Let Me Alone Read online

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  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, be
sides, 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.
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  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.