Anne Severn and the Fieldings - May Sinclair
But Cutler has given me leave to go over and see him. I shall
get to Wyck as soon as this letter.
Dear Col-Col, I wish I could do something for him. I feel as if
we could never, never do too much after all he's been through.
Fancy Eliot knowing exactly what would happen.
Your loving
Anne.
Nieuport. _September 7th._
Dear Anne,--Now that you _have_ gone I think I ought to tell you
that it would be just as well if you didn't come back. I've got
a man to take your place; Queenie picked him up at Dunkirk the
day you sailed, and he's doing very well.
The fact is we're getting on much better since you left. There's
perfect peace now. You and Queenie didn't hit it off, you know,
and for a job like ours it's absolutely essential that everybody
should pull together like one. It doesn't do to have two in a
Corps always at loggerheads.
I don't like to lose you, and I know you've done splendidly. But
I've got to choose between Queenie and you, and I must keep her,
if it's only because she's worked with me all the time. So now
that you've made the break I take the opportunity of asking you
to resign. Personally I'm sorry, but the good of the Corps must
come before everything.
Sincerely yours,
Robert Cutler.
The Manor, Wyck-on-the-Hill, Gloucestershire.
_September 11th, 1915._
Dear Dicky,--This is only to say good-bye, as I shan't see you
again. Cutler's fired me out of the Corps. He _says_ it's
because Queenie and I don't hit it off. I shouldn't have thought
that was my fault, but he seems to think it is. He says there's
been perfect peace since I left.
Well, we've had some tremendous times together, and I wish we
could have gone on.
Good-bye and Good Luck,
Yours ever,
Anne Severn.
P. S.--Poor Colin Fielding's in an awful state. But he's been a
bit better since I came. Even if Cutler'd let me come back I
couldn't leave him. This is my job. The queer thing is he's
afraid of Queenie, so it's just as well she didn't come home.
Nieuport.
_September 15th, 1915._
Dear Old Thing,--We're all furious here at the way you've been
treated. I've resigned as a protest, and I'm going into the R.
A. M. So has Miss Mullins--: resigned I mean--so Queenie's the
only woman left in the Corps. That'll suit her down to the
ground.
I gave myself the treat of telling Cutler what I jolly well
think of him. But of course you know she made him hoof you out.
She's been trying for it ever since you joined. It's all rot his
saying you didn't hit it off with her, when everybody knows you
were a perfect angel to her. Why, you backed her every time when
we were all going for her. It's quite true that the peace of God
has settled on the Corps since you left it; but that's only
because Queenie doesn't rage round any more.
You'll observe that she never went for Miss Mullins. That's
because Miss Mullins kept well out of the line of fire. And if
you hadn't jolly well distinguished yourself there she'd have
let you alone, too. The real trouble began that day you were at
Dixmude. It wasn't a bit because she was afraid you'd be killed.
Queenie doesn't want you about when the War medals are handed
round. Everybody sees that but old Cutler. He's too much gone on
her to see anything. She can twist him round and round and tie
him up in knots.
But Cutler isn't in it now. Queenie's turned him down for that
young Noel Fenwick who's got your job. Cutler's nose was a
sight, I can tell you.
Well, I'm not surprised that Queenie's husband funks her. She's
a terror. Worse than war.
Good-bye and Good Luck, Old Thing, till we meet again.
Yours ever,
Dicky Cartwright.
VII
ADELINE
i
They would never know what it cost her to come back and look after
Colin. That knowledge was beyond Adeline Fielding. She congratulated
Anne and expected Anne to congratulate herself on being "well out of
it." Her safety was revolting and humiliating to Anne when she thought
of Queenie and Cutler and Dicky, and Eliot and Jerrold and all the
allied armies in the thick of it. She had left a world where life was
lived at its highest pitch of intensity for a world where people were
only half-alive. To be safe from the chance of sudden violent death was
to be only half-alive.
Her one consolation had been that now she would see Jerrold. But she did
not see him. Jerrold had given up his appointment in the Punjaub three
weeks before the outbreak of the war. His return coincided with the
retreat from Mons. He had not been in England a week before he was in
training on Salisbury Plain. Anne had left Wyck when he arrived; and
before he got leave she was in Belgium with her Field Ambulance. And
now, in October of nineteen fifteen, when she came back to Wyck, Jerrold
was fighting in France.
