FIVE: THE FROST HELD
Thefrost held. On Sunday morning the little boys lingered round the edges of the Broad Ditch on their way to chapel, and Mr. Dunnock, hurrying to the vestry, noticed Mr. Lambert’s foxhound puppy running across the ice.
“There will be skating,” he said to himself, “and I have not lived all my life in the fens for nothing. I can still show the younger men something,” and he decided to ask Anne to cut sandwiches. They would spend the morrow at Bluntisham:—a long walk, but one which would repay them with the finest stretch of ice in Huntingdonshire, and at Bluntisham Mr. Dunnock would see the best figure skaters and be seen by them.
After evening service he tapped the barometer, asking himself if it would be tempting Providence if he were to look at the skates that evening. There might be a screw missing, a strap needed, or a broken bootlace, and such little things were best attended to overnight, he reflected, trying to conceal his eagerness, for hewould not be happy until he had handled his skates.
“They will be in the box-room,” he said, taking a candle with him from the hall, but in the box-room many things met his eye which reminded him of his life at Ely. It had been a wretched subordinate existence, supporting his wife and daughter on a hundred and twenty pounds a year, but as he looked back on it such things were forgotten, and it seemed to him that his life there had been a happy one, for it had been shared with the woman he loved. Setting down his candle, he turned over the Japanese screen, which he had always liked for the storks flying across it, embroidered in silver thread. His wife had intended to re-cover the screen, for the storks were tarnished, and the silver threads unravelling, but she had died before she had found a suitable piece of stuff. “She is in Heaven,” he said mechanically, and was surprised once again that the words with which he comforted others held no consolation for him.
“An old age passed together would have brought a closer understanding between us,” he said, suddenly speaking his innermost thought, which he had not admitted to himself before, for the clergyman’s tragedy was never to have hadthe conviction of perfect understanding or intimacy, even with his wife.
“In the middle years of life we live too much in the affairs of the day, and a child troubles the mind of its mother. So many burdens to be borne, so many duties to be fulfilled.... We were too occupied to look into each other’s hearts, and old age, the sweetest portion of life if it be filled with harmony, and the happiness of memories shared in common, old age is reserved for me only; a lonely and miserable old age. Now that I have lost Mavis, intimacy is impossible with anyone else, and I feel myself growing far away from everyone, and farthest of all from Anne. She reminds me too closely of her mother; I find it painful to be with her and I find her youth as tiresome as she finds my hasty temper.”
Mr. Dunnock told himself that such feelings must be controlled, but he had said that before, and had no faith that the strangeness which seemed to be growing upon him could be overcome. “Death will release me, and I must console myself with the hope that Mavis is waiting for me in Heaven, that she will fold me in her wings, and take me to herself without a word of reproach. When I hear the birds singing in the mornings they repeat that promise, and once or twice I have had the conviction that when Ilooked out of our bedroom window I should see angels perched in the branches of the trees.”
The three pairs of skates lay on a shelf, the blades had been smeared with vaseline and wrapped in greaseproof paper, but the boots were dusty, and stretched stiffly over the boxwood trees.
“Yes, yes, the skates will be all right: there will be nothing amiss with them,” for they had been greased byherhands; it wasshewho had laid them aside after the frost last winter a few weeks before her death.
The road to Bluntisham was long, and, as she walked with her father, Anne thought about bicycles. Her father had once had a bicycle, but that was many years ago; he appeared to have no wish to possess another, and Anne had never summoned up sufficient courage to buy one for herself, though the price of a bicycle was lying idly in the savings bank at the Post Office.
“I shall certainly buy a bicycle,” she thought. “It is madness not to have got one before; a bicycle would give me the freedom for which I pine; what the horse is to the Arab of the desert, a bicycle is to a girl in my position. I could ride to Cambridge; in Cambridge I could go to concerts, and even plays; I could ride to Peterborough.”But she did not finish her thought, for she was uncertain what Peterborough would give her.
“If I had a bicycle I should make friends and instead of wasting my life like a fool, dreaming about acrobats at a travelling circus, I should meet Cambridge undergraduates, and receive invitations to play tennis, or to join in a picnic party on the river.”
