Anne Severn and the Fieldings - May Sinclair
"So you've come back," she said. "You might go in and tell me how he
is."
"Haven't you seen him?"
"Of course I've seen him. But I'm afraid, Jerrold. It was awful, awful,
the haemorrhage. You can't think how awful. I daren't go in and see it
again. I shouldn't be a bit of good if I did. I should only faint, or be
ill or something. I simply can not bear it."
"You mustn't go in," he said.
"Who's with him?"
"Eliot and Anne."
"Anne?"
"Yes."
"Jerrold, to think that Anne should be with him and me not."
"Well, she'll be all right. She can stand things."
"It's all very well for Anne. He isn't _her_ husband."
"You'd better go away, Mother."
"Not before you tell me how he is. Go in, Jerrold."
He knocked and went in.
His father was sitting up in his white, slender bed, raised on Eliot's
arm. He saw his face, strained and smoothed with exhaustion, sallow
white against the pillows, the back-drawn-mouth, the sharp, peaked nose,
the iron grey hair, pointed with sweat, sticking to the forehead. A face
of piteous, tired patience, waiting. He saw Eliot's face, close, close
beside it by the edge of the pillow, grave and sombre and intent.
Anne was crossing the room from the bed to the washstand. Her face was
very white but she had an air of great competence and composure. She
carried a white basin brimming with a reddish froth. He saw little red
specks splashed on the sleeve of her white linen gown. He shuddered.
Eliot made a sign to him and he went back to the door where his mother
waited.
"Is he better?" she whispered. "Can I come in?"
Jerrold shook his head. "Better not--yet."
"You'll send for me if--if--"
"Yes."
He heard her trailing away along the gallery. He went into the room. He
stood at the foot of the bed and stared, stared at his father lying
there in Eliot's arms. He would have liked to have been in Eliot's
place, close to him, close, holding him. As it was he could do nothing
but stand and look at him with that helpless, agonized stare. He _had_
to look at him, to look and look, punishing himself with sight for not
having seen.
His eyes felt hot and brittle; they kept on filling with tears, burned
themselves dry and filled again. His hand clutched the edge of the
footrail as if only so he could keep his stand there.
A stream of warm air came through the open windows. Everything in the
room stood still in it, unnaturally still, waiting. He was aware of the
pattern of the window curtains. Blue parrots perched on brown branches
among red flowers on a white ground; it all hung very straight and
still, waiting.
Anne looked at him and spoke. She was standing beside the bed now,
holding the clean basin and a towel, ready.
"Jerrold, you might go and get some more ice. It's in the bucket in the
bath-room. Break it up into little pieces, like that. You split it with
a needle."
He went to the bath-room, moving like a sleepwalker, wrapped in his
dream-like horror. He found the ice, he broke it into little pieces,
like that. He was very careful and conscientious about the size, and
grateful to Anne for giving him something to do. Then he went back again
and took up his station at the foot of the bed and waited. His father
still lay back on his pillow, propped by Eliot's arm. His hands were
folded on his chest above the bedclothes.
Anne still stood by the bed holding her basin and her towel ready. From
time to time they gave him little pieces of ice to suck.
Once he opened his eyes, looked round the room and spoke. "Is your
mother there?"
"Do you want her?" Eliot said.
"No. It'll only upset her. Don't let her come in."
He closed his eyes and opened them again.
"Is that Anne?"
"Yes. Who did you think it was?"
"I don't know...I'm sorry, Anne."
"Darling--" the word broke from a tender inarticulate sound she made.
Then: "Jerrold--," he said.
Jerrold came closer. His father's right arm unfolded itself and
stretched out towards him along the bed.
Anne whispered, "Take his hand." Jerrold took it. He could feel it
tremble as he touched it.
"It's all right, Jerry," he said. "It's all right." He gave a little
choking cough. His eyes darkened with a sudden anxiety, a fear. His hand
slackened. His head sank forward. Anne came between them. Jerrold felt
the slight thrust of her body pushing him aside. He saw her arms
stretched out, and the white gleam of the basin, then, the haemorrhage,
jet after jet. Then his father's face tilted up on Eliot's arm, very
white, and Anne stooping over him tenderly, and her hand with the towel,
wiping the red foam from his lips.
Then eyes glazed between half-shut lids, mouth open, and the noise of
death.
Eliot's arm laid down its burden. He got up and put his hand on
Jerrold's shoulder and led him out of the room. "Go out into the air,"
he said. "I'll tell Mother."
