SEVEN: THE BURNT FARM
TheMarch gale continued for several days; the daffodils were broken, the hyacinths in the border laid low, but one morning Anne awoke to find that not a breath of wind was stirring in the elms, and after an hour or so the sun was blazing with the heat of June. On the breakfast table layThe Church Times, and she trembled with emotion when she saw it in her father’s hands.
“I must speak to him,” she said to herself, “I must speak to him now,” but she did not speak, consoling herself for her lack of resolution with the thought that the earliest answers to her advertisement could not arrive for two days, since they were to be forwarded from the office in Fleet Street; she had not given her name and address, but had used a box number.
“I will speak to him to-morrow,” she said to herself. “For I would like to enjoy one day of perfect spring weather before I leave Dry Coulter, and our conversation is certain to upset us.”
She waited eagerly until the birds’ breakfast left her free to take the newspaper into her hands. Her advertisement was in, and reading the modest three lines Anne felt her heart swell with the triumph of authorship, and she ran upstairs withThe Church Timesin her hand to read the announcement over and over to herself in private.
“There is no turning back now!” she exclaimed. “I have shown my independence; I have taken the first step, and nothing now can keep me from achieving my purpose.”
Anne’s eyes flashed as she turned to the looking-glass; and the eager look she met there intoxicated her: at that moment she almost suffocated with the sense of her own power. The blood rushed to her head, and she clenched her fists, and ground her teeth in the effort to remain calm.
“Have you seenThe Church Times?” called Mr. Dunnock, coming back from watching the birds.
“Here it is, father,” she answered, and running downstairs surrendered it to him without a tremor. Her father took it absentmindedly, saying as he did so:
“I think there is some straw somewhere, my dear. Would you ask Noah to scatter it aboutthe lawn? It will be useful for the sparrows; the nearest rick is several hundred yards away, a long journey for them, almost an impossible one if the wind should veer to the east. On a calm day like this, it is not so important, but there are not many calm days in March, and in any case it will save a great deal of trouble.”
At another moment Anne might have been vexed at her father’s solicitude for the hated sparrows, but she was in a mood to forgive his follies, and she ran off at once to the potting-shed to find the straw, and scattered it on the lawn herself.
All the morning she was beside herself with excitement; and she found it hard to answer Maggie sensibly when she spoke of their plan of whitewashing the scullery. When the proposal had been put forward a fortnight before by Anne, it had seemed to mark an epoch, but Maggie found that it was suddenly brushed on one side, her feelings were hurt, the date was left uncertain, and Anne had fled out into the garden before she had time to question her again.
The first tulips were standing stiffly to attention in their field-grey uniforms, their buds unopened, but the girl could not think of tulips as she paced up and down the borders. Her life at the vicarage was coming to an end, and shemust speak to her father, but after thinking over what she would say for an hour, she could find no words, and came to the conclusion that it would be unwise to open the subject before she had decided where she was going. Her father would be certain to raise objections, and they would appear more formidable if her plans were not fixed. It would be better for both of them if the parting were to come suddenly.
“I will go to him in his study,” she said, “when my bag is packed,” and with this settled in her mind she felt happy for the first time that morning. She had come out to enjoy the warm spring weather, but, as soon as she had decided not to speak to her father, and before she had time to look about her, she saw Maggie waving from the kitchen door and knew that it was time for lunch.
After the strain of making plans about her future she found the meal a pleasant one, emotion had given her an appetite, and, as she ate, Anne enjoyed listening to her father inveighing against the stupidity of old Noah.
“You would scarcely believe it,” said Mr. Dunnock, “but within half an hour of your having scattered the straw, that old fool was sweeping it up. I ordered him to stop, but he would not listen to me until I had taken him bythe arm and had explained my reasons. But so blind is the prejudice of the rustics about here, that he said that he would as soon poison the sparrows as not. I was forced to speak to him very severely. It is his first lapse since the question of the strawberry nets last year.”
The mild sunlit air was full of bees as Anne left the vicarage after lunch; the celandines were gaping in the sunlight on the bank above the Broad Ditch. Wagtails ran round the water’s edge, goldfinches flew up into the elms, and yellowhammers trotted before her on the road.
As she passed the Post Office she remembered Richard Sotheby and his strange telegram, and tired of the turmoil of her own emotion, she welcomed the memory. “I am tired of thy little love affairs and of my own love. I consent. Write.” And pondering over these words she asked herself what kind of creature the Grandison might be to whom they were addressed.
