Queenie's flush darkened. She was holding her mouth so tight that the
thin red line of the lips faded.
"Noel Fenwick," said Anne, suddenly remembering.
"What about him?" Queenie's throat moved as if she swallowed something
big and hard.
"Is he there still?"
"He was when I left."
Her angry, defiant eyes were fixed on the open doorway. You could see
she was waiting for Colin, ready to fall on him and tear him as soon as
he came in.
"Am I to see Colin or not?" she said as she rose.
"Have you anything to say to him?"
"Only what I've said to you."
"Then you won't see him. In fact I think you'd better not see him at
all."
"You mean he funks it?"
"I funk it for him. He isn't well enough to be raged at and threatened
with proceedings. It'll upset him horribly and I don't see what good
it'll do you."
"No more do I. I'm not going to live with him after this. You can tell
him that. Tell him I don't want to see him or speak to him again."
"I see. You just came down to make a row."
"You don't suppose I came down to stay with you two?"
Queenie was so far from coming down to stay that she had taken rooms for
the night at the White Hart in Wyck. Anne drove her there.
ii
Two and a half years passed. Anne's work on the farm filled up her days
and marked them. Her times were ploughing time and the time for sowing:
wheat first, and turnips after the wheat, barley after the turnips,
sainfoin, grass and clover after the barley. Oats in the five-acre field
this year; in the seven-acre field the next. Lambing time, calving time,
cross-ploughing and harrowing, washing and shearing time, time for
hoeing; hay time and harvest. Then threshing time and ploughing again.
All summer the hard fight against the charlock, year after year the
same. You harrowed it out and ploughed it down and sprayed it with
sulphate of copper; you sowed vetches and winter corn to crowd it out;
and always it sprang up again, flaring in bright yellow stripes and fans
about the hills. The air was sweet with its smooth, delicious smell.
Always the same clear-cut pattern of the fields; but the colors shifted.
The slender, sharp-pointed triangle that was jade-green last June, this
June was yellow-brown. The square under the dark comb of the plantation
that had been yellow-brown was emerald; the wide-open fan beside it that
had been emerald was pink. By August the emerald had turned to red-gold
and the jade-green to white.
These changes marked the months and the years, a bright patterned,
imperceptibly moving measure, rolling time off across the hills.
Nineteen-sixteen, seventeen. Nineteen-eighteen and the armistice.
Nineteen-nineteen and the peace.
iii
In the spring of that year Anne and Colin were still together at the
Manor Farm. He was stronger. But, though he did more and more work every
year, he was still unfit to take over the management himself.
Responsibility fretted him and he tired soon. He could do nothing
without Anne.
He was now definitely separated from his wife. Queenie had come back
from the war a year ago. As soon as it was over she had begun to rage
and consult lawyers and write letters two or three times a week,
threatening to drag Anne and Colin through the Divorce Court. But Miss
Mullins (once the secretary of Dr. Cutler's Field Ambulance Corps),
recovering at the Farm from an excess of war work, reassured them.
Queenie, she said, was only bluffing. Queenie was not in a position to
bring an action against any husband, she had been too notorious herself.
Miss Mullins had seen things, and she intimated that no defence could
stand against the evidence she could give.
And in the end Queenie left off talking about divorce and contented
herself with a judicial separation.
Colin still woke every morning to his dread of some blank, undefined
disaster; but, as if Queenie and the war had made one obsession, he was
no longer haunted by the imminent crash of phantom shells. It was
settled that he was to live with Jerrold and Maisie when they came back
to the Manor, while Anne stayed on by herself at the Farm.
Every now and then Eliot came down to see them. He had been sent home
early in nineteen-seventeen with a shrapnel wound in his left leg, the
bone shattered. He obtained his discharge at the price of a permanent
limp, and went back to his research work.
For the last two years he had been investigating trench fever, with
results that were to make him famous. But that was not for another year.
In February, nineteen-nineteen, Jerrold had come back. He and Maisie had
been living in London ever since he had left the Army, filling in time
till Wyck Manor would be no longer a Home for Convalescent Soldiers. He
had tried to crowd into this interval all the amusement he hadn't had
for four years. His way was to crush down the past with the present; to
pile up engagements against the future, party on party, dances on
suppers and suppers on plays; to dine every evening at some place where
they hadn't dined before; to meet lots of nice amusing people with
demobilised minds who wouldn't talk to him about the war; to let himself
go in bursts of exquisitely imbecile laughter; never to be quiet for an
hour, never to be alone with himself, never to be long alone with
Maisie.
