remembered that Maggie Pattle had once told her that the Sothebys had a
son. Why was it that she had imagined that he was dead? But it did not
occur to her to connect him with the photograph in the parlour, for she
was looking at the elm trees, and listening to the song of a thrush;
then gazing at the roof of Lambert’s barn, bathed in sunlight, she felt
her heart beating happily, and asked herself why had she felt beauty
was a prison? She could be happy in that village for ever, for spring
was coming, and the birds were singing.
FOUR: THE TRAPEZE BOY
A hard frost came early in February.
“If this lasts,” said Mr. Dunnock eagerly, “we shall have skating the
day after to-morrow,” but his face clouded quickly, and he put down
his cup with a gesture of annoyance. The day after to-morrow would be
Sunday.
“We may be in for a long spell of frost,” said Anne, but, reminded of
his duties, her father was not in the mood to be consoled. “A frost
brings more suffering than you or I can quite realize, my dear,” he
said severely. “Think of the poor, without the coal or the blankets to
keep them warm; think of the seamen in the rigging of ships; think of
the outcasts on the roads; think of the birds.”
“Think of the polar bears,” said Anne under her breath, as her father
rose from the table and scooped out the crumb of the loaf.
“The trap ought to be here in ten minutes; I shall be back from Ely
by the eight o’clock train,” he said, and with these words went to
the front door where an impatient flock of sparrows was waiting his
arrival.
When the trap came, she went to the gate and watched her father drive
away, wondering whether he would meet Enid in the street. “I am glad I
am not going. Now the rest of the day is mine. Mine, and I am free to
do whatever I choose!”
The road was like iron; it rang under the pony’s hoofs, and Anne
thought she had never seen a lovelier morning; the spell of the frost
was more beautiful than the enchanted world of the snow had been a
month before, though it was not so strange. Every twig was fledged with
rime, for there had been a fog during the night, but already the sun
had broken through the mist, the sky was showing blue overhead, and the
white tops of the elms were blushing in the sunshine.
“Every tree is smothered in snowy blossom; it is as if spring had
come,” and she thought that the flowering time of the cherry in Japan
could not equal the beauty of this February morning in England. When
she turned to go back into the house she noticed that the bare wall of
the vicarage was covered with hoarfrost, an opalescent bloom shining in
the sunlight.
“A fairy palace fit for the Snow Queen or the Sleeping Beauty,” she
said, and the words reminded her that Maggie must be waiting for her to
make the beds.
“You ought to see the fat woman,” said Maggie Pattle. “Her bosom was
bigger than that pair of marrows Mr. Lambert gave for Harvest Festival;
there’s a paper outside says she is only twenty and weighs nineteen
stone. I shall never call Ida Whalley fat again, after last night.”
Linton Fair lasted two days, and the merry-go-rounds were staying till
the end of the week.
“I went in the swing-boats, and I went to the circus, and I spent seven
shillings altogether,” said Maggie with triumph.
Anne shuddered at the fat woman, but when Maggie spoke of the circus,
of the little lady who rode on a pink horse and jumped through paper
hoops, and of a horse that undressed and went to bed and drew up the
sheets with its teeth, she wished that she could go herself.
“Why not? Why not?” she wondered. “Why should I not go this afternoon?
There is no disgrace in going to the fair, and there are the
drawing-pins that I have to buy at Linton. I must begin trying to do
some fashion plates. Besides, I should enjoy the walk on a day like
this.”
The six miles of road brought a glow of colour into her cheeks, and she
felt her heart beat with excitement as she crossed the old bridge over
the Ouse, and entered the little town. The streets were crowded with
men and beasts; the market place was full of farmers and machinery,
and half a dozen cheap-jacks, each surrounded by a dense crowd, were
shouting against each other.
Anne quickened her pace; the noise of a steam organ told her that the
merry-go-rounds were in a field near the railway station, but when she
had passed the first booths, the coco-nut shies, the rifle-range, and
the places where she was invited to win cups and saucers by throwing
rings, she suddenly became embarrassed. Just in front of her were the
swing-boats sure enough, laden with shrieking girls; beyond them a
great merry-go-round painted with all the majesty of a heathen temple,
and loaded with strange idols: swans, dolphins, lions, and ostriches,
turned slowly round like a monstrous humming-top, and near by was the
vast curving canvas wall of the circus.
