Anne Severn and the Fieldings - May Sinclair
"I'm thinking of Colin."
Her voice kept on sounding loud and dreadful in her brain, while
Maisie's voice floated across it, faint, as if it came from somewhere a
long way off.
"You never think of yourself. You're too good for anything, Anne."
She would never be safe from Maisie and Maisie's innocence that accused,
reproached and threatened her. Maisie's sweetness went through her like
a thrusting sword, like a sharp poison; it had words that cut deeper
than threats, reproaches, accusations. Before she had seen Maisie she
had been fearless, pitiless, remorseless; now, because of Maisie, she
would never be safe from remorse and pity and fear.
She recovered. She told herself that she hadn't lied; that she _had_
been thinking of Colin; that she had thought of him first; that she had
refused to go to Taormina before she knew that Jerrold was coming back
for the hay harvest. She couldn't help it if she knew that now. It was
not as if she had schemed for it or counted on it. She had never for one
moment counted on anything or schemed. And still, as she thought of
Jerrold, her heart tightened on the sharp sword-thrust of remorse.
Because of Maisie, nothing would ever be the same again.
ii
In the last week of April they had gone, Jerrold and Maisie, Eliot and
Colin, to Taormina. In the last week in May Jerrold and Eliot took
Maisie up to Como on their way home. They found Sir Charles and Lady
Durham there waiting for her. They had left Colin by himself at
Taormina.
From the first moment of landing Colin had fallen in love with Sicily
and refused to be taken away from it. He was aware that his recovery was
now in his own hands, and that he would not be free from his malady so
long as he was afraid to be alone. He had got to break himself of his
habit of dependence on other people. And here in Taormina he had come
upon the place that he could bear to be alone in. There was freedom in
his surrender to its enchantment and in the contemplation of its beauty
there was peace. And with peace and freedom he had found his
indestructible self; he had come to the end of its long injury.
One day, sitting out on the balcony of his hotel, he wrote to Anne.
"Don't imagine because I've got well here away from you that it wasn't
you who made me well. In the first place, I should never have gone away
if you hadn't made me go. You knew what you were about when you sent me
here. I know now what Jerrold meant when he wanted to get away by
himself after Father died. He said he wanted to grow a new memory. Well,
that's what I've done here.
"It seemed to happen all at once. One day I'd left them all and gone out
for a walk by myself. It came over me that between me and being well,
perfectly well, there was nothing but myself, that I was really hanging
on to my illness for some sort of protection that it gave me, just as
I'd hung on to you. I'd been thinking about it all the time, filling my
mind with my illness, hanging on to the very fear of it; to save myself,
I suppose, from a worse fear, the fear of life itself. And suddenly, out
there, I let go. And the beauty of the place got me. I can't describe
the beauty, except that there was a lot of strong blue and yellow in it,
a clear gold atmosphere, positively quivering, and streaming over
everything like gold water. I seemed to remember it as if I'd been here
before, a long, steady memory, not just a flash. It was like finding
something you'd lost, or when a musical phrase you've been looking for
suddenly comes back to you. It was the most utter, indescribable peace
and satisfaction. And somehow this time joined on to the times at Wyck
when we were all there and happy together; and the beastly time in
between slipped through. It just dropped out, as if it had never
happened, and I got a sense of having done with it forever. I can't tell
you what it was like. But I think it means I'm well.
"And then, on the top of it all, I remembered you, Anne, and all your
goodness and sweetness. I got right away from my beastly self and saw
you as you are. And I knew what you'd done for me. I don't believe I
ever knew, really _knew_, before. I had to be alone with myself before I
could see it, just as I always had to be alone with my music before I
could get it right. I've never thanked you properly. I can't thank you.
There aren't any words to do it in. And I only know now what it's cost
you...."
Did he know? Did he know that it had once cost her Jerrold?
"... For instance, I know you gave up coming here with us because you
thought it would be better for me without you."
Colin, too, turning it in her heart, the sharp blade of remorse. Would
they never have done punishing her?
And then: "Maisie knows what you are. She told Eliot you were the most
beautiful thing, morally, she had ever known. The one person, she said,
whose motives would always be clean."
If he had tried he couldn't have hit on anything that would have hurt
her so. It was more than she could bear to be punished like this through
the innocence of innocent people, through their kindness and affection,
their belief, their incorruptible trust in her. There was nothing in the
world she dreaded more than Maisie's trust. It was as if she foresaw
what it would do to her, how at any minute it would beat her, it would
break her down.
