and Mr. Dunnock soon passed from the invasions of the Danes to the
prosperous farmers who tilled the lands reclaimed by the Romans until
the twelfth or fourteenth century, when the fields relapsed into
fenland, and soon they reached the great days of the seventeenth
century, for, as Mr. Dunnock said, the history of the Commonwealth
is to be found in the Fens of Huntingdonshire, and the Commonwealth
itself may be regarded as a mere episode in the struggle between the
Uplanders and the Lowlanders.
Although Mr. Dunnock was an Uplander by birth, and a High Churchman, he
was proud of the part that the inhabitants of the swamps had played in
English history.
“Without the three men of Godmanchester there would have been no Magna
Charta, and if Charles had not tried to drain the Fens, there is little
doubt he would have won the Civil War,” he said, and went on telling
Anne how as a young man Oliver must have made the reflection that his
family had been ruined by the Stuarts, who had encouraged their hopes
and given them nothing. It was a good reason for him to repent of his
loose life, and become more determined a Puritan. Soon he was stirring
up trouble against the church in St. Ives; then his uncle, Sir Thomas
Steward, died, leaving him his heir, and Oliver removed to Ely, but the
temptation to make trouble still persisted, and when one next hears of
him he was giving money to the Fen Dwellers and helping them to resist
the drainage schemes of the King’s Adventurers.
“Adventurers’ Fen is called after them,” said Anne, and her father
answered that it might well be so, and they stopped for a moment to
look out towards the fen in question.
“At that time the people in the fens lived by fishing and wild
fowling,” said Mr. Dunnock. “Every week during the winter a train of
waggons left Linton for London loaded with wild duck,” and he continued
his story of how when the King was engaged in reclaiming the fen, the
birds were driven from their nesting grounds, and the great decoys
woven of osiers were being left high and dry, so that the lowlanders
foresaw that they would have to abandon a mode of livelihood which had
endured since the Iceni. They had no desire to plough and reap, and the
drained lands did not prove fertile until a century afterwards, when
the farmers were shown how to dig through the peat and quarry clay to
mix with it, after which it became the most fruitful soil in England.
Oliver Cromwell had taken up their cause, and later, when the Duke of
Manchester was letting victory slip out of the hands of the Parliament,
it was Cromwell who impeached him, and then, seeking an army, turned
for his New Model to the Fens. It was Cromwell who equipped the
Lowlanders, and headed the Eastern Association, and it was the Eastern
Association which had won the Civil War, and so the Cromwells had their
revenge on the Stuarts. But though the lowlanders had been made use of,
the work of drainage went on, and the Ironsides who had been enlisted
to resist the draining of the fens were betrayed by old Ironsides
himself, the Lord Protector.
But by the time Mr. Dunnock had reached this crowning example of the
perfidy of the figure he so much hated, they had turned the corner
below Bluntisham Church, and saw before them the great expanse of ice
covered with the descendants of Cromwell’s Ironsides.
The field beside the road was full of motorcars, of farmers’ gigs,
waggonettes, and grazing ponies, and at the entrance stood the farmer
asking a penny from every person who went on the ice. No crop had
ever yielded so handsome a profit as his flooded water-meadows, and
no fenman in Cromwell’s day would have fought more bitterly against a
scheme which would have kept it drained during the winter months.
The noise of hundreds of pairs of skates on the ice came to their ears
as they entered the field,--a grumbling sound that had within it a note
which rang as clear as a bell, and they sat down to unlace their boots,
refusing the offer of a chair which would mean spending another penny.
Anne was the first on the ice, and as her father watched her hesitating
strokes the feeling of affection, which the conversation about
Cromwell had aroused, gave place to one of shame and irritation.
“Am I to be tied to such a limpet all day?” he asked himself as he
had so often asked himself before when skating with his wife; then,
without giving his daughter another look, he hobbled rapidly to the
edge of the ice and was off himself, slipping away as easily as a
swallow that recovers the freedom of its element after beating against
the window-panes. His own strokes were as effortless as the flickering
of a bird’s wing, and it was impossible for the onlookers watching him
to say what kept him in motion. Mr. Dunnock never appeared to strike
off, but leant gracefully forward, lifting a leg slightly to cross
his feet, and, changing his weight from one leg to the other, he flew
lazily across the ice, picking his way without appearing to observe
the existence of the clumsy young farmers who doubled up, and, with
their hands clasped behind their backs, dashed round and round at top
speed on their long fen skates. Soon everyone had noticed the tall
clergyman with his beard tucked under a white woollen muffler, and many
paused to watch as he began figure-skating in the real English style.
