She retreated before him. She went down to the Marsh, she
entered again the immunity of her parents' love for her. He
remained at Yew Cottage, black and clinched, his mind dead. He
was unable to work at his wood-carving. He went on working
monotonously at the garden, blindly, like a mole.
As she came home, up the hill, looking away at the town dim
and blue on the hill, her heart relaxed and became yearning. She
did not want to fight him any more. She wanted love--oh,
love. Her feet began to hurry. She wanted to get back to him.
Her heart became tight with yearning for him.
He had been making the garden in order, cutting the edges of
the turf, laying the path with stones. He was a good, capable
workman.
"How nice you've made it," she said, approaching tentatively
down the path.
But he did not heed, he did not hear. His brain was solid and
dead.
"Haven't you made it nice?" she repeated, rather
plaintively.
He looked up at her, with that fixed, expressionless face and
unseeing eyes which shocked her, made her go dazed and blind.
Then he turned away. She saw his slender, stooping figure
groping. A revulsion came over her. She went indoors.
As she took off her hat in the bedroom, she found herself
weeping bitterly, with some of the old, anguished, childish
desolation. She sat still and cried on. She did not want him to
know. She was afraid of his hard, evil moments, the head dropped
a little, rigidly, in a crouching, cruel way. She was afraid of
him. He seemed to lacerate her sensitive femaleness. He seemed
to hurt her womb, to take pleasure in torturing her.
He came into the house. The sound of his footsteps in his
heavy boots filled her with horror: a hard, cruel, malignant
sound. She was afraid he would come upstairs. But he did not.
She waited apprehensively. He went out.
Where she was most vulnerable, he hurt her. Oh, where she was
delivered over to him, in her very soft femaleness, he seemed to
lacerate her and desecrate her. She pressed her hands over her
womb in anguish, whilst the tears ran down her face. And why,
and why? Why was he like this?
Suddenly she dried her tears. She must get the tea ready. She
went downstairs and set the table. When the meal was ready, she
called to him.
"I've mashed the tea, Will, are you coming?"
She herself could hear the sound of tears in her own voice,
and she began to cry again. He did not answer, but went on with
his work. She waited a few minutes, in anguish. Fear came over
her, she was panic-stricken with terror, like a child; and she
could not go home again to her father; she was held by the power
in this man who had taken her.