SIX: WINGED SEEDS
“Whyis it?” Anne Dunnock asked herself next day, “that my father can be pleasant to other people but not to me? Though to be sure I fancied yesterday that his pleasantness to Mr. Yockney was a trifle vulgar, while his unpleasantness to me has at all events the merit of being sincere and well-bred.” And Anne told herself that the only explanation must be that she was as much a burden to her father as he was to her. “But only I realize it,” she burst out. “For I am young enough to recognize the truth, and to welcome it; he does not understand himself or other people; all his life he has hidden his head in the sand like an ostrich, and after all what else can one expect of a clergyman?”
Her anger had lasted since the conversation about the Sothebys, for her irritation during the lunch beside the ice had been quickly followed by fatigue, which had intensified her resentment. After the unaccustomed exercise her ankles seemed to have turned to jelly, and the eight-mile walk from Bluntisham had been torture to her.
“Never again,” she said to herself; and when Mr. Lambert had stopped at the door next morning to offer her a place in his gig (he was going to Bluntisham for the skating), she had refused, and her father had accepted in her place.
“If I want any skating I shall go on the Broad Ditch,” she had said, a remark which had estranged Mr. Dunnock more than her sullenness the previous day had done, and he drove off with a hurt look which said: “You are no daughter of mine to speak of skating in such a way before a stranger!”
When the gig was out of sight Anne went indoors to write a letter to Coventry for a catalogue of bicycles.
The catalogue came, but though she selected a machine, she hesitated to post the letter ordering it, and after a week’s indecision she tore it up, since the thought had come to her that a bicycle would tie her more firmly than ever to her life with her father, and this life seemed every day to become less endurable.
A thaw followed quickly on the second day of skating, and after that rain and sleet fell for several days. Mr. Dunnock appeared to be equally disgusted by the weather and by his daughter, and retired to his study, scarcely aword being exchanged throughout the day except at breakfast, when Mr. Dunnock always reminded Anne of her duties in the parish.
“A bicycle would rivet me to my present life,” said Anne to herself. “What a chain is to a yard-dog, a bicycle is to the daughter of a clergyman! A bicycle would give me a certain radius of movement; it would fill the emptiness of my life; but I want things that no bicycle can give me. Yes, I want books, music, beautiful clothes, and more than any of these I want what they stand for: that is, the society of intelligent men and cultivated women. Such hopes are vain, I know: I shall never succeed in ‘unwinding the accursed chain’—still I shall attempt it and the best way to set about it is certainly not by entangling myself with a bicycle. Even if I had to live in solitude I should prefer independence, and that I can achieve, for the world is full of women who earn their own living. Ten pounds is more valuable to me than a machine with plated rims or a little oil-bath; no one ever ran away from home on a bicycle, and I shall want all my savings for a railway ticket and lodgings in London while I look about me.”
So the letter ordering the bicycle was torn up, and the catalogue itself cast into the fire, since it was a temptation to the flesh, one whichassailed her particularly in the evenings; the ten pounds was replaced to her credit in the Savings Bank, and several days were spent in turning over the best way of earning her living.
“I shall go away from here, that is clear,” she said. “I have known that ever since the ploughmen came that snowy morning. Here the accursed chain can never be unwound, but when I am living a free life, among new people, and my father is forgotten, I shall escape, and speaking easily to everyone I shall be accepted by them; I shall love; I shall be beloved....” Anne shook her head and a shower of hairpins flew out on to the floor.
“Damn the elastic stuff!” she cried. “Why do I endure it a moment longer?” and, tears coming into her eyes, she started up and seized a pair of scissors out of her workbasket.
“There will be time enough for that later on,” and the scissors were dropped as she told herself that she must plan for the future, and not dissipate her emotions in the present.
Yet another week was spent in considering how she could earn her living, and March came in like a lamb before she had arrived at any practical decision.
“The birds sing and build their nests, soon they will be laying their eggs, and then fatherwill be in agonies whenever a young thrush hops across the lawn, lest it should fall between Pussy’s paws. The snowdrops are over long ago, the hyacinths have broken through the ground, their fat buds look like pine-cones. First came the daffodils, the double ones, and then the single. The peaches are showing their pink petals on the walls of the dove house, but I remain where I am, I cannot flower, unfold my petals or spread my wings....”
