Let Me Alone

CHAPTER 3

WHEN Lauretta heard of James Forrester’s death she made one of her generous gestures.

‘Of course, we must be responsible for Anna-Marie,’ she said to Heyward Bland.

Lauretta was capable of sudden impulses of rather spectacular generosity; it was part of her Lady Bountiful attitude towards life. But on this occasion there was real virtue in the decision, for the unfavourable impression which Anna had made upon her was still fairly fresh in her mind, and, moreover, she was very pre-occupied. She had other fish to fry just then. For the war was starting, and Lauretta, carried on the crest of a wave of hysterio-mystical-patriotic excitement, was feverishly converting her house into an amateur nursing home. It was really laudable that she should find time at such a moment to consider an insignificant and unprepossessing waif hidden away in the mountains half across Europe.

The difficulty was to know what to do with her. Obviously, an officers’ convalescent home in war time was no place for a girl-child of thirteen.

‘She would only be in the way here,’ thought Lauretta, who, besides, was very averse to the actual presence of her disconcerting niece. Her generosity did not extend to having Anna to live in the house with her — not just then, at any rate.

Boarding-school seemed to be the only solution. And if at first Lauretta felt any qualms at plunging this child, so unprepared and so unusual, into the rigidly-disciplined scholastic world which makes no allowance for individual peculiarities, she soon stifled them with the vague and comfortable reflection that it would be all for the best. Heyward Bland, conspicuous neither for his understanding nor his humanity, lent his moral support.

‘Let her mix with other children of her own age, that’s the thing,’ snapped the Colonel in his best military manner, rather vindictive. ‘Get the corners rubbed off her.’

He had heard a good deal about Anna’s angularities.

So Anna was sent to a boarding-school in Lausanne. Switzerland was safely neutral and safely remote. Lauretta felt that she had arranged things very well for the moment. Later on — delightfully non-committal term! — she could make other arrangements.

For Anna the world seemed suddenly to have become a vague and unconvincing place, minatory and yet unreal, like a species of prolonged, unacute nightmare. Her father’s death affected her deeply, but not in any conventional way. She did not consciously grieve for him, or even particularly regret him. Her chief feeling was one almost of resentment against him. Why had he not told her what he was going to do? Why had he shut her out of his confidence? She felt hurt and affronted.

And at the same time her life was violently torn up by the roots. She was dragged like a seedling from the earth where the young, sensitive tendrils of her life had taken root, and flung down harshly in a strange place which seemed barren and uncongenial. She was unhappy at school. How should it not be so? All the memories, the influences of the preceding years protested against this abrupt immersion in an unfriendly element, this caging and chaining of rules and repressions.

She felt herself alone, lost like a stranger in some fantastic country whose language and mode of life were alike incomprehensible, surrounded by enemies in an atmosphere of suspicion and perpetually lurking, unimaginable dangers.

She felt that the whole world was against her. An immense gulf separated her from her laughing, chattering companions. She was cut off from them as completely and irrevocably as from the strange, pale mistresses who moved, ghost-like, in a chilly aura of authority. Anna was alone; she stood among the crowd in a small black circle of isolation: she was different.

And now into her life there came creeping an intangible depression, a spiritual malaise, a sort of day-time nightmare, very vague and unacknowledged, but threatening at any moment to overwhelm her. She resisted it with stoicism, with the unchildlike hardness that was in her character; but still it left its mark. Something frank and free and gracious in her was lost for ever. Some inner flame that might have burned up strong and vivid as the sunshine, was damped back to a weak flickering gleam. Her independence, the good, firm independence of her youth, began to waver. A sullen look came often to her face.

She did not know what had happened to her. She only knew, obscurely, as children know these things, that outside forces, destructive and uncontrollable, had driven her life out of its proper course: that things had gone wrong with her. And she could only submit. She submitted with the profound, stoical resignation of the very young who must submit to no matter what torment or injustice; because they are in the power of others, because the forces ranged against them are too strong. But her daily life was like an uneasy dream, threatening from moment to moment to become a nightmare in good earnest; at once stupid and dangerous, meaningless and menacing. She was lonely and she was afraid.

