and looked about her over the pile of azure bells, there was no sign of bareness, for all she had gathered; she still stood to her knees in a lake of blue and green and gold. She stretched herself lazily as she considered the flowers about her and wondered at their luxuriance. They were thicker and longer-stemmed than the mass of those she carried: the leaves were juicy and shining like dark swords: the last dozen of her armful had flecked her hands and dress with milky syrup. The ground, too, was black and boggy, and sucked at her feet as she moved. Suddenly she realised that the trees grew thick and close together—that the patches of sunlight were far apart—and that she had wandered farther into the wood than she had intended. She thought that she had picked enough, more than enough for Elsbeth as well as Clare; that it was time to be getting[281] home. She had no idea of the hour.... It would not do to risk being late.... She moved forward uncertainly. She had had a blessed afternoon: she had surrendered herself to the sounds and sights and smells of the spring, to the warmth of the sun and the touch of the wind, till every sense was drunken with pleasure. But her ecstasy had been impersonal and thoughtless: she had enjoyed too completely to have had knowledge of her enjoyment. With the return to realisation of place and time, her mood was changing. She was no longer of the wood, but in it merely; wandering in the dark heart of it, no dryad returned and welcome, but a stranger, one Alwynne Durand, in thin shoes and an unsuitable dress, with the wood's flowers, not her own, in her hands. Stolen flowers—their weight was suddenly a burden to her. She felt guilty, and had an odd, sudden wish to put them down tenderly at the foot of a tree, hide them with grasses and run for her life. She laughed at the idea as she looked for the path—what were flowers for, but picking? Yet she could not get rid of the feeling that she had been doing wrong, and that even now she was being watched, and would, in due time, be caught and punished, her stolen treasures still in her hands. But wild flowers are free to all—and the wood was Roger Lumsden's wood! He had told her that he rented it. She moved backwards and forwards, turning hurriedly hither and thither, trampling the hyacinths and stumbling on the uneven ground, unreasonably flurried that she could not find any path. She could not even track her own footsteps. It was very strange, she thought, when she had penetrated so easily the depths of the wood, that the return should be so difficult. She had thought it a mere copse. She put her free hand to her eyes, scanning the wall of greenery in all directions. She fancied that at one point the trees grew less densely, and set out, scrambling over rough ground towards the faint light.[282] But in spite of her hurry she advanced slowly. The thin switches of the undergrowth whipped her as she pushed them aside, and the huge briars twisted themselves about her like live things. Twice the slippery moss brought her to her knees, and the faint light grew no stronger as she pressed forward. She began to feel frightened, though she knew the sensation to be absurd. It was impossible to be lost in a little wood, half a mile across.... It was merely a question of walking straight on till one emerged on open fields.... She told herself so, and tried to be amused at her adventure, and hummed a confident little tune as she plodded on, very careful not to look behind her. Her shoes, thudding and squelching in the wet mess of mould and green stuff, made more noise than one would have thought possible for one pair of feet, and woke the oddest echoes. Of course, it was impossible that any one could be following her.... But the wood was so horribly silent that her own breathing and clumsy footfalls (there could be nothing else) counterfeited the noises of pursuit.... She could have sworn there was a presence at her elbow, in her rear, moving as she moved, stumbling as she stumbled. Twice she faced round abruptly, standing still—but she saw nothing but the wall of vegetation, motionless, silent, yet insistently alive. She felt that every tree, every leaf, every blade of grass, was watching her with green, unwinking eyes. There was nothing more in the wood than there had been a pleasant hour ago—less indeed, for she realised suddenly that the sun had gone in and that it was cold; yet she owned to herself at last that she was nervous, vaguely uneasy. Instantly, by that mere act of recognition, fright was born in her—unreasonable and unreasoning fright, that, in the length of a thought, pervaded her entire personality, crisping her hair, catching at her throat, paralysing her mind. The wood-panic had her in its grip—the age-old terror that still lies in wait where trees are gathered together,[283] though the god that begot it be dead these nineteen hundred years. She began to run. It was impossible to pass quickly through the tangled undergrowth; but sheer fright gave her skill to avoid real obstacles, strength to crash over and through the mere