LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

wet that was flowing over her hand. She knew that it was blood. Perhaps she could staunch…. She had not lived for twenty years in savage Africa to be strange to the results of accident, or any form of violence. Feeling upward, she learnt the uselessness of her efforts. The woman’s head was half severed from her body

      Knowing this, she lost no further time in attempting her own security. She crawled on hands and knees to the place where she supposed the door to be, raising her hands continually to feel for any fallen obstacle that might confront her, or for the guidance of the wall. Her eyes were adjusted to the darkness, and she began to see a little way ahead She found the door, and then the stairs.

      Soon she was in the open air. Rain was falling heavily now—or scarcely falling—stinging rain that was carried almost level on the steady force of the wind. Rain that struck her face like hail. She turned sideways to the wind. She covered her face with her hands. She knew the way to the garden gate, and she feared at every moment that the cottage would collapse toward her.

      But she could not make much headway. She tried to keep straight, and found that ridges of soft soil were beneath her feet. She must have been blown on to the potato-bed which she had observed Mr. Wilkes to be hoeing on Saturday. She wondered where he could be now. It seemed impossible that he could be asleep in the battered cottage. Yet perhaps she ought to try to go back to warn or find him?

      As she tried to turn she was seized in sudden arms that caught and whirled her forward for ten or fifteen yards and then dropped her breathless. It was a great bough with many smaller branches from the cherry-tree in the hedge that the wind had severed. She knew that she had been scratched and torn, and her clothing shredded by the unconscious violence of this fellow-victim of the elemental fury around her. She was in the rhubarb-bed now. She could feel the broken stems beneath her hands as she lay.

      The noise of the falling walls, as the cottage flattened to the wind, roused her to a momentary further effort. She rose with difficulty, made two stumbling steps, and fell to her knees. Then she lay flat again on the wet earth that seemed the only stable thing remaining in a world of ruin. She did not doubt the earth.

      She lay there for an hour or more, while the wind blew over her. As, she did so her body recovered a measure of its strength from the violent ordeal it had endured. She had a natural desire to find some place of rest and shelter. She did not think that any of the cottages in the lane could offer such a haven, even if they had stood more solidly than the one from which she had fled.

      Perhaps the Rectory, which she had scarcely seen, but which she knew lay in the hollow of the hill behind the church, not more than three or four hundred yards away, might give her rest and shelter.

      As she lay face downward, half sunk in the rain-soaked soil, and among the stems and litter of the rhubarb-bed, torn and beaten and motionless, she might have seemed dead already to anyone who could have seen her in the darkness. But her mind, courageous, practical, tenacious, was already planning the way to the safety of which she had thought. She must find the back gate, and avoid the well; the lower lane would be a little longer, but it would be so much easier to follow its curving hollow and not to face the wind. She tried to remember, to construct the way which she must take before making any effort to commence the journey. Then she rose on her knees, and was surprised to find how well she could see among the surrounding shadows. But they were strange, confusing shadows. The contours of familiar things were changed and flailed and flattened. Yet she could see the gap of the back-lane gate in the low hawthorn hedge that still stood stoutly. But the walls and roof of the well must have fallen in.

      An uprooted plum-tree, dragging at intervals farther across the garden, lengthened her progress, but she found the gate at last, or, rather, the gap where the gate had been, and scrambled down the three stone steps to the lower level of the lane.

      After that progress was easier.

      Chapter Four

      The lane was very deep and narrow. Its width was just suffi­cient to allow two farm-carts to pass each other, with one wheel in the gutter, or tilted somewhat on the bank-side. These sides rose steeply for thirty feet to the level of the ploughed lands. Trees grew thickly from the steep slopes of the banks, and lined the edges, which were fenced with hedges of untrimmed hawthorn—un­trimmed because the countryside had been deserted of all but the most inevitable labour, and those who remained to do it were old men whose ancient habit still enabled them to overcome the reluc­tance of stiffened muscles and the vagueness of failing sight; and such of the younger generation as lacked the restless energy of a race more virile than were those who led it.

      The lane was older than any record of the lives of men: older than those straight and narrow ways that the Romans cut blindly through the midland swamps and forests. The wild strawberries on its banks had an ancestry of possession that outdated the flood of Genesis.

      There was an old oak on the northern bank. Its roots went deep in the sloping side. They projected also where the feet of climbing children had kicked away the soil that had once sustained them. Its branches spread, broad and low, over the narrow lane, and stretched across the field above, from which the wheat was springing.

      The storm struck it, but it felt no fear. It had fought with storms for three centuries. There was no lightning, and it was only lightning it hated. A half-dead branch on its western side, and a weal down its wrinkled trunk, showed how nearly it had met disaster eighty years ago. But that was when the elms on the farther side had been too small to shade it.

      If it thrilled to the first impact of the wind through all its sap-fed fibres, it was not with fear, but with the pleasure of a sport it knew, and to which it knew itself to be equal.

      It did not meet the wind’s assault as do the palms of tropic lands with a slim bole that could bend over, at the worst, without snapping, and with a feathery crest of a similar flexibility—the elms had tried the idea of the straight bole, and a poor job they made of it. Nor did it grow to a full and equal amplitude, as did the ash, as in pretence of a perpetual calm, or in mere contempt of the wind’s power to harm it. The ash was a tree of good repute, not to be contemned by any neighbour. It would not snap and show a rotten heart, as the elm may, when it looks most confident. But yet the oak, its clutching claws deep in the rocky soil, its short, thick arms jutting awkwardly from its squat and stubborn trunk, knew that it might still be there when the ash’s children had perished.

      It met the early fury of the storm with a joyous quickening of tenacious life in nerves that were alert and vivid with the youth of spring, and veins in which the sap pulsed strongly, despite the centuries which it carried.

      But the storm did not strike with the sudden and interrupted violences of the tempests which it had known so often. It struck once, and the blow endured and continued, a relentless pressure. And the hours passed, and it did not slacken, and the stubborn strength endured it, and would not fear, though the joy of strife was gone, and every fibre ached and quivered; and the time came when the aching of the boughs was in the deep roots also, clutching, in terror now, to the hard rock which they had riven deeper for centuries The aching of the great east limb, which stretched horizontally across the path of the unceasing wind, became an increasing pain, and when it snapped at last, as a twig snaps, through its eight-foot girth, the stunned tree scarcely felt the pain of its parting. When the storm paused for a moment, and then struck with a fresh force, that bore the great tree bodily, with all its roots, and a hundred tons of the rock it gripped, into the hollow of the lane, it was scarcely conscious of the calamity that had overthrown it: it leaned, still half-erect, conscious, as in a dream, of the cessation of that intolerable strain, and falling into the heavy sleep from which it must wake at last to be aware of its ruin.

      * * * * * * *

      Muriel made her way up the deep lane with comparatively little difficulty, till she came to the place at which the oak had fallen. Here she found herself wading in loose soil, and sinking deeper at every step, till she fell over a projecting root of the fallen giant, that had held its position almost upright as it slid into the hollow.

      To surmount this impediment would have been difficult in the daylight for one of her physical limitations. It was impossible in the darkness. But she was of the kind that does not easily turn from any purpose when once

Скачать книгу