Anne Severn and the Fieldings

by May Sinclair

V

ELIOT AND ANNE

i

Anne did not go back to her Ilford farm at once. Adeline had made that impossible.

At the prospect of Anne's going her resentment died down as suddenly as it had risen. She forgot that Anne had taken her sons' affection and her place beside her husband's deathbed. And though she couldn't help feeling rather glad that Jerrold had gone to India without Anne, she was sorry for her. She loved her and she meant to keep her. She said she simply could not bear it if Anne left her, and was it the time to choose when she wanted her as she had never wanted her before? She had nobody to turn to, as Anne knew. Corbetts and Hawtreys and Markhams and people were all very well; but they were outsiders.

"It's the inside people that I want now, Anne. You're deep inside, dear."

Yes, of course she had relations. But relations were no use. They were all wrapped up in their own tiresome affairs, and there wasn't one of them she cared for as she cared for Anne.

"I couldn't care more if you were my own daughter. Darling Robert felt about you just the same. You can't leave me."

And Anne didn't. She never could resist unhappiness. She thought: "I was glad enough to stop with her through all the happy times. I'd be a perfect beast to go and leave her now when she's miserable and hasn't got anybody."

It would have been better for Anne if she could have gone. Robert Fielding's death and Jerrold's absence were two griefs that inflamed each other; they came together to make one immense, intolerable wound. And here at Wyck, she couldn't move without coming upon something that touched it and stung it to fresh pain. But Anne was not like Jerrold, to turn from what she loved because it hurt her. For as long as she could remember all her happiness had come to her at Wyck. If unhappiness came now, she had got, as Eliot said, "to take it."

And so she stayed on through the autumn, then over Christmas to the New Year; this time because of Colin who was suffering from depression. Colin had never got over his father's death and Jerrold's going; and the last thing Jerrold had said to her before he went was; "You'll look after Col-Col, won't you? Don't let him go grousing about by himself."

Jerrold had always expected her to look after Colin. At seventeen there was still something piteous and breakable about him, something that clung to you for help. Eliot said that if Colin didn't look out he'd be a regular neurotic. But he owned that Anne was good for him.

"I don't know what you do to him, but he's better when you're there."

Eliot was the one who appeared to have recovered first. He met the shock of his father's death with a defiant energy and will.

He was working now at bacteriology under Sir Martin Crozier. Covered with a white linen coat, in a white-washed room of inconceivable cleanness, surrounded by test-tubes and mixing jars, Eliot spent the best part of the day handling the germs of the deadliest diseases; making cultures, examining them under the microscope; preparing vaccines. He went home to the brown velvety, leathery study in his Welbeck Street flat to write out his notes, or read some monograph on inoculation; or he dined with a colleague and talked to him about bacteria.

At this period of his youth Eliot had more than ever the appearance of inhuman preoccupation. His dark, serious face detached itself with a sort of sullen apathy from the social scene. He seemed to have no keen interests beyond his slides and mixing jars and test-tubes. Women, for whom his indifference had a perverse fascination, said of him: "Dr. Fielding isn't interested in people, only in their diseases. And not really in diseases, only in their germs."

They never suspected that Eliot was passionate, and that a fierce pity had driven him into his profession. The thought of preventable disease filled him with fury; he had no tolerance for the society that tolerated it. He suffered because he had a clearer vision and a profounder sense of suffering than most persons. Up to the time of his father's death all Eliot's suffering had been other people's. He couldn't rest till he had done something to remove the cause of it.

Add to this an insatiable curiosity as to causes, and you have the main bent of Eliot's mind.

And it seemed to him that there was nobody but Anne who saw that hidden side of him. She knew that he was sorry for people, and that being sorry for them had made him what he was, like Jerrold and yet unlike him. Eliot was attracted to suffering by the same sensitiveness that made Jerrold avoid everything once associated with it.

And so the very thing that Jerrold couldn't bear to remember was what drew Eliot closer to Anne. He saw her as Jerrold had seen her, moving, composed and competent, in his father's room; he saw her stooping over him to help him, he saw the specks of blood on her white sleeve; and he thought of her with the more tenderness. From that instant he really loved her. He wanted Anne as he had never conceived himself wanting any woman. He could hardly remember his first adolescent feeling for her, that confused mixture of ignorant desire and fear, so different was it from the intense, clear passion that possessed him now. At night when his work was done, he lay in bed, not sleeping, thinking of Anne with desire that knew itself too well to be afraid. Anne was the one thing necessary to him beside his work, necessary as a living part of himself. She could only not come before his work because Eliot's work came before himself and his own happiness. When he went down every other week-end to Wyck-on-the-Hill he knew that it was to see Anne.

