DAVID GARNETT

GO SHE MUST!

ALFRED·A·KNOPF: NEW YORK

MCMXXVII

COPYRIGHT 1927, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO
STEPHEN TOMLIN

CONTENTS

GO SHE MUST!

ONE: BIRDS IN THE SNOW

Snow lay thick over everything on the morning of the second Monday in the year, and the Reverend Charles Dunnock, drawing back the curtains of his bedroom window, said to himself that if the great sycamore full of rooks’ nests in the churchyard were to fall, or even if a steeple were to be built for the little church of Dry Coulter, such changes would not alter the landscape so much as this snowstorm had done. Buried under three inches of snow the country was recognizable, but wholly transformed, and he asked himself how it was that a uniform colouring should make a totally new world yet one which was composed of familiar objects in their accustomed places.

Indifferent to the cold, he gazed out of his bedroom window enchanted by the beauty of the scene, and then, as he caught a glimpse of the first horizontal beams of the sun falling on Nature’s wedding-cake, he told himself that even the dullest witted of his dissenting parishioners would feel compelled to cry out: “This is like Heaven! I could fancy myself dead, and this Eternity!”

“Yes”—he reflected—“all men must feel it, for that conceit is helped out by the extraordinary stillness, the footfalls of man and bird and beast are muffled, and the world seems empty. Nobody is stirring, for there is nothing like a heavy fall of snow to keep people by their firesides. Only the postman and the milkman go their rounds”; and while he was dressing he heard their sudden knocks at the back door, with no warning crunch of gravel, or sound of the gate slamming in the yard.

“Their fidelity,” he said to himself, “is like that of the clocks striking the hours when there is death in the house”—for Mrs. Dunnock had died exactly a year before, and her death was always in his mind. His bedroom had been her bedroom, though only for a few months, for she had died soon after her husband had been presented with a living, and since her death he slept alone in the great bed where she had waited so often for him to come up from his study, and where he had always found her with her soft hair spread like a bird’s wing over the pillow, and in which she had died.

“The clocks strike the hours in the moments of our greatest sorrow,” he said to himself. “Nothing will keep them from the punctual discharge of their duty, and listening to them we are recalled to this life, we shoulder our burdens once more, we begin ticking again ourselves, ticking away our ordinary lives.”

He went to the looking-glass hanging over her dressing-table and began to comb his beard, then, looking once more out of the window, watched two men pass by, leading a horse along the road to be roughed at the blacksmith’s, a slow business, for one of the men had to throw down sacks every few yards for it to step on, wherever the blizzard had whirled away the snow and left a polished slide of ice.

At a few minutes before nine he sat down to the breakfast table and took the cup of tea that his daughter poured out for him; then, hearing a shout, both Anne and he turned to the window and caught sight of a red muffler flying in the wind, and a thrown snowball, but when the children had passed, running on their way to school, all was silence, for Mr. Dunnock had turned to read a circular which the postman had brought that morning.

“Evangelicals! Evangelicals!” he muttered angrily, for he was a ritualist; a last flicker of the Oxford Movement had filled his life with poetry. Then he pushed away the newspaper, and, taking some bread for the birds, he rose from the breakfast table and went to the front door.

The world outside was dazzling, and the snow lay piled up deep before the sill. Mr. Dunnock peered out, not daring to step in the snow in his carpet slippers. He listened: not a sound; he looked and marked the roofs which yesterday were but the edges of a row of tiles, to-day as thick as thatch—like Christmas cards. “And here’s a robin,” he said, “waiting for me to throw him some of the bread.” He threw a piece which was lost in the snow. “A wedding-cake! How strange it is to reflect that Anne is older now than her mother when I married her! Yes, the world is become a wedding-cake. Something very strange has happened, and who knows what will be the end of it? for it has begun to snow again, and the rare flakes drift slowly to the ground like feathers from the angels’ wings. Are they moulting up there? Or has Satan got among them like a black cat which has climbed through the wire netting into the dove loft?”

Mr. Dunnock fetched a piece of cardboard from his study to serve as a table for the birds, and dropped it a few feet away on to the snow, then, crumbling the bread in his fingers, he threw the birds their breakfast. Some of the crumbs fell on each side into the snow and were lost.

“Here they come,” he said to himself, for bright eyes had been watching him from every tree and bush.

The birds fluttered nearer, eyeing the crumbs spread out for them, and then looking sideways at the tall, bearded man standing in the doorway. Their fear was speedily forgotten, for the clergyman made it his habit to feed them every morning, and soon the cardboard table was covered with sparrows, robins, blackbirds, and thrushes, all of them flashing their wings, bickering and scrambling for the finest crumbs like a flock of bantams. And having been successful, one would often fly off with a piece in his bill, which he wished to devour in solitude.

Anne Dunnock remained at the breakfast table, for she had only just finished the kipper on her plate. “The labourers will not go to work in the fields on such a day as this,” she said to herself. “And not a woman will venture out except me, for women’s boots are generally leaky, and their skirts flap wet against their calves. With a frost like this there should be skating, but the snow will have spoilt the ice, even if it were swept.” She finished a piece of toast and rose from the table to clear away the breakfast. The loaf was a pitiful object, only a shell of crust, with all of the inside scooped out.

“Another loaf gone,” she said to herself. “We always have stale crusts, yet I am sure the birds would eat them as readily as they do the crumb, and crusts are so nasty in bread-and-butter pudding.”

Mr. Dunnock continued watching the birds, and the draught from the open front door made his daughter shiver. “Birds! Birds! I should like to wear a bird in my hat.”

She was a tall girl, beautiful, with a small pale face, and straw-coloured hair, hair which would not stay up; wherever she went she scattered hairpins. She was still in mourning for her mother’s death, and her long black dress fitted her badly, hindering her impatient movements, and giving her the look of a converted savage dressed in a missionary’s night-gown.

“Father is feeding the birds. He never forgets them, and here am I grudging them the crumb of the loaf. But housekeeping would have made Saint Francis uncharitable, though Saint Francis would not have said he wanted a bird for his hat.”

The marmalade, the cruet, the silver toast rack, all were put away into the mahogany sideboard, the tablecloth was brushed, and holding the little wooden tray full of crumbs, she went out into the hall, where her father still stood at the open door, and then leaning over his shoulder she shook the crumbs out on to the snow, and, scared by her sudden gesture, the birds flew off.

“Oh, Anne, how stupid and inconsiderate you are!” exclaimed her father, angrily. “How little imagination you have. Don’t you understand that when you wave anything suddenly like that you frighten them? There was such a fine missel-thrush too. He is not regular, and though the other birds will soon come back, he will be discouraged. It is most vexing.” Now that Mr. Dunnock had lost his congregation (a far larger one than had ever attended a Communion service at Dry Coulter Church), he shut the door, shaking his head irritably, then he put his beard in his mouth, as if that were the best way to stifle his anger, and went into his study.

The book he took up fell from his hands before he had turned the second or third page, for he had not the intellect nor the determination to be a scholar. A beautiful word always set his mind chasing a beautiful picture; his thoughts clouded over with dreams, and he remained lost in meditation. When he came to himself it was to sink on to his knees in prayer, for he was a shy man, unable to express himself to men, and for that reason much given to communing with God.

For twenty years he had been a poor curate at a church in the shadow of Ely Cathedral, but he had not been popular: he was indifferent to the things which were important to his fellow clergy, and his mystical love of ritual had found no sympathizers, until at last the Bishop took pity on him, and gave him a small living in a district in the fens. His growing uncertainty of temper, combined with a sort of hopeless oddity, had begun to make him a nuisance, and some provision had to be made.

At Ely the Church is taken seriously: it is a great power, and on taking up his new position, Mr. Dunnock was shocked to find it completely disregarded, for the inhabitants of Dry Coulter are Nonconformists. Even with the few who belonged to the church, he was not a success. His sermons were incomprehensible, yet they might have passed unnoticed if he had not affected a cassock and a biretta, if he had not placed a crucifix on the Communion table and called a blessing on the houses of the sick before he entered them. As vicar Mr. Dunnock was a failure, and within less than a year he was regarded with far greater contempt than is usually extended to the clergy. Yet he was not a disappointed man, for he had never been ambitious of success, and had never imagined that he might be popular. He knew that it was too late in his life for him to make any effort; he was disinclined to exert himself with his parishioners, and avoiding them as far as he could, he was not unhappy. He had grown lazy, too, and now that it was in his power, he neglected to hold the innumerable little services which as a curate he had longed to celebrate.

If his wife had lived he might perhaps have exerted himself, but he knew that Anne did not share his emotions, and soon the special days were passed over, and Mr. Dunnock remained sunk in melancholy. Sometimes his conscience pricked him; then he shut himself up in his room and remained for hours in prayer.

