Anna of the Five Towns · Chapter 10 (2/4)

“Go away, do,” Beatrice exclaimed, opening her eyes and shutting them again, wearily.

So they went away, and discovered two empty deck-chairs on the foredeck. Anna was innocently vain of her immunity from malaise. Mynors appeared to appoint himself little errands about the deck, returning frequently to his chair.

“Look over there. Can you see anything?”

Anna ran to the rail, with the infantile idea of getting nearer, and Mynors followed, laughing. What looked like a small slate-coloured cloud lay on the horizon.

“I seem to see something,” she said.

“That is the Isle of Man.”

By insensible gradations the contours of the land grew clearer in the afternoon haze.

“How far are we off now?”

“Perhaps twenty miles.”

Twenty miles of uninterrupted flatness, and the ship steadily invading that separating solitude, yard by yard, furlong by furlong! The conception awed her. There, a morsel in the waste of the deep, a speck under the infinite sunlight, lay the island, mysterious, enticing, enchanted, a glinting jewel on, the sea’s bosom, a remote entity fraught with strange secrets. It was all unspeakable.

“Anna, you have covered yourself with glory,” said Mrs. Sutton, when they were in the diminutive and absurd train which by breathless plunges annihilates the sixteen miles between Douglas and Port Erin in sixty-five minutes.

“Have I?” she answered. “How?”

“By not being ill.”

“That’s always the beginner’s luck,” said Beatrice, pale and dishevelled. They all relapsed into the silence of fatigue. It was growing dusk when the train stopped at the tiny terminus. The station was a hive of bustling activity, the arrival of this train being the daily event at that end of the world. Mynors and the Suttons were greeted familiarly by several sailors, and one of these, Tom Kelly, a tall, middle-aged man, with grey beard, small grey eyes, a wrinkled skin of red mahogany, and an enormous fist, was introduced to Anna. He raised his cap, and shook hands. She was touched by the sad, kind look on his face, the melancholy impress of the sea. Then they drove to their lodging, and here again the party was welcomed as being old and tried friends. A fire was burning in the parlour. Throwing herself down in front of it, Mrs. Sutton breathed, “At last! Oh, for some tea.” Through the window, Anna had a glimpse of a deeply indented bay at the foot of cliffs below them, with a bold headland to the right. Fishing vessels with flat red sails seemed to hang undecided just outside the bay. From cottage chimneys beneath the road blue smoke softly ascended.

All went early to bed, for the weariness of Mr. and Mrs. Sutton seemed to communicate itself to the three young people, who might otherwise have gone forth into the village in search of adventures. Anna and Beatrice shared a room. Each inspected the other’s clothes, and Beatrice made Anna try on the new serge skirt. Through the thin wall came the sound of Mr. and Mrs. Sutton talking, a high voice, then a bass reply, in continual alternation. Beatrice said that these two always discussed the day’s doings in such manner. In a few moments Beatrice was snoring; she had the subdued but steady and serious snore characteristic of some muscular men. Anna felt no inclination to sleep. She lived again hour by hour through the day, and beneath Beatrice’s snore her ear caught the undertone of the sea.

The next morning was as lovely as the last. It was Sunday, and every activity of the village was stilled. Sea and land were equally folded in a sunlit calm. During breakfast⁠—a meal abundant in fresh herrings, fresh eggs and fresh rolls, eaten with the window wide open⁠—Anna was puzzled by the singular amenity of her friends to one another and to her. They were as polite as though they had been strangers; they chatted amiably, were full of goodwill, and as anxious to give happiness as to enjoy it. She thought at first, so unusual was it to her as a feature of domestic privacy, that this demeanour was affected, or at any rate a somewhat exaggerated punctilio due to her presence; but she soon came to see that she was mistaken. After breakfast Mr. Sutton suggested that they should attend the Wesleyan Chapel on the hill leading to the Chasms. Here they met the sailors of the night before, arrayed now in marvellous blue Melton coats with velveteen collars. Tom Kelly walked back with them to the beach, and showed them the yacht Fay which Mynors had arranged to hire for mackerel-fishing; it lay on the sands speckless in new white paint. All the afternoon they dozed on the cliffs, doing nothing whatever, for this Sunday was tacitly regarded, not as part of the holiday, but as a preparation for the holiday; all felt that the holiday, with its proper exertions and appointed delights, would really begin on Monday morning.

“Let us go for a walk,” said Mynors, after tea, to Beatrice and Anna. They stood at the gate of the lodging-house. The old people were resting within.

