will be difficulties, but they will be overcome, and when I look back
on my life I shall say it began on the day when I posted this letter,
and I shall remember the March gale roaring like a lion among the elms.”
A vision of an elderly lady with soft brown eyes like bees, and short
grey hair, haunted her: a precise lady she would be, perhaps one who
had been an actress or an opera singer in her day, and kept a casket
of love-letters from all the poets of the ’eighties standing on the
table beside her. Her employer would laugh gently at her enthusiasm,
and would tell her wonderful anecdotes. Her name would be beautiful,
and familiar: a name that is to be found in every catalogue of roses,
for she was the kind of lady after whom roses are named. Anne would
take the place of a daughter, and would soon inherit all her passionate
fire tempered by her knowledge of the world, all her deep wisdom born
of experience and of renunciation; all her cynical clear-sighted witty
tenderness....
“Good morning, Miss Dunnock.” Anne’s day-dream was interrupted, and
she looked down to find Rachel Sotheby standing before her, her bright
eyes shining, and her cheeks flushed by the wind. Anne was pleased to
see the little girl, and thinking that they must part soon, she bent
down to kiss her, a thing she had not done before. As she did so, she
remembered Mr. Yockney’s remark about Rachel’s boots and glanced at
them. Yes, they were stiff little boots, cracked behind the toe-caps,
worn out, they would let in the water.
“Mr. Yockney was quite right,” she said to herself, and entering the
Post Office, was embarrassed to find a stranger standing at the counter
writing a telegram.
“This must be Rachel’s brother,” she thought as she recognized the
foxey nose, and the slit eyes of the photograph she had seen in the
grocer’s parlour. “This must be Richard Sotheby, who has been turned
into a gentleman while his sister has holes in her boots.”
As Anne asked for her postal order she avoided looking at the young
man of whom she had heard so much, but while she was waiting for
the pen (there was only one in the Post Office with which it was
possible to write) she could not keep her eyes turned away, and when
he had finished his telegram, she had to meet his eye as he handed
her the pen. The action was polite, but though their eyes met for an
instant, she could see that it was mechanical, she had not engaged his
attention, he was thinking of his telegram, and next moment she heard
him spelling it over to Mrs. Day, the post-mistress, and explaining
that it was in French.
“_The Church Times_....” wrote Anne.
“G...R...A...N...D...I...S...O...N,” spelt the young man.
“Barclays Bank and Co.,” wrote Anne, keeping her ears open but failing
to follow the address.
She had filled in her postal order and had sealed up her letter; there
was no reason to stay longer listening while Mrs. Day repeated the
letters after him, and she went out, posted her letter, and turned
homewards. Already her emotions about her advertisement had subsided,
and as she hurried under the storm-tossed elms her thoughts were
occupied with the grocer’s son and his strange telegram.
“Je suis las de tes amourettes et de mon amour. Je consens. Ecris.”
What did that mean? And who was the Grandison to whom it was addressed?
Her meditations were interrupted by Richard Sotheby himself, who passed
her, walking rapidly down the avenue. His hat was jammed hard on his
head: he did not lift it, and directly he had passed she noticed that
he was wearing button boots made of patent leather.
SEVEN: THE BURNT FARM
The March gale continued for several days; the daffodils were broken,
the hyacinths in the border laid low, but one morning Anne awoke to
find that not a breath of wind was stirring in the elms, and after an
hour or so the sun was blazing with the heat of June. On the breakfast
table lay _The Church Times_, and she trembled with emotion when she
saw it in her father’s hands.
“I must speak to him,” she said to herself, “I must speak to him now,”
but she did not speak, consoling herself for her lack of resolution
with the thought that the earliest answers to her advertisement could
not arrive for two days, since they were to be forwarded from the
office in Fleet Street; she had not given her name and address, but had
used a box number.
“I will speak to him to-morrow,” she said to herself. “For I would like
to enjoy one day of perfect spring weather before I leave Dry Coulter,
and our conversation is certain to upset us.”
She waited eagerly until the birds’ breakfast left her free to take
the newspaper into her hands. Her advertisement was in, and reading
the modest three lines Anne felt her heart swell with the triumph of
authorship, and she ran upstairs with _The Church Times_ in her hand to
read the announcement over and over to herself in private.