“Damn the missel-thrush!” thought his daughter. “But father is always irritable on Mondays; I have noticed it before. Life indeed would be intolerable if it were not for the house. I have everything to make me unhappy, but I love this house. Dear old Noah’s ark.”

She went upstairs, where Maggie was waiting for her to help in making the beds. Maggie Pattle was a girl of seventeen, who lived out with her mother, and let herself into the vicarage early every morning, for she was the only servant and came in by the day. Shorter than Anne, she was fully twice as broad, a well-nourished girl, who would eat a pound of sausages or of bacon at a sitting, washing it down with vinegar, and her red cheeks shone with health.

Anne often thought that if only Maggie had come from another village she would have made an excellent servant; all her sluttish ways came from her mother’s being just round the corner; she had only to slip down the vicarage garden and through a hole in the hedge to be at home. The cottage was so small, and Mrs. Pattle and her family so large, that Anne thought of the old woman who lived in a shoe whenever she looked at it; though Mrs. Pattle never seemed in any doubt what to do. She knew when to slap a child, and when only to swear at it.

No doubt she was a good mother, resembling very much one of the huge sows which sometimes wandered over the village green in front of her cottage—a sow whose steps were followed by a sounder of little porkers trotting about in all directions. What if she did chastise one, or even gobble it up? One would not be missed.... No, indeed, for how did it come about that Mrs. Pattle had three children that all seemed to be between two and three years old, yet none of them twins? Was one of them Maggie’s? Anne thought not, but it was difficult to be sure, and if the matter were not settled soon she would never know; on such points the Pattles’ memories were not trustworthy. Yes, they were a slipshod family, though not exactly what one would call an immoral one....

Yet, though Anne despised Maggie for her sluttishness and untruthfulness, in some ways she admired her. Maggie was a good girl, she did what she was told, had a passion for washing floors, and was not a bad cook. Then she would go anywhere at any time, and do anything for anybody to oblige. Mrs. Pattle’s cottage was crawling with babies, could one of them be the fruit of this cheery good-nature?

But if Anne admired the way Maggie scrubbed the scullery floor, she felt envy when she saw her sauntering along the lanes with her hands in her pockets, whistling like a ploughboy, and stopping to speak to every person she met on the road. Did she envy Maggie only because she had so many friends, or was it partly because she knew all the boys and the young men, and went in the grove in the evenings, coming out with her cheeks no redder than they were by nature?

Why was it, Anne asked herself, that she could not whistle as she walked along in her long black dress and her black straw hat? She had no friends to talk to except the village people, and she could only visit them if they were ill, or in trouble. That, and watching her father feed the birds, was not enough to fill her life. She read, and when the young carters went ploughing she laid aside her book to watch them as they passed the house, sitting sideways on their great horses. Anne liked the way men whistled, and their deep voices as they spoke to the cart-horses drinking at the pond, voices so full of restraint and kindliness. There was no way for her to speak to these young men who looked so cheerful as they went by to work in their rough clothes, though sometimes, when she was out on a long walk and was far from home, she had tried to get into conversation with a young farmer leaning over a gate, or with a gamekeeper idling along the edge of a wood, his black and white spaniel at his heels.

But the beds had to be made, and since she liked to sleep in a big four-poster that they had found in the vicarage on their arrival, and her father also slept in a large bed, she helped Maggie to turn the mattresses.

It takes two to make a bed properly, and with an unselfish companion who does not take more than her fair share of the sheets to tuck in on her side, it is pleasant work.

How the mattress bends and coils on itself, somersaulting heavily like a whale, and how brave the great linen sheet looks as you turn it down! The last of the two beds was made, and they were tucking in the quilt when a strange sound came from outside the house—a confused noise of voices singing. Was it a hymn?

“Whatever can that be, Maggie?” she asked.

“That’s the carters come, Miss,” the girl answered. “It is Plough Monday to-day.”

“What is Plough Monday?”

Maggie could only stare at this question—she could not answer it, except by saying:

“Well, they always keep Plough Monday round here, though not properly, like they used to do. They came to the gate last year, but I told them not to come singing with your mother lying ill.”

“I shall go and see,” said Anne, and she ran across the landing from her bedroom, which faced the garden, into her father’s, which overlooked the road.

TWO: PLOUGH MONDAY

The sound of voices came again, men and boys singing, one out of tune with the others, but all ringing with the same fresh gaiety and purity through the frosty air, reminding the hearer of the sharp notes of the blacksmith’s hammer raining on the anvil, and giving him the same assurance that the very texture of man’s ordinary life is a beautiful and joyous fabric.

This time Anne could hear the words of the song.

One morning very early,

The ploughboy he was seen

All hastening to the stable

His horses for to clean.

She ran to the window and, looking out into the whiteness, she was blinded for the first moment by the sun shining on to the dazzling field of snow, but in the next instant she perceived three great chestnut horses standing just below her immediately in front of the door. They were harnessed to a plough, at the handles of which stood a labourer, whilst at the head of each of the horses was a young carter, and on the foremost of the horses were two little boys riding. It was the voices of these little boys which were so oddly out of tune.

Anne was astonished to see them with their plough and horses so close to the doorstep, and was filled with a sense of strangeness even before she saw what was most strange about these visitors. That a plough should be standing so close to the house was strange, and even for the moment seemed to her shocking, for one of the horses was standing on a flower-bed, but this was nothing to the appearance of the men, for all of them had their faces blacked and their shoulders and their caps were white with snow. The black faces against the whiteness of the snow frightened her; for a moment she caught her breath with fear, which turned almost instantly to wonder and delight.

With chaff and corn

He did them bait,

Their tails and manes

He did comb straight.

What was it? What was it? Something strange, something beautiful, the thing perhaps she had always wanted, and half guessed at, but which she had never before met face to face.

The tune changed:

Come all you lads and lasses

See a gay ploughboy.

Gay, yes, they were gay; the snow was falling, and the sun was shining, and they had blacked their faces and come to her doorstep, and one black face with an open pink mouth was looking up at her in the window.

Please can you spare a halfpenny

For an old ploughboy?

A bit of bread and cheese

Is better than nothing.

The song was over; one of the young carters came to the door and gave a knock which echoed through the house. Anne started, woken from her rapt contemplation of the horses and the men, and still repeating under her breath: “Beautiful, they are beautiful!” she ran downstairs to open the door. Mr. Dunnock, however, was there before her, and from the hall she could see nothing of the men with their black faces, nor of the plough, nor the horses with their satin coats, their manes flecked with snow, and their tails twisted up in plaits of straw; her father’s back blocked the doorway, and she could hear his voice in anger.

“That’s enough of this foolery. You should know better than to trample down the lawn and the flower-bed.”

Give us a shilling and we shall be glad,

Give us a penny and we shall go home,

piped the two little boys from the horse’s back. “Please, Sir, it’s Plough Monday, we like to keep it up.”

“I have nothing for you,” said her father. “I have quite enough deserving objects for my charity.” He shut the door, and found himself face to face with his daughter.

“Some village clod-hoppers have come begging,” said the clergyman, throwing back his head and giving vent to a cough of irritation. “They actually brought three horses and a plough over the flower-beds and up to the door.”

“They won’t have hurt the flower-beds, father, in this weather, with so much snow on the ground,” said Anne.

“Perhaps not,” he answered, “but they have made a great mess of the snow in front of the house; besides I had wished to measure the footprints of the birds.”

“You might have given them something, they seemed so jolly.”

“Jolly?” Mr. Dunnock’s cough became almost a bark. “It is not my idea of jollity, nor I should have hoped yours, for yokels to black their faces in imitation of Christie minstrels, and come begging for money simply because they are given a day’s holiday on account of the weather.”

“But, father, I think that it is an old custom, and that they expect to be given money.”

Mr. Dunnock gazed at his daughter with real surprise.

“I won’t hear of it. I most strongly disapprove. They may try other people. I am not going to be victimized, or imposed on. Old custom? Remember what the midshipman said in his letter to his mother: ‘Manners they have none, and their customs are beastly.’” The clergyman recovered himself sufficiently to laugh at his own joke, but when his daughter moved towards the door, he said angrily: “I forbid you to encourage them, Anne; the incident is closed and I have sent them away.”

The local Christie minstrels, however, had not gone away, and as Mr. Dunnock spoke a loud knock resounded on the door.

“You had better go upstairs, Anne. Kindly leave me to deal with them.”

Anne ran upstairs, trembling with rage, and rushed into her father’s bedroom, where, by looking out of window, she was able to see what was going on and overhear most of what was being said.