“You two go,” Beatrice replied, looking at Anna. “You know I hate walking, Henry. I’ll stop with mother and dad.”

Throughout the day Anna had been conscious of the fact that all the Suttons showed a tendency, slight but perceptible, to treat Henry and herself as a pair desirous of opportunities for being alone together. She did not like it. She flushed under the passing glance with which Beatrice accompanied the words: “You two go.” Nevertheless, when Mynors placidly remarked: “Very well,” and his eyes sought hers for a consent, she could not refuse it. One part of her nature would have preferred to find an excuse for staying at home; but another, and a stronger, part insisted on seizing this offered joy.

They walked straight up out of the village toward the high coast-range which stretches peak after peak from Port Erin to Peel. The stony and devious lanes wound about the bleak hillside, passing here and there small, solitary cottages of whitewashed stone, with children, fowls, and dogs at the doors, all embowered in huge fuchsia trees. Presently they had surmounted the limit of habitation and were on the naked flank of Bradda, following a narrow track which crept upwards amid short mossy turf of the most vivid green. Nothing seemed to flourish on this exposed height except bracken, sheep, and boulders that, from a distance, resembled sheep; there was no tree, scarcely a shrub; the immense contours, stark, grim, and unrelieved, rose in melancholy and defiant majesty against the sky: the hand of man could coax no harvest from these smooth but obdurate slopes; they had never relented, and they would never relent. The spirit was braced by the thought that here, to the furthest eternity of civilisation more and more intricate, simple and strong souls would always find solace and repose.

Mynors bore to the left for a while, striking across the moor in the direction of the sea. Then he said:

“Look down, now.”

The little bay lay like an oblong swimming-bath five hundred feet below them. The surface of the water was like glass; the strand, with its phalanx of boats drawn up in Sabbath tidiness, glittered like marble in the living light, and over this marble black dots moved slowly to and fro; behind the boats were the houses⁠—dolls’ houses⁠—each with a curling wisp of smoke; further away the railway and the high road ran out in a black and white line to Port St. Mary; the sea, a pale grey, encompassed all; the southern sky had a faint sapphire tinge, rising to delicate azure. The sight of this haven at rest, shut in by the restful sea and by great moveless hills, a calm within a calm, aroused profound emotion.

“It’s lovely,” said Anna, as they stood gazing. Tears came to her eyes and hung there. She wondered that scenery should cause tears, felt ashamed, and turned her face so that Mynors should not see. But he had seen.

“Shall we go on to the top?” he suggested, and they set their faces northwards to climb still higher. At length they stood on the rocky summit of Bradda, seven hundred feet from the sea. The Hill of the Night Watch lifted above them to the north, but on east, south, and west, the prospect was bounded only by the ocean. The coastline was revealed for thirty miles, from Peel to Castletown. Far to the east was Castletown Bay, large, shallow and inhospitable, its floor strewn with a thousand unseen wrecks; the lighthouse at Scarlet Point flashed dimly in the dusk; thence the beach curved nearer in an immense arc, without a sign of life, to the little cove of Port St. Mary, and jutted out again into a tongue of land at the end of which lay the Calf of Man with its single white cottage and cart-track. The dangerous Calf Sound, where the vexed tide is forced to run nine hours one way and three the other, seemed like a grey ribbon, and the Chicken Rock like a tiny pencil on a vast slate. Port Erin was hidden under their feet. They looked westward. The darkening sky was a labyrinth of purple and crimson scarves drawn pellucid, as though by the finger of God, across a sheet of pure saffron. These decadent tints of the sunset faded in every direction to the same soft azure which filled the south, and one star twinkled in the illimitable field. Thirty miles off, on the horizon, could be discerned the Mourne Mountains of Ireland.

“See!” Mynors exclaimed, touching her arm.

The huge disc of the moon was rising in the east, and as this mild lamp passed up the sky, the sense of universal quiescence increased. Lovely, Anna had said. It was the loveliest sight her eyes had ever beheld, a panorama of pure beauty transcending all imagined visions. It overwhelmed her, thrilled her to the heart, this revelation of the loveliness of the world. Her thoughts went back to Hanbridge and Bursley and her life there; and all the remembered scenes, bathed in the glow of a new ideal, seemed to lose their pain. It was as if she had never been really unhappy, as if there was no real unhappiness on the whole earth. She perceived that the monotony, the austerity, the melancholy of her existence had been sweet and beautiful of its kind, and she recalled, with a sort of rapture, hours of companionship with the beloved Agnes, when her father was equable and pacific. Nothing was ugly nor mean. Beauty was everywhere, in everything.

