Let Me Alone

CHAPTER 2

ANNA did not cry when Miss Wilson went away. Although the parting meant the end of all that was pleasant, familiar, safe and normal in her unpropitious childhood, something cold and unchildlike in her almost rejoiced. She was proud to think that she was to be alone with her father; as though she were being admitted to a kind of equality with him. In her secret heart she was glad to get rid of the tiresome, devoted old creature whom she almost despised. And so, when the one human being in the whole world who loved her was leaving her for ever, she did not shed a single tear.

Miss Wilson herself attained a certain dignity at the last. She had slept less than an hour the previous night. All through the long, dark, silent hours she had lain awake, weeping and praying for the child whom she must perforce abandon. In the night she had become definitely an old woman. New lines had appeared upon her face, and in her eyes, dim with many tears, a dullness of despair was gathering. But in the morning, in the bright, limpid sun of the mountain morning, she stood up stiff and proud to go off bravely with her flag still flying in the face of her conquering enemy.

James smiled his thin, unpleasant smile when he watched her trudging down the hill, this pathetic little wisp of a woman whom he had beaten, with her head held high in its unbecoming hat, while the loutish Paul followed behind with her meagre possessions.

But Anna did not smile with him. Dimly, her immature mind was aware of tragedy in that comical dwindling figure; recognized a kind of nobility in that unromantic departure, so that she almost started to run after her, to give her some sign of appreciation and affection, that she might not go away altogether uncomforted. But it was too late. The small, dowdy figure was already disappearing in the rich, dappled green shade of the chestnut-wood; and Paul, with the burdens he carried so easily, was plunging in behind, like a diver entering a sea of purplish shadow and dancing, lucent green.

So the first bright infantile page of Anna’s life was turned, and before her lay a new page, neither so bright nor so innocent, a page whereon the shadows were already beginning to fall.

The existence of Mascarat was one of complete, almost incredible isolation. No visitor from the outside world climbed that stony and arduous path that led at length through the whispering chestnut-forest. No stranger entered the grim old house where Seguela, like a bundle of dingy black feathers, flopped perpetually from room to room in clumsy, corvine haste.

Seguela was one of those women who seem never to have been young, rather tall, but with an ugly stoop, so that on the rare occasions when she stood upright her height came as a surprise. She had a strange, broken way of moving, as though she were deformed, and was always in a frustration of stumbling, purposeless haste. She lived with her son in a dark hole of a room, a sort of den, opening out of the kitchen at the back.

Nobody knew what Seguela thought of the strange ménage. She went on with her work with an obstinate, blank indifference, taking no notice of anyone. But all the time, out of the bundle of dusty black rags that was her slovenly person, her small, sharp eyes were continually peering about with a cynical gleam of malice that took note of everything.

Silent and cynical, she watched what went on. But when Miss Wilson had gone, Seguela went limping about as before, busy in her stubborn, aimless, animal sort of way, seeming to have forgotten immediately that the other woman had ever existed.

Seguela was the chief link between Mascarat and the outer world. Once or twice a month on a fine afternoon she would take off the black triangular shawl that usually covered her thick, dark, greasy hair, and put on instead a full-bottomed cap of some white material. Then she would set out to visit her friends, looking like a dusty, white-headed insect as she toiled awkwardly down the rocky slope.

It was she who, when any communication became necessary between James Forrester and his neighbours, conveyed the messages and made the arrangements. The peasants disliked James, distrusted him as a foreigner in such circumstances must always be distrusted. But in his case there was something more than hostile suspicion. There was fear and there was profound opposition. A queer, black, half-insolent fear, and a definite, immense opposition, like a mountain that could never be moved.

But all the same, they came every autumn in due time and at Seguela’s summons to buy the grapes from James’s vineyards and carry them away. But always with the peculiar subterranean malevolence about them, keeping their heads averted. And sometimes the tawny, Spanish-seeming men would look up at James with a dark gleaming ferocity in their eyes, as though they would have liked to destroy him — if they dared.

