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.