Eliot's arm laid down its burden. He got up and put his hand on Jerrold's shoulder and led him out of the room. "Go out into the air," he said. "I'll tell Mother."
Jerrold staggered downstairs, and through the hall and out into the blinding sunshine.
Far down the avenue he could hear the whirring of the car coming back from Cheltenham; the lines of the beech trees opened fan-wise to let it through. He saw Colin sitting up beside Scarrott.
Above his head a lattice ground and clattered. Somebody was going through the front rooms, shutting the windows and pulling down the blinds.
Jerrold turned back into the house to meet Colin there.
Upstairs his father's door opened and shut softly and Anne came out. She moved along the gallery to her room. Between the dark rails he could see her white skirt, and her arm, hanging, and the little specks of red splashed on the white sleeve.
iii
Jerrold was afraid of Anne, and he saw no end to his fear. He had been dashed against the suffering he was trying to put away from him and the shock of it had killed in one hour his young adolescent passion. She would be for ever associated with that suffering. He would never see Anne without thinking of his father's death. He would never think of his father's death without seeing Anne. He would see her for ever through an atmosphere of pain and horror, moving as she had moved in his father's room. He couldn't see her any other way. This intolerable memory of her effaced all other memories, memories of the child Anne with the rabbit, of the young, happy Anne who walked and rode and played with him, of the strange, mysterious Anne he had found yesterday in her room at dawn. That Anne belonged to a time he had done with. There was nothing left for him but the Anne who had come to tell him his father was dying, who had brought him to his father's death-bed, who had bound herself up inseparably with his death, who only moved from the scene of it to appear dressed in black and carrying the flowers for his funeral.
She was wrapped round and round with death and death, nothing but death, and with Jerrold's suffering. When he saw her he suffered again. And as his way had always been to avoid suffering, he avoided Anne. His eyes turned from her if he saw her coming. He spoke to her without looking at her. He tried not to think of her. When he had gone he would try not to remember.
His one idea was to go, to get away from the place his father had died in and from the people who had seen him die. He wanted new unknown faces, new unknown voices that would not remind him———
Ten days after his father's death the letter came from John Severn. He wrote:
"… I'm delighted about Sir Charles Durham. You are a lucky devil. Any chap Sir Charles takes a fancy to is bound to get on. He can't help himself. You're not afraid of hard work, and I can tell you we give our Assistant Commissioners all they want and a lot more.
"It'll be nice if you bring Anne out with you. If you're stationed anywhere near us we ought to give her the jolliest time in her life between us."
"But Jerrold," said Adeline when she had read this letter. "You're not going outnow. You must wire and tell him so."
"Why not now?"
"Because, my dear boy, you've got the estate and you must stay and look after it."
"Barker'll look after it. That's what he's there for."
"Nonsense, Jerrold. There's no need for you to go out to India."
"Thereisneed. I've got to go."
"You haven't. There's every need for you to stop where you are. Eliot will be going abroad if Sir Martin Crozier takes him on. And if Colin goes into the diplomatic service Goodness knows where he'll be sent to."
"Colin won't be sent anywhere for another four years."
"No. But he'll be at Cheltenham or Cambridge half the time. I must have one son at home."
"Sorry, Mother. But I can't stand it here. I've got to go, and I'm going."
To all her arguments and entreaties he had one answer: He had got to go and he was going.
Adeline left him and went to look for Eliot whom she found in his room packing to go back to London. She came sobbing to Eliot.
"It's too dreadfully hard. As if it weren't bad enough to lose my darling husband I must lose all my sons. Not one of you will stay with me. And there's Anne going off with Jerrold.Shemay have him with her and I mayn't. She's taken everything from me. You'd have said if a wife's place was anywhere it was with her dying husband. But no.Shewas allowed to be with him andIwas turned out of his room."
"My dear Mother, you know you weren't."
"Iwas. You turned me out yourself, Eliot, and had Anne in."
"Only because you couldn't stand it and she could."
"I daresay. She hadn't the same feelings."
"She had her own feelings, anyhow, only she controlled them. She stood it because she never thought of her feelings. She only thought of what she could do to help. She was magnificent."
"Of course you think so, because you're in love with her. She must take you, too. As if Jerrold wasn't enough."
"She hasn't taken me. She probably won't if I ask her. You shouldn't say those things, Mother. You don't know what you're talking about."
"I know I'm the most unhappy woman in the world. How am I going to live?I can't stand it if Jerry goes."
"He's got to go, Mother."
"He hasn't. Jerrold's place is here. He's got a duty and a responsibility. Your dear father didn't leave him the estate for him to let it go to wrack and ruin. It's most cruel and wrong of him."
"He can't do anything else. Don't you see why he wants to go? He can't stand the place without Father."
"I've got to stand it. So he may."
"Well, he won't, that's all. He simply funks it."
"He always was an arrant coward where trouble was concerned. He doesn't think of other people and how bad it is for them. He leaves me when I want him most."
"It's hard on you, Mother; but you can't stop him. And I don't think you ought to try."
"Oh, everybody tells me whatIought to do. My children can do as they like. So can Anne. She and Jerrold can go off to India and amuse themselves as if nothing had happened and it's all right."
But Anne didn't go off to India.
When she spoke to Jerrold about going with him his hard, unhappy face showed her that he didn't want her.
"You'd rather I didn't go," she said gently.
"It isn't that, Anne. It isn't that I don't want you. It's—it's simply that I want to get away from here, to get away from everything that reminds me—I shall go off my head if I've got to remember every minute, every time I see somebody who—I want to make a clean break and grow a new memory."
"I understand. You needn't tell me."
"Mother doesn't. I wish you'd make her see it."
"I'll try. But it's all right, Jerrold. I won't go."
"Of course you'll go. Only you won't think me a brute if I don't take you out with me?"
"I'm not going out with you. In fact, I don't think I'm going at all. I only wanted to because of going out together and because of the chance of seeing you when you got leave. I only thought of the heavenly times we might have had."
"Don't—don't, Anne."