It pleased James to see this ferocious glitter; as well as the silent, immovable opposition. It amused him. It gave him an ironic sense of power. Grey-faced and grim, he stood up there on the pedestal of his proud, innate superiority, the inevitable master, while their little slavish hates laid seige to him, trying to drag him down.

Anna had almost forgotten Miss Wilson. But not quite: for Miss Wilson had left behind her a parting gift that served to keep her memory alive. This was a little crucifix, a tiny silver Christ on a white cross. It was pretty; when the sun shone on it, the silver shone out prettily. It was the only thing in the nature of a trinket that Anna had ever possessed, and she wore it sometimes when she was alone, hung on a piece of tape round her neck.

One day her father saw it. He came upon her suddenly when her thoughts were far away, too far to be recalled quickly, walking silently towards her over the grass. The silver Christ flashed tell-tale in the sun.

‘What is that round your neck?’ he asked her.

She was uncomfortable at the question, silently holding out the cross for him to see.

He came near to her, breaking the tape, holding the crucifix in the palm of his hand. And a sinister insulting glaze came over his face as he looked down at the little silver Christ; his face was like a grey mask of disgust.

‘Still this religious nonsense,’ he said, in his quiet, cold voice, that had gentleness, too much queer gentleness, in it.

Anna remained silent. She did not move, although the jerking of the tape had left a red, sore streak on the brown skin of her neck.

James did not seem to be thinking about her, standing there with the harmless, pretty trinket in his hand, and the curious film of derision on his face; until he said:

‘This little toy is supposed to be the image of God, isn’t it?’

He spoke in so ordinary a tone that Anna was deceived.

‘Yes,’ she said.

A faint smile of satisfaction started under the mask of James’s face. His cold eyes had a reptilian look.

‘Then God, if there were any such person, would not like us to insult his image — wouldn’t allow it, in fact?’

He looked sideways at Anna, in sliding, insidious mockery.

She flushed, bewildered by the stealthy attack, not understanding it.

‘No,’ she said slowly, as if reluctant.

He laughed sharply, with a curious sound of gloom.

‘But, you see, there is no God, so we can insult the image with impunity.’

Anna watch, fascinated, as his thin lips pursed themselves together, and a little globe of spittle, shining like a ball of quicksilver in the sun, fell through the air on to the patient Christ.

There was a very blank silence. The spittle elongated itself and ran down slowly over the little figure, tarnishing the sun-dazzle of the silver, down towards the flat, smooth palm beneath.

Anna was a little bit afraid. True, she had almost forgotten Miss Wilson’s religious teaching. But her child’s mind was impressed by the effrontery of the gesture, the desire to insult and wound the little Christ-figure. She half expected that the heavens would fall. But nothing happened. The sky arched up, translucent and serene, above the ragged tops of the mountains.

And suddenly, James threw the crucifix away. With a slight flick of his hand that was in itself an affront, he flicked the little cross up into the blue air. It cut through the blueness, a small glittering arc, and slipped down among the stalks of the coarse grass.

‘Religion is a drug, and to take drugs is degrading,’ he said. ‘You must learn to look life in the face. Throw away your cowardly drugs, and see the truth, the ugly, cruel, ungodly truth, as it really is.’

And he went away laughing, laughing at Anna, and left the crucifix lying there.

She did not pick it up. And the next day, when she came back to the place, it had gone. Perhaps Seguela or Paul had found it and taken it away. She did not ask them.

But all the same, her father was well disposed towards her. It was strange how Anna always felt that he wished her well. James cared for no one and for nothing. But just the one slender tie that bound him to Anna, this he could not break. There was a queer thread of subtle relationship between them, almost like a secret understanding. No, he couldn’t throw off the sense of obligation to Anna. But at the same time he cherished a sort of grudge against her; a grudge of profound, ironical pity that was in some way directed against himself. He almost wanted to destroy her, to put her out of the way, as one puts a small animal out of life. She was like an animal to him, a young, useless animal that nobody wanted and for which there was no place in the businesslike world. And the responsibility rested upon him. He saw only misery for her, and the frustrations which he himself had suffered. It was a reflection upon himself. He would have liked to put her out of the misery.

