Anne Severn and the Fieldings Part 21

"I don't, Jerry. It's not your fault. Things have just happened. And you see, I understand. I felt the same about Auntie Adeline after Mother died. I didn't want to see her because she reminded me--and yet, really, I loved her all the time."

"You won't go back on me for it?"

"I wouldn't go back on you whatever you did. And you mustn't keep on thinking I _want_ to go to India. I don't care a rap about India itself.

I hate Anglo-Indians and I simply loathe hot places. And Daddy doesn't want me out there, really. I shall be much happier on my farm. And it'll save a lot of expense, too. Just think what my outfit and pa.s.sage would have cost."

"You wouldn't have cared what it cost if--"

"There isn't any if. I'm not lying, really." Not lying. Not lying. She would have given up more than India to save Jerrold that pang of memory.

Only, when it was all over and he had sailed without her, she realized in one wounding flash that what she had given up was Jerrold himself.

V

ELIOT AND ANNE

i

Anne did not go back to her Ilford farm at once. Adeline had made that impossible.

At the prospect of Anne's going her resentment died down as suddenly as it had risen. She forgot that Anne had taken her sons' affection and her place beside her husband's deathbed. And though she couldn't help feeling rather glad that Jerrold had gone to India without Anne, she was sorry for her. She loved her and she meant to keep her. She said she simply could not bear it if Anne left her, and _was_ it the time to choose when she wanted her as she had never wanted her before? She had n.o.body to turn to, as Anne knew. Corbetts and Hawtreys and Markhams and people were all very well; but they were outsiders.

"It's the inside people that I want now, Anne. You're deep inside, dear."

Yes, of course she had relations. But relations were no use. They were all wrapped up in their own tiresome affairs, and there wasn't one of them she cared for as she cared for Anne.

"I couldn't care more if you were my own daughter. Darling Robert felt about you just the same. You _can't_ leave me."

And Anne didn't. She never could resist unhappiness. She thought: "I was glad enough to stop with her through all the happy times. I'd be a perfect beast to go and leave her now when she's miserable and hasn't got anybody."

It would have been better for Anne if she could have gone. Robert Fielding's death and Jerrold's absence were two griefs that inflamed each other; they came together to make one immense, intolerable wound.

And here at Wyck, she couldn't move without coming upon something that touched it and stung it to fresh pain. But Anne was not like Jerrold, to turn from what she loved because it hurt her. For as long as she could remember all her happiness had come to her at Wyck. If unhappiness came now, she had got, as Eliot said, "to take it."

And so she stayed on through the autumn, then over Christmas to the New Year; this time because of Colin who was suffering from depression.

Colin had never got over his father's death and Jerrold's going; and the last thing Jerrold had said to her before he went was; "You'll look after Col-Col, won't you? Don't let him go grousing about by himself."

Jerrold had always expected her to look after Colin. At seventeen there was still something piteous and breakable about him, something that clung to you for help. Eliot said that if Colin didn't look out he'd be a regular neurotic. But he owned that Anne was good for him.

"I don't know what you do to him, but he's better when you're there."

Eliot was the one who appeared to have recovered first. He met the shock of his father's death with a defiant energy and will.

He was working now at bacteriology under Sir Martin Crozier. Covered with a white linen coat, in a white-washed room of inconceivable cleanness, surrounded by test-tubes and mixing jars, Eliot spent the best part of the day handling the germs of the deadliest diseases; making cultures, examining them under the microscope; preparing vaccines. He went home to the brown velvety, leathery study in his Welbeck Street flat to write out his notes, or read some monograph on inoculation; or he dined with a colleague and talked to him about bacteria.

At this period of his youth Eliot had more than ever the appearance of inhuman preoccupation. His dark, serious face detached itself with a sort of sullen apathy from the social scene. He seemed to have no keen interests beyond his slides and mixing jars and test-tubes. Women, for whom his indifference had a perverse fascination, said of him: "Dr.

Fielding isn't interested in people, only in their diseases. And not really in diseases, only in their germs."

They never suspected that Eliot was pa.s.sionate, and that a fierce pity had driven him into his profession. The thought of preventable disease filled him with fury; he had no tolerance for the society that tolerated it. He suffered because he had a clearer vision and a profounder sense of suffering than most persons. Up to the time of his father's death all Eliot's suffering had been other people's. He couldn't rest till he had done something to remove the cause of it.

