Part 2

“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.