Anne Severn and the Fieldings | Page 7

get it over. You can't go on funking it
for ever."
Jerrold went. But he went alone, he wouldn't let Anne go with him. He
said he didn't want her to be mixed up with it.
"He means," said Eliot, "that he doesn't want to think of Yearp every

time he sees Anne."
ix
It was true that Eliot was fond of Yearp's society. He would spend
hours with him, learning how to dissect frogs and rabbits and pigeons.
He drove about the country with Yearp seeing the sick animals, the
ewes at lambing time and the cows at their calving. And he spent half
the midsummer holidays reading Animal Biology and drawing diagrams
of frogs' hearts and pigeons' brains. He said he wasn't going to Oxford
or Cambridge when he left Cheltenham; he was going to Barts. He
wanted to be a doctor. But his mother said he didn't know what he'd
want to be in three years' time. She thought him awful, with his frogs'
hearts and horrors.
Next to Jerrold and little Colin Anne loved Eliot. He seemed to know
when she was thinking about her mother and to understand. He took
her into the woods to look for squirrels; he showed her the wildflowers
and told her all their names: bugloss, and lady's smock and speedwell,
king-cup, willow herb and meadow sweet, crane's bill and celandine.
One day they found in the garden a tiny egg-shaped shell made of
gold-coloured lattice work. When they put it under the microscope they
saw inside it a thing like a green egg. Every day they watched it; it put
out two green horns, and a ridge grew down the middle of it, and one
morning they found the golden shell broken. A long, elegant fly with
slender wings crawled beside it.
When Benjy died of eating too much lettuce Eliot was sorry. Aunt
Adeline said it was all put on and that he really wanted to cut him up
and see what he was made of. But Eliot didn't. He said Benjy was
sacred. That was because he knew they loved him. And he dug the
grave and lined it with moss and told Aunt Adeline to shut up when she
said it ought to have been lettuce leaves.
Aunt Adeline complained that it was hard that Eliot couldn't be nice to
her when he was her favorite.

"Little Anne, little Anne, what have you done to my Eliot?" She was
always saying things like that. Anne couldn't think what she meant till
Jerrold told her she was the only kid that Eliot had ever looked at. The
big Hawtrey girl from Medlicote would have given her head to be in
Anne's shoes.
But Anne didn't care. Her love for Jerrold was sharp and exciting. She
brought tears to it and temper. It was mixed up with God and music and
the deaths of animals, and sunsets and all sorrowful and beautiful and
mysterious things. Thinking about her mother made her think about
Jerrold; but she never thought about Eliot at all when he wasn't there.
She would run away from Eliot any minute if she heard Jerrold calling.
It was Jerrold, Jerrold, all the time, said Aunt Adeline.
And when Eliot was busy with his microscope and Jerrold had turned
from her to Colin, there was Uncle Robert. He seemed to know the
moments when she wanted him. Then he would take her out riding with
him over the estate that stretched from Wyck across the valley of the
Speed and beyond it for miles over the hills. And he would show her
the reaping machines at work, and the great carthorses, and the prize
bullocks in their stalls at the Manor Farm. And Anne told him her
secret, the secret she had told to nobody but Jerrold.
"Some day," she said, "I shall have a farm, with horses and cows and
pigs and little calves."
"Shall you like that?"
"Yes," said Anne. "I would. Only it can't happen till Grandpapa's dead.
And I don't want him to die."
x
They were saying now that Colin was wonderful. He was only seven,
yet he could play the piano like a grown-up person, very fast and with
loud noises in the bass. And he could sing like an angel. When you
heard him you could hardly believe that he was a little boy who cried

sometimes and was afraid of ghosts. Two masters came out from
Cheltenham twice a week to teach him. Eliot said Colin would be a
professional when he grew up, but his mother said he should be nothing
of the sort and Eliot wasn't to go putting nonsense like that into his
head. Still, she was proud of Colin when his hands went pounding and
flashing over the