TEN: NO GOOD-BYES
Itwas morning before Anne could find any sleep, and the hours she spent lying in the darkness with her eyes open, or sometimes standing at her bedroom window gazing out at the pale lawn and the moony spaces of the orchard beyond, listening to the whispering notes of the little owls, and to the weather-vane on the dove house, whimpering as it swung in the wind: those hours were remembered afterwards as the most miserable of her life.
“What have I done?” she asked herself, but she could find nothing in her own conduct to explain Richard’s behaviour. “If he regarded me with even the interest of a casual acquaintance he must have told me of his departure. He would have said something, surely. Even if he hates me he would have spoken of when he was going away.”
But Richard had not mentioned it, and had it not been for a chance remark of Mr. Sotheby’s she would have known nothing of the matter. “He must have intended to hide it from me,” shesaid, wondering why it should be hidden and asking herself if it was because he was afraid of telling her, or because he had fancied that she was in love with him.
“No, he has no such thoughts,” she assured herself. “It is because of his complete indifference to me. His whole mind is occupied by Ginette Grandison.” And suddenly, a new thought striking her, she said aloud and almost joyfully: “Who knows what unhappiness she may be causing him?” The thought of Richard’s pain was a comfort to her, and she wondered once more what the woman could be like who had so enslaved him.
“I seem sometimes in my thoughts to assume that I am in love with Richard myself,” she said to herself with surprise. “But indeed I don’t love him. He is hateful; when I am with him I know well enough that we could never by any chance love each other. He is as sharp as his own nose; he has no feelings that I can understand. But yet I am fond of him, for he is the first man to whom I have been able to speak freely, the first man. How I long to live in a world of such men. To live in Paris.”
Presently her thoughts turned from Richard and his cruel behaviour, to think of her own life and what it would become.
“I should have escaped from here by now had it not been for him,” she said bitterly, and then, recollecting that there had been no more answers to her advertisement, she wondered if she would ever have another opportunity. “If I have the courage to advertise again,” she added, for even that seemed doubtful to her at that hour.
“Damn the fellow,” she said at last. “He has disturbed my life to no purpose, he has raised a hundred questions he cannot answer; I should have been happier if I had never seen him.”
And it seemed to her that every fresh experience in life would always bring her such regrets; that all struggles were only destined to make her suffer, and that the best course perhaps was to go through life blindly, living from day to day, immersed in a world of dreams like her father, and like him shunning all contact with her fellow creatures. These thoughts were dreadful to her, for the afternoons she had passed sitting at the Burnt Farm talking to Richard Sotheby while he painted her were precious. “The happiest moments in my life,” she cried. “For I thought then that I had found a friend.”
Yet it was true: she would have been happier if she had never met him.
“I am not jealous,” she exclaimed. “I know he is in love with Ginette Grandison; I havealways known it, and it has never given me a moment’s pang of jealousy. If only he had spoken of her, if he had told me he was going back to her, I should have felt happy for his sake. I should not have had a single selfish thought.
“But he has made me lay bare my whole life to him and has never once spoken of his own. I only know of the existence of Ginette Grandison by an accident; he would not trust me with his secret and would be annoyed at my knowing it. No friendship can be based on anything so one-sided as our conversations have been. And the reason is plain, only that I have been too stupid to see it before. The reason is that he never intended a friendship. It amused him to get my little secret from me; it flattered his....”
But Anne suddenly checked her thought, crying: “No, that is vulgar, that is unworthy. The root of the matter is that I mean nothing to him, nothing, whilst to me he is the only man with whom I have spoken freely; the only intimate friend except Enid that I have ever had. And he cares no more for me than she did.”
A flood of tears eased her heart; she turned her face to the pillow; then, when she had done weeping, she got out of bed once more and went to the window. The air was cold; there was agust of wind in the chimney; the weather-cock gave its gentle whine.
After standing there an hour, Anne went back to bed again with a picture of the darkness in her mind, saying to herself: “And so on for ever and ever, cold and darkness after the sunshine and the warmth of the day.”
Next morning Anne felt ill when she woke; her head ached, she was dizzy, and the outer world was seen alternately as a whirling mist and defined with extraordinary clearness. She got up from habit, but she could eat nothing at breakfast, and as soon as her bed had been made she undressed and lay down on it, and fell asleep.
When she awoke it was with the echo of Richard’s voice ringing in her ears; she scrambled out of bed and went at once to her window. There was nothing to be seen, she blinked her eyes in the brilliant sunlight and, reeling with sleep, groped her way back through the sudden darkness of the room to her bed to fall into a doze from which she awoke once more, this time with the certainty of having heard voices: beyond a doubt, one of them was Richard’s.
The voices rose for a moment; then she heard the front door slam, in a gust of wind, and there was a silence. She understood suddenly thatRichard had been in the house, that he had come to see her, and she got out of bed.