"No, I won't. After all, I shouldn't care a rap about Ambala if you weren't there. And you may be stationed miles away. I'd rather go back to Ilford and do farming. Ever so much rather. India would really have wasted a lot of time."
"Oh, Anne, I've spoilt all your pleasure."
"No, you haven't. There isn't any pleasure to spoil—now."
"What a brute—what a cad you must think me."
"I don't, Jerry. It's not your fault. Things have just happened. And you see, I understand. I felt the same about Auntie Adeline after Mother died. I didn't want to see her because she reminded me—and yet, really, I loved her all the time."
"You won't go back on me for it?"
"I wouldn't go back on you whatever you did. And you mustn't keep on thinking Iwantto go to India. I don't care a rap about India itself. I hate Anglo-Indians and I simply loathe hot places. And Daddy doesn't want me out there, really. I shall be much happier on my farm. And it'll save a lot of expense, too. Just think what my outfit and passage would have cost."
"You wouldn't have cared what it cost if—"
"There isn't any if. I'm not lying, really." Not lying. Not lying. She would have given up more than India to save Jerrold that pang of memory. Only, when it was all over and he had sailed without her, she realized in one wounding flash that what she had given up was Jerrold himself.
i
Anne did not go back to her Ilford farm at once. Adeline had made that impossible.
At the prospect of Anne's going her resentment died down as suddenly as it had risen. She forgot that Anne had taken her sons' affection and her place beside her husband's deathbed. And though she couldn't help feeling rather glad that Jerrold had gone to India without Anne, she was sorry for her. She loved her and she meant to keep her. She said she simply could not bear it if Anne left her, andwasit the time to choose when she wanted her as she had never wanted her before? She had nobody to turn to, as Anne knew. Corbetts and Hawtreys and Markhams and people were all very well; but they were outsiders.
"It's the inside people that I want now, Anne. You're deep inside, dear."
Yes, of course she had relations. But relations were no use. They were all wrapped up in their own tiresome affairs, and there wasn't one of them she cared for as she cared for Anne.
"I couldn't care more if you were my own daughter. Darling Robert felt about you just the same. Youcan'tleave me."
And Anne didn't. She never could resist unhappiness. She thought: "I was glad enough to stop with her through all the happy times. I'd be a perfect beast to go and leave her now when she's miserable and hasn't got anybody."
It would have been better for Anne if she could have gone. Robert Fielding's death and Jerrold's absence were two griefs that inflamed each other; they came together to make one immense, intolerable wound. And here at Wyck, she couldn't move without coming upon something that touched it and stung it to fresh pain. But Anne was not like Jerrold, to turn from what she loved because it hurt her. For as long as she could remember all her happiness had come to her at Wyck. If unhappiness came now, she had got, as Eliot said, "to take it."
And so she stayed on through the autumn, then over Christmas to the New Year; this time because of Colin who was suffering from depression. Colin had never got over his father's death and Jerrold's going; and the last thing Jerrold had said to her before he went was; "You'll look after Col-Col, won't you? Don't let him go grousing about by himself."
Jerrold had always expected her to look after Colin. At seventeen there was still something piteous and breakable about him, something that clung to you for help. Eliot said that if Colin didn't look out he'd be a regular neurotic. But he owned that Anne was good for him.
"I don't know what you do to him, but he's better when you're there."
Eliot was the one who appeared to have recovered first. He met the shock of his father's death with a defiant energy and will.
He was working now at bacteriology under Sir Martin Crozier. Covered with a white linen coat, in a white-washed room of inconceivable cleanness, surrounded by test-tubes and mixing jars, Eliot spent the best part of the day handling the germs of the deadliest diseases; making cultures, examining them under the microscope; preparing vaccines. He went home to the brown velvety, leathery study in his Welbeck Street flat to write out his notes, or read some monograph on inoculation; or he dined with a colleague and talked to him about bacteria.
At this period of his youth Eliot had more than ever the appearance of inhuman preoccupation. His dark, serious face detached itself with a sort of sullen apathy from the social scene. He seemed to have no keen interests beyond his slides and mixing jars and test-tubes. Women, for whom his indifference had a perverse fascination, said of him: "Dr. Fielding isn't interested in people, only in their diseases. And not really in diseases, only in their germs."
They never suspected that Eliot was passionate, and that a fierce pity had driven him into his profession. The thought of preventable disease filled him with fury; he had no tolerance for the society that tolerated it. He suffered because he had a clearer vision and a profounder sense of suffering than most persons. Up to the time of his father's death all Eliot's suffering had been other people's. He couldn't rest till he had done something to remove the cause of it.
Add to this an insatiable curiosity as to causes, and you have the main bent of Eliot's mind.
And it seemed to him that there was nobody but Anne who saw that hidden side of him.Sheknew that he was sorry for people, and that being sorry for them had made him what he was, like Jerrold and yet unlike him. Eliot was attracted to suffering by the same sensitiveness that made Jerrold avoid everything once associated with it.
And so the very thing that Jerrold couldn't bear to remember was what drew Eliot closer to Anne. He saw her as Jerrold had seen her, moving, composed and competent, in his father's room; he saw her stooping over him to help him, he saw the specks of blood on her white sleeve; and he thought of her with the more tenderness. From that instant he really loved her. He wanted Anne as he had never conceived himself wanting any woman. He could hardly remember his first adolescent feeling for her, that confused mixture of ignorant desire and fear, so different was it from the intense, clear passion that possessed him now. At night when his work was done, he lay in bed, not sleeping, thinking of Anne with desire that knew itself too well to be afraid. Anne was the one thing necessary to him beside his work, necessary as a living part of himself. She could only not come before his work because Eliot's work came before himself and his own happiness. When he went down every other week-end to Wyck-on-the-Hill he knew that it was to see Anne.
His mother knew it too.
"I wish Eliot would marry," she said.
"Why?" said Anne.
"Because then he wouldn't be so keen on going off to look for germs in disgusting climates."
