Anne Severn and the Fieldings - May Sinclair
"If you're going into Wyck, Jerry, you might tell Yearp----"
Yearp.
He got up. His face was very red. He looked mournful and frightened too.
Yes, frightened.
"I--can't, Mother."
"You can perfectly well. Tell Yearp to come and look at Pussy's ears, I
think she's got canker."
"She hasn't," said Jerry defiantly.
"She jolly well has," said Eliot.
"Rot."
"You only say that because you don't like to think she's got it."
"Eliot can go himself. _He's_ fond of Yearp."
"You'll do as you're told, Jerry. It's downright cowardice."
"It isn't cowardice, is it, Daddy?"
"Well," said his father, "it isn't exactly courage."
"Whatever it is," his mother said, "you'll have to get over it. You go
on as if nobody cared about poor Binky but yourself."
Binky was Jerry's dog. He had run into a motor-bicycle in the Easter
holidays and hurt his back, so that Yearp, the vet, had had to come and
give him chloroform. That was why Jerrold was afraid of Yearp. When he
saw him he saw Binky with his nose in the cup of chloroform; he heard
him snorting out his last breath. And he couldn't bear it.
"I could send one of the men," his father was saying.
"Don't encourage him, Robert. He's got to face it."
"Yes, Jerrold, you'd better go and get it over. You can't go on funking
it for ever."
Jerrold went. But he went alone, he wouldn't let Anne go with him. He
said he didn't want her to be mixed up with it.
"He means," said Eliot, "that he doesn't want to think of Yearp every
time he sees Anne."
ix
It was true that Eliot was fond of Yearp's society. He would spend hours
with him, learning how to dissect frogs and rabbits and pigeons. He
drove about the country with Yearp seeing the sick animals, the ewes at
lambing time and the cows at their calving. And he spent half the
midsummer holidays reading _Animal Biology_ and drawing diagrams of
frogs' hearts and pigeons' brains. He said he wasn't going to Oxford or
Cambridge when he left Cheltenham; he was going to Barts. He wanted to
be a doctor. But his mother said he didn't know what he'd want to be in
three years' time. She thought him awful, with his frogs' hearts and
horrors.
Next to Jerrold and little Colin Anne loved Eliot. He seemed to know
when she was thinking about her mother and to understand. He took her
into the woods to look for squirrels; he showed her the wildflowers and
told her all their names: bugloss, and lady's smock and speedwell,
king-cup, willow herb and meadow sweet, crane's bill and celandine.
One day they found in the garden a tiny egg-shaped shell made of
gold-coloured lattice work. When they put it under the microscope they
saw inside it a thing like a green egg. Every day they watched it; it
put out two green horns, and a ridge grew down the middle of it, and one
morning they found the golden shell broken. A long, elegant fly with
slender wings crawled beside it.
When Benjy died of eating too much lettuce Eliot was sorry. Aunt Adeline
said it was all put on and that he really wanted to cut him up and see
what he was made of. But Eliot didn't. He said Benjy was sacred. That
was because he knew they loved him. And he dug the grave and lined it
with moss and told Aunt Adeline to shut up when she said it ought to
have been lettuce leaves.
Aunt Adeline complained that it was hard that Eliot couldn't be nice to
her when he was her favorite.
"Little Anne, little Anne, what have you done to my Eliot?" She was
always saying things like that. Anne couldn't think what she meant till
Jerrold told her she was the only kid that Eliot had ever looked at. The
big Hawtrey girl from Medlicote would have given her head to be in
Anne's shoes.
But Anne didn't care. Her love for Jerrold was sharp and exciting. She
brought tears to it and temper. It was mixed up with God and music and
the deaths of animals, and sunsets and all sorrowful and beautiful and
mysterious things. Thinking about her mother made her think about
Jerrold; but she never thought about Eliot at all when he wasn't there.
She would run away from Eliot any minute if she heard Jerrold calling.