When her father spoke to her of the migrant birds flitting northwards through Africa and Spain and Italy and France, from bush to bush, twenty yards by twenty yards, to find their way to England’s shores “where alone they find the happiness of love,” said Mr. Dunnock, “and where alone they sing,” Anne vowed fiercely that before the last of the migrants arrived she would be gone herself.
“The cuckoo will be here in six weeks,” said she to herself. “The nightingale will be here a week after; I shall stay to hear one but not the other. Which it will be I cannot tell, for sometimes the nightingale comes before the cuckoo, and that they say is the luckier. I hope I shall hear the nightingale before I go and not the cuckoo; it would be an omen that I should find a true lover waiting for me, and not a deceiver.”
The spring pleased her and excited her, and an hour or two was spent happily searching for the first wild flowers, and gathering the sweet-scented white violets which grew under the old apple trees, but meeting her father at lunch and hearing him speak to her of the Sunday school reminded her of her resolution to leave him, and at that moment the beauty of the springtime seemed nothing but a reflection of the weakness of her character.
“How can I leave him? He is helpless, and I am useful to him. Who will teach in the Sunday school? Who will keep up the thin pretence that he cares what happens to his parishioners when I am gone? Without me who will order his meals, and who will keep a watch on the bacon? The Pattles will rob him; they will eat him out of house and home.” But though it seemed that it was impossible for her to leave her father helpless, and though Anne knew that she loved him, she was soon going over her old arguments about how a girl can earn her living.
All her experiences had been no more than to pour out tea, and to teach in the Sunday school. Other women of her age she knew were able to be bank clerks, or the secretaries of business men, they worked in Government offices, they did typewriting, indeed there seemed nothing thatwomen did not do, but Anne doubted very much whether she could become a useful person of that kind. She had received what Mr. Dunnock had called “the education of a lady” (that was no education at all), she could not add up columns of figures, or use a typewriter, or write in shorthand. All she could do was to keep the children quiet, to tell them Bible stories about Balaam’s ass, and Daniel in the den of lions; she could order the groceries, check the washing, arrange a bowl of flowers, speak boarding-school French and struggle somehow through a piece of Schumann—letting the hammer notes sound rather weak as her fingers tired.
To earn her living seemed impossible unless she were to succeed with her fashion plates, or were to exchange one Sunday school for another. That was always possible, and in another parish she would meet with a curate who would ask her to marry him, for nowhere could a curate find a better wife.
“Better a bicycle than a curate!” she exclaimed. “I would rather cut my throat than be the wife of a clergyman. Other duties perhaps I might face, but I have not the courage to work all my life for parishioners who prefer to go to their own chapels, or to the public-house. It is the fashion plates or suicide.”
But then Anne remembered that there were many elderly ladies in the world whose incomes permitted the keeping of a donkey-carriage, with a companion to walk beside it. “Why should I not be such a companion?” she asked. “In the winter her sciatica will require a change of climate, and we shall go away together to the Riviera, or to Egypt.” And the rest of the afternoon was spent dreaming of the music she would be hearing at Rome, of seeing the Sphinx by moonlight and visiting Tutankhamen’s grave.
By the evening she had decided to put an advertisement inThe Church Times, and at night lay awake repeating to herself the magic words which would bring her freedom: “A well-educated girl, daughter of a clergyman, requires situation as companion to a lady of means.” No, that did not sound well: should she call herself “a respectable girl”? No, not a respectable girl—that smacked of the kitchen. “A quiet girl, with an old-fashioned education, desires to become the paid companion of a lady.” Nothing would do, but nevertheless the advertisement would have to be sent, and finding sleep impossible, Anne took pen and paper and wrote first one sentence and then another until she had covered several sheets.
Next morning all her efforts seemed vain, but at last she decided on sending the sentence which seemed to her to be the clearest. “Young lady, who has enjoyed a religious upbringing, wishes to see the world as the paid companion of a lady.” There was nothing more required but a covering letter to the newspaper, and a postal order.