Anne wondered whether Adeline knew Eliot. For Eliot talked to her about his work as he walked with her at a fine swinging pace over the open country, taking all his exercise now while he could get it. That was another thing he liked about Anne Severn, her splendid physical fitness; she could go stride for stride with him, and mile for mile, and never tire. Her mind, too, was robust and active, and full of curiosity; it listened by the hour and never tired. It could move, undismayed, among horrors. She could see, as he saw, the "beauty" of the long trains of research by which Sir Martin Crozier had tracked down the bacillus of amoebic dysentery and established the difference between typhoid and Malta fever.
Once started on his subject, the grave, sullen Eliot talked excitedly.
"You do see, Anne, how thrilling it is, don't you? For me there's nothing but bacteriology. I always meant to go in for it, and Sir Martin's magnificent. Absolutely top-hole. You see, all these disgusting diseases can be prevented. It's inconceivable that they should be tolerated in a civilized country. People can't care a rap or they couldn't sleep in their beds. They ought to get up and make a public row about it, to insist on compulsory inoculation for everybody whether they like it or not. It really isn't enough to cure people of diseases when they've got them. We ought to see that they never get them, that there aren't any to get… What we don't know yet is the complete behaviour of all these bacteria among themselves. A bad bacillus may be doing good work by holding down a worse one. It's conceivable that if we succeeded in exterminating all known diseases we might release an unknown one, supremely horrible, that would exterminate the race."
"Oh Eliot, how awful. How canyousleep in your bed?"
"You needn't worry. It's only a nightmare idea of mine."
And so on and so on, for he was still so young that he wanted Anne to be excited by the things that excited him. And Anne told him all about her Ilford farm and what she meant to do on it. Eliot didn't behave like Aunt Adeline, he listened beautifully, like Uncle Robert and Jerrold, as if it was really most important that you should have a farm and work on it.
"What I want is to sell it and get one here. I don't want to be anywhere else. I can't tell you how frightfully home-sick I am when I'm away. I keep on seeing those gables with the little stone balls, and the peacocks, and the fields down to the Manor Farm. And the hills, Eliot. When I'm away I'm always dreaming that I'm trying to get back to them and something stops me. Or I see them and they turn into something else. I shan't be happy till I can come back for good."
"You don't want to go to India?" Eliot's heart began to beat as he asked his question.
"I want to work. To work hard. To work till I'm so dead tired that I roll off to sleep the minute I get into bed. So tired that I can't dream."
"That isn't right. You're too young to feel like that, Anne."
"I do feel like it. You feel like it yourself—My farm is to me what your old bacteria are to you."
"Oh, if I thought it was the farm—"
"Why, what else did you think it was?"
Eliot couldn't bring himself to tell her. He took refuge in apparent irrelevance.
"You know Father left me the Manor Farm house, don't you?"
"No, I didn't. I suppose he thought you'd want to come back, like me."
"Well, I'm glad I've got it. Mother's got the Dower House in Wyck. But she'll stay on here till—"
"Till Jerrold comes back," said Anne bravely.
"I don't suppose Jerry'll turn her out even then. Unless—"
But neither he nor Anne had the courage to say "unless he marries."
Not Anne, because she couldn't trust herself with the theme of Jerrold's marrying. Not Eliot, because he had Jerrold's word for it that if he married anybody, ever, it would not be Anne.
* * * * *
It was this assurance that made it possible for him to say what he had been thinking of saying all the time that he talked to Anne about his bacteriology. Bacteriology was a screen behind which Eliot, uncertain of Anne's feelings, sheltered himself against irrevocable disaster. He meant to ask Anne to marry him, but he kept putting it off because, so long as he didn't know for certain that she wouldn't have him, he was at liberty to think she would. He would not be taking her from Jerrold. Jerrold, inconceivable ass, didn't want her. Eliot had made sure of that months ago, the night before Jerrold sailed. He had simply put it to him: what did he mean to do about Anne Severn? And Jerrold had made it very plain that his chief object in going to India was to get away from Anne Severn and Everything. Eliot knew Jerrold too well to suspect his sincerity, so he considered that the way was now honorably open to him.
His only uncertainty was Anne herself. He had meant to give her a year to forget Jerrold in, if she was ever going to forget him; though in moments of deeper insight he realized that Anne was not likely to forget, nor to marry anybody else as long as she remembered.
Yet, Eliot reasoned, women did marry, even remembering. They married and were happy. You saw it every day. He was content to take Anne on her own terms, at any cost, at any risk. He had never been afraid of risks, and once he had faced the chance of her refusal all other dangers were insignificant.
A year was a long time, and Eliot had to consider the probability of his going out to Central Africa with Sir Martin Crozier to investigate sleeping sickness. He wanted the thing settled one way or another before he went.
He put it off again till the next week-end. And in the meanwhile Sir Martin Crozier had seen him. He was starting in the spring and Eliot was to go with him.
It was on Sunday evening that he spoke to Anne, sitting with her under the beeches at the top of the field where she and Jerrold had sat together. Eliot had chosen his place badly.
"I wouldn't bother you so soon if I wasn't going away, but I simply must—must know—"
"Must know what?"
"Whether you care for me at all. Not much, of course, but just enough not to hate marrying me."
Anne turned her face full on him and looked at him with her innocent, candid eyes. And all she said was, "Youdoknow about Jerrold, don't you?"
"Oh God, yes. I know all about him."
"He's why I can't."
"I tell you, I know all about Jerrold. He isn't a good enough reason."
"Good enough for me."
"Not unless—" But he couldn't say it.
"Not unless he cares for me. That's why you're asking me, then, because you know he doesn't."
"Well, it wouldn't be much good if I knew he did."
"Eliot, it's awful of me to talk about it, as if he'd said he did. He never said a word. He never will."
"I'm afraid he won't, Anne."
"Don't imagine I ever thought he would. He never did anything to make me think it for a minute, really."
"Are you quite sure he didn't?"
"Quite sure. I made it all up out of my head. My silly head. I don't care what you think of me so long as you don't think it was Jerry's fault. I should go on caring for him whatever he did or didn't do."
"I know you would. But it's possible—"
"To care for two people and marry one of them, no matter which? It isn't possible for me. If I can't have the person I want I won't have anybody."