At least they knew what had happened to Colin; but about Eliot and
Jerrold they knew nothing. Anything might have happened to them since
they had written the letters that let them off from week to week,
telling them that they were safe. Anything might happen and they might
never know.
Anne's fear was dumb and secret. She couldn't talk about Jerrold. She
lived every minute in terror of Adeline's talking, of the cries that
came from her at queer unexpected moments: between two cups of tea, two
glances at the mirror, two careful gestures of her hands pinning up her
hair.
"I cannot bear it if anything happens to Jerrold, Anne."
"Oh Anne, I wonder what's happening to Jerrold."
"If only I knew what was happening to Jerrold."
"If only I knew where Jerrold _was_. Nothing's so awful as not knowing."
And at breakfast, over toast and marmalade: "Anne, I've got such an
awful feeling that something's happened to Jerrold. I'm sure these
feelings aren't given you for nothing... You aren't eating anything,
darling. You _must_ eat."
Every morning at breakfast Anne had to look through the lists of killed,
missing and wounded, to save Adeline the shock of coming upon Jerrold's
or Eliot's name. Every morning Adeline gazed at Anne across the table
with the same look of strained and agonised enquiry. Every morning
Anne's heart tightened and dragged, then loosened and lifted, as they
were let off for one more day.
One more day? Not one more hour, one minute. Any second the wire from
the War Office might come.
ii
Anne never knew the moment when she was first aware that Colin's mother
was afraid of him. Aunt Adeline was very busy, making swabs and
bandages. Every day she went off to her War Hospital Supply work at the
Town Hall, and Anne was left to take care of Colin. She began to wonder
whether the swabs and bandages were not a pretext for getting away from
Colin.
"It's no use," Adeline said. "I cannot stand the strain of it. Anne,
he's worse with me than he is with you. Everything I say and do is
wrong. You don't know what it was like before you came."
Anne did know. The awful thing was that Colin couldn't bear to be left
alone, day or night. He would lie awake shivering with terror. If he
dropped off to sleep he woke screaming. At first Pinkney slept with him.
But Pinkney had joined up, and old Wilkins, the butler, was impossible
because he snored.
Anne had her old room across the passage where she had slept when they
were children. And now, as then, their doors were left open, so that at
a sound from Colin she could get up and go to him.
She was used to the lacerating, unearthly scream that woke her, the
scream that terrified Adeline, that made her cover her head tight with
the bed-clothes, to shut it out, that made her lock her door to shut out
Colin. Once he had come into his mother's room and she had found him
standing by her bed and looking at her with the queer frightened face
that frightened her. She was always afraid of this happening again.
Anne couldn't bear to think of that locked door. She was used to the
sight of Colin standing in her doorway, to the watches beside his bed
where he lay shivering, holding her hand tight as he used to hold it
when he was a child. To Anne he was "poor Col-Col" again, the little boy
who was afraid of ghosts, only more abandoned to terror, more
unresisting.
He would start and tremble at any quick, unexpected movement. He would
burst into tears at any sudden sound. Small noises, whisperings,
murmurings, creakings, soft shufflings, irritated him. Loud noises, the
slamming of doors, the barking of dogs, the crowing of cocks, made him
writhe in agony. For Colin the deep silence of the Manor was the ambush
for some stupendous, crashing, annihilating sound; sound that was always
coming and never came. The droop of the mouth that used to appear
suddenly in his moments of childish anguish was fixed now, and fixed the
little tortured twist of his eyebrows and his look of anxiety and fear.
His head drooped, his shoulders were hunched slightly, as if he cowered
before some perpetually falling blow.
On fine warm days he lay out on the terrace on Adeline's long chair; on
wet days he lay on the couch in the library, or sat crouching over the
fire. Anne brought him milk or beef tea or Benger's Food every two
hours. He was content to be waited on; he had no will to move, no desire
to get up and do things for himself. He lay or sat still, shivering
every now and then as he remembered or imagined some horror. And as he
was afraid to be left alone Anne sat with him.
"How can you say this is a quiet place?" he said.
"It's quiet enough now."
"It isn't. It's full of noises. Loud, thundering noises going on and on.
Awful noises.... You know what it is? It's the guns in France. I can
hear them all the time."
"No, Colin. That isn't what you hear. We're much too far off. Nobody
could hear them."
"_I_ can."
"I don't think so."
"Do you mean it's noises in my head?"
"Yes. They'll go away when you're stronger."
"I shall never be strong again."