After the first week of it this sort of thing ceased to amuse him, but
he went on with it because he thought it amused Maisie.
There was something he missed; something he wanted and hadn't got. At
night, when he lay awake, alone with himself at last, he knew that it
was Anne.
And he went on laughing and amusing Maisie; and Maisie, with a
heart-breaking sweetness, laughed back at him and declared herself
amused. She had never had such a jolly time in all her life, she said.
Then, very early in the spring, Maisie went down to her people in
Yorkshire to recover from the jolly time she had had. The convalescent
soldiers had all gone, and Wyck Manor, rather worn and shabby, was Wyck
Manor again.
Jerrold came back to it alone.
XII
COLIN, JERROLD, AND ANNE
i
He went through the wide empty house, looking through all the rooms,
trying to find some memory of the happiness he had had there long ago.
The house was full of Anne. Anne's figure crossed the floors before him,
her head turned over her shoulder to see if he were coming; her voice
called to him from the doorways, her running feet sounded on the stairs.
That was her place at the table; that was the armchair she used to curl
up in; just there, on the landing, he had kissed her when he went to
school.
They had given his mother's room to Maisie, and they had put his things
into the room beyond, his father's room. Everything was in its place as
it had been in his father's time, the great wardrobe, the white
marble-topped washstand, the bed he had died on. He saw him lying there
and Anne going to and fro between the washstand and the bed. The parrot
curtains hung from the windows, straight and still.
Jerrold shuddered as he looked at these things.
They had thought that he would want to sleep in that room because he was
married, because Maisie would have the room it led out of.
But he couldn't sleep in it. He couldn't stay in it a minute; he would
never pass its door without that sickening pang of memory. He moved his
things across the gallery into Anne's room.
He would sleep there; he would sleep in the white bed that Anne had
slept in.
He told himself that he had to be near Colin; there was only the passage
between and their doors could stand open; that was why he wanted to
sleep there. But he knew that was not why. He wanted to sleep there
because there was no other room where he could feel Anne so near him,
where he could see her so clearly. When the dawn came she would be with
him, sitting in her chair by the window. The window looked to the west,
to Upper Speed and the Manor Farm house. The house was down there behind
the trees, and somewhere there, jutting out above the porch, was the
window of Anne's room.
He looked at his watch. One o'clock. At two he would go and see Anne.
ii
When Jerrold called at the Manor Farm house Anne was out. Old Ballinger
came slouching up from the farmyard to tell him that Miss Anne had gone
up to the Far Acres field to try the new tractor.
The Far Acres field lay at the western end of the estate. Jerrold
followed her there. Five furrows, five bright brown bands on the sallow
stubble, marked out the Far Acres into five plots. In the turning space
at the top corner he saw Anne on her black horse and Colin standing
beside her.
With a great clanking and clanging the new American, tractor struggled
towards them up the hill, dragging its plough. It stopped and turned at
the "headland" as Jerrold came up.
A clear, light wind blew over the hill and he felt a sudden happiness
and excitement. He was beginning to take an interest in his land. He
shouted:
"I say, Anne, you look like Napoleon at the battle of Waterloo."
"Oh, not Waterloo, I hope. I'm going to win _my_ battle."
"Well, Marengo--Austerlitz--whatever battles he did win. Does Curtis
understand that infernal thing?"
Young Curtis, sulky and stolid on his driver's seat, stared at his new
master.
"Yes. He's been taught motor mechanics. He's quite good at it ... If
only he'd do what you tell him. Curtis, I said you were not to use those
disc coulters for this field. I've had three smashed in two weeks.
They're no earthly good for stony soil."
"Tis n' so bad 'ere as it is at the east end, miss."
"Well, we'll see. You can let her go now."
With a fearful grinding and clanking the tractor started. The revolving
disc coulter cut the earth; the three great shares gripped it and turned
it on one side. But the earth, instead of slanting off clear from the
furrows, fell back again. Anne dismounted and ran after the tractor and
stopped it.
"He hasn't got his plough set right," she said. "It's too deep in."
