THIRTEEN: PARIS
Nextday, when she got up, Anne said to herself that she must see Richard at once to discuss her plans with him. But the beauty of the day tempted her to explore Paris. The morning was spent happily in looking into the windows of the shops in the Rue de Rivoli and in buying herself an umbrella; then she lunched alone, thinking that it would be better to reach the studio in the afternoon. But it was already late before she found Montmartre, and when at last she had mounted the staircase and had rung the bell she was prepared for Richard to be out.
“A day wasted,” she said to herself, but in her heart she felt that it had been well spent, wishing that she could spend another day and then another in wandering about Paris. In the evening she had dinner at her hotel, and then went out once more to see the town by night.
“I can never get lost in Paris so long as I can find the river, for if I follow the river sooner or later I must come to the Pont Royal, and from there it is but a step to my hotel.” She walkedalong the quays for some little way, but the Place de la Concorde tempted her with its wide expanse, and presently she found herself under the trees of the Champs Elysées. The clouds parted and the moonlight shone through the young leaves, a few dark figures moved in the shadows, and a band of young men passed her humming a foxtrot. Anne stopped for a moment and waved her arms with a sense of freedom and then strode rapidly up the hill.
At the Étoile she turned to the left down an avenue, which she guessed would bring her to the river, and when she saw the moonlight shining over the water she cried aloud: “I am free. I can do what I like; I can live how I like. I may never see Richard or his friend or anyone I have ever met, again. I have no friends in the world. Nobody can interfere now with my happy life!” And suddenly, as she gazed over the water, Anne remembered how she had wept in her bedroom on the morning when the ploughmen had come. “No need for tears now that the accursed chain is broken. Who would guess, meeting me here, that I was the vicar’s daughter with no hope of escaping from the parish? I am still alone, absolutely alone, but I care nothing for that because I am free. I am free!” she repeated in a loud voice which startled her, but there was no one nearher, and she set off along the bank of the river. “I shall never go back!” she said, drawing herself up proudly, then, looking at the water, she wished that she could bathe, and her gaiety and irresponsibility were such that she was almost on the point of undressing beneath a lamp-post and plunging in. She recollected in time that she would be saved by a French policeman, and walked on laughing as she pictured to herself the explanations that she would offer next morning in the police-court in her broken French.
“Richard would never forgive me if I dragged him to a police-court,” she said, and her thoughts went back to her father. “Strange how blind I was, thinking that he needed me when he welcomed my going. But, who knows? he may be missing me now.” She turned back when she had reached St. Cloud and retraced her footsteps easily; in less than an hour she had reached the Pont Royal.
“I have done something that no respectable girl should do,” she said as she went up to her room. “I have run the risk of being spoken to in the street. Apparently I am not attractive enough to be in any danger from the vicious,” she added as she looked in the glass, but she was pleased with what she saw there and fell asleep at once.
There was a letter from Richard waiting for her asking her to luncheon the following day, and when the time came Anne was overjoyed to see a familiar face once more, though she had been repeating to herself the words she had spoken by the river.
The door of the studio was opened by Ginette, who held out a cool hand. As the girl turned to lead her in, Anne looked at the dark head with the short black hairs cropped close to the brown neck and such envy filled her at the sight that she nearly burst into tears. To be cool and dark and brown, to live in a studio with two men, to talk French, such were the hopeless ambitions which filled her heart. Grandison got up from his chair as she came in but he said nothing, only bowed and sat down again with his eyes on her face. Richard was washing his hands in the corner. “Don’t come near me, Anne, I am covered with paint,” he called out, but his voice sounded friendly as though he were glad to see her.
Ginette laid her hand on her shoulder:
“You are very beautiful,” she brought out laboriously. She had been practising the phrase all the morning, and the unexpected words set Anne blushing with pleasure. “Richard has said much of you but not that you are beautiful. He is bad.”
Anne’s blush was a blush of happiness, and she caught the French girl by the hand and pressed it. Ginette laughed and raised her eyebrows, and would have spoken if they had not been startled by Grandison, who ordered them to sit down to luncheon.