Anna was pleased when he began to teach her. Miss Wilson had taught her to write, and to read from an old book in a worn black binding — Reading Without Tears. And now James began to teach her Latin and Greek, the languages he was fond of and which seemed to suit his personality. The books in the house were nearly all classics. He was writing his own intimate diary in Greek; a fat, faded brown leather book, full of the strange, neat little symbols in James’s beautiful script.

He was not a good teacher. The slightest trace of slowness on the part of his pupil was unendurable to him. At the faintest sign of wandering attention he would break off the lesson. There were many days on which he would not teach at all, driving Anna away with sarcasm or silence. He hardly ever praised her; but his sarcastic scorn was easily and frequently aroused.

Anna was intelligent and very quick. She learnt quickly because she wanted to learn, because she wanted to do as her father did, to read what he read, to imitate him. She wanted to be like him, to win his difficult approval. But also she wanted the learning for its own sake, for some subtle satisfaction it bestowed upon her. Quite soon she was reading from the plain, brownish books that were arranged so neatly in the dark, bare room.

She spoke with equal facility English, French and the Catalan dialect used by the peasants; and she read everything she could find. Petronius and Apuleius besides the more conventional classic authors, French and English essayists and an occasional newspaper. There were no novels at Mascarat.

Everything she met with in her reading James would discuss with her — when he was in the mood — freely, as with an equal. Her mind developed rapidly. But some innate youthful dignity combined with her isolation to save her from the monkeyish sharpness, the horrible sharp knowingness of the precocious child. Only a seriousness was added to her manner, a rather unnatural gravity, like a secret weight. And her eyes had a sort of inward look, unwavering, as though a little veil hung there.

In the main, she was contented with her isolation. But occasionally a restlessness would come upon her, a longing for the presence of other children, a sort of subconscious craving for normality. Then she would set off by tracks and gulleys that she knew, to join the peasant boys and girls at a mountain farm two miles away.

Not that she liked being with them when she got there. They were uncouth and noisy and stupid, and she soon tired of their clumsy, quarrelsome games. But the restlessness seemed to drive her to them in spite of herself.

She was aware that her father disapproved of these visits, although he had not forbidden them; there were no absolute vetoes in Anna’s life. Still, his disapproval made itself felt, and troubled her.

One day James met her as she was returning, rather limp after the long climb, with a curious foiled look on her childish face. She could not understand the impulse, the restless ache, that drove her to those rough companions and sent her back again, still unsatisfied.

‘You have been to the farm?’ said James, in his still, dead voice.

Anna admitted it. She knew that he disapproved, but she was too tired to make excuses. Her small brown hands hung loose at her sides, the fingers curving inwards with an unconscious air of pathos and weariness.

Her father did not rebuke her.

‘Come with me,’ he said.

He moved in front of her like a shadow, but a shadow that has achieved a certain solidity, the sun gleaming on his smooth grey hair. There was a shadow-smoothness of movement in his limbs.

They came to an old shed, some distance from the house, where the goats were kept in winter. An orange tree grew at one side, bearing a few greenish oranges that no one ever troubled to pick. Hens were scratching in the dusty shade of the tree.

‘Stand over there,’ James said to her, pointing to the wooden door of the shed.

She went wonderingly, and stood there facing him, touching the rough, splintery boards with her hands, feeling the warmth of the wood that had been in the sun all day. The sun was low now, shining yellowish towards the sunset. The vines were tufted with new leaves that caught the slanting light and stood out burningly, row after row, fistfuls of small, green, vivid flames against the dusky earth. The mountains showed a haze of fresh greenery among the rocks.

Anna saw that her father had a revolver in his hand. His face against the light had gone dark and strange as he looked at her.

‘Keep very still,’ he said. ‘You will be all right as long as you keep still.’

Anna stood against the door of the shed, transfixed. She did not know what was going to happen.

