Books 5-8: Whiteoak Heritage / Whiteoak Brothers / Jalna / Whiteoaks of Jalna

by Mazo de La Roche

  “For God’s sake, somebody give him cake,” said Renny.

  Little Wake snatched up a piece of cake and held it toward Boney, but just as the parrot was at the point of taking it he jerked it away. With flaming temper Boney tried three times, and failed to snatch the morsel. He flapped his wings and uttered a screech that set the blood pounding in the ears of those in the room.

  It was too much for Finch. He doubled up on his footstool, laughing hysterically; the footstool slipped—or did Eden’s foot push it?—and he was sent sprawling on the floor.

  Grandmother seized her cane and struggled to get to her feet.

  “Let me at them!” she screamed.

  “Boys! Boys!” cried Meggie, melting into sudden laughter. This was the sort of thing she loved—“rough-house” among the boys, and she sitting solidly, comfortably in her chair, looking on. She laughed; but in an instant she was lachrymose again, and averted her eyes from the figure of Finch stretched on the floor.

  Renny was bending over him. He administered three hard thumps on the boy’s bony, untidy person, and said:

  “Now, get up and behave yourself.”

  Finch got up, red in the face, and skulked to a corner. Nicholas turned heavily in his chair, and regarded Piers.

  “As for you,” he said, “you ought to be flayed alive for what you’ve done to Meggie.”

  “Never mind,” Piers returned. “I’m getting out.”

  Meg looked at him scornfully. “You’d have to go a long way to get away from scandal—I mean, to make your absence really a help to me, to all of us.”

  Piers retorted: “Oh, we’ll go far enough to please you. We’ll go to the States—perhaps.” The “perhaps” was mumbled on a hesitating note. The sound of his own voice announcing that he would go to a foreign country, far from Jalna and the land he had helped to grow things on, the horses, his brothers, had an appalling sound.

  “What does he say?” asked Grandmother, roused from one of her sudden dozes. Boney had perched on her shoulder and cuddled his head against her long flat cheek. “What’s the boy say?”

  Ernest answered: “He says he’ll go to the States.”

  “The States? A Whiteoak go to the States? A Whiteoak a Yankee? No, no, no! It would kill me. He mustn’t go. Shame, shame on you, Meggie, to drive the poor boy to the States! You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Oh, those Yankees! First they take Eden’s book and now they want Piers himself. Oh, don’t let him go!” She burst into loud sobs.

  Renny’s voice was raised, but without excitement.

  “Piers is not going away—anywhere. He’s going to stay right here. So is Pheasant. The girl and he are married. I presume they’ve lived together. There’s no reason on earth why she shouldn’t make him a good wife—”

  Meg interrupted:

  “Maurice has never forgiven me for refusing to marry him. He has made this match between his daughter and Piers to punish me. He’s done it. I know he’s done it.”

  Piers turned to her. “Maurice has known nothing about it.”

  “How can you know what schemes were in his head?” replied Meg. “He’s simply been waiting his chance to thrust his brat into Jalna.”

  Piers exclaimed: “Good God, Meggie! I didn’t know you had such a wicked tongue.”

  “No back chat, please,” rejoined his sister.

  Renny’s voice, with a vibration from the chest which the family knew foreboded an outburst if he were opposed, broke in.

  “I have been talking the affair over with Maurice this afternoon. He is as upset about it as we are. As for his planning the marriage to avenge himself on you, Meg, that is ridiculous. Give the man credit for a little decency—a little sense. Why, your affair with him was twenty years ago. Do you think he’s been brooding over it ever since? And he was through the War too. He’s had a few things to think of besides your cruelty, Meggie!”

  He smiled at her. He knew how to take her. And she liked to have her “cruelty” referred to. Her beautifully shaped lips curved a little, and she said, with almost girlish petulance:

  “What’s the matter with him, then? Everyone agrees that there’s something wrong with him.”

  “Oh, well, I don’t think there is very much wrong with Maurice, but if there is, and you are responsible, you shouldn’t be too hard on him, or on this child, either. I told Piers that if he went on meeting her there’d be trouble, and there has been, hasn’t there? Lots of it. But I’m not going to drive him away from Jalna. I want him here—and I want my tea, terribly. Will you pour it out, Meggie?”

  Silence followed his words, broken only by the snapping of the fire and Grandmother’s peaceful, bubbling snores. Nicholas took out his pipe and began to fill it from his pouch. Sasha leaped from the mantelpiece to Ernest’s shoulder and began to purr loudly, as though in opposition to Grandmother’s snores. Wakefield opened the door of a cabinet filled with curios from India, with which he was not allowed to play, and stuck his head inside.

  “Darling, don’t,” said Meg, gently.