“I have brought some of the drawings I did for fashion plates to show you,” said Anne, but Richard did not refer to them when the meal was over; he seemed more interested in Dry Coulter than in Paris, and began to speak of the village while his companions sat in silence.
“I have heard from Rachel: she is very excited as she is going to be chosen Queen of the May. You know May-day is even more of an institution than Plough Monday,” he said, turning towards Grandison. “It is celebrated more pleasantly in an English village than in Paris.” And Richard began to describe how five little girls were chosen, of whom Rachel would be the leader, to go from house to house carrying an arbour of flowers and singing whatever songs they happened to know.
“The arbour is made of cowslips and may, with a few of the early purple orchids,” said Anne, calling up the memory of May-day a year ago. “It was raining when they came to the vicarage and they wore yellow ribbons and sang‘Ta ra ra Boom de ay.’ I opened the door and they went on singing without paying any attention to the sixpence I held out to them.”
“That sixpence went to the chapel Sunday School Treat,” said Richard. “Paganism has been made respectable.”
“What will Rachel wear as the May Queen?”
“She speaks of a wreath of pansies if there are enough of them out to make it; her companions will have chaplets of forget-me-nots, and they will carry the bower while she carries an armful of tulips. She did not speak of her dress, but of course it will be a white one, and they will wear black worsted stockings and solid little hobnailed boots laced high up the leg.”
“Rachel doesn’t worry about her boots,” said Anne at once, and her thoughts flew back to Mr. Yockney, then she looked round the studio thinking that the rent was paid out of the grocer’s shop at home. “I think Rachel’s perfectly happy. I think all your family are,” she said.
“So they ought to be,” said Richard, laughing. “See what a good son I am. I give my father an object in life, which is more than any of you do. He is very happy and proud of me. In the old days of course,” Richard went on, “the first of May was a great affair, with a maypole setup and a Jack of the Green. The May Queen was not a little girl in those days. You would have been chosen instead of Rachel and, having been kissed by all the boys in the village, you would have got rid of your obsession about never getting to know anyone.”
Anne blushed uncomfortably, and looked at Grandison, who must, she thought, have repeated what she had said while he was seeing her home. “An obsession about never getting to know anyone!” and she wondered if Richard had summed her up for ever in these unkind words.
“I expect the maze was laid out on a May-day,” said Richard, “and the monument is nothing more than a stone maypole, or something with the same signification.”
“I can tell you about the monument,” said Anne. “It commemorates the restoration of Charles II, and was put up by a young man of nineteen, who must have come back from France with the King and recovered his sequestered estate:—a small enough one, I should guess, and the Old Hall. I suppose the maze might have been cut on a May-day, and no doubt they had a maypole on the green again: they had been put down under the Commonwealth, but I doubt if there were many to dance. All the better peoplehad served in Cromwell’s regiments. Except in Huntingdon itself, they were all Puritans.”
“Then we must imagine your young cavalier setting up a maypole on the green and dancing with gypsy girls and all the riff-raff he could assemble, while the village people held aloof under the elm trees round the edges of the green and prayed for a thunderstorm,” said Richard.
“There were oak trees in those days, not elms,” said Anne.
“How do you know that?” he asked her sharply.
She knew positively, but she had forgotten how she knew and, as she repeated that she was sure, she felt that she must seem very stupid to Mr. Grandison.
“Well, he danced in a scarlet coat with lace ruffles, which he had brought back from France, with the gipsy girls in their rags, and Maggie Pattle joined in for the sake of the beer, but all the respectable tenants stood under the oak trees looking glum and hating him. But how do you explain that the monument is still standing and that, though it is the most striking thing in the village, nobody ever looks at it or knows anything about it? If one asks a question they just shake their heads and change the conversation.”
“The young cavalier lived to be eighty-eight,”answered Anne. “It is natural that nobody would dare disturb his maze while he was living, or to pull down the stone column sculptured with his arms. All the Puritans were dead before he was, and the significance of the monument was forgotten by 1729.”