A rich woman in Paris, it seemed reasonable to suppose, who had been his mistress.... “It is to secure her love that little Rachel is neglected.” Anne wondered what their life had been in Paris, and slowly a picture of Miss Grandison formed itself clearly in her mind—a fair woman she must be, with a white skin like the flesh of a hazel nut, with fair almost colourless hair andlight blue eyes, a thick, slightly aquiline nose.... That certainly was Miss Grandison, and at the opera she wore diamonds and was wrapped in white fur. On summer evenings her habit must be to drive with Sotheby out of Paris in her limousine to have supper in the open air, of lobsters and cream, raspberries and iced champagne.... As the night drew on she would become bored, and drag young Sotheby after her to a vast hotel in Paris where they could dance all night. The men in their starched shirtfronts would turn pale, and wilt in the small hours of the morning under the tropical palms, but La Grandison would dance on and on, ruthlessly, first with one man and then with another. Richard Sotheby would be forgotten, a young man from the Peruvian Embassy would escort her home, while Richard, disconsolate and brokenhearted, would be left to pay for the buckets of iced champagne, and the mounds of uneaten sandwiches.... No wonder, with such a woman, that he should declare he was weary of her love affairs and of his love. But there was a hint of jealousy in his bitterness.
Anne smiled contentedly. Richard Sotheby’s telegram enabled her to see her own life with more philosophy. Soon she forgot to think, and walked slowly onwards, happy in feeling the softair caress her cheek, in hearing the chatter of starlings in the orchard trees, in looking about her in idleness. Ewes lay indolently on the green; their lambs were already strong on their legs, and she watched the play of the pair nearest to her, at one moment butting each other, in the next skipping behind each other, or mounting on one another in amorous curvets and then, suddenly indifferent, breaking off their play.
The stream was still swollen, though rain had not fallen for a week. Anne crossed it by the little bridge beside the water splash, and made her way across the green, the sheep scattering as she passed. On each side of the old track that led to the burnt farmhouse, the blackthorn bushes were in flower. The masses of frail blossom were full of the humming of bees, but as yet there were no wild flowers in the hedge, only an occasional celandine shone on the bank like a dropped sovereign.
The fields on each side were hired by a farmer living at a distance; they were still cultivated and kept in some sort of repair, but much had gone to ruin since the farmhouse had been burnt. The hedges had not been cut for years; there were forest trees in them, and holes big enough for bullocks to wander through. The great stretch of pasture by the farm itself, thehome meadows where the prize herd of spotted cows used to be milked in the open, that had gone out of cultivation, and was full of hawthorn bushes, of the trailing briars of dog-roses and of brambles. The finest pasture which had yielded the richest butter was become no more than a covert where the French partridges nested. Of the farmhouse itself there was nothing left but a few of the walls, heaps of plaster where the nettles grew in summer, and one or two blackened beams. The vegetable garden was a wilderness with a quarter of an acre of horseradish and matted gooseberry bushes buried in convolvulvus. At one side, on a smooth expanse of turf, stood the old square dove house, as sound as the day it had been built, and the pigeons came and went as they had always done, for the dove house was still used as a granary, and the pigeons were the perquisite of a farmhand.
As Anne came in front of the house, it seemed strange to her to see the fine iron gates, with great ilexes on either side of them, and the flagged path that ran so cleanly up to a mere heap of broken bricks, where the front door had been. Not a weed had taken root on the pathway, not a bramble strayed across it, and even the pond, by whose bricked side it ran, was clearwater. Irises grew there and flowered in the summer time; on the grassy bank opposite there were daffodils in bloom. Anne let herself in at the iron gates, thinking to herself that it was very strange that no farmhouse had been rebuilt there on the site of the old one, that no labourer had been allowed to work the rich garden as his allotment, and that it was impossible to guess why everything should have been let go to ruin except the square dove house of red brick, which must have stood for three centuries and which looked as if it would stand for as many more. All about there were the traces of a former fruitfulness, a great walnut overshadowed one of the ancient yards by the edge of the pond, and on the other side, hidden in an impenetrable thicket of bullaces, giant pear trees and plum suckers, laced about with bramble and dog-rose, was the orchard. The plums were bursting into a fine blow, and Anne wondered whether the boys came there to rob the fruit, or whether the plums and apples fell of their own weight, or hung until the wasps had hollowed out the last of them. She wondered how it was that she had never met anyone by the Burnt Farm, never a child nor a village labourer. She had not seen it before in spring, though in the summer it had been a favourite haunt of hers; and she had gatheredroses there late on into the autumn from a bush which had not yet gone wild. As she walked up the path she smelt a breath of wood smoke, and turning the corner of the house by what had been the chimney stack, she saw tongues of flame shooting up, and heard the crackle of sticks. “A tramp, or perhaps an encampment of gipsies,” she said to herself, and would have drawn back, but at that instant she caught sight of Rachel Sotheby coming from the orchard with an armful of dry sticks.
“Why, Rachel, are you having a picnic here?” she asked, seeing a kettle on the fire.
Rachel came running to her with eyes that shone with excitement; she had lost her grave look of self-possession, so that it was natural for Anne to stoop to kiss her for the second time, seduced by her wild look and her tangled curls.
“Yes, Miss Dunnock. Do you come here often? I have never been here before, but my brother brought me. He is sketching the house from the other side.”