"Oh yes, you will be. You're better already."
"If I get better they'll send me out again."
"Never. Never again."
"I ought to be out. I oughtn't to be sticking here doing nothing....
Anne, you don't think Queenie'll come over, do you?"
"No, I don't. She's got much too much to do out there."
"You know, that's what I'm afraid of, more than anything, Queenie's
coming. She'll tell me I funked. She thinks I funked. She thinks that's
what's the matter with me."
"She doesn't. She knows it's your body, not you. Your nerves are shaken
to bits, that's all."
"I didn't funk, Anne." (He said it for the hundredth time.) "I mean I
stuck it all right. I went back after I had shell-shock the first
time--straight back into the trenches. It was at the very end of the
fighting that I got it again. Then I couldn't go back. I couldn't move."
"I know, Colin, I know."
"Does Queenie know?"
"Of course she does. She understands perfectly. Why, she sees men with
shell-shock every day. She knows you were splendid."
"I wasn't. But I wasn't as bad as she thinks me. ... Don't let her see
me if she comes back."
"She won't come."
"She will. She will. She'll get leave some day. Tell her not to come.
Tell her she can't see me. Say I'm off my head. Any old lie that'll stop
her."
"Don't think about her."
"I can't help thinking. She said such beastly things. You can't think
what disgusting things she said."
"She says them to everybody. She doesn't mean them."
"Oh, doesn't she!... Is that mother? You might tell her I'm sleeping."
For Colin was afraid of his mother, too. He was afraid that she would
talk, that she would talk about the War and about Jerrold. Colin had
been home six weeks and he had not once spoken Jerrold's name. He read
his letters and handed them to Anne and Adeline without a word. It was
as if between him and the thought of Jerrold there was darkness and a
supreme, nameless terror.
One morning at dawn Anne was wakened by Colin's voice in her room.
"Anne, are you awake?"
The room was full of the white dawn. She saw him standing in it by her
bedside.
"My head's awfully queer," he said. "I can feel my brain shaking and
wobbling inside it, as if the convolutions had come undone. Could they?"
"Of course they couldn't."
"The noise might have loosened them."
"It isn't your brain you feel, Colin. It's your nerves. It's just the
shock still going on in them."
"Is it never going to stop?"
"Yes, when you're stronger. Go back to bed and I'll come to you."
He went back. She slipped on her dressing-gown and came to him. She sat
by his bed and put her hand on his forehead.
"There--it stops when you put your hand on."
"Yes. And you'll sleep."
Presently, to her joy, he slept.
She stood up and looked at him as he lay there in the white dawn. He was
utterly innocent, utterly pathetic in his sleep, and beautiful. Sleep
smoothed out his vexed face and brought back the likeness of the boy
Colin, Jerrold's brother.
That morning a letter came to her from Jerrold. He wrote: "Don't worry
too much about Col-Col. He'll be all right as long as you'll look after
him."
She thought: "I wonder whether he remembers that he asked me to."
But she was glad he was not there to hear Colin scream.
iii
"Anne, can _you_ sleep?" said Adeline. Colin had gone to bed and they
were sitting together in the drawing-room for the last hour of the
evening.
"Not very well, when Colin has such bad nights."
"Do you think he's ever going to get right again?"
"Yes. But it'll take time."
"A long time?"
"Very long, probably."
"My dear, if it does, I don't know how I'm going to stand it. And if I
only knew what was happening to Jerrold and Eliot. Sometimes I wonder
how I've lived through these five years. First, Robert's death; then the
War. And before that there was nothing but perfect happiness. I think
trouble's worse to bear when you've known nothing but happiness
before.... If I could only die instead of all these boys, Anne. Why
can't I? What is there to live for?"
"There's Jerrold and Eliot and Colin."
"Oh, my dear, Jerrold and Eliot may never come back. And look at poor
Colin. _That_ isn't the Colin I know. He'll never be the same again. I'd
almost rather he'd been killed than that he should be like this. If he'd
lost a leg or an arm.... It's all very well for you, Anne. He isn't your
son."
"You don't know what he is," said Anne. She thought: "He's Jerrold's
brother. He's what Jerrold loves more than anything."
"No," said Adeline. "Everything ended for me when Robert died. I shall
never marry again. I couldn't bear to put anybody in Robert's place."
"Of course you couldn't. I know it's been awful for you, Auntie."
"I couldn't bear it, Anne, if I didn't believe that there is Something
Somewhere. I can't think how you get on without any religion."