“But the civil war isn’t forgotten,” said Richard.
“I have often heard a villager say when someone has got into trouble for poaching hares: ‘We want another of the Cromwells in this country. There were no game laws in Nolly’s time.’”
“I expect there is a tradition that the maze represents something out of harmony with the village: they have ignored it for so long that they have forgotten everything except that it is something which ought to be ignored,” said Anne.
Richard agreed with her, and an hour passed before she remembered the drawings she had brought to show him.
“Leave them for me to look at,” said Richard, but she would not be put off. As she untied the portfolio she felt that her fingers were trembling, and she became confused as she explained that she knew her drawings were not fashionable: she had done them at Dry Coulter in ignoranceof what the latest fashions might be, thinking that they would serve as specimens to show her workmanship. Instead of explaining this clearly, what she said was something very silly, but Richard did not smile at her absurdity, and there was an absolute silence as she laid the first of the drawings on the table, propping it up against a wine bottle.
For a long while Richard Sotheby stood wrinkling his nose and Gerald and Ginette stood silent.
“And the next,” said Richard sharply, but, going to the portfolio himself, he turned over the other drawings rapidly. There was a silence again as he carefully fastened the clasp of the portfolio, and then turned and walked a few steps away. Suddenly, however, he began to speak, and the words fell so rapidly that Anne could scarcely follow them.
“Dress designers are very stupid people,” he began. “Don’t be discouraged when I advise you not to show these actual drawings. In order to create an impression you must first obtain a thorough knowledge of the mode. There is just as much fashion in the drawings of dresses as in the dresses themselves. What would have been all right last year or the year before is quite out of date now.” And he began to explain very rapidlywhat these changes in styles of drawing had been.
He was interrupted suddenly by Ginette. Anne could not follow her words, but she noticed Grandison nod his head vigorously and say: “An excellent idea,” while an expression of exasperation came over Richard’s white face.
When he turned to Anne she felt a sudden conviction that her drawings were bad and that Richard was concealing his opinion of them.
“Ginette is of the opinion that you are the right figure, and that you have acquired, Heaven knows how, the right appearance for a mannequin. She wants to introduce you to a man she knows who works in one of the wholesale houses. I think that you would dislike such a life and would soon wish that you were back in England. But don’t despair about your drawings,” he added, almost shouting the last words.
Anne took up her portfolio, turning Ginette’s advice over in her mind.
“How should I get a job as a mannequin?” she asked, but an argument had broken out between Richard and Ginette and her question went for some time unanswered. At last he turned from the French girl in exasperation, and she repeated her question.
“Ginette will let you know,” he said. “Come to tea to-morrow at five o’clock.” The tone of the invitation was so cross that Anne said good-bye at once. Grandison had scarcely spoken a word during the discussion, but as she left the room he made a gesture as if he would speak, but he said nothing.
“What have I done to upset them all so much?” she asked herself as she hurried down the stairs, but she could find no answer. Richard’s words had been encouraging, yet she was tempted to tear up her wretched drawings then and there.
“Yes, my fashion plates are hopeless,” she said to herself, but she found it hard to understand why Richard should have been so exasperated by Ginette’s suggestion. “If my drawings are no good I must find some other way of earning my living. Richard would keep me in a fool’s paradise until my money is exhausted.”
Her train of thought was interrupted by the sound of footsteps, and she heard a voice calling her. It was Richard.
“I meant to ask you: if you are short of money, let me lend you ten pounds. You must have time to look about you.”
Anne stared at him in surprise. He was very white; out of breath with running and his wordscame with an effort, but his tone was still one of exasperation.
“Thank you,” she said, looking him in the eyes. “Thank you, I have still seventeen pounds.”
“Well, later on,” answered Richard. “Whenever you want a loan, come to me. While one has money it is one’s duty to share it. That is what Grandison and I believe, and after all you and I come from the same village.”
After saying this he turned round and walked back, quietly cursing her existence.