When Mr. Dunnock opened the door he found all the ploughmen gathered in a group on the doorstep.

“It’s Plough Monday, Sir, and we have come to keep it, and ask you for a piece of money for our song.”

“I have told you already to go away,” said the clergyman, coughing with exasperation. “I don’t give money to beggars.”

There was a silence, then one of the young men at the back laughed and said: “He doesn’t tumble to it; tell the parson that it is Plough Monday.”

“Where would you be if there weren’t no ploughmen, or no ploughing done?” asked the spokesman of the group. “You wouldn’t get no tithes if it weren’t for the plough.”

There was a chorus of approval at that.

“No, that you wouldn’t!”

“He can’t answer that, Fred.”

They shouted, but at the word tithes Mr. Dunnock had slammed the door in their faces. The ploughmen knocked again, and for some minutes the sound echoed through every room in the house. Anne could see that they were puzzled, and in some doubt what to do next. One or two of them were laughing, another scratched his head while he said: “Called us beggars, did he? Reckon we work as hard as he.” Presently they retreated to one corner of the garden and remained talking together for some little while, until Maggie appeared from round the corner of the kitchen and called out to them.

“You had best go away,” she said. “The parson he says you are a lot of lazy louts. I heard him. He won’t give you naught. You won’t get nothing if you do plough his doorstep up.” The ploughmen did not answer her, nor did they appear to pay any attention to her words, but slowly went back to their horses’ heads. “What must be, must be,” said the oldest of the company, laying hold of the handles of the plough. “I’ld as lief keep the custom. Come on, boys!” he shouted. At these words Anne could see that they all suddenly recovered their good humour, and a moment after they began joking among themselves.

“Parson will have to wipe his feet on his mat before we have done with him,” said one lad.

“There won’t be anyone shy of paying us our pennies after this,” added another.

“Let him preach what sermon he likes next Sunday; there won’t be no one but his daughter and our Maggie to hear him swearing.”

“Hey, my beauties!” shouted the ploughman at the handles.

The great horses strained and began to move; the young carters at their heads shouted and led the team in a wide circle across the untouched snowfield which was the lawn; the plough sidled and circled through the snow, and the men began arguing with the horses.

“Hold back, can’t you!”

“Steady there, whoa.”

At last, after one horse had nearly put its head through the window of Mr. Dunnock’s study, and another had trampled down a rose bush, the plough was got into position at the far corner of the house. After that they all waited while the ploughman left the handles and began to hammer at part of his plough.

The fear which Anne had felt when she first looked out returned to her, and the sense of strangeness persisted. Was she waking or dreaming, was she afraid or was she glad? Suddenly she heard Maggie’s voice saying in excited tones:

“You are never going to plough up Mr. Dunnock’s doorstep!” and hearing these words Anne began to tremble.

At last the ploughman straightened his back and said:

“Calls us idle beggars, does he? And too busy to speak with us; we’ll mark Plough Monday in his prayer-book. Get up there....”

The horses strained, and the plough sank through the snow into the soft earth of a flower-bed, the traces tightened and the three horses pulled; a wrinkle or two showed itself in their haunches, and the share of the plough threw up a broad streak of raw earth.

“Steady, boys, steady by the doorstep,” called the ploughman, and the carters edged the horses nearer in to the wall of the house. In a moment the plough reached the door, and Anne, gazing down from above, saw the flagstone lift and topple, while the plough ran swiftly on, and the earth streamed out upon the snow.

“I must stop them,” she whispered, but she did not move, or take her eyes off the scene. Watching from above, the girl was fascinated and horrified by every detail; the swift and irresistible progress of the hidden ploughshare running through the earth delighted her; the strength of the three stalwart Suffolk Punches, and the lean, sinewy wrists of the ploughman guiding the handles, and the gay young men, all thrilled her. While watching, she could not have told what were her emotions: yet she knew that the scene was beautiful, the plough slipping so easily in the rich earth had the grace and lissom strength of a snake. Once again the horses turned, sweeping down and halting beside the hedge of laurel, and there was another pause while the plough was got into position, and then the team swept round and strained forward again to cut the second furrow, and, that finished, to draw the plough out into the roadway in front of the vicarage, while the ploughman threw the handles on one side and held them down so that the share skidded through the snow over the grass.

The men did not call out, nor even appear to speak or to laugh among themselves; having cut their two furrows, they went away swiftly, pausing only for a moment on the road to adjust the ploughshare, and then hurrying on to sing their songs under other windows.

Only when the plough had turned the corner of the lane and the last of the horses’ heads had vanished down the avenue of elm trees, did Anne Dunnock leave her position at the window, and only then did she burst into a flood of tears. “I cannot live after such an insult,” she said to herself. “How could they do such a thing to our house? But why is it that it seemed to me so beautiful as well as so cruel?” and as she asked herself this question she noticed that though she had dried her tears her hands were still trembling. “The lawn of virgin snow has been torn up by the plough, the naked earth exposed, and the garden trampled over by the iron shoes of the horses and the hobnails of the labourers,” she said. “And our doorstep has been overturned; my father’s fault, for he was in the wrong. I feel now as if I could never forgive him for bringing this shame on us, yet if it had not been him it might have been me, for the same fault of character is in both of us. We are rejected everywhere, unable to share in the life around us, or to understand it. Enid taught me that at Ely, but to-day it has been recognized by the ploughmen, and this broad gash in the earth and the uprooted doorstep proclaim it to our neighbours. I shall never dare show my face in the village after this.”

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.

After breakfast, old Noah, the gardener, busied himself in filling in the furrow, and old Simmonds, who called himself a builder and fencing contractor, came round and, after mixing a little mortar on a board, laid the doorstep back, only a trifle askew, in its old place.

“There’s your doorstep, Miss,” he said, straightening his back as Anne opened the front door and stood on the threshold prepared for walking. “There’s your doorstep; no one will ever shift that again.”

Simmonds was right, for Anne lacked the courage to tell him to take it up and set it straight.

“May I step on it?” she asked.

“Ay, he’ll bear your weight, Miss,” said the old man blinking, and to prove his words he stepped on to the doorstep himself, blocking her path while he stamped once or twice with his hobnailed boots.

“Is that firm enough for you, Miss?” he asked, speaking with melancholy pride, and then standing aside for her to walk on it herself.

“Yes, that seems all right, Simmonds,” she said, stepping on to the stone, and was aware as she spoke that her words were meaningless, for why should the old man be so proud of the force of gravity which kept the doorstep where it lay? Why should she have to give him credit for it?

“I was going to speak to your father, Miss, about the sills,” said Simmonds.

“About what?”

“It’s a long time since they were painted, and the wood is perishing. I thought perhaps your father might like me to estimate for them.”

Anne frowned; the question of the sills annoyed her, but she could not escape until she had looked at them.

Simmonds was right—the paint on the window-sills had cracked into hundreds of little grey lichenous cups.

“I’ll speak to him about it,” she said. “We must have it done one day.”

The elm trees were so beautiful; it was because of the elms that she loved Dry Coulter. Soon the spring would come, soon the snowdrops would cluster thickly under the garden walls, and every day that passed improved the quality of the birds’ song.

“There is no prison so terrible as beauty,” she said suddenly to herself. “I love the seasons, the beauty of the village, the clouds, and the tall groves of elms standing round the green. I love our orchard with its old apple trees, and the pears; I dream in the winter of what the crop will be in the following autumn, fearing that the bullfinches will take the buds, or the blossom be cut down by a late frost, yet time is flying—and while my blood runs fast as it does now I must walk demurely like the old woman that I shall so soon become. Yes, I shall be old before I am free to live as I should like. Shall I ever go to the opera? A cheap seat would do—I cannot expect a box, or emeralds, but one can hear as well from the gallery, and it is the music that I want to hear. Shall I escape one day? Shall I go to London?”

Then it came into her mind that perhaps even if she went to London, even if she got to know interesting men (and such beings must exist), even if she went to the opera with them, she might still feel herself a prisoner, and that perhaps the most that one can do in life is to exchange one sort of beauty for another; the beauty of the apple trees for the beauty of music.

“Yes, there is no prison so terrible as beauty,” she said again, and added immediately: “Now I must go to the grocer’s,” and though she disliked the grocer himself, she smiled with pleasure at the thought that she might see his little daughter Rachel.