She stooped, and did something mysterious and efficient with a lever;
the wheels dipped, raising the shares to their right level, and the
tractor set off again. This time the earth parted clean from the furrows
with the noise of surge, and three slanting, glistening waves ran the
length of the field in the wake of the triple plough.
"Oh, Jerrold, look at those three lovely furrows. Look at the pace it
goes. This field will be ploughed up in a day or two. Colin, aren't you
pleased?"
The tractor was coming towards them, making a most horrible noise.
"No," he said, "I don't like the row it makes. Can't I go, now I've seen
what the beastly thing can do?"
"Yes. You'd better go if you can't stand it."
Colin went with quick, desperate strides down the field away from the
terrifying sound of the tractor.
They looked after him sorrowfully.
"He's not right yet. I don't think he'll ever be able to stand noises."
"You must give him time, Anne."
"Time? He's had three years. It's heart-breaking. I must just keep him
out of the way of the tractors, that's all."
She mounted her horse and went riding up and down the field, abreast of
the plough.
Jerrold waited for her at the gate of the field.
iii
It was Sunday evening between five and six.
Anne was in the house, in the great Jacobean room on the first floor.
Barker had judged it too large and too dilapidated to live in, and it
had been left empty in his time. Eliot had had it restored and Jerrold
had furnished it. Black oak bookcases from the Manor stretched along
the walls, for Jerrold had given Eliot half of their father's books.
This room would be too dilapidated to live in, and it had been left
empty in his time. Eliot had had it restored and Jerrold had furnished
it. Black oak bookcases from the Manor stretched along the walls, for
Jerrold had given Eliot half of their father's books. This room would be
Eliot's library when he came down. It was now Anne's sitting-room.
The leaded windows were thrown open to the grey evening and a drizzling
rain; but a fire blazed on the great hearth under the arch of the carved
stone chimney-piece. Anne's couch was drawn up before it. She lay
stretched out on it, tired with her week's work.
She was all alone in the house. The gardener and his wife went out
together every Sunday to spend the evening with their families at
Medlicote or Wyck. She was not sorry when they were gone; the stillness
of the house rested her. But she missed Colin. Last Sunday he had been
there, sitting beside her in his chair by the hearth, reading. Today he
was with Jerrold at the Manor. The soft drizzle turned to a quick patter
of rain; a curtain of rain fell, covering the grey fields between the
farm and the Manor, cutting her off.
She was listening to the rain when she heard the click of the gate and
feet on the garden path. They stopped on the flagstones under her
window. Jerrold's voice called up to her.
"Anne--Anne, are you there? Can I come up?"
"Rather."
He came rushing up the stairs. He was in the room now.
"How nice of you to come on this beastly evening."
"That's why I came. I thought it would be so rotten for you all alone
down here."
"What have you done with Colin?"
"Left him up there. He was making no end of a row on the piano."
"Oh Jerrold, if he's playing again he'll be all right."
"He didn't sound as if there was much the matter with him."
"You never can tell. He can't stand those tractors."
"We must keep him away from the beastly things. I suppose we've got to
have 'em?"
"I'm afraid so. They save no end of labour, and labour's short and
dear."
"Is that why you've been working yourself to death?"
"I haven't. Why, do I look dead?"
"No. Eliot told me. He saw you at it."
"I only take a hand at hay time and harvest. All the rest of the year
it's just riding about and seeing that other people work. And Colin does
half of that now."
"All the same, I think it's about time you stopped."
"But if I stop the whole thing'll stop. The men must have somebody over
them."
"There's me."
"You don't know anything about farming, Jerry dear. You don't know a teg
from a wether."
"I suppose I can learn if Colin's learnt. Or I can get another Barker."
"Not so easy. Don't you like my looking after your land, then? Aren't
you pleased with me? I haven't done so badly, you know. Seven hundred
acres."
"You've been simply splendid. I shall never forget what you've done. And
I shall never forgive myself for letting you do it. I'd no idea what it
meant."
"It's only meant that Colin's better and I've been happier than I ever
thought I could have been."
"Happier? Weren't you happy then?"
She didn't answer. They were on dangerous ground. If they began talking
about happiness--
"If I gave it up to-morrow," she said, "I should only go and work on
another farm."
"Would you?"
"Jerrold--do you want me to go?"
"Want you?"
"Yes. You did once. At least, you wanted to get away from _me_."
"I didn't know what I was doing. If I had known I shouldn't have done
it. I can't talk about that, Anne. It doesn't bear thinking about."
