Let Me Alone E-Book

Anna Kavan

• Herausgeber: Peter Owen Publishers
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 452

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

The mother of 'Anna' in this novel dies in childbirth and she brought up by her father and a governess, in a remote Pyrenean village. When she is thirteen, her father shoots himself and she Is adopted by a rich, beautiful and ruthless aunt who stows her in a boarding school. She forms friendships at the school but her freedom is abruptly curtailed when the aunt forces her into a loveless marriage: she comes to detest her husband and bourgeois family but cannot break away and finds herself marooned with him in Burma, where the story climaxes.

Leseprobe

LET ME ALONE

The mother of ‘Anna’ in this novel dies in childbirth, and she is brought up by her father and a governess in a remote Pyrenean village. When she is thirteen her father shoots himself and she is adopted by a rich, beautiful and ruthless aunt who sends her to boarding school. She forms friendships at the school but her freedom is abruptly curtailed when the aunt forces her into a loveless marriage. She comes to detest her husband and his bourgeois family but cannot break away and finds herself marooned with him in Burma where the story climaxes.

An early work from Anna Kavan – published originally under the name Helen Ferguson – Let Me Alone strongly evokes life in Britain and its colonies from the early years of the century through the period following the First World War. More straightforward than her more famous later novels, Let Me Alone is nevertheless fascinating for its hint of the personal stresses that were to inform many of her uncompromising storylines.

ANNA KAVAN, née Helen Woods, was born in Cannes in 1901 and spent her childhood in Europe, the USA and Great Britain. Her life was haunted by her rich, glamorous mother, beside whom her father remains an indistinct figure. Twice married and divorced, she began writing while living with her first husband in Burma and was initially published under her married name of Helen Ferguson. Her early writing consisted of somewhat eccentric ‘Home Counties’ novels, but everything changed after her second marriage collapsed. In the wake of this, she suffered the first of many nervous breakdowns and was confined to a clinic in Switzerland. She emerged from her incarceration with a new name, Anna Kavan, the protagonist of her 1930 novel Let Me Alone, as well as an outwardly different persona and a new literary style. She suffered periodic bouts of mental illness and long-term drug addiction – she had become addicted to heroin in the 1920s and continued to use it throughout her life – and these facets of her life feature prominently in her work. She destroyed almost all of her personal correspondence and most of her diaries, therefore ensuring that she achieved her ambition to become ‘one of the world’s best-kept secrets’. She died in 1968 of heart failure, soon after the publication of her most celebrated work, the novel Ice.

PREFATORY NOTE

ANNA KAVAN found an apt title for this novel, first published in 1930 under the name of Helen Ferguson. Let Me Alone is an account, from childhood, of isolation in a woman and of her compulsive retreat from any association, especially marriage, that might impinge upon the strange, austere loneliness and solitude she both wanted and mortally dreaded: a schizophrenic condition. She marries – the wrong man inevitably – with predictably disastrous consequences.

This 1930 novel brings to mind today’s Women’s Liberation movement, with its demands for independence of mind and spirit for women. ‘She wanted to go through life alone, in her own independent, detached fashion,’ the heroine meditates, before marrying. ‘The idea of being bound up with another person in such a relationship as marriage was hateful to her.’ After the marriage, she is reading a Life of Luther when ‘… from the midst of the printed page, there suddenly sprang out at her these words: “Here I stand; I can no other,” a great enlightenment came to her, a sudden illumination. In a moment everything was made plain to her…. How easy and simple to face life from the single basis of her own undeniable individuality. She was what she was: herself. No need for compromise or apology or modification or defence.’

All very well if one is content with isolation and able to encrust oneself with a satisfactory crab’s shell. The heroine of Let Me Alone makes her efforts to be absorbed in other people. But the three men in her life fail her – her father, her husband and the hesitant, would-be lover, Findlay. She falters towards lesbianism; one of the best scenes in the novel describes her hopeless return to the erstwhile devoted girl, Sidney, and Sidney’s acutely perceptive rejection of her.

A Brontë influence seems to pervade the early part of this novel: the sombre father might have been imagined by Charlotte or Emily. Later, more than a hint of the D. H. Lawrence of Women in Love pervades its language, with obsessional repetitions of certain key words. In the finely written last part, the identity of the future Anna Kavan emerges clearly, especially in the hallucinatory power of the great rainstorm in Burma, coinciding with the final collapse of the ill-starred marriage.