Eight after eight was drawn with the slow precision of a sleepy rook
wheeling in the evening sky, before descending in a perfect spiral to
roost on the topmost bough of the high elm, and indeed the black-coated
figure forgot for a few moments that he was an elderly vicar on a
pair of skates, and believed himself to be circling in space among a
vast flock of waterfowl flying over the fens. It seemed to him as if
at intervals a V-shaped band of wild duck flashed past him, each with
its neck craned forward, and beating furiously with its short, clumsy
wings; a flock of curlew was all about him, and would wheel suddenly in
its tracks with a flash of white, then a stray snipe corkscrewed past,
a pair of greedy seagulls chased each other, and two roseate terns
revolved round each other on their nuptial flight....
Half an hour had gone by when his dream was interrupted by a young
man with pink cheeks and rather protruding black eyes, who skated up
to him and addressed him by name. It was Mr. Yockney, Dr. Boulder’s
assistant, whose professional duties brought him to Dry Coulter when
there was a birth, or death, but rarely at other times:--the villagers
were uncommonly healthy, and on the rare occasions when they took cold,
or developed inflammation of the lungs, they doctored each other with
gaseous mixture, or turpentine and honey.
“Ah, so you are here,” said Mr. Dunnock, shaking hands warmly, for
young Yockney had attended Mrs. Dunnock in her last illness, and his
sympathy and tenderness to the dying woman would never be forgotten.
“Yes, Doctor Boulder gave me the day off. This frost is so healthy we
have no patients left; but it’s an ill-wind that blows nobody any good,
and I would not miss a day’s skating like this for the world.”
Mr. Dunnock said that Doctor Boulder must write to the Clerk of the
Weather about the deplorably healthy winter. Mr. Yockney laughed, and
then both of them remembered that it must be lunch time.
“Come, Yockney, you must join us,” said Mr. Dunnock, and Anne, coming
up at that moment, added her invitation, which the young man was glad
enough to accept.
A line of trestles had been put up on the ice, and crowds were waiting
round the shoemaker’s, and the men who let out skates for hire,
but most popular of all were the sellers of hot potatoes and roast
chestnuts with their buckets of glowing coals. Mr. Yockney purchased
three steaming cups of cocoa, while Anne went to fetch the satchel full
of sandwiches, and in a little while they were sitting on the edge of a
grassy bank.
“I have been seeing a friend of yours, Miss Dunnock,” said the doctor
after the second sandwich. “Little Rachel Sotheby, and I fear that it
may have been your doing that I had to be called in, for I understand
it was you who took her to the circus. She caught a chill on the way
back. Oh, no, it is nothing in the least serious, though she is rather
delicate.”
Anne expressed her concern, and hastened to explain to her father how
she had met the Sothebys in the tea-shop, and had taken the little girl
to see the circus.
“Extraordinary chap that old grocer is,” said Mr. Yockney. “He’d
have been a rich man by now, I fancy, if it had not been for that
good-for-nothing son of his. Just fancy, he told me that he was
spending all his money on making his son a gentleman!”
This seemed to Mr. Dunnock an excellent joke, and he laughed heartily.
He disliked the grocer for his assurance, and his cheerfulness, and his
nonconformity, and was ready to hear anything to his disadvantage.
“The great news,” continued Mr. Yockney, “only I expect you know it, is
that the prodigal is expected home next week. He’s been in Paris, and
has been going the pace a bit, I fancy.”
“Oh, I am so glad,” said Anne with real interest showing in her
voice. “I have heard so much about him from Mr. Sotheby, and I quite
look forward to seeing what he’s like. He sounds quite an interesting
person.”
A frown gathered on her father’s face.
“Yes, we are all eager to see him,” said the doctor, and then the
tone of his voice changed so completely that Anne could see that it
was another, and a serious Mr. Yockney who was speaking, although she
observed that his eyes bulged just as much when he was serious as when
he was only talking lightly.