‘Keep still,’ she heard him say again, in such quietude that it was almost a whisper, from a little way off.

Then, suddenly, the sharp crack of a shot.

She started violently as the sharp hiss rushed past her and she felt the wind of it on her face. Her heart leapt in terror. Unable to scream or move, she waited as if struck motionless with dread.

James Forrester was standing away from her, beyond the orange tree, Behind him, the frightened chickens were scuttling off in noisy, ungainly haste. On his face was a strange expression, a look of concentration that seemed to cover something else, something almost superhuman, a pure, quiet, inhuman attentiveness. She could not know it, but he was thinking: ‘If I should make a mistake now? If she should move? If I should shoot her dead? It would be an accident.’ With more than half his mind he was hoping for that accident. But not whole-heartedly. He was not quite sure of himself.

Again the sharp smack of a shot, not very loud. Little splinters of wood flew up and touched her hair. Anna was almost paralysed with terror. Yet some part of her was resigned and even proud. She didn’t mind what her father did to her; as long as it was his will she didn’t mind what happened, fundamentally. She had such faith in him.

Crack! went the revolver again, deliberately, like a dog barking.

James was standing quietly beyond the orange tree. Against the sun his body looked very dark, rising from the dark pool of shadow from the tree. She watched him lift his revolver, carefully, deliberately, before each shot snapped at her, sinking fangs of pure terror into her heart. She pressed her fingers tight against the palms of her hands, as she stood.

Finally there was silence. The hand holding the revolver was lowered, and it did not come up again. James, with his feet in the shadow, did not stir, but stood looking at Anna.

At length, however, he moved. With the revolver in his hand he came forward and touched her, moving her away from the door. She sighed, wondering if it was all over.

‘Look at your silhouette,’ he said, smiling at her very faintly.

She looked round, and saw on the wooden door of the shed an outline of little splintery holes, the outline of her body.

She stood in the sunset, facing the outline on the door, while her father walked away. The luxurious yellow light was flooding everywhere, the mountains had a rich, uncanny gilding. She was trembling. After a time she began to walk slowly to the house, half-stunned, hearing still the frightening, sharp smack of the bullets in her ears. She did not know if the shooting had been intended as a punishment.

As Anna outgrew the clothes which Miss Wilson had made for her, they had been replaced by boy’s garments from Paralba. Boy’s clothes were more durable than girl’s and easier to obtain: and Anna herself preferred them. She wore the short trousers, in summer the cotton shirt, in winter the heavy woollen sweater, of the peasant lads; her long brown legs, very thin and brown and strong, always bare, and on her feet the espadrilles, the coloured canvas sandals bound above the ankles with criss-crossing tapes, that all the peasants wore. Her hair, thick and brown and straight, at some times was cropped short to her head, at others fell almost to her shoulders like that of a mediæval page; according to the length of time that had passed since her last visit to Paralba and to the barber. Her skin had the warm, rich, yellow-creamy colouring of a naturally pale skin that has been evenly sun-tanned.

With her straight, strong, slender limbs she was really handsome. And her shapely face, framed by its smooth line of brown hair, was sometimes beautiful. But closed, with a curious adult hardness mocking the childish features. She was in the first soft flush of youth: yet there was no trace of softness in her face. It was reserved. Even in her eyes the small veils seemed to hang, like curtains drawn before the windows of a house, behind which the owner goes secretly about his private business.

This was Anna-Marie at twelve years old, when Lauretta, moved by some tardy recrudescence of conscience, or some accident of propinquity, came once more to Mascarat to visit her niece.

James went up into the mountains and left Anna to receive the visitor alone. He had no patience with Lauretta. Anna waited with some curiosity. She could hardly remember her aunt. But there was animosity in her mind as well. She rather resented the visit and its savour of patronage.

Six years seemed to have made Lauretta daintier and younger than ever. Up she came to the rough old house, fluttering along with fragile, butterfly-prettiness, dressed in flowery blue silk, and somewhat artificial in her sophisticated girlishness. She made Anna look amazingly straight and masculine and serious, and somehow a little absurd.