She was surrounded by a happy crowd, but she could not mingle with it.
Already her pink cheeks had drawn upon her the notice of a group of
young farmers; it was clear to her that she could not visit the circus
unless she went with a companion. At that moment she envied Maggie
her freedom as she had never done before; Maggie, who might laugh or
scream until her voice drowned the hurdy-gurdy, and who could answer
back when a man spoke to her without anyone thinking the worse.
What would be said if she, Miss Dunnock, the daughter of the vicar
of Dry Coulter, were to try to win a coco-nut? Many of her father’s
parishioners must be in town, and, with flagging footsteps, Anne passed
by the entrance to the field full of merry-go-rounds, and walked slowly
on towards the railway station.
Within the great tent of the circus she could hear the thumping of the
ponies’ hoofs, the crack of the circus-master’s whip, and the falsetto
note of a clown’s voice, followed by a roar of rustic laughter and
clapping hands; then, passing on, she came in view of the showmen’s
encampment: a score of caravans with smoking chimneys, groups of
hobbled ponies, and women carrying pails of water, hanging out washing,
and preparing the evening meal.
“A curious life,” the girl said to herself. “Wandering from town to
town, roaming from one country to another, for the circus I see here
may be at Nizhninovgorod next summer and in Italy or Spain six months
after that. The women must have a hard life, but I would rather be one
of them than the wife or daughter of a clergyman. If I were to join
them; but that cannot be--some dark woman would stab me rather than
have me for her daughter-in-law, yet if one of these handsome gipsies
asked me, I would not hesitate to go with him. I would rather that my
son were a clown or a lion-tamer than an archdeacon or a bishop.”
Anne roused herself after a few minutes; the sun was setting, she felt
chilly, and her thoughts had depressed her. “My mind runs in a circle,”
she said. “Whatever I see, whatever I do, I come back to the thought
that I am an outcast unable to share in the life around me, or to enjoy
it, and that somehow I must escape from my surroundings, for I cannot
live any longer without friends.”
She turned back towards the market place, for there is nothing more
gloomy than an empty railway station, resolving to buy what she needed
and then go home without delay.
“Loneliness is terrible, and I have not got a friend in the world.
The worst fate which can befall a human being is to be born a young
lady,” and meeting the gaze of a handsome gipsy with gold earrings, she
added: “I can see that I do not attract him; he does not care for young
ladies, and he is wise. We are an unhealthy, artificial breed; his
women are better; they smell of tallow and wood ashes, and have the
spirit and the health of mares.”
Anne bought her drawing-pins and decided to go home, but first she
would have a cup of tea, and threading her way past a steam plough with
seven shares, and through a series of galvanized iron cisterns, at
which a group of farmers were gazing with intellectual doubt written on
their faces, she crossed the market place and went into White’s. The
turmoil of the fair had not penetrated inside the confectioner’s shop,
and she would have thought that they had no knowledge of it there if it
were not that a greater primness reigned, and that the very gingerbread
seemed weary of the flesh. Anne sipped her cup of tea with distaste,
asking herself what the young ladies behind the counter would have said
if she had given way to her desires, and they had seen her mounted on
an ostrich.... Did they suffer from such temptations themselves?
She had almost finished her cup of tea when the door opened and a
little girl came in, followed by a short, thick-set, white-bearded man
of sixty. It was Rachel, her favourite, and her father, Mr. Sotheby.
Rachel smiled, and all Anne’s depression was laid aside; even the tea,
tasting of wet boots, seemed changed by the pleasure of their meeting.
“Well, Rachel, have you been enjoying yourself at the fair?” she asked,
looking into the pale little face, framed in short dark curls. The
child nodded her head quickly.
“Yes, Miss Dunnock, thank you very much. I have been on the switchback,
and enjoyed seeing the fair very much.” Rachel’s voice was always a
trifle stilted, her words always polite, and her sentiments always
perfectly correct, but Anne noticed that on this occasion the child’s
usual gaiety was lacking. A few words with the grocer were sufficient
to explain the cause: Mr. Sotheby had brought Rachel into Linton to see
the fair, he had taken her twice on the roundabout, but his business
was waiting for him and must be done, and since he did not think it
suitable to let the child go to the circus alone, he was leaving her at
White’s, where she would keep warm.
“Come and choose yourself a cake, Rachel,” he said.
“May I take her to the circus, Mr. Sotheby?” asked Anne.
