is a more disinterested one than parents are usually in a position to
give. My revelation has come to me late in life, but I am aware that
it has changed me greatly, so that now I find it almost impossible
to think of worldly things. However, I have packed up the old silver
teapot which was your mother’s and have had it sent to you addressed
to the Paris branch of our bank at Linton for greater safety....
You shall have the rat-tail spoons, but one seems to be mislaid.
Your letter was the first communication for many weeks to recall me
to this transient world, and to that extent I must admit that your
marriage caused me pain. But no, I am wrong, something else has
happened since you left--a sad tragedy.
You will remember our little angelic visitors of the dove house,
so faithful to one another and so happy as they chased the summer
flies. You will recollect the pleasure he gave us with his song,
always rather saddened, whilst she brooded over her mysteries in the
little clay cup on the joist. Old Noah had occasion to go into the
upper storey of the dove house and carelessly (for it was nothing
but carelessness) left the hatch open. I did not notice anything for
several days, then, going up myself, found the swallow dead. She must
have flown up, attracted by the light, and have beaten her life out
on the window-panes. He, poor fellow, had flown away. I pray that
neither you nor your husband should ever know his sorrow. My best
regards to the gentleman with the beautiful name, your husband.
Your affectionate Father,
CHARLES DUNNOCK.
P.S. It gives me peculiar pleasure to inscribe Mrs. Grandison on the
envelope.
Anne smiled as she finished the letter, but her heart was troubled;
never before had her father been so intimate with her--never had he
revealed so much of himself. Her love for him came back to her, a
sudden shock astonishing her, for it was a love of which she had hardly
suspected the existence, while at the same moment she thought: “He can
afford to write to me like this now I am safely married and he is in no
danger of my coming back.”
Soon her emotion passed, and she looked around her with renewed
excitement. “How lovely the blue sky and the blossom of the oleander!”
The waiter was standing beside her setting out the coffee-pot and the
milk jug, the cups and saucers, the two hot rolls, wrapped in napkins,
and the four thin bricks of lustreless sugar. She picked up her
husband’s letter and glanced at the envelope.
“How happy it will make Grandison to have a friendly letter from
Richard!” she thought, recognizing the handwriting, and she sat
wondering if, after all the letters they had written to him and the
postcards they had sent, he still remained cold and unforgiving.
“He loved Grandison; he cared for nobody else, and yet Grandison never
gave him any happiness and never showed him any consideration. I
cannot bear to think of his feelings after they parted in anger on my
account. But this letter must be to say that he has become reconciled
to the marriage; he would not write otherwise.”
Richard had sent a wedding present, but when they had gone to the
studio they found it locked, and after the third or fourth fruitless
visit the _concierge_ had told them that he had gone away.
Anne looked again at the letter, and saw that it bore an English stamp
and that the postmark was Dry Coulter; Richard must have gone home
suddenly on a surprise visit.
“It is strange how real Dry Coulter is to me! I was unhappy while I
was living there, yet all my memories of it are beautiful, and nowhere
else in the world seems so real as that village. Are the English elms
more beautiful than the olives? Is the song of the blackbird as lovely
as Fleury’s flute? Why do I remember every detail of my life before my
marriage and nothing of the things that happen to me now? Nothing is
real to me now but Grandison, my happiness in him is such that I can
enjoy no other beauty.”
And Anne reminded herself how she had been with him to the opera and
to students’ balls in Paris night after night, but the memory of them
was already dim, a lovely voice thrilling her for a moment, a sea of
lights, a crowd of faces.
“I cannot keep my attention fixed on the stage,” she said to herself.
“At every moment I have to turn to glance at him, to look at his blunt
healthy features, his soft and furry hair, his round head, so like a
seal’s or an otter’s thrust suddenly above the surface of the water.
All I remember of the opera, of the picture galleries, and of the
castles which we saw yesterday, is catching Grandison’s eye to see
whether he were moved by the same things that moved me--and because of
that I felt no emotion except about him.”
She laughed, but her happiness was coloured with the regret that her
only opportunity of seeing so many beautiful things should have been
during her honeymoon.