But she was not beaten yet, not broken down. After every fit of remorse
her passion asserted itself again in a superb recovery. Her motives
might not be so spotless as they looked to Maisie, but her passion
itself was clean as fire. Nothing, not even Maisie's innocence, Maisie's
trust in her, could make her go back on it. Hard, wounding tears cut
through her eyelids as she thought of Maisie, but she brushed them away
and began counting the days till Jerrold should come back.
iii
He came back the first week in June, in time for the hay harvest. And it
happened as she had foreseen.
It would have been dangerous for Jerrold to have left the house at night
to go to the Manor Farm. At any moment he might have been betrayed by
his own footsteps treading the passages and stairs, by the slipping of
locks and bolts, the sound of the opening and shutting of doors. The
servants might be awake and hear him; they might go to his room and find
that he was not there.
But Colin's shelter stood in a recess on the lawn, open to the fields
and hidden from the house by tall hedges of yew. Nobody could see him
slip out into the moonlight or the darkness; nobody could hear the soft
padding of his feet on the grass. He had only to run down the three
fields and cross the belt of firs to come to Anne's shelter at the
bottom. The blank, projecting wall of the mill hid it from the cottages
and the Manor Farm house; the firs hid it from the field path; a high
bank, topped by a stone wall, hid it from the road and Sutton's Farm.
Its three wooden walls held them safe.
Night after night, between eleven and midnight, he came to her. Night
after night, she lay awake waiting till the light rustling of the meadow
grass told her he was there: on moonlit nights a quick brushing sound;
in the thick blackness a sound like a slow shearing as he felt his way.
The moon would show him clear, as he stood in the open frame of the
shelter, looking in at her; or she would see him grey, twilit and
mysterious; or looming, darker than dark, on black nights without moon
or stars.
They loved the clear nights when their bodies showed to each other white
under the white moon; they loved the dark nights that brought them
close, shutting them in, annihilating every sensation but that of his
tense, hard muscles pressing down, of her body crushed and yielding,
tightening and slackening in surrender; of their brains swimming in
their dark ecstasy.
They loved the warmth of each other's bodies in the hot windless nights;
they loved their smooth, clean coolness washed by the night wind.
Nothing, not even the sweet, haunting ghost of Maisie, came between.
They would fall asleep in each other's arms and lie there till dawn,
till Anne woke in a sudden fright. Always she had this fear that some
day they would sleep on into the morning, when the farm people would be
up and about. Jerrold lay still, tired out with satisfaction, sunk under
all the floors of sleep. She had to drag him up, with kisses first and
light stroking, then with a strong undoing of their embrace, pushing
back his heavy arms that fell again to her breast as she parted them.
Then she would wrench herself loose and shake him by the shoulders till
she woke him. He woke clean, with no ugly turning and yawning, but with
a great stretching of his strong body and a short, sudden laugh, the
laugh he had for danger. Then he would look at his wrist watch and show
it her, laughing again as she saw that this time, again, they were safe.
And they would lie a little while longer, looking into each other's
faces for the sheer joy of looking, reckless with impunity. And he would
start up suddenly with, "I say, Anne, I must clear out or we shall be
caught." And they would get up.
Outside, the world looked young and unknown in the June dawn, in the
still, clear, gold-crystal air, where green leaves and green grass shone
with a strange, hard lustre like fresh paint, and yet unearthly,
uncreated, fixed in their own space and time.
And she would go with him, her naked feet shining white on the queer,
bright, cold green of the grass, up the field to the belt of firs that
stood up, strange and eternal, under the risen sun.
They parted there, holding each other for a last kiss, a last clinging,
as if never in this world they would meet again.
Dawn after dawn. They belonged to the dawn and the dawn light; the dawn
was their day; they knew it as they knew no other time.
And Anne would go back to her shelter, and lie there, and live through
their passion again in memory, till she fell asleep.
And when she woke she would find the sweet, sad ghost of Maisie haunting
her, coming between her and the memory of her dark ecstasy. Maisie,
utterly innocent, utterly good, trusting her, sending Jerrold back to
her because she trusted her. Only to think of Maisie gave her a fearful
sense of insecurity. She thought: If I'd loved her I could never have
done it. If I were to love her even now that would end it. We couldn't
go on. She prayed God that she might not love her.