“Emmanuel Sotheby, Grocer and Provision Merchant” was painted over the little shop with its windows filled with bars of soap, packets of starch, clay pipes, and walnuts, for Sotheby dealt in everything, and though the shop was small, the stock was large. Sotheby always had what you wanted: calico, mustard, cotton, China tea, boot polish, even lamp chimneys. There was no shop so good as Sotheby’s in the nearest town: there was nothing better than Sotheby’s even in Ely, yet would he be able to provide her with drawing-pins? It was unlikely, almost impossible, and Anne determined not to mention them until she had made her other purchases; she would only speak of them just before she left the shop. In that way Mr. Sotheby would not feel that she had expected too much of him, or think that she was disappointed. With her hand on the latch, she said to herself: “I will not speak of the drawing-pins if there are other customers,” but the shop was empty, and the jangling bell brought Mrs. Sotheby out of an inner room. The grocer’s wife was a slender woman of fifty; her pale wrinkled face made her seem older, though her hair was still a beautiful brown, and when she smiled she showed two even rows of little pearly teeth. Mrs. Sotheby was always merry; whenever Anne came into the shop her brown eyes twinkled, or she broke into a low musical laugh, while her face crumpled itself up into all its wrinkles, her white teeth flashed, and her eyes almost vanished. Such a merry laugh greeted Anne that morning, and Mrs. Sotheby explained it by a reference to the events of the day before.

“Good morning, Miss Dunnock, I have been hearing such dreadful things all yesterday about the ploughmen. I am afraid they must have upset your father, but you must not take any notice of them. It is all foolishness, and I don’t know what the men can have been thinking of, but, of course, it is an old custom and they like keeping it on that account. You know men are just like boys about anything like that, but they did not mean to be disrespectful or unneighbourly, I’m sure. Your father is still rather a stranger here; I expect he did not understand their ways.”

At Mrs. Sotheby’s words Anne started, all her shame came back to her suddenly, but she saw that she must answer. A lump came in her throat, and her mouth trembled as she said:

“No, neither father nor I had ever heard of Plough Monday. It was entirely my father’s fault: he is sometimes impatient when he is disturbed reading.”

“It was very foolish of the men,” said Mrs. Sotheby. “And they should feel ashamed of themselves, but directly I heard of it I knew there was a misunderstanding of some sort. It happens so easily, only I thought I would speak of it, because you know it is an old custom, and the men are proud of keeping it here, so you must make allowances for them.”

The kindliness of these words was more than Anne could bear. “Thank you, thank you so much,” she cried, and suddenly she found that her tears would flow—she could not keep them back, though she shook her head angrily, and as she did so a couple of hairpins dropped on to the floor.

At that moment a shadow passed in front of the windows; there was the sound of wheels, and a horse being pulled up short in front of the shop.

Anne looked about her wildly, but Mrs. Sotheby had lifted a flap of the counter and was saying:

“Come into our parlour and sit down for a little while, Miss Dunnock; it was foolish of me to speak, but I never guessed you would have taken such nonsense to heart. If one were to pay attention to half the silly things men do, our lives would not be worth living.”

Anne followed Mrs. Sotheby through the shop into a little room, with a coal fire burning in the grate. She sat down in the armchair pushed forward for her, while the grocer’s wife hurried back into the shop, summoned by the jangling bell. For a little while Anne was overcome with mortification at finding herself in the grocer’s parlour and wondered how she could have so disgraced herself.

Why, if she must cry every morning (and it seemed to have become a habit), could she not retire to her own room and weep in solitude? But after a few moments of humiliation the thought came into her mind that at last she had disgraced herself finally and for ever, and this reflection was a consolation to her.

“I cannot undo this. If I were to steal out of the back door without Mrs. Sotheby hearing me, it would make no difference. I have shown her my feelings; I have burst into tears in her shop; I cannot pretend to have any dignity after this.”

Anne dried the last of her tears, reflecting that it was exciting to have made a fool of herself, and that if she had not lost her self-control she would never have been asked into that parlour. Then, taking off her hat, she began tidying her hair and looking about her.

The room she was in was small and richly furnished with uncomfortable armchairs, upholstered in dark red plush; there was a table covered with a red cloth, which had a fringe of little balls; a slowly ticking clock stood on the mantelpiece; on a small table, before the window, stood a large green pot containing an arum lily with one leaf half-unfurled and a white bud showing; from the curtain rod hung a wire cage full of maidenhair ferns. On the walls were photographs: Mr. and Mrs. Sotheby on their wedding day, a plump and rather ugly young woman, the Tower Bridge with a ship going through it, and a boy with pomatum on his hair. Then, turning her head, Anne saw a large photograph hanging just behind her.

“What a strange face!” for the young man certainly had a strange face, and was wearing an odd little round cap, almost like a skull-cap, with a tiny tail sticking up in the middle; his throat was bare, with no sign of a collar or tie, or even of a shirt. A cigarette was hanging out of the corner of his mouth, but the strangest thing was not the cap, but the face, or rather the expression of the face, for the features themselves were vaguely familiar. The young man was laughing, but there was a look of careless contempt, almost of insolence, which Anne very much disliked. The nose was long and straight, and rather foxy, the eyes mere slits set wide apart; the forehead was broad and large, but the chin feeble. “Good gracious me!” exclaimed Anne, noticing that in one ear there was a little earring. “A man wearing an earring! How extraordinary!” She gazed at the photograph for some time, taking in every detail of the face. Certainly there was something disagreeable in the expression; the laughter was untrustworthy and heartless; he was laughing at other people, not sharing his laughter with them.

But the customer was staying a long while in the shop, and, becoming impatient, she went to the door and listened. The voice she heard was that of Mr. Lambert, a young farmer, whom Anne knew since he attended church (he was a churchwarden), and once he had stopped her in the road and told her that she should go riding.

To Anne his remark had seemed ridiculous, since he must know well enough that they were too poor to keep a hack for her use, and he could not have meant that he had one for her to ride.

If he had wished to say: “If you get the habit, I’ll mount you on one of my horses,” why hadn’t he said so? He could not have intended that, and even if he had, what would she have answered? What did he expect in return? That she should go riding with him? She smiled at the thought: Mr. Lambert’s company might not be so bad, but she would not care for it if she were under an obligation to him. If she killed his horse in taking a fence ... that would be awkward! And if he met a girl whom he liked better as a companion on his rides—in that case she would be left with the habit on her hands. Her father would never allow such a thing; think of the gossip there would be!

“Damn this place! Damn my father!” she said to herself, and listening to the farmer’s sharp, but very pleasant voice, and closing her eyes, she had for a moment the delicious sensation of the horse bounding under her, of patting its withers, listening to the creak of the saddle, and keeping her balance while she looked proudly over the level landscape of the fens.

“I will, I will, I will,” she repeated to herself. “I will ride a horse once in my life. I will even if I get left with a riding habit. But I suppose that is the spirit which brings young girls to ruin. I can imagine how Maggie would say to herself: ‘I will let my head be turned by a man, even if I am left with a baby.’” Anne laughed at the comparison. “Silly thoughts.... They hurry me on to absurdities, and all because Mr. Lambert said something polite and meaningless to me, for it is politeness to assume that one can do whatever one likes without regard for money. But here am I laughing when I ought still to be sobbing, since I am still waiting for Mrs. Sotheby to come and console me. What shall I do? How on earth, by what false pretences, did I ever get into this cosy little room? If Mr. Lambert does not go away soon, I shall march into the shop, lift the flap in the counter and go away.”

She listened then to the voices. “Very good, Mrs. Sotheby, you shall have the pig for scalding on Thursday, unless Mr. Sotheby sends me word to-morrow.”

The bell of the shop tinkled; Mr. Lambert paused to add a last word, and Mrs. Sotheby answered him: “Well, if you say so, Mr. Lambert,” and Anne could hear her hand on the latch.

“Well, I thought Mr. Lambert was never going. He had come to see Mr. Sotheby about carting sand, and really I didn’t know what to say to him. Now I have agreed to share a pig with him; let me know if you would like a leg of pork, or sausages, or one of my pork cheeses. My husband is so busy now; I hardly see him from morning till night; he is putting up some cottages at Linton, and his mind is far more on them than on the grocery business, so that I have quite as much as I can manage. I am really sorry that I undertook to scald the pig, but it was rather tempting. Still, however many pigs I scald, I shall never do half so much as Emmanuel does; he’s out every day of the week, and drives the round himself, and then he preaches twice every Sunday, here and in the Ebenezer Tabernacle at Wet Coulter. Mr. Lambert wanted to see him in a hurry, but I could not tell him where to find my husband. I cannot keep in my head half the things he is doing, and I have not yet been out to see the Linton cottages. Still, it keeps him in good spirits, and he is doing it for my boy. But I mustn’t keep you any longer now.” Mrs. Sotheby stopped speaking, she smiled, and added rather shyly: “You will come and chat with me sometimes, won’t you, Miss Dunnock?”