There could be no refusal, and the two friends set off at once, Rachel
carrying the cheese-cake she had chosen, in her hand.
When the time came to meet Mr. Sotheby in the market place the two
girls left the circus, and still under the spell of the wonders they
had seen, it seemed as if they could never express sufficiently their
admiration and their astonishment. The pink horse and the fair rider of
which Maggie had spoken that morning, and the clowns, who had appeared
so suddenly that one might have thought a shower of frogs had fallen
into the ring after a thunderstorm, were discussed in detail, but best
of all they had liked the handsome young man who had stood on his head
on a trapeze, and who, without holding on with his hands, had swung
rapidly from one side of the great roof of the circus to the other.
Mr. Sotheby was driving out of the inn-yard as they reached the market
place, and Anne was about to say good-bye, when the grocer offered her
a seat in his dog-cart, saying that he would not hear of her walking
back alone. She was grateful for his offer, for she had no great fancy
for the six-mile walk herself, and soon they were all ready, tucked up
in a large rug, with nothing to be seen of Rachel, crouching against
their legs, but the tassel of her woollen cap. Mr. Sotheby flicked
the pony with his whip, and in a few moments they had crossed the old
bridge over the river, and had left Linton behind.
During the drive home, Anne’s thoughts ran on the young man, dressed
in scarlet tights like Mephistopheles; she could not forget his proud
and serious face, intent only on his trapeze and indifferent to the
audience; she would never forget that unsmiling face, looking up at the
trapeze above him, as he deliberately rubbed first the soles of his
shoes, and then his hands, in a box of sand.
But she could not speak of the young man, or of the circus, to Mr.
Sotheby, whom she disliked; she could not continue her happy talk with
Rachel in front of him, and they drove in silence--a silence broken at
last by the grocer remarking on the number of foreigners that there
were at the fair.
“Nothing interests us country folk more than to see a foreigner,” said
he. “A black man will draw a crowd anywhere, and no wonder either, for
however contented we may be with our own lives, we always wish to learn
about those of other people.”
“He is a foreigner, of course,” Anne was saying to herself. “Perhaps
if I went to the circus again to-morrow I might learn his name, and
whether he is an Italian or a Spaniard,” but she roused herself, for
Mr. Sotheby was still speaking, and then, wondering whether his words
required an answer, she looked about her.
The risen moon was nearly full: there were no stars, and the road
before them sparkled with frost. “How fast we are driving,” she
reflected. “There is nothing like a frost to make a pony go, and no
doubt he is thinking of his stable.” The sound of the hoofs rang out;
the air was much colder than in the morning, so cold that it hurt her
to breathe.
“My son Richard is abroad, living in Paris,” said the grocer, and
hearing his voice, Anne told herself that politeness required her to
listen. If she married the trapezist she might live in Paris, too--or
else they would travel from town to town wherever there were circuses.
“Before that boy was eight years old,” Mr. Sotheby went on, “I knew
that he would have to be a gentleman, and I am proud to say that I
always encouraged him to do what he wanted with his life.”
She would call him Lorenzo. What did it matter whether Lorenzo was
a gentleman or not? And Anne said this to herself, certain that the
boy who had swung so gracefully on the trapeze was a gentleman. “For
what is gentility but pride and perfect dignity? And he is as proud as
Lucifer.”
“Everyone says that I spoil Richard,” and the old man beside her
cracked his whip gaily. “But as long as I can make money I shall send
it to him.”
“I am sure you are quite right,” said Anne. Money! If only she had a
little money! How that would simplify things!
Mr. Sotheby had needed no encouragement, and went on speaking: “All
these farmers hoard their money, and laugh at me for spending mine,
but I always say that we are both in the right, for they haven’t sons
like my Richard. What good is money to my wife and me?” he asked,
but, without waiting for a reply, continued: “To him it means books,
education, painting in the best studios, and the company of his equals,
for he would not find his equals about here.”
“Yes, money means all that and more,” thought Anne, but aloud she said:
“Is Lorenzo a painter, then?”
“My son Richard? No, he is an artist. I am fond of pictures myself, so
I can understand him. I have seen some by the great men: Rembrandt,
Turner, and Wouverman. There is a fine gallery at Norwich.”
“I am very fond of pictures, too,” said Anne. “I have always wanted to
try oils; perhaps I shall one day.”