‘Is it possible that you are Anna?’ she cried in exaggerated, smiling astonishment, when she first saw her.

‘Yes,’ said Anna, with her air of quiet composure that was so unchildlike.

She shook hands gravely with her aunt, and stood as if waiting, her grey eyes steady and changeless. She was tall for her age and looked a year or two older.

‘But why are you dressed like that?’ Lauretta cried, plaintively, amazedly.

She was laughing and feigning horror, but the horror was not altogether feigned, and Anna knew it. She began to smile.

‘These are the only clothes I have,’ she answered.

Lauretta gave a shrill little cry as if something had hurt her.

‘My dear child! How too terrible! she exclaimed in exaggerated dismay, still laughing, but genuinely shocked.

She put her hands on Anna’s thin shoulders and held her rigid, looking at her, examining her with a slight, delicate, patronizing insolence.

‘She looks just like a peasant boy,’ she said to herself in real disapproval. But immediately she realized that it was not true; that comely, well-shaped face was most un-peasantlike; there was nothing of the yokel in the fineness of that slender body.

‘A Greek shepherd-boy is nearer the mark,’ she thought. ‘An Arcadian shepherd-lad.’ And for a moment her romanticism, her faculty of seeing everything in terms of romance, almost carried her away. Just for one moment she saw Anna as a romantic figure, caught a glimpse of something strange and rather charming about her. But then her practical worldliness came back and took the upper hand. Romance in the abstract was all very well; but in one’s own family, in one’s own sister’s child, something more conventional was to be desired. She became definitely the disapproving superior; the condescending but critical great-lady who finds the state of affairs prevailing among her inferiors very far from her liking. It was in Lauretta’s nature to be a sort of exacting Lady Bountiful.

Anna stood quietly, submitting to the critical, disapproving regard, with her slim brown hands that were even more delicate than Lauretta’s, hanging at her sides. She flushed slightly, resenting the criticism and the patronage. The quick blood rose under the clear, warm-cream skin, a bright light, like enmity, leapt into the grey-veiled eyes. The instinctive blood-recoil from an opposing — nature.

It was hot and airless in the house, so they went and sat at the edge of the chestnut-wood where there was a breeze blowing. Anna built a seat for Lauretta among the rocks, cushioning it with grass and the soft, greyish, fibrous moss from the stones. The sunshine, the wonderful, pure, rich mountain sunshine, like a flood of liquid gold, was pouring down upon the world. The wood was all in motion, restless and uneasy, the green leaves lifting and dipping and weaving in a watery way, so that an ocean of green wavelets seemed to have blown inland.

Lauretta sat on the rock in her flowery dress that was so unmistakably, elegantly expensive, and talked to her niece. She was trying very hard to be charming and winsome and sympathetic to the queer, uncommunicative child.

Anna was reserved and rather distant; she could not help being a little nervous with this sophisticated, elegant, unfamiliar woman, this visitor from another world. Nervous and perhaps a little envious as well. She was proud; she did not want to envy. But she could not shut herself off from the strange, other-world fascination of experienced, assertive perfection that Lauretta possessed: that and the hidden, implacable authority that lurked all the time behind her winning, smiling manner. She made Anna feel clumsy and constrained; and Anna was quite aware that in spite of all her charming kindliness she intended it to be so. Lauretta was very consciously the superior, putting Anna in her humble place with a cunning technique of apparent friendliness.

‘She despises me,’ thought Anna, ‘because I’m not beautifully dressed and because I don’t live in the same way as she does.’

She felt hurt and resentful. At one moment she envied Lauretta; the next she disliked her.

She became silent. The occasional words fell with difficulty from her lips. Her bright, steady, steel-cold eyes never altered. She maintained a sort of steely blankness towards Lauretta, the inevitable enemy.