The bedroom window gave on to the garden, so she ran to her father’s room just as she had done to see the ploughmen on that snowy winter morning. Her guess had been right, for there almost directly beneath her were Richard and her father; they were standing bare-headed in the rain talking amicably; she could hear her father’s gentle laugh; they were reluctant to part. Anne’s first instinct was to call out; to ask Richard to wait while she exchanged her dressing-gown for clothes in which she could appear, but she realized that it was impossible to do so, and then, with the angry feelings that every sick person has experienced of knowing that life is going on unchanged behind his back, she was forced to watch Richard disappear after shaking hands with her father by the garden gate.
“A thousand pities,” she said to herself. “He must have come to see me. What can he have said to my father?” Her headache and dizziness were gone, she felt eager and excited, and the moments while she was putting on her clothes and doing up her hair were spent in trying to imagine the conversation that had been going on while she was asleep.
“What an extraordinary thing,” said Anne,“that he should think of calling! Nobody but Richard would have done such a thing!” Her thoughts were interrupted by Maggie coming to ask her if she would like to have tea in bed. As she was going downstairs it occurred to her that Richard might have spoken of her; he would have told her father that they had met; he might even have mentioned his picture. As she opened the door into the room where her father was already sitting, she remembered the well-brought-up heroes in Victorian novels who ask a father’s permission before entering into correspondence with the girl they have rescued when the pony has taken the bit between its teeth and the governess cart is heading for the side of the quarry ... a memory which was driven away with a laugh, but which left her anxious and expectant as she took her place at the tea table.
Mr. Dunnock did not make any reference to his visitor, though he was less abstracted than usual, asking Anne with great solicitude about her headache, and then saying: “I have been feeling a little more melancholy than usual to-day because of the bad weather, and so I took down Burton. In his anatomy he has much to say about the effect of food. The authorities all agree that beef is only safe for those who lead an active life; that pork is definitely bad for thereasoning man; that goats’ flesh disposes those who partake of it to evil-living; venison is most strongly condemned, and even horse-flesh is held to account for the well-known melancholy of your Spaniard; among vegetables the onion and its congeners, and I am glad to say the cabbage, are absolutely condemned; peas and beans should be avoided as far as possible, and salads and fruit only taken in the strictest moderation. Burton thinks that the potato may be a safe article of diet, and highly recommends borage.”
Anne was smiling at her father’s enthusiasm. “There seems very little for you to eat,” she said.
“Well, Anne, I do not know quite what Burton would recommend; he says nothing against wheaten bread; he regards fresh country cheese as wholesome, and speaks with enthusiasm of beer.” Mr. Dunnock giggled as he said this and for some reason that familiar clerical sound seemed to his daughter at that moment to express all that she most hated and despised. “The giggle is unforgivable,” she said to herself gazing at her father over the tea table. “He is a grown-up man; he has a beard; he is my father, but if beer is mentioned one hears a silly adolescent giggle. One would think that he was a choir boy caught with a cigarette.”
She left the table and went out into the garden in a fury; she had forgotten her own embarrassment when Richard had used the word “rape.”
Mr. Dunnock, absorbed in his own thoughts, hardly looked after her.
“Beer,” he said, pouring himself out a fourth cup of tea, and giggling slightly. “Good stuff, beer. He thought that because his name was Burton,” and Mr. Dunnock began to wonder if Robert Burton had really come from Burton-on-Trent, and if beer had always been brewed there.
“I forgot to tell you,” he said to Anne at supper, “that I had a visit this afternoon from Richard Sotheby, the son of our grocer. It was a great pity that you had a headache, for we do not have many interesting visitors. I think he is charming: a most delightful, most intelligent young man. But you should have told me that you had met him; you should have asked him to tea, and have introduced him to me. It was too bad, Anne, to have kept him to yourself.”
Anne gasped with astonishment and, not knowing what to reply, waited until her father went on: “He seems to have liked you very much; you have made quite a conquest,” and Mr. Dunnock smiled his peculiar little smile which showed that he was not speaking seriously.
“I thought you rather disapproved of the Sothebys,” said Anne. “Because, of course, they are Nonconformists.”
“Well, well,” said her father, wrinkling up his face at the word, for it set his teeth on edge like the thought of sour fruit. “Well, well, I suppose they are happy with their little ugly worship; I confess their outlook is repugnant to me. But the son has escaped from all that. He told me he has been to visit Little Gidding, and asked me a number of questions about Nicholas Ferrar’s community. Apparently he is greatly interested in the antiquities of the county.”
Anne had known Little Gidding all her life, and she shared her father’s love for the lonely little church perched on the edge of the hillside, with the slope of green sward below and the woods behind. She had been brought up to revere Nicholas Ferrar, and had loved to reconstruct a life which had so much of the beauty of religion in it, and nothing of what she disliked. Often she thought that she would have been content for her father to have been a clergyman if he had lived in the seventeenth century, or even in the eighteenth for the matter of that, for it was only during the reign of Queen Victoria that the clergy in England lost touch with the community and became self-conscious. Anne knewhow much happier her father would have been had he belonged to Nicholas Ferrar’s household, and though she would not have cared for it herself (she would have disliked rising at four o’clock for prayers every morning) she wished he could live in such a way himself. Thus for once she was tolerant, for she loved Little Gidding, and had prayed in the narrow little church with an outburst of religious passion such as she had never experienced in Ely Cathedral.