The name Helen Ferguson, used for the earlier novels, was to be discarded, and the author began to use that of Anna Kavan (the married name of the protagonist of Let Me Alone) for the later books by which she is better known. As I have related in my Introduction to her posthumous collection of stories, Julia and the Bazooka (Peter Owen, 1970), she adopted the latter name by deed poll, following two retreats to mental hospitals, after which she changed not only her name and mode of living but also, somewhat remarkably, her personal appearance. Her vitality remained unimpaired; even her daily recourse to heroin – for some thirty years – as an escape from her conflicts, did not bring drastic physical damage until her last year or so. There had been two failed marriages. She lived until she was 67, and did not cease writing novels and short stories. She achieved the isolation and independence she wanted, but not an impervious shell.

RHYS DAVIES

CHAPTER 1

JAMES FORRESTER, the father of Anna-Marie, was a peculiar man. He belonged to the technical hierarchy of gentlemen. That is to say that he had received a lengthy and expensive education from which all utilitarian subjects had been carefully excluded; that he had been born into a class of people who spoke, ate, dressed and usually thought in the same prescribed manner, who were dominated by certain fixed ideas – chief among them being the conviction of their own intrinsic superiority – and who considered most activities, physical or intellectual, not only undesirable but disgusting.

But James was disquietingly untrue to type. He would not hunt with the pack: in fact, he would not hunt at all. He had ‘ideas.’

‘He’s picked them up at Cambridge,’ said his father, making excuses for his son’s damning departure from the gentlemanly intellectual norm. ‘He’ll grow out of them.’

Not that anyone knew what James’s ideas really were. He never spoke of them. Indeed, he had very little to say on any subject. He was a silent young man.

His father, who was proud of him, proud of his intellectual record at the university (though secretly a little disappointed that it was not a sporting one) tried to draw him out. But James would not be drawn. He was always perfectly polite to the old man, perfectly reserved and perfectly discouraging. His father began to lose heart in the face of his suave unapproachableness. Nevertheless, he tried perseveringly to interest his son in the estate, which was his own last absorbing passion. The young man courteously but firmly refused to be interested. When questioned and driven into an argumentative corner, he replied quietly that it struck him as slightly degrading that man – who after all was an independent thinking animal – should allow his whole life to be dominated by and devoted to his possessions.

His father then left him alone.

James was unsociable. He fled from the society of his father’s friends, whom he disliked, to the society of his inferiors, whom he disliked even more, and from whom in turn he fled to solitude. In spite of his habitual cold politeness, he was occasionally extremely rude to members of his own class, for whom he felt a curious blend of sympathy and contempt. He was essentially one of them; and he knew it. If he could not tolerate them, at least, most certainly, he could tolerate no one else; and if he despised them he despised himself also. He was at once an aristocrat and a revolutionary, the hater and the hated. An unfortunate combination.

People put up with his eccentricities remarkably well, partly on account of his prospective wealth and partly because of his appearance, which was rather distinguished. He was always the best-dressed person in the room.

When he was twenty-seven his father died, discouraged. Since he could do no more for him, he left his son a large fortune.

James’s first action was to sell the estate; an act that would have broken the old man’s heart. He then proceeded, with a certain methodical determination, to spend his father’s money. Eight years later he had practically succeeded, when he suddenly and incomprehensibly married a penniless girl of semi-Austrian parentage.

James Forester was now thirty-five years old and looked considerably older. He was tall and thin, with a cold, stern, grey face and smooth grey hair. He looked like a statesman. His manner was chilly, aloof, arrogant and repelling. He had no friends and he disliked everyone. He liked mountains, however; he was also fond of the sea and of the earth as a whole: ‘Where every prospect pleases, and every man is vile,’ as he sometimes mis-quoted.

Nevertheless, he was sufficiently attracted by Lise to marry her. It was almost a clandestine marriage. Lise’s Austrian mother did not approve of James. But she tolerated him because of his distinguished appearance and his reputed fortune, into which, being a lady of casual temperament, she did not trouble to inquire. In point of fact it was already practically non-existent.

The couple lived opulently enough upon credit until the birth of Anna-Marie some eighteen months later. Thereupon, Lise, conveniently, or perhaps inconveniently, died; and it became known that James was no longer a rich man.