Anne put on her boots and hurried out into the blustering March wind. It had broken the first hyacinth, and the daffodils were lying flat on the earth. How the wind roared! It was pleasant to be out of the house, for the chimneys had been smoking. The grass on the lawn was lashed into white streaks by the wind before which the hens ran sideways, like old ladies crossing the road. There was a thick scum at one side of the broad ditch, a scum of withered catkins fallen from the black poplars. Catkins hung like funereal trappings or like black caterpillars on every twig of the apple trees; on the ditch, the ducks were dancing on the waves.
“Such a wind as this scatters the seeds,” said Anne. “The winged fruits of the elms and the maples are whirled up from the ditches where they have been lying all the winter, and are carried over the tops of the tallest trees, and this wind will gather me up like a seed that haslain too long under the tree from which it fell. Heaven knows where it will carry me! To Egypt or Greece, maybe, or perhaps only to pull the rug over the knees of an old lady driving her donkey-cart along the lanes of an adjoining parish.”
Under the avenue of elms the wind roared so loud that Anne feared for the safety of the trees, and stepped cautiously, looking up among the swaying branches. In her hand she held the precious letter that was to set her free, the letter which was to her as the wing is to the seed.
“Once this is posted, there is no turning back,” she thought. “There will be difficulties, but they will be overcome, and when I look back on my life I shall say it began on the day when I posted this letter, and I shall remember the March gale roaring like a lion among the elms.”
A vision of an elderly lady with soft brown eyes like bees, and short grey hair, haunted her: a precise lady she would be, perhaps one who had been an actress or an opera singer in her day, and kept a casket of love-letters from all the poets of the ’eighties standing on the table beside her. Her employer would laugh gently at her enthusiasm, and would tell her wonderful anecdotes. Her name would be beautiful, andfamiliar: a name that is to be found in every catalogue of roses, for she was the kind of lady after whom roses are named. Anne would take the place of a daughter, and would soon inherit all her passionate fire tempered by her knowledge of the world, all her deep wisdom born of experience and of renunciation; all her cynical clear-sighted witty tenderness....
“Good morning, Miss Dunnock.” Anne’s day-dream was interrupted, and she looked down to find Rachel Sotheby standing before her, her bright eyes shining, and her cheeks flushed by the wind. Anne was pleased to see the little girl, and thinking that they must part soon, she bent down to kiss her, a thing she had not done before. As she did so, she remembered Mr. Yockney’s remark about Rachel’s boots and glanced at them. Yes, they were stiff little boots, cracked behind the toe-caps, worn out, they would let in the water.
“Mr. Yockney was quite right,” she said to herself, and entering the Post Office, was embarrassed to find a stranger standing at the counter writing a telegram.
“This must be Rachel’s brother,” she thought as she recognized the foxey nose, and the slit eyes of the photograph she had seen in the grocer’s parlour. “This must be Richard Sotheby,who has been turned into a gentleman while his sister has holes in her boots.”
As Anne asked for her postal order she avoided looking at the young man of whom she had heard so much, but while she was waiting for the pen (there was only one in the Post Office with which it was possible to write) she could not keep her eyes turned away, and when he had finished his telegram, she had to meet his eye as he handed her the pen. The action was polite, but though their eyes met for an instant, she could see that it was mechanical, she had not engaged his attention, he was thinking of his telegram, and next moment she heard him spelling it over to Mrs. Day, the post-mistress, and explaining that it was in French.
“The Church Times....” wrote Anne.
“G...R...A...N...D...I...S...O...N,” spelt the young man.
“Barclays Bank and Co.,” wrote Anne, keeping her ears open but failing to follow the address.
She had filled in her postal order and had sealed up her letter; there was no reason to stay longer listening while Mrs. Day repeated the letters after him, and she went out, posted her letter, and turned homewards. Already her emotions about her advertisement had subsided, andas she hurried under the storm-tossed elms her thoughts were occupied with the grocer’s son and his strange telegram.
“Je suis las de tes amourettes et de mon amour. Je consens. Ecris.” What did that mean? And who was the Grandison to whom it was addressed?
Her meditations were interrupted by Richard Sotheby himself, who passed her, walking rapidly down the avenue. His hat was jammed hard on his head: he did not lift it, and directly he had passed she noticed that he was wearing button boots made of patent leather.