  Renny, the chieftain, had spoken. He had said that Piers was not to be cast out from the tribe, and the tribe had listened and accepted his words as wisdom. All the more readily because not one of them wanted to see Piers cast out, even though they must accept with him an unwelcome addition to the family. Not even Meg. In truth, Renny was more often the organ of the family than its head. They knew beforehand what he would say in a crisis, and they excited, harried, and goaded him till he said it with great passion. Then, with apparent good grace, they succumbed to his will.

  Renny dropped into a chair with his cup of tea and a piece of bread and butter. His face was redder than usual, but he looked with deep satisfaction at the group about him. He had quelled the family riot. They depended on him, from savage old Gran down to delicate little Wake. They depended on him to lead them. He felt each one of them bound to him by a strong, invisible cord. He could feel the pull of the cords, drawn taut from himself to each individual in the room. To savage old Gran. To beastly young Finch. To that young fool Piers with his handkerchief against his bleeding ear. To Meggie, who pictured Maurice as brooding in black melancholy all these years. Well, there was no doubt about it, Maurice was a queer devil. He had let two women make a very different man of him from what Nature had intended him to be. Renny felt the cords from himself stretching dark and strong to each member of the family. Suddenly he felt a new drawing, a fresh cord. It was between Pheasant and him. She was one of them now. His own. He looked at her, sitting upright in the big chair, her eyes swollen from crying, but eating her tea like a good child. Their eyes met, and she gave a little watery pleading smile. Renny grinned at her encouragingly.

  Rags had come in and Meg was ordering a fresh pot of tea.

  This was the Whiteoak family as it was when Alayne Archer came into their midst from New York.

  IX

  EDEN AND ALAYNE

  EDEN found that his steps made no noise on the thick rug that covered the floor of the reception room of the New York publishing firm of Cory and Parsons, so he could pace up and down as restlessly as he liked without fear of attracting attention. He was horribly nervous. He had a sensation in his stomach that was akin to hunger, yet his throat felt so oddly constricted that to swallow would have been impossible.

  A mirror in a carved frame gave him, when he hesitated before it, a greenish reflection of himself that was not reassuring. He wished he had not got such a brazen coat of tan in the North that summer. These New Yorkers would surely look on him as a Canadian backwoodsman. His hands, as he grasped the package containing his new manuscript, were almost black, it seemed to him, and no wonder, for he had been paddling and camping among the Northern lakes for months. He decided to lay the manuscript on a table, picking it up at the last minute before he entered Mr. Cory’s private office. It had been Mr. Cory with whom he had corresponded about his poems, who had expressed himself as eager to read the long narrative poem composed that summer. For the book published in
midsummer was being well reviewed, American critics finding an agreeable freshness and music in Eden’s lyrics. As books of poems went, it had had a fair sale. The young poet would get enough out of it perhaps to buy himself a new winter overcoat. He stood now, tall and slender in his loosely fitting tweeds, very British-looking, feeling that this solemn, luxurious room was the threshold over which he would step into the world of achievement and fame.

  The door opened and a young woman entered so quietly that she was almost at Eden’s side before he was aware of her presence.

  “Oh,” he said, starting, “I beg your pardon. I’m waiting to see Mr. Cory.”

  “You are Mr. Whiteoak, aren’t you?” she asked in a tranquil voice.

  He flushed red, very boyishly, under his tan.

  “Yes. I’m Eden Whiteoak. I’m the—”

  Just in time he choked back what he had been about to say: that he was the author of Under the North Star. It would have been a horrible way to introduce himself—just as though he had expected the whole world to know about his book of poems.

  However, she said, with a little excited catch of the breath:

  “Oh, Mr. Whiteoak, I could not resist coming to speak to you when I heard you were here. I want to tell you how very, very much I have enjoyed your poems. I am a reader for Mr. Cory, and he generally gives me the poetry manuscripts, because—well, I am very much interested in poetry.”

  “Yes, yes, I see,” said Eden, casting about to collect his thoughts.

  She went on in her low even voice:

  “I cannot tell you how proud I was when I was able to recommend your poems to him. I have to send in adverse reports on so many. Your name was new to us. I felt that I had discovered you. Oh, dear, this is very unbusinesslike, telling you all this, but your poetry has given me so much pleasure that—I wanted you to know.”

  Her face flashed suddenly from gravity into smiling. Her head was tilted as she looked into his eyes, for she was below medium height. Eden, looking down at her, thought she was like some delicately tinted yet sturdy spring flower, gazing upward with a sort of gentle defiance.

  He held the hand she offered in his own warm, deeply tanned one.

  “My name is Alayne Archer,” she said. “Mr. Cory will be ready to see you in a few minutes. As a matter of fact, he told me to have a little talk with you about your new poem. It is a narrative poem, is it not? But I did so want to tell you that I was the ‘discoverer’ of your first.”