He himself caused the news to be spread about Europe, where in the course of nine years’ extravagances he had achieved a considerable reputation. If anything, he exaggerated the rumours of his ruin. He was a moral extremist. If he could not be a Crœsus he would be a pauper. And he derived a certain ironic satisfaction from contemplating the complete dissipation of his father’s carefully nursed inheritance.

The family of Lise was indignant. They consoled themselves, however, with the thought that they had never approved of the marriage. And they prepared to receive the motherless infant.

But now the aggravating eccentricity of James’s character manifested itself. He refused to part with the child. To an impressive old lady of the impoverished Austrian nobility, and a very charming young one who was Lise’s sister, he courteously and determinedly announced his intention of keeping the baby himself. And finally they had to go away, beaten. Though anything more incongruous than the association of an infant in arms with this cold, severe, grey-faced man would be difficult to imagine.

Why did he want the child? Perhaps only from the perverse desire to annoy them all; perhaps from some dubious secret feeling of responsibility; perhaps from some motive still darker and more obscure. In any case, his mind was made up.

A Miss Wilson appeared; one of those inevitable middle-aged British spinsters who always seem to be at hand where a baby is concerned, ready and eager to devote to its care thankless years of unprofitable self-sacrifice. Miss Wilson was like all the rest, inconspicuous and unassertive, with timid, pale eyes in her sharp, pale face. She was terrified of James and devoted to Anna.

With the last remnant of his fortune James bought a small farm in the eastern Pyrenees. He was fond of mountains; and the district was rough, wild, unfrequented by tourists, and very far from anywhere where an old lady of the Austrian nobility would be likely to travel. The place was called Mascarat.

It was very different from any of his previous residences: a strong old Spanish-looking farm with rough wood floors and whitewashed walls, and the sloping wall of the mountain bordering the small domain. At the back of the house, beyond the vineyard, grew almond and cherry trees, and there was a bright ribbon of water in the stony ravine. In front were two more vineyards and a stretch of grass-land running down to the little chestnut-forest beyond the stream. At the far end of the valley the mountains stood up, blue and rather unreal, fold after fold, seventeen separate slopes rising one behind another, to the vast, dim, improbable peaks of snow that floated like strange white scarves upon the distant blueness.

Here was Anna’s home, her earliest consciousness, this rough, dark, lonely house; this great wild background of mountains pale or brilliant in the sun, or blackly threatening in the stormy weather, the noisy water and the yellow vineyards, the theatrical splendour of the shadow-pale, far-off snows.

And this was the home of James Forrester, the man whose wealth and extravagance had almost become a legend, the man who had lived like a prince in every European capital, who had bought and tired of half-a-dozen great houses.

Sometimes, as he stood on the rocky, bush-grown slope, and looked at Mascarat lying like an insignificant patch on the huge tapestry of mountain and forest, he smiled to himself, a thin, inward smile of extreme ironic bitterness mingled with a semi-masochistic satisfaction. He had tried the life of the world, the life of luxury and wealth, and he had had no pleasure in it. Now he was trying the hermit’s life to see what that had to offer. But sometimes his face wore an expression that was neither good nor pleasant to see.

The small Anna lived entirely under the ægis of the admirable Miss Wilson. For several years her life, waking, sleeping, playing, in the big, bare, dark rooms, or out in the wide stretches of brilliant sun, was governed and bounded by the pale, watchful, anxious face and the quick, nervous voice of Miss Wilson. Outside, on the fringes of her existence moved – huge, spectral and unreal in their comings and goings – three other figures: her father, tall, silent and grey-faced, rather frightening in his stern remoteness; then Seguela, the old peasant-woman, black, untidy, going about with flopping, ungainly speed, like an old crow; and her son Paul, a queer, staring, animal sort of fellow who did not usually appear indoors until the evening. But between Anna and these people, the small, flat, colourless figure of Miss Wilson was always swooping forward, swooping down with a strange incongruous fire of maternal, protective anxiety in her pale eyes, her humble spirit roused to pugnacity on behalf of her charge.

Against all her instincts, Miss Wilson had become a warrior in those days. She sometimes wondered fearfully at the change which had overtaken her gentle, abject, old-maid’s heart. She had only one loyalty: her love for Anna. Only one determination: to do battle against the powers which she obscurely felt to be ranged against Anna. Only one fear: that she might be sent away from Anna.

Suddenly, one mild spring day, an incident occurred. It was one of the first of Anna’s definite recollections; and it served to bring her father out of the shadows into a position of importance in her childish scheme of life.