"How do you know I haven't any?"
"Well, you've no faith in Anything. Have you, ducky?"
"I don't know what I've faith in. It's too difficult. If you love
people, that's enough, I think. It keeps you going through everything."
"No, it doesn't. It's all the other way about. It's loving people that
makes it all so hard. If you didn't love them you wouldn't care what
happened to them. If I didn't love Colin I could bear his shell-shock
better."
"If _I_ didn't love him, I couldn't bear it at all."
"I expect," said Adeline, "we both mean the same thing."
Anne thought of Adeline's locked door; and, in spite of her love for
her, she had a doubt. She wondered whether in this matter of loving they
had ever meant the same thing. With Adeline love was a passive state
that began and ended in emotion. With Anne love was power in action.
More than anything it meant doing things for the people that you loved.
Adeline loved her husband and her sons, but she had run away from the
sight of Robert's haemorrhage, she had tried to keep back Eliot and
Jerrold from the life they wanted, she locked her door at night and shut
Colin out. To Anne that was the worst thing Adeline had done yet. She
tried not to think of that locked door.
"I suppose," said Adeline, "you'll leave me now your father's coming
home?"
John Severn's letter lay between them on the table. He was retiring
after twenty-five years of India. He would be home as soon as his
letter.
"I shall do nothing of the sort," said Anne. "I shall stay as long as
you want me. If father wants me he must come down here."
In another three days he had come.
iv
He had grey hair now and his face was a little lined, a little faded,
but he was slender and handsome still--handsomer, more distinguished,
Adeline thought, than ever.
Again he sat out with her on the terrace when the October days were
warm; he walked with her up and down the lawn and on the flagged paths
of the flower garden. Again he followed her from the drawing-room to the
library where Colin was, and back again. He waited, ready for her.
Again Adeline smiled her self-satisfied, self-conscious smile. She had
the look of a young girl, moving in perfect happiness. She was
perpetually aware of him.
One night Colin called out to Anne that he couldn't sleep. People were
walking about outside under his window. Anne looked out. In the full
moonlight she saw Adeline and her father walking together on the
terrace. Adeline was wrapped in a long cloak; she held his arm and they
leaned toward each other as they walked. His man's voice sounded tender
and low.
Anne called to them. "I say, darlings, would you mind awfully going
somewhere else? Colin can't sleep with you prowling about there."
Adeline's voice came up to them with a little laughing quiver.
"All right, ducky; we're going in."
v
It was the end of October; John Severn had gone back to London. He had
taken a house in Montpelier Square and was furnishing it.
One morning Adeline came down smiling, more self-conscious than ever.
"Anne," she said, "do you think you could look after Colin if I went up
to Evelyn's for a week or two?"
Evelyn was Adeline's sister. She lived in London.
"Of course I can."
"You aren't afraid of being alone with him?"
"Afraid? Of Col-Col? What do you take me for?"
"Well--" Adeline meditated. "It isn't as if Mrs. Benning wasn't here."
Mrs. Benning was the housekeeper.
"That'll make it all right and proper. The fact is, I must have a rest
and change before the winter. I hardly ever get away, as you know. And
Evelyn would like to have me. I think I must go."
"Of course you must go," Anne said.
And Adeline went.
At the end of the first week she wrote:
12 Eaton Square. November 3d, 1915.
Darling Anne,--Will you be very much surprised to hear that your
father and I are going to be married? You mayn't know it, but he
has loved me all his life. We _were_ to have married once (you
knew _that_), and I jilted him. But he has never changed. He has
been so faithful and forgiving, and has waited for me so
patiently--twenty-seven years, Anne--that I hadn't the heart to
refuse him. I feel that I must make up to him for all the pain
I've given him.
We want you to come up for the wedding on the 10th. It will be
very quiet. No bridesmaids. No party. We think it best not to
have it at Wyck, on Colin's account. So I shall just be married
from Evelyn's house.
Give us your blessing, there's a dear.
Your loving
Adeline Fielding.
Anne's eyes filled with tears. At last she saw Adeline Fielding
completely, as she was, without any fascination. She thought: "She's
marrying to get away from Colin. She's left him to me to look after. How
could she leave him? How could she?"
Anne didn't go up for the wedding. She told Adeline it wasn't much use
asking her when she knew that Colin couldn't be left.
"Or, if you like, that _I_ can't leave him."
