But Cutler has given me leave to go over and see him. I shall
    get to Wyck as soon as this letter.

    Dear Col-Col, I wish I could do something for him. I feel as if
    we could never, never do too much after all he's been through.
    Fancy Eliot knowing exactly what would happen.

    Your loving

    Anne.

    Nieuport. _September 7th._

    Dear Anne,--Now that you _have_ gone I think I ought to tell you
    that it would be just as well if you didn't come back. I've got
    a man to take your place; Queenie picked him up at Dunkirk the
    day you sailed, and he's doing very well.

    The fact is we're getting on much better since you left. There's
    perfect peace now. You and Queenie didn't hit it off, you know,
    and for a job like ours it's absolutely essential that everybody
    should pull together like one. It doesn't do to have two in a
    Corps always at loggerheads.

    I don't like to lose you, and I know you've done splendidly. But
    I've got to choose between Queenie and you, and I must keep her,
    if it's only because she's worked with me all the time. So now
    that you've made the break I take the opportunity of asking you
    to resign. Personally I'm sorry, but the good of the Corps must
    come before everything.

    Sincerely yours,

    Robert Cutler.

    The Manor, Wyck-on-the-Hill, Gloucestershire.

    _September 11th, 1915._

    Dear Dicky,--This is only to say good-bye, as I shan't see you
    again. Cutler's fired me out of the Corps. He _says_ it's
    because Queenie and I don't hit it off. I shouldn't have thought
    that was my fault, but he seems to think it is. He says there's
    been perfect peace since I left.

    Well, we've had some tremendous times together, and I wish we
    could have gone on.

    Good-bye and Good Luck,

    Yours ever,

    Anne Severn.

    P. S.--Poor Colin Fielding's in an awful state. But he's been a
    bit better since I came. Even if Cutler'd let me come back I
    couldn't leave him. This is my job. The queer thing is he's
    afraid of Queenie, so it's just as well she didn't come home.

    Nieuport.

    _September 15th, 1915._

    Dear Old Thing,--We're all furious here at the way you've been
    treated. I've resigned as a protest, and I'm going into the R.
    A. M. So has Miss Mullins--: resigned I mean--so Queenie's the
    only woman left in the Corps. That'll suit her down to the
    ground.

    I gave myself the treat of telling Cutler what I jolly well
    think of him. But of course you know she made him hoof you out.
    She's been trying for it ever since you joined. It's all rot his
    saying you didn't hit it off with her, when everybody knows you
    were a perfect angel to her. Why, you backed her every time when
    we were all going for her. It's quite true that the peace of God
    has settled on the Corps since you left it; but that's only
    because Queenie doesn't rage round any more.

    You'll observe that she never went for Miss Mullins. That's
    because Miss Mullins kept well out of the line of fire. And if
    you hadn't jolly well distinguished yourself there she'd have
    let you alone, too. The real trouble began that day you were at
    Dixmude. It wasn't a bit because she was afraid you'd be killed.
    Queenie doesn't want you about when the War medals are handed
    round. Everybody sees that but old Cutler. He's too much gone on
    her to see anything. She can twist him round and round and tie
    him up in knots.

    But Cutler isn't in it now. Queenie's turned him down for that
    young Noel Fenwick who's got your job. Cutler's nose was a
    sight, I can tell you.


    Well, I'm not surprised that Queenie's husband funks her. She's
    a terror. Worse than war.

    Good-bye and Good Luck, Old Thing, till we meet again.

    Yours ever,

    Dicky Cartwright.



VII


ADELINE

i

They would never know what it cost her to come back and look after
Colin. That knowledge was beyond Adeline Fielding. She congratulated
Anne and expected Anne to congratulate herself on being "well out of
it." Her safety was revolting and humiliating to Anne when she thought
of Queenie and Cutler and Dicky, and Eliot and Jerrold and all the
allied armies in the thick of it. She had left a world where life was
lived at its highest pitch of intensity for a world where people were
only half-alive. To be safe from the chance of sudden violent death was
to be only half-alive.

Her one consolation had been that now she would see Jerrold. But she did
not see him. Jerrold had given up his appointment in the Punjaub three
weeks before the outbreak of the war. His return coincided with the
retreat from Mons. He had not been in England a week before he was in
training on Salisbury Plain. Anne had left Wyck when he arrived; and
before he got leave she was in Belgium with her Field Ambulance. And
now, in October of nineteen fifteen, when she came back to Wyck, Jerrold
was fighting in France.

At least they knew what had happened to Colin; but about Eliot and
Jerrold they knew nothing. Anything  might have happened to them since
they had written the letters that let them off from week to week,
telling them that they were safe. Anything might happen and they might
never know.

Anne's fear was dumb and secret. She couldn't talk about Jerrold. She
lived every minute in terror of Adeline's talking, of the cries that
came from her at queer unexpected moments: between two cups of tea, two
glances at the mirror, two careful gestures of her hands pinning up her
hair.

"I cannot bear it if anything happens to Jerrold, Anne."

"Oh Anne, I wonder what's happening to Jerrold."

"If only I knew what was happening to Jerrold."

"If only I knew where Jerrold _was_. Nothing's so awful as not knowing."

And at breakfast, over toast and marmalade: "Anne, I've got such an
awful feeling that something's happened to Jerrold. I'm sure these
feelings aren't given you for nothing... You aren't eating anything,
darling. You _must_ eat."

