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?"
"Yes. But I'm coming back."
"How soon?"
And she would say, "An hour;" or, "Half an hour," or, "Ten minutes."
"Don't be longer."
"No."
And then: "I don't know how it is, Anne. But everything seems all right
when you're there, and all wrong when you're not."
ii
The Manor Farm house stands in the hamlet of Upper Speed. It has the
grey church and churchyard beside it and looks across the deep road
towards Sutton's farm.
The beautiful Jacobean house, the church and church-yard, Sutton's farm
and the rectory, the four cottages and the Mill, the river and its
bridge, lie close together in the small flat of the valley. Green
pastures slope up the hill behind them to the north; pink-brown arable
lands, ploughed and harrowed, are flung off to either side, east and
west.
Northwards the valley is a slender slip of green bordering the slender
river. Southwards, below the bridge, the water meadows widen out past
Sutton's farm. From the front windows of the Manor Farm house you see
them, green between the brown trunks of the elms on the road bank. From
the back you look out across orchard and pasture to the black, still
water and yellow osier beds above the Mill. Beyond the water a double
line of beeches, bare delicate branches, rounded head after rounded
head, climbs a hillock in a steep curve, to part and meet again in a
thick ring at the top.
The house front stretches along a sloping grass plot, the immense porch
built out like a wing with one ball-topped gable above it, a smaller
gable in the roof behind. On either side two rows of wide black windows,
heavy browed, with thick stone mullions.
Barker, Jerrold Fielding's agent, used to live there; but before the
spring of nineteen sixteen Barker had joined up, Wyck Manor had been
turned into a home for convalescent soldiers, and Anne was living with
Colin at the Manor Farm.
Half of her Ilford land had been taken by the government; and she had
let the rest together with the house and orchard. Instead of her own
estate she had the Manor to look after now. It had been impossible in
war-time to fill Barker's place, and Anne had become Jerrold's agent.
She had begun with a vague promise to give a look round now and then;
but when the spring came she found herself doing Barker's work, keeping
the farm accounts, ordering fertilizers, calculating so many
hundredweights of superphosphate of lime, or sulphate of ammonia, or
muriate of potash to the acre; riding about on Barker's horse, looking
after the ploughing; plodding through the furrows of the hill slopes to
see how the new drillers were working; going the round of the sheep-pens
to keep count of the sick ewes and lambs; carrying the motherless lambs
in her arms from the fold to the warm kitchen.
She went through February rain and snow, through March wind and sleet,
and through the mists of the low meadows; her feet were loaded with
earth from the ploughed fields; her nostrils filled with the cold, rich
smell of the wet earth; the rank, sharp smell of swedes, the dry,
pungent smell of straw and hay; the thick, oily, woolly smell of the
folds, the warm, half-sweet, half sour smell of the cattle sheds, of
champed fodder, of milky cow's breath; the smell of hot litter and dung.
At five and twenty she had reached the last clear decision of her
beauty. Dressed in riding coat and breeches, her body showed more
slender and more robust than ever. Rain, sun and wind were cosmetics to
her firm, smooth skin. Her eyes were bright dark, washed with the clean
air.
On her Essex farm and afterwards at the War she had learned how to
handle men. Sulky Curtis, who grumbled under Barker's rule, surrendered
to Anne without a scowl. When Anne came riding over the Seven Acre
field, lazy Ballinger pulled himself together and ploughed through the
two last furrows that he would have left for next day in Barker's time.
Even for Ballinger and Curtis she had smiles that atoned for her little
air of imperious command.
And Colin followed her about the farmyard and up the fields till he
tired and turned back. She would see him standing by the gate she had
passed through, looking after her with the mournful look he used to have
when he was a little boy and they left him behind.
He would stand looking till Anne's figure, black on her black horse,
stood up against the skyline from the curve of the round-topped hill. It
dipped; it dipped and disappeared and Colin would go slowly home.
At the first sound of her horse's hoofs in the yard he came out to meet
her.
One day he said to her, "Jerrold'll be jolly pleased with what you've
done when he comes home."
And then, "If he ever can be pleased with anything again."
It was the first time he had said Jerrold's name.