By day the hard work of the farm stopped her thinking. And the next
night and the next dawn brought back her safety.
iv
The hay harvest was over by the last week of June, and in the first week
of July Maisie had come back.
Maisie or no Maisie, the work of the farm had to go on; and Anne felt
more than ever that it justified her. When the day of reckoning came, if
it ever did come, let her be judged by her work. Because of her love for
Jerrold here was this big estate held together, and kept going; because
of his love for her here was Jerrold, growing into a perfect farmer and
a perfect landlord; because of her he had found the one thing he was
best fitted to do; because of him she herself was valuable. Anne brought
to her work on the land a thoroughness that aimed continually at
perfection. She watched the starting of every tractor-plough and driller
as it broke fresh ground, to see that machines and men were working at
their highest pitch of efficiency. She demanded efficiency, and, on the
whole, she got it; she gave it by a sort of contagion. She wrung out of
the land the very utmost it was capable of yielding; she saw that there
was no waste of straw or hay, of grain or fertilizers; and she knew how
to take risks, spending big sums on implements and stock wherever she
saw a good chance of a return.
Jerrold learned from her this perfection. Her work stood clear for the
whole countryside to see. Nobody could say she had not done well by the
land. When she first took on the Manor Farm it had stood only in the
second class; in four years she had raised it to the first. It was now
one of the best cultivated estates in the county and famous for its
prize stock. Sir John Corbett of Underwoods, Mr. Hawtrey of Medlicote,
and Major Markham of Wyck Wold owned to an admiration for Anne Severn's
management. Her morals, they said, might be a trifle shady, but her
farming was above reproach. More reluctantly they admitted that she had
made something of that young rotter, Colin, even while they supposed
that he had been sent abroad to keep him out of Anne Severn's way. They
also supposed that as soon as he could do it decently Jerrold would get
rid of Anne.
Then two things happened. In July Maisie Fielding came back and was seen
driving about the country with Anne Severn; and in the same month old
Sutton died and the Barrow Farm was let to Anne, thus establishing her
permanence.
Anne had refused to take it from Jerrold as his gift. He had pressed her
persistently.
"You might, Anne. It's the only thing I can give you. And what is it? A
scrubby two hundred acres."
"It's a thundering lot of land, Jerrold. I can't take it."
"You must. It isn't enough, after all you've done for us. I'd like to
give you everything I've got; Wyck Manor and the whole blessed estate to
the last turnip, and every cow and pig. But I can't do that. And you
used to say you wanted the Barrow Farm."
"I wanted to rent it, Jerry darling. I can't let you give it me."
"Why not? I think it's simply beastly of you not to."
At that point Maisie had passed through the room with her flowers and he
had called to her to help him.
"What are you two quarrelling about?" she said.
"Why, I want to give her the Barrow Farm and she won't let me."
"Of course I won't let him. A whole farm. How could I?"
"I think you might, Anne. It would please him no end."
"She thinks," Jerrold said, "she can go on doing things for us, but we
mustn't do anything for her. And I say it's beastly of her."
"It is really, Anne darling. It's selfish. He wants to give it you so
awfully. He won't be happy if you won't take it."
"But a farm, a whole thumping farm. It's a big house and two hundred
acres. How can I take a thing like that? You couldn't yourself if you
were me."
Maisie's little white fingers flickered over the blue delphiniums
stacked in the blue-and-white Chinese jar. Her mauve-blue eyes were
smiling at Anne over the tops of the tall blue spires.
"Don't you want to make him happy?" she said.
"Not that way."
"If it's the only way--?"
She passed out of the room, still smiling, to gather more flowers. They
looked at each other.
"Jerrold, I can't stand it when she says things like that."
"No more can I. But you know, she really does want you to take that
farm."
"Don't you see why I can't take it--from _you_? It's because we're
lovers."
"I should have thought that made it easier."
"It makes it impossible. I've _given_ myself to you. I can't take
anything. Besides, it would look as if I'd taken it for that."
"That's an appalling idea, Anne."
"It is. But it's what everybody'll think. They'll wonder what on earth
you did it for. We don't want people wondering about us. If they once
begin wondering they'll end by finding out."
"I see. Perhaps you're right. I'm sorry."
"It sticks out of us enough as it is. I can't think how Maisie doesn't
see it. But she never will. She'll never believe that we--"
"Do you want her to see it?"
"No, but it hurts so, her not seeing.... Jerrold, I believe that's the
punishment--Maisie's trusting us. It's the worst thing she could have
done to us."