“If you ask me, Miss Dunnock, I should say that young man is the very
worst type of rotter. Look at the old grocer sweating away at sixty,
look at his mother still serving in the shop, look at his little
sister with patches on the sides of her boots, while Master Richard
is learning to be a _gentleman_ in Paris! There’s no word too bad for
him. I should like him to know what decent people think of that sort of
gentility!”
“You had better tell him, my dear fellow,” said Mr. Dunnock languidly.
“It would do him a world of good, I’ve no doubt. But I must say it
is probably not the fault of the son but because of the vanity of
the father. Over and over again I have seen a young oaf of that
description produced by a couple of vain and silly parents who ruin
their children’s lives by denying them nothing.”
“But no decent chap, you must admit....” said Mr. Yockney.
“You think the son is to blame because you are nearer his age and
imagine yourself in his position,” said Mr. Dunnock with a smile. “But
I, as a father, imagine myself in the position of our excellent grocer.
If I were to bring Anne up to expect luxuries, and to suppose that she
was born to lead an idle, useless existence, it would not be her fault
if she grew up a silly and discontented woman.”
Even without this argument Anne was feeling decidedly uncomfortable,
and a clumsy piece of gallantry from Mr. Yockney added to her
irritation.
“Stupid, coarse, hidebound brute! Do your eyes bulge because of your
manly virtue?” she said under her breath, but she had to confess that
there was something in what the doctor had said. She had not noticed
the patches on Rachel’s boots herself, and she felt her respect for Mr.
Yockney as a doctor increasing with her dislike of him as a man. If it
were true, it was disgraceful that Rachel should not have a sound pair
of boots, but it was absurd to object to Mrs. Sotheby serving in the
shop; would she have been happier at a hydro in Harrogate?
Mr. Dunnock had continued a whimsical description of how he might have
brought up his daughter so that she would have been discontented with
her life; the doctor replied, but finally they agreed that both of the
Sothebys, father and son, were very much to blame, when Anne remarked,
in a voice which trembled, that she was fond of the Sothebys and that
she thought that it was very fine of them to sacrifice themselves in
order to make their son a great artist.
“I can trust you not to be taken in by the word _gentleman_, Anne,
but I am afraid you may be by the word _artist_. Art, you know, Mr.
Yockney, covers a multitude of sins.”
“The best definition of art I have ever heard,” said the doctor, “is
that it is the opposite of work.” Mr. Dunnock laughed approvingly,
and Mr. Yockney went on, his eyes bulging more than ever with the
seriousness of his appeal.
“No, Miss Dunnock, whatever you may say, I know that the kind of
caddish selfishness we have been talking about is absolutely abhorrent
to you, as it is to all decent people. I quite agree with you that
there is something pathetic in the old Sothebys, but there is nothing
to be said for the son.”
“Well, they seem to be an unusually happy family,” answered Anne,
feeling that she had lost her temper.
“I am too old to play at Happy Families any longer,” said her father
with a titter. “I shall go back to the ice and leave Mr. Yockney and
you to settle the momentous question of Master Grits the Grocer’s son.”
SIX: WINGED SEEDS
“Why is it?” Anne Dunnock asked herself next day, “that my father can
be pleasant to other people but not to me? Though to be sure I fancied
yesterday that his pleasantness to Mr. Yockney was a trifle vulgar,
while his unpleasantness to me has at all events the merit of being
sincere and well-bred.” And Anne told herself that the only explanation
must be that she was as much a burden to her father as he was to her.
“But only I realize it,” she burst out. “For I am young enough to
recognize the truth, and to welcome it; he does not understand himself
or other people; all his life he has hidden his head in the sand like
an ostrich, and after all what else can one expect of a clergyman?”
Her anger had lasted since the conversation about the Sothebys, for her
irritation during the lunch beside the ice had been quickly followed by
fatigue, which had intensified her resentment. After the unaccustomed
exercise her ankles seemed to have turned to jelly, and the eight-mile
walk from Bluntisham had been torture to her.
“Never again,” she said to herself; and when Mr. Lambert had stopped
at the door next morning to offer her a place in his gig (he was going
to Bluntisham for the skating), she had refused, and her father had
accepted in her place.
“If I want any skating I shall go on the Broad Ditch,” she had said,
a remark which had estranged Mr. Dunnock more than her sullenness the
previous day had done, and he drove off with a hurt look which said:
“You are no daughter of mine to speak of skating in such a way before a
stranger!”