“There is no turning back now!” she exclaimed. “I have shown my
independence; I have taken the first step, and nothing now can keep me
from achieving my purpose.”
Anne’s eyes flashed as she turned to the looking-glass; and the
eager look she met there intoxicated her: at that moment she almost
suffocated with the sense of her own power. The blood rushed to her
head, and she clenched her fists, and ground her teeth in the effort to
remain calm.
“Have you seen _The Church Times_?” called Mr. Dunnock, coming back
from watching the birds.
“Here it is, father,” she answered, and running downstairs surrendered
it to him without a tremor. Her father took it absentmindedly, saying
as he did so:
“I think there is some straw somewhere, my dear. Would you ask Noah to
scatter it about the lawn? It will be useful for the sparrows; the
nearest rick is several hundred yards away, a long journey for them,
almost an impossible one if the wind should veer to the east. On a calm
day like this, it is not so important, but there are not many calm days
in March, and in any case it will save a great deal of trouble.”
At another moment Anne might have been vexed at her father’s solicitude
for the hated sparrows, but she was in a mood to forgive his follies,
and she ran off at once to the potting-shed to find the straw, and
scattered it on the lawn herself.
All the morning she was beside herself with excitement; and she found
it hard to answer Maggie sensibly when she spoke of their plan of
whitewashing the scullery. When the proposal had been put forward a
fortnight before by Anne, it had seemed to mark an epoch, but Maggie
found that it was suddenly brushed on one side, her feelings were hurt,
the date was left uncertain, and Anne had fled out into the garden
before she had time to question her again.
The first tulips were standing stiffly to attention in their field-grey
uniforms, their buds unopened, but the girl could not think of tulips
as she paced up and down the borders. Her life at the vicarage was
coming to an end, and she must speak to her father, but after thinking
over what she would say for an hour, she could find no words, and came
to the conclusion that it would be unwise to open the subject before
she had decided where she was going. Her father would be certain to
raise objections, and they would appear more formidable if her plans
were not fixed. It would be better for both of them if the parting were
to come suddenly.
“I will go to him in his study,” she said, “when my bag is packed,” and
with this settled in her mind she felt happy for the first time that
morning. She had come out to enjoy the warm spring weather, but, as
soon as she had decided not to speak to her father, and before she had
time to look about her, she saw Maggie waving from the kitchen door and
knew that it was time for lunch.
After the strain of making plans about her future she found the meal a
pleasant one, emotion had given her an appetite, and, as she ate, Anne
enjoyed listening to her father inveighing against the stupidity of old
Noah.
“You would scarcely believe it,” said Mr. Dunnock, “but within half an
hour of your having scattered the straw, that old fool was sweeping it
up. I ordered him to stop, but he would not listen to me until I had
taken him by the arm and had explained my reasons. But so blind is the
prejudice of the rustics about here, that he said that he would as soon
poison the sparrows as not. I was forced to speak to him very severely.
It is his first lapse since the question of the strawberry nets last
year.”
The mild sunlit air was full of bees as Anne left the vicarage after
lunch; the celandines were gaping in the sunlight on the bank above the
Broad Ditch. Wagtails ran round the water’s edge, goldfinches flew up
into the elms, and yellowhammers trotted before her on the road.
As she passed the Post Office she remembered Richard Sotheby and his
strange telegram, and tired of the turmoil of her own emotion, she
welcomed the memory. “I am tired of thy little love affairs and of my
own love. I consent. Write.” And pondering over these words she asked
herself what kind of creature the Grandison might be to whom they were
addressed.
A rich woman in Paris, it seemed reasonable to suppose, who had
been his mistress.... “It is to secure her love that little Rachel
is neglected.” Anne wondered what their life had been in Paris, and
slowly a picture of Miss Grandison formed itself clearly in her mind--a
fair woman she must be, with a white skin like the flesh of a hazel
nut, with fair almost colourless hair and light blue eyes, a thick,
slightly aquiline nose.... That certainly was Miss Grandison, and at
the opera she wore diamonds and was wrapped in white fur. On summer
evenings her habit must be to drive with Sotheby out of Paris in her
limousine to have supper in the open air, of lobsters and cream,
raspberries and iced champagne.... As the night drew on she would
become bored, and drag young Sotheby after her to a vast hotel in Paris
where they could dance all night. The men in their starched shirtfronts
would turn pale, and wilt in the small hours of the morning under the
tropical palms, but La Grandison would dance on and on, ruthlessly,
first with one man and then with another. Richard Sotheby would be
forgotten, a young man from the Peruvian Embassy would escort her home,
while Richard, disconsolate and brokenhearted, would be left to pay for
the buckets of iced champagne, and the mounds of uneaten sandwiches....
