Chapter 16

Maisie saw it and felt the first vague disturbance of her peace. Her illness had worried everybody while it lasted, but she couldn't think why, when she was well again, Anne and Jerrold should go on looking like that. Maisie thought it was physical; the poor dears worked too hard.

The change had been so gradual that she saw it without consternation, but when Eliot came down in November he couldn't hide his distress. To Eliot the significant thing was not Anne's illness or Jerrold's illness but the likeness in their illnesses, the likeness in their faces. It was clear that they suffered together, with the same suffering, from the same cause. And when on his last evening Jerrold took him into the library to consult him about Maisie's case, Eliot had a hard, straight talk with him about his own.

"My dear Jerrold," he said, "there's nothing seriously wrong with Maisie. I've examined her heart. It isn't a particularly strong heart, but there's no disease in it. If you took her to all the specialists in Europe they'd tell you the same thing."

"I know, but I keep on worrying."

"That, my dear chap, is because you're ill yourself. I don't like it. I'm not bothered about Maisie, but I am bothered about you and Anne."

"Anne? Do you think _Anne's_ ill?"

"I think she will be, and so will you if... What have you been doing?"

"We've been doing nothing."

"That's it. You've got to do something and do it pretty quick if it's to be any good."

Jerrold started and looked up. He wondered whether Eliot knew. He had a way of getting at things, you couldn't tell how.

"What d'you mean? What are you talking about?" His words came with a sudden sharp rapidity.

"You know what I mean."

"I don't know how _you_ know anything. And, as a matter of fact, you don't."

"I don't know much. But I know enough to see that you two can't go on like this."

"Maisie and me?"

"No. You and Anne. It's Anne I'm talking about. I suppose you can make a mess of your own life if you like. You've no business to make a mess of hers."

"My God! as if I didn't know it. What the devil am I to do?"

"Leave her alone, Jerrold, if you can't have her."

"Leave her alone? I _am_ leaving her alone. I've got to leave her alone, if we both die of it."

"She ought to go away," Eliot said.

"She shan't go away unless I go with her. And I can't."'

"Well, then, it's an impossible situation."

"It's a damnable situation, but it's the only decent one. You forget there's Maisie."

"No, I don't. Maisie doesn't know?"

"Oh Lord, no. And she never will."

"You ought to tell her."

Jerrold was silent.

"My dear Jerrold, it's the only sensible thing. Tell her straight and get her to divorce you."

"I was going to. Then she got ill and I couldn't."

"She isn't ill now."

"She will be if I tell her. It'll simply kill her."

"It won't. It may--even--cure her."

"It'll make her frightfully unhappy. And it'll bring back that infernal pain. If you'd seen her, Eliot, you'd know how impossible it is. We simply can't be swine. And if I could, Anne couldn't.... No. We've got to stick it somehow, Anne and I."

"It's all wrong, Jerrold."

"I know it's all wrong. But it's the best we can do. You don't suppose Anne would be happy if we did Maisie down."

"No. No. She wouldn't. You're right there. But it's a damnable business."

"Oh, damnable, yes."

Jerrold laughed in his agony. Yet he saw, as if he had never seen it before, Eliot's goodness and the sadness and beauty of his love for Anne. He had borne for years what Jerrold was bearing now, and Anne had not loved him. He had never known for one moment the bliss of love or any joy. He had had nothing. And Jerrold remembered with a pang of contrition that he had never cared enough for Eliot. It had always been Colin, the young, breakable Colin, who had clung to him and followed him. Eliot had always gone his own queer way, keeping himself apart.

And now Eliot was nearer to him than anything in the world, except Anne.

"I'm sorry, Jerrold."

"You're pretty decent, Eliot, to be sorry--I believe you honestly want me to have Anne."

"I wouldn't go so far as that, old man. But I believe I honestly want Anne to have you.... I say, she hasn't gone yet, has she?"

"No. Maisie's keeping her for dinner in your honour. You'll probably find her in the drawing-room now."

"Where's Maisie?"

"She won't worry you. She's gone to lie down."

Eliot went into the drawing-room and found Anne there.

She looked at him. "You've been talking to Jerrold," she said.

"Yes, Anne. I'm worried about him."

"So am I."

