Anne Severn and the Fieldings. Sinclair May
"I think I expected something smaller and rather less grown-up."
"I'm not grown-up. I'm the same as ever."
"Well, you're not little Anne any more."
She squeezed his arm, hanging on it in her old loving way. "No. But I'm still me. And I'd have known you anywhere."
"What? With my grey hair?"
"I love your grey hair."
It made him handsome, more lovable than ever. Anne loved it as she loved his face, tanned and tightened by sun and wind, the long hard-drawn lines, the thin, kind mouth, the clear, greenish brown eyes, quick and kind.
Colin stood by the dogcart in the station yard. Colin was changed. He was no longer the excited child who came rushing to you. He stood for you to come to him, serious and shy. His child's face was passing from prettiness to a fine, sombre beauty.
"What's happened to Col-Col? He's all different?"
"Is he? Wait," Uncle Robert said, "till you've seen Jerrold."
"Oh, is Jerrold going to be different, too?"
"I'm afraid he'll look a little different."
"I don't care," she said. "He'll be him."
She wanted to come back and find everybody and everything the same, looking exactly as she had left them. What they had once been for her they must always be.
They drove slowly up Wyck Hill. The tree-tops meeting overhead made a green tunnel. You came out suddenly into the sunlight at the top. The road was the same. They passed by the Unicorn Inn and the Post Office, through the narrow crooked street with the church and churchyard at the turn; and so into the grey and yellow Market Square with the two tall elms standing up on the little green in the corner. They passed the Queen's Head; the powder-blue sign hung out from the yellow front the same as ever. Next came the fountain and the four forked roads by the signpost, then the dip of the hill to the left and the grey ball-topped stone pillars of the Park gates on the right.
At the end of the beech avenue she saw the house; the three big, sharp-pointed gables of the front: the little gable underneath in the middle, jutting out over the porch. That was the bay of Aunt Adeline's bed-room. She used to lean out of the lattice windows and call to the children in the garden. The house was the same.
So were the green terraces and the wide, flat-topped yew walls, and the great peacocks carved out of the yew; and beyond them the lawn, flowing out under banks of clipped yew down to the goldfish pond. They were things that she had seen again and again in sleep and memory; things that had made her heart ache thinking of them; that took her back and back, and wouldn't let her be. She had only to leave off what she was doing and she saw them; they swam before her eyes, covering the Swiss mountains, the flat Essex fields, the high white London houses. They waited for her at the waking end of dreams.
She had found them again.
A gap in the green walls led into the flower garden, and there, down the path between tall rows of phlox and larkspurs and anchusa, of blue heaped on blue, Aunt Adeline came holding up a tall bunch of flowers, blue on her white gown, blue on her own milk-white and blue. She came, looking like a beautiful girl; the same, the same; Anne had seen her in dreams, walking like that, tall among the tall flowers.
She never hurried to meet you; hurrying would have spoiled the beauty of her movement; she came slowly, absent-mindedly, stopping now and then to pluck yet another of the blue spires. Robert stood still in the path to watch her. She was smiling a long way off, intensely aware of him.
"Is that Anne?" she said.
"Yes, Auntie, really Anne."
"Well, you are a big girl, aren't you?"
She kissed her three times and smiled, looking away again over her flower-beds. That was the difference between Aunt Adeline and Uncle Robert. His eyes made you important; they held you all the time he talked to you; when he smiled, it was for you altogether and not for himself at all. Her eyes never looked at you long; her smile wandered, it was half for you and half for herself, for something she was thinking of that wasn't you.
"What have you done with your father?" she said.
"I was to tell you. Daddy's ever so sorry; but he can't come till to-morrow. A horrid man kept him on business."
"Oh?" A little crisping wave went over Aunt Adeline's face, a wave of vexation. Anne saw it.
"He is really sorry. You should have heard him damning and cursing."
They laughed. Adeline was appeased. She took her husband's arm and drew him to herself. Something warm and secret seemed to pass between them.
Anne said to herself: "That's how people look—" without finishing her thought.
Lest she should feel shut out he turned to her.
"Well, are you glad to be back again, Anne?" he said.
"Glad? I'm never glad to be anywhere else. I've been counting the weeks and the days and the minutes."
"The minutes?"
"Yes. In the train."
They had come up on to the flagged terrace. Anne looked round her.
"Where's Jerrold?" she said.
And they laughed again. "There's no doubt," said Uncle Robert, "about it being the same Anne."
ii
A day passed. John Severn had come. He was to stay with the Fieldings for the last weeks of his leave. He had followed Adeline from the hot terrace to the cool library. When she wanted the sun again he would follow her out.
Robert and Colin were down at the Manor Farm. Eliot was in the schoolroom, reading.
Jerrold and Anne sat together on the grass under the beech trees, alone.
They had got over the shock of the first encounter, when they met at arms' length, not kissing, but each remembering, shyly, that they used to kiss. If they had not got over the "difference," the change of Anne from a child to a big girl, of Jerrold from a big boy to a man's height and a man's voice, it was because, in some obscure way, that difference fascinated them. The great thing was that underneath it they were both, as Anne said, "the same."
"I don't know what I'd have done, Jerrold, if you hadn't been."
"You might have known I would be."
"I did know."
"I say, what a thundering lot of hair you've got. I like it."
"Do you like what Auntie Adeline calls my new nose?"
"Awfully."
She meditated. "Jerrold, do you remember Benjy?"
"Rather."
"Dear Benjy … Do you know, I can hardly believe I'm here. I never thought I should come again."
"But why shouldn't you?"
"I don't know. Only I think every time something'll happen to prevent me. I'm afraid of being ill or dying before I can get away. And they might send me anywhere any day. It's awful to be so uncertain."
"Don't think about it. You're here now."
"Oh Jerrold, supposing it was the last time—"
"It isn't the last time. Don't spoil it by thinking."
"You'd think if you were me."
"I say—you don't mean they're not decent to you?"
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