In England, where the convalescent home, now a long time in full-swing, was losing some of its novelty, Lauretta conscientiously read through the reports which the headmistress in Lausanne made out for her benefit. They were not very satisfactory. Anna, it appeared, was difficult and inclined to resent authority. She was not a good ‘mixer.’ All the complaints came from the disciplinary side; she was perfectly satisfactory as far as scholarship went.

Lauretta sighed as she read these reports.

‘I’m afraid the child is taking after her father,’ she said. She could not make a more derogatory criticism.

And then, as such things happen, by the purest accident, Anna’s fate was altered.

Lauretta, spending a day in London, encountered an old friend, a certain Rachel Fielding, whom she had not seen for some time. The two women lunched together, and in the course of conversation Miss Fielding mentioned that she had recently started a school of her own on somewhat original lines.

Anna was spoken of, and the trials and difficulties of her education. The ladies of Lausanne, it seemed, were not being very successful. Would Rachel take her? Rachel, intrigued by the fragments of the story which Lauretta poured out over the coffee, her imagination caught by the curious picture of Anna’s lonely, unpropitious childhood, quite emphatically would. So it was arranged.

Rachel Fielding was a big woman of about forty, not at all beautiful, but with a certain vividness. It was a gift she had of intense, absorbing interest in whatever concerned her, a vital, eager enthusiasm glowing in her short-sighted hazel eyes. It made her seem youthful and attractive. Even her walk was eager. She walked quickly, with her head thrust forward a little, and her big, bright, hazel eyes gleaming and questing; and she kept moving her head very slightly from side to side as she walked, as if questing for something.

When Anna-Marie first saw her, she thought that she was like a friendly, Homeric goddess. That was another gift of Rachel’s, of looking like a minor deity in some benevolent pantheon. She dressed richly and with good taste in an unconventional, highly-coloured way, very far from smartness.

An amiable, interested goddess, with a quick intelligence and a vivid intuition, she came forward and took Anna by the hand.

‘You’re going to be happy here; very happy,’ she said, in her clear, quick, musical voice that beat an eager rhythm of its own; rather assertive. There was a strong personal will lurking behind the deistic benevolence.

From the first moment when her bright, questing eyes had leapt upon Anna as upon a quarry, Rachel’s abounding interest had centred in her. She saw at once that here was a worthy object upon which to pour out the ever-brimming vials of her enthusiastic spirit. An object of unusual interest, this tall, grave, slender girl who stood unsmiling in her curious aura of isolation. She saw that Anna was not only aware of her isolation, but proud of it in a slightly defiant way. And she admired her for her dauntlessness.

But at the same time, her large, short-sighted eyes that were so discerning, had taken note of something else in the face of the silent girl. A hard look that covered up a certain blankness; a bitter, hopeless blankness underneath, a blankness of the spirit.

‘There’s something wrong here,’ she said to herself. And indeed it would have been surprising had there not been. Rachel thought of Lauretta, whom she knew fairly well, and looking at the strange, aloof young figure before her, she sighed a little despairingly.

‘I must do what I can for her,’ she thought.

It did not seem easy to do anything for Anna. She was so unapproachable, so shyly arrogant. To all tentative advances she replied so coldly, with a frigid, quiet courtesy that seemed perfectly impassable. And all the time she carried about with her an aura of isolation that was like something tangible, like a black cloak that covered her entirely and which she never took off.

But Rachel, biding her time, ceaselessly watching from a distance, observed two things: first that Anna had an unusual intelligence, and second that she was afraid. For all her pride and independence and her hard-closed mouth, there was fear in her life, a certain wanness in her face, the result of fear and bitterness and helpless bewilderment. Rachel yearned to destroy that look; to restore the beauty of confidence that should have been there by right. But she had to bide her time.

Her opportunity came finally on a bleak February day when the sky was grey and ugly and a scattering of snow powdered the empty flower-beds. Anna was recovering from a mild attack of influenza, and Rachel sent her into her private room to keep warm.

