Unminded of her father, Charity was examining with admiration the new toy that Seth had contrived for himself. To the flint axe-head, which they had found in this very spot on the first day of their love, he had attached a wooden handle. The work had occupied many a spare minute during the past few days, and he took a boyish pleasure in the result. The handle was about two feet long and curved slightly at the grip end. It had been lopped off a stout stake, stripped of its bark, planed and rubbed smooth with sand, and finally oiled; and it was bound securely to the axe-head with thongs of leather. Altogether it was a job that any boy might have been proud of. ‘You gurt baby,’ said Charity fondly. Then she kissed him and asked what use it was, when there were a dunnamany good axes already at Squire’s, and he confessed, with a diffident grin, that it wasn’t much use at alclass="underline" yet could not forbear to add, in defence of his whim: ‘But he do cut owdacious sharp, lovey, seeing he be only a bit of stone.’ In witness whereof he jumped up, and led her from the covert, and bade her watch; and swinging his axe made a murderous slash at the trunk of the nearest tree. The bladed flint bit laterally into the wood and lodged there, so that his grip slackened. ‘Lookee there,’ said Seth proudly. ‘Dang me if tain’t stuck in the tree and all manner!’ Here was triumph indeed. He let the axe stay, and went back to Charity’s side.
His arm about her, they stood without speaking, and seemed to listen to their own chiming thoughts. They were done for a while with kissing and embracing; the intoxication of touch was spent; and now, perhaps more intimately than ever before, they were turned towards each other. Man’s greed and woman’s trickery were for a moment of small account: the hour was golden, and the spirit of the hour was beauty. The day was ebbing about them, and dusk, though scarcely perceptible as yet, was beginning to fall. Nothing of sunlight remained in the wood but a spray of bronze on the higher branches, and a spattering of rust on the ground. The warm hum of summer, which had brimmed this sylvan world all day with a luminous and dazzling sound, was now diminished; and the lovers, when they had finished speaking, became suddenly aware of the gathering silence.
CHAPTER 8
HOW ONE MAN AND FOUR MEN FOUGHT IN GLATTING WOOD, AND OF THE DARKNESS THAT CAME UPON THEM
We are the children of Koor and of others innumerable; divided from them only in illusion, by a trick of time; joined, with them and with each other, not by metaphor, but by an unbroken physical continuity. On the stream of our common blood, the lusts and terrors and aspiring dreams of Koor are carried into us. His impulses lurk and prowl among our labouring thoughts; his ignorance defeats our little knowledge; his cruelties, fruit of his fear, distort the face of our wisdom; and his gods, though we repudiate them or miscall them by comfortable names, loom on our dark horizons. He and all who came before him, and all who have followed him, are no more than cells in a vast multiple organism, the copious fermentation which is Man. They are lives generating from one immortal sperm.
Here, for an instant, we see three atoms of that life joined in conflict. The lovers stood quietly hand in hand; and Noke was with them before they had time even to take alarm from the noise of his coming. Charity gave a little shriek, and Seth stared in dumb astonishment at the strange creature confronting him: its sharp bright eyes, bristling beard, sneering mouth, and its posture rigid, like a stretched bow, with the tension of a controlled fury.
From this nightmare apparition there issued a voice startlingly quiet.
‘So I’ve found ee, have I? Come you here, girl.’
Charity clung in terror to her lover.
‘D’ye hear, miss I Come to y’r father.’
Seth flung a protecting arm round the girl and wished for a weapon. He had courage and strength, but the ugly and sudden force of Noke’s personality shocked him. This adversary had an air of madness; his malice was coiled like a snake ready to strike; and in the smoothness of his speech was treachery. And now, all too visibly, dusk was invading the wood.
‘Come you ’ere,’ said Noke again. ‘And you, boy—take y’r hands off her. Me and darter want a liddle tark together, daun’tus, deary?’
Charity, at sound of this endearment, raised her head and looked uncertainly at her father. He grinned with hatred, and she despaired of charming that hatred out of him. Her eyes widened to make room for the welling terror of her heart. Dared she risk all by flinging herself at her father and entreating his mercy? Would the softness of her arms about his neck, and the throbbing anguish of her young bosom, wean him from his anger? Unable to answer these questions, she clung to Seth still, her strong faithful Seth. He would not let this ogre kill her.
‘I be waiten, darter,’ said Noke, in a kind of whisper.
Seth broke into troubled speech.
‘You ha’nt no call to be wild with her, Mus Noke. Me and Cis wanta get married, sir. I’ll treat her praaper, gogzoons I will, Mus Noke.’
Noke came a step nearer. His right hand held a cudgel.
‘Come you here, Charity Noke. I’ll not ask again, mindee.’
The movement fired in Seth a train of fear. ‘Draap that!’ He unfastened the girl’s grip on his shoulder and pushed himself in front of her. ‘Us daun’t want a belvering then, do us?’ He spoke mildly, in a tone of friendly persuasion.
Noke, snarling, came at him with the cudgel. But the boy’s stillness seemed to disconcert him; for he did not strike. ‘You’d best get outa my road while you may,’ said he. ‘I’ll have a word wi’ me darter first, I bluv. And settle with you prensley, me fine lubber.’ But, seeing the young man standing his ground solid and stupid, he raised his cudgel again and struck out savagely. But the target moved and the violence of his assault pitched him forward; and Seth, having stepped aside, drove at him with a fury equal to his own. The blow caught him on the ear and filled his head with a thunder that presently dissolved into a monotonous singing; his fall was heavy, and when he angrily tried to raise himself there came so sharp a pain in his left ankle that he sank back again and in a loud voice cried curses on the world. There was dew already fallen, and the freshened earth gave out a rich smell. His hands were sticky with sap from the bruised grass. The world rocked about him. There was thunder again, and voices speaking in the thunder; there was a crack in the sky, a zigzag scarlet crack from which, as he watched, blood came dropping down, and he shut his eyes and felt its warm plash upon his sweating face. He was lying alone in a dark hut, and the thunder was the thunder of galloping hooves, and the voice the voice of a horseman. A dead face stared at him from the grass. He fell on his knees; a wooden yoke was made fast about his neck; and there, at a little distance, the eyes and lips of a young girl mocked and allured him. And when presently he came to himself, and to Glatting Wood, and to the memory of all that had befallen, he wondered what had become of his daughter Charity, for whom he had set this snare tonight. He raised himself cautiously on one elbow and took careful stock of his surroundings. Not knowing that all his phantasmagoria had flashed past in an instant, he was astonished to see the young man still within a yard of him. To be powerless, and at this young man’s mercy, even for a moment, made him choke and cough and spend himself in curses. But the young man paid no heed to him. He, too, was looking to see where Charity had hid herself. And at that moment he saw, not Charity indeed, but a man creeping towards him from the shadows. A man stalking him; and there, another. Having no weapon, he turned to run. Two other faces confronted him. He was surrounded by the sons of Noke.