XI
INTERIM
i
Colin thought with terror of the time when Queenie would come back from the war. At any moment she might get leave and come; if she had not had it yet that only made it more likely that she would have it soon.
The vague horror that waited for him every morning had turned into this definite fear of Queenie. He was afraid of her temper, of her voice and eyes, of her crude, malignant thoughts, of her hatred of Anne. More than anything he was afraid of her power over him, of her vehement, exhausting love. He was afraid of her beauty.
One morning, early in September, the wire came. Colin shook with agitation as he read it.
"What is it?" Anne said.
"Queenie. She's got leave. She'll be here today. At four o'clock."
"Don't you want to see her?"
"No, I don't."
"Then you'd better drive over to Kingden and look at those bullocks of
Ledbury's."
"I don't know anything about bullocks. They ought to be straight lines from their heads to their tails. That's about all I know."
"Never mind, you'll have gone to look at bullocks. And you can tell
Ledbury I'm coming over to-morrow. Do you mind driving yourself?"
Colin did mind. He was afraid to drive by himself; but he was much more afraid of Queenie.
"You can take Harry. And leave me to settle Queenie."
Colin went off with Harry to Chipping Kingden. And at four o'clock
Queenie came. Her hard, fierce eyes stared past Anne, looking for Colin.
"Where's Colin?" she said.
"He had to go out, but he'll be back before dinner."
Presently Queenie asked if she might go upstairs. As they went you could see her quick, inquisitive eyes sweeping and flashing.
The door of Colin's room stood open.
"Is that Colin's room?"
"Yes."
She went in, opened the inner door and looked into the gable room.
"Who sleeps here?" she said.
"I do," said Anne.
"You?"
"Have you any objection?"
"You might as well sleep in my husband's room."
"Oh no, this is near enough. I can tell whether he's asleep or awake."
"Can you? And, please, how long has this been going on?"
"I've been sleeping in this room since November. Before that we had our old rooms at the Manor. There was a passage between, you remember. But I left the doors wide open."
"Oh no, this is near enough. I can tell whether he's asleep or awake."
"Can you? And, please, how long has this been going on?"
"I've been sleeping in this room since November. Before that we had our old rooms at the Manor. There was a passage between, you remember. But I left the doors wide open."
"I suppose," said Queenie, with furious calm, "you want me to divorce him?"
"Divorce him? Why on earth should you? Just because I looked after him at night? I had to. There wasn't anybody else. And he was afraid to sleep alone. He is still. But he's all right as long as he knows I'm there."
"You expect me to believe that's all there is in it?"
"No, I don't, considering what your mind's like."
"Oh yes, when people do dirty things it's always other people's dirty minds. Do you imagine I'm a fool, Anne?"
"You're an awful fool if you think Colin's my lover."
"I think it, and I say it."
"If you think it you're a fool. If you say it you're a liar. A damned liar."
"And is Colin's mother a liar, too?"
"Yes, but not a damned one. It would serve you jolly well right,
Queenie, if he was my lover, after the way you left him to me."
"I didn't leave him to you. I left him to his mother."
"Anyhow, you left him."
"I couldn't help it. You were not wanted at the front and I was. I couldn't leave hundreds of wounded soldiers just for Colin."
"I had to. He was in an awful state. I've looked after him day and night; I've got him almost well now, and I think the least you can do is to keep quiet and let him alone."
"I shall do nothing of the sort. I shall divorce him as soon as the war's over."
"It isn't over yet. And I don't advise you to try. No decent barrister would touch your case, it's so rotten."
"Not half so rotten as you'll look when it's in all the papers."
"You can't frighten me that way."
"Can't I? I suppose you'll say you were looking, poor darling, if you do bring your silly old action. Only please don't do it till he's quite well, or he'll be ill again…I think that's tea going in. Will you go down?"
They went down. Tea was laid in the big bare hall. The small round oak table brought them close together. Anne waited on Queenie with every appearance of polite attention. Queenie ate and drank in long, fierce silences; for her hunger was even more imperious than her pride.
"I don't want to eat your food," she said at last. "I'm only doing it because I'm starving. I dined with Colin's mother last night. It was the first dinner I've eaten since I went to the war."
"You needn't feel unhappy about it," said Anne. "It's Eliot's house and
Jerrold's food. How's Cutler?"
"Much the same as when you saw him." Queenie answered quietly, but her face was red.
"And that Johnnie—what was his name?—who took my place?"
Queenie's flush darkened. She was holding her mouth so tight that the thin red line of the lips faded.
"Noel Fenwick," said Anne, suddenly remembering.
"What about him?" Queenie's throat moved as if she swallowed something big and hard.
"Is he there still?"
"He was when I left."
