Let Me Alone (3 page)

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.

A
NNA
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.