"It isn't wise, Anne. I tell you I could make you care for me. I know all about you. I know how you think and how you feel. I understand you better than Jerrold does. You'd be happy with me and you'd be safe."
"It's no use. I'd rather be unhappy and in danger if it was withJerrold."
"You'll be unhappy and in danger without him."
"I don't care. Besides, I shan't be. I shall work. You'll work, too.It'll be so exciting that you'll soon forget all about me."
"You know I shan't. And I'll never give you up, unless Jerrold gets you."
"Eliot—I only told you about Jerrold, because I thought you ought to know. So that you mightn't think it was anything in you."
"It isn't something in me, then? Tell me—if it hadn't been for Jerry, do you think you might have cared for me?"
"Yes. I do. I quite easily might. And I think it would be a jolly good thing if I could, now. Only I can't. I can't."
"Poor little Anne."
"Does it comfort you to think I'd have cared if it hadn't been forJerry?"
"It does, very much."
"Eliot—you're the only person I can talk to about him. Do you mind telling me whether he said that to you, or whether you just guessed it."
"What?"
"Why, that he wouldn't—ever—"
"I asked him, Anne, because I had to know. And he told me."
"I thought he told you."
"Yes, he told me. But I'm a cad for letting you think he didn't care for you. I believe he did, or that he would have cared—awfully—if my father hadn't died just then. Your being in the room that day upset him. If it hadn't been for that—"
"Yes, but therewasthat. It was like he was when Binky died and he couldn't stand Yearp. Don't you remember how he wouldn't let me go with him to see Yearp because he said he didn't want me mixed up with it. Well—I've been mixed up, that's all."
"Still, Anne, I'm certain he'd have cared—if that's any comfort to you.You didn't make it up out of your dear little head. We all thought it.Father thought it. I believe he wanted it. If he'd only known!"
She thought: If he'd only known how he had hurt her, he who had never hurt anybody in all his beautiful life.
"Dear Uncle Robert. There's no good talking about it. I knew, the minuteJerry said he didn't want me to go to India with him."
"Is that why you didn't go?"
"Yes."
"That was a mistake, Anne. You should have gone."
"How could I, after that? And if I had, he'd only have kept away."
"You should have let him go first and then gone after him. You should have turned up suddenly, in wonderful clothes, looking cheerful and beautiful. So that you wiped out the memory he funked. As it is you've left him nothing else to think of."
"I daresay that's what I should have done. But it's too late. I can't do it now."
"I'm not so sure."
"What, goafterJerrold? Hunt him down? Dress up and scheme to make him marry me?"
"Yes. Yes. Yes."
"Eliot, you know I couldn't."
"You said once you'd commit a crime for anybody you cared about."
"A crime, yes. But not that. I'd rather die."
"You're too fastidious. It's only the unscrupulous people who get what they want in this world. They know what they want and go for it. They stamp on everything and everybody that gets in their way."
"Oh, Eliot dear, I know what I want, and I'd go for it. If only Jerrold knew, too."
"He would know if you showed him."
"And that's just what I can't do."
"Well, don't say I didn't give you the best possible advice, against my own interests, too."
"It was sweet of you. But you see how impossible it is."
"I see how adorable you are. You always were."
iv
For the first time in her life Adeline was furious.
She had asked Eliot whether he was or was not going to marry Anne Severn, and was told that he had asked her to marry him that afternoon and that she wouldn't have him.
"Wouldn't have you? What's she thinking of?"
"You'd better ask her," said Eliot, never dreaming that she would.
But that was what Adeline did. She came that night to Anne's room just as Anne was getting into bed. Unappeased by her defenseless attitude, she attacked with violence.
"What's all this about Eliot asking you to marry him?"
Anne uncurled herself and sat up on the edge of her bed.
"Did he tell you?"
"Yes. Of course he told me. He says you refused him. Did you?"
"I'm afraid I did."
"Then Anne, you're a perfect little fool."
"But Auntie, I don't love him."
"Nonsense; you love him as much as most people love the men they marry.He's quite sensible. He doesn't want you to go mad about him."
"He wants more than I can give him."
"Well, all I can say is if you can't give him what he wants you'd no business to go about with him as you've been doing."
"I've been going about with him all my life and I never dreamed he'd want to marry me."
"What did you suppose he'd want?"
"Why, nothing but just to go about. As we always did."
"You idiot."
"I don't see why you should be so cross about it."
Adeline sat down in the armchair at the head of the bed, prepared to "have it out" with Anne.
"I suppose you think my son's happiness is nothing to me? Didn't it occur to you that if you refuse him he'll stick for years in that awful place he's going to? Whereas if he had a wife in England there'd be a chance of his coming home now and then. Perhaps he'd never go out again."
"I'm sorry, Auntie. I can't marry Eliot even to keep him in England.Even to please you."
"Even to save his life, you mean. You don't care if he dies of some hideous tropical disease."
"I care awfully. But I can't marry him. He knows why."
"It's more than I do. If you're thinking of Jerrold, you needn't. I thought you'd done with that schoolgirlish nonsense."
"I'm not 'thinking' of him. I'm not 'thinking' of anybody and I wish you'd leave me alone."
"My dear child, how can I leave you alone when I see you making the mistake of your life? Eliot is absolutely the right person for you, if you'd only the sense to see it. He's got more character than anybody I know. Much more than dear Jerry. He'll be ten times more interesting to live with."
"I thought Jerrold was your favourite."
"No, Eliot, my dear. Always Eliot. He was my first baby."
"Well, I'm awfully sorry you mind so much. And I'd marry Eliot if I could. I simply hate him to be unhappy. But he won't be. He'll live to be frightfully glad I didn't…What, aren't you going to kiss me good-night?"
Adeline had risen and turned away with the great dignity of her righteous anger.
"I don't feel like it," she said. "I think you've been thoroughly selfish and unkind. I hate girls who go on like that—making a man mad about you by pretending to be his comrade, and then throwing him over. I've had more men in love with me, Anne, than you've seen in your life, but I never didthat."