For the rest of that evening father and daughter spoke of Little Gidding, calling up pictures in each other’s minds of how it must be looking in the spring weather, and of the life of the immense and extraordinary household which had lived there until the Roundheads had burned the roof over their heads and had thrown the brass eagle lectern in the church into the pond below.
“The men slept in one wing of the house and the women in the other,” Anne remembered. “And Nicholas Ferrar slept watchfully in the middle. That is the funny side,” but she hid her thought from her father, and when she spoke it was to remind him of the immense number of children in the community.
“His daughter brought her eleven children; there were thirty people altogether,” said herfather, and he passed on to describe the three visits of King Charles I, and so vivid were his words that Anne could picture to herself, more clearly than ever before, the visit the King paid during the civil war when he came toiling up the hill on foot, and alone, to pray.
“There is no more sacred spot in England,” said Mr. Dunnock, and Anne was inclined to agree with him. That night she lay for some time without sleeping, giving herself up to the happiest thoughts, and when at last she dozed off it was with the picture of Richard Sotheby in her mind: Richard walking over the greenest turf where the manor house had stood, resting on the sides of the dry grassy moat, and then walking down by the edge of the wood to the little church with Nicholas Ferrar’s tomb in the pathway leading up to it, under a tombstone, the letters of which are written in moss. A tall figure came toiling up the hill to meet him; she saw a tired man with a pale face—King Charles the First, and try how she would to dream of Richard Sotheby, King Charles would reappear.
“I shall certainly try to see Richard before he goes this morning,” Anne thought at breakfast. “I shall look in and tell Mrs. Sotheby that I have come to say good-bye.”
But when the time came she went past the shop, for she remembered Mr. Sotheby’s look of surprise when he found that she was acquainted with his son, and the long hostile silence before he spoke, after he had recognized her in the painting.
“Mr. Sotheby does not approve of my knowing Richard,” Anne said to herself, glancing through the windows of the shop. She could see no one inside, and the longer she meditated over the grocer’s behaviour at Rachel’s birthday party, the more convinced she became that he was jealous of her, and alarmed lest an attachment should spring up between his son and her.
“I will go for a stroll on the green,” and looking about her she saw for the first time that the sun was shining, and that the grass was greener after the rain of the day before. “Why, the hawthorns have come into leaf; the horse-chestnut buds are bursting; in a few days the apples will be in blossom,” but the daily progress of the spring, which would ordinarily have given her such keen pleasure, was meaningless now. “I must see Richard before he goes,” she said in desperation. “I must arrange with him about finding me work in Paris,” and she remembered with dismay that she did not even know his address.
Soon she turned back on her footsteps, and fully an hour was spent in passing and repassing the grocer’s shop.
“I am wasting my time,” she thought. “For Easter is nearly upon us; there is much to do at the church.” But it was not possible to go home after waiting so long, and at last she set off along the road to Linton. A mile was covered before it occurred to her that Richard would be driving with his father, and that even if Mr. Sotheby should pull up it would be difficult for them to speak in front of him, and she turned back and walked to the village at top speed.
All seemed well, for she had not passed them on the road, and she determined once more to enter the shop, but it occurred to her, as she approached, that Rachel would be coming out of school in a few minutes: it was just twelve o’clock.
As she turned the corner by the schoolhouse, she noticed the strange ring deeply cut into the earth and full of dust, and wondered again what game the children played there.
Soon the door opened and the children began to run out. “In this riot I shall not be able to speak to Rachel,” Anne said to herself. “But if I walk back towards the shop she may walk another way.”
“A lovely morning, Miss Dunnock,” said a voice behind her, and she turned to find Mr. Lambert.
The moments spent talking to him were agonizing, for every instant she expected to see Rachel run past her, but Mr. Lambert would not be hurried. Soon he began to speak of Easter, and the arrangements at the church, for he was a churchwarden, and when that subject was exhausted he returned to the weather.
“One is happy to be alive on such a morning, Miss Dunnock; I envy you your leisure to enjoy it. Free as air, Miss Dunnock, and no one to call your master. Work is my master. This weather keeps us very busy.”
“Impertinent puppy,” said Anne to herself, though as a matter of fact she rather liked Mr. Lambert, and saw nothing impertinent in his manners.
At the very moment when Mr. Lambert released her she heard Rachel’s voice saying: “Good morning, Miss Dunnock,” and the little girl ran by her with two or three other children. Anne saw that it was useless to wait any longer, and returned to the vicarage; there was nothing to be angry about, nobody was at fault.
“There was this note left for you. Rachel Sotheby brought it over,” said Maggie when shewent into the kitchen, and Anne thought the girl’s grin was an impertinence too.
Richard had gone by the early morning train. “I am so sorry not to see you to say good-bye,” he wrote. “You must not forget your promise to write, and remember to tell me all the news of the parish.” He enclosed his address.