“I thought at first of sending Richard to Cambridge,” said the grocer,
for he was not interested in Anne’s chances of painting. “But he said
no to it. ‘There’s only one place where I can learn to be an artist,’
he said. ‘Paris is the only place for that.’”
Mr. Sotheby shook the reins, and murmured to his pony as they crossed
a little bridge, then he continued: “One hears a great deal about the
wickedness of Paris; several of our ministers have spoken to me about
it, but I console myself with thinking that none of those men would
mind letting their boys go to sea, and there is as much wickedness in
Hull or Swansea as anywhere on earth.”
Rachel shifted her position under the rug, and suddenly thrusting her
head out, looked about her with curiosity, like a little monkey.
“Do the sailors believe in the Pope of Rome, father?” she asked in her
precise voice.
Anne did not listen to the reply. Of course Lorenzo was a Roman
Catholic. Her father would be heartbroken, but she would give up
everything for Lorenzo. Together they would voyage over the roads of
Europe, their horses trotting on through the night, while the van they
were sleeping in rocked gently on its springs. In the early morning
she would wake to find that they were encamped by the side of a
stream; the curling smoke of the wood fire would be rising beneath an
ash tree; and near at hand the piebald horses would be hobbled, and
happily grazing on the dew-soaked grass. She would wander along the
hedge-row, startling a wood pigeon which would rise from the cornfield,
and catching sight of the black and white of a magpie stealing along
the edge of the wood. Soon she would return with her arms full of
dog-roses, and would give one to Lorenzo to wear in his buttonhole; and
in the evening she would see the fragile flower pinned to his breast as
he swung on the trapeze.
“Scripture tells us,” said Mr. Sotheby, “that children should honour
their parents, but I feel a respect for my son which I never felt for
my father, and which I don’t expect Richard to feel for me. I know
that he works as hard at his painting as I should expect him to work
if he had stayed in the shop, though of course he earns no money by
it. Perhaps he never will, for the qualities necessary are not the
same, and Richard has spoken of men as great as Wouverman, living and
painting in Paris to-day, who cannot sell their pictures. I would
rather that Richard were to become a great master than that he were to
sell a picture for hundreds of guineas, and incur the contempt of such
men. Money is not everything: one need only read one’s Bible to see
that.”
The pony slackened its speed, and turned a corner; they were back at
Dry Coulter.
“Steady, boy,” said the grocer, pulling up at the vicarage gate.
“Thank you very much, Mr. Sotheby,” said Anne.
“A pleasure, Miss Dunnock; thank you for taking Rachel to the circus.”
“Good-night, Mr. Sotheby. Good-night Rachel.”
“Good-night, Miss Dunnock, thank you for your kindness,” came the
child’s voice as the pony darted off impatiently.
“What a glorious moon,” Anne said to herself. “And what a hard frost!
There will be skating without a doubt.” She would have liked to go
for a long walk to straighten out her tangled feelings, but it was
half-past seven: it was time to lay the table for dinner.
“Perhaps Lorenzo is married,” she said to herself suddenly. “Then we
can only be friends,” she added as she opened the door.
FIVE: THE FROST HELD
The frost held. On Sunday morning the little boys lingered round the
edges of the Broad Ditch on their way to chapel, and Mr. Dunnock,
hurrying to the vestry, noticed Mr. Lambert’s foxhound puppy running
across the ice.
“There will be skating,” he said to himself, “and I have not lived
all my life in the fens for nothing. I can still show the younger men
something,” and he decided to ask Anne to cut sandwiches. They would
spend the morrow at Bluntisham:--a long walk, but one which would
repay them with the finest stretch of ice in Huntingdonshire, and at
Bluntisham Mr. Dunnock would see the best figure skaters and be seen by
them.
After evening service he tapped the barometer, asking himself if it
would be tempting Providence if he were to look at the skates that
evening. There might be a screw missing, a strap needed, or a broken
bootlace, and such little things were best attended to overnight, he
reflected, trying to conceal his eagerness, for he would not be happy
until he had handled his skates.