"No. But, Jerrold--tell me the truth. Do you want me to go because of
Colin?"
"Colin?"
"Yes. Because of what your mother told you?"
"How do you know what she told me?"
"She told Eliot."
"And he told _you_? Good God! what was he thinking of?"
"He thought it better for me to know it. It _was_ better."
"How could it be?"
"I can't tell you...Jerrold, it isn't true."
"I know it isn't."
"But you thought it was."
"When did I think?"
"Then; when you came to see me."
"Did I?"
"Yes. And you're not going to lie about it now."
"Well, if I did I've paid for it."
(What did he mean? Paid for it? It was she who had paid.)
"When did you know it wasn't true?" she said.
"Three months after, when Eliot wrote and told me. It was too late
then.... If only you'd told me at the time. Why didn't you?"
"But I didn't know you thought it. How could I know?"
"No. How could you? Who would have believed that things could have
happened so damnably as that?"
"But it's all right now. Why did you say it was too late?"
"Because it _was_ too late. I was married."
"What _do_ you mean?"
"I mean that I lied when I told you it made no difference. It made that
difference. If I hadn't thought that you and Colin were...if I hadn't
thought that, I wouldn't have married Maisie. I'd have married you."
"Don't say that, Jerrold."
"Well--you asked for the truth, and there it is."
She got up and walked away from him to the window. He followed her
there. She spread out her hands to the cold rain.
"It's raining still," she said.
He caught back her hands.
"Would you have married me?"
"Don't, Jerrold, don't. It's cruel of you."
He was holding her by her hands.
"_Would_ you? Tell me. Tell me."
"Let go my hands, then."
He let them go. They turned back to the fireplace. Anne shivered. She
held herself to the warmth.
"You haven't told me," he said.
"No, I haven't told you," she repeated, stupidly.
"That's because you _would_. That's because you love me. You do love
me."
"I've always loved you."
She spoke as if from some far-off place; as if the eternity of her love
removed her from him, put her beyond his reach.
"But--what's the good of talking about it?" she said.
"All the good in the world. We owed each other the truth. We know it
now; we know where we are. We needn't humbug ourselves and each other
any more. You see what comes of keeping back the truth. Look how we've
had to pay for it. You and me. Would you rather go on thinking I didn't
care for you?"
"No, Jerrold, no. I'm only wondering what we're to do next."
"Next?"
"Yes. _That's_ why you want me to go away."
"It isn't. It's why I want you to stay. I want you to leave off working
and do all the jolly things we used to do."
"You mustn't make me leave off working. It's my only chance."
They turned restlessly from the fireplace to the couch. They sat one at
each end of it, still for a long time, without speaking. The fire died
down. The evening darkened in the rain. The twilight came between them,
poignant and disquieting, dimming their faces, making them strange and
wonderful to each other. Their bodies loomed up through it, wonderful
and strange. The high white stone chimney-piece glimmered like an arch
into some inner place.
Outside, from the church below the farm house, the bell tinkled for
service.
It ceased.
Suddenly they rose and he came towards her to take her in his arms. She
beat down his hands and hung on them, keeping him off.
"Don't, Jerry, please, please don't hold me."
"Oh Anne, let me. You let me once. Don't you remember?"
"We can't now. We mustn't."
And yet she knew that it would happen in some time, in some way. But not
now. Not like this.
"We mustn't."
"Don't you want me to take you in my arms?"
"No. Not that."
"What, then?" He pressed tighter.
"I want you not to hurt Maisie."
"It's too late to think of Maisie now."
"I'm not thinking of her. I'm thinking of you. You'll hurt yourself
frightfully if you hurt her." She wrenched his hands apart and went from
him to the door.
"What are you going to do?" he said.
"I'm going to fetch the lamp."
She left him standing there.
A few minutes later she came back carrying the lighted lamp. He took it
from her and set it on the table.
"And now?"
"Now you're going back to Colin. And we're both going to be good...You
do want to be good--don't you?"
"Yes. But I don't see how we're going to manage it."
"We could manage it if we didn't see each other. If I went away."
"Anne, you wouldn't. You can't mean that. I couldn't stand not seeing
you. You couldn't stand it, either."
"I have stood it. I can stand it again."
"You can't. Not now. It's all different. I swear I'll be decent. I won't
say another word if only you won't go."