"And I'm worried about you."

"And he's worried about Maisie."

"Yes. I suppose he began by not seeing she was ill, and now he does see it he thinks she's going to die. I've been trying to explain to him that she isn't."

"Can you explain why she's got into this state? It's not as if she wasn't happy. She _is_ happy."

"She wasn't always happy. Jerrold must have made her suffer damnably."

"When?"

"Oh, long before he married her."

"But _how_ did he make her suffer?"

"Oh, by just not marrying her. She found out he didn't care for her. Her people took her out to India, I believe, with the idea that he would marry her. And when they saw that Jerry wasn't on in that act they sent her back again. Poor Maisie got it well rammed into her then that he didn't care for her, and the idea's stuck. It's left a sort of wound in her memory."

"But she must have thought he cared for her when he did marry her. She thinks he cares now."

"Of course she thinks it. I don't suppose he's ever let her see."

"I know he hasn't."

"But the wound's there, all the same. She's never got over it, though she isn't conscious of it now. The fact remains that Maisie's marriage is incomplete because Jerry doesn't care for her. Part of Maisie, the adorable part we know, isn't aware of any incompleteness; it lives in a perpetual illusion. But the part we don't know, the hidden, secret part of her, is aware of nothing else.... Well, her illness is simply camouflage for that. Maisie's mind couldn't bear the reality, so it escaped into a neurosis. Maisie's behaving as though she wasn't married, so that her mind can say to itself that her marriage is incomplete because she's ill, not because Jerry doesn't care for her. It's substituted a bearable situation for an unbearable one."

"Then, you don't think she _knows_?"

"That Jerrold doesn't care for her? No. Only in that unconscious way. Her mind remembers and _she_ doesn't."

"I mean, she doesn't know about Jerrold and me?"

"I'm sure she doesn't. If she did she'd do something."

"That's what Jerrold said. What would she do?"

"Oh something beautiful, or it wouldn't be Maisie. She'd let Jerrold go."

"Yes. She'd let him go. And she'd die of it."

"Oh no, she wouldn't. I told Jerrold just now it might cure her."

"How _could_ it cure her?"

"By making her face reality. By making her see that her illness simply means that she hasn't faced it. All our neuroses come because we daren't live with the truth."

"It's no good making Maisie well if we make her unhappy. Besides, I don't believe it. If Maisie's unhappy she'll be worse, not better."

"There _is_ just that risk," he said. "But it's you I'm thinking about, not Maisie. You see, I don't know what's happened."

"Jerrold didn't tell you?"

"He only told me what I know already."

"After all, what _do_ you know?"

"I know you were all right, you and he, when I saw you together here in the spring. So I suppose you were happy then. Jerrold looked wretchedly ill all the time he was at Taormina. So I suppose he was unhappy then because he was away from you. He looks wretchedly ill now. So do you. So I suppose you're both unhappy."

"Yes, we're both unhappy."

"Do you want to tell me about it, Anne?"

"No. I don't want to tell you about it. Only, if I thought you still wanted to marry me----"

"I do want to marry you. I shall always want to marry you. I told you long ago nothing would ever make any difference.

"Even if----?"

"Even if--Whatever you did or didn't do I'd still want you. But I told you--don't you remember?--that you could never do anything dishonourable or cruel."

"And I told you I wasn't sure."

"And I am sure. That's enough for me. I don't want to know anything more. I don't want to know anything you'd rather I didn't know."

"Oh, Eliot, you _are_ so good. You're good like Maisie. Don't worry about Jerry and me. We'll see it through somehow."

"And if you can't stand the strain of it?"

"But I can."

"And if _he_ can't? If you want to be safe----"

"I told you I should never want to be safe."

"If you want _him_ to be safe, then, would you marry me?"

"That's different. I don't know, Eliot, but I don't think so."

He went away with a faint hope. She had said it would be different; what she would never do for him she might do for Jerrold.

She might, after all, marry him to keep Jerrold safe.

Nothing made any difference. Whatever Anne did she would still be Anne. And it was Anne he loved. And, after all, what did he know about her and Jerrold? Only that if they had been lovers that would account for their strange happiness seven months ago; if they had given each other up this would account for their unhappiness now. He thought: How they must have struggled.