Anne promised to come again soon, and spoke of the arum lily beginning to unfold its flower, and then, passing through into the shop, asked for curry powder and sultanas.

When these had been given her, she hesitated, asking herself whether, after Mrs. Sotheby’s kindness, she could ask for drawing-pins. Perhaps Mr. Sotheby would fetch some from Linton, but at that moment she felt shy of asking a man who was building a row of cottages to execute her little commissions. She would wait until another day for that. But on the doorstep she paused:

“Thank you for being so kind to me. I shall always come and talk to you if I am upset by anything.”

The face behind the counter broke into hundreds of wrinkles, the little teeth shone, and a delighted laugh answered her. “Like pouring water out of a glass bottle,” thought Anne as she went out into the winter sunshine.

There was happiness, who could doubt it? The secret of life was to be like the Sothebys, and to work as they did, absorbed in building cottages. Would she ever think the prospect of scalding a pig too tempting to be refused, if she were over-worked already?

“Mr. Sotheby must be very enterprising,” she said to herself, trying to conquer her dislike for him, and forgot the grocer in gazing at the distant elms which bounded the far side of the village green a quarter of a mile away, for in the middle of the village was a long and lovely stretch of common pasture.

But who was the boy for whom Mr. Sotheby worked so hard? And Anne remembered that Maggie Pattle had once told her that the Sothebys had a son. Why was it that she had imagined that he was dead? But it did not occur to her to connect him with the photograph in the parlour, for she was looking at the elm trees, and listening to the song of a thrush; then gazing at the roof of Lambert’s barn, bathed in sunlight, she felt her heart beating happily, and asked herself why had she felt beauty was a prison? She could be happy in that village for ever, for spring was coming, and the birds were singing.

FOUR: THE TRAPEZE BOY

A hard frost came early in February.

“If this lasts,” said Mr. Dunnock eagerly, “we shall have skating the day after to-morrow,” but his face clouded quickly, and he put down his cup with a gesture of annoyance. The day after to-morrow would be Sunday.

“We may be in for a long spell of frost,” said Anne, but, reminded of his duties, her father was not in the mood to be consoled. “A frost brings more suffering than you or I can quite realize, my dear,” he said severely. “Think of the poor, without the coal or the blankets to keep them warm; think of the seamen in the rigging of ships; think of the outcasts on the roads; think of the birds.”

“Think of the polar bears,” said Anne under her breath, as her father rose from the table and scooped out the crumb of the loaf.

“The trap ought to be here in ten minutes; I shall be back from Ely by the eight o’clock train,” he said, and with these words went to the front door where an impatient flock of sparrows was waiting his arrival.

When the trap came, she went to the gate and watched her father drive away, wondering whether he would meet Enid in the street. “I am glad I am not going. Now the rest of the day is mine. Mine, and I am free to do whatever I choose!”

The road was like iron; it rang under the pony’s hoofs, and Anne thought she had never seen a lovelier morning; the spell of the frost was more beautiful than the enchanted world of the snow had been a month before, though it was not so strange. Every twig was fledged with rime, for there had been a fog during the night, but already the sun had broken through the mist, the sky was showing blue overhead, and the white tops of the elms were blushing in the sunshine.

“Every tree is smothered in snowy blossom; it is as if spring had come,” and she thought that the flowering time of the cherry in Japan could not equal the beauty of this February morning in England. When she turned to go back into the house she noticed that the bare wall of the vicarage was covered with hoarfrost, an opalescent bloom shining in the sunlight.

“A fairy palace fit for the Snow Queen or the Sleeping Beauty,” she said, and the words reminded her that Maggie must be waiting for her to make the beds.

“You ought to see the fat woman,” said Maggie Pattle. “Her bosom was bigger than that pair of marrows Mr. Lambert gave for Harvest Festival; there’s a paper outside says she is only twenty and weighs nineteen stone. I shall never call Ida Whalley fat again, after last night.”

Linton Fair lasted two days, and the merry-go-rounds were staying till the end of the week.

“I went in the swing-boats, and I went to the circus, and I spent seven shillings altogether,” said Maggie with triumph.

Anne shuddered at the fat woman, but when Maggie spoke of the circus, of the little lady who rode on a pink horse and jumped through paper hoops, and of a horse that undressed and went to bed and drew up the sheets with its teeth, she wished that she could go herself.

“Why not? Why not?” she wondered. “Why should I not go this afternoon? There is no disgrace in going to the fair, and there are the drawing-pins that I have to buy at Linton. I must begin trying to do some fashion plates. Besides, I should enjoy the walk on a day like this.”

The six miles of road brought a glow of colour into her cheeks, and she felt her heart beat with excitement as she crossed the old bridge over the Ouse, and entered the little town. The streets were crowded with men and beasts; the market place was full of farmers and machinery, and half a dozen cheap-jacks, each surrounded by a dense crowd, were shouting against each other.

Anne quickened her pace; the noise of a steam organ told her that the merry-go-rounds were in a field near the railway station, but when she had passed the first booths, the coco-nut shies, the rifle-range, and the places where she was invited to win cups and saucers by throwing rings, she suddenly became embarrassed. Just in front of her were the swing-boats sure enough, laden with shrieking girls; beyond them a great merry-go-round painted with all the majesty of a heathen temple, and loaded with strange idols: swans, dolphins, lions, and ostriches, turned slowly round like a monstrous humming-top, and near by was the vast curving canvas wall of the circus.

She was surrounded by a happy crowd, but she could not mingle with it.

Already her pink cheeks had drawn upon her the notice of a group of young farmers; it was clear to her that she could not visit the circus unless she went with a companion. At that moment she envied Maggie her freedom as she had never done before; Maggie, who might laugh or scream until her voice drowned the hurdy-gurdy, and who could answer back when a man spoke to her without anyone thinking the worse.

What would be said if she, Miss Dunnock, the daughter of the vicar of Dry Coulter, were to try to win a coco-nut? Many of her father’s parishioners must be in town, and, with flagging footsteps, Anne passed by the entrance to the field full of merry-go-rounds, and walked slowly on towards the railway station.

Within the great tent of the circus she could hear the thumping of the ponies’ hoofs, the crack of the circus-master’s whip, and the falsetto note of a clown’s voice, followed by a roar of rustic laughter and clapping hands; then, passing on, she came in view of the showmen’s encampment: a score of caravans with smoking chimneys, groups of hobbled ponies, and women carrying pails of water, hanging out washing, and preparing the evening meal.

“A curious life,” the girl said to herself. “Wandering from town to town, roaming from one country to another, for the circus I see here may be at Nizhninovgorod next summer and in Italy or Spain six months after that. The women must have a hard life, but I would rather be one of them than the wife or daughter of a clergyman. If I were to join them; but that cannot be—some dark woman would stab me rather than have me for her daughter-in-law, yet if one of these handsome gipsies asked me, I would not hesitate to go with him. I would rather that my son were a clown or a lion-tamer than an archdeacon or a bishop.”

Anne roused herself after a few minutes; the sun was setting, she felt chilly, and her thoughts had depressed her. “My mind runs in a circle,” she said. “Whatever I see, whatever I do, I come back to the thought that I am an outcast unable to share in the life around me, or to enjoy it, and that somehow I must escape from my surroundings, for I cannot live any longer without friends.”

She turned back towards the market place, for there is nothing more gloomy than an empty railway station, resolving to buy what she needed and then go home without delay.

“Loneliness is terrible, and I have not got a friend in the world. The worst fate which can befall a human being is to be born a young lady,” and meeting the gaze of a handsome gipsy with gold earrings, she added: “I can see that I do not attract him; he does not care for young ladies, and he is wise. We are an unhealthy, artificial breed; his women are better; they smell of tallow and wood ashes, and have the spirit and the health of mares.”

Anne bought her drawing-pins and decided to go home, but first she would have a cup of tea, and threading her way past a steam plough with seven shares, and through a series of galvanized iron cisterns, at which a group of farmers were gazing with intellectual doubt written on their faces, she crossed the market place and went into White’s. The turmoil of the fair had not penetrated inside the confectioner’s shop, and she would have thought that they had no knowledge of it there if it were not that a greater primness reigned, and that the very gingerbread seemed weary of the flesh. Anne sipped her cup of tea with distaste, asking herself what the young ladies behind the counter would have said if she had given way to her desires, and they had seen her mounted on an ostrich.... Did they suffer from such temptations themselves?

She had almost finished her cup of tea when the door opened and a little girl came in, followed by a short, thick-set, white-bearded man of sixty. It was Rachel, her favourite, and her father, Mr. Sotheby. Rachel smiled, and all Anne’s depression was laid aside; even the tea, tasting of wet boots, seemed changed by the pleasure of their meeting.

