The spring pleased her and excited her, and an hour or two was spent happily searching for the first wild flowers, and gathering the sweet-scented white violets which grew under the old apple trees, but meeting her father at lunch and hearing him speak to her of the Sunday school reminded her of her resolution to leave him, and at that moment the beauty of the springtime seemed nothing but a reflection of the weakness of her character.
“How can I leave him? He is helpless, and I am useful to him. Who will teach in the Sunday school? Who will keep up the thin pretence that he cares what happens to his parishioners when I am gone? Without me who will order his meals, and who will keep a watch on the bacon? The Pattles will rob him; they will eat him out of house and home.” But though it seemed that it was impossible for her to leave her father helpless, and though Anne knew that she loved him, she was soon going over her old arguments about how a girl can earn her living.
All her experiences had been no more than to pour out tea, and to teach in the Sunday school. Other women of her age she knew were able to be bank clerks, or the secretaries of business men, they worked in Government offices, they did typewriting, indeed there seemed nothing that women did not do, but Anne doubted very much whether she could become a useful person of that kind. She had received what Mr. Dunnock had called “the education of a lady” (that was no education at all), she could not add up columns of figures, or use a typewriter, or write in shorthand. All she could do was to keep the children quiet, to tell them Bible stories about Balaam’s ass, and Daniel in the den of lions; she could order the groceries, check the washing, arrange a bowl of flowers, speak boarding-school French and struggle somehow through a piece of Schumann—letting the hammer notes sound rather weak as her fingers tired.
To earn her living seemed impossible unless she were to succeed with her fashion plates, or were to exchange one Sunday school for another. That was always possible, and in another parish she would meet with a curate who would ask her to marry him, for nowhere could a curate find a better wife.
“Better a bicycle than a curate!” she exclaimed. “I would rather cut my throat than be the wife of a clergyman. Other duties perhaps I might face, but I have not the courage to work all my life for parishioners who prefer to go to their own chapels, or to the public-house. It is the fashion plates or suicide.”
But then Anne remembered that there were many elderly ladies in the world whose incomes permitted the keeping of a donkey-carriage, with a companion to walk beside it. “Why should I not be such a companion?” she asked. “In the winter her sciatica will require a change of climate, and we shall go away together to the Riviera, or to Egypt.” And the rest of the afternoon was spent dreaming of the music she would be hearing at Rome, of seeing the Sphinx by moonlight and visiting Tutankhamen’s grave.
By the evening she had decided to put an advertisement in The Church Times, and at night lay awake repeating to herself the magic words which would bring her freedom: “A well-educated girl, daughter of a clergyman, requires situation as companion to a lady of means.” No, that did not sound well: should she call herself “a respectable girl”? No, not a respectable girl—that smacked of the kitchen. “A quiet girl, with an old-fashioned education, desires to become the paid companion of a lady.” Nothing would do, but nevertheless the advertisement would have to be sent, and finding sleep impossible, Anne took pen and paper and wrote first one sentence and then another until she had covered several sheets.
Next morning all her efforts seemed vain, but at last she decided on sending the sentence which seemed to her to be the clearest. “Young lady, who has enjoyed a religious upbringing, wishes to see the world as the paid companion of a lady.” There was nothing more required but a covering letter to the newspaper, and a postal order.
Anne put on her boots and hurried out into the blustering March wind. It had broken the first hyacinth, and the daffodils were lying flat on the earth. How the wind roared! It was pleasant to be out of the house, for the chimneys had been smoking. The grass on the lawn was lashed into white streaks by the wind before which the hens ran sideways, like old ladies crossing the road. There was a thick scum at one side of the broad ditch, a scum of withered catkins fallen from the black poplars. Catkins hung like funereal trappings or like black caterpillars on every twig of the apple trees; on the ditch, the ducks were dancing on the waves.
“Such a wind as this scatters the seeds,” said Anne. “The winged fruits of the elms and the maples are whirled up from the ditches where they have been lying all the winter, and are carried over the tops of the tallest trees, and this wind will gather me up like a seed that has lain too long under the tree from which it fell. Heaven knows where it will carry me! To Egypt or Greece, maybe, or perhaps only to pull the rug over the knees of an old lady driving her donkey-cart along the lanes of an adjoining parish.”