Every morning at breakfast Anne had to look through the lists of killed,
missing and wounded, to save Adeline the shock of coming upon Jerrold's
or Eliot's name. Every morning Adeline gazed at Anne across the table
with the same look of strained and agonised enquiry. Every morning
Anne's heart tightened and dragged, then loosened and lifted, as they
were let off for one more day.

One more day? Not one more hour, one minute. Any second the wire from
the War Office might come.


ii

Anne never knew the moment when she was first aware that Colin's mother
was afraid of him. Aunt Adeline was very busy, making swabs and
bandages. Every day she went off to her War Hospital Supply work at the
Town Hall, and Anne was left to take care of Colin. She began to wonder
whether the swabs and bandages were not a pretext for getting away from
Colin.

"It's no use," Adeline said. "I cannot stand the strain of it. Anne,
he's worse with me than he is with you. Everything I say and do is
wrong. You don't know what it was like before you came."

Anne did know. The awful thing was that Colin couldn't bear to be left
alone, day or night. He would lie awake shivering with terror. If he
dropped off to sleep he woke screaming. At first Pinkney slept with him.
But Pinkney had joined up, and old Wilkins, the butler, was impossible
because he snored.

Anne had her old room across the passage where she had slept when they
were children. And now, as then, their doors were left open, so that at
a sound from Colin she could get up and go to him.

She was used to the lacerating, unearthly scream that woke her, the
scream that terrified Adeline, that made her cover her head tight with
the bed-clothes, to shut it out, that made her lock her door to shut out
Colin. Once he had come into his mother's room and she had found him
standing by her bed and looking at her with the queer frightened face
that frightened her. She was always afraid of this happening again.

Anne couldn't bear to think of that locked door. She was used to the
sight of Colin standing in her doorway, to the watches beside his bed
where he lay shivering, holding her hand tight as he used to hold it
when he was a child. To Anne he was "poor Col-Col" again, the little boy
who was afraid of ghosts, only more abandoned to terror, more
unresisting.

He would start and tremble at any quick, unexpected movement. He would
burst into tears at any sudden sound. Small noises, whisperings,
murmurings, creakings, soft shufflings, irritated him. Loud noises, the
slamming of doors, the barking of dogs, the crowing of cocks, made him
writhe in agony. For Colin the deep silence of the Manor was the ambush
for some stupendous, crashing, annihilating sound; sound that was always
coming and never came. The droop of the mouth that used to appear
suddenly in his moments of childish anguish was fixed now, and fixed the
little tortured twist of his eyebrows and his look of anxiety and fear.
His head drooped, his shoulders were hunched slightly, as if he cowered
before some perpetually falling blow.

On fine warm days he lay out on the terrace on Adeline's long chair; on
wet days he lay on the couch in the library, or sat crouching over the
fire. Anne brought him milk or beef tea or Benger's Food every two
hours. He was content to be waited on; he had no will to move, no desire
to get up and do things for himself. He lay or sat still, shivering
every now and then as he remembered or imagined some horror. And as he
was afraid to be left alone Anne sat with him.

"How can you say this is a quiet place?" he said.

"It's quiet enough now."

"It isn't. It's full of noises. Loud, thundering noises going on and on.
Awful noises.... You know what it is? It's the guns in France. I can
hear them all the time."

"No, Colin. That isn't what you hear. We're much too far off. Nobody
could hear them."

"_I_ can."

"I don't think so."

"Do you mean it's noises in my head?"

"Yes. They'll go away when you're stronger."

"I shall never be strong again."

"Oh yes, you will be. You're better already."

"If I get better they'll send me out again."

"Never. Never again."

"I ought to be out. I oughtn't to be sticking here doing nothing....
Anne, you don't think Queenie'll come over, do you?"

"No, I don't. She's got much too much to do out there."

"You know, that's what I'm afraid of, more than anything, Queenie's
coming. She'll tell me I funked. She thinks I funked. She thinks that's
what's the matter with me."

"She doesn't. She knows it's your body, not you. Your nerves are shaken
to bits, that's all."

"I didn't funk, Anne." (He said it for the hundredth time.) "I mean I
stuck it all right. I went back after I had shell-shock the first
time--straight back into the trenches. It was at the very end of the
fighting that I got it again. Then I couldn't go back. I couldn't move."

"I know, Colin, I know."

"Does Queenie know?"

"Of course she does. She understands perfectly. Why, she sees men with
shell-shock every day. She knows you were splendid."

"I wasn't. But I wasn't as bad as she thinks me. ... Don't let her see
me if she comes back."

"She won't come."

"She will. She will. She'll get leave some day. Tell her not to come.
Tell her she can't see me. Say I'm off my head. Any old lie that'll stop
her."

"Don't think about her."

"I can't help thinking. She said such beastly things. You can't think
what disgusting things she said."

"She says them to everybody. She doesn't mean them."

"Oh, doesn't she!... Is that mother? You might tell her I'm sleeping."

For Colin was afraid of his mother, too. He was afraid that she would
talk, that she would talk about the War and about Jerrold. Colin had
been home six weeks and he had not once spoken Jerrold's name. He read
his letters and handed them to Anne and Adeline without a word. It was
as if between him and the thought of Jerrold there was darkness and a
supreme, nameless terror.

One morning at dawn Anne was wakened by Colin's voice in her room.

"Anne, are you awake?"

The room was full of the white dawn. She saw him standing in it by her
bedside.

"My head's awfully queer," he said. "I can feel my brain shaking and
wobbling inside it, as if the convolutions had come undone. Could they?"

"Of course they couldn't."