His mother knew it too.

"I wish Eliot would marry," she said.

"Why?" said Anne.

"Because then he wouldn't be so keen on going off to look for germs in disgusting climates."

Anne wondered whether Adeline knew Eliot. For Eliot talked to her about his work as he walked with her at a fine swinging pace over the open country, taking all his exercise now while he could get it. That was another thing he liked about Anne Severn, her splendid physical fitness; she could go stride for stride with him, and mile for mile, and never tire. Her mind, too, was robust and active, and full of curiosity; it listened by the hour and never tired. It could move, undismayed, among horrors. She could see, as he saw, the "beauty" of the long trains of research by which Sir Martin Crozier had tracked down the bacillus of amoebic dysentery and established the difference between typhoid and Malta fever.

Once started on his subject, the grave, sullen Eliot talked excitedly.

"You do see, Anne, how thrilling it is, don't you? For me there's nothing but bacteriology. I always meant to go in for it, and Sir Martin's magnificent. Absolutely top-hole. You see, all these disgusting diseases can be prevented. It's inconceivable that they should be tolerated in a civilized country. People can't care a rap or they couldn't sleep in their beds. They ought to get up and make a public row about it, to insist on compulsory inoculation for everybody whether they like it or not. It really isn't enough to cure people of diseases when they've got them. We ought to see that they never get them, that there aren't any to get… What we don't know yet is the complete behaviour of all these bacteria among themselves. A bad bacillus may be doing good work by holding down a worse one. It's conceivable that if we succeeded in exterminating all known diseases we might release an unknown one, supremely horrible, that would exterminate the race."

"Oh Eliot, how awful. How can you sleep in your bed?"

"You needn't worry. It's only a nightmare idea of mine."

And so on and so on, for he was still so young that he wanted Anne to be excited by the things that excited him. And Anne told him all about her Ilford farm and what she meant to do on it. Eliot didn't behave like Aunt Adeline, he listened beautifully, like Uncle Robert and Jerrold, as if it was really most important that you should have a farm and work on it.

"What I want is to sell it and get one here. I don't want to be anywhere else. I can't tell you how frightfully home-sick I am when I'm away. I keep on seeing those gables with the little stone balls, and the peacocks, and the fields down to the Manor Farm. And the hills, Eliot. When I'm away I'm always dreaming that I'm trying to get back to them and something stops me. Or I see them and they turn into something else. I shan't be happy till I can come back for good."

"You don't want to go to India?" Eliot's heart began to beat as he asked his question.

"I want to work. To work hard. To work till I'm so dead tired that I roll off to sleep the minute I get into bed. So tired that I can't dream."

"That isn't right. You're too young to feel like that, Anne."

"I do feel like it. You feel like it yourself—My farm is to me what your old bacteria are to you."

"Oh, if I thought it was the farm—"

"Why, what else did you think it was?"

Eliot couldn't bring himself to tell her. He took refuge in apparent irrelevance.

"You know Father left me the Manor Farm house, don't you?"

"No, I didn't. I suppose he thought you'd want to come back, like me."

"Well, I'm glad I've got it. Mother's got the Dower House in Wyck. But she'll stay on here till—"

"Till Jerrold comes back," said Anne bravely.

"I don't suppose Jerry'll turn her out even then. Unless—"

But neither he nor Anne had the courage to say "unless he marries."

Not Anne, because she couldn't trust herself with the theme of Jerrold's marrying. Not Eliot, because he had Jerrold's word for it that if he married anybody, ever, it would not be Anne.

* * * * *

It was this assurance that made it possible for him to say what he had been thinking of saying all the time that he talked to Anne about his bacteriology. Bacteriology was a screen behind which Eliot, uncertain of Anne's feelings, sheltered himself against irrevocable disaster. He meant to ask Anne to marry him, but he kept putting it off because, so long as he didn't know for certain that she wouldn't have him, he was at liberty to think she would. He would not be taking her from Jerrold. Jerrold, inconceivable ass, didn't want her. Eliot had made sure of that months ago, the night before Jerrold sailed. He had simply put it to him: what did he mean to do about Anne Severn? And Jerrold had made it very plain that his chief object in going to India was to get away from Anne Severn and Everything. Eliot knew Jerrold too well to suspect his sincerity, so he considered that the way was now honorably open to him.