"That's what's been bothering me," he went on. "I can't think how
Jerrold's going to get over it. You remember what he was like when
Father died?"
"Yes." She remembered.
"Well--what's the War going to do to him? Look what it's done to me. He
minds things so much more than I do."
"It doesn't take everybody the same way, Colin."
"I don't suppose Jerrold'll get shell-shock. But he might get something
worse. Something that'll hurt him more. He must mind so awfully."
"You may be sure he won't mind anything that could happen to himself."
"Of course he won't. But the things that'll happen to other people.
Seeing the other chaps knocked about and killed."
"He minds most the things that happen to the people he cares about. To
you and Eliot. They're the sort of things he can't face. He'd pretend
they couldn't happen. But the war's so big that he can't say it isn't
happening; he's got to stand up to it. And the things you stand up to
don't hurt you. I feel certain he'll come through all right."
That was the turning point in Colin's malady. She thought: "If he can
talk about Jerrold he's getting well."
The next day a letter came to her from Jerrold. He wrote: "I wish to
goodness I could get leave. I don't want it _all_ the time. I'm quite
prepared to stick this beastly job for any reasonable period; but a
whole year without leave, it's a bit thick..."
"About Colin. Didn't I tell you he'd be all right? And it's all _you_,
Anne. You've made him; you needn't pretend you haven't. I want most
awfully to see you again. There are all sorts of things I'd like to say
to you, but I can't write 'em."
She thought: "He's got over it at last, then. He won't be afraid of me
any more."
Somehow, since the war she had felt that Jerrold would come back to her.
It was as if always, deep down and in secret, she had known that he
belonged to her and that she belonged to him as no other person could;
that whatever happened and however long a time he kept away from her he
would come back at some time, in some way. She couldn't distinguish
between Jerrold and her sense of Jerrold; and as nothing could separate
her from the sense of him, nothing could separate her from Jerrold
himself. He had part in the profound and secret life of her blood and
nerves and brain.
IX
JERROLD
i
At last, in March, nineteen-sixteen, Jerrold had got leave.
Anne was right; Jerrold had come through because he had had to stand up
to the War and face it. He couldn't turn away. It was too stupendous a
fact to be ignored or denied or in any way escaped from. And as he had
to "take" it, he took it laughing. Once in the thick of it, Jerrold was
sustained by his cheerful obstinacy, his inability to see the things he
didn't want to see. He admitted that there was a war, the most appalling
war, if you liked, that had ever been; but he refused, all the time, to
believe that the Allies would lose it; he refused from moment to moment
to believe that they could be beaten in any single action; he denied the
possibility of disaster to his own men. Disaster to himself--possibly;
probably, in theory; but not in practice. Not when he turned back in the
rain of the enemy's fire to find his captain who had dropped wounded
among the dead, when he swung him over his shoulder and staggered to the
nearest stretcher. He knew he would get through. It was inconceivable to
Jerrold that he should not get through. Even in his fifth engagement,
when his men broke and gave back in front of the German parapet, and he
advanced alone, shouting to them to come on, it was inconceivable that
they should not come on. And when they saw him, running forward by
himself, they gathered again and ran after him and the trench was taken
in a mad rush.
Jerrold got his captaincy and two weeks' leave together. He had meant to
spend three days in London with his mother, three days in Yorkshire with
the Durhams, and the rest of his time at Upper Speed with Anne and
Colin. He was not quite sure whether he wanted to go to the Durhams.
More than anything he wanted to see Anne again.
His last unbearable memory of her was wiped out by five years of India
and a year of war. He remembered the child Anne who played with him, the
girl Anne who went about with him, and the girl woman he had found in
her room at dawn. He tried to join on to her the image of the Anne that
Eliot wrote to him about, who had gone out to the war and come back from
it to look after Colin. He was in love with this image of her and ready
to be in love again with the real Anne. He would go back now and find
her and make her care for him.
There had been a time, after his father's death, when he had tried to
make himself think that Anne had never cared for him, because he didn't
want to think she cared. Now that he did want it he wasn't sure.
Not so sure as he was about little Maisie Durham. He knew Maisie cared.