"The noise might have loosened them."

"It isn't your brain you feel, Colin. It's your nerves. It's just the
shock still going on in them."

"Is it never going to stop?"

"Yes, when you're stronger. Go back to bed and I'll come to you."

He went back. She slipped on her dressing-gown and came to him. She sat
by his bed and put her hand on his forehead.

"There--it stops when you put your hand on."

"Yes. And you'll sleep."

Presently, to her joy, he slept.

She stood up and looked at him as he lay there in the white dawn. He was
utterly innocent, utterly pathetic in his sleep, and beautiful. Sleep
smoothed out his vexed face and brought back the likeness of the boy
Colin, Jerrold's brother.

That morning a letter came to her from Jerrold. He wrote: "Don't worry
too much about Col-Col. He'll be all right as long as you'll look after
him."

She thought: "I wonder whether he remembers that he asked me to."

But she was glad he was not there to hear Colin scream.


iii

"Anne, can _you_ sleep?" said Adeline. Colin had gone to bed and they
were sitting together in the drawing-room for the last hour of the
evening.

"Not very well, when Colin has such bad nights."

"Do you think he's ever going to get right again?"

"Yes. But it'll take time."

"A long time?"

"Very long, probably."

"My dear, if it does, I don't know how I'm going to stand it. And if I
only knew what was happening to Jerrold and Eliot. Sometimes I wonder
how I've lived through these five years. First, Robert's death; then the
War. And before that there was nothing but perfect happiness. I think
trouble's worse to bear when you've known nothing but happiness
before.... If I could only die instead of all these boys, Anne. Why
can't I? What is there to live for?"

"There's Jerrold and Eliot and Colin."

"Oh, my dear, Jerrold and Eliot may never come back. And look at poor
Colin. _That_ isn't the Colin I know. He'll never be the same again. I'd
almost rather he'd been killed than that he should be like this. If he'd
lost a leg or an arm.... It's all very well for you, Anne. He isn't your
son."

"You don't know what he is," said Anne. She thought: "He's Jerrold's
brother. He's what Jerrold loves more than anything."

"No," said Adeline. "Everything ended for me when Robert died. I shall
never marry again. I couldn't bear to put anybody in Robert's place."

"Of course you couldn't. I know it's been awful for you, Auntie."

"I couldn't bear it, Anne, if I didn't believe that there is Something
Somewhere. I can't think how you get on without any religion."

"How do you know I haven't any?"

"Well, you've no faith in Anything. Have you, ducky?"

"I don't know what I've faith in. It's too difficult. If you love
people, that's enough, I think. It keeps you going through everything."

"No, it doesn't. It's all the other way about. It's loving people that
makes it all so hard. If you didn't love them you wouldn't care what
happened to them. If I didn't love Colin I could bear his shell-shock
better."

"If _I_ didn't love him, I couldn't bear it at all."

"I expect," said Adeline, "we both mean the same thing."

Anne thought of Adeline's locked door; and, in spite of her love for
her, she had a doubt. She wondered whether in this matter of loving they
had ever meant the same thing. With Adeline love was a passive state
that began and ended in emotion. With Anne love was power in action.
More than anything it meant doing things for the people that you loved.
Adeline loved her husband and her sons, but she had run away from the
sight of Robert's haemorrhage, she had tried to keep back Eliot and
Jerrold from the life they wanted, she locked her door at night and shut
Colin out. To Anne that was the worst thing Adeline had done yet. She
tried not to think of that locked door.

"I suppose," said Adeline, "you'll leave me now your father's coming
home?"

John Severn's letter lay between them on the table. He was retiring
after twenty-five years of India. He would be home as soon as his
letter.

"I shall do nothing of the sort," said Anne. "I shall stay as long as
you want me. If father wants me he must come down here."

In another three days he had come.


iv

He had grey hair now and his face was a little lined, a little faded,
but he was slender and handsome still--handsomer, more distinguished,
Adeline thought, than ever.

Again he sat out with her on the terrace when the October days were
warm; he walked with her up and down the lawn and on the flagged paths
of the flower garden. Again he followed her from the drawing-room to the
library where Colin was, and back again. He waited, ready for her.

Again Adeline smiled her self-satisfied, self-conscious smile. She had
the look of a young girl, moving in perfect happiness. She was
perpetually aware of him.

One night Colin called out to Anne that he couldn't sleep. People were
walking about outside under his window. Anne looked out. In the full
moonlight she saw Adeline and her father walking together on the
terrace. Adeline was wrapped in a long cloak; she held his arm and they
leaned toward each other as they walked. His man's voice sounded tender
and low.

Anne called to them. "I say, darlings, would you mind awfully going
somewhere else? Colin can't sleep with you prowling about there."

Adeline's voice came up to them with a little laughing quiver.

"All right, ducky; we're going in."


v

It was the end of October; John Severn had gone back to London. He had
taken a house in Montpelier Square and was furnishing it.

One morning Adeline came down smiling, more self-conscious than ever.

"Anne," she said, "do you think you could look after Colin if I went up
to Evelyn's for a week or two?"

Evelyn was Adeline's sister. She lived in London.

"Of course I can."

"You aren't afraid of being alone with him?"

"Afraid? Of Col-Col? What do you take me for?"

"Well--" Adeline meditated. "It isn't as if Mrs. Benning wasn't here."

Mrs. Benning was the housekeeper.

"That'll make it all right and proper. The fact is, I must have a rest
and change before the winter. I hardly ever get away, as you know. And
Evelyn would like to have me. I think I must go."