No wonder, with such a woman, that he should declare he was weary of
her love affairs and of his love. But there was a hint of jealousy in
his bitterness.
Anne smiled contentedly. Richard Sotheby’s telegram enabled her to
see her own life with more philosophy. Soon she forgot to think, and
walked slowly onwards, happy in feeling the soft air caress her cheek,
in hearing the chatter of starlings in the orchard trees, in looking
about her in idleness. Ewes lay indolently on the green; their lambs
were already strong on their legs, and she watched the play of the pair
nearest to her, at one moment butting each other, in the next skipping
behind each other, or mounting on one another in amorous curvets and
then, suddenly indifferent, breaking off their play.
The stream was still swollen, though rain had not fallen for a week.
Anne crossed it by the little bridge beside the water splash, and made
her way across the green, the sheep scattering as she passed. On each
side of the old track that led to the burnt farmhouse, the blackthorn
bushes were in flower. The masses of frail blossom were full of the
humming of bees, but as yet there were no wild flowers in the hedge,
only an occasional celandine shone on the bank like a dropped sovereign.
The fields on each side were hired by a farmer living at a distance;
they were still cultivated and kept in some sort of repair, but much
had gone to ruin since the farmhouse had been burnt. The hedges had
not been cut for years; there were forest trees in them, and holes big
enough for bullocks to wander through. The great stretch of pasture by
the farm itself, the home meadows where the prize herd of spotted cows
used to be milked in the open, that had gone out of cultivation, and
was full of hawthorn bushes, of the trailing briars of dog-roses and of
brambles. The finest pasture which had yielded the richest butter was
become no more than a covert where the French partridges nested. Of the
farmhouse itself there was nothing left but a few of the walls, heaps
of plaster where the nettles grew in summer, and one or two blackened
beams. The vegetable garden was a wilderness with a quarter of an acre
of horseradish and matted gooseberry bushes buried in convolvulvus. At
one side, on a smooth expanse of turf, stood the old square dove house,
as sound as the day it had been built, and the pigeons came and went as
they had always done, for the dove house was still used as a granary,
and the pigeons were the perquisite of a farmhand.
As Anne came in front of the house, it seemed strange to her to see
the fine iron gates, with great ilexes on either side of them, and the
flagged path that ran so cleanly up to a mere heap of broken bricks,
where the front door had been. Not a weed had taken root on the
pathway, not a bramble strayed across it, and even the pond, by whose
bricked side it ran, was clear water. Irises grew there and flowered
in the summer time; on the grassy bank opposite there were daffodils
in bloom. Anne let herself in at the iron gates, thinking to herself
that it was very strange that no farmhouse had been rebuilt there on
the site of the old one, that no labourer had been allowed to work
the rich garden as his allotment, and that it was impossible to guess
why everything should have been let go to ruin except the square dove
house of red brick, which must have stood for three centuries and which
looked as if it would stand for as many more. All about there were
the traces of a former fruitfulness, a great walnut overshadowed one
of the ancient yards by the edge of the pond, and on the other side,
hidden in an impenetrable thicket of bullaces, giant pear trees and
plum suckers, laced about with bramble and dog-rose, was the orchard.
The plums were bursting into a fine blow, and Anne wondered whether the
boys came there to rob the fruit, or whether the plums and apples fell
of their own weight, or hung until the wasps had hollowed out the last
of them. She wondered how it was that she had never met anyone by the
Burnt Farm, never a child nor a village labourer. She had not seen it
before in spring, though in the summer it had been a favourite haunt of
hers; and she had gathered roses there late on into the autumn from a
bush which had not yet gone wild. As she walked up the path she smelt a
breath of wood smoke, and turning the corner of the house by what had
been the chimney stack, she saw tongues of flame shooting up, and heard
the crackle of sticks. “A tramp, or perhaps an encampment of gipsies,”
she said to herself, and would have drawn back, but at that instant she
caught sight of Rachel Sotheby coming from the orchard with an armful
of dry sticks.