Anne would have taken her leave on hearing of Richard Sotheby’s presence, but Rachel would not let her go before she had gathered her some daffodils from the far side of the pond, and had shown her the white violets growingunder the walnut tree. The kettle had not boiled when they came back to the fire, and as Richard Sotheby was nowhere to be seen, she sat down for a little while, talking to the little girl while she heaped up the sticks and unpacked the basket. A minute passed when suddenly she heard a step, and, jumping up, saw that Richard Sotheby was standing a yard or two behind her. He was bare-headed, frowning, his lips twitching, and seeing Anne at the same moment as she saw him, he gave his sister rather a puzzled glance.
“This is my brother Richard,” said Rachel, looking up from blowing the fire. “Richard, this is Miss Dunnock.”
The young man’s face broke into smiles at her name, and he held out his hand.
“I am very pleased to meet you,” said Anne, taking it. “Now I must be getting on. Good-bye, Rachel.”
“Please don’t go,” said the grocer’s son. “I have finished work for to-day; the light has changed, and I have been wanting to meet you. I want to ask you all about how your doorstep was ploughed up. I shall never meet anyone else to whom such a thing has happened, and I want to know what it felt like.”
Anne was too much taken aback by this to know what to answer, but just at that momentthey were interrupted by Rachel’s saying that the tea was made.
Young Sotheby repeated his invitation, and Anne sat down on a block of stone which had once supported the corner of a haystack, feeling very foolish, shy, and ashamed of her shyness, but she was determined that she would not run away after what he had said. She had blushed crimson when he had spoken of Plough Monday, but it had pleased her to hear something spoken of openly about which so much must have been said behind her back.
“Yes. Our doorstep was ploughed up,” she said, and her voice sounded to the others as though she were angry. “Why does it interest you?”
“It was very wicked of the men to do it,” said Rachel suddenly. “And you ought not to speak of such a thing to Miss Dunnock, Richard.”
The grocer’s son laughed at his sister’s indignant interruption. “Rachel is a great friend of yours, Miss Dunnock. I shall have to apologize to her, but I hope I have not offended you also.”
“No. Not at all. I want to talk about it, Rachel,” she said, looking at the child. The little girl’s mouth was trembling.
“That don’t matter,” she said, almost crying. “Richard did not ought to have spoken to youof that thing. Mother told everyone that what they done was no better than if they were heathens, and that no one was to say a word about it. No one would have ever but our Richard.”
Anne took Rachel on to her knees, and hugged the child close; at that moment she was near to tears herself; for the first time in her life she understood that she had neighbours who loved her, and did not think of her only as a queer girl, and the daughter of a queer clergyman.
“Sit here, close to me,” she said, letting the child go. “And let me talk to your brother, because he is very clever and is....” It was on the tip of her tongue to say “a gentleman,” but she altered it to: “because I am sure he would never be unkind.”
Rachel looked at him in a way which threatened that if he were unkind to Miss Dunnock there would be terrible consequences, and Richard Sotheby poured out the tea in silence, until Anne asked him again why he was interested in the ploughing up of the doorstep.
“Because it was, as my mother said, a heathenish act, and I imagine that, like most heathen things, it must have been beautiful.”
“Yes, it was beautiful,” replied Anne instantly. “It was so beautiful that I was fascinatedwatching it, and though I was crying with shame, I was glad that they had done it.”
Richard Sotheby grinned with interest as Anne said this, and nodded his head several times.
“Like a rape,” he said under his breath. His words were not meant for Anne to hear, but she had caught the word, and for some minutes did not know what to say or where to look, but sat praying with all her soul that she would not blush. At last the danger passed, and she went on to speak of the plough wobbling a little as it ran through the earth, and of the broad, shiny backs of the three chestnut horses, and the handsome face opposite her quickened with pleasure as she told how it happened after a fall of snow, and that there was snow on the horses’ manes and on the carters’ caps.
When she had described the whole scene, he pressed her for further details, and soon she found that she was speaking of her feelings after the event, and that he was listening in silence. She pulled herself up suddenly, unwilling to tell him so much about herself, and there was a long silence, for the young man did not press her with questions, but the silence was broken at last by Anne saying: “But you cannot understand it unless I were to tell you about my father.”
“Of course it came about through him in the first place,” said Richard Sotheby reflectively, and Anne would have begun to speak of her father and her feelings for him if she had not felt Rachel shiver, and then she perceived that the sun was sinking low, and that it had grown cold for sitting out of doors.
“That is too long a story,” she said, rising to her feet. “You would not understand it, and if you did, it would bore you. But it is late now, and I must be going home.”
“You must promise to tell me another time,” said the grocer’s son. “If the weather keeps fine I shall be working here every afternoon, until about half-past three when the light changes. Come and have tea with me to-morrow and finish your story.”
Anne promised to come, and then gathering up her flowers and saying good-bye to Rachel, she hurried off, for young Sotheby had to go back to his easel and put it away in the dove house, and she had no wish to be seen walking home with him.