"Then, if we're punished we're quits. Don't think of it, Anne darling.
Don't let Maisie come in between us like that."
He took her in his arms and kissed her, close and quick, so that no
thought could come between.
But Maisie's sweetness had not done its worst. She had yet to prove what
she was and what she could do.
v
July passed and August; the harvest was over. And in September Jerrold
went up to London to stay with Eliot for the week-end, and Anne stayed
with Maisie, because Maisie didn't like being left in the big house by
herself. Through all those weeks that was the way Maisie had her,
through her need of her.
And on the Thursday before Anne came Maisie had called on Mrs. Hawtrey
of Medlicote, and Mrs. Hawtrey had asked her to lunch with her on the
following Monday. Maisie said she was afraid she couldn't lunch on
Monday because Anne Severn would be with her, and Mrs. Hawtrey said she
was very sorry, but she was afraid she couldn't ask Anne Severn.
And Maisie enquired in her tender voice, "Why not?"
And Mrs. Hawtrey replied, "Because, my dear, nobody here does ask Anne
Severn."
Maisie said again, "Why not?"
Then Mrs. Hawtrey said she didn't want to go into it, the whole thing
was so unpleasant, but nobody _did_ call on Anne Severn. She was too
well known.
And at that Maisie rose in her fragile dignity and said that nobody knew
Anne Severn so well as she and her husband did, and that there was
nobody in the world so absolutely _good_ as Anne, and that she couldn't
possibly know anybody who refused to know her, and so left Mrs. Hawtrey.
The evening Jerrold came home, Maisie, flushed with pleasure,
entertained him with a report of the encounter.
"So you've given an ultimatum to the county."
"Yes. I told you I'd cut them all if they went on cutting Anne. And now
they know it."
"That means that you won't know anybody, Maisie. Except for Anne and me
you'll be absolutely alone here."
"I don't care. I don't want anybody but you and Anne. And if I do we can
ask somebody down. There are lots of amusing people who'd come. And
Eliot can bring his scientific crowd. It simply means that Corbetts and
Hawtreys won't be asked to meet them, that's all."
She went upstairs to lie down before dinner, and presently Anne came to
him in the drawing-room. She was dressed in her riding coat and breeches
as she had come off the land.
"What do you think Maisie's done now?" he said.
"I don't know. Something that'll make me feel awful, I suppose."
"If you're going to take it like that I won't tell you."
"Yes. Tell me. Tell me. I'd rather know."
He told her as Maisie had told him.
"Can't you see her, standing up to the whole county? Pounding them with
her little hands."
His vision of the gentle thing, rising up in that sudden sacred fury of
protection, moved him to admiring, tender laughter. It made Anne burst
into tears.
"Oh, Jerrold, that's the worst that's happened yet. Everybody'll cut
her, because of me."
"Bless you, she won't care. She says she doesn't care about anybody but
you and me."
"But that's the awful thing, her caring. That's the punishment. The
punishment."
Again he took her in his arms and comforted her.
"What am I to do, Jerry? What am I to _do?_"
"Go to her," he said, "and say something nice."
"Go to her and take my punishment?"
"Well, yes, darling, I'm afraid you've got to take it. We can't have it
both ways. It wouldn't _be_ a punishment if you weren't so sweet, if you
didn't mind so. I wish to God I'd never told you."
She held her head high.
"I made you. I'm glad you told me."
She went up to Maisie in her room. Maisie had dressed for dinner and lay
on her couch, looking exquisite and fragile in a gown of thick white
lace. She gave a little soft cry as Anne came to her.
"Anne, you've been crying. What is it, darling?"
"Nothing. Only Jerrold told me what you'd done."
"Done?"
"Yes, for me. Why did you do it, Maisie?"
"Why? I suppose it was because I love you. It was the least I could do."
She held out her hands to her. Anne knelt down, crouching on the floor
beside her, with her face hidden against Maisie's body. Maisie put her
arm round her.
"But why are you crying about it, Anne? You never cry. I can't bear it.
It's like seeing Jerrold cry."
"It's because you're so good, so good, and I'm such a brute. You don't
know what a brute I am."
"Oh yes, I know."
"Do you?" she said, sharply. For one moment she thought that Maisie did
indeed know, know and understand so perfectly that she forgave. This was
forgiveness.
"Of course I do. And so does Jerrold. _He_ knows what a brute you are."