That was why she had gone out to India. It was also why she had been
sent back again. He was afraid it might be why the Durhams had asked him
to stay with them as soon as he had leave. If that was so, he wasn't
sure whether he ought to stay with them, seeing that he didn't care for
Maisie. But since they had asked him, well, he could only suppose that
the Durhams knew what they were about. Perhaps Maisie had got over it.
The little thing had lots of sense.
It hadn't been his fault in the beginning, Maisie's caring. Afterwards,
perhaps, in India, when he had let himself see more of her than he would
have done if he had known she cared; but that, again, was hardly his
fault since he didn't know. You don't see these things unless you're on
the lookout for them, and you're not on the lookout unless you're a
conceited ass. Then when he did see it, when he couldn't help seeing,
after other people had seen and made him see, it had been too late.
But this was five years ago, and of course Maisie had got over it. There
would be somebody else now. Perhaps he would go down to Yorkshire.
Perhaps he wouldn't.
At this point Jerrold realised that it depended on Anne.
But before he saw Anne he would have to see his mother. And before he
saw his mother his mother had seen Anne and Colin.
ii
And while Anne in Gloucestershire was answering Jerrold's letter,
Jerrold sat in the drawing-room of the house in Montpelier Square and
talked to his mother. They talked about Colin and Anne.
"What's Colin's wife doing?" he said.
"Queenie? She's driving a field ambulance car in Belgium."
"Why isn't she looking after Colin?"
"That isn't in Queenie's line. Besides--"
"Besides what?"
"Well, to tell the truth, I don't suppose she'll live with Colin
after--"
"After _what_?"
"Well, after Colin's living with Anne."
Jerrold stiffened. He felt the blood rushing to his heart, betraying
him. His face was God only knew what awful colour.
"You don't mean to say they--"
"I don't mean to say I blame them, poor darlings. What were they to do?"
"But" (he almost stammered it) "you don't know--you can't know--it
doesn't follow."
"Well, of course, my dear, they haven't _told_ me. You don't shout these
things from the house-tops. But what is one to think? There they are;
there they've been for the last five months, living together at the
Farm, absolutely alone. Anne won't leave him. She won't have anybody
there. If you tell her it's not proper she laughs in your face. And
Colin swears he won't go back to Queenie. What _is_ one to think?"
Jerrold covered his face with his hands. He didn't know.
His mother went on in a voice of perfect sweetness. "Don't imagine I
think a bit the worse of Anne. She's been simply splendid. I never saw
anything like her devotion. She's brought Colin round out of the most
appalling state. We've no business to complain of a situation we're all
benefitting by. Some people can do these things and you forgive them.
Whatever Anne does or doesn't do she'll always be a perfect darling. As
for Queenie, I don't consider her for a minute. She's been simply asking
for it."
He wondered whether it were really true. It didn't follow that Anne and
Colin were lovers because his mother said so; even supposing that she
really thought it.
"You don't go telling everybody, I hope?" he said.
"My dear Jerrold, what do you think I'm made of? I haven't even told
Anne's father. I've only told you because I thought you ought to know."
"I see; you want to put me off Anne?"
"I don't _want_ to. But it would, wouldn't it?"
"Oh Lord, yes, if it was true. Perhaps it isn't."
"Jerry dear, it may be awfully immoral of me, but for Colin's sake I
can't help hoping that it is. I did so want Anne to marry Colin--really
he's only right when he's with her--and if Queenie divorces him I
suppose she will."
"But, mother, you _are_ going ahead. You may be quite wrong."
"I may. You can only suppose--"
"How on earth am I to know? I can't ask them."
"No, you can't ask them."
Of course he couldn't. He couldn't go to Colin and say, "Are you Anne's
lover?" He couldn't go to Anne and say, "Are you Colin's mistress?"
"If they wanted us to know," said Adeline, "they'd have told us. There
you are."
"Supposing it isn't true, do you imagine he cares for her?"
"Yes, Jerrold. I'm quite, quite sure of that. I was down there last week
and saw them. He can't bear her out of his sight one minute. He couldn't
not care."
"And Anne?"
"Oh, well, Anne isn't going to give herself away. But I'm certain...
Would she stick down there, with everybody watching them and thinking
things and talking, if she didn't care so much that nothing matters?"