“Why, Rachel, are you having a picnic here?” she asked, seeing a kettle
on the fire.
Rachel came running to her with eyes that shone with excitement; she
had lost her grave look of self-possession, so that it was natural for
Anne to stoop to kiss her for the second time, seduced by her wild look
and her tangled curls.
“Yes, Miss Dunnock. Do you come here often? I have never been here
before, but my brother brought me. He is sketching the house from the
other side.”
Anne would have taken her leave on hearing of Richard Sotheby’s
presence, but Rachel would not let her go before she had gathered her
some daffodils from the far side of the pond, and had shown her the
white violets growing under the walnut tree. The kettle had not boiled
when they came back to the fire, and as Richard Sotheby was nowhere to
be seen, she sat down for a little while, talking to the little girl
while she heaped up the sticks and unpacked the basket. A minute passed
when suddenly she heard a step, and, jumping up, saw that Richard
Sotheby was standing a yard or two behind her. He was bare-headed,
frowning, his lips twitching, and seeing Anne at the same moment as she
saw him, he gave his sister rather a puzzled glance.
“This is my brother Richard,” said Rachel, looking up from blowing the
fire. “Richard, this is Miss Dunnock.”
The young man’s face broke into smiles at her name, and he held out his
hand.
“I am very pleased to meet you,” said Anne, taking it. “Now I must be
getting on. Good-bye, Rachel.”
“Please don’t go,” said the grocer’s son. “I have finished work for
to-day; the light has changed, and I have been wanting to meet you. I
want to ask you all about how your doorstep was ploughed up. I shall
never meet anyone else to whom such a thing has happened, and I want to
know what it felt like.”
Anne was too much taken aback by this to know what to answer, but just
at that moment they were interrupted by Rachel’s saying that the tea
was made.
Young Sotheby repeated his invitation, and Anne sat down on a block of
stone which had once supported the corner of a haystack, feeling very
foolish, shy, and ashamed of her shyness, but she was determined that
she would not run away after what he had said. She had blushed crimson
when he had spoken of Plough Monday, but it had pleased her to hear
something spoken of openly about which so much must have been said
behind her back.
“Yes. Our doorstep was ploughed up,” she said, and her voice sounded to
the others as though she were angry. “Why does it interest you?”
“It was very wicked of the men to do it,” said Rachel suddenly. “And
you ought not to speak of such a thing to Miss Dunnock, Richard.”
The grocer’s son laughed at his sister’s indignant interruption.
“Rachel is a great friend of yours, Miss Dunnock. I shall have to
apologize to her, but I hope I have not offended you also.”
“No. Not at all. I want to talk about it, Rachel,” she said, looking at
the child. The little girl’s mouth was trembling.
“That don’t matter,” she said, almost crying. “Richard did not ought to
have spoken to you of that thing. Mother told everyone that what they
done was no better than if they were heathens, and that no one was to
say a word about it. No one would have ever but our Richard.”
Anne took Rachel on to her knees, and hugged the child close; at that
moment she was near to tears herself; for the first time in her life
she understood that she had neighbours who loved her, and did not think
of her only as a queer girl, and the daughter of a queer clergyman.
“Sit here, close to me,” she said, letting the child go. “And let me
talk to your brother, because he is very clever and is....” It was on
the tip of her tongue to say “a gentleman,” but she altered it to:
“because I am sure he would never be unkind.”
Rachel looked at him in a way which threatened that if he were unkind
to Miss Dunnock there would be terrible consequences, and Richard
Sotheby poured out the tea in silence, until Anne asked him again why
he was interested in the ploughing up of the doorstep.
“Because it was, as my mother said, a heathenish act, and I imagine
that, like most heathen things, it must have been beautiful.”
“Yes, it was beautiful,” replied Anne instantly. “It was so beautiful
that I was fascinated watching it, and though I was crying with shame,
I was glad that they had done it.”
Richard Sotheby grinned with interest as Anne said this, and nodded his
head several times.