His only uncertainty was Anne herself. He had meant to give her a year to forget Jerrold in, if she was ever going to forget him; though in moments of deeper insight he realized that Anne was not likely to forget, nor to marry anybody else as long as she remembered.

Yet, Eliot reasoned, women did marry, even remembering. They married and were happy. You saw it every day. He was content to take Anne on her own terms, at any cost, at any risk. He had never been afraid of risks, and once he had faced the chance of her refusal all other dangers were insignificant.

A year was a long time, and Eliot had to consider the probability of his going out to Central Africa with Sir Martin Crozier to investigate sleeping sickness. He wanted the thing settled one way or another before he went.

He put it off again till the next week-end. And in the meanwhile Sir Martin Crozier had seen him. He was starting in the spring and Eliot was to go with him.

It was on Sunday evening that he spoke to Anne, sitting with her under the beeches at the top of the field where she and Jerrold had sat together. Eliot had chosen his place badly.

"I wouldn't bother you so soon if I wasn't going away, but I simply must—must know—"

"Must know what?"

"Whether you care for me at all. Not much, of course, but just enough not to hate marrying me."

Anne turned her face full on him and looked at him with her innocent, candid eyes. And all she said was, "You do know about Jerrold, don't you?"

"Oh God, yes. I know all about him."

"He's why I can't."

"I tell you, I know all about Jerrold. He isn't a good enough reason."

"Good enough for me."

"Not unless—" But he couldn't say it.

"Not unless he cares for me. That's why you're asking me, then, because you know he doesn't."

"Well, it wouldn't be much good if I knew he did."

"Eliot, it's awful of me to talk about it, as if he'd said he did. He never said a word. He never will."

"I'm afraid he won't, Anne."

"Don't imagine I ever thought he would. He never did anything to make me think it for a minute, really."

"Are you quite sure he didn't?"

"Quite sure. I made it all up out of my head. My silly head. I don't care what you think of me so long as you don't think it was Jerry's fault. I should go on caring for him whatever he did or didn't do."

"I know you would. But it's possible—"

"To care for two people and marry one of them, no matter which? It isn't possible for me. If I can't have the person I want I won't have anybody."

"It isn't wise, Anne. I tell you I could make you care for me. I know all about you. I know how you think and how you feel. I understand you better than Jerrold does. You'd be happy with me and you'd be safe."

"It's no use. I'd rather be unhappy and in danger if it was with
Jerrold."

"You'll be unhappy and in danger without him."

"I don't care. Besides, I shan't be. I shall work. You'll work, too.
It'll be so exciting that you'll soon forget all about me."

"You know I shan't. And I'll never give you up, unless Jerrold gets you."

"Eliot—I only told you about Jerrold, because I thought you ought to know. So that you mightn't think it was anything in you."

"It isn't something in me, then? Tell me—if it hadn't been for Jerry, do you think you might have cared for me?"

"Yes. I do. I quite easily might. And I think it would be a jolly good thing if I could, now. Only I can't. I can't."

"Poor little Anne."

"Does it comfort you to think I'd have cared if it hadn't been for
Jerry?"

"It does, very much."

"Eliot—you're the only person I can talk to about him. Do you mind telling me whether he said that to you, or whether you just guessed it."

"What?"

"Why, that he wouldn't—ever—"

"I asked him, Anne, because I had to know. And he told me."

"I thought he told you."

"Yes, he told me. But I'm a cad for letting you think he didn't care for you. I believe he did, or that he would have cared—awfully—if my father hadn't died just then. Your being in the room that day upset him. If it hadn't been for that—"

"Yes, but there was that. It was like he was when Binky died and he couldn't stand Yearp. Don't you remember how he wouldn't let me go with him to see Yearp because he said he didn't want me mixed up with it. Well—I've been mixed up, that's all."

"Still, Anne, I'm certain he'd have cared—if that's any comfort to you.
You didn't make it up out of your dear little head. We all thought it.
Father thought it. I believe he wanted it. If he'd only known!"

She thought: If he'd only known how he had hurt her, he who had never hurt anybody in all his beautiful life.

"Dear Uncle Robert. There's no good talking about it. I knew, the minute
Jerry said he didn't want me to go to India with him."

"Is that why you didn't go?"

"Yes."

"That was a mistake, Anne. You should have gone."

"How could I, after that? And if I had, he'd only have kept away."

"You should have let him go first and then gone after him. You should have turned up suddenly, in wonderful clothes, looking cheerful and beautiful. So that you wiped out the memory he funked. As it is you've left him nothing else to think of."