Perhaps, some day, when the whole story was told and Anne was tired of struggling, she would come to him and he would marry her.

Even if----

XVIII

JERROLD AND ANNE

i

The Barrow Farm house, long, low and grey, stood back behind the tall elms and turned its blank north gable end to the road and the Manor Farm. Its nine mullioned windows looked down the field to the river. And the great barns were piled behind it, long roof-trees, steep, mouse-coloured slopes and peaks above grey walls.

Anne didn't move into the Barrow Farm house all at once. She had to wait while Jerrold had the place made beautiful for her.

This was the only thing that roused him to any interest. Through all his misery he could still find pleasure in the work of throwing small rooms into one to make more space for Anne, and putting windows into the south gable to give her the sun.

Anne's garden absorbed him more than his own seven hundred acres. Maisie and he planned it together, walking round the rank flower-beds, and bald wastes scratched up by the hens.

There was to be a flagged court on one side and a grass plot on the other, with a flower garden between. Here, Maisie said, there should be great clumps of larkspurs and there a lavender hedge. They said how nice it would be for Anne to watch the garden grow.

"He's going to make it so beautiful that you'll want to stay in it forever," she said.

And Anne went with them and listened to them, and told them they were angels, and pretended to be excited about her house and garden, while all the time her heart ached and she was too tired to care.

The house was finished by the end of November and Jerrold and Maisie helped her to furnish it. Maisie sent to London for patterns and brought them to Anne to choose. Maisie thought perhaps the chintz with the cream and pink roses, or the one with the green leaves and red tulips and blue and purple clematis was the prettiest. Anne tried to behave as if all her happiness depended on a pattern, and ended by choosing the one that Maisie liked best. And the furniture went where Maisie thought it should go, because Anne was too tired to care. Besides, she was busy on her farm. Old Sutton in his decadence had let most of his arable land run to waste, and Anne's job was to make good soil again out of bad.

Maisie was pleased like a child and excited with her planning. Her idea was that Anne should come in from her work on the land and find the house all ready for her, everything in its place, chairs and sofas dressed in their gay suits of chintz, the books on their shelves, the blue-and-white china in rows on the oak dresser.

Tea was set out on the gate-legged table before the wide hearth-place. The lamps were lit. A big fire burned. Colin and Jerrold and Maisie were there waiting for her. And Anne came in out of the fields, tired and white and thin, her black hair drooping. Her rough land dress hung slack on her slender body.

Jerrold looked at her. Anne's tired face, trying to smile, wrung his heart. So did the happiness in Maisie's eyes. And Anne's voice trying to sound as if she were happy.

"You darlings! How nice you've made it."

"Do you like it?"

Maisie was breathless with joy.

"I love it. I adore it! But--aren't there lots of things that weren't here before? Where did that table come from?"

"From the Manor Farm. Don't you remember it? That's Eliot."

"And the bureau, and the dresser, and those heavenly rugs?"

"That's Jerrold."

And the china was Colin, and the chintz was Maisie. The long couch for Anne to lie down on was Maisie. Everything that was not Anne's they had given her.

"You shouldn't have done it," she said.

"We did it for ourselves. To keep you with us," said Maisie.

"Did you think it would take all that?"

She wondered whether they saw how hard she was trying to look happy, not to be too tired to care.

Then Maisie took her upstairs to show her her bedroom and the white bathroom. Colin carried the lamp. He left them together in Anne's room. Maisie turned to her there.

"Darling, how tired you look. Are you too tired to be happy?"

"I'd be a brute if I weren't happy," Anne said.

But she wasn't happy. The minute they were gone her sadness came upon her, crushing her down. She could hear Colin and Maisie, the two innocent ones, laughing out into the darkness. She saw again Jerrold's hard, unhappy face trying to smile; his mouth jerking in the tight, difficult smile that was like an agony. And it used to be Jerrold who was always happy, who went laughing.

She turned up and down the beautiful lighted room; she looked again and again at the things they had given her, Colin and Jerrold and Maisie.

Maisie. She would have to live with the cruelty of Maisie's gifts, with Maisie's wounding kindness and her innocence. Maisie's curtains, Maisie's couch, covered with flowers that smiled at her, gay on the white ground. She thought of the other house, of the curtains that had shut out the light from her and Jerrold, of the couch where she had lain in his arms. Each object had a dumb but poignant life that reminded and reproached her.