Add to this an insatiable curiosity as to causes, and you have the main bent of Eliot's mind.

And it seemed to him that there was n.o.body but Anne who saw that hidden side of him. _She_ knew that he was sorry for people, and that being sorry for them had made him what he was, like Jerrold and yet unlike him. Eliot was attracted to suffering by the same sensitiveness that made Jerrold avoid everything once a.s.sociated with it.

And so the very thing that Jerrold couldn't bear to remember was what drew Eliot closer to Anne. He saw her as Jerrold had seen her, moving, composed and competent, in his father's room; he saw her stooping over him to help him, he saw the specks of blood on her white sleeve; and he thought of her with the more tenderness. From that instant he really loved her. He wanted Anne as he had never conceived himself wanting any woman. He could hardly remember his first adolescent feeling for her, that confused mixture of ignorant desire and fear, so different was it from the intense, clear pa.s.sion that possessed him now. At night when his work was done, he lay in bed, not sleeping, thinking of Anne with desire that knew itself too well to be afraid. Anne was the one thing necessary to him beside his work, necessary as a living part of himself.

She could only not come before his work because Eliot's work came before himself and his own happiness. When he went down every other week-end to Wyck-on-the-Hill he knew that it was to see Anne.

His mother knew it too.

"I wish Eliot would marry," she said.

"Why?" said Anne.

"Because then he wouldn't be so keen on going off to look for germs in disgusting climates."

Anne wondered whether Adeline knew Eliot. For Eliot talked to her about his work as he walked with her at a fine swinging pace over the open country, taking all his exercise now while he could get it. That was another thing he liked about Anne Severn, her splendid physical fitness; she could go stride for stride with him, and mile for mile, and never tire. Her mind, too, was robust and active, and full of curiosity; it listened by the hour and never tired. It could move, undismayed, among horrors. She could see, as he saw, the "beauty" of the long trains of research by which Sir Martin Crozier had tracked down the bacillus of amoebic dysentery and established the difference between typhoid and Malta fever.

Once started on his subject, the grave, sullen Eliot talked excitedly.

"You do see, Anne, how thrilling it is, don't you? For me there's nothing but bacteriology. I always meant to go in for it, and Sir Martin's magnificent. Absolutely top-hole. You see, all these disgusting diseases can be prevented. It's inconceivable that they should be tolerated in a civilized country. People can't care a rap or they couldn't sleep in their beds. They ought to get up and make a public row about it, to insist on compulsory inoculation for everybody whether they like it or not. It really isn't enough to cure people of diseases when they've got them. We ought to see that they never get them, that there aren't any to get... What we don't know yet is the complete behaviour of all these bacteria among themselves. A bad bacillus may be doing good work by holding down a worse one. It's conceivable that if we succeeded in exterminating all known diseases we might release an unknown one, supremely horrible, that would exterminate the race."

"Oh Eliot, how awful. How can _you_ sleep in your bed?"

"You needn't worry. It's only a nightmare idea of mine."

And so on and so on, for he was still so young that he wanted Anne to be excited by the things that excited him. And Anne told him all about her Ilford farm and what she meant to do on it. Eliot didn't behave like Aunt Adeline, he listened beautifully, like Uncle Robert and Jerrold, as if it was really most important that you should have a farm and work on it.

"What I want is to sell it and get one here. I don't want to be anywhere else. I can't tell you how frightfully home-sick I am when I'm away. I keep on seeing those gables with the little stone b.a.l.l.s, and the peac.o.c.ks, and the fields down to the Manor Farm. And the hills, Eliot.

When I'm away I'm always dreaming that I'm trying to get back to them and something stops me. Or I see them and they turn into something else.

I shan't be happy till I can come back for good."

"You don't want to go to India?" Eliot's heart began to beat as he asked his question.

"I want to work. To work hard. To work till I'm so dead tired that I roll off to sleep the minute I get into bed. So tired that I can't dream."

"That isn't right. You're too young to feel like that, Anne."

"I do feel like it. You feel like it yourself--My farm is to me what your old bacteria are to you."

"Oh, if I thought it was the farm--"

"Why, what else did you think it was?"

Eliot couldn't bring himself to tell her. He took refuge in apparent irrelevance.

"You know Father left me the Manor Farm house, don't you?"

"No, I didn't. I suppose he thought you'd want to come back, like me."