"Of course you must go," Anne said.

And Adeline went.

At the end of the first week she wrote:

    12 Eaton Square. November 3d, 1915.

    Darling Anne,--Will you be very much surprised to hear that your
    father and I are going to be married? You mayn't know it, but he
    has loved me all his life. We _were_ to have married once (you
    knew _that_), and I jilted him. But he has never changed. He has
    been so faithful and forgiving, and has waited for me so
    patiently--twenty-seven years, Anne--that I hadn't the heart to
    refuse him. I feel that I must make up to him for all the pain
    I've given him.

    We want you to come up for the wedding on the 10th. It will be
    very quiet. No bridesmaids. No party. We think it best not to
    have it at Wyck, on Colin's account. So I shall just be married
    from Evelyn's house.

    Give us your blessing, there's a dear.

    Your loving

    Adeline Fielding.

Anne's eyes filled with tears. At last she saw Adeline Fielding
completely, as she was, without any fascination. She thought: "She's
marrying to get away from Colin. She's left him to me to look after. How
could she leave him? How could she?"

Anne didn't go up for the wedding. She told Adeline it wasn't much use
asking her when she knew that Colin couldn't be left.

"Or, if you like, that _I_ can't leave him."

Her father wrote back:

    Your Aunt Adeline thinks you reproach her for leaving Colin. I told her
    you were too intelligent to do anything of the sort. You'll agree it's
    the best thing she could do for him. She's no more capable of looking
    after Colin than a kitten. She wants to be looked after herself, and
    you ought to be grateful to me for relieving you of the job.

    But I don't like your being alone down there with Colin. If he isn't
    better we must send him to a nursing home.

    Are you wondering whether we're going to be happy?

    We shall be so long as I let her have her own way; which is what I mean
    to do.

    Your very affectionate father,

    JOHN SEVERN.


And Anne answered:

    DEAREST DADDY,--I shouldn't dream of reproaching Aunt Adeline any more
    than I should reproach a pussycat for catching birds.

    Look after her as much as you please--_I_ shall look after Colin.
    Whether you like it or not, darling, you can't stop me. And I won't let
    Colin go to a nursing home. It would be the worst possible place for
    him. Ask Eliot. Besides, he _is_ better.

    I'm ever so glad you're going to be happy.

    Your loving

    ANNE.



VIII


ANNE AND COLIN

i

Autumn had passed. Colin's couch was drawn up before the fire in the
drawing-room. Anne sat with him there.

He was better. He could listen for half an hour at a time when Anne read
to him--poems, short stories, things that were ended before Colin tired
of them. He ate and drank hungrily and his body began to get back its
strength.

At noon, when the winter sun shone, he walked, first up and down the
terrace, then round and round the garden, then to the beech trees at the
top of the field, and then down the hill to the Manor Farm. On mild days
she drove him about the country in the dog-cart. She had tried motoring
but had had to give it up because Colin was frightened at the hooting,
grinding and jarring of the car.

As winter went on Anne found that Colin was no worse in cold or wet
weather. He couldn't stand the noise and rush of the wind, but his
strange malady took no count of rain or snow. He shivered in the clear,
still frost, but it braced him all the same. Driving or strolling, she
kept him half the day in the open air.

She saw that he liked best the places they had gone to when they were
children--the Manor Farm fields, High Slaughter, and Hayes Mill. They
were always going to the places where they had done things together.
When Colin talked sanely he was back in those times. He was safe there.
There, if anywhere, he could find his real self and be well.

She had the feeling that Colin's future lay somewhere through his past.
If only she could get him back there, so that he could be what he had
been. There must be some way of joining up that time to this, if only
she could find a bridge, a link. She didn't know that she was the way,
she was the link binding his past to his present, bound up with his
youth, his happiness, his innocence, with the years before Queenie and
the War.

She didn't know what Queenie had done to him. She didn't know that the
war had only finished what Queenie had begun. That was Colin's secret,
the hidden source of his fear.

But he was safe with Anne because they were not in love with each other.
She left his senses at rest, and her affection never called for any
emotional response. She took him away from his fear; she kept him back
in his childhood, in his boyhood, in the years before Queenie, with a
continual, "Do you remember?"

"Do you remember the walk to High Slaughter?"

"Do you remember the booby-trap we set for poor Pinkney?"

That was dangerous, for poor Pinkney was at the War.

"Do you remember Benjy?"

"Yes, rather."

But Benjy was dangerous, too; for Jerrold had given him to her. She
could feel Colin shying.

"He had a butterfly smut," he said. "Hadn't he? ...Do you remember how I
used to come and see you at Cheltenham?"

"And Grannie and Aunt Emily, and how you used to play on their piano.
And how Grannie jumped when you came down crash on those chords in the
Waldstein."

"Do you mean the _presto?_"

"Yes. The last movement."

"No wonder she jumped. I should jump now." He turned his mournful face
to her. "Anne--I shall never be able to play again."

There was danger everywhere. In the end all ways led back to Colin's
malady.

"Oh yes, you wall when you're quite strong."

"I shall never be stronger."

"You will. You're stronger already."

She knew he was stronger. He could sleep three hours on end now and he
had left off screaming.

And still the doors were left open between their rooms at night. He was
still afraid to sleep alone; he liked to know that she was there, close
to him.

Instead of the dreams, instead of the sudden rushing, crashing horror,
he was haunted by a nameless dread. Dread of something he didn't know,
something that waited for him, something he couldn't face. Something
that hung over him at night, that was there with him in the morning,
that came between him and the light of the sun.