It was Jerrold, Jerrold, all the time, said Aunt Adeline.
And when Eliot was busy with his microscope and Jerrold had turned from
her to Colin, there was Uncle Robert. He seemed to know the moments when
she wanted him. Then he would take her out riding with him over the
estate that stretched from Wyck across the valley of the Speed and
beyond it for miles over the hills. And he would show her the reaping
machines at work, and the great carthorses, and the prize bullocks in
their stalls at the Manor Farm. And Anne told him her secret, the secret
she had told to nobody but Jerrold.
"Some day," she said, "I shall have a farm, with horses and cows and
pigs and little calves."
"Shall you like that?"
"Yes," said Anne. "I would. Only it can't happen till Grandpapa's dead.
And I don't want him to die."
x
They were saying now that Colin was wonderful. He was only seven, yet he
could play the piano like a grown-up person, very fast and with loud
noises in the bass. And he could sing like an angel. When you heard him
you could hardly believe that he was a little boy who cried sometimes
and was afraid of ghosts. Two masters came out from Cheltenham twice a
week to teach him. Eliot said Colin would be a professional when he grew
up, but his mother said he should be nothing of the sort and Eliot
wasn't to go putting nonsense like that into his head. Still, she was
proud of Colin when his hands went pounding and flashing over the keys.
Anne had to give up practising because she did it so badly that it hurt
Colin to hear her.
He wasn't in the least conceited about his playing, not even when
Jerrold stood beside him and looked on and said, "Clever Col-Col. Isn't
he a wonderful kid? Look at him. Look at his little hands, all over the
place."
He didn't think playing was wonderful. He thought the things that
Jerrold did were wonderful. With his child's legs and arms he tried to
do the things that Jerrold did. They told him he would have to wait nine
years before he could do them. He was always talking about what he would
do in nine years' time.
And there was the day of the walk to High Slaughter, through the valley
of the Speed to the valley of the Windlode, five miles there and back.
Eliot and Jerrold and Anne had tried to sneak out when Colin wasn't
looking; but he had seen them and came running after them down the
field, calling to them to let him come. Eliot shouted "We can't,
Col-Col, it's too far," but Colin looked so pathetic, standing there in
the big field, that Jerrold couldn't bear it.
"I think," he said, "we might let him come."
"Yes. Let him," Anne said.
"Rot. He can't walk it."
"I can," said Colin. "I can."
"I tell you he can't. If he's tired he'll be sick in the night and then
he'll say it's ghosts."
Colin's mouth trembled.
"It's all right, Col-Col, you're coming." Jerrold held out his hand.
"Well," said Eliot, "if he crumples up _you_ can carry him."
"I can," said Jerrold.
"So can I," said Anne.
"Nobody," said Colin "shall carry me. I can walk."
Eliot went on grumbling while Colin trotted happily beside them. "You're
a fearful ass, Jerrold. You're simple ruining that kid. He thinks he can
come butting into everything. Here's the whole afternoon spoiled for all
three of us. He can't walk. You'll see he'll drop out in the first
mile."
"I shan't, Jerrold."
And he didn't. He struggled on down the fields to Upper Speed and along
the river-meadows to Lower Speed and Hayes Mill, and from Hayes Mill to
High Slaughter. It was when they started to walk back that his legs
betrayed him, slackening first, then running, because running was easier
than walking, for a change. Then dragging. Then being dragged between
Anne and Jerrold (for he refused to be carried). Then staggering,
stumbling, stopping dead; his child's mouth drooping.
Then Jerrold carried him on his back with his hands clasped under
Colin's soft hips. Colin's body slipped every minute and had to be
jerked up again; and when it slipped his arms tightened round Jerrold's
neck, strangling him.
At last Jerrold, too, staggered and stumbled and stopped dead.
"I'll take him," said Eliot. He forbore, nobly, to say "I told you so."