This was the scene where her life was to be cast. Henceforth these things would know her in her desolation. Jerrold would never come to her here as he had come to the Manor Farm house; they would never sit together talking by this fireside; those curtains would never be drawn on their passion; he would never go up to that lamp and put it out; she would never lie here waiting, thrilling, as he came to her through the darkness.

She had wanted the Barrow Farm and she had got what she had wanted, and she had got it too late. She loved it. Yet how was it possible to love the place that she was to be so unhappy in? She ought to hate it with its enclosing walls, its bright-eyed, watching furniture, its air of quiet complicity in her pain.

She drew back the curtains. The lamp and its yellow flame hung out there on the darkness of the fields. The fields dropped away through the darkness to the river, and there were the black masses of the trees.

There the earth waited for her. Out there was the only life left for her to live. The life of struggling with the earth, forcing the earth to yield to her more than it had yielded to the men who had tilled it before her, making the bad land good. Ploughing time would come and seed time, and hay harvest and corn harvest. Feeding time and milking time would come. She would go on seeing the same things done at the same hour, at the same season, day after day and year after year. There would have been joy in that if it had been Jerrold's land, if she could have gone on working for Jerrold and with Jerrold. And if she had not been so tired.

She was only twenty-nine and Jerrold was only thirty-two. She wondered how many more ploughing times they would have to go through, how many seed times and harvests. And how would they go through them? Would they go on getting more and more tired, or would something happen?

No. Nothing would happen. Nothing that they could bear to think of. They would just go on.

In the stillness of the house she could feel her heart beating, measuring out time, measuring out her pain.

ii

That winter Adeline and John Severn came down to Wyck Manor for Christmas and the New Year.

Adeline was sitting in the drawing-room with Maisie in the heavy hour before tea time. All afternoon she had been trying to talk to Maisie, and she was now bored. Jerrold's wife had always bored her. She couldn't imagine why Jerrold had married her when it was so clear that he was not in love with her.

"It's funny," she said at last, "staying in your own house when it isn't your own any more."

Maisie hoped that Adeline would treat the house as if it were her own.

"I probably shall. Don't be surprised if you hear me giving orders to the servants. I really cannot consider that Wilkins belongs to anybody but me."

Maisie hoped that Adeline wouldn't consider that he didn't.

And there was a pause. Adeline looked at the clock and saw that there was still another half-hour till tea time. How could they possibly fill it in? Then, suddenly, from a thought of Jerrold so incredibly married to Maisie, Adeline's mind wandered to Anne.

"Is Anne dining here tonight?" she said.

And Maisie said yes, she thought Adeline and Mr. Severn would like to see as much as possible of Anne. And Adeline said that was very kind of Maisie, and was bored again.

She saw nothing before her but more and more boredom; and the subject of Anne alone held out the prospect of relief. She flew to it as she would have fled from any danger.

"By the way, Maisie, if I were you I wouldn't let Anne see too much of Jerrold."

"Why not?"

"Because, my dear, it isn't good for her."

"I should have thought," Maisie said, "it was very good for both of them, as they like each other. I should never dream of interfering with their friendship. That's the way people get themselves thoroughly disliked. I don't want Jerry to dislike me, or Anne, either. I like them to feel that if he _is_ married they can go on being friends just the same."

"Oh, of course, if you like it----"

"I do like it," said Maisie, firmly.

Firm opposition was a thing that Adeline's wilfulness could never stand. It always made her either change the subject or revert to her original statement. This time she reverted.

"My point was that it isn't fair to Anne."

"Why isn't it?"

"Because she's in love with him."

"That," said Maisie, with increasing decision, "I do _not_ believe. I've never seen any signs of it."

"You're the only person who hasn't then. It sticks out of her. If it was a secret I shouldn't have told you."

"It is a secret to me," said Maisie, "so I think you might let it alone."

"You ought to know it if nobody else does. We've all of us known about Anne for ages. She was always quite mad about Jerrold. It was funny when she was a little thing; but it's rather more serious now she's thirty."

"She isn't thirty," said Maisie, contradictiously.