"I daresay that's what I should have done. But it's too late. I can't do it now."

"I'm not so sure."

"What, go after Jerrold? Hunt him down? Dress up and scheme to make him marry me?"

"Yes. Yes. Yes."

"Eliot, you know I couldn't."

"You said once you'd commit a crime for anybody you cared about."

"A crime, yes. But not that. I'd rather die."

"You're too fastidious. It's only the unscrupulous people who get what they want in this world. They know what they want and go for it. They stamp on everything and everybody that gets in their way."

"Oh, Eliot dear, I know what I want, and I'd go for it. If only Jerrold knew, too."

"He would know if you showed him."

"And that's just what I can't do."

"Well, don't say I didn't give you the best possible advice, against my own interests, too."

"It was sweet of you. But you see how impossible it is."

"I see how adorable you are. You always were."

iv

For the first time in her life Adeline was furious.

She had asked Eliot whether he was or was not going to marry Anne Severn, and was told that he had asked her to marry him that afternoon and that she wouldn't have him.

"Wouldn't have you? What's she thinking of?"

"You'd better ask her," said Eliot, never dreaming that she would.

But that was what Adeline did. She came that night to Anne's room just as Anne was getting into bed. Unappeased by her defenseless attitude, she attacked with violence.

"What's all this about Eliot asking you to marry him?"

Anne uncurled herself and sat up on the edge of her bed.

"Did he tell you?"

"Yes. Of course he told me. He says you refused him. Did you?"

"I'm afraid I did."

"Then Anne, you're a perfect little fool."

"But Auntie, I don't love him."

"Nonsense; you love him as much as most people love the men they marry.
He's quite sensible. He doesn't want you to go mad about him."

"He wants more than I can give him."

"Well, all I can say is if you can't give him what he wants you'd no business to go about with him as you've been doing."

"I've been going about with him all my life and I never dreamed he'd want to marry me."

"What did you suppose he'd want?"

"Why, nothing but just to go about. As we always did."

"You idiot."

"I don't see why you should be so cross about it."

Adeline sat down in the armchair at the head of the bed, prepared to "have it out" with Anne.

"I suppose you think my son's happiness is nothing to me? Didn't it occur to you that if you refuse him he'll stick for years in that awful place he's going to? Whereas if he had a wife in England there'd be a chance of his coming home now and then. Perhaps he'd never go out again."

"I'm sorry, Auntie. I can't marry Eliot even to keep him in England.
Even to please you."

"Even to save his life, you mean. You don't care if he dies of some hideous tropical disease."

"I care awfully. But I can't marry him. He knows why."

"It's more than I do. If you're thinking of Jerrold, you needn't. I thought you'd done with that schoolgirlish nonsense."

"I'm not 'thinking' of him. I'm not 'thinking' of anybody and I wish you'd leave me alone."

"My dear child, how can I leave you alone when I see you making the mistake of your life? Eliot is absolutely the right person for you, if you'd only the sense to see it. He's got more character than anybody I know. Much more than dear Jerry. He'll be ten times more interesting to live with."

"I thought Jerrold was your favourite."

"No, Eliot, my dear. Always Eliot. He was my first baby."

"Well, I'm awfully sorry you mind so much. And I'd marry Eliot if I could. I simply hate him to be unhappy. But he won't be. He'll live to be frightfully glad I didn't…What, aren't you going to kiss me good-night?"

Adeline had risen and turned away with the great dignity of her righteous anger.

"I don't feel like it," she said. "I think you've been thoroughly selfish and unkind. I hate girls who go on like that—making a man mad about you by pretending to be his comrade, and then throwing him over. I've had more men in love with me, Anne, than you've seen in your life, but I never did that."

"Oh Auntie, what about Father? And you were engaged to him."

"Well, anyhow," said Adeline, softened by the recollection, "I was engaged."

She smiled her enchanting smile; and Anne, observing the breakdown of dignity, got up off the bed and kissed her.

"I don't suppose," she said, "that Father was the only one."

"He wasn't. But then, with me, my dear, it was their own risk. They knew where they were."

v

In March, nineteen eleven, Eliot went out to Central Africa. He stayed there two years, investigating malaria and sleeping sickness. Then he went on to the Straits Settlements and finally took a partnership in a practice at Penang.

Anne left Wyck at Easter and returned in August because of Colin. Then she went back to her Ilford farm.

The two years passed, and in the spring of the third year, nineteen fourteen, she came again.