And by turns they carried him, from the valley of the Windlode to the
valley of the Speed, past Hayes Mill, through Lower Speed, Upper Speed,
and up the fields to Wyck Manor. Then up the stairs to the schoolroom,
pursued by their mother's cries.
"Oh Col-Col, my little Col-Col! What have you done to him, Eliot?"
Eliot bore it like a lamb.
Only after they had left Colin in the schoolroom, he turned on Jerrold.
"Some day," he said, "Col-Col will be a perfect nuisance. Then you and
Anne'll have to pay for it."
"Why me and Anne?"
"Because you'll both be fools enough to keep on giving in to him."
"I suppose," said Jerrold bitterly, "you think you're clever."
Adeline came out and overheard him and made a scene in the gallery
before Pinkney, the footman, who was bringing in the schoolroom tea. She
said Eliot was clever enough and old enough to know better. They were
all old enough. And Jerrold said it was his fault, not Eliot's, and Anne
said it was hers, too. And Adeline declared that it was all their faults
and she would have to speak to their father. She kept it up long after
Eliot and Jerrold had retreated to the bathroom. If it had been anybody
but her little Col-Col. She wouldn't _have_ him dragged about the
country till he dropped.
She added that Col-Col was her favourite.
xi
It was the last week of the holidays. Rain had come with the west wind.
The hills were drawn back behind thick sheets of glassy rain. Shining
spears of rain dashed themselves against the west windows. Jets of rain
rose up, whirling and spraying, from the terrace. Rain ran before the
wind in a silver scud along the flagged path under the south front.
The wind made hard, thudding noises as if it pounded invisible bodies in
the air. It screamed high above the drumming and hissing of the rain.
It excited the children.
From three o'clock till tea-time the sponge fight stormed up and down
the passages. The house was filled with the sound of thudding feet and
shrill laughter.
Adeline lay on the sofa in the library. Eliot was with her there.
She was amused, but a little plaintive when they rushed in to her.
"It's perfectly awful the noise you children are making. I'm tired out
with it."
Jerrold flung himself on her. "Tired? What must _we_ be?"
But he wasn't tired. His madness still worked in him. It sought some
supreme expression.
"What can we play at next?" said Anne.
"What can we play at next?" said Colin.
"Something quiet, for goodness sake," said his mother.
They were very quiet, Jerrold and Anne and Colin, as they set the
booby-trap for Pinkney. Very quiet as they watched Pinkney's innocent
approach. The sponge caught him--with a delightful, squelching
flump--full and fair on the top of his sleek head.
Anne shrieked with delight. "Oh Jerry, did you _hear_ him say 'Damn'?"
They rushed back to the library to tell Eliot. But Eliot couldn't see
that it was funny. He said it was a rotten thing to do.
"When he's a servant and can't do anything to _us_."
"I never thought of that," said Jerrold. (It _was_ pretty rotten.) ...
"I could ask him to bowl to me and let him get me out."
"He'd do that in any case."
"Still--I'll have _asked_ him."
But it seemed that Pinkney was in no mood to think of cricket, and they
had to be content with begging his pardon, which he gave, as he said,
"freely." Yet it struck them that he looked sadder than a booby-trap
should have made him.
It was just before bed-time that Eliot told them the awful thing.
"I suppose you know," he said, "that Pinkney's mother's dying?"
"I didn't," said Jerrold. "But I might have known. I notice that when
you're excited, _really_ excited, something awful's bound to happen....
Don't cry, Anne. It was beastly of us, but we didn't know."
"No. It's no use crying," said Eliot. "You can't do anything."
"That's it," Anne sobbed. "If we only could. If we could go to him and
tell him we wouldn't have done it if we'd known."
"You jolly well can't. It would only bother the poor chap. Besides, it
was Jerry did it. Not you."
"It _was_ me. I filled the sponge. We did it together."
