So saying, Anne Dunnock found herself sobbing again. “This is too silly,” she told herself, yet the tears continued to flow, until she gave up resisting them and lay down on the bed in her own room. She thought of Enid, to whom she had written so many poems and so many passionate letters, only to discover that they had been shown to all the girls in the school, that they had been borrowed and read aloud in every bathroom where there were girls talking before going to bed. “I could have killed Enid; she made all the girls in Ely think that I was perfectly ridiculous.” And all the bitter experiences of her life came back into her mind and were confused with her present unhappiness.
“Why should we suffer from this?” she asked herself, after a few moments of weeping. “For I know father suffers from it as much as I do, though he has never spoken of it to me, and perhaps not even to himself. Is it because he is a clergyman, or is it because we are in some way superior, cleverer, or better than our neighbours? No,” she answered herself, “it cannot be that, for though I am intelligent, perhaps even remarkably intelligent, father is terribly stupid. In fact he is almost deficient in some respects, and I am sure neither he nor I are superior morally. We are both too emotional and too ready to lose our tempers. All our troubles spring from the fact that father is a clergyman, for whether they recognize it or not, ordinary people have a contempt for the clergy, and clergymen are always ill at ease with their fellow men. Thank God father isn’t one of the hearty sort; in his own way he is an honest man and a religious one, but he has ruined my life. It is Ibsen’s Ghosts over again,” for Anne had been reading Ibsen lately. Then a phrase from another book she had been reading, De Quincey’s Opium-eater, came into her mind: “Unwinding the accursed chain.”
“How can I unwind the accursed chain?” she asked herself. “I must begin soon, for I am twenty-three, and the best part of my life is gone.”
“It is no good crying over spilt milk,” she said, and went on: “At all events I am glad that they did not go away when father told them to go; I am glad that they tore up our garden with that narrow snake-like plough wobbling a little as it ran through the earth. I am glad of it, though I shall find it hard to face our neighbours after this, for they will have changed. Everyone will know of our disgrace.”
She rose from her bed and tidied her hair before the glass; as usual all the hairpins had fallen. Then turning to the window she looked out over the untouched snowfield at the back of the house where not even a dog had run as yet. Everything was covered, even the winter jessamine on the summer-house was concealed, and the black poplars beyond the pond had every twig laden with snow.
“All will be forgotten as soon as the snows are melted,” she said to herself suddenly, with the certainty that her words were true. “All my emotion is nonsense. To me everything seems changed, but it is only a joke to the carters; they will laugh about it over a pint of beer to-day, but in a week’s time they will have forgotten it; the fact that some dog has killed a rat will seem more important. My life is not changed: to-morrow the mason will come to lay the doorstep in its old place, and I shall say: ‘It’s a fine day,’ when I go to the grocer’s shop, and: ‘Very seasonable weather,’ when I take the loaves from the baker. That is the nearest that I shall ever get to contact with my fellows; why should they care how we live, what we do, or whether we disgrace ourselves or not? We mean nothing to them.”
And Anne Dunnock, who only a few moments before had been weeping because the world was changed, began suddenly to weep again because it appeared to her that it had not changed and that it would always remain the same. This time the tears were not so readily checked, for one tear brings the next after it, and Anne remained hidden in her bedroom until Maggie knocked at the door to say that lunch was on the table. But by then she herself had forgotten what had so much moved her less than two hours before, for she had taken up Peer Gynt, and as she went downstairs she was thinking not of the carters with their black faces and the snow on their caps, but of the trolls.
THREE: SOTHEBY’S SHOP
In the night the wind changed to the west and rain fell, so that by morning the snow was gone from the grass, and only lingered in a few places, on the roads and on the bare earth of the kitchen garden, and the rain which thawed the snow washed away the memory of Plough Monday, thus bringing to pass what Anne had fancied sooner than she had expected.
She no longer felt ashamed to go into the village, and as for her father, half an hour after the event he had forgotten his irritation in watching the starlings searching for worms in the loose earth thrown up by the plough.