"But would she--would she--"
The best of his mother was that in these matters her mind jumped to meet
yours halfway. You hadn't got to put things into words.
"My dear, if you think she wouldn't, supposing she cared enough, you
don't know Anne."
"I shall go down," he said, "and see her."
"If you do, for goodness' sake be careful. Even supposing there's
nothing in it, you mustn't let Colin see you think there is. He'd feel
then that he ought to leave her for fear of compromising her. And if he
leaves her he'll be as bad as ever again. And _I_ can't manage him.
Nobody can manage him but Anne. That's how they've tied our hands. We
can't say anything."
"I see."
"After all, Jerrold, it's very simple. If they're innocent we must leave
them in their innocence. And if they're not----"
"If they're not?"
"Well, we must leave them in _that_."
Jerrold laughed. But he was not in the least amused.
iii
He went down to Wyck the next day; he couldn't wait till the day after.
Not that he had the smallest hope of Anne now. Even if his mother's
suspicion were unfounded, she had made it sufficiently clear to him that
Anne was necessary to Colin; and, that being so, the chances were that
Colin cared for her. In these matters his mother was not such a fool as
to be utterly mistaken. On every account, therefore, he must be prepared
to give Anne up. He couldn't take her away from Colin, and he wouldn't
if he could. It was his own fault. What was done was done six years ago.
He should have loved Anne then.
Going down in the train he thought of her, a little girl with short
black hair, holding a black-and-white rabbit against her breast, a
little girl with a sweet mouth ready for kisses, who hung herself round
his neck with sudden, loving arms. A big girl with long black hair tied
in an immense black bow, a girl too big for kisses. A girl sitting in
her room between her white bed and the window with a little black cat in
her arms. Her platted hair lay in a thick black rope down her back. He
remembered how he had kissed her; he remembered the sliding of her sweet
face against his, the pressure of her darling head against his shoulder,
the salt taste of her tears. It was inconceivable that he had not loved
Anne then. Why hadn't he? Why had he let his infernal cowardice stop
him? Eliot had loved her.
Then he remembered Colin. Little Col-Col running after them down the
field, calling to them to take him with them; Colin's hands playing;
Colin's voice singing _Lord Rendal_. He tried to think of Queenie, the
woman Colin had married. He had no image of her. He could see nothing
but Colin and Anne.
She was there alone at the station to meet him. She came towards him
along the platform. Their eyes looked for each other. Something choked
his voice back. She spoke first.
"Jerrold------"
"Anne." A strange, thick voice deep down in his throat.
Their hands clasped one into the other, close and strong.
"Colin wanted to come, but I wouldn't let him. It would have been too
much for him. He might have cried or something ... You mustn't mind if
he cries when he sees you. He isn't quite right yet."
"No, but he's better."
"Ever so much better. He can do things on the farm now. He looks after
the lambs and the chickens and the pigs. It's good for him to have
something to do."
Jerrold agreed that it was good.
They had reached the Manor Farm now.
"Don't take any notice if he cries," she said.
Colin waited for him in the hall of the house. He was trying hard to
control himself, but when he saw Jerrold coming up the path he broke
down in a brief convulsive crying that stopped suddenly at the touch of
Jerrold's hand.
Anne left them together.
iv
"Don't go, Anne."
Colin called her back when she would have left them, again after dinner.
"Don't you want Jerrold to yourself?" she said.
"We don't want you to go, do we, Jerrold?"
"Rather not."
Jerrold found himself looking at them all the time. He had tried to
persuade himself that what his mother had told him was not true. But he
wasn't sure. Look as he would, he was not sure.
If only his mother hadn't told him, he might have gone on believing in
what she had called their innocence. But she had shown him what to look
for, and for the life of him he couldn't help seeing it at every turn:
in Anne's face, in the way she looked at Colin, the way she spoke to
him; in her kindness to him, her tender, quiet absorption. In the way
Colin's face turned after her as she came and went; in his restlessness
when she was not there; in the peace, the sudden smoothing of his vexed
brows, when having gone she came back again.