"Oh Auntie, what about Father? And you were engaged to him."
"Well, anyhow," said Adeline, softened by the recollection, "Iwasengaged."
She smiled her enchanting smile; and Anne, observing the breakdown of dignity, got up off the bed and kissed her.
"I don't suppose," she said, "that Father was the only one."
"He wasn't. But then, withme, my dear, it was their own risk. They knew where they were."
v
In March, nineteen eleven, Eliot went out to Central Africa. He stayed there two years, investigating malaria and sleeping sickness. Then he went on to the Straits Settlements and finally took a partnership in a practice at Penang.
Anne left Wyck at Easter and returned in August because of Colin. Then she went back to her Ilford farm.
The two years passed, and in the spring of the third year, nineteen fourteen, she came again.
i
Something awful had happened. Adeline had told Anne about it.
It seemed that Colin in his second year at Cambridge, when he should have given his whole mind to reading for the Diplomatic Service, had had the imprudence to get engaged. And to a girl that Adeline had never heard of, about whom nothing was known but that she was remarkably handsome and that her family (Courthopes of Leicestershire) were, in Adeline's brief phrase, "all right."
From the terrace they could see, coming up the lawn from the goldfish pond, Colin and his girl.
Queenie Courthope. She came slowly, her short Russian skirt swinging out from her ankles. The brilliance of her face showed clear at a distance, vermilion on white, flaming; hard, crystal eyes, sweeping and flashing; bobbed hair, brown-red, shining in the sun. Then a dominant, squarish jaw, and a mouth exquisitely formed, but thin, a vermilion thread drawn between her staring, insolent nostrils and the rise of her round chin.
This face in its approach expressed a profound, arrogant indifference to Adeline and Anne. Only as it turned towards Colin its grey-black eyes lowered and were soft dark under the black feathers of their brows.
Colin looked back at it with a shy, adoring tenderness.
Queenie could be even more superbly uninterested than Adeline. In Adeline's self-absorption there was a passive innocence, a candor that disarmed you, but Queenie's was insolent and hostile; it took possession of the scene and challenged every comer.
"Hallo, Anne!" Colin shouted. "How did you get here?"
"Motored down."
"I say, have you got a car?"
"Only just."
"Drove yourself?"
"Rather."
Queenie scowled as if there were something disagreeable to her in the idea that Anne should have a car of her own and drive it. She endured the introduction in silence and addressed herself with an air of exclusiveness to Colin.
"What are we going to do?"
"Anything you like," he said.
"I'll play you singles, then."
"Anne might like to play," said Colin. But he still looked at Queenie, as she flamed in her beauty.
"Oh, three's a rotten game. You can't play the two of us unless MissSevern handicaps me."
"She won't do that. Anne could take us both on and play a decent game."
Queenie picked up her racquet and stood between them, beating her skirts with little strokes of irritated impatience. Her eyes were fixed on Colin, trying, you could see, to dominate him.
"We'd better take it in turns," he said.
"Thanks, Col-Col. I'd rather not play. I've driven ninety-seven miles."
"Really rather?"
Queenie backed towards the court.
"Oh, come on, Colin, if you're coming."
He went.
"What do you think of Queenie?" Adeline said.
"She's very handsome."
"Yes, Anne. But it isn't a nice face. Now, is it?"
Anne couldn't say it was a nice face.
"It's awful to think of Colin being married to it. He's only twenty-one now, and she's seven years older. If it had been anybody but Colin. If it had been Eliot or Jerrold I shouldn't have minded so much. They can look after themselves. He'll never stand up against that horrible girl."
"She does look terribly strong."
"And cruel, Anne, as if she might hurt him. I don't want him to be hurt. I can't bear her taking him away from me. My little Col-Col….I did hope, Anne, that if you wouldn't have Eliot—"
"I'd have Colin? But Auntie, I'm years older than he is. He's a baby."
"If he's a baby he'll want somebody older to look after him."
"Queenie's even better fitted than I am, then."
"Do you think, Anne, she proposed to Colin?"
"No. I shouldn't think it was necessary."
"I should say she was capable of anything. My only hope is they'll tire each other out before they're married and break it off."
All afternoon on the tennis court below Queenie played against Colin. She played vigorously, excitedly, savagely, to win. She couldn't hide her annoyance when he beat her.
"What was I to do?" he said. "You don't like it when I beat you. But ifI was beaten you wouldn't likeme."
ii
Adeline's only hope was not realized. They hadn't had time to tire of each other before the War broke out. And Colin insisted on marrying before he joined up. Their engagement had left him nervous and unfit, and his idea was that, once married, he would present a better appearance before the medical examiners.
But after a month of Queenie, Colin was more nervous and unfit than ever.
"I can't think," said Adeline, "what that woman does to him. She'll wear him out."
So Colin waited, trying to get fitter, and afraid to volunteer lest he should be rejected.
Everybody around him was moving rapidly. Queenie had taken up motoring, so that she could drive an ambulance car at the front. Anne had gone up to London for her Red Cross training. Eliot had left his practice to his partner at Penang and had come home and joined the Army Medical Corps.
Eliot, home on leave for three days before he went out, tried hard to keep Colin back from the War. In Eliot's opinion Colin was not fit and never would be fit to fight. He was just behaving as he always had behaved, rushing forward, trying insanely to do the thing he never could do.
"Do you mean to say they won't pass me?" he asked.
"Oh, they'll pass you all right," Eliot said. "They'll give you an expensive training, and send you into the trenches, and in any time from a day to a month you'll be in hospital with shell-shock. Then you'll be discharged as unfit, having wasted everybody's time and made a damned nuisance of yourself….I suppose I ought to say it's splendid of you to want to go out. But it isn't splendid. It's idiotic. You'll be simply butting in where you're not wanted, taking a better man's place, taking a better man's commission, taking a better man's bed in a hospital. I tell you we don't want men who are going to crumple up in their first action."
"Do you think I'm going to funk then?" said poor Colin.
