Let Me Alone Page 2

  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 car
eworn, 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 se
rved 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.