While Anne was thinking of all the changes which would come into her life when she bought herself a bicycle, her father was enjoying the exercise of walking.
“I am a great pedestrian,” he had said to the Bishop, and although he scarcely ever went outside his house if he could avoid it, the saying was true, and it was all his daughter could do to keep up with him.
Bluntisham Church stands as the last outpost over the flooded fen country; a little beyond, at Earith, is the starting point of the Bedford Level, which runs for thirty miles to King’s Lynn without a hedge, or a tree, or even as much as a mole-hill to break the flat expanse—green all the summer, but under water, or rather under ice when the Dunnocks approached it.
The father and daughter had in common a great liking for the fens; they loved the blackpeaty earth, the vast level expanse of sodden land, which looked flatter than the sea, when viewed from the high banks of a causeway running through it, or the embankments of the Bedford River raised up above the fields which it drained; they liked even the squalid villages on each side of the level, the low houses clustering wherever a hillock projecting into the fenland made it possible for man to build. But better than the Bedford Level of the present day, they loved to think of the fens of the past, and of the struggle to reclaim them which had begun with the war between the Romans and the Iceni, flitting from islet to islet in their osier coracles, sheltering behind the willows, and making a night attack on the legionaries posted to defend the bridge at Huntingdon.
As they drew near Bluntisham they began to speak of these things, and Mr. Dunnock soon passed from the invasions of the Danes to the prosperous farmers who tilled the lands reclaimed by the Romans until the twelfth or fourteenth century, when the fields relapsed into fenland, and soon they reached the great days of the seventeenth century, for, as Mr. Dunnock said, the history of the Commonwealth is to be found in the Fens of Huntingdonshire, and the Commonwealth itself may be regarded as a mereepisode in the struggle between the Uplanders and the Lowlanders.
Although Mr. Dunnock was an Uplander by birth, and a High Churchman, he was proud of the part that the inhabitants of the swamps had played in English history.
“Without the three men of Godmanchester there would have been no Magna Charta, and if Charles had not tried to drain the Fens, there is little doubt he would have won the Civil War,” he said, and went on telling Anne how as a young man Oliver must have made the reflection that his family had been ruined by the Stuarts, who had encouraged their hopes and given them nothing. It was a good reason for him to repent of his loose life, and become more determined a Puritan. Soon he was stirring up trouble against the church in St. Ives; then his uncle, Sir Thomas Steward, died, leaving him his heir, and Oliver removed to Ely, but the temptation to make trouble still persisted, and when one next hears of him he was giving money to the Fen Dwellers and helping them to resist the drainage schemes of the King’s Adventurers.
“Adventurers’ Fen is called after them,” said Anne, and her father answered that it might well be so, and they stopped for a moment to look out towards the fen in question.
“At that time the people in the fens lived by fishing and wild fowling,” said Mr. Dunnock. “Every week during the winter a train of waggons left Linton for London loaded with wild duck,” and he continued his story of how when the King was engaged in reclaiming the fen, the birds were driven from their nesting grounds, and the great decoys woven of osiers were being left high and dry, so that the lowlanders foresaw that they would have to abandon a mode of livelihood which had endured since the Iceni. They had no desire to plough and reap, and the drained lands did not prove fertile until a century afterwards, when the farmers were shown how to dig through the peat and quarry clay to mix with it, after which it became the most fruitful soil in England. Oliver Cromwell had taken up their cause, and later, when the Duke of Manchester was letting victory slip out of the hands of the Parliament, it was Cromwell who impeached him, and then, seeking an army, turned for his New Model to the Fens. It was Cromwell who equipped the Lowlanders, and headed the Eastern Association, and it was the Eastern Association which had won the Civil War, and so the Cromwells had their revenge on the Stuarts. But though the lowlanders had been made use of, the work of drainage went on, andthe Ironsides who had been enlisted to resist the draining of the fens were betrayed by old Ironsides himself, the Lord Protector.
But by the time Mr. Dunnock had reached this crowning example of the perfidy of the figure he so much hated, they had turned the corner below Bluntisham Church, and saw before them the great expanse of ice covered with the descendants of Cromwell’s Ironsides.