Anne kept it away. Anne came between it and him. He was unhappy and
frightened when Anne was not there.

It was always, "You're _not_ going, Anne?"

"Yes. But I'm coming back."

"How soon?"

And she would say, "An hour;" or, "Half an hour," or, "Ten minutes."

"Don't be longer."

"No."

And then: "I don't know how it is, Anne. But everything seems all right
when you're there, and all wrong when you're not."


ii

The Manor Farm house stands in the hamlet of Upper Speed. It has the
grey church and churchyard beside it and looks across the deep road
towards Sutton's farm.

The beautiful Jacobean house, the church and church-yard, Sutton's farm
and the rectory, the four cottages and the Mill, the river and its
bridge, lie close together in the small flat of the valley. Green
pastures slope up the hill behind them to the north; pink-brown arable
lands, ploughed and harrowed, are flung off to either side, east and
west.

Northwards the valley is a slender slip of green bordering the slender
river. Southwards, below the bridge, the water meadows widen out past
Sutton's farm. From the front windows of the Manor Farm house you see
them, green between the brown trunks of the elms on the road bank. From
the back you look out across orchard and pasture to the black, still
water and yellow osier beds above the Mill. Beyond the water a double
line of beeches, bare delicate branches, rounded head after rounded
head, climbs a hillock in a steep curve, to part and meet again in a
thick ring at the top.

The house front stretches along a sloping grass plot, the immense porch
built out like a wing with one ball-topped gable above it, a smaller
gable in the roof behind. On either side two rows of wide black windows,
heavy browed, with thick stone mullions.

Barker, Jerrold Fielding's agent, used to live there; but before the
spring of nineteen sixteen Barker had joined up, Wyck Manor had been
turned into a home for convalescent soldiers, and Anne was living with
Colin at the Manor Farm.

Half of her Ilford land had been taken by the government; and she had
let the rest together with the house and orchard. Instead of her own
estate she had the Manor to look after now. It had been impossible in
war-time to fill Barker's place, and Anne had become Jerrold's agent.
She had begun with a vague promise to give a look round now and then;
but when the spring came she found herself doing Barker's work, keeping
the farm accounts, ordering fertilizers, calculating so many
hundredweights of superphosphate of lime, or sulphate of ammonia, or
muriate of potash to the acre; riding about on Barker's horse, looking
after the ploughing; plodding through the furrows of the hill slopes to
see how the new drillers were working; going the round of the sheep-pens
to keep count of the sick ewes and lambs; carrying the motherless lambs
in her arms from the fold to the warm kitchen.

She went through February rain and snow, through March wind and sleet,
and through the mists of the low meadows; her feet were loaded with
earth from the ploughed fields; her nostrils filled with the cold, rich
smell of the wet earth; the rank, sharp smell of swedes, the dry,
pungent smell of straw and hay; the thick, oily, woolly smell of the
folds, the warm, half-sweet, half sour smell of the cattle sheds, of
champed fodder, of milky cow's breath; the smell of hot litter and dung.

At five and twenty she had reached the last clear decision of her
beauty. Dressed in riding coat and breeches, her body showed more
slender and more robust than ever. Rain, sun and wind were cosmetics to
her firm, smooth skin. Her eyes were bright dark, washed with the clean
air.

On her Essex farm and afterwards at the War she had learned how to
handle men. Sulky Curtis, who grumbled under Barker's rule, surrendered
to Anne without a scowl. When Anne came riding over the Seven Acre
field, lazy Ballinger pulled himself together and ploughed through the
two last furrows that he would have left for next day in Barker's time.
Even for Ballinger and Curtis she had smiles that atoned for her little
air of imperious command.

And Colin followed her about the farmyard and up the fields till he
tired and turned back. She would see him standing by the gate she had
passed through, looking after her with the mournful look he used to have
when he was a little boy and they left him behind.

He would stand looking till Anne's figure, black on her black horse,
stood up against the skyline from the curve of the round-topped hill. It
dipped; it dipped and disappeared and Colin would go slowly home.

At the first sound of her horse's hoofs in the yard he came out to meet
her.

One day he said to her, "Jerrold'll be jolly pleased with what you've
done when he comes home."

And then, "If he ever can be pleased with anything again."

It was the first time he had said Jerrold's name.

"That's what's been bothering me," he went on. "I can't think how
Jerrold's going to get over it. You remember what he was like when
Father died?"

"Yes." She remembered.

"Well--what's the War going to do to him? Look what it's done to me. He
minds things so much more than I do."

"It doesn't take everybody the same way, Colin."

"I don't suppose Jerrold'll get shell-shock. But he might get something
worse. Something that'll hurt him more. He must mind so awfully."

"You may be sure he won't mind anything that could happen to himself."

"Of course he won't. But the things that'll happen to other people.
Seeing the other chaps knocked about and killed."

"He minds most the things that happen to the people he cares about. To
you and Eliot. They're the sort of things he can't face. He'd pretend
they couldn't happen. But the war's so big that he can't say it isn't
happening; he's got to stand up to it. And the things you stand up to
don't hurt you. I feel certain he'll come through all right."

That was the turning point in Colin's malady. She thought: "If he can
talk about Jerrold he's getting well."

The next day a letter came to her from Jerrold. He wrote: "I wish to
goodness I could get leave. I don't want it _all_ the time. I'm quite
prepared to stick this beastly job for any reasonable period; but a
whole year without leave, it's a bit thick..."