"Almost thirty. It's a dangerous age, Maisie. And Anne's a dangerous person. She's absolutely reckless. She always was."

"I thought you thought she was in love with Colin."

"I never thought it."

Maisie hated people who lied to her.

"Why did you tell Jerrold they were lovers, then?" she said.

"Did I tell Jerrold they were lovers?"

"He thinks you did."

"He must have misunderstood what I said. Colin gave me his word of honour that there was nothing between them."

But Maisie had no mercy.

"Why should he do that if you didn't think there was? If you were mistaken then you may be mistaken now."

"I'm not mistaken now. Ask Colin, ask Eliot, ask Anne's father."

"I shouldn't dream of asking them. You forget, if Jerrold's my husband, Anne's my friend."

"Then for goodness sake keep her out of mischief. Keep her out of Jerrold's way. Anne's a darling and I'm devoted to her, but she always did love playing with fire. If she's bent on burning her pretty wings it isn't kind to bring her where the lamp is."

"I'd trust Anne's wings to keep her out of danger."

"How about Jerrold's danger? You might think of him."

"I do think of him. And I trust him. Absolutely."

"I don't. I don't trust anybody absolutely."

"One thing's clear," said Maisie, "that it's time we had tea."

She got up, with an annihilating dignity, and rang the bell. Adeline's smile intimated that she was unbeaten and unconvinced.

That evening John Severn came into his wife's room as she was dressing for dinner.

"I wish to goodness Anne hadn't this craze for farming," he said. "She's simply working herself to death. I never saw her look so seedy. I'm sorry Jerrold let her have that farm."

"So am I," said Adeline. "I never saw Jerry look so seedy, either. Maisie's been behaving like a perfect idiot. If she wanted them to go off together she couldn't have done better."

"You don't imagine," John said, "that's what they're after?"

"How do I know what they're after? You never can tell with people like Jerrold and Anne. They're both utterly reckless. They don't care who suffers so long as they get what they want. If Anne had the morals of a--of a mouse, she'd clear out."

"I think," John said, "you're mistaken. Anne isn't like that.... I hope you haven't said anything to Maisie?"

Adeline made a face at him, as much as to say, "What do you take me for?" She lifted up her charming, wilful face and powdered it carefully.

iii

The earth smelt of the coming rain. All night the trees had whispered of rain coming to-morrow. Now they waited.

At noon the wind dropped. Thick clouds, the colour of dirty sheep's wool, packed tight by their own movement, roofed the sky and walled it round, hanging close to the horizon. A slight heaving and swelling in the grey mass packed it tighter. It was pregnant with rain. Here and there a steaming vapour broke from it as if puffed out by some immense interior commotion. Thin tissues detached themselves and hung like a frayed hem, lengthening, streaming to the hilltops in the west.

Anne was going up the fields towards the Manor and Jerrold was coming down towards the Manor Farm. They met at the plantation as the first big drops fell.

He called out to her, "I say, you oughtn't to be out a day like this."

Anne had been ill all January with a slight touch of pleurisy after a cold that she had taken no care of.

"I'm going to see Maisie."

"You're _not_," he said. "It's going to rain like fury."

"Maisie knows I don't mind rain," Anne said, and laughed.

"Maisie'd have a fit if she knew you were out in it. Look, how it's coming down over there."

Westwards and northwards the round roof and walls of cloud were shaken and the black rain hung sheeted between sky and earth. Overhead the dark tissues thinned out and lengthened. The fir trees quivered; they gave out slight creaking, crackling noises as the rain came down. It poured off each of the sloping fir branches like a jet from a tap.

"We must make a dash for it," Jerrold said. And they ran together, laughing, down the field to Anne's shelter at the bottom. He pushed back the sliding door.

The rain drummed on the roof and went hissing along the soaked ground; it sprayed out as the grass bent and parted under it; every hollow tuft was a water spout. The fields were dim behind the shining, glassy bead curtain of the rain.

The wind rose again and shook the rain curtain and blew it into the shelter. Rain scudded across the floor, wetting them where they stood. Jerrold slid the door to. They were safe now from the downpour.

Anne's bed stood in the corner tucked up in its grey blankets. They sat down on it side by side.