It was not forgiveness. It was Maisie's innocence again, her trust--the
punishment. Anne knelt there and took the pain of it.
vi
She lay awake, alone in her shelter. She had given the excuse of a
racking headache to keep Jerrold from coming to her. For that she had
had to lie. But what was her whole existence but a lie? A lie told by
her silence under Maisie's trust in her, by her acceptance of Maisie's
friendship, by her acquiescence in Maisie's preposterous belief. Every
minute that she let Maisie go on loving and trusting and believing in
her she lied. And the appalling thing was that she couldn't be alone in
her lying. So long as Maisie trusted him Jerrold lied, too--Jerrold, who
was truth itself. One moment she thought: That's what I've brought him
to. That's how I've dragged him down. The next she saw that reproach as
the very madness of her conscience. She had not dragged Jerrold down;
she had raised him to his highest intensity of loving, she had brought
him, out of the illusion of his life with Maisie, to reality and kept
him there in an immaculate faithfulness. Not even for one insane moment
did Anne admit that there was anything wrong or shameful in their
passion itself. It was Maisie's innocence that made them liars, Maisie's
goodness that put them in the wrong and brought shame on them, her truth
that falsified them.
No woman less exquisite in goodness could have moved her to this
incredible remorse. It took the whole of Maisie, in her unique
perfection, to beat her and break her down. Her first instinct in
refusing to know Maisie had been profoundly right. It was as if she had
foreseen, even then, that knowing Maisie would mean loving her, and
that, loving her, she would be beaten and broken down. The awful thing
was that she did love Maisie; and she couldn't tell which was the worse
to bear, her love for Maisie or Maisie's love for her. And who could
have foreseen the pain of it? When she prayed that she might take the
whole punishment, she had not reckoned on this refinement and precision
of torture. God knew what he was about. With all his resources he
couldn't have hit on anything more delicately calculated to hurt.
Nothing less subtle would have touched her. Not discovery; not the
grossness of exposure; but this intolerable security. What could
discovery and exposure do but set her free in her reality? Anne would
have rejoiced to see her lie go up in one purifying flame of revelation.
But to go safe in her lie, hiding her reality, and yet defenceless under
the sting of Maisie's loving, was more than she could bear. She had
brought all her truth and all her fineness to this passion which
Maisie's innocence made a sin, and she was punished where she had
sinned, wounded by the subtle God in her fineness and her truth. If only
Jerrold could have escaped, but he was vulnerable, too; there was
fineness and truth in him. To suffer really he had to be wounded in his
soul.
If Jerrold was hurt then they must end it.
As yet he had given no sign of feeling; but that was like him. Up to the
last minute he would fight against feeling, and when it came he would
refuse to own that he suffered, that there was any cause for suffering.
It would be like the time when his father was dying, when he refused to
see that he was dying. So he would refuse to see Maisie and then, all at
once, he would see her and he would be beaten and broken down.
vii
And suddenly he did see her.
It was on the first Sunday after Jerrold's return. Maisie had had
another of her heart attacks, by herself, in her bed, the night before;
and she had been lying down all day. The sun had come round on to the
terrace, and she now rested there, wrapped in a fur coat and leaning
back on her cushions in the garden chair.
They were sitting out there, all three, Jerrold and Anne talking
together, and Maisie listening with her sweet, attentive eyes. Suddenly
she shut her eyes and ceased to listen. Jerrold and Anne went on talking
with hushed voices, and in a little while Maisie was asleep.
Her head, rising out of the brown fur, was tilted back on the cushions,
showing her innocent white throat; her white violet eyelids were shut
down on her eyes, the dark lashes lying still; her mouth, utterly
innocent, was half open; her breath came through it unevenly, in light
jerks.
"She's asleep, Jerrold."
They sat still, making no sound.
And as she looked at Maisie sleeping, tears came again into Anne's eyes,
the hard tears that cut her eyelids and spilled themselves, drop by slow
drop, heavily. She tried to wipe them away secretly with her hand before
Jerrold saw them; but they came again and again and he had seen. He had
risen to his feet as if he would go, then checked himself and stood
beside her; and together they looked on at Maisie's sleeping; they felt
together the infinite anguish, the infinite pathos of her goodness and
her trust. The beauty of her spirit lay bare to them in the white,
tilted face, slackened and smoothed with sleep. Sleep showed them her
innocence again, naked and helpless. They saw her in her poignant being,
her intense reality. She was so real that in that moment nothing else
mattered to them.