“We should have been just as happy if we had stayed in that horrid room
with the beautiful view.” And Anne recalled how they had spent their
first days held in a web of unrealities, making declarations, mumbling
affidavits before a consul, handing telegrams through wire netting, and
patiently waiting for permission to get married. “Days vague and as
impossible to remember as the waving of weeds seen through water,” she
said. But Sir John, who had cut off his son’s allowance while he was
living in Paris with Richard Sotheby, had been pleased at the marriage
and had sent a cable with his blessing and a thousand pounds from
Ceylon.... And dismissing the past, Anne paused for a moment to wonder
what their life would be like in the future. Grandison had consented to
live in London and to take the job his father had offered him in the
tea business.
“How long he is, dressing!” she exclaimed, and jumping up she ran up
the yellow stairs to their bedroom.
She had forgotten to take Richard’s letter with her, but it was the
first thing she spoke of.
“You’ve been using my powder puff,” she added, for his shaven cheek was
delicious with scent.
“Stingy! Stingy! If there is anything I hate it’s stinginess!” he
exclaimed, embracing her again. She fought with him but was overcome;
they laughed, but their laughter changed suddenly to the seriousness of
love-making.
“What a devil you are, Anne, slipping out of bed like a mouse without
waking me until the moment you were going down to breakfast.”
“It is difficult to wake you,” she answered. “And I always feel a
criminal when I do.”
“You are a sly hypocrite. But I vowed I would not come downstairs this
morning until you had come up again to find me. You see your tricks
don’t work.”
“For all you know I might have gone out with the American ladies.”
“I should have stayed here all day.”
“We are scandal enough as it is in this hotel,” she answered.
“Just as we were at Dijon.”
“If you will go down alone to breakfast, naturally you cause a scandal.
People think something dreadful must have happened. They see that you
care nothing for me, Anne. Love means nothing to you.”
Her looks were a sufficient answer to his reproaches, and he was silent
as she seized him and bent over him.
“Keep still,” she whispered. Looking up, Grandison could see the
ceiling of the darkened room striped with bars of light from the
upturned slats of the shutters. Outside, the sunlight poured into the
grilling street; an electric tram passed by, its passage announced
by the swishing of overhead wires and followed by the crackling of
electric sparks. Wrapped in the weakness of love, Anne and Grandison
lay at each other’s mercy; each tiny movement was agony to them.
“Keep still! Keep still!” A cry broke from their lips, and then, in
the solitude of perfect unity, they fell asleep. The overhead wires
swished, an electric tram lurched past the hotel on grinding wheels,
above which the soft crackle of electricity came like the sound of a
silk skirt. Already the American ladies had left the hotel, the waiter
in the courtyard had cleared away the cold coffee and the uneaten
rolls; the forgotten letter had been handed in at the manager’s office;
the chambermaid had looked through the keyhole and had gone away to
wash vegetables in the kitchen, before either husband or wife spoke.
“What time is the bus?” he asked, girding his silk trowsers with a sash.
“In five minutes!” screamed Anne, looking at the gold wrist watch that
Richard Sotheby had given her. Grandison seized his pocket-book and
cigarettes, they snatched up their Panama hats and fled down the cool
staircase with its smell of varnish and of glue, out into the baking
heat of the street.
There was no taxi to be seen and no tram.
“Run!” he cried, and they ran, though the air came hot to the mouth and
the sun slashed through their silk shirts, scorching their shoulders.
They were late, but the char-a-banc had waited for them, and when
Grandison had cried out: “No breakfast!” it waited while he rushed into
the station buffet and came back with a bottle of sweet champagne,
a long roll of bread and a green water-melon. They sat in the front
seats, and the oilcloth cushions ran with their clean sweat, while they
were drinking champagne out of the palms of their hands and spilling it
over their knees as the heavy car lurched and bumped on the road. They
laughed, and the melon juice ran over their chins and into their ears;
they spoke their thoughts aloud heedless of the American ladies and the
party of English school-teachers behind them, and the whole char-a-banc
of twenty people was united by the happiness of watching them. Looking
at the outlines of their shoulders, everyone was moved to a gay,
slightly tipsy sentimentality; the discomfort of a whole day’s jolting,
of being a school-teacher and wearing stays, or a double-breasted
waistcoat and starched collars and side-whiskers, all such ills
passed unnoticed. As for the lovers, they paid no attention to their
companions and scarcely even looked at the sights they had come to see.