The room was fairly large, and not in the least suggestive of school or school-life. It was the room of a woman of the world, a woman of taste who was not bound by the ordinary shibboleths. Rachel had arranged the room as she wanted it, for her own self. And the result was in keeping with her personality. It was richly coloured and not too tidy: pleasantly warm, and smelling faintly of cigarettes and flowers. There were hyacinths growing in a bowl on the table, and on the floor, standing about three feet high, a scarlet azalea in full blow, a solid mass of blossom.

Anna lay on the sofa, reading and looking about her. Outside the day was cold and dreary beyond words. But she did not look out of doors. Instead, she looked at the room, at the cheerfully blazing fire, and the pure, vivid scarlet of the azalea. She saw the shelves of inviting books, the scattered cushions, the soft-toned Persian rugs, the handsome tapestry hung behind the door, the huge twisted candlestick of white and vermilion lacquer, standing on the floor and holding a candle as thick as a man’s arm, the delicate, sophisticated grace of the Queen Anne bureau, the barbaric-looking gold embroidery flung over a chair, the haphazard sprinkling of semi-precious objects, bowls and ornaments and carvings of carnelian and agate and onyx and ivory and jade.

She was surprised and fascinated. Some repressed craving for beauty in her began to stir towards life.

‘What a nice room this is,’ she said to Rachel Fielding.

Rachel only smiled at her. Throughout the morning, she kept coming in and out, hurrying about with her quick, eager walk, leaning slightly forward as if in an excess of eagerness, a very busy goddess indeed.

But after lunch she came in and shut the door after her with a definite sneck which seemed to shut out all the rest of the world.

‘There! I think I deserve a little rest now,’ she said, and sat down quite close to Anna.

The room glowed like a jewel in the dull breast of the day. They seemed shut away there, together, in absolute seclusion in the bright, warm room. Anna felt a little uneasy; rather alarmed at being shut up alone with the bright-eyed, assertive woman in her dark velvet dress — the goddess woman. She sat up on the sofa, very straight against the cushions, with her fine, slender brown hands motionless in her lap, and her head well up; on the defensive.

Rachel took a cigarette from a cedarwood box, and lit it.

‘Does it shock you to watch me smoke?’ she said. ‘I’m afraid I’m a very unprofessional sort of school-marm really.’

She blew out a fine stream of smoke, and smiled very winningly at Anna, as at an equal.

‘I like it,’ said Anna quietly.

She sat still, watching the thin, bluish feather of smoke curl upwards from the cigarette. It was blue as it left the cigarette, and greyish when Rachel blew it in a soft, cloudy stream from her red mouth. There was rather a long silence.

‘Well, how do you like us all?’ Rachel asked suddenly, darting her quick, hazel eyes at Anna above the smoke. But she saw that Anna was confused, and immediately altered the form of the question.

‘How do you think you will like being at Haddenham?’

Anna was relieved. She could answer that, all right.

‘I like it much better than Lausanne. Oh, very much better,’ she answered, and her mouth gave a little smile.

But she couldn’t help wondering, rather, what it was all about; what Rachel was getting at. A sort of misgiving lurked in her grey-blue eyes. And she sat up very straight and still, such a suspicious, haughty soul in her thin girl’s body.

‘What is it? What is the matter with you?’ Rachel asked her, with her soft, Madonna-fondness.

She threw away her cigarette and knelt beside the sofa, taking Anna’s hand caressively, covering that small, reluctant hand completely with her own large, soft, white hand. It was evident that she really loved Anna at that moment, was carried away in a muse of pitying Madonna-love. She really wanted to help her.

‘Why are you so suspicious? Why do you want to drive me away? What is it that frightens you?’

The questions dropped from her soft mouth with a gentle, crooning sound. Anna looked in wonder at the big, short-sighted hazel eyes peering close into her own. Hitherto the world had been united to repress her, to insult and humiliate her, to make her feel ashamed and unimportant. The world had made her feel an outcast, a dweller in outer darkness. She had known what it was to sink lower and lower, till there seemed no place for her in all the universe.

Now the opposite was happening. This vivid, splendid woman was trying to raise her up, to save her from the bitterness of the insults she had received, to restore to her the pride and beauty of herself. And suddenly it seemed as though a light had fallen upon her: as sometimes in the mountains when all the sky was threatening and gloomy with dark cloud, a slender ray of sunshine would come through, unexpectedly, brightening the sad earth.