"About Colin. Didn't I tell you he'd be all right? And it's all _you_,
Anne. You've made him; you needn't pretend you haven't. I want most
awfully to see you again. There are all sorts of things I'd like to say
to you, but I can't write 'em."

She thought: "He's got over it at last, then. He won't be afraid of me
any more."

Somehow, since the war she had felt that Jerrold would come back to her.
It was as if always, deep down and in secret, she had known that he
belonged to her and that she belonged to him as no other person could;
that whatever happened and however long a time he kept away from her he
would come back at some time, in some way. She couldn't distinguish
between Jerrold and her sense of Jerrold; and as nothing could separate
her from the sense of him, nothing could separate her from Jerrold
himself. He had part in the profound and secret life of her blood and
nerves and brain.



IX


JERROLD

i

At last, in March, nineteen-sixteen, Jerrold had got leave.

Anne was right; Jerrold had come through because he had had to stand up
to the War and face it. He couldn't turn away. It was too stupendous a
fact to be ignored or denied or in any way escaped from. And as he had
to "take" it, he took it laughing. Once in the thick of it, Jerrold was
sustained by his cheerful obstinacy, his inability to see the things he
didn't want to see. He admitted that there was a war, the most appalling
war, if you liked, that had ever been; but he refused, all the time, to
believe that the Allies would lose it; he refused from moment to moment
to believe that they could be beaten in any single action; he denied the
possibility of disaster to his own men. Disaster to himself--possibly;
probably, in theory; but not in practice. Not when he turned back in the
rain of the enemy's fire to find his captain who had dropped wounded
among the dead, when he swung him over his shoulder and staggered to the
nearest stretcher. He knew he would get through. It was inconceivable to
Jerrold that he should not get through. Even in his fifth engagement,
when his men broke and gave back in front of the German parapet, and he
advanced alone, shouting to them to come on, it was inconceivable that
they should not come on. And when they saw him, running forward by
himself, they gathered again and ran after him and the trench was taken
in a mad rush.

Jerrold got his captaincy and two weeks' leave together. He had meant to
spend three days in London with his mother, three days in Yorkshire with
the Durhams, and the rest of his time at Upper Speed with Anne and
Colin. He was not quite sure whether he wanted to go to the Durhams.
More than anything he wanted to see Anne again.

His last unbearable memory of her was wiped out by five years of India
and a year of war. He remembered the child Anne who played with him, the
girl Anne who went about with him, and the girl woman he had found in
her room at dawn. He tried to join on to her the image of the Anne that
Eliot wrote to him about, who had gone out to the war and come back from
it to look after Colin. He was in love with this image of her and ready
to be in love again with the real Anne. He would go back now and find
her and make her care for him.

There had been a time, after his father's death, when he had tried to
make himself think that Anne had never cared for him, because he didn't
want to think she cared. Now that he did want it he wasn't sure.

Not so sure as he was about little Maisie Durham. He knew Maisie cared.
That was why she had gone out to India. It was also why she had been
sent back again. He was afraid it might be why the Durhams had asked him
to stay with them as soon as he had leave. If that was so, he wasn't
sure whether he ought to stay with them, seeing that he didn't care for
Maisie. But since they had asked him, well, he could only suppose that
the Durhams knew what they were about. Perhaps Maisie had got over it.
The little thing had lots of sense.

It hadn't been his fault in the beginning, Maisie's caring. Afterwards,
perhaps, in India, when he had let himself see more of her than he would
have done if he had known she cared; but that, again, was hardly his
fault since he didn't know. You don't see these things unless you're on
the lookout for them, and you're not on the lookout unless you're a
conceited ass. Then when he did see it, when he couldn't help seeing,
after other people had seen and made him see, it had been too late.

But this was five years ago, and of course Maisie had got over it. There
would be somebody else now. Perhaps he would go down to Yorkshire.
Perhaps he wouldn't.

At this point Jerrold realised that it depended on Anne.

But before he saw Anne he would have to see his mother. And before he
saw his mother his mother had seen Anne and Colin.


ii

And while Anne in Gloucestershire was answering Jerrold's letter,
Jerrold sat in the drawing-room of the house in Montpelier Square and
talked to his mother. They talked about Colin and Anne.

"What's Colin's wife doing?" he said.

"Queenie? She's driving a field ambulance car in Belgium."

"Why isn't she looking after Colin?"

"That isn't in Queenie's line. Besides--"

"Besides what?"

"Well, to tell the truth, I don't suppose she'll live with Colin
after--"

"After _what_?"

"Well, after Colin's living with Anne."

Jerrold stiffened. He felt the blood rushing to his heart, betraying
him. His face was God only knew what awful colour.

"You don't mean to say they--"

"I don't mean to say I blame them, poor darlings. What were they to do?"

"But" (he almost stammered it) "you don't know--you can't know--it
doesn't follow."

"Well, of course, my dear, they haven't _told_ me. You don't shout these
things from the house-tops. But what is one to think? There they are;
there they've been for the last five months, living together at the
Farm, absolutely alone. Anne won't leave him. She won't have anybody
there. If you tell her it's not proper she laughs in your face. And
Colin swears he won't go back to Queenie. What _is_ one to think?"

Jerrold covered his face with his hands. He didn't know.