It was early March and the rains had been heavy for several days. Now the sun shone vividly, bringing out the pristine colours of the world. The distance stood sharp on the clean, rain-washed air, distinct, clear-cut but fragile-looking as egg-shell, very far away. And the great crumpled sea of mountains, like a pile of crumpled drapery, fold behind fold, stretching away to the ultimate distance, to the unsubstantial dim-white snows.

Anna was playing beside Miss Wilson on the bright green grass of the upper valley where it narrowed to the neck of the gorge. Some goats, soiled-white and russet-brown and black, were feeding near. The high walls of the gorge towered savagely, silent and rather sinister in the bright glare of the sun. The slowly-passing, sunny morning was very silent; almost ghostly in stillness and silence.

Then a sound came; a strange tearing, roaring sound, far off in the sky it seemed, growing swiftly to a crashing thunder. In amazement they looked up at the cloudless, blank blue sky. There was nothing there. But on the crest of the cliff, on the ragged summit of the mountainous wall of the gorge where the great rocks stood up in sombre heaps with the dark bulks of greenery between, Anna saw a strange ball rolling. Like a weird, irregular ball it came bounding, bouncing down the sheer stony slope, leaping like a mad thing down the cliff. It was funny to see it. Anna would have laughed. But before her lips had time to stretch to a smile, the bounding ball had become a lion, an elephant, a house, an immense primeval mass of solid rock bearing down with terrifying speed straight upon them.

Miss Wilson’s timorous heart seemed to turn over in her breast. God knew she had done her best, had striven – with heroism when the limitations of her temperament are considered – against the difficulties and alarms of the past few years. But now, when actual physical danger threatened, danger so horrifyingly imminent that her elderly mind had barely time to conceive it, she did not know what to do. So she stood still, doing nothing at all, simply clasping Anna against her body in the immobility of utter unthinking panic.

And at the very last moment, when the great cruel mass seemed almost upon them, ready in a blind rush of destruction to blot out for ever the obscure old life of the maiden lady and the other life that had hardly begun, a strong hand dragged them away. The huge boulder crashed past with a noise like thunder, down into the green hollow below, where it seemed suddenly to fall in pieces, raising clouds of yellowish dust.

The goats had moved on a little way, such a little way, only a few steps it seemed, out of the course of the falling peril, and were quietly feeding. The small, sharp tearing noises as they cropped the grass sounded clearly in the empty silence.

‘Lucky for you that I happened to be near,’ said the calm, cold, somewhat sardonic voice of James Forrester.

Nothing more; but in those few words, Miss Wilson, cringing abjectly in an inward agony of self-recrimination, seemed to hear the merciless trial of her case, the implacable judgment given against her. She was appalled at what seemed to her to be her own despicable cowardice.

‘He will send me away,’ she thought, almost weeping. She knew that in that one moment of supreme failure she had forfeited all the years of self-sacrifice and laborious service.

But in the secret mind of the child a new thought was stirring. Anna saw that her father possessed something that was lacking in the familiar, oldish woman. Her imagination was touched, something like admiration began to awaken. Her father had become real to her.

When Anna was six years old a visitor came to Mascarat. This was Lauretta, the sister of the dead Lise. Lauretta, unlike her unfortunate sister, had done pretty well for herself in the world. She had married Heyward Bland, a retired military man, oldish, didactic, very British, very comme-il-faut, who had recently inherited a good deal of money. Their winters were spent on the Riviera. Now, suddenly, before she returned to England, an impulse of duty, or perhaps of curiosity, prompted her to visit the niece whom she had not seen for so long. She was fond of motoring, and the mountain district was picturesque. She would drive to Mascarat and see for herself that poor Lise’s child was being properly cared for.

Miss Wilson was thrown into an enormous flutter of excitement at the prospect of the visit. At the back of her mind a vague scheme was forming: possibly Lauretta could be persuaded to take the child away with her. Since the day of the falling boulder, Miss Wilson had felt that her own fate was sealed. She would not be allowed to stay much longer with her charge. Hence this scheming activity in her sly old brain, this desperate anxiety for Anna’s future.

But things did not work out well from the schemer’s point of view. It was a beautiful day, warm and sunny, with the mountains seeming further away, and a soft hyacinth-blue curtain over the harsh rocks. The landscape seemed softer and more mysterious, there was a smell of flowers in the air. The water ran clear as crystal in the ravine, making a merry noise. The almonds and the cherry trees were in blossom, dotting the foreground with puffs of delicate pink and white, like a Japanese picture.