Strolling through the Roman theatre and the bull-ring at Arles, they
made silly jokes about asparagus, and on the way home broke into their
first quarrel, Anne maintaining that a cigale was a grasshopper, while
Grandison reiterated that it was a sedentary dragonfly with a beetle’s
body.
“A letter for you, Sir,” said the porter as they entered the hotel, and
they looked at each other in embarrassment, wondering how they could
have come to forget Richard’s letter. A word from him meant so much
to both of them! But recollecting how it was that they had so nearly
missed the bus that morning, they broke out laughing.
“Bad news,” said Grandison, his face changing suddenly. “Richard’s
father, the grocer, has gone bankrupt. The worst is that I cannot help
feeling I have had my share in causing it by my cursed extravagance.
Richard paid for everything for me, and for Ginette.” As he said this
his face flushed scarlet.
“It is more likely to be the hotel,” said Anne.
“Yes, that is what Richard says, and then there is a message about your
father,” he added, handing her the letter. His face was still flushed,
but the first feeling of shame had passed into one of anger with the
outside world that threatened to break in upon his happiness.
Dry Coulter.
Dear Seal,
Why do you and Anne send me so many postcards? I ask because I got
six yesterday; very disturbing when I am doing my best to forget you.
“Let the dead bury their dead.” What does that mean? Perhaps I have
got the phrase wrong, but for some reason though I don’t understand
what it means I find it expresses my feelings.
So don’t send me any more postcards. I shall think of you and Anne
quite as much as you deserve, and I shall want to see you directly
you come back to England.
You ask me what I think of your compact with your father, and your
giving up painting. I have no opinion about it: you must settle your
own affairs as you think best. If you mean: do I think you would have
been a good painter if you went on, I don’t. But I think you might
have eventually done something else, I mean something serious, and
badly as I think of you I still believe you capable of something
better than being a tea-merchant in Mincing Lane. That seems to me a
frivolous waste of time. One only has one life.
I have plenty to distract me here: my father has involved himself
in a tiresome disaster. He has gone bankrupt with no assets but an
unfinished hotel with water-logged foundations, which would have
flooded every winter. He has taken to his bed with a bad heart
attack, and I have spent a hectic fortnight finding out the exact
position. Meanwhile I have arranged for a show in Bond Street, and
have got a commission to paint a portrait. I am setting up in London.
The only drawback is that England always gives me indigestion. My
mother is quite unmoved by the bankruptcy.
Please tell Anne that I haven’t seen her father, but from what I can
hear his position is much more serious. He has given up taking the
services in church, and people think that he is definitely odd. The
vicarage certainly looks odd; he wouldn’t open the door to me. I
think Anne ought to come down as soon as possible. I will do what I
can but I have got my hands full just now.
Rachel sends her love; she is a pretty creature. I shall have to
begin to think about sending her to Newnham in a year or two. There:
I know you can’t help your character (a bad one) any more than I can
help mine, so don’t let’s think of our characters and don’t send me
any more postcards or letters.
Au Revoir,
RICHARD.
P.S. Ginette has got the job she meant for Anne, as a mannequin
_style anglais_. She writes to me _every day_. Whose fault is that?
Anne crumpled the letter in her hand; she did not feel shame or anger
as her husband had done; she had no irritation against the outside
world but only pity. As she followed her husband to the stairs her
mind was busy with plans for returning to England. She thought of her
father, of the old grocer lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, and of
Mrs. Sotheby.
“All the same, we were right to send Richard all those postcards; he
would have been more unhappy without any news of us.” Grandison was
stamping about the room in a rage.
“It means no more to me than a famine in China,” he said.
“We had better pack our things; we shall have to go home to-morrow,”
answered Anne.
In the train the outside world became once more “like the waving of
weeds seen through water,” a series of noises, smells, and movements
which concerned them little, and they did not speak of the future until
they were on the boat, when Anne said: “Let’s deal with our affairs
separately: while you are arranging with your father’s firm I will go
down to Dry Coulter.”