wreckage of the wood. She turned and doubled like a hare, yet desperately, with the hare's terror of the sudden turn that might confront her with the presence at her heels. She could endure its pursuit, but she knew that its revelation would be more than she could bear. She was so far merely and indefinitely frightened, but to face the unknown would be to confront fear itself. And she was more frightened of fear than of any evil she knew. She could, she thought, meet pain or sickness, or any mere misery, with sufficient calmness, but the fear of fear was an obsession. She tore through the wood, shaken and gasping with terror of the greater terror she every moment expected to be forced to undergo; for almost the only clear thought remaining to her, in that onrush of panic, was the realisation that there was, at her elbow, in her heart, physical or metaphysical, she knew not which, some as yet veiled fact waiting to be revealed, in view of which her present agitation was trivial and meaningless. She ran on, blind and blundering; yet her feet were so clogged by the weight of earth and wet, her thoughts by the sweat of the fear that was on them, that neither seemed to move for all her willing. And all the while, another part of her consciousness sat aloof, critical and detached, laughing at her for an excitable fool, analysing, in Clare's crispest accents, the illusions which were bewildering her, and wondering coolly that any girl of her age could so let her imagination run away with her. She pulled herself together with an immense effort of will. That was the truth.... It was her own imagination that[284] was literally and physically running away with her, whipping her tired body into unnecessary exertion, flogging her into mad flight from this pleasant, harmless place, with its hideous and horrible suggestion of evil at hand.... But the evil was in her own mind.... There was nothing pursuing her, no vague ghost at her elbow.... The horror was in herself, to be faced, and fought, and trampled.... Running would not help her ... she would only carry her terror with her.... For an instant she had a lightning glimpse of the reasons of the Sadducean attitude to personality, and its desperate denials of future existence. She was suddenly appalled at the hideous possibility of existing eternally with her own undying thoughts for company. She wondered if there were really such a thing as soul suicide, and thought that, if so, many must have chosen to commit it. Here her shifting, crowding thoughts blotted out the glimmer of understanding, as flies clustering on a window-pane can blot out light; yet the word suicide remained in her mind, disturbing, vaguely suggestive. It was connected with something terrible—she could not remember what—that in its turn was one with the vague horror at her elbow, that walked with the echo of her footsteps and panted with the echoes of her breaths, and yet was not real at all, but only in her mind. She did not believe she should ever find her way out of the wood.... The hyacinths in her arms were so heavy—a queerly familiar weight: and the sun had gone in, which had, somehow, something to do with the trouble.... She felt the black depression of the winter months that she had left Utterbridge to escape settling down on her once more. She turned hopelessly to elude it, but it surrounded her like a fog, as indeed she half believed it to be. She supposed they had sudden fogs in the country, when the sun went in.... And the sun had gone in because she had picked all the hyacinths.... She remembered the story clearly enough now.... The sun had played at quoits with a[285] child, and had thrown amiss, and killed it, and the purple blood had trickled down from the child's forehead.... So the sun had turned it into purple hyacinths.... But she, Alwynne, had been gathering all the hyacinths, and they were a heavy bunch, heavy as a dead child's body ... and in another minute they would be disenchanted, and she would be carrying a dead child's body in her arms.... She stood still, gazing down at the flowers, white and glassy-eyed with terror, wondering that she was still alive and not yet mad. For she knew that the fear she had feared was upon her at last. She dared not blink lest in that second the change should take place, and she should find Louise, long buried, in her arms. Because, of course, it was Louise who had been following her all the while.... Louise—who had committed suicide.... She was following Alwynne, because it was Alwynne's fault.... Clare had said so.... Well—at least she could tell Louise that she had meant no harm.... She waited, swayed back against a tree trunk, the flowers a dead weight over her arm. She held them gently, lest a rough movement should wake the horror they hid. With what was left of sanity she prayed. The trees encircled her, watching. From far away there came once more a sound of footsteps. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> [286] <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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