Chapter II: Part 2

“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.

A thaw followed quickly on the second day of skating, and after that rain and sleet fell for several days. Mr. Dunnock appeared to be equally disgusted by the weather and by his daughter, and retired to his study, scarcely a word being exchanged throughout the day except at breakfast, when Mr. Dunnock always reminded Anne of her duties in the parish.

“A bicycle would rivet me to my present life,” said Anne to herself. “What a chain is to a yard-dog, a bicycle is to the daughter of a clergyman! A bicycle would give me a certain radius of movement; it would fill the emptiness of my life; but I want things that no bicycle can give me. Yes, I want books, music, beautiful clothes, and more than any of these I want what they stand for: that is, the society of intelligent men and cultivated women. Such hopes are vain, I know: I shall never succeed in ‘unwinding the accursed chain’--still I shall attempt it and the best way to set about it is certainly not by entangling myself with a bicycle. Even if I had to live in solitude I should prefer independence, and that I can achieve, for the world is full of women who earn their own living. Ten pounds is more valuable to me than a machine with plated rims or a little oil-bath; no one ever ran away from home on a bicycle, and I shall want all my savings for a railway ticket and lodgings in London while I look about me.”

So the letter ordering the bicycle was torn up, and the catalogue itself cast into the fire, since it was a temptation to the flesh, one which assailed her particularly in the evenings; the ten pounds was replaced to her credit in the Savings Bank, and several days were spent in turning over the best way of earning her living.

“I shall go away from here, that is clear,” she said. “I have known that ever since the ploughmen came that snowy morning. Here the accursed chain can never be unwound, but when I am living a free life, among new people, and my father is forgotten, I shall escape, and speaking easily to everyone I shall be accepted by them; I shall love; I shall be beloved....” Anne shook her head and a shower of hairpins flew out on to the floor.

“Damn the elastic stuff!” she cried. “Why do I endure it a moment longer?” and, tears coming into her eyes, she started up and seized a pair of scissors out of her workbasket.

“There will be time enough for that later on,” and the scissors were dropped as she told herself that she must plan for the future, and not dissipate her emotions in the present.

Yet another week was spent in considering how she could earn her living, and March came in like a lamb before she had arrived at any practical decision.

“The birds sing and build their nests, soon they will be laying their eggs, and then father will be in agonies whenever a young thrush hops across the lawn, lest it should fall between Pussy’s paws. The snowdrops are over long ago, the hyacinths have broken through the ground, their fat buds look like pine-cones. First came the daffodils, the double ones, and then the single. The peaches are showing their pink petals on the walls of the dove house, but I remain where I am, I cannot flower, unfold my petals or spread my wings....”

When her father spoke to her of the migrant birds flitting northwards through Africa and Spain and Italy and France, from bush to bush, twenty yards by twenty yards, to find their way to England’s shores “where alone they find the happiness of love,” said Mr. Dunnock, “and where alone they sing,” Anne vowed fiercely that before the last of the migrants arrived she would be gone herself.

“The cuckoo will be here in six weeks,” said she to herself. “The nightingale will be here a week after; I shall stay to hear one but not the other. Which it will be I cannot tell, for sometimes the nightingale comes before the cuckoo, and that they say is the luckier. I hope I shall hear the nightingale before I go and not the cuckoo; it would be an omen that I should find a true lover waiting for me, and not a deceiver.”

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.