Her angry, defiant eyes were fixed on the open doorway. You could see she was waiting for Colin, ready to fall on him and tear him as soon as he came in.
"Am I to see Colin or not?" she said as she rose.
"Have you anything to say to him?"
"Only what I've said to you."
"Then you won't see him. In fact I think you'd better not see him at all."
"You mean he funks it?"
"I funk it for him. He isn't well enough to be raged at and threatened with proceedings. It'll upset him horribly and I don't see what good it'll do you."
"No more do I. I'm not going to live with him after this. You can tell him that. Tell him I don't want to see him or speak to him again."
"I see. You just came down to make a row."
"You don't suppose I came down to stay with you two?"
Queenie was so far from coming down to stay that she had taken rooms for the night at the White Hart in Wyck. Anne drove her there.
ii
Two and a half years passed. Anne's work on the farm filled up her days and marked them. Her times were ploughing time and the time for sowing: wheat first, and turnips after the wheat, barley after the turnips, sainfoin, grass and clover after the barley. Oats in the five-acre field this year; in the seven-acre field the next. Lambing time, calving time, cross-ploughing and harrowing, washing and shearing time, time for hoeing; hay time and harvest. Then threshing time and ploughing again.
All summer the hard fight against the charlock, year after year the same. You harrowed it out and ploughed it down and sprayed it with sulphate of copper; you sowed vetches and winter corn to crowd it out; and always it sprang up again, flaring in bright yellow stripes and fans about the hills. The air was sweet with its smooth, delicious smell.
Always the same clear-cut pattern of the fields; but the colors shifted. The slender, sharp-pointed triangle that was jade-green last June, this June was yellow-brown. The square under the dark comb of the plantation that had been yellow-brown was emerald; the wide-open fan beside it that had been emerald was pink. By August the emerald had turned to red-gold and the jade-green to white.
These changes marked the months and the years, a bright patterned, imperceptibly moving measure, rolling time off across the hills.
Nineteen-sixteen, seventeen. Nineteen-eighteen and the armistice.
Nineteen-nineteen and the peace.
iii
In the spring of that year Anne and Colin were still together at the Manor Farm. He was stronger. But, though he did more and more work every year, he was still unfit to take over the management himself. Responsibility fretted him and he tired soon. He could do nothing without Anne.
He was now definitely separated from his wife. Queenie had come back from the war a year ago. As soon as it was over she had begun to rage and consult lawyers and write letters two or three times a week, threatening to drag Anne and Colin through the Divorce Court. But Miss Mullins (once the secretary of Dr. Cutler's Field Ambulance Corps), recovering at the Farm from an excess of war work, reassured them. Queenie, she said, was only bluffing. Queenie was not in a position to bring an action against any husband, she had been too notorious herself. Miss Mullins had seen things, and she intimated that no defence could stand against the evidence she could give.
And in the end Queenie left off talking about divorce and contented herself with a judicial separation.
Colin still woke every morning to his dread of some blank, undefined disaster; but, as if Queenie and the war had made one obsession, he was no longer haunted by the imminent crash of phantom shells. It was settled that he was to live with Jerrold and Maisie when they came back to the Manor, while Anne stayed on by herself at the Farm.
Every now and then Eliot came down to see them. He had been sent home early in nineteen-seventeen with a shrapnel wound in his left leg, the bone shattered. He obtained his discharge at the price of a permanent limp, and went back to his research work.
For the last two years he had been investigating trench fever, with results that were to make him famous. But that was not for another year.
In February, nineteen-nineteen, Jerrold had come back. He and Maisie had been living in London ever since he had left the Army, filling in time till Wyck Manor would be no longer a Home for Convalescent Soldiers. He had tried to crowd into this interval all the amusement he hadn't had for four years. His way was to crush down the past with the present; to pile up engagements against the future, party on party, dances on suppers and suppers on plays; to dine every evening at some place where they hadn't dined before; to meet lots of nice amusing people with demobilised minds who wouldn't talk to him about the war; to let himself go in bursts of exquisitely imbecile laughter; never to be quiet for an hour, never to be alone with himself, never to be long alone with Maisie.
After the first week of it this sort of thing ceased to amuse him, but he went on with it because he thought it amused Maisie.
There was something he missed; something he wanted and hadn't got. At night, when he lay awake, alone with himself at last, he knew that it was Anne.
And he went on laughing and amusing Maisie; and Maisie, with a heart-breaking sweetness, laughed back at him and declared herself amused. She had never had such a jolly time in all her life, she said.
Then, very early in the spring, Maisie went down to her people in
Yorkshire to recover from the jolly time she had had. The convalescent
soldiers had all gone, and Wyck Manor, rather worn and shabby, was Wyck
Manor again.
Jerrold came back to it alone.