The field beside the road was full of motorcars, of farmers’ gigs, waggonettes, and grazing ponies, and at the entrance stood the farmer asking a penny from every person who went on the ice. No crop had ever yielded so handsome a profit as his flooded water-meadows, and no fenman in Cromwell’s day would have fought more bitterly against a scheme which would have kept it drained during the winter months.
The noise of hundreds of pairs of skates on the ice came to their ears as they entered the field,—a grumbling sound that had within it a note which rang as clear as a bell, and they sat down to unlace their boots, refusing the offer of a chair which would mean spending another penny.
Anne was the first on the ice, and as her father watched her hesitating strokes the feeling of affection, which the conversation about Cromwellhad aroused, gave place to one of shame and irritation.
“Am I to be tied to such a limpet all day?” he asked himself as he had so often asked himself before when skating with his wife; then, without giving his daughter another look, he hobbled rapidly to the edge of the ice and was off himself, slipping away as easily as a swallow that recovers the freedom of its element after beating against the window-panes. His own strokes were as effortless as the flickering of a bird’s wing, and it was impossible for the onlookers watching him to say what kept him in motion. Mr. Dunnock never appeared to strike off, but leant gracefully forward, lifting a leg slightly to cross his feet, and, changing his weight from one leg to the other, he flew lazily across the ice, picking his way without appearing to observe the existence of the clumsy young farmers who doubled up, and, with their hands clasped behind their backs, dashed round and round at top speed on their long fen skates. Soon everyone had noticed the tall clergyman with his beard tucked under a white woollen muffler, and many paused to watch as he began figure-skating in the real English style. Eight after eight was drawn with the slow precision of a sleepy rook wheeling in the evening sky, before descending ina perfect spiral to roost on the topmost bough of the high elm, and indeed the black-coated figure forgot for a few moments that he was an elderly vicar on a pair of skates, and believed himself to be circling in space among a vast flock of waterfowl flying over the fens. It seemed to him as if at intervals a V-shaped band of wild duck flashed past him, each with its neck craned forward, and beating furiously with its short, clumsy wings; a flock of curlew was all about him, and would wheel suddenly in its tracks with a flash of white, then a stray snipe corkscrewed past, a pair of greedy seagulls chased each other, and two roseate terns revolved round each other on their nuptial flight....
Half an hour had gone by when his dream was interrupted by a young man with pink cheeks and rather protruding black eyes, who skated up to him and addressed him by name. It was Mr. Yockney, Dr. Boulder’s assistant, whose professional duties brought him to Dry Coulter when there was a birth, or death, but rarely at other times:—the villagers were uncommonly healthy, and on the rare occasions when they took cold, or developed inflammation of the lungs, they doctored each other with gaseous mixture, or turpentine and honey.
“Ah, so you are here,” said Mr. Dunnock,shaking hands warmly, for young Yockney had attended Mrs. Dunnock in her last illness, and his sympathy and tenderness to the dying woman would never be forgotten.
“Yes, Doctor Boulder gave me the day off. This frost is so healthy we have no patients left; but it’s an ill-wind that blows nobody any good, and I would not miss a day’s skating like this for the world.”
Mr. Dunnock said that Doctor Boulder must write to the Clerk of the Weather about the deplorably healthy winter. Mr. Yockney laughed, and then both of them remembered that it must be lunch time.
“Come, Yockney, you must join us,” said Mr. Dunnock, and Anne, coming up at that moment, added her invitation, which the young man was glad enough to accept.
A line of trestles had been put up on the ice, and crowds were waiting round the shoemaker’s, and the men who let out skates for hire, but most popular of all were the sellers of hot potatoes and roast chestnuts with their buckets of glowing coals. Mr. Yockney purchased three steaming cups of cocoa, while Anne went to fetch the satchel full of sandwiches, and in a little while they were sitting on the edge of a grassy bank.
“I have been seeing a friend of yours, MissDunnock,” said the doctor after the second sandwich. “Little Rachel Sotheby, and I fear that it may have been your doing that I had to be called in, for I understand it was you who took her to the circus. She caught a chill on the way back. Oh, no, it is nothing in the least serious, though she is rather delicate.”