What they had done was beastly--setting booby-traps for Pinkney, and
laughing at him when his mother was dying--but they had done it
together. The pain of her sin had sweetness in it since she shared it
with Jerry. Jerry's arm was round her as she went upstairs to bed,
crying. They sat together on her bed, holding each other's hands; they
faced it together.
"You'd never have done it, Anne, if I hadn't made you."
"I wouldn't mind so much if we hadn't laughed at him."
"Well, we couldn't help _that_. And it wasn't as if we'd known."
"If only we could tell him--"
"We can't. He'd hate us to go talking to him about his mother."
"He'd hate us."
Then Anne had an idea. They couldn't talk to Pinkney but they could
write. That wouldn't hurt him. Jerry fetched a pencil and paper from the
schoolroom; and Anne wrote.
Dear Pinkney: We didn't know. We wouldn't have done it if we'd
known. We are awfully sorry.
Yours truly,
ANNE SEVERN.
P.S. You aren't to answer this.
JERROLD FIELDING.
Half an hour later Jerrold knocked at her door.
"Anne--are you in bed?"
She got up and stood with him at the door in her innocent nightgown.
"It's all right," he said. "I've seen Pinkney. He says we aren't to
worry. He knew we wouldn't have done it if we'd known."
"Was he crying?"
"No. Laughing.... All the same, it'll be a lesson to us," he said.
xii
"Where's Jerrold?"
Robert Fielding called from the dogcart that waited by the porch. Eliot
sat beside him, very stiff and straight, painfully aware of his mother
who stood on the flagged path below, and made yearning faces at him,
doing her best, at this last moment, to destroy his morale. Colin sat
behind him by Jerrold's place, tearful but excited. He was to go with
them to the station. Eliot tried hard to look as if he didn't care; and,
as his mother said, he succeeded beautifully.
It was the end of the holidays.
"Adeline, you might see where Jerrold is."
She went into the house and saw Anne and Jerrold coming slowly down the
stairs together from the gallery. At the turn they stopped and looked at
each other, and suddenly he had her in his arms. They kissed, with
close, quick kisses and then stood apart, listening.
Adeline went back. "The monkey," she thought; "and I who told her she
didn't know how to do it."
Jerrold ran out, very red in the face and defiant. He gave himself to
his mother's large embrace, broke from it, and climbed into the dogcart.
The mare bounded forward, Jerrold and Eliot raised their hats, shouted
and were gone.
Adeline watched while the long lines of the beech-trees narrowed on
them, till the dogcart swung out between the ball-topped pillars of the
Park gates.
Last time their going had been nothing to her. Today she could hardly
bear it. She wondered why.
She turned and found little Anne standing beside her. They moved
suddenly apart. Each had seen the other's tears.
xiii
Outside Colin's window the tree rocked in the wind. A branch brushed
backwards and forwards, it tapped on the pane. Its black shadow shook on
the grey, moonlit wall.
Jerrold's empty bed showed white and dreadful in the moonlight, covered
with a sheet. Colin was frightened.
A narrow passage divided his room from Anne's. The doors stood open. He
called "Anne! Anne!"
A light thud on the floor of Anne's room, then the soft padding of naked
feet, and Anne stood beside him in her white nightgown. Her hair rose in
a black ruff round her head, her eyes were very black in the sharp
whiteness of her face.
"Are you frightened, Colin?"
"No. I'm not exactly frightened, but I think there's something there."
"It's nothing. Only the tree."
"I mean--in Jerry's bed."
"Oh no, Colin."
"Dare you," he said, "sit on it?"
"Of course I dare. _Now_ you see. _Now_ you won't be frightened."
"You know," Colin said, "I don't mind a bit when Jerrold's there. The
ghosts never come then, because he frightens them away."
The clock struck ten. They counted the strokes. Anne still sat on
Jerrold's bed with her knees drawn up to her chin and her arms clasped
round them.
"I'll tell you a secret," Colin said. "Only you mustn't tell."
"I won't."