Lauretta, who was inclined to sentimentalize over nature, found everything delightful. It seemed to her that one could wish no better fate than to live in that lovely valley, under the calm guardianship of the blue-grey mountains upon whose tops the little streaks of white, impalpable snow wandered like misty ribbons.

Lauretta Bland was such a charming little thing. In her light, beautiful dress, with a gay silk scarf fluttering from her shoulders, she was like a butterfly floating in the sunshine. It seemed that nothing ugly or crude could ever touch her. She was talkative and lively, with a pretty, bubbling laugh that came easily to her lips.

Anna stared at her in amazement, intrigued, fascinated, but somewhat suspicious. She had never seen anyone in the least like her, and with childish distrustfulness she rather fought shy of that fluttering vivacity. So she kept still, reserving judgment, while they sat at tea under the cherry trees, and a cool breeze from the melting snows blew the white petals like a flock of tiny birds, circling and dipping about Lauretta’s pretty head.

They made a queer little trio in that enormous setting: Lauretta, elegant, charming, beautifully-dressed and scented, a woman of the world for all her affectation of girlish gaiety; Miss Wilson, prim, uncompromising, nervous and faded beside her in her ancient, unbecoming clothes; and the child, a small, grave creature in a rather ill-fitting home-made dress, with bare legs and coloured espadrilles. James was not present.

Lauretta was not very well impressed by her niece. Anna was a serious, quiet, unobtrusive, independent child. She was rather tall for her age, and thin, with a creamy-brown skin, straight brown hair, and the steady blue-grey eyes of her father. She was critical and self-possessed and kept her head well up. She would not show off, or prattle childishly, or respond to her aunt’s charming advances. Lauretta thought her curiously unchildlike and somewhat disconcerting.

Miss Wilson realized distressfully that her charge was not making a good impression. Rather desperately, she tried to put things right, to show Anna off to her best advantage.

‘She really has a wonderful imagination,’ said Miss Wilson. And added with a little nod of nervous encouragement to Anna: ‘Tell your auntie one of the stories you have been telling me.’

Anna remained awhile in uneasy silence. She was neither shy nor sulky, but something restrained her from speaking freely in the presence of this attractive stranger. Her private imaginings were precious to her.

‘Go along, dear,’ urged Miss Wilson, feverishly amiable.

‘Well,’ said Anna at last, her clear eyes seeming to stare out with a certain challenge, ‘there was once a boy who lived in the middle of a chestnut tree.’

It was not at all the way in which her stories usually began. Miss Wilson looked on nervously, fidgeting with her thin fingers. Lauretta waited with a patient smile on her face. But nothing more was forthcoming. Anna shuffled with her feet, and stared up with challenging grey eyes. She simply could not bring herself to say another word to this visitor who had alighted like a strange brilliant bird under the familiar cherry trees, this charming, birdlike creature with her fluttering scarf and her scent and her pretty, smiling face, who seemed somehow to be an enemy. Anna did not know what she thought – whether she felt any admiration for Lauretta, or only just a childish, closed, reserved sort of suspicion. But she could not tell the story to her.

James Forrester, in his old grey suit that was as neat as on the day it had been finished, came strolling slowly under the white blossom, watching the feminine group with cold, inscrutable eyes. Slowly, with a heavy, cold assertiveness, he seemed to lay his dark shadow upon them, swamping them all in some way, laying a blight upon Lauretta’s elegant, butterfly gaiety. It was strange how his coming seemed to crush her into insignificance, into a rather pathetic sort of flippancy.

‘Refusing to do your parlour-tricks?’ he said to Anna. And though his voice was hard she felt he was on her side.

Lauretta left early, tripping on ridiculous high heels down the stony path to her motor car. She was quite satisfied with her visit to Mascarat. James was more impossible than ever. But the child was all right; a queer little fish, not very attractive. She seemed healthy, though, and well-cared-for. That poor, plain Miss Wilson was evidently a sensible woman. Of course, the place was terribly rough; but children didn’t mind things like that. Lauretta gave a sigh of relief. She had salved her conscience and done her duty by poor Lise’s child: now she was free to forget her.