"Funk? Oh, Lord no. You'll stick it till you drop, till you're paralyzed, till you've lost your voice and memory, till you're an utter wreck. There'll be enough of 'em, poor devils, without you, Col-Col."
"But why should I go like that more than anybody else?"
"Because you're made that way, because you haven't got a nervous system that can stand the racket. The noises alone will do for you. You'll be as right as rain if you keep out of it."
"But Jerrold's coming back.He'll go out at once. How can I stick at home when he's gone?"
"Heaps of good work to be done at home."
"Not by men of my age."
"By men of your nervous organization. Your going out would be sheer waste."
"Why not?" Does it matter what becomes of me?"
"No. It doesn't. It matters, though, that you'll be taking a better man's place."
Now Colin really did want to go out and fight, as he had always wanted to follow Jerrold's lead; he wanted it so badly that it seemed to him a form of self-indulgence; and this idea of taking a better man's place so worked on him that he had almost decided to give it up, since that was the sacrifice required of him, when he told Queenie what Eliot had said.
"All I can say is," said Queenie, "that if you don't go out I shall giveyouup. I've no use for men with cold feet."
"Can't you see," said Colin (he almost hated Queenie in that moment), "what I'm afraid of? Being a damned nuisance. That's what Eliot says I'll be. I don't know how he knows."
"He doesn't know everything. Ifmybrother tried to stop my going to the front I'd jolly soon tell him to go to hell. I swear, Colin, if you back out of it I won't speak to you again. I'm not asking you to do anything I funk myself."
"Oh, shut up. I'm going all right. Not because you've asked me, but because I want to."
"If you didn't I should think you'd feel pretty rotten when I'm out with my Field Ambulance," said Queenie.
"Damn your Field Ambulance!… No, I didn't mean that, old thing; it's splendid of you to go. But you'd no business to suppose I funked. Imayfunk. Nobody knows till they've tried. But I was going all right till Eliot put me off."
"Oh, if you're put off as easily as all that——"
She was intolerable. She seemed to think he was only going because she'd shamed him into it.
That evening he sang:
"'What are you doing all the day, Rendal, my son?What are you doing all the day, my pretty one?'"
He understood that song now.
"'What will you leave to your lover, Rendal, my son?What will you leave to your lover, my pretty one?A rope to hang her, mother,A rope to hang her, mother….'"
"Go it, Col-Col!" Out on the terrace Queenie laughed her harsh, cruel laugh.
"'For I'm sick to my heart and I fain would lie down.'"
"'I'm sick to my heart and I fain would lie down,'" Queenie echoed, with clipped words, mocking him.
He hated Queenie.
And he loved her. At night, at night, she would unbend, she would be tender and passionate, she would touch him with quick, hurrying caresses, she would put her arms round him and draw him to her, kissing and kissing. And with her young, beautiful body pressed tight to him, with her mouth on his and her eyes shining close and big in the darkness, Colin would forget.
iii
Dr. Cutler's Field Ambulance, British Hospital, Antwerp.
September 20th, 1914.
Dearest Auntie Adeline,—I haven't been able to write before. There's been a lot of fighting all round here and we're frightfully busy getting in wounded. And when you've done you're too tired to sit up and write letters. You simply roll into bed and drop off to sleep. Sometimes we're out with the ambulances half the night.
You needn't worry about me. I'm keeping awfully fit. Iamglad now I've always lived in the open air and played games and ploughed my own land. My muscles are as hard as any Tommie's. So are Queenie's. You see, we have to act as stretcher bearers as well as chauffeurs. You're not much good if you can't carry your own wounded.
Queenie is simply splendid. She reallydoesn'tknow what fear is, and she's at her very best under fire. It sort of excites her and bucks her up. I can't help seeing how fine she is, though she was so beastly to poor old Col-Col before he joined up. But talk of the War bringing out the best in people, you should simply see her out here with the wounded. Dr. Cutler (the Commandant) thinks no end of her. She drives for him and I drive for a little doctor man called Dicky Cartwright. He's awfully good at his job and decent. Queenie doesn't like him. I can't think why.
Good-bye, darling. Take care of yourself.
Your loving
Anne.
Antwerp.October 3rd.
… You ask me what I really think of Queenie at close quarters. Well, the quarters are very close and I know she simply hates me. She was fearfully sick when she found we were both in the same Corps. She's always trying to get up a row about something. She'd like to have me fired out of Belgium if she could, but I mean to stay as long as I can, so I won't quarrel with her. She can't do it all by herself. And when I feel like going back on her I tell myself how magnificent she is, so plucky and so clever at her job. I don't wonder that half the men in our Corps are gone on her. And there's a Belgian Colonel, the one Cutler gets his orders from, who'd make a frantic fool of himself if she'd let him. But good old Queenie sticks to her job and behaves as if they weren't there. That makes them madder. You'd have thought they'd never have had the time to be such asses in, but it's wonderful what a state you can get into in your few odd moments. Dicky says it's the War whips you up and makes it all the easier. I don't know….
November.
That's where we are now. I simply can't describe the retreat. It was too awful, and I don't want to think about it. We've "settled" down in a house we've commandeered and I suppose we shall stick here till we're shelled out of it.
Talking of shelling, Queenie is funny. She's quite annoyed if anybody besides herself gets anywhere near a shell. We picked up two more stretcher-bearers in Ostend and a queer little middle-aged lady out for a job at the front. Cutler took her on as a sort of secretary. At first Queenie was so frantic that she wouldn't speak to her, and swore she'd make the Corps too hot to hold her. But when she found that the little lady wasn't for the danger zone and only proposed to cook and keep our accounts for us, she calmed down and was quite decent. Then the other day Miss Mullins came and told us that a bit of shell had chipped off the corner of her kitchen. The poor old thing was ever so proud and pleased about it, and Queenie snubbed her frightfully, and said she wasn't in any danger at all, and asked her how she'd enjoy it if she was out all day under fire, like us.