"Really and truly?"
"Really and truly."
"I think Jerrold's the wonderfullest person in the whole world. When I
grow up I'm going to be like him."
"You couldn't be."
"Not now. But when I'm grown-up, I say."
"You couldn't be. Not even then. Jerrold can't sing and he can't play."
"I don't care."
"But you mustn't do what he can't if you want to be like him."
"When I'm singing and playing I shall pretend I'm not."
"You needn't. You won't ever be him."
"I--shall."
"Col-Col, I don't want you to be like him. I don't want anybody else to
be like Jerrold in the whole world."
"But," said Colin, "I shall be like him."
xiv
Every night Adeline still came to see Anne in bed. The little thing had
left off pretending to be asleep. She lay with eyes wide open, yielding
sweetly to the embrace.
To-night her eyelids lay shut, slack on her eyes, and Adeline thought
"She's really asleep, the little lamb. Better not touch her."
She was going away when a sound stopped her. A sound of sobbing.
"Anne--Anne--are you crying?"
A tremulous drawing-in of breath, a shaking under the bed-clothes. On
Anne's white cheek the black eyelashes were parted and pointed with her
tears. She had been crying a long time.
Adeline knelt down, her face against Anne's face.
"What is it darling? Tell me."
Anne shivered.
"Oh Anne, I wish you loved me. You don't, ducky, a little bit."
"I do. I do. Really and truly."
"Then give me a kiss. The proper kind."
Anne gave her the tight, deep kiss that was the proper kind.
"Now--tell me what it is." She knew by Anne's surrender that, this time,
it was not her mother.
"I don't know."
"You _do_ know. Is it Jerry? Do you want Jerry?"
At the name Anne's crying broke out again, savage, violent.
Adeline held her close and let the storm beat itself out against her
heart.
"You can't want him more than I do, little Anne."
"You'll have him when he comes back. And I shan't. I shall be gone."
"You'll come again, darling. You'll come again."
II
ADOLESCENTS
i
For the next two years Anne came again and again, staying four months at
Wyck and four months in London with Grandmamma Severn and Aunt Emily,
and four months with Grandpapa Everitt at the Essex Farm.
When she was twelve they sent her to school in Switzerland for three
years. Then back to Wyck, after eight months of London and Essex in
between.
Only the times at Wyck counted for Anne. Her calendar showed them clear
with all their incidents recorded; thick black lines blotted out the
other days, as she told them off, one by one. Three years and eight
months were scored through in this manner.
Anne at fifteen was a tall girl with long hair tied in a big black bow
at the cape of her neck. Her vague nose had settled into the
forward-raking line that made her the dark likeness of her father. Her
body was slender but solid; the strong white neck carried her head high
with the poise of a runner. She looked at least seventeen in her
clean-cut coat and skirt. Probably she wouldn't look much older for
another fifteen years.
Robert Fielding stared with incredulity at this figure which had pursued
him down the platform at Wyck and now seized him by the arm.
"Is it--is it Anne?"
"Of course it is. Why, didn't you expect me?"
"I think I expected something smaller and rather less grown-up."
"I'm not grown-up. I'm the same as ever."
"Well, you're not little Anne any more."
She squeezed his arm, hanging on it in her old loving way. "No. But I'm
still me. And I'd have known _you_ anywhere."
"What? With my grey hair?"
"I love your grey hair."
It made him handsome, more lovable than ever. Anne loved it as she loved
his face, tanned and tightened by sun and wind, the long hard-drawn
lines, the thin, kind mouth, the clear, greenish brown eyes, quick and
kind.
Colin stood by the dogcart in the station yard. Colin was changed. He
was no longer the excited child who came rushing to you. He stood for
you to come to him, serious and shy. His child's face was passing from
prettiness to a fine, sombre beauty.
"What's happened to Col-Col? He's all different?"
"Is he? Wait," Uncle Robert said, "till you've seen Jerrold."