‘I thought everybody must despise me; because I’m different, somehow. I don’t know why —’ Her voice trailed off uncertainly.

Rachel looked into her eyes for a moment, and her face seemed to go softer, warmer, melting away in a fusion of pitying love. She took Anna in her warm arms.

‘Poor little foreigner. Poor little lost girl,’ she murmured, very low, as if speaking to herself.

Anna relaxed against her, feeling that something new and wonderful had happened, changing the whole aspect of the world. It was the first time since the day of poor Miss Wilson, almost the first time in her life, that anyone had embraced her with real affection. Her heart grew lighter. But at the back of her mind, a faint, ironical self-consciousness would not be banished entirely, so that she was glad when Rachel released her and sat back again on her chair, a little way off.

But what a dominant will the full, queenly woman had! She had an almost uncanny power to make Anna feel confident and strong. The smooth head of the girl poised more surely. She was coming back to herself.

Then Rachel began to talk, not emotionally now, but very kindly, with a subtle flattery of intimacy, and a certain matter-of-factness that banished all alarms.

‘Things have gone wrong with you,’ she said. ‘You’ve lost yourself a bit. But it doesn’t really matter very much. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong, nothing that we shan’t be able to put right. The great thing is not to be afraid.’

Anna sat still, listening, and at the sound of those confident and consoling words, the nightmare, the threatening nightmare that had crept into her daily life, began to slink away. She looked out of the window, and saw the trees, rank upon bare rank, naked and motionless against the naked winter sky. Only by some freak of the wind, a single tree, a young chestnut, a tall sapling on which the dark buds were already distinguishable, blew strongly to and fro with a slow, even motion, like the rolling of a boat at sea. And ever after, through her stormy life, the recollection of those comforting words must be associated with the stormily swaying tree, swinging and rolling against the motionless background of the other trees which the wind left untouched.

‘You must never be afraid of anything,’ said Rachel Fielding. ‘Always remember that with your intelligence you can do anything you like. There is no such thing as an insurmountable obstacle. The world is there for you to do as you like with — not the other way round.’

‘But why is it that I feel so much alone? So cut off from everybody? As though I can never come near?’ Anna asked, after a pause.

The eager, penetrating, sensitive eyes of the other woman looked at her, looked into her soul, it seemed, and smiled their reassurance.

‘You’ve got to put up with that, Anna-Marie. You’ve got to get used to it, because its inevitable. You might even be a little proud of it, perhaps. All brilliant minds, all exceptional minds, have to stand alone. You see, they’ve outgrown the herd-mind, the ordinary intelligence of their fellows. And you are brilliant, my dear, though you don’t realize it yet. You’ve got to pay the penalty of brilliance; and after all it has its compensations too.’

She stopped and looked out into the distance, absently, as if seeking something far away. Then the smile came, the vivid, loving, protective, goddess-smile on her face, the understanding glisten in her hazel eyes, as she said:

‘And there’s usually someone who understands, more or less. You won’t be absolutely isolated like a stylite on your little pillar of superiority. Now, for instance, while you’re here, you can always talk to me.’

So the friendship was started between them. The friendship between the clever, intense woman, with her feminine strength and softness, and her rather beautiful, lavish maturity, her goddess-ship: and Anna, the pale, slight girl with her quiet gravity, and her masculine quality of detachment, her wild, uncaptured, virgin aloofness, that turned so easily to hardness and frigidity.

Anna was a little shy at first, a little doubtful. Her innate scepticism made her stand off from the proffered affection. She was somewhat suspicious, seeing the big white arms of Rachel wide open to receive her: as though it were some sort of a trap. But she had suffered fear and humiliation at the hands of the world; the world had brought the creeping nightmare into her life. And Rachel had saved her, Rachel had driven away the nightmare. So she must love Rachel in the end. She had to feel an almost passionate gratitude to this woman who had restored her pride in herself.