And she was furious with me because I had the luck to get into the bombardment at Dixmude and she hadn't. She talked as if I'd done her out of her shelling on purpose, whereas it only meant that I happened to be on the spot when the ambulances were sent out and she was away somewhere with her own car. She really is rather vulgar about shells. Dicky says it's a form of war snobbishness (he hasn't got a scrap of it), but I think it really is because all the time she's afraid of one of us being killed. It must be that. Even Dicky owns that she's splendid, though he doesn't like her….
iv
Five months later.
The Manor, Wyck-on-the-Hill, Gloucestershire.
May 30th, 1915.
My darling Anne,—Queenie will have told you about Colin. He was through all that frightful shelling at Ypres in April. He's been three weeks in the hospital at Boulogne with shell-shock—had it twice—and now he's back and in that Officers' Hospital in Kensington, not a bit better. I really think Queenie ought to get leave and come over and see him.
Eliot was perfectly right. He ought never to have gone out. Of course he was as plucky as they make them—went back into the trenches after his first shell-shock—but his nerves couldn't stand it. Whether they're treating him right or not, they don't seem to be able to do anything for him.
I'm writing to Queenie. But tell her she must come and see him.
Your loving
Adeline Fielding.
Three months later.
The Manor, Wyck-on-the-Hill, Gloucestershire.
August 30th.
Darling Anne,—Colin has been discharged at last as incurable. He is with me here. I'm so glad to have him, the darling. But oh, his nerves are in an awful state—all to bits. He's an utter wreck, my beautiful Colin; it would make your heart bleed to see him. He can't sleep at night; he keeps on hearing shells; and if he does sleep he dreams about them and wakes up screaming. It's awful to hear a man scream. Anne, Queenie must come home and look after him. My nerves are going. I can't sleep any more than Colin. I lie awake waiting for the scream. I can't take the responsibility of him alone, I can't really. After all, she's his wife, and she made him go out and fight, though she knew what Eliot said it would do to him. It's too cruel that it should have happened to Col-Col of all people.Makethat woman come.
Your loving
Adeline Fielding.
Nieuport.September 5th, 1915.
Darling Auntie,—I'm so sorry about dear Col-Col. And I quite agree that Queenie ought to go back and look after him. But she won't. She says her work here is much more important and that she can't give up hundreds of wounded soldiers for just one man. Of course she is doing splendidly, and Cutler says he can't spare her and she'd be simply thrown away on one case. They think Colin's people ought to look after him. It doesn't seem to matter to either of them that he's her husband. They've got into the way of looking at everybody as a case. They say it's not even as if Colin could be got better so as to be sent out to fight again. It would be sheer waste of Queenie.
But Cutler has given me leave to go over and see him. I shall get to Wyck as soon as this letter.
Dear Col-Col, I wish I could do something for him. I feel as if we could never, never do too much after all he's been through. Fancy Eliot knowing exactly what would happen.
Your loving
Anne.
Nieuport.September 7th.
Dear Anne,—Now that youhavegone I think I ought to tell you that it would be just as well if you didn't come back. I've got a man to take your place; Queenie picked him up at Dunkirk the day you sailed, and he's doing very well.
The fact is we're getting on much better since you left. There's perfect peace now. You and Queenie didn't hit it off, you know, and for a job like ours it's absolutely essential that everybody should pull together like one. It doesn't do to have two in a Corps always at loggerheads.
I don't like to lose you, and I know you've done splendidly. But I've got to choose between Queenie and you, and I must keep her, if it's only because she's worked with me all the time. So now that you've made the break I take the opportunity of asking you to resign. Personally I'm sorry, but the good of the Corps must come before everything.
Sincerely yours,
Robert Cutler.
The Manor, Wyck-on-the-Hill, Gloucestershire.
September 11th, 1915.
Dear Dicky,—This is only to say good-bye, as I shan't see you again. Cutler's fired me out of the Corps. Hesaysit's because Queenie and I don't hit it off. I shouldn't have thought that was my fault, but he seems to think it is. He says there's been perfect peace since I left.
Well, we've had some tremendous times together, and I wish we could have gone on.
Good-bye and Good Luck,
Yours ever,
Anne Severn.
P. S.—Poor Colin Fielding's in an awful state. But he's been a bit better since I came. Even if Cutler'd let me come back I couldn't leave him. This is my job. The queer thing is he's afraid of Queenie, so it's just as well she didn't come home.
Nieuport.
September 15th, 1915.
Dear Old Thing,—We're all furious here at the way you've been treated. I've resigned as a protest, and I'm going into the R. A. M. So has Miss Mullins—: resigned I mean—so Queenie's the only woman left in the Corps. That'll suit her down to the ground.
I gave myself the treat of telling Cutler what I jolly well think of him. But of course you know she made him hoof you out. She's been trying for it ever since you joined. It's all rot his saying you didn't hit it off with her, when everybody knows you were a perfect angel to her. Why, you backed her every time when we were all going for her. It's quite true that the peace of God has settled on the Corps since you left it; but that's only because Queenie doesn't rage round any more.
You'll observe that she never went for Miss Mullins. That's because Miss Mullins kept well out of the line of fire. And if you hadn't jolly well distinguished yourself there she'd have let you alone, too. The real trouble began that day you were at Dixmude. It wasn't a bit because she was afraid you'd be killed. Queenie doesn't want you about when the War medals are handed round. Everybody sees that but old Cutler. He's too much gone on her to see anything. She can twist him round and round and tie him up in knots.
But Cutler isn't in it now. Queenie's turned him down for that young Noel Fenwick who's got your job. Cutler's nose was a sight, I can tell you.
Well, I'm not surprised that Queenie's husband funks her. She's a terror. Worse than war.
Good-bye and Good Luck, Old Thing, till we meet again.
Yours ever,
Dicky Cartwright.
i
They would never know what it cost her to come back and look after Colin. That knowledge was beyond Adeline Fielding. She congratulated Anne and expected Anne to congratulate herself on being "well out of it." Her safety was revolting and humiliating to Anne when she thought of Queenie and Cutler and Dicky, and Eliot and Jerrold and all the allied armies in the thick of it. She had left a world where life was lived at its highest pitch of intensity for a world where people were only half-alive. To be safe from the chance of sudden violent death was to be only half-alive.