His mother went on in a voice of perfect sweetness. "Don't imagine I
think a bit the worse of Anne. She's been simply splendid. I never saw
anything like her devotion. She's brought Colin round out of the most
appalling state. We've no business to complain of a situation we're all
benefitting by. Some people can do these things and you forgive them.
Whatever Anne does or doesn't do she'll always be a perfect darling. As
for Queenie, I don't consider her for a minute. She's been simply asking
for it."

He wondered whether it were really true. It didn't follow that Anne and
Colin were lovers because his mother said so; even supposing that she
really thought it.

"You don't go telling everybody, I hope?" he said.

"My dear Jerrold, what do you think I'm made of? I haven't even told
Anne's father. I've only told you because I thought you ought to know."

"I see; you want to put me off Anne?"

"I don't _want_ to. But it would, wouldn't it?"

"Oh Lord, yes, if it was true. Perhaps it isn't."

"Jerry dear, it may be awfully immoral of me, but for Colin's sake I
can't help hoping that it is. I did so want Anne to marry Colin--really
he's only right when he's with her--and if Queenie divorces him I
suppose she will."

"But, mother, you _are_ going ahead. You may be quite wrong."

"I may. You can only suppose--"

"How on earth am I to know? I can't ask them."

"No, you can't ask them."

Of course he couldn't. He couldn't go to Colin and say, "Are you Anne's
lover?" He couldn't go to Anne and say, "Are you Colin's mistress?"

"If they wanted us to know," said Adeline, "they'd have told us. There
you are."

"Supposing it isn't true, do you imagine he cares for her?"

"Yes, Jerrold. I'm quite, quite sure of that. I was down there last week
and saw them. He can't bear her out of his sight one minute. He couldn't
not care."

"And Anne?"

"Oh, well, Anne isn't going to give herself away. But I'm certain...
Would she stick down there, with everybody watching them and thinking
things and talking, if she didn't care so much that nothing matters?"

"But would she--would she--"

The best of his mother was that in these matters her mind jumped to meet
yours halfway. You hadn't got to put things into words.

"My dear, if you think she wouldn't, supposing she cared enough, you
don't know Anne."

"I shall go down," he said, "and see her."

"If you do, for goodness' sake be careful. Even supposing there's
nothing in it, you mustn't let Colin see you think there is. He'd feel
then that he ought to leave her for fear of compromising her. And if he
leaves her he'll be as bad as ever again. And _I_ can't manage him.
Nobody can manage him but Anne. That's how they've tied our hands. We
can't say anything."

"I see."

"After all, Jerrold, it's very simple. If they're innocent we must leave
them in their innocence. And if they're not----"

"If they're not?"

"Well, we must leave them in _that_."

Jerrold laughed. But he was not in the least amused.


iii

He went down to Wyck the next day; he couldn't wait till the day after.

Not that he had the smallest hope of Anne now. Even if his mother's
suspicion were unfounded, she had made it sufficiently clear to him that
Anne was necessary to Colin; and, that being so, the chances were that
Colin cared for her. In these matters his mother was not such a fool as
to be utterly mistaken. On every account, therefore, he must be prepared
to give Anne up. He couldn't take her away from Colin, and he wouldn't
if he could. It was his own fault. What was done was done six years ago.
He should have loved Anne then.

Going down in the train he thought of her, a little girl with short
black hair, holding a black-and-white rabbit against her breast, a
little girl with a sweet mouth ready for kisses, who hung herself round
his neck with sudden, loving arms. A big girl with long black hair tied
in an immense black bow, a girl too big for kisses. A girl sitting in
her room between her white bed and the window with a little black cat in
her arms. Her platted hair lay in a thick black rope down her back. He
remembered how he had kissed her; he remembered the sliding of her sweet
face against his, the pressure of her darling head against his shoulder,
the salt taste of her tears. It was inconceivable that he had not loved
Anne then. Why hadn't he? Why had he let his infernal cowardice stop
him? Eliot had loved her.

Then he remembered Colin. Little Col-Col running after them down the
field, calling to them to take him with them; Colin's hands playing;
Colin's voice singing _Lord Rendal_. He tried to think of Queenie, the
woman Colin had married. He had no image of her. He could see nothing
but Colin and Anne.

She was there alone at the station to meet him. She came towards him
along the platform. Their eyes looked for each other. Something choked
his voice back. She spoke first.

"Jerrold------"

"Anne." A strange, thick voice deep down in his throat.

Their hands clasped one into the other, close and strong.

"Colin wanted to come, but I wouldn't let him. It would have been too
much for him. He might have cried or something ... You mustn't mind if
he cries when he sees you. He isn't quite right yet."

"No, but he's better."

"Ever so much better. He can do things on the farm now. He looks after
the lambs and the chickens and the pigs. It's good for him to have
something to do."

Jerrold agreed that it was good.

They had reached the Manor Farm now.

"Don't take any notice if he cries," she said.

Colin waited for him in the hall of the house. He was trying hard to
control himself, but when he saw Jerrold coming up the path he broke
down in a brief convulsive crying that stopped suddenly at the touch of
Jerrold's hand.

Anne left them together.


iv

"Don't go, Anne."

Colin called her back when she would have left them, again after dinner.

"Don't you want Jerrold to yourself?" she said.

"We don't want you to go, do we, Jerrold?"

"Rather not."

Jerrold found himself looking at them all the time. He had tried to
persuade himself that what his mother had told him was not true. But he
wasn't sure. Look as he would, he was not sure.