Jerrold staggered downstairs, and through the hall and out into the
blinding sunshine.
Far down the avenue he could hear the whirring of the car coming back
from Cheltenham; the lines of the beech trees opened fan-wise to let it
through. He saw Colin sitting up beside Scarrott.
Above his head a lattice ground and clattered. Somebody was going
through the front rooms, shutting the windows and pulling down the
blinds.
Jerrold turned back into the house to meet Colin there.
Upstairs his father's door opened and shut softly and Anne came out. She
moved along the gallery to her room. Between the dark rails he could see
her white skirt, and her arm, hanging, and the little specks of red
splashed on the white sleeve.
iii
Jerrold was afraid of Anne, and he saw no end to his fear. He had been
dashed against the suffering he was trying to put away from him and the
shock of it had killed in one hour his young adolescent passion. She
would be for ever associated with that suffering. He would never see
Anne without thinking of his father's death. He would never think of his
father's death without seeing Anne. He would see her for ever through an
atmosphere of pain and horror, moving as she had moved in his father's
room. He couldn't see her any other way. This intolerable memory of her
effaced all other memories, memories of the child Anne with the rabbit,
of the young, happy Anne who walked and rode and played with him, of the
strange, mysterious Anne he had found yesterday in her room at dawn.
That Anne belonged to a time he had done with. There was nothing left
for him but the Anne who had come to tell him his father was dying, who
had brought him to his father's death-bed, who had bound herself up
inseparably with his death, who only moved from the scene of it to
appear dressed in black and carrying the flowers for his funeral.
She was wrapped round and round with death and death, nothing but death,
and with Jerrold's suffering. When he saw her he suffered again. And as
his way had always been to avoid suffering, he avoided Anne. His eyes
turned from her if he saw her coming. He spoke to her without looking at
her. He tried not to think of her. When he had gone he would try not to
remember.
His one idea was to go, to get away from the place his father had died
in and from the people who had seen him die. He wanted new unknown
faces, new unknown voices that would not remind him------
Ten days after his father's death the letter came from John Severn. He
wrote:
"... I'm delighted about Sir Charles Durham. You are a lucky devil. Any
chap Sir Charles takes a fancy to is bound to get on. He can't help
himself. You're not afraid of hard work, and I can tell you we give our
Assistant Commissioners all they want and a lot more.
"It'll be nice if you bring Anne out with you. If you're stationed
anywhere near us we ought to give her the jolliest time in her life
between us."
"But Jerrold," said Adeline when she had read this letter. "You're not
going out _now_. You must wire and tell him so."
"Why not now?"
"Because, my dear boy, you've got the estate and you must stay and look
after it."
"Barker'll look after it. That's what he's there for."
"Nonsense, Jerrold. There's no need for you to go out to India."
"There _is_ need. I've got to go."
"You haven't. There's every need for you to stop where you are. Eliot
will be going abroad if Sir Martin Crozier takes him on. And if Colin
goes into the diplomatic service Goodness knows where he'll be sent to."
"Colin won't be sent anywhere for another four years."
"No. But he'll be at Cheltenham or Cambridge half the time. I must have
one son at home."
"Sorry, Mother. But I can't stand it here. I've got to go, and I'm
going."
To all her arguments and entreaties he had one answer: He had got to go
and he was going.
Adeline left him and went to look for Eliot whom she found in his room
packing to go back to London. She came sobbing to Eliot.
"It's too dreadfully hard. As if it weren't bad enough to lose my
darling husband I must lose all my sons. Not one of you will stay with
me. And there's Anne going off with Jerrold. _She_ may have him with her
and I mayn't. She's taken everything from me. You'd have said if a
wife's place was anywhere it was with her dying husband. But no. _She_
was allowed to be with him and _I_ was turned out of his room."
"My dear Mother, you know you weren't."
"I _was_. You turned me out yourself, Eliot, and had Anne in."
"Only because you couldn't stand it and she could."
"I daresay. She hadn't the same feelings."
"She had her own feelings, anyhow, only she controlled them. She stood
it because she never thought of her feelings. She only thought of what
she could do to help. She was magnificent."
"Of course you think so, because you're in love with her. She must take
you, too. As if Jerrold wasn't enough."
"She hasn't taken me. She probably won't if I ask her. You shouldn't say
those things, Mother. You don't know what you're talking about."
"I know I'm the most unhappy woman in the world. How am I going to live?