When the gig was out of sight Anne went indoors to write a letter to
Coventry for a catalogue of bicycles.
The catalogue came, but though she selected a machine, she hesitated
to post the letter ordering it, and after a week’s indecision she tore
it up, since the thought had come to her that a bicycle would tie her
more firmly than ever to her life with her father, and this life seemed
every day to become less endurable.
A thaw followed quickly on the second day of skating, and after that
rain and sleet fell for several days. Mr. Dunnock appeared to be
equally disgusted by the weather and by his daughter, and retired to
his study, scarcely a word being exchanged throughout the day except
at breakfast, when Mr. Dunnock always reminded Anne of her duties in
the parish.
“A bicycle would rivet me to my present life,” said Anne to herself.
“What a chain is to a yard-dog, a bicycle is to the daughter of a
clergyman! A bicycle would give me a certain radius of movement; it
would fill the emptiness of my life; but I want things that no bicycle
can give me. Yes, I want books, music, beautiful clothes, and more
than any of these I want what they stand for: that is, the society of
intelligent men and cultivated women. Such hopes are vain, I know:
I shall never succeed in ‘unwinding the accursed chain’--still I
shall attempt it and the best way to set about it is certainly not by
entangling myself with a bicycle. Even if I had to live in solitude I
should prefer independence, and that I can achieve, for the world is
full of women who earn their own living. Ten pounds is more valuable to
me than a machine with plated rims or a little oil-bath; no one ever
ran away from home on a bicycle, and I shall want all my savings for a
railway ticket and lodgings in London while I look about me.”
So the letter ordering the bicycle was torn up, and the catalogue
itself cast into the fire, since it was a temptation to the flesh, one
which assailed her particularly in the evenings; the ten pounds was
replaced to her credit in the Savings Bank, and several days were spent
in turning over the best way of earning her living.
“I shall go away from here, that is clear,” she said. “I have known
that ever since the ploughmen came that snowy morning. Here the
accursed chain can never be unwound, but when I am living a free life,
among new people, and my father is forgotten, I shall escape, and
speaking easily to everyone I shall be accepted by them; I shall love;
I shall be beloved....” Anne shook her head and a shower of hairpins
flew out on to the floor.
“Damn the elastic stuff!” she cried. “Why do I endure it a moment
longer?” and, tears coming into her eyes, she started up and seized a
pair of scissors out of her workbasket.
“There will be time enough for that later on,” and the scissors were
dropped as she told herself that she must plan for the future, and not
dissipate her emotions in the present.
Yet another week was spent in considering how she could earn her
living, and March came in like a lamb before she had arrived at any
practical decision.
“The birds sing and build their nests, soon they will be laying their
eggs, and then father will be in agonies whenever a young thrush
hops across the lawn, lest it should fall between Pussy’s paws. The
snowdrops are over long ago, the hyacinths have broken through the
ground, their fat buds look like pine-cones. First came the daffodils,
the double ones, and then the single. The peaches are showing their
pink petals on the walls of the dove house, but I remain where I am, I
cannot flower, unfold my petals or spread my wings....”
When her father spoke to her of the migrant birds flitting northwards
through Africa and Spain and Italy and France, from bush to bush,
twenty yards by twenty yards, to find their way to England’s shores
“where alone they find the happiness of love,” said Mr. Dunnock, “and
where alone they sing,” Anne vowed fiercely that before the last of the
migrants arrived she would be gone herself.
“The cuckoo will be here in six weeks,” said she to herself. “The
nightingale will be here a week after; I shall stay to hear one but
not the other. Which it will be I cannot tell, for sometimes the
nightingale comes before the cuckoo, and that they say is the luckier.
I hope I shall hear the nightingale before I go and not the cuckoo; it
would be an omen that I should find a true lover waiting for me, and
not a deceiver.”
The spring pleased her and excited her, and an hour or two was spent
happily searching for the first wild flowers, and gathering the
sweet-scented white violets which grew under the old apple trees, but
meeting her father at lunch and hearing him speak to her of the Sunday
school reminded her of her resolution to leave him, and at that moment
the beauty of the springtime seemed nothing but a reflection of the
weakness of her character.