If only his mother hadn't told him, he might have gone on believing in
what she had called their innocence. But she had shown him what to look
for, and for the life of him he couldn't help seeing it at every turn:
in Anne's face, in the way she looked at Colin, the way she spoke to
him; in her kindness to him, her tender, quiet absorption. In the way
Colin's face turned after her as she came and went; in his restlessness
when she was not there; in the peace, the sudden smoothing of his vexed
brows, when having gone she came back again.

Supposing it were true that they--

He couldn't bear it to be true; his mind struggled against the truth of
it, but if it _were_ true he didn't blame them. So far from being untrue
or even improbable, it seemed to Jerrold the most likely thing in the
world to have happened. It had happened to so many people since the war
that he couldn't deny its likelihood. There was only one thing that
could have made it impossible--if Anne had cared for him. And what
reason had he to suppose she cared? After six years? After he had told
her he was trying to get away from her? He had got away; and he saw a
sort of dreadful justice in the event that made it useless for him to
come back. If anybody was to blame it was himself. Himself and Queenie,
that horrible girl Colin had married.

When he asked himself whether it was the sort of thing that Anne would
be likely to do he thought: Why not, if she loved him, if she wanted to
make him happy? How could he tell what Anne would or would not do? She
had said long ago that he couldn't, that she might do anything.

They spent the evening talking, by fits and starts, with long silences
in between. They talked about the things that happened before the war,
before Colin's marriage, the things they had done together. They talked
about the farm and Anne's work, about Barker and Curtis and Ballinger,
about Mrs. Sutton who watched them from her house across the road.

Mrs. Sutton had once been Colin's nurse up at the Manor: she had married
old Sutton after his first wife's death; old Sutton who wouldn't die and
let Anne have his farm. And now she watched them as if she were afraid
of what they might do next.

"Poor old Nanna," Jerrold said.

"Goodness knows what she thinks of us," said Anne.

"It doesn't matter what she thinks," said Colin.

And they laughed; they laughed; and Jerrold was not quite sure, yet.

But before the night was over he thought he was.

They had given him the little room in the gable. It led out of Colin's
room. And there on the chimneypiece he saw an old photograph of himself
at the age of thirteen, holding a puppy in his arms. He had given it to
Anne on the last day of the midsummer holidays, nineteen hundred. Also
he found a pair of Anne's slippers under the bed, and, caught in a crack
of the dressing-table, one long black hair. This room leading out of
Colin's was Anne's room.

And Colin called out to him, "Do you mind leaving the door open, Jerry?
I can't sleep if it's shut."


v

It was Jerrold's second day. He and Anne climbed the steep beech walk to
the top of the hillock and sat there under the trees. Up the fields on
the opposite rise they could see the grey walls and gables of the Manor,
and beside it their other beech ring at the top of the last field.

They were silent for a while. He was intensely aware of her as she
turned her head round, slowly, to look at him, straight and full.

And the sense of his nearness came over her, soaking in deeper, swamping
her brain. Her wide open eyes darkened; her breathing came in tight,
short jerks; her nerves quivered. She wondered whether he could feel
their quivering, whether he could hear her jerking breath, whether he
could see something queer about her eyes. But she had to look at him,
not shyly, furtively, but straight and full, taking him in.

He was changed. The war had changed him. His face looked harder, the
mouth closer set under the mark of the little clipped fawn-brown
moustache. His eyes that used to flash their blue so gayly, to rest so
lightly, were fixed now, dark and heavy with memory. They had seen too
much. They would never lose that dark memory of the things they had
seen. She wondered, was Colin right? Had the war done worse things to
Jerrold than it had done to him? He would never tell her.

"Jerrold," she said, suddenly, "did you have a good time in India?"

"I suppose so. I dare say I thought I had."

"And you hadn't?"

"Well, I can't conceive how I could have had."

"You mean it seems so long ago."

"No, I don't mean that."

"You've forgotten."

"I don't mean that, either."

Silence.

"Look here, Anne, I want to know about Colin. Has he been very bad?"

"Yes, he has."

"How bad?"

"So bad that sometimes I was glad you weren't there to see him. You
remember when he was a kid, how frightened he used to be at night. Well,
he's been like that all the time. He's like that now, only he's a bit
better. He doesn't scream now.... All the time he kept on worrying about
you. He only told me that the other day. He seemed to think the war must
have done something more frightful to you than it had done to him; he
said, because you'd mind it more. I told him it wasn't the sort of thing
you'd mind most."

"It isn't the sort of thing it's any good minding. I don't suppose I
minded more than the other chaps. If anything had happened to you, or
him, or Eliot, I'd have minded that."

"I know. That's what I told him. I knew you'd come through."

"Eliot was dead right about Colin. He knew he wouldn't. He ought never
to have gone out."

"He wanted so awfully to go. But Eliot could have stopped him if it
hadn't been for Queenie. She hunted and hounded him out. She told him he
was funking. Fancy Colin funking!"

"What's Queenie like?"

"She's like that. She never funks herself, but she wants to make out
that everybody else does."

"Do you like Queenie?"

"No. I hate her. I don't mind her hounding him out so much since she
went herself; I _do_ mind her leaving him. Do you know, she's never even
tried to come and see him."

"Good God! what a beast the woman must be. What on earth made him marry
her?"

"He was frightfully in love. An awful sort of love that wore him out and
made him wretched. And now he's afraid for his life of her. I believe
he's afraid of the war ending because then she'll come back."

"And if she does come back?"

"She may try and take Colin away from me. But she shan't. She can't take
him if he doesn't want to go. She left him to me to look after and I
mean to stick to him. I won't have him frightened and made all ill again
just when I've got him well."