“They will be in the box-room,” he said, taking a candle with him from
the hall, but in the box-room many things met his eye which reminded
him of his life at Ely. It had been a wretched subordinate existence,
supporting his wife and daughter on a hundred and twenty pounds a year,
but as he looked back on it such things were forgotten, and it seemed
to him that his life there had been a happy one, for it had been shared
with the woman he loved. Setting down his candle, he turned over the
Japanese screen, which he had always liked for the storks flying across
it, embroidered in silver thread. His wife had intended to re-cover
the screen, for the storks were tarnished, and the silver threads
unravelling, but she had died before she had found a suitable piece of
stuff. “She is in Heaven,” he said mechanically, and was surprised once
again that the words with which he comforted others held no consolation
for him.
“An old age passed together would have brought a closer understanding
between us,” he said, suddenly speaking his innermost thought, which
he had not admitted to himself before, for the clergyman’s tragedy was
never to have had the conviction of perfect understanding or intimacy,
even with his wife.
“In the middle years of life we live too much in the affairs of the
day, and a child troubles the mind of its mother. So many burdens to
be borne, so many duties to be fulfilled.... We were too occupied to
look into each other’s hearts, and old age, the sweetest portion of
life if it be filled with harmony, and the happiness of memories shared
in common, old age is reserved for me only; a lonely and miserable old
age. Now that I have lost Mavis, intimacy is impossible with anyone
else, and I feel myself growing far away from everyone, and farthest
of all from Anne. She reminds me too closely of her mother; I find it
painful to be with her and I find her youth as tiresome as she finds my
hasty temper.”
Mr. Dunnock told himself that such feelings must be controlled, but
he had said that before, and had no faith that the strangeness which
seemed to be growing upon him could be overcome. “Death will release
me, and I must console myself with the hope that Mavis is waiting
for me in Heaven, that she will fold me in her wings, and take me to
herself without a word of reproach. When I hear the birds singing in
the mornings they repeat that promise, and once or twice I have had the
conviction that when I looked out of our bedroom window I should see
angels perched in the branches of the trees.”
The three pairs of skates lay on a shelf, the blades had been smeared
with vaseline and wrapped in greaseproof paper, but the boots were
dusty, and stretched stiffly over the boxwood trees.
“Yes, yes, the skates will be all right: there will be nothing amiss
with them,” for they had been greased by _her_ hands; it was _she_ who
had laid them aside after the frost last winter a few weeks before her
death.
The road to Bluntisham was long, and, as she walked with her father,
Anne thought about bicycles. Her father had once had a bicycle, but
that was many years ago; he appeared to have no wish to possess
another, and Anne had never summoned up sufficient courage to buy
one for herself, though the price of a bicycle was lying idly in the
savings bank at the Post Office.
“I shall certainly buy a bicycle,” she thought. “It is madness not to
have got one before; a bicycle would give me the freedom for which I
pine; what the horse is to the Arab of the desert, a bicycle is to a
girl in my position. I could ride to Cambridge; in Cambridge I could go
to concerts, and even plays; I could ride to Peterborough.” But she
did not finish her thought, for she was uncertain what Peterborough
would give her.
“If I had a bicycle I should make friends and instead of wasting my
life like a fool, dreaming about acrobats at a travelling circus, I
should meet Cambridge undergraduates, and receive invitations to play
tennis, or to join in a picnic party on the river.”
While Anne was thinking of all the changes which would come into her
life when she bought herself a bicycle, her father was enjoying the
exercise of walking.
“I am a great pedestrian,” he had said to the Bishop, and although he
scarcely ever went outside his house if he could avoid it, the saying
was true, and it was all his daughter could do to keep up with him.
Bluntisham Church stands as the last outpost over the flooded fen
country; a little beyond, at Earith, is the starting point of the
Bedford Level, which runs for thirty miles to King’s Lynn without a
hedge, or a tree, or even as much as a mole-hill to break the flat
expanse--green all the summer, but under water, or rather under ice
when the Dunnocks approached it.
The father and daughter had in common a great liking for the fens; they
loved the black peaty earth, the vast level expanse of sodden land,
which looked flatter than the sea, when viewed from the high banks
of a causeway running through it, or the embankments of the Bedford
River raised up above the fields which it drained; they liked even the
squalid villages on each side of the level, the low houses clustering
wherever a hillock projecting into the fenland made it possible for man
to build. But better than the Bedford Level of the present day, they
loved to think of the fens of the past, and of the struggle to reclaim
them which had begun with the war between the Romans and the Iceni,
flitting from islet to islet in their osier coracles, sheltering behind
the willows, and making a night attack on the legionaries posted to
defend the bridge at Huntingdon.