"I don't see how I can very well. There's the land... No. Colin must
look after that. I'll go when the ploughing's done. And some day you'll
be glad I went."
"Go. Go. You'll find out then."
Their tenderness was over. Something hard and defiant had come in to
them with the light. He was at the door now.
"And you'll come back," he said. "You'll see you'll come back."
XIII
ANNE AND JERROLD
i
When he was gone she turned on herself in fury. What had she done it
for? Why had she let him go? She didn't want to be good. She wanted
nothing in the world but Jerrold.
She hadn't done it for Maisie. Maisie was nothing to her. A woman she
had never seen and didn't want to see. She knew nothing of her but her
name, and that was sweet and vague like a perfume coming from some place
unknown. She had no sweet image of Maisie in her mind. Maisie might
never have existed for all that Anne thought about her.
What did she do it for, then? Why didn't she take him when he gave
himself? When she knew that in the end it must come to that?
As far as she could see through her darkness it was because she knew
that Jerrold had not meant to give himself when he came to her. She had
driven him to it. She had made him betray his secret when she asked for
the truth. At that moment she was the stronger; she had him at a
disadvantage. She couldn't take him like that, through the sudden
movement of his weakness. Before she surrendered she must know first
whether Jerrold's passion for her was his weakness or his strength.
Jerrold didn't know yet. She must give him time to find out.
But before all she had been afraid that if Jerrold hurt Maisie he would
hurt himself. She must know which was going to hurt him more, her
refusal or her surrender. If he wanted "to be good" she must go away and
give him his chance.
And before the ploughing was all over she had gone.
She went down into Essex, to see how her own farm was getting on. The
tenant who had the house wanted to buy it when his three years' lease
was up. Anne had decided that she would let him. The lease would be up
in June. Her agent advised her to sell what was left of the farm land
for building, which was what Anne had meant to do. She wanted to get rid
of the whole place and be free. All this had to be looked into.
She had not been gone from Jerrold a week before the torture of
separation became unbearable. She had said that she could bear it
because she had borne it before, but, as Jerrold had pointed out to her,
it wasn't the same thing now. There was all the difference in the world
between Jerrold's going away from her because he didn't want her, and
her going away from Jerrold because he did. It was the difference
between putting up with a dull continuous pain you had to bear, and
enduring a sharp agony you could end at any minute. Before, she had only
given up what she couldn't get; now, she was giving up what she could
have to-morrow by simply going back to Wyck.
She loathed the flat Essex country and the streets of little white rough
cast and red-tiled houses on the Ilford side where the clear fields had
once lain beyond the tall elm rows. She was haunted by the steep,
many-coloured pattern of the hills round Wyck, and the grey gables of
the Manor. Love-sickness and home-sickness tore at her together till her
heart felt as if it were stretched out to breaking point.
She had only to go back and she would end this pain. Then on the sixth
day Jerrold's wire came: "Colin ill again. Please come back. Jerrold."
ii
It was not her fault and it was not Jerrold's. The thing had been taken
out of their hands. She had not meant to go and Jerrold had not meant to
send for her. Colin must have made him. They had lost each other through
Colin and now it was Colin who had brought them together.
Colin's terror had come again. Again he had the haunting fear of the
tremendous rushing noise, the crash always about to come that never
came. He slept in brief fits and woke screaming.
Eliot had been down to see him and had gone. And again, as before,
nobody could do anything with him but Anne.
"I couldn't," Jerrold said, "and Eliot couldn't. Eliot made me send for
you."
They had left Colin upstairs and were together in the drawing-room. He
stood in the full wash of the sunlight that flooded in through the west
window. It showed his face drawn and haggard, and discoloured, as though
he had come through a long illness. His mouth was hard with pain. He
stared away from her with heavy, wounded eyes. She looked at him and was
frightened.
"Jerrold, have you been ill?"
"No. What makes you think so?"
"You look ill. You look as if you hadn't slept for ages."
"I haven't. I've been frightfully worried about Colin."
"Have you any idea what set him off again?"
"I believe it was those infernal tractors. He would go out with them
after you'd left. He said he'd have to, as long as you weren't there.
And he couldn't stand the row. Eliot said it would be that. And the
responsibility, the feeling that everything depended on him."
"I see. I oughtn't to have left him."
"It looks like it."
"What else did Eliot say?"