A week later a parcel arrived at Mascarat. They stood round, Anna and Seguela, and Paul who had carried it all the way up from Paralba, while Miss Wilson very carefully, almost too carefully, almost tenderly, lifted the tissue-paper and brought out the dresses that Lauretta had sent as a final conscientious sop to her niece. There were pink and white and blue and patterned frocks, of organdie, of linen and of silk. None of them, except perhaps Miss Wilson, had ever dreamed of such frocks. There they stood, a rather forlorn little gathering, staring at the flower-gay dresses.

But they were standing round the table of the big, dark, cave-like kitchen, and into this cavernous darkness came the darker figure of James Forrester, a tall, black, imperturbable man, with danger in his coldly penetrating eyes.

‘What have you got there?’ he asked in a hard, subdued voice, not very loud.

While Miss Wilson was explaining in a voice gone rather squeaky with nervousness and a sort of wrennish defiance, he stood up close to the table in his peculiar heavy resistance, looking at the bright heap of flimsy stuffs.

When she had said all that she had to say, and her voice had trailed off pathetically into silence, he gathered up the dresses like an armful of crushed flowers and tossed them into the red-hot, angry maw of the fire. It was not in the least an act of violence. The whole rhythm of the gesture was deliberate, cold and heavy. The flames licked up the fragile garments in a trice; a blaze, a flicker, a puff of smoke, and they were gone as if a handful of hay had been thrown on the fire.

Anna had a little puzzled frown of pain on her face. She would have liked to wear the pretty clothes. But when her father said to her: ‘Do you want to be dressed up like a performing monkey?’ she felt that he was right in spite of her disappointment, and she bore him no grudge.

Miss Wilson lamented bitterly in herself her failure to enlist Lauretta Bland’s sympathies on Anna’s behalf. The poor woman knew that she would not be tolerated much longer at Mascarat. She crept about, unobtrusive as a careworn, timid mouse in her drab garments, avoiding James’s eye, hoping by obliterating herself to gain an hour, a week, a month of respite before the blow fell. That it would fall sooner or later she knew. Sentence had been passed on her long ago in the high valley on the day of the falling boulder. It was slow in being carried out, but she had no false illusion of security.

The final execution was swift and sudden. It was evening in the bare, clean upper room that Miss Wilson called the nursery. The room was dark and uninteresting, blank in its cleanliness. The cheap, rose-patterned cotton curtains that she had hung at the window looked tawdry and out of place. Anna was saying her prayers, an odd young shoot in her white nightgown, kneeling beside the clumsy wooden bed.

Suddenly James Forrester came in. It was very unusual for him to come into that room. Miss Wilson’s heart gave a rapid leap of alarm, the terrible, nerve-torturing apprehension of the dependant. Anna was peering at him through her fingers, uncertain whether to go on with her prayers.

‘Get up,’ he said quietly to her.

She obeyed at once, and stood looking at him with a child’s curious trustfulness that is already half suspicion. He had so much power over her.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

‘Saying my prayers,’ she answered, in her clear, thin voice, looking straight at him.

‘What are they?’

She stood in confused silence, not knowing how to reply. Then she glanced round doubtfully at Miss Wilson who had drawn near and would have spoken had not James motioned her imperiously to remain silent. Finally Anna flushed and said:

‘Prayers are talking to God.’

‘That is nonsense,’ her father said calmly. ‘There is no such person as God, and you are only making yourself ridiculous by kneeling down there in your silly white shirt to talk to someone who doesn’t exist.’

The child said nothing, staring with bewildered grey-blue eyes at the tall, strange man whose lips were dark and closed and angry-looking.

Again Miss Wilson tried to interfere, and again she was silenced. She stood looking on, almost in tears, her old face creased and reddened, not daring to speak a word.

‘Are you determined to be a little performing monkey, then?’ said James to his daughter. ‘Do you want to be a little saintly monkey this time, in a little white shirt?’

‘No!’ said Anna flatly, looking him straight in the eyes.

The father seemed satisfied.

‘Never let me see you kneeling again,’ he said; and signed to Miss Wilson to follow him out of the room.

That night he told her that she must go. She dared not plead with him or protest; her spirit was so broken, so abject, the spirit of the poor, friendless, unwanted elderly spinster who has no rights and for whom there seems to be no place.

In the silent darkness she watched over Anna lying asleep in the high bed. Upon her bare old knees she prayed for the child whose future seemed so sinister and so obscure, and her tired heart yearned over her.

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.