"Oh, is Jerrold going to be different, too?"
"I'm afraid he'll _look_ a little different."
"I don't care," she said. "He'll _be_ him."
She wanted to come back and find everybody and everything the same,
looking exactly as she had left them. What they had once been for her
they must always be.
They drove slowly up Wyck Hill. The tree-tops meeting overhead made a
green tunnel. You came out suddenly into the sunlight at the top. The
road was the same. They passed by the Unicorn Inn and the Post Office,
through the narrow crooked street with the church and churchyard at the
turn; and so into the grey and yellow Market Square with the two tall
elms standing up on the little green in the corner. They passed the
Queen's Head; the powder-blue sign hung out from the yellow front the
same as ever. Next came the fountain and the four forked roads by the
signpost, then the dip of the hill to the left and the grey ball-topped
stone pillars of the Park gates on the right.
At the end of the beech avenue she saw the house; the three big,
sharp-pointed gables of the front: the little gable underneath in the
middle, jutting out over the porch. That was the bay of Aunt Adeline's
bed-room. She used to lean out of the lattice windows and call to the
children in the garden. The house was the same.
So were the green terraces and the wide, flat-topped yew walls, and the
great peacocks carved out of the yew; and beyond them the lawn, flowing
out under banks of clipped yew down to the goldfish pond. They were
things that she had seen again and again in sleep and memory; things
that had made her heart ache thinking of them; that took her back and
back, and wouldn't let her be. She had only to leave off what she was
doing and she saw them; they swam before her eyes, covering the Swiss
mountains, the flat Essex fields, the high white London houses. They
waited for her at the waking end of dreams.
She had found them again.
A gap in the green walls led into the flower garden, and there, down the
path between tall rows of phlox and larkspurs and anchusa, of blue
heaped on blue, Aunt Adeline came holding up a tall bunch of flowers,
blue on her white gown, blue on her own milk-white and blue. She came,
looking like a beautiful girl; the same, the same; Anne had seen her in
dreams, walking like that, tall among the tall flowers.
She never hurried to meet you; hurrying would have spoiled the beauty of
her movement; she came slowly, absent-mindedly, stopping now and then to
pluck yet another of the blue spires. Robert stood still in the path to
watch her. She was smiling a long way off, intensely aware of him.
"Is _that_ Anne?" she said.
"Yes, Auntie, _really_ Anne."
"Well, you _are_ a big girl, aren't you?"
She kissed her three times and smiled, looking away again over her
flower-beds. That was the difference between Aunt Adeline and Uncle
Robert. His eyes made you important; they held you all the time he
talked to you; when he smiled, it was for you altogether and not for
himself at all. Her eyes never looked at you long; her smile wandered,
it was half for you and half for herself, for something she was thinking
of that wasn't you.
"What have you done with your father?" she said.
"I was to tell you. Daddy's ever so sorry; but he can't come till
to-morrow. A horrid man kept him on business."
"Oh?" A little crisping wave went over Aunt Adeline's face, a wave of
vexation. Anne saw it.
"He is _really_ sorry. You should have heard him damning and cursing."
They laughed. Adeline was appeased. She took her husband's arm and drew
him to herself. Something warm and secret seemed to pass between them.
Anne said to herself: "That's how people look--" without finishing her
thought.
Lest she should feel shut out he turned to her.
"Well, are you glad to be back again, Anne?" he said.
"Glad? I'm never glad to be anywhere else. I've been counting the weeks
and the days and the minutes."
"The minutes?"
"Yes. In the train."
They had come up on to the flagged terrace. Anne looked round her.
"Where's Jerrold?" she said.
And they laughed again. "There's no doubt," said Uncle Robert, "about it
being the same Anne."
ii
A day passed. John Severn had come. He was to stay with the Fieldings
for the last weeks of his leave. He had followed Adeline from the hot
terrace to the cool library. When she wanted the sun again he would
follow her out.