Her father wrote back:
Your Aunt Adeline thinks you reproach her for leaving Colin. I told her
you were too intelligent to do anything of the sort. You'll agree it's
the best thing she could do for him. She's no more capable of looking
after Colin than a kitten. She wants to be looked after herself, and
you ought to be grateful to me for relieving you of the job.
But I don't like your being alone down there with Colin. If he isn't
better we must send him to a nursing home.
Are you wondering whether we're going to be happy?
We shall be so long as I let her have her own way; which is what I mean
to do.
Your very affectionate father,
JOHN SEVERN.
And Anne answered:
DEAREST DADDY,--I shouldn't dream of reproaching Aunt Adeline any more
than I should reproach a pussycat for catching birds.
Look after her as much as you please--_I_ shall look after Colin.
Whether you like it or not, darling, you can't stop me. And I won't let
Colin go to a nursing home. It would be the worst possible place for
him. Ask Eliot. Besides, he _is_ better.
I'm ever so glad you're going to be happy.
Your loving
ANNE.
VIII
ANNE AND COLIN
i
Autumn had passed. Colin's couch was drawn up before the fire in the
drawing-room. Anne sat with him there.
He was better. He could listen for half an hour at a time when Anne read
to him--poems, short stories, things that were ended before Colin tired
of them. He ate and drank hungrily and his body began to get back its
strength.
At noon, when the winter sun shone, he walked, first up and down the
terrace, then round and round the garden, then to the beech trees at the
top of the field, and then down the hill to the Manor Farm. On mild days
she drove him about the country in the dog-cart. She had tried motoring
but had had to give it up because Colin was frightened at the hooting,
grinding and jarring of the car.
As winter went on Anne found that Colin was no worse in cold or wet
weather. He couldn't stand the noise and rush of the wind, but his
strange malady took no count of rain or snow. He shivered in the clear,
still frost, but it braced him all the same. Driving or strolling, she
kept him half the day in the open air.
She saw that he liked best the places they had gone to when they were
children--the Manor Farm fields, High Slaughter, and Hayes Mill. They
were always going to the places where they had done things together.
When Colin talked sanely he was back in those times. He was safe there.
There, if anywhere, he could find his real self and be well.
She had the feeling that Colin's future lay somewhere through his past.
If only she could get him back there, so that he could be what he had
been. There must be some way of joining up that time to this, if only
she could find a bridge, a link. She didn't know that she was the way,
she was the link binding his past to his present, bound up with his
youth, his happiness, his innocence, with the years before Queenie and
the War.
She didn't know what Queenie had done to him. She didn't know that the
war had only finished what Queenie had begun. That was Colin's secret,
the hidden source of his fear.
But he was safe with Anne because they were not in love with each other.
She left his senses at rest, and her affection never called for any
emotional response. She took him away from his fear; she kept him back
in his childhood, in his boyhood, in the years before Queenie, with a
continual, "Do you remember?"
"Do you remember the walk to High Slaughter?"
"Do you remember the booby-trap we set for poor Pinkney?"
That was dangerous, for poor Pinkney was at the War.
"Do you remember Benjy?"
"Yes, rather."
But Benjy was dangerous, too; for Jerrold had given him to her. She
could feel Colin shying.
"He had a butterfly smut," he said. "Hadn't he? ...Do you remember how I
used to come and see you at Cheltenham?"
"And Grannie and Aunt Emily, and how you used to play on their piano.
And how Grannie jumped when you came down crash on those chords in the
Waldstein."
"Do you mean the _presto?_"
"Yes. The last movement."
"No wonder she jumped. I should jump now." He turned his mournful face
to her. "Anne--I shall never be able to play again."
There was danger everywhere. In the end all ways led back to Colin's
malady.
"Oh yes, you wall when you're quite strong."
"I shall never be stronger."
"You will. You're stronger already."
She knew he was stronger. He could sleep three hours on end now and he
had left off screaming.
And still the doors were left open between their rooms at night. He was
still afraid to sleep alone; he liked to know that she was there, close
to him.
Instead of the dreams, instead of the sudden rushing, crashing horror,
he was haunted by a nameless dread. Dread of something he didn't know,
something that waited for him, something he couldn't face. Something
that hung over him at night, that was there with him in the morning,
that came between him and the light of the sun.
Anne kept it away. Anne came between it and him. He was unhappy and
frightened when Anne was not there.
It was always, "You're _not_ going, Anne?"