Anne expressed her concern, and hastened to explain to her father how she had met the Sothebys in the tea-shop, and had taken the little girl to see the circus.
“Extraordinary chap that old grocer is,” said Mr. Yockney. “He’d have been a rich man by now, I fancy, if it had not been for that good-for-nothing son of his. Just fancy, he told me that he was spending all his money on making his son a gentleman!”
This seemed to Mr. Dunnock an excellent joke, and he laughed heartily. He disliked the grocer for his assurance, and his cheerfulness, and his nonconformity, and was ready to hear anything to his disadvantage.
“The great news,” continued Mr. Yockney, “only I expect you know it, is that the prodigal is expected home next week. He’s been in Paris, and has been going the pace a bit, I fancy.”
“Oh, I am so glad,” said Anne with real interestshowing in her voice. “I have heard so much about him from Mr. Sotheby, and I quite look forward to seeing what he’s like. He sounds quite an interesting person.”
A frown gathered on her father’s face.
“Yes, we are all eager to see him,” said the doctor, and then the tone of his voice changed so completely that Anne could see that it was another, and a serious Mr. Yockney who was speaking, although she observed that his eyes bulged just as much when he was serious as when he was only talking lightly.
“If you ask me, Miss Dunnock, I should say that young man is the very worst type of rotter. Look at the old grocer sweating away at sixty, look at his mother still serving in the shop, look at his little sister with patches on the sides of her boots, while Master Richard is learning to be agentlemanin Paris! There’s no word too bad for him. I should like him to know what decent people think of that sort of gentility!”
“You had better tell him, my dear fellow,” said Mr. Dunnock languidly. “It would do him a world of good, I’ve no doubt. But I must say it is probably not the fault of the son but because of the vanity of the father. Over and over again I have seen a young oaf of that descriptionproduced by a couple of vain and silly parents who ruin their children’s lives by denying them nothing.”
“But no decent chap, you must admit....” said Mr. Yockney.
“You think the son is to blame because you are nearer his age and imagine yourself in his position,” said Mr. Dunnock with a smile. “But I, as a father, imagine myself in the position of our excellent grocer. If I were to bring Anne up to expect luxuries, and to suppose that she was born to lead an idle, useless existence, it would not be her fault if she grew up a silly and discontented woman.”
Even without this argument Anne was feeling decidedly uncomfortable, and a clumsy piece of gallantry from Mr. Yockney added to her irritation.
“Stupid, coarse, hidebound brute! Do your eyes bulge because of your manly virtue?” she said under her breath, but she had to confess that there was something in what the doctor had said. She had not noticed the patches on Rachel’s boots herself, and she felt her respect for Mr. Yockney as a doctor increasing with her dislike of him as a man. If it were true, it was disgraceful that Rachel should not have a sound pair of boots, but it was absurd to object to Mrs.Sotheby serving in the shop; would she have been happier at a hydro in Harrogate?
Mr. Dunnock had continued a whimsical description of how he might have brought up his daughter so that she would have been discontented with her life; the doctor replied, but finally they agreed that both of the Sothebys, father and son, were very much to blame, when Anne remarked, in a voice which trembled, that she was fond of the Sothebys and that she thought that it was very fine of them to sacrifice themselves in order to make their son a great artist.
“I can trust you not to be taken in by the wordgentleman, Anne, but I am afraid you may be by the wordartist. Art, you know, Mr. Yockney, covers a multitude of sins.”
“The best definition of art I have ever heard,” said the doctor, “is that it is the opposite of work.” Mr. Dunnock laughed approvingly, and Mr. Yockney went on, his eyes bulging more than ever with the seriousness of his appeal.
“No, Miss Dunnock, whatever you may say, I know that the kind of caddish selfishness we have been talking about is absolutely abhorrent to you, as it is to all decent people. I quite agree with you that there is something pathetic in theold Sothebys, but there is nothing to be said for the son.”
“Well, they seem to be an unusually happy family,” answered Anne, feeling that she had lost her temper.
“I am too old to play at Happy Families any longer,” said her father with a titter. “I shall go back to the ice and leave Mr. Yockney and you to settle the momentous question of Master Grits the Grocer’s son.”