In silence they began to descend, perforce walking quickly because of the steep gradient. At the first cottage they saw a little girl in a mobcap playing with two kittens.

“How like Agnes!” Mynors said.

“Yes. I was just thinking so,” Anna answered.

“I thought of her up on the hill,” he continued. “She will miss you, won’t she?”

“I know she cried herself to sleep last night. You mightn’t guess it, but she is extremely sensitive.”

“Not guess it? Why not? I am sure she is. Do you know⁠—I am very fond of your sister. She’s a simply delightful child. And there’s a lot in her, too. She’s so quick and bright, and somehow like a little woman.”

“She’s exactly like a woman sometimes,” Anna agreed. “Sometimes I fancy she’s a great deal older than I am.”

“Older than any of us,” he corrected.

“I’m glad you like her,” Anna said, content. “She thinks all the world of you.” And she added: “My word, wouldn’t she be vexed if she knew I had told you that!”

This appreciation of Agnes brought them into closer intimacy, and they talked the more easily of other things.

“It will freeze tonight,” Mynors said; and then, suddenly looking at her in the twilight: “You are feeling chill.”

“Oh, no!” she protested.

“But you are. Put this muffler round your neck.” He took a muffler from his pocket.

“Oh, no, really! You will need it yourself.” She drew a little away from him, as if to avoid the muffler.

“Please take it.”

She did so, and thanked him, tying it loosely and untidily round her throat. That feeling of the untidiness of the muffler, of its being something strange to her skin, something with the rough virtue of masculinity, which no one could detect in the gloom, was in itself pleasant.

“I wager Mrs. Sutton has a good fire burning when we get in,” he said.

She thought with joyous anticipation of the warm, bright, sitting-room, the supper, and the vivacious good-natured conversation. Though the walk was nearly at an end, other delights were in store. Of the holiday, thirteen complete days yet remained, each to be as happy as the one now closing. It was an age! At last they entered the human cosiness of the village. As they walked up the steps of their lodging and he opened the door for her, she quickly drew off the muffler and returned it to him with a word of thanks.

On Monday morning, when Beatrice and Anna came downstairs, they found the breakfast odorously cooling on the table, and nobody in the room.

“Where are they all, I wonder. Any letters?” Beatrice said.

“There’s your mother, out on the front⁠—and Mr. Mynors too.”

Beatrice threw up the window, and called: “Come along, Henry; come along, mother. Everything’s going cold.”

“Is it?” Mynors cheerfully replied. “Come out here, both of you, and begin the day properly with a dose of ozone.”

“I loathe cold bacon,” said Beatrice, glancing at the table, and they went out into the road, where Mrs. Sutton kissed them with as much fervour as if they had arrived from a long journey.

“You look pale, Anna,” she remarked.

“Do I?” said Anna, “I don’t feel pale.”

“It’s that long walk last night,” Beatrice put in. “Henry always goes too far.”

“I don’t⁠—” Anna began; but at that moment Mr. Sutton, lumbering and ponderous, joined the party.

“Henry,” he said, without greeting anyone, “hast noticed those half-finished houses down the road yonder by the Falcon? I’ve been having a chat with Kelly, and he tells me the fellow that was building them has gone bankrupt, and they’re at a standstill. The Receiver wants to sell ’em. In fact Kelly says they’re going cheap. I believe they’d be a good spec.”

“Eh, dear!” Mrs. Sutton interrupted him. “Father, I wish you would leave your specs alone when you’re on your holiday.”

“Now, missis!” he affectionately protested, and continued: “They’re fairly well built, seemingly, and the rafters are on the roof. Anna,” he turned to her quickly, as if counting on her sympathy, “you must come with me and look at ’em after breakfast. Happen they might suit your father⁠—or you. I know your father’s fond of a good spec.”

She assented with a ready smile. This was the beginning of a fancy which the Alderman always afterwards showed for Anna.

After breakfast Mrs. Sutton, Beatrice, and Anna arranged to go shopping:

“Father⁠—brass,” Mrs. Sutton ejaculated in two monosyllables to her husband.

“How much will content ye?” he asked mildly.

“Give me five or ten pounds to go on with.”

He opened the left-hand front pocket of his trousers⁠—a pocket which fastened with a button; and leaning back in his chair drew out a fat purse, and passed it to his wife with a preoccupied air. She helped herself, and then Beatrice intercepted the purse and lightened it of half a sovereign.

“Pocket-money,” Beatrice said; “I’m ruined.”

The Alderman’s eyes requested Anna to observe how he was robbed. At last the purse was safely buttoned up again.