“How can I leave him? He is helpless, and I am useful to him. Who will
teach in the Sunday school? Who will keep up the thin pretence that
he cares what happens to his parishioners when I am gone? Without me
who will order his meals, and who will keep a watch on the bacon? The
Pattles will rob him; they will eat him out of house and home.” But
though it seemed that it was impossible for her to leave her father
helpless, and though Anne knew that she loved him, she was soon going
over her old arguments about how a girl can earn her living.
All her experiences had been no more than to pour out tea, and to
teach in the Sunday school. Other women of her age she knew were able
to be bank clerks, or the secretaries of business men, they worked in
Government offices, they did typewriting, indeed there seemed nothing
that women did not do, but Anne doubted very much whether she could
become a useful person of that kind. She had received what Mr. Dunnock
had called “the education of a lady” (that was no education at all),
she could not add up columns of figures, or use a typewriter, or write
in shorthand. All she could do was to keep the children quiet, to tell
them Bible stories about Balaam’s ass, and Daniel in the den of lions;
she could order the groceries, check the washing, arrange a bowl of
flowers, speak boarding-school French and struggle somehow through a
piece of Schumann--letting the hammer notes sound rather weak as her
fingers tired.
To earn her living seemed impossible unless she were to succeed with
her fashion plates, or were to exchange one Sunday school for another.
That was always possible, and in another parish she would meet with a
curate who would ask her to marry him, for nowhere could a curate find
a better wife.
“Better a bicycle than a curate!” she exclaimed. “I would rather cut my
throat than be the wife of a clergyman. Other duties perhaps I might
face, but I have not the courage to work all my life for parishioners
who prefer to go to their own chapels, or to the public-house. It is
the fashion plates or suicide.”
But then Anne remembered that there were many elderly ladies in the
world whose incomes permitted the keeping of a donkey-carriage, with a
companion to walk beside it. “Why should I not be such a companion?”
she asked. “In the winter her sciatica will require a change of
climate, and we shall go away together to the Riviera, or to Egypt.”
And the rest of the afternoon was spent dreaming of the music she would
be hearing at Rome, of seeing the Sphinx by moonlight and visiting
Tutankhamen’s grave.
By the evening she had decided to put an advertisement in _The Church
Times_, and at night lay awake repeating to herself the magic words
which would bring her freedom: “A well-educated girl, daughter of a
clergyman, requires situation as companion to a lady of means.” No,
that did not sound well: should she call herself “a respectable girl”?
No, not a respectable girl--that smacked of the kitchen. “A quiet girl,
with an old-fashioned education, desires to become the paid companion
of a lady.” Nothing would do, but nevertheless the advertisement would
have to be sent, and finding sleep impossible, Anne took pen and paper
and wrote first one sentence and then another until she had covered
several sheets.
Next morning all her efforts seemed vain, but at last she decided on
sending the sentence which seemed to her to be the clearest. “Young
lady, who has enjoyed a religious upbringing, wishes to see the world
as the paid companion of a lady.” There was nothing more required but a
covering letter to the newspaper, and a postal order.
Anne put on her boots and hurried out into the blustering March wind.
It had broken the first hyacinth, and the daffodils were lying flat on
the earth. How the wind roared! It was pleasant to be out of the house,
for the chimneys had been smoking. The grass on the lawn was lashed
into white streaks by the wind before which the hens ran sideways, like
old ladies crossing the road. There was a thick scum at one side of the
broad ditch, a scum of withered catkins fallen from the black poplars.
Catkins hung like funereal trappings or like black caterpillars on
every twig of the apple trees; on the ditch, the ducks were dancing on
the waves.
“Such a wind as this scatters the seeds,” said Anne. “The winged fruits
of the elms and the maples are whirled up from the ditches where they
have been lying all the winter, and are carried over the tops of the
tallest trees, and this wind will gather me up like a seed that has
lain too long under the tree from which it fell. Heaven knows where it
will carry me! To Egypt or Greece, maybe, or perhaps only to pull the
rug over the knees of an old lady driving her donkey-cart along the
lanes of an adjoining parish.”
Under the avenue of elms the wind roared so loud that Anne feared for
the safety of the trees, and stepped cautiously, looking up among the
swaying branches. In her hand she held the precious letter that was to
set her free, the letter which was to her as the wing is to the seed.