Grandison nodded, and realizing that the cliffs before him were indeed
those of Dover, that an interview with his uncle and his elder brother
awaited him, and that his father would be back in England in a few
days, a bitter regret seized him that he had ever seen Anne.
“Love for this woman is ruining my life,” he said to himself, but when
he turned his head and he found himself gazing into her pale, fierce,
happy face, he understood that he was helpless. He looked at his wife’s
short straw-coloured hair, her intense grey eyes and her slim body, and
listening to her abrupt speech he told himself that everything else was
unimportant.
“I am glad I didn’t buy a bicycle,” said Anne. She had been thinking
for a moment of the past.
SIXTEEN: ANGELS
The train reached Linton station at last, and Anne leaped out of the
stuffy carriage, all the weariness of her long wait at Cambridge
forgotten in the excitement of seeing again what she had so often seen
before. She could not hide the eagerness in her voice as she handed her
bag to the porter, asking him to give it to the carrier.
“Well, Miss, are you glad to be back?” he asked, recognizing her.
“Yes, of course I am,” she answered, and smiling with surprise she made
her way across the market place.
Linton was unchanged, and she was filled with joy and gratitude to the
little town, believing that it could never alter in the future and not
reflecting that it was scarcely three months since she had set off with
even greater excitement on her way to France in the belief that she
would never see Linton again.
She walked on, and turned down Bridge Street, rejoicing to see the
signs over the shops and the faces of the shopmen who were standing in
their doorways looking out for the last customers before closing--all
familiar things and persons. On the crest of the bridge she paused and
looked back, thinking that on the morrow she would have met Grandison
at the station and would be walking with him through the streets of
the old town. A lorry coming towards her filled the bridge, and she
took shelter in one of the angles of the parapet. Looking down over the
side, she watched the waters of the Ouse slipping away from the masonry
of the piers, and hoped that she would see a fish, but no fish showed
itself, and when she lifted her eyes she was startled by the sight of
an addition to the landscape, the beginnings, surely, of Mr. Sotheby’s
hotel. There was a huge hole excavated by the edge of the river, filled
with muddy water, a mound of blue clay, an ordered pile of white glazed
bricks, a few wheelbarrows upside down, a lot of drain-pipes and
nothing else.
“So perish all innovations!” Anne exclaimed, and recollecting how
the old grocer had talked to her three months before, and seeing his
tragedy before her, she began to laugh.
“I wonder if Richard laughed when he saw that hole full of water? Yes,
to be sure he did, for we all laugh at our parents, we understand them
so well,” but, her thoughts turning suddenly to her own father, she
sighed in despair and walked on.
She had scarcely left the bridge when she caught sight of the grocer
himself. He was sitting bolt upright, driving his flea-bitten white
pony, his head thrown back, and his white beard sticking out in front
of him. “Like a billy-goat looking up to Heaven,” thought Anne. “Yet he
is like Richard too, he has the same foxy nose.”
“Good evening, Mr. Sotheby,” she called out. The pony had dropped to
a walk as she spoke, but the old man’s eye fell stonily on her and he
made no answer to her greeting. When he had passed, Anne looked after
him in doubt whether she had been deliberately ignored or had not
been recognized, or perhaps not even heard, and she saw that the old
dog-cart had been lately repainted and newly varnished; on the back was
written in scarlet letters:
“INTERNATIONAL TEA TRUST.”
“He looks ill,” she thought. “And his illness is that his pride has
been wounded. He has been so virtuous and so successful all his life,
it is too bad that Grandison and Ginette, and excavating a hole in a
river bank, should have combined to ruin him.” She smiled as she said
this, but her thought was broken suddenly by the reflection that her
own father was waiting for her and that in less than an hour they would
be speaking together. Trouble would be sure to arise between them at
once, and each of them would behave with falsity. And reluctant to come
to her journey’s end, unconsciously she dropped into a slower walk.