“Well, Rachel, have you been enjoying yourself at the fair?” she asked, looking into the pale little face, framed in short dark curls. The child nodded her head quickly.

“Yes, Miss Dunnock, thank you very much. I have been on the switchback, and enjoyed seeing the fair very much.” Rachel’s voice was always a trifle stilted, her words always polite, and her sentiments always perfectly correct, but Anne noticed that on this occasion the child’s usual gaiety was lacking. A few words with the grocer were sufficient to explain the cause: Mr. Sotheby had brought Rachel into Linton to see the fair, he had taken her twice on the roundabout, but his business was waiting for him and must be done, and since he did not think it suitable to let the child go to the circus alone, he was leaving her at White’s, where she would keep warm.

“Come and choose yourself a cake, Rachel,” he said.

“May I take her to the circus, Mr. Sotheby?” asked Anne.

There could be no refusal, and the two friends set off at once, Rachel carrying the cheese-cake she had chosen, in her hand.

When the time came to meet Mr. Sotheby in the market place the two girls left the circus, and still under the spell of the wonders they had seen, it seemed as if they could never express sufficiently their admiration and their astonishment. The pink horse and the fair rider of which Maggie had spoken that morning, and the clowns, who had appeared so suddenly that one might have thought a shower of frogs had fallen into the ring after a thunderstorm, were discussed in detail, but best of all they had liked the handsome young man who had stood on his head on a trapeze, and who, without holding on with his hands, had swung rapidly from one side of the great roof of the circus to the other.

Mr. Sotheby was driving out of the inn-yard as they reached the market place, and Anne was about to say good-bye, when the grocer offered her a seat in his dog-cart, saying that he would not hear of her walking back alone. She was grateful for his offer, for she had no great fancy for the six-mile walk herself, and soon they were all ready, tucked up in a large rug, with nothing to be seen of Rachel, crouching against their legs, but the tassel of her woollen cap. Mr. Sotheby flicked the pony with his whip, and in a few moments they had crossed the old bridge over the river, and had left Linton behind.

During the drive home, Anne’s thoughts ran on the young man, dressed in scarlet tights like Mephistopheles; she could not forget his proud and serious face, intent only on his trapeze and indifferent to the audience; she would never forget that unsmiling face, looking up at the trapeze above him, as he deliberately rubbed first the soles of his shoes, and then his hands, in a box of sand.

But she could not speak of the young man, or of the circus, to Mr. Sotheby, whom she disliked; she could not continue her happy talk with Rachel in front of him, and they drove in silence—a silence broken at last by the grocer remarking on the number of foreigners that there were at the fair.

“Nothing interests us country folk more than to see a foreigner,” said he. “A black man will draw a crowd anywhere, and no wonder either, for however contented we may be with our own lives, we always wish to learn about those of other people.”

“He is a foreigner, of course,” Anne was saying to herself. “Perhaps if I went to the circus again to-morrow I might learn his name, and whether he is an Italian or a Spaniard,” but she roused herself, for Mr. Sotheby was still speaking, and then, wondering whether his words required an answer, she looked about her.

The risen moon was nearly full: there were no stars, and the road before them sparkled with frost. “How fast we are driving,” she reflected. “There is nothing like a frost to make a pony go, and no doubt he is thinking of his stable.” The sound of the hoofs rang out; the air was much colder than in the morning, so cold that it hurt her to breathe.

“My son Richard is abroad, living in Paris,” said the grocer, and hearing his voice, Anne told herself that politeness required her to listen. If she married the trapezist she might live in Paris, too—or else they would travel from town to town wherever there were circuses.

“Before that boy was eight years old,” Mr. Sotheby went on, “I knew that he would have to be a gentleman, and I am proud to say that I always encouraged him to do what he wanted with his life.”

She would call him Lorenzo. What did it matter whether Lorenzo was a gentleman or not? And Anne said this to herself, certain that the boy who had swung so gracefully on the trapeze was a gentleman. “For what is gentility but pride and perfect dignity? And he is as proud as Lucifer.”

“Everyone says that I spoil Richard,” and the old man beside her cracked his whip gaily. “But as long as I can make money I shall send it to him.”

“I am sure you are quite right,” said Anne. Money! If only she had a little money! How that would simplify things!

Mr. Sotheby had needed no encouragement, and went on speaking: “All these farmers hoard their money, and laugh at me for spending mine, but I always say that we are both in the right, for they haven’t sons like my Richard. What good is money to my wife and me?” he asked, but, without waiting for a reply, continued: “To him it means books, education, painting in the best studios, and the company of his equals, for he would not find his equals about here.”

“Yes, money means all that and more,” thought Anne, but aloud she said:

“Is Lorenzo a painter, then?”

“My son Richard? No, he is an artist. I am fond of pictures myself, so I can understand him. I have seen some by the great men: Rembrandt, Turner, and Wouverman. There is a fine gallery at Norwich.”

“I am very fond of pictures, too,” said Anne. “I have always wanted to try oils; perhaps I shall one day.”

“I thought at first of sending Richard to Cambridge,” said the grocer, for he was not interested in Anne’s chances of painting. “But he said no to it. ‘There’s only one place where I can learn to be an artist,’ he said. ‘Paris is the only place for that.’”

Mr. Sotheby shook the reins, and murmured to his pony as they crossed a little bridge, then he continued: “One hears a great deal about the wickedness of Paris; several of our ministers have spoken to me about it, but I console myself with thinking that none of those men would mind letting their boys go to sea, and there is as much wickedness in Hull or Swansea as anywhere on earth.”

Rachel shifted her position under the rug, and suddenly thrusting her head out, looked about her with curiosity, like a little monkey.

“Do the sailors believe in the Pope of Rome, father?” she asked in her precise voice.

Anne did not listen to the reply. Of course Lorenzo was a Roman Catholic. Her father would be heartbroken, but she would give up everything for Lorenzo. Together they would voyage over the roads of Europe, their horses trotting on through the night, while the van they were sleeping in rocked gently on its springs. In the early morning she would wake to find that they were encamped by the side of a stream; the curling smoke of the wood fire would be rising beneath an ash tree; and near at hand the piebald horses would be hobbled, and happily grazing on the dew-soaked grass. She would wander along the hedge-row, startling a wood pigeon which would rise from the cornfield, and catching sight of the black and white of a magpie stealing along the edge of the wood. Soon she would return with her arms full of dog-roses, and would give one to Lorenzo to wear in his buttonhole; and in the evening she would see the fragile flower pinned to his breast as he swung on the trapeze.

“Scripture tells us,” said Mr. Sotheby, “that children should honour their parents, but I feel a respect for my son which I never felt for my father, and which I don’t expect Richard to feel for me. I know that he works as hard at his painting as I should expect him to work if he had stayed in the shop, though of course he earns no money by it. Perhaps he never will, for the qualities necessary are not the same, and Richard has spoken of men as great as Wouverman, living and painting in Paris to-day, who cannot sell their pictures. I would rather that Richard were to become a great master than that he were to sell a picture for hundreds of guineas, and incur the contempt of such men. Money is not everything: one need only read one’s Bible to see that.”

The pony slackened its speed, and turned a corner; they were back at Dry Coulter.

“Steady, boy,” said the grocer, pulling up at the vicarage gate.

“Thank you very much, Mr. Sotheby,” said Anne.

“A pleasure, Miss Dunnock; thank you for taking Rachel to the circus.”

“Good-night, Mr. Sotheby. Good-night Rachel.”

“Good-night, Miss Dunnock, thank you for your kindness,” came the child’s voice as the pony darted off impatiently.

“What a glorious moon,” Anne said to herself. “And what a hard frost! There will be skating without a doubt.” She would have liked to go for a long walk to straighten out her tangled feelings, but it was half-past seven: it was time to lay the table for dinner.

“Perhaps Lorenzo is married,” she said to herself suddenly. “Then we can only be friends,” she added as she opened the door.

FIVE: THE FROST HELD

The frost held. On Sunday morning the little boys lingered round the edges of the Broad Ditch on their way to chapel, and Mr. Dunnock, hurrying to the vestry, noticed Mr. Lambert’s foxhound puppy running across the ice.

“There will be skating,” he said to himself, “and I have not lived all my life in the fens for nothing. I can still show the younger men something,” and he decided to ask Anne to cut sandwiches. They would spend the morrow at Bluntisham:—a long walk, but one which would repay them with the finest stretch of ice in Huntingdonshire, and at Bluntisham Mr. Dunnock would see the best figure skaters and be seen by them.