Supposing it were true that they--
He couldn't bear it to be true; his mind struggled against the truth of
it, but if it _were_ true he didn't blame them. So far from being untrue
or even improbable, it seemed to Jerrold the most likely thing in the
world to have happened. It had happened to so many people since the war
that he couldn't deny its likelihood. There was only one thing that
could have made it impossible--if Anne had cared for him. And what
reason had he to suppose she cared? After six years? After he had told
her he was trying to get away from her? He had got away; and he saw a
sort of dreadful justice in the event that made it useless for him to
come back. If anybody was to blame it was himself. Himself and Queenie,
that horrible girl Colin had married.
When he asked himself whether it was the sort of thing that Anne would
be likely to do he thought: Why not, if she loved him, if she wanted to
make him happy? How could he tell what Anne would or would not do? She
had said long ago that he couldn't, that she might do anything.
They spent the evening talking, by fits and starts, with long silences
in between. They talked about the things that happened before the war,
before Colin's marriage, the things they had done together. They talked
about the farm and Anne's work, about Barker and Curtis and Ballinger,
about Mrs. Sutton who watched them from her house across the road.
Mrs. Sutton had once been Colin's nurse up at the Manor: she had married
old Sutton after his first wife's death; old Sutton who wouldn't die and
let Anne have his farm. And now she watched them as if she were afraid
of what they might do next.
"Poor old Nanna," Jerrold said.
"Goodness knows what she thinks of us," said Anne.
"It doesn't matter what she thinks," said Colin.
And they laughed; they laughed; and Jerrold was not quite sure, yet.
But before the night was over he thought he was.
They had given him the little room in the gable. It led out of Colin's
room. And there on the chimneypiece he saw an old photograph of himself
at the age of thirteen, holding a puppy in his arms. He had given it to
Anne on the last day of the midsummer holidays, nineteen hundred. Also
he found a pair of Anne's slippers under the bed, and, caught in a crack
of the dressing-table, one long black hair. This room leading out of
Colin's was Anne's room.
And Colin called out to him, "Do you mind leaving the door open, Jerry?
I can't sleep if it's shut."
v
It was Jerrold's second day. He and Anne climbed the steep beech walk to
the top of the hillock and sat there under the trees. Up the fields on
the opposite rise they could see the grey walls and gables of the Manor,
and beside it their other beech ring at the top of the last field.
They were silent for a while. He was intensely aware of her as she
turned her head round, slowly, to look at him, straight and full.
And the sense of his nearness came over her, soaking in deeper, swamping
her brain. Her wide open eyes darkened; her breathing came in tight,
short jerks; her nerves quivered. She wondered whether he could feel
their quivering, whether he could hear her jerking breath, whether he
could see something queer about her eyes. But she had to look at him,
not shyly, furtively, but straight and full, taking him in.
He was changed. The war had changed him. His face looked harder, the
mouth closer set under the mark of the little clipped fawn-brown
moustache. His eyes that used to flash their blue so gayly, to rest so
lightly, were fixed now, dark and heavy with memory. They had seen too
much. They would never lose that dark memory of the things they had
seen. She wondered, was Colin right? Had the war done worse things to
Jerrold than it had done to him? He would never tell her.
"Jerrold," she said, suddenly, "did you have a good time in India?"
"I suppose so. I dare say I thought I had."
"And you hadn't?"
"Well, I can't conceive how I could have had."
"You mean it seems so long ago."
"No, I don't mean that."
"You've forgotten."
"I don't mean that, either."
Silence.
"Look here, Anne, I want to know about Colin. Has he been very bad?"
"Yes, he has."
"How bad?"
"So bad that sometimes I was glad you weren't there to see him. You
remember when he was a kid, how frightened he used to be at night. Well,
he's been like that all the time. He's like that now, only he's a bit
better. He doesn't scream now.... All the time he kept on worrying about
you. He only told me that the other day. He seemed to think the war must
have done something more frightful to you than it had done to him; he
said, because you'd mind it more. I told him it wasn't the sort of thing
you'd mind most."
"It isn't the sort of thing it's any good minding. I don't suppose I
minded more than the other chaps. If anything had happened to you, or
him, or Eliot, I'd have minded that."
"I know. That's what I told him. I knew you'd come through."