The road was long and dusty, and she was glad to turn aside into the
footpath by the cross-roads, a footpath that was little frequented,
for it was half a mile longer than the road. The first field was so
huge that it seemed she would never cross it; there was not a tree on
which she could rest her eyes and nothing in it except the tussocky
grass underfoot and a dozen thirsty bullocks clustering round an empty
cistern by the gate, waiting for the water-cart. A field of ripening
wheat lay next, and she pushed her way down the narrow lane between
the ears, unable to resist snatching at some of them. The grains were
still full of milk, yet there was something dry even in their juiciness
which made her clear her throat and wish for a cup of tea. Already she
could see the elms of Dry Coulter, and she pushed on, getting at last
into the next field, where there were men at work with teams of horses
harrowing and rolling the dusty earth.
“It is likely enough that these are the men and the horses that came
to our doorstep in the snow,” she said, and soon she had crossed to the
far side, where a line of men, bent up double, were strung out across
the field. But so big was the expanse that rollers and harrows, men and
teams of horses and this string of men dibbling, were so far away that
she could not see their faces, and felt as though she were alone.
“They are planting cabbages,” she guessed. “Each man leans forward
to make a hole with the dibber in his right hand, sticks in a young
plant and treads it firm with his left heel as he passes in his stride
forward to strike the next hole. So they work all day, and this will be
a vast expanse of cabbages before the winter. The life of these men is
to labour all day in the sun, or in the rain, in these immense fields,
alone for hour after hour, with nothing to speak with but horse, and
to go back at night to sleep in a tiny room with a candle burning in
the closed window, then to rise again with the first colour of the
dawn. That is the life that the greater number have always led, yet it
has hardly touched our thoughts and we live on their labour, drinking
the milk and swallowing the buttered toast, thinking of anything
rather than of how the cows are kept fat and the thistles and docks
are spudded out to make room for the wheat, for there is nothing in
all that labour, or in all those lives, to interest us. The labourers
themselves are silent about it; there are few songs which take mangels
or potatoes as their subject, and when we look for poetry in the fields
we turn south to Italy or Greece and the goats nibbling at the vines.”
The footpath had been ploughed up, its last traces had disappeared
beneath the harrow and the roller, and she walked carefully among the
young cabbage plants, withering and grey after the long day’s sun. They
looked dead, but they would live.
“They would die in a garden unless they were shaded under flower-pots,
but everything lives in the fields; perhaps the air is purer under the
open sky,” thought Anne.
As she crossed into the next field a bird flew out of a poplar tree by
the stream. “A hawk,” was her first thought, but it surprised her by
calling “Cuckoo” as it flew.
“He ought to have changed his tune a month ago. ‘In July he gets ready
to fly; in August, go he must.’ Go he must, go he must,” she repeated,
and the sentence in her father’s letter came back into her mind in
which he had compared her to a whitethroat.
“Indeed he was right, for I was under the same compulsion to go as
the birds, but my going was harder. At least I fancy so, though the
young swallows find it a difficult business to leave England, staying a
week or two after the old birds have gone.” And Anne was surprised at
herself for thinking of the birds with pleasure: in the past she had
found her father’s love for them so irritating.
“I remember that I wished for a bird for my hat, yet in Paris where
I could have worn it, the suggestion would have disgusted me. There,
where I was going to the opera, I was always thinking of the birds, and
the one beautiful thing that I shall never forget is the shout of the
birds’ song with which one is woken on a March morning. And how they
sing after the rain.” She laughed at the contradiction in herself which
had made her love in Paris what had so much bored her in England.
“Yet within an hour of my meeting with my father I shall be wishing the
cats good hunting,” she added smiling.
“How will he greet me, I wonder?”--a question which had been repeated
so often that it made her ill with apprehension.
“What are the troubles that await me?” She was already at Dry Coulter;
the elms rose up before her, and when she had crossed the last field
the path would lead her through the churchyard and on to the green. The
last field had been cut and the last of the hay was being carried, a
little boy drove a clicking horse-rake across her path and, pulling a
lever, dropped a thin roll of the last gleanings of hay at her feet;
farther on two women were raking up the wisps of hay into heaps and a
boy was pitching it into a red tumbril where another boy gathered it
into his arms and trod it underfoot, after which the old mare was led
on to the next heap.