After evening service he tapped the barometer, asking himself if it would be tempting Providence if he were to look at the skates that evening. There might be a screw missing, a strap needed, or a broken bootlace, and such little things were best attended to overnight, he reflected, trying to conceal his eagerness, for he would not be happy until he had handled his skates.

“They will be in the box-room,” he said, taking a candle with him from the hall, but in the box-room many things met his eye which reminded him of his life at Ely. It had been a wretched subordinate existence, supporting his wife and daughter on a hundred and twenty pounds a year, but as he looked back on it such things were forgotten, and it seemed to him that his life there had been a happy one, for it had been shared with the woman he loved. Setting down his candle, he turned over the Japanese screen, which he had always liked for the storks flying across it, embroidered in silver thread. His wife had intended to re-cover the screen, for the storks were tarnished, and the silver threads unravelling, but she had died before she had found a suitable piece of stuff. “She is in Heaven,” he said mechanically, and was surprised once again that the words with which he comforted others held no consolation for him.

“An old age passed together would have brought a closer understanding between us,” he said, suddenly speaking his innermost thought, which he had not admitted to himself before, for the clergyman’s tragedy was never to have had the conviction of perfect understanding or intimacy, even with his wife.

“In the middle years of life we live too much in the affairs of the day, and a child troubles the mind of its mother. So many burdens to be borne, so many duties to be fulfilled.... We were too occupied to look into each other’s hearts, and old age, the sweetest portion of life if it be filled with harmony, and the happiness of memories shared in common, old age is reserved for me only; a lonely and miserable old age. Now that I have lost Mavis, intimacy is impossible with anyone else, and I feel myself growing far away from everyone, and farthest of all from Anne. She reminds me too closely of her mother; I find it painful to be with her and I find her youth as tiresome as she finds my hasty temper.”

Mr. Dunnock told himself that such feelings must be controlled, but he had said that before, and had no faith that the strangeness which seemed to be growing upon him could be overcome. “Death will release me, and I must console myself with the hope that Mavis is waiting for me in Heaven, that she will fold me in her wings, and take me to herself without a word of reproach. When I hear the birds singing in the mornings they repeat that promise, and once or twice I have had the conviction that when I looked out of our bedroom window I should see angels perched in the branches of the trees.”

The three pairs of skates lay on a shelf, the blades had been smeared with vaseline and wrapped in greaseproof paper, but the boots were dusty, and stretched stiffly over the boxwood trees.

“Yes, yes, the skates will be all right: there will be nothing amiss with them,” for they had been greased by her hands; it was she who had laid them aside after the frost last winter a few weeks before her death.

The road to Bluntisham was long, and, as she walked with her father, Anne thought about bicycles. Her father had once had a bicycle, but that was many years ago; he appeared to have no wish to possess another, and Anne had never summoned up sufficient courage to buy one for herself, though the price of a bicycle was lying idly in the savings bank at the Post Office.

“I shall certainly buy a bicycle,” she thought. “It is madness not to have got one before; a bicycle would give me the freedom for which I pine; what the horse is to the Arab of the desert, a bicycle is to a girl in my position. I could ride to Cambridge; in Cambridge I could go to concerts, and even plays; I could ride to Peterborough.” But she did not finish her thought, for she was uncertain what Peterborough would give her.

“If I had a bicycle I should make friends and instead of wasting my life like a fool, dreaming about acrobats at a travelling circus, I should meet Cambridge undergraduates, and receive invitations to play tennis, or to join in a picnic party on the river.”

While Anne was thinking of all the changes which would come into her life when she bought herself a bicycle, her father was enjoying the exercise of walking.

“I am a great pedestrian,” he had said to the Bishop, and although he scarcely ever went outside his house if he could avoid it, the saying was true, and it was all his daughter could do to keep up with him.

Bluntisham Church stands as the last outpost over the flooded fen country; a little beyond, at Earith, is the starting point of the Bedford Level, which runs for thirty miles to King’s Lynn without a hedge, or a tree, or even as much as a mole-hill to break the flat expanse—green all the summer, but under water, or rather under ice when the Dunnocks approached it.

The father and daughter had in common a great liking for the fens; they loved the black peaty earth, the vast level expanse of sodden land, which looked flatter than the sea, when viewed from the high banks of a causeway running through it, or the embankments of the Bedford River raised up above the fields which it drained; they liked even the squalid villages on each side of the level, the low houses clustering wherever a hillock projecting into the fenland made it possible for man to build. But better than the Bedford Level of the present day, they loved to think of the fens of the past, and of the struggle to reclaim them which had begun with the war between the Romans and the Iceni, flitting from islet to islet in their osier coracles, sheltering behind the willows, and making a night attack on the legionaries posted to defend the bridge at Huntingdon.

As they drew near Bluntisham they began to speak of these things, and Mr. Dunnock soon passed from the invasions of the Danes to the prosperous farmers who tilled the lands reclaimed by the Romans until the twelfth or fourteenth century, when the fields relapsed into fenland, and soon they reached the great days of the seventeenth century, for, as Mr. Dunnock said, the history of the Commonwealth is to be found in the Fens of Huntingdonshire, and the Commonwealth itself may be regarded as a mere episode in the struggle between the Uplanders and the Lowlanders.

Although Mr. Dunnock was an Uplander by birth, and a High Churchman, he was proud of the part that the inhabitants of the swamps had played in English history.

“Without the three men of Godmanchester there would have been no Magna Charta, and if Charles had not tried to drain the Fens, there is little doubt he would have won the Civil War,” he said, and went on telling Anne how as a young man Oliver must have made the reflection that his family had been ruined by the Stuarts, who had encouraged their hopes and given them nothing. It was a good reason for him to repent of his loose life, and become more determined a Puritan. Soon he was stirring up trouble against the church in St. Ives; then his uncle, Sir Thomas Steward, died, leaving him his heir, and Oliver removed to Ely, but the temptation to make trouble still persisted, and when one next hears of him he was giving money to the Fen Dwellers and helping them to resist the drainage schemes of the King’s Adventurers.

“Adventurers’ Fen is called after them,” said Anne, and her father answered that it might well be so, and they stopped for a moment to look out towards the fen in question.

“At that time the people in the fens lived by fishing and wild fowling,” said Mr. Dunnock. “Every week during the winter a train of waggons left Linton for London loaded with wild duck,” and he continued his story of how when the King was engaged in reclaiming the fen, the birds were driven from their nesting grounds, and the great decoys woven of osiers were being left high and dry, so that the lowlanders foresaw that they would have to abandon a mode of livelihood which had endured since the Iceni. They had no desire to plough and reap, and the drained lands did not prove fertile until a century afterwards, when the farmers were shown how to dig through the peat and quarry clay to mix with it, after which it became the most fruitful soil in England. Oliver Cromwell had taken up their cause, and later, when the Duke of Manchester was letting victory slip out of the hands of the Parliament, it was Cromwell who impeached him, and then, seeking an army, turned for his New Model to the Fens. It was Cromwell who equipped the Lowlanders, and headed the Eastern Association, and it was the Eastern Association which had won the Civil War, and so the Cromwells had their revenge on the Stuarts. But though the lowlanders had been made use of, the work of drainage went on, and the Ironsides who had been enlisted to resist the draining of the fens were betrayed by old Ironsides himself, the Lord Protector.

But by the time Mr. Dunnock had reached this crowning example of the perfidy of the figure he so much hated, they had turned the corner below Bluntisham Church, and saw before them the great expanse of ice covered with the descendants of Cromwell’s Ironsides.

The field beside the road was full of motorcars, of farmers’ gigs, waggonettes, and grazing ponies, and at the entrance stood the farmer asking a penny from every person who went on the ice. No crop had ever yielded so handsome a profit as his flooded water-meadows, and no fenman in Cromwell’s day would have fought more bitterly against a scheme which would have kept it drained during the winter months.

The noise of hundreds of pairs of skates on the ice came to their ears as they entered the field,—a grumbling sound that had within it a note which rang as clear as a bell, and they sat down to unlace their boots, refusing the offer of a chair which would mean spending another penny.

Anne was the first on the ice, and as her father watched her hesitating strokes the feeling of affection, which the conversation about Cromwell had aroused, gave place to one of shame and irritation.

