"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?"