It was in the summer that the friendship ripened. In spring-time the flat country that through the long winter had seemed bleak and dreary under the perpetual beating of the rain or the sharp-edged dryness of the frost, became soothed and beautiful. The gentle English spring laid a softening veil over the land. The hedges burned with a long white fire of blackthorn, the fruit trees flowered in a light-hearted way, like girls standing in full-skirted dresses, pink and white, multitudes of small, gay flowers twinkled in the grass, the sky was a pale, pale blue. And over everything the green was stealing, the very delicate, tender first green, like the softest, downy feathers on a bird’s breast.

Anna walked often with Rachel through the bright fields.

‘I’d no idea it could be so beautiful here, so soft and flowery,’ she said.

She had thought of Haddenham as a harsh, cold place, cheerless and dank. Now suddenly, a softness had come over it, a benevolence. And Anna too felt softened and comforted.

Rachel was now the centre of her life. Other people, the other girls who thronged the surface of her everyday life, were dim and vague, phantom-like, inconspicuous, almost invisible. She took no heed of them. Rachel was the only reality. The big, magnificent woman filled her life. They were constantly together. Whenever Rachel could get away from her busy-ness, from the countless preoccupations and duties of her position, she came back to Anna. It was almost as if she got something from her; as if she derived some secret strength or encouragement from the thin, proud, pale-skinned girl.

And Anna was happy. For the first time in her life she could talk openly of the things which interested her and were important to her. She had a great need of speech, of putting her thoughts into words; otherwise her thoughts seemed to escape her, flying about her brain in a wild confusion. It needed the power of words to put them in their places. And Rachel was full of understanding, using her sensitiveness to fan the thoughts of Anna towards coherency.

She gave Anna self-confidence. This was what she wanted to do. For the moment this was her métier, this exaltation of the strange little creature who had come so near to losing the sense of her own value. As a goddess, she wanted to save Anna, to have her as a protégée: and as a woman she wanted her for a friend. With her mysterious feminine will she enveloped Anna most completely. She had the most curious power in the world of making Anna feel confident and strong. She exalted her.

She convinced her of her own intelligence, and of the fact that as an intelligent being she was important. This gave Anna a satisfaction, a feeling of anchorage. She felt that never again could the nightmare come creeping back into her life. She was safe.

But the relations between the two of them were peculiar. On Anna’s side there was always a holding back, almost a trace of resentment. She distrusted that glorification of herself even while it gratified her. She felt that in some way she was being made soft. She was not standing on her own feet. It was the goddess-ship of Rachel that was exalting her for her own ends, almost making her into the victim. She rather resented the goddess aspect of Rachel: and her actual physical aspect, so lavish in its rich maturity, like a gorgeous, soft fruit. Rachel would touch her, would take her arm, or her small, cool hand, or stroke caressively her sleek, well-shaped head. And immediately she would be made uncomfortably conscious of the full, feminine body under the bright clothes, the soft, white-fleshed limbs, the rich female luxuriousness. It was as if some part of her were repelled, disgusted even, by the proximity of so much ripe, luscious femininity. She didn’t want to be touched.

She sat on the grass with her back to a low brick wall, looking up at the sprays of lilac that hung down almost touching her. Some of the florets were already wide open, like tiny purple butterflies resting there, but others were close-furled in their round buds. The open flowers looked curiously voluptuous with their small, sweet-scented, wide-spread purple petals beside the hard, dark, virginal buds.

‘I am like one of the buds, and Rachel is like a wide-open flower,’ thought Anna; and pulling off a floret, she sucked the sweet drop of honey through the tiny, delicate, silken tube.

‘Are you happy?’ asked Rachel, in her eager, musical voice.

She bent over Anna, looking into her with quick, bright hazel eyes, yearning over her. And her large, well-kept hand rested caressively, possessively, on Anna’s thin shoulder.

Anna felt a little repugnance for her; for the big, clever woman who had altered her life, the goddess-woman who had given her back the pride and beauty of herself to demand them again as a kind of sacrifice. She was determined that she would not allow herself to be made, even so very indefinably, into a victim. She would stand on her own feet. But it was not so easy. She wanted Rachel’s support; and Rachel wanted something from her. They seemed bound together.