  “Well then, I suppose I may as well hand the manuscript over to you at once.”

  “No. I should give it to Mr. Cory.”

  They both looked down at the packet in his hand, then their eyes met and they smiled.

  “Do you like it very much yourself?” she asked. “Is it at all like the others?”

  “Yes, I like it—naturally,” he answered, “and yes, I think it has the same feeling as the others. It was good fun writing it, up there in the North, a thousand miles from anywhere.”

  “It must have been inspiring,” she said. “Mr. Cory is going to visit the North this fall. He suffers from insomnia. He will want to hear a great deal about it from you.” She led the way toward two upholstered chairs. “Will you please sit down and tell me more about the new poem? What is it called?”

  “The Golden Sturgeon.’Really, I can’t tell you about it. You’ll just have to read it. I’m not used to talking about my poetry. In my family it’s rather a disgrace to write poetry.”

  They had sat down, but she raised herself in her chair and stared at him incredulously. She exclaimed in a rather hushed voice: “Poetry? A disgrace?”

  “Well, not so bad as that, perhaps,” said Eden, hurriedly. “But a handicap to a fellow—something to be lived down.”

  “But are they not proud of you?”

  “Y-Yes. My sister is. But she doesn’t know anything about poetry. And one of my uncles. But he’s quite old. Reads nothing this side of Shakespeare.”

  “And your parents? Your mother?” It seemed to her that he must have a mother to adore him.

  “Both dead,” he replied, and he added: “My brothers really despise me for it. There is a military tradition in our family.”

  She asked: “Were you through the War?”

  “No. I was only seventeen when peace came.”

  “Oh, how stupid I am! Of course you were too young.”

  She began then to talk about his poetry. Eden forgot that he was in a reception room of a publisher’s office. He forgot everything except his pleasure in her gracious, self-possessed, yet somehow shy presence. He heard himself talking, reciting bits of his poems—he had caught something of the Oxford intonation from his uncles—saying beautiful and mournful things that would have made Renny wince with shame for him, could he have overheard.

  A stenographer came to announce that Mr. Cory would see Mr. Whiteoak. They arose, and looking down on her, he thought he had never seen such smooth, shining hair. It was coiled about her head like bands of shimmering satin.

  He followed the stenographer to Mr. Cory’s private room, and was given a tense handshake and a tenser scrutiny by, the publisher.

  “Sit down, Mr. Whiteoak,” he said, in a dry, precise voice. “I am very glad that you were able to come to New York. I and my assistant, Miss Archer, have been looking forward to meeting you. We think your work is exceedingly interesting.”

  Yet his pleasure seemed very perfunctory. After a short discussion of the new poem which Mr. Cory took into his charge, he changed the subject abruptly, and began to fire at Eden question after question about the North. How far north had he been? What supplies were needed? Particularly, what underwear and shoes. Was the food very bad? He suffered at times from indigestion. He supposed it was very rough. His physicians had told him that a hunting trip up there would set him up, make a new man of him. He was strong enough but—well, insomnia was a disagreeable disorder. He couldn’t afford to lower his efficiency.

  Eden was a mine of information. He knew something about everything. As Mr. Cory listened to these details he grew more animated. A faint ashes-of-roses pink crept into his greyish cheeks. He tapped excitedly on his desk with the tips of his polished fingernails.

  Eden in his mind was trying to picture Mr. Cory in that environment, but he could not, and his fancy instead followed Miss Archer, with her bands of shimmering hair and her grey-blue eyes, set wide apart beneath a lovely white brow. He followed her shadow, grasping at it as it disappeared, imploring it to save him from Mr. Cory, for he had begun to hate Mr. Cory, since he believed he had found out that he was interesting to the publisher only as a Canadian who knew all about the country to which a physician had ordered him.

  Yet at that moment Mr. Cory was asking him almost genially to dinner at his house that night.

  “Miss Archer will be there,” added Mr. Cory. She will talk to you about your poetry with much more understanding than I can, but I like it. I like it very well indeed.”

  And, naturally, Eden suddenly liked Mr. Cory. He suddenly seemed to discover that he was very human, almost boyish, like a very orderly greyish boy who had never been really young. But he liked him, and shook his hand warmly as he thanked him, and said he would be glad to go to dinner.

  Eden had no friends in New York, but he spent the afternoon happily wandering about. It was a brilliant day in mid-September. The tower-like skyscrapers and the breezy canyons of the streets fluttering bright flags—he did not know what the occasion was—exhilarated him. Life seemed very full, brimming with movement, adventure, poetry, singing in the blood, crying out to be written.

  Sitting in a tea room, the first lines of a new poem began to take form in his mind. Pushing his plate of cinnamon toast to one side, he jotted them