It made Lauretta angry. She was definitely repelled, this time, by her niece. The tall, quiet, boyish, unchildlike little female with her cold, impersonal grey eyes was really repulsive to her. She could not bear the temperate, almost inhuman steadiness of those grey-blue eyes. And she couldn’t bear the self-contained reserve of the strange girl, resisting her own charming advances. She went away in anger.

Anna’s mind was troubled by the visit. Was she missing something? she asked herself. Wasn’t there, perhaps, something admirable and amusing about the life of the world, the life from which she was completely cut off? And wasn’t something lacking in herself?

James Forrester returned at twilight when the small wild lupins in the grass glimmered white and ghostly like miniature turrets of phosphorescence.

‘A pleasant afternoon?’ he said to his daughter, smiling.

And for a moment on both faces, the grey, grim, haughty face of the man, and the brooding, pale-dark face of the child, the same smile rested, the secret, inward smile of understanding which came from the blood, glamorous.

‘I don’t think my aunt liked me very much,’ said Anna, smiling upwards, a bit cunning in the dusk. ‘She tried to make me feel ashamed of myself.’

‘And did she succeed?’ he asked.

‘No!’ Anna said loyally, and her eyes flashed.

But the father knew that she did not speak the truth.

Anna could not have told when it began; when first she was aware that something new and rather sinister had crept into her relations with her father: a new element. The element of fear. Perhaps it had started on the day of the shooting, when she had stood with her back to the goat-shed in the voluptuous yellow glare of the sunset. Or perhaps it had been born long before, with its thin roots like black worms twisted into the far distant past. But somehow fear had risen. And now its ugly, flat, dangerous head was always rearing up at her out of the bland innocuousness of everyday, as the venomous little vipers would suddenly poke up, hissing, from the sun-warmed rocks.

It was lonely at Mascarat, and the wind came swooping down from the mountains, making wild, maritime noises in the chestnut-forest, shuddering and whining through the draughty old house. Anna had never realized till now the isolation, the complete, black isolation that shut her up alone with her father, absolutely, like the banging of a trap-door. Particularly at night.

By nine o’clock Seguela and Paul would have vanished into their black hole. When there was no wind the house was silent, curiously, stonily silent, as if dead. And Anna, lying on her bed in the dark, would be acutely conscious of her father who sat in the other room in the meagre, dusky light of the lamp, reading, reading; or filling the pages of his diary with the small, beautiful Greek letters that he formed so perfectly. Till somehow his stooping form would become a nightmare to her, a terrifying menace of the night, so that she could hardly bear to feel herself shut up with him, alone in the absolute silence of the dark house.

Gradually, this obscure terror, this intangible, indescribable nightmare fear, began to make itself felt by day also. Anna became nervous in her father’s presence. She developed a vague, increasing dread of him. She would not acknowledge it; she fought with a kind of shame against this insidious, black, sliding intrusion. But it persisted. And somehow, the uneasiness of the child seemed to communicate itself to the man also. His attitude towards Anna became subtly modified. The old understanding between them, the blood-sympathy, was lost; he withdrew himself from her. And at the same time, he watched her, secretly it seemed, as one might spy upon an enemy; or a victim.

He was no longer harsh with her or scornfully sarcastic as before. He was always quiet and restrained, and gentle, too strangely gentle, in his manner. But he was so preoccupied; he seemed to forget Anna more and more, and to become always stranger and more absorbed in his own thoughts. And sometimes he sat staring at her in a way that made her afraid. She was afraid of his secret thoughts with which she felt that she was in some way connected.

Anna was fond of bathing in the stream where the water had been dammed back with stones to make a basin about twelve feet across. There was room to swim a few strokes, and the water was vividly clear. It was pleasant when the weather was hot to splash about in the water that came down, pure, pure melted snow from the mountains, and then to lie in the biting glare of the sun on the dry grass. Like a young pagan creature from some long-lost era before the world became vulnerable in the consciousness of sex, Anna lay on the warm grass in the sun. Her slim, hard, brown-skinned body looked small and childish in the blazing light, very pure and impersonal, with a certain primitive unearthliness of virginity. As the first dwellers on the earth might have looked in the bright, pristine freshness of creation.

