A thaw followed quickly on the second day of skating, and after that rain and sleet fell for several days. Mr. Dunnock appeared to be equally disgusted by the weather and by his daughter, and retired to his study, scarcely a word being exchanged throughout the day except at breakfast, when Mr. Dunnock always reminded Anne of her duties in the parish.
“A bicycle would rivet me to my present life,” said Anne to herself. “What a chain is to a yard-dog, a bicycle is to the daughter of a clergyman! A bicycle would give me a certain radius of movement; it would fill the emptiness of my life; but I want things that no bicycle can give me. Yes, I want books, music, beautiful clothes, and more than any of these I want what they stand for: that is, the society of intelligent men and cultivated women. Such hopes are vain, I know: I shall never succeed in ‘unwinding the accursed chain’—still I shall attempt it and the best way to set about it is certainly not by entangling myself with a bicycle. Even if I had to live in solitude I should prefer independence, and that I can achieve, for the world is full of women who earn their own living. Ten pounds is more valuable to me than a machine with plated rims or a little oil-bath; no one ever ran away from home on a bicycle, and I shall want all my savings for a railway ticket and lodgings in London while I look about me.”
So the letter ordering the bicycle was torn up, and the catalogue itself cast into the fire, since it was a temptation to the flesh, one which assailed her particularly in the evenings; the ten pounds was replaced to her credit in the Savings Bank, and several days were spent in turning over the best way of earning her living.
“I shall go away from here, that is clear,” she said. “I have known that ever since the ploughmen came that snowy morning. Here the accursed chain can never be unwound, but when I am living a free life, among new people, and my father is forgotten, I shall escape, and speaking easily to everyone I shall be accepted by them; I shall love; I shall be beloved....” Anne shook her head and a shower of hairpins flew out on to the floor.
“Damn the elastic stuff!” she cried. “Why do I endure it a moment longer?” and, tears coming into her eyes, she started up and seized a pair of scissors out of her workbasket.
“There will be time enough for that later on,” and the scissors were dropped as she told herself that she must plan for the future, and not dissipate her emotions in the present.
Yet another week was spent in considering how she could earn her living, and March came in like a lamb before she had arrived at any practical decision.
“The birds sing and build their nests, soon they will be laying their eggs, and then father will be in agonies whenever a young thrush hops across the lawn, lest it should fall between Pussy’s paws. The snowdrops are over long ago, the hyacinths have broken through the ground, their fat buds look like pine-cones. First came the daffodils, the double ones, and then the single. The peaches are showing their pink petals on the walls of the dove house, but I remain where I am, I cannot flower, unfold my petals or spread my wings....”
When her father spoke to her of the migrant birds flitting northwards through Africa and Spain and Italy and France, from bush to bush, twenty yards by twenty yards, to find their way to England’s shores “where alone they find the happiness of love,” said Mr. Dunnock, “and where alone they sing,” Anne vowed fiercely that before the last of the migrants arrived she would be gone herself.
“The cuckoo will be here in six weeks,” said she to herself. “The nightingale will be here a week after; I shall stay to hear one but not the other. Which it will be I cannot tell, for sometimes the nightingale comes before the cuckoo, and that they say is the luckier. I hope I shall hear the nightingale before I go and not the cuckoo; it would be an omen that I should find a true lover waiting for me, and not a deceiver.”