I can't stand it if Jerry goes."
"He's got to go, Mother."
"He hasn't. Jerrold's place is here. He's got a duty and a
responsibility. Your dear father didn't leave him the estate for him to
let it go to wrack and ruin. It's most cruel and wrong of him."
"He can't do anything else. Don't you see why he wants to go? He can't
stand the place without Father."
"I've got to stand it. So he may."
"Well, he won't, that's all. He simply funks it."
"He always was an arrant coward where trouble was concerned. He doesn't
think of other people and how bad it is for them. He leaves me when I
want him most."
"It's hard on you, Mother; but you can't stop him. And I don't think you
ought to try."
"Oh, everybody tells me what _I_ ought to do. My children can do as they
like. So can Anne. She and Jerrold can go off to India and amuse
themselves as if nothing had happened and it's all right."
But Anne didn't go off to India.
When she spoke to Jerrold about going with him his hard, unhappy face
showed her that he didn't want her.
"You'd rather I didn't go," she said gently.
"It isn't that, Anne. It isn't that I don't want you. It's--it's simply
that I want to get away from here, to get away from everything that
reminds me--I shall go off my head if I've got to remember every minute,
every time I see somebody who--I want to make a clean break and grow a
new memory."
"I understand. You needn't tell me."
"Mother doesn't. I wish you'd make her see it."
"I'll try. But it's all right, Jerrold. I won't go."
"Of course you'll go. Only you won't think me a brute if I don't take
you out with me?"
"I'm not going out with you. In fact, I don't think I'm going at all. I
only wanted to because of going out together and because of the chance
of seeing you when you got leave. I only thought of the heavenly times
we might have had."
"Don't--don't, Anne."
"No, I won't. After all, I shouldn't care a rap about Ambala if you
weren't there. And you may be stationed miles away. I'd rather go back
to Ilford and do farming. Ever so much rather. India would really have
wasted a lot of time."
"Oh, Anne, I've spoilt all your pleasure."
"No, you haven't. There isn't any pleasure to spoil--now."
"What a brute--what a cad you must think me."
"I don't, Jerry. It's not your fault. Things have just happened. And you
see, I understand. I felt the same about Auntie Adeline after Mother
died. I didn't want to see her because she reminded me--and yet, really,
I loved her all the time."
"You won't go back on me for it?"
"I wouldn't go back on you whatever you did. And you mustn't keep on
thinking I _want_ to go to India. I don't care a rap about India itself.
I hate Anglo-Indians and I simply loathe hot places. And Daddy doesn't
want me out there, really. I shall be much happier on my farm. And it'll
save a lot of expense, too. Just think what my outfit and passage would
have cost."
"You wouldn't have cared what it cost if--"
"There isn't any if. I'm not lying, really." Not lying. Not lying. She
would have given up more than India to save Jerrold that pang of memory.
Only, when it was all over and he had sailed without her, she realized
in one wounding flash that what she had given up was Jerrold himself.
V
ELIOT AND ANNE
i
Anne did not go back to her Ilford farm at once. Adeline had made that
impossible.
At the prospect of Anne's going her resentment died down as suddenly as
it had risen. She forgot that Anne had taken her sons' affection and her
place beside her husband's deathbed. And though she couldn't help
feeling rather glad that Jerrold had gone to India without Anne, she was
sorry for her. She loved her and she meant to keep her. She said she
simply could not bear it if Anne left her, and _was_ it the time to
choose when she wanted her as she had never wanted her before? She had
nobody to turn to, as Anne knew. Corbetts and Hawtreys and Markhams and
people were all very well; but they were outsiders.
"It's the inside people that I want now, Anne. You're deep inside,
dear."
Yes, of course she had relations. But relations were no use. They were
all wrapped up in their own tiresome affairs, and there wasn't one of
them she cared for as she cared for Anne.
"I couldn't care more if you were my own daughter. Darling Robert felt
about you just the same. You _can't_ leave me."
And Anne didn't. She never could resist unhappiness. She thought: "I was
glad enough to stop with her through all the happy times. I'd be a
perfect beast to go and leave her now when she's miserable and hasn't
got anybody."
It would have been better for Anne if she could have gone. Robert
Fielding's death and Jerrold's absence were two griefs that inflamed
each other; they came together to make one immense, intolerable wound.