“Am I to be tied to such a limpet all day?” he asked himself as he had so often asked himself before when skating with his wife; then, without giving his daughter another look, he hobbled rapidly to the edge of the ice and was off himself, slipping away as easily as a swallow that recovers the freedom of its element after beating against the window-panes. His own strokes were as effortless as the flickering of a bird’s wing, and it was impossible for the onlookers watching him to say what kept him in motion. Mr. Dunnock never appeared to strike off, but leant gracefully forward, lifting a leg slightly to cross his feet, and, changing his weight from one leg to the other, he flew lazily across the ice, picking his way without appearing to observe the existence of the clumsy young farmers who doubled up, and, with their hands clasped behind their backs, dashed round and round at top speed on their long fen skates. Soon everyone had noticed the tall clergyman with his beard tucked under a white woollen muffler, and many paused to watch as he began figure-skating in the real English style. Eight after eight was drawn with the slow precision of a sleepy rook wheeling in the evening sky, before descending in a perfect spiral to roost on the topmost bough of the high elm, and indeed the black-coated figure forgot for a few moments that he was an elderly vicar on a pair of skates, and believed himself to be circling in space among a vast flock of waterfowl flying over the fens. It seemed to him as if at intervals a V-shaped band of wild duck flashed past him, each with its neck craned forward, and beating furiously with its short, clumsy wings; a flock of curlew was all about him, and would wheel suddenly in its tracks with a flash of white, then a stray snipe corkscrewed past, a pair of greedy seagulls chased each other, and two roseate terns revolved round each other on their nuptial flight....

Half an hour had gone by when his dream was interrupted by a young man with pink cheeks and rather protruding black eyes, who skated up to him and addressed him by name. It was Mr. Yockney, Dr. Boulder’s assistant, whose professional duties brought him to Dry Coulter when there was a birth, or death, but rarely at other times:—the villagers were uncommonly healthy, and on the rare occasions when they took cold, or developed inflammation of the lungs, they doctored each other with gaseous mixture, or turpentine and honey.

“Ah, so you are here,” said Mr. Dunnock, shaking hands warmly, for young Yockney had attended Mrs. Dunnock in her last illness, and his sympathy and tenderness to the dying woman would never be forgotten.

“Yes, Doctor Boulder gave me the day off. This frost is so healthy we have no patients left; but it’s an ill-wind that blows nobody any good, and I would not miss a day’s skating like this for the world.”

Mr. Dunnock said that Doctor Boulder must write to the Clerk of the Weather about the deplorably healthy winter. Mr. Yockney laughed, and then both of them remembered that it must be lunch time.

“Come, Yockney, you must join us,” said Mr. Dunnock, and Anne, coming up at that moment, added her invitation, which the young man was glad enough to accept.

A line of trestles had been put up on the ice, and crowds were waiting round the shoemaker’s, and the men who let out skates for hire, but most popular of all were the sellers of hot potatoes and roast chestnuts with their buckets of glowing coals. Mr. Yockney purchased three steaming cups of cocoa, while Anne went to fetch the satchel full of sandwiches, and in a little while they were sitting on the edge of a grassy bank.

“I have been seeing a friend of yours, Miss Dunnock,” said the doctor after the second sandwich. “Little Rachel Sotheby, and I fear that it may have been your doing that I had to be called in, for I understand it was you who took her to the circus. She caught a chill on the way back. Oh, no, it is nothing in the least serious, though she is rather delicate.”

Anne expressed her concern, and hastened to explain to her father how she had met the Sothebys in the tea-shop, and had taken the little girl to see the circus.

“Extraordinary chap that old grocer is,” said Mr. Yockney. “He’d have been a rich man by now, I fancy, if it had not been for that good-for-nothing son of his. Just fancy, he told me that he was spending all his money on making his son a gentleman!”

This seemed to Mr. Dunnock an excellent joke, and he laughed heartily. He disliked the grocer for his assurance, and his cheerfulness, and his nonconformity, and was ready to hear anything to his disadvantage.

“The great news,” continued Mr. Yockney, “only I expect you know it, is that the prodigal is expected home next week. He’s been in Paris, and has been going the pace a bit, I fancy.”

“Oh, I am so glad,” said Anne with real interest showing in her voice. “I have heard so much about him from Mr. Sotheby, and I quite look forward to seeing what he’s like. He sounds quite an interesting person.”

A frown gathered on her father’s face.

“Yes, we are all eager to see him,” said the doctor, and then the tone of his voice changed so completely that Anne could see that it was another, and a serious Mr. Yockney who was speaking, although she observed that his eyes bulged just as much when he was serious as when he was only talking lightly.

“If you ask me, Miss Dunnock, I should say that young man is the very worst type of rotter. Look at the old grocer sweating away at sixty, look at his mother still serving in the shop, look at his little sister with patches on the sides of her boots, while Master Richard is learning to be a gentleman in Paris! There’s no word too bad for him. I should like him to know what decent people think of that sort of gentility!”

“You had better tell him, my dear fellow,” said Mr. Dunnock languidly. “It would do him a world of good, I’ve no doubt. But I must say it is probably not the fault of the son but because of the vanity of the father. Over and over again I have seen a young oaf of that description produced by a couple of vain and silly parents who ruin their children’s lives by denying them nothing.”

“But no decent chap, you must admit....” said Mr. Yockney.

“You think the son is to blame because you are nearer his age and imagine yourself in his position,” said Mr. Dunnock with a smile. “But I, as a father, imagine myself in the position of our excellent grocer. If I were to bring Anne up to expect luxuries, and to suppose that she was born to lead an idle, useless existence, it would not be her fault if she grew up a silly and discontented woman.”

Even without this argument Anne was feeling decidedly uncomfortable, and a clumsy piece of gallantry from Mr. Yockney added to her irritation.

“Stupid, coarse, hidebound brute! Do your eyes bulge because of your manly virtue?” she said under her breath, but she had to confess that there was something in what the doctor had said. She had not noticed the patches on Rachel’s boots herself, and she felt her respect for Mr. Yockney as a doctor increasing with her dislike of him as a man. If it were true, it was disgraceful that Rachel should not have a sound pair of boots, but it was absurd to object to Mrs. Sotheby serving in the shop; would she have been happier at a hydro in Harrogate?

Mr. Dunnock had continued a whimsical description of how he might have brought up his daughter so that she would have been discontented with her life; the doctor replied, but finally they agreed that both of the Sothebys, father and son, were very much to blame, when Anne remarked, in a voice which trembled, that she was fond of the Sothebys and that she thought that it was very fine of them to sacrifice themselves in order to make their son a great artist.

“I can trust you not to be taken in by the word gentleman, Anne, but I am afraid you may be by the word artist. Art, you know, Mr. Yockney, covers a multitude of sins.”

“The best definition of art I have ever heard,” said the doctor, “is that it is the opposite of work.” Mr. Dunnock laughed approvingly, and Mr. Yockney went on, his eyes bulging more than ever with the seriousness of his appeal.

“No, Miss Dunnock, whatever you may say, I know that the kind of caddish selfishness we have been talking about is absolutely abhorrent to you, as it is to all decent people. I quite agree with you that there is something pathetic in the old Sothebys, but there is nothing to be said for the son.”

“Well, they seem to be an unusually happy family,” answered Anne, feeling that she had lost her temper.

“I am too old to play at Happy Families any longer,” said her father with a titter. “I shall go back to the ice and leave Mr. Yockney and you to settle the momentous question of Master Grits the Grocer’s son.”

SIX: WINGED SEEDS

“Why is it?” Anne Dunnock asked herself next day, “that my father can be pleasant to other people but not to me? Though to be sure I fancied yesterday that his pleasantness to Mr. Yockney was a trifle vulgar, while his unpleasantness to me has at all events the merit of being sincere and well-bred.” And Anne told herself that the only explanation must be that she was as much a burden to her father as he was to her. “But only I realize it,” she burst out. “For I am young enough to recognize the truth, and to welcome it; he does not understand himself or other people; all his life he has hidden his head in the sand like an ostrich, and after all what else can one expect of a clergyman?”

Her anger had lasted since the conversation about the Sothebys, for her irritation during the lunch beside the ice had been quickly followed by fatigue, which had intensified her resentment. After the unaccustomed exercise her ankles seemed to have turned to jelly, and the eight-mile walk from Bluntisham had been torture to her.

“Never again,” she said to herself; and when Mr. Lambert had stopped at the door next morning to offer her a place in his gig (he was going to Bluntisham for the skating), she had refused, and her father had accepted in her place.

“If I want any skating I shall go on the Broad Ditch,” she had said, a remark which had estranged Mr. Dunnock more than her sullenness the previous day had done, and he drove off with a hurt look which said: “You are no daughter of mine to speak of skating in such a way before a stranger!”

When the gig was out of sight Anne went indoors to write a letter to Coventry for a catalogue of bicycles.

The catalogue came, but though she selected a machine, she hesitated to post the letter ordering it, and after a week’s indecision she tore it up, since the thought had come to her that a bicycle would tie her more firmly than ever to her life with her father, and this life seemed every day to become less endurable.