Her father came to watch her. He had developed a habit, lately, of coming down to the stream while she was bathing. There he would sit under the cherry tree, isolated in a black ring of shadow, while all the world swam unsubstantially in a great flood of light. He did not speak to her, but his eyes, his bright grey eyes, would gleam out of the shadow, watching her with a piercing grey attention, and his shadowed, cold, distinguished face would wear a secret, sly, absorbed expression, very peculiar. It made Anna uncomfortable. She was embarrassed without knowing why, and stayed longer in the water than she would otherwise have done. But growing chilled, she had to climb out over the wet, slippery rocks to sit down in the sun.

But always some distance away from her father, not close to him, near the cherry tree, as would have been natural. Till one day he came to where she was sitting like a young brown nymph with her arms clasped round her knees, and touched her, just stealthily touched her wet shoulder. Anna would have liked to jump away from the stealthy touch; but she was ashamed to do that. So she sat still, very tense and uncomfortable, while James Forrester’s hand moved down her arm with the strangest, softest, most disturbing touch imaginable. Then raised itself and touched, just lightly touched with bent fingers the cool curve of her neck where tiny runnels of water were still creeping from her wet hair. This was too much for Anna; this sinister, slight touch on the sensitive skin of her neck was more than she could endure. She sprang up quickly and ran away to hide herself in the woods. She did not know what she was hiding from. But after that she no longer wanted to bathe in the bright pool.

She avoided her father as much as possible these days. The meals that they had together in the big, dark, barren room were a trial to her. She began to dislike the room, so rough and empty and severely neat, with the curtains that Miss Wilson had sewed, years before, still hanging, limp and faded, at the high windows. Then the food: the endless, monotonous, hot, greasy stews and bits of boiled meat, and old Seguela flopping back and forward from the kitchen in meaningless haste, like some stupid, clumsy bird.

And at the other end of the table sat James, looking like a dead statesman, with his grey face blank and dead, and his thoughts very far away.

He drank a good deal at times. But the alcohol did not seem to affect him. His stony expression never changed. But sometimes a strange, flashing glance from his cold eyes would rest upon Anna, full of some burning fierceness that was like hatred, and he would force her to drink with him, force her to swallow the little glassful of fiery spirit at a single gulp.

‘I ought to shoot you, really,’ he said to her once, in a dead voice. ‘Conscientiously, it would be the best thing for me to do.’

She saw from the grave concentration of his face that his conscience did actually require him to kill her. And this puzzled her because she could not understand why her death should be a conscientious necessity. The thought of being shot did not seem to cause her any concern.

‘Why? Why ought you to shoot me?’ she asked, looking at him with earnest, faithful, unfaltering eyes, very anxious to understand.

But instead of answering her question, he stared at her for a long time, tracing with his thin fingers an imaginary circle upon the table. Then suddenly he was still, and on his face there came a fanatical, fixed look, like a possession.

‘There is only one thing in life of any importance, and that is complete honesty,’ he said. ‘Honesty with oneself. The truth. Complete, stark, final honesty.’

Anna wondered if he would kill her. And once more she realized that she didn’t mind what happened to her as long as he willed it; she even didn’t mind dying if that was what he wanted. In spite of everything.

The weather grew hot and thundery. Great masses of cloud banked themselves behind the mountains. The air ran hot with electricity. There was no breath of wind. Anna could not bear the threatening quiet, the threat of electric devilment in the stillness. She went down to the chestnut-forest to search for a little breeze.

But there was none. Only, after a time, came old Seguela running, flapping grotesquely down the stony path, with the staring face of some dark, dishevelled prophetess of doom, calling harsh, brutal words like the cries of a distracted bird.

James Forrester was dead. He had burned his private papers, reduced the closely-covered pages of beautiful Greek letters to a handful of ash. Then he had shot himself. His body looked handsome and powerful, lying incongruously on the bare floor. But he was quite dead. No more important than the ashes on the hearth. He had carried honesty to its logical conclusion.