And here at Wyck, she couldn't move without coming upon something that
touched it and stung it to fresh pain. But Anne was not like Jerrold, to
turn from what she loved because it hurt her. For as long as she could
remember all her happiness had come to her at Wyck. If unhappiness came
now, she had got, as Eliot said, "to take it."
And so she stayed on through the autumn, then over Christmas to the New
Year; this time because of Colin who was suffering from depression.
Colin had never got over his father's death and Jerrold's going; and the
last thing Jerrold had said to her before he went was; "You'll look
after Col-Col, won't you? Don't let him go grousing about by himself."
Jerrold had always expected her to look after Colin. At seventeen there
was still something piteous and breakable about him, something that
clung to you for help. Eliot said that if Colin didn't look out he'd be
a regular neurotic. But he owned that Anne was good for him.
"I don't know what you do to him, but he's better when you're there."
Eliot was the one who appeared to have recovered first. He met the shock
of his father's death with a defiant energy and will.
He was working now at bacteriology under Sir Martin Crozier. Covered
with a white linen coat, in a white-washed room of inconceivable
cleanness, surrounded by test-tubes and mixing jars, Eliot spent the
best part of the day handling the germs of the deadliest diseases;
making cultures, examining them under the microscope; preparing
vaccines. He went home to the brown velvety, leathery study in his
Welbeck Street flat to write out his notes, or read some monograph on
inoculation; or he dined with a colleague and talked to him about
bacteria.
At this period of his youth Eliot had more than ever the appearance of
inhuman preoccupation. His dark, serious face detached itself with a
sort of sullen apathy from the social scene. He seemed to have no keen
interests beyond his slides and mixing jars and test-tubes. Women, for
whom his indifference had a perverse fascination, said of him: "Dr.
Fielding isn't interested in people, only in their diseases. And not
really in diseases, only in their germs."
They never suspected that Eliot was passionate, and that a fierce pity
had driven him into his profession. The thought of preventable disease
filled him with fury; he had no tolerance for the society that tolerated
it. He suffered because he had a clearer vision and a profounder sense
of suffering than most persons. Up to the time of his father's death all
Eliot's suffering had been other people's. He couldn't rest till he had
done something to remove the cause of it.
Add to this an insatiable curiosity as to causes, and you have the main
bent of Eliot's mind.
And it seemed to him that there was nobody but Anne who saw that hidden
side of him. _She_ knew that he was sorry for people, and that being
sorry for them had made him what he was, like Jerrold and yet unlike
him. Eliot was attracted to suffering by the same sensitiveness that
made Jerrold avoid everything once associated with it.
And so the very thing that Jerrold couldn't bear to remember was what
drew Eliot closer to Anne. He saw her as Jerrold had seen her, moving,
composed and competent, in his father's room; he saw her stooping over
him to help him, he saw the specks of blood on her white sleeve; and he
thought of her with the more tenderness. From that instant he really
loved her. He wanted Anne as he had never conceived himself wanting any
woman. He could hardly remember his first adolescent feeling for her,
that confused mixture of ignorant desire and fear, so different was it
from the intense, clear passion that possessed him now. At night when
his work was done, he lay in bed, not sleeping, thinking of Anne with
desire that knew itself too well to be afraid. Anne was the one thing
necessary to him beside his work, necessary as a living part of himself.
She could only not come before his work because Eliot's work came before
himself and his own happiness. When he went down every other week-end to
Wyck-on-the-Hill he knew that it was to see Anne.
His mother knew it too.
"I wish Eliot would marry," she said.
"Why?" said Anne.
"Because then he wouldn't be so keen on going off to look for germs in
disgusting climates."
Anne wondered whether Adeline knew Eliot. For Eliot talked to her about
his work as he walked with her at a fine swinging pace over the open
country, taking all his exercise now while he could get it. That was
another thing he liked about Anne Severn, her splendid physical fitness;
she could go stride for stride with him, and mile for mile, and never
tire. Her mind, too, was robust and active, and full of curiosity; it
listened by the hour and never tired. It could move, undismayed, among
horrors. She could see, as he saw, the "beauty" of the long trains of
research by which Sir Martin Crozier had tracked down the bacillus of
amoebic dysentery and established the difference between typhoid and
Malta fever.
Once started on his subject, the grave, sullen Eliot talked excitedly.