Her one consolation had been that now she would see Jerrold. But she did not see him. Jerrold had given up his appointment in the Punjaub three weeks before the outbreak of the war. His return coincided with the retreat from Mons. He had not been in England a week before he was in training on Salisbury Plain. Anne had left Wyck when he arrived; and before he got leave she was in Belgium with her Field Ambulance. And now, in October of nineteen fifteen, when she came back to Wyck, Jerrold was fighting in France.
At least they knew what had happened to Colin; but about Eliot and Jerrold they knew nothing. Anything might have happened to them since they had written the letters that let them off from week to week, telling them that they were safe. Anything might happen and they might never know.
Anne's fear was dumb and secret. She couldn't talk about Jerrold. She lived every minute in terror of Adeline's talking, of the cries that came from her at queer unexpected moments: between two cups of tea, two glances at the mirror, two careful gestures of her hands pinning up her hair.
"I cannot bear it if anything happens to Jerrold, Anne."
"Oh Anne, I wonder what's happening to Jerrold."
"If only I knew what was happening to Jerrold."
"If only I knew where Jerroldwas. Nothing's so awful as not knowing."
And at breakfast, over toast and marmalade: "Anne, I've got such an awful feeling that something's happened to Jerrold. I'm sure these feelings aren't given you for nothing… You aren't eating anything, darling. Youmusteat."
Every morning at breakfast Anne had to look through the lists of killed, missing and wounded, to save Adeline the shock of coming upon Jerrold's or Eliot's name. Every morning Adeline gazed at Anne across the table with the same look of strained and agonised enquiry. Every morning Anne's heart tightened and dragged, then loosened and lifted, as they were let off for one more day.
One more day? Not one more hour, one minute. Any second the wire from the War Office might come.
ii
Anne never knew the moment when she was first aware that Colin's mother was afraid of him. Aunt Adeline was very busy, making swabs and bandages. Every day she went off to her War Hospital Supply work at the Town Hall, and Anne was left to take care of Colin. She began to wonder whether the swabs and bandages were not a pretext for getting away from Colin.
"It's no use," Adeline said. "I cannot stand the strain of it. Anne, he's worse with me than he is with you. Everything I say and do is wrong. You don't know what it was like before you came."
Anne did know. The awful thing was that Colin couldn't bear to be left alone, day or night. He would lie awake shivering with terror. If he dropped off to sleep he woke screaming. At first Pinkney slept with him. But Pinkney had joined up, and old Wilkins, the butler, was impossible because he snored.
Anne had her old room across the passage where she had slept when they were children. And now, as then, their doors were left open, so that at a sound from Colin she could get up and go to him.
She was used to the lacerating, unearthly scream that woke her, the scream that terrified Adeline, that made her cover her head tight with the bed-clothes, to shut it out, that made her lock her door to shut out Colin. Once he had come into his mother's room and she had found him standing by her bed and looking at her with the queer frightened face that frightened her. She was always afraid of this happening again.
Anne couldn't bear to think of that locked door. She was used to the sight of Colin standing in her doorway, to the watches beside his bed where he lay shivering, holding her hand tight as he used to hold it when he was a child. To Anne he was "poor Col-Col" again, the little boy who was afraid of ghosts, only more abandoned to terror, more unresisting.
He would start and tremble at any quick, unexpected movement. He would burst into tears at any sudden sound. Small noises, whisperings, murmurings, creakings, soft shufflings, irritated him. Loud noises, the slamming of doors, the barking of dogs, the crowing of cocks, made him writhe in agony. For Colin the deep silence of the Manor was the ambush for some stupendous, crashing, annihilating sound; sound that was always coming and never came. The droop of the mouth that used to appear suddenly in his moments of childish anguish was fixed now, and fixed the little tortured twist of his eyebrows and his look of anxiety and fear. His head drooped, his shoulders were hunched slightly, as if he cowered before some perpetually falling blow.
On fine warm days he lay out on the terrace on Adeline's long chair; on wet days he lay on the couch in the library, or sat crouching over the fire. Anne brought him milk or beef tea or Benger's Food every two hours. He was content to be waited on; he had no will to move, no desire to get up and do things for himself. He lay or sat still, shivering every now and then as he remembered or imagined some horror. And as he was afraid to be left alone Anne sat with him.
"How can you say this is a quiet place?" he said.
"It's quiet enough now."
"It isn't. It's full of noises. Loud, thundering noises going on and on. Awful noises…. You know what it is? It's the guns in France. I can hear them all the time."
"No, Colin. That isn't what you hear. We're much too far off. Nobody could hear them."
"Ican."
"I don't think so."
"Do you mean it's noises in my head?"
"Yes. They'll go away when you're stronger."
"I shall never be strong again."
"Oh yes, you will be. You're better already."
"If I get better they'll send me out again."
"Never. Never again."
"I ought to be out. I oughtn't to be sticking here doing nothing….Anne, you don't think Queenie'll come over, do you?"
"No, I don't. She's got much too much to do out there."
"You know, that's what I'm afraid of, more than anything, Queenie's coming. She'll tell me I funked. She thinks I funked. She thinks that's what's the matter with me."
"She doesn't. She knows it's your body, not you. Your nerves are shaken to bits, that's all."
"I didn't funk, Anne." (He said it for the hundredth time.) "I mean I stuck it all right. I went back after I had shell-shock the first time—straight back into the trenches. It was at the very end of the fighting that I got it again. Then I couldn't go back. I couldn't move."
"I know, Colin, I know."
"Does Queenie know?"
"Of course she does. She understands perfectly. Why, she sees men with shell-shock every day. She knows you were splendid."
"I wasn't. But I wasn't as bad as she thinks me. … Don't let her see me if she comes back."
"She won't come."
"She will. She will. She'll get leave some day. Tell her not to come. Tell her she can't see me. Say I'm off my head. Any old lie that'll stop her."
"Don't think about her."
"I can't help thinking. She said such beastly things. You can't think what disgusting things she said."
"She says them to everybody. She doesn't mean them."