“Like a rape,” he said under his breath. His words were not meant for
Anne to hear, but she had caught the word, and for some minutes did not
know what to say or where to look, but sat praying with all her soul
that she would not blush. At last the danger passed, and she went on
to speak of the plough wobbling a little as it ran through the earth,
and of the broad, shiny backs of the three chestnut horses, and the
handsome face opposite her quickened with pleasure as she told how it
happened after a fall of snow, and that there was snow on the horses’
manes and on the carters’ caps.
When she had described the whole scene, he pressed her for further
details, and soon she found that she was speaking of her feelings after
the event, and that he was listening in silence. She pulled herself up
suddenly, unwilling to tell him so much about herself, and there was
a long silence, for the young man did not press her with questions,
but the silence was broken at last by Anne saying: “But you cannot
understand it unless I were to tell you about my father.”
“Of course it came about through him in the first place,” said Richard
Sotheby reflectively, and Anne would have begun to speak of her father
and her feelings for him if she had not felt Rachel shiver, and then
she perceived that the sun was sinking low, and that it had grown cold
for sitting out of doors.
“That is too long a story,” she said, rising to her feet. “You would
not understand it, and if you did, it would bore you. But it is late
now, and I must be going home.”
“You must promise to tell me another time,” said the grocer’s son. “If
the weather keeps fine I shall be working here every afternoon, until
about half-past three when the light changes. Come and have tea with me
to-morrow and finish your story.”
Anne promised to come, and then gathering up her flowers and saying
good-bye to Rachel, she hurried off, for young Sotheby had to go back
to his easel and put it away in the dove house, and she had no wish to
be seen walking home with him.
EIGHT: WILLOW-PATTERN PARIS
For several days a gentle wind blew from the west and the cloudiness
of dew-drenched mornings was followed by the sunshine and softness of
the afternoons. Anne Dunnock knew that the grocer’s son was painting
at the Burnt Farm, but though each day she set out in that direction,
she always turned aside on the way, breaking her promise that she would
meet him there again.
“I spoke to him too freely; Heaven knows what he must think of me!” she
repeated to herself. At moments she found it consoling to remember that
she felt quite sure that she did not like Richard Sotheby, but at other
times it seemed to her that what was so terrible was to have confided
so much of her secret life to a man whom she disliked. But the weather
was too beautiful for her to remain long unhappy for such reasons, and
nearly her whole day was spent out of doors. In the morning she would
busy herself in the garden, and, tempted by the sunshine, Mr. Dunnock
would leave his study to come and stand beside her while she sowed the
sweet peas and the mignonette, or planted out young wallflowers in the
borders.
“Do not forget to sow teazles by the pond,” he would remind her. “They
are as handsome as hollyhocks, and wherever there have been teazles in
summer time the goldfinches will come in winter.”
Anne did not regard the teazle as a weed, she loved the plant’s bold
leaves that hold hands about the prickly stem, making a cup to catch
the rain, and the flower-heads with their bands of blue which creep up
and down the inflorescence.
Few words passed between father and daughter, yet both were happy as
they went together to sow the teazle seed that he had saved, and were
conscious of being in sympathy with one another as they had scarcely
been all the winter. Once there was a rose tree to be transplanted; on
another occasion a rambler which had been blown down had to be nailed
up on the far side of the summer-house, and while Anne shovelled the
earth round the roots, and drove the nails through strips cut from an
old stair carpet, Mr. Dunnock held the tree upright and the creeper in
place, his hands protected in Noah’s hedging gloves.
“The bees are working in the willows,” he said. “Though it is still
three weeks to Palm Sunday.”
Yet Anne had not abandoned her plan; it was only that the spring and
the garden full of growing things had claimed her attention. But one
morning she found a letter for her on the breakfast table, and as she
opened it her heart sank, for she guessed that it was from a lady
anxious to engage her as a companion.
“What am I to say to him?” she asked herself, looking up at her father
as he came into the room, and the morning was spent wandering about
the house, first carrying an old trunk out of the box-room to pack her
things, and then with pale cheeks running to the door of her father’s
study. She did not knock, when she stood trembling outside the door,
though she knew that in a day or two at most, perhaps even in a few
hours, she would be leaving the vicarage.