"You do see, Anne, how thrilling it is, don't you? For me there's
nothing but bacteriology. I always meant to go in for it, and Sir
Martin's magnificent. Absolutely top-hole. You see, all these disgusting
diseases can be prevented. It's inconceivable that they should be
tolerated in a civilized country. People can't care a rap or they
couldn't sleep in their beds. They ought to get up and make a public row
about it, to insist on compulsory inoculation for everybody whether they
like it or not. It really isn't enough to cure people of diseases when
they've got them. We ought to see that they never get them, that there
aren't any to get... What we don't know yet is the complete behaviour of
all these bacteria among themselves. A bad bacillus may be doing good
work by holding down a worse one. It's conceivable that if we succeeded
in exterminating all known diseases we might release an unknown one,
supremely horrible, that would exterminate the race."
"Oh Eliot, how awful. How can _you_ sleep in your bed?"
"You needn't worry. It's only a nightmare idea of mine."
And so on and so on, for he was still so young that he wanted Anne to be
excited by the things that excited him. And Anne told him all about her
Ilford farm and what she meant to do on it. Eliot didn't behave like
Aunt Adeline, he listened beautifully, like Uncle Robert and Jerrold, as
if it was really most important that you should have a farm and work on
it.
"What I want is to sell it and get one here. I don't want to be anywhere
else. I can't tell you how frightfully home-sick I am when I'm away. I
keep on seeing those gables with the little stone balls, and the
peacocks, and the fields down to the Manor Farm. And the hills, Eliot.
When I'm away I'm always dreaming that I'm trying to get back to them
and something stops me. Or I see them and they turn into something else.
I shan't be happy till I can come back for good."
"You don't want to go to India?" Eliot's heart began to beat as he asked
his question.
"I want to work. To work hard. To work till I'm so dead tired that I
roll off to sleep the minute I get into bed. So tired that I can't
dream."
"That isn't right. You're too young to feel like that, Anne."
"I do feel like it. You feel like it yourself--My farm is to me what
your old bacteria are to you."
"Oh, if I thought it was the farm--"
"Why, what else did you think it was?"
Eliot couldn't bring himself to tell her. He took refuge in apparent
irrelevance.
"You know Father left me the Manor Farm house, don't you?"
"No, I didn't. I suppose he thought you'd want to come back, like me."
"Well, I'm glad I've got it. Mother's got the Dower House in Wyck. But
she'll stay on here till--"
"Till Jerrold comes back," said Anne bravely.
"I don't suppose Jerry'll turn her out even then. Unless--"
But neither he nor Anne had the courage to say "unless he marries."
Not Anne, because she couldn't trust herself with the theme of Jerrold's
marrying. Not Eliot, because he had Jerrold's word for it that if he
married anybody, ever, it would not be Anne.
* * * * *
It was this assurance that made it possible for him to say what he had
been thinking of saying all the time that he talked to Anne about his
bacteriology. Bacteriology was a screen behind which Eliot, uncertain of
Anne's feelings, sheltered himself against irrevocable disaster. He
meant to ask Anne to marry him, but he kept putting it off because, so
long as he didn't know for certain that she wouldn't have him, he was at
liberty to think she would. He would not be taking her from Jerrold.
Jerrold, inconceivable ass, didn't want her. Eliot had made sure of that
months ago, the night before Jerrold sailed. He had simply put it to
him: what did he mean to do about Anne Severn? And Jerrold had made it
very plain that his chief object in going to India was to get away from
Anne Severn and Everything. Eliot knew Jerrold too well to suspect his
sincerity, so he considered that the way was now honorably open to him.
His only uncertainty was Anne herself. He had meant to give her a year
to forget Jerrold in, if she was ever going to forget him; though in
moments of deeper insight he realized that Anne was not likely to
forget, nor to marry anybody else as long as she remembered.
Yet, Eliot reasoned, women did marry, even remembering. They married and
were happy. You saw it every day. He was content to take Anne on her own
terms, at any cost, at any risk. He had never been afraid of risks, and
once he had faced the chance of her refusal all other dangers were
insignificant.
A year was a long time, and Eliot had to consider the probability of his
going out to Central Africa with Sir Martin Crozier to investigate
sleeping sickness. He wanted the thing settled one way or another before
he went.
He put it off again till the next week-end. And in the meanwhile Sir
Martin Crozier had seen him. He was starting in the spring and Eliot was
to go with him.
It was on Sunday evening that he spoke to Anne, sitting with her under
the beeches at the top of the field where she and Jerrold had sat
together. Eliot had chosen his place badly.
"I wouldn't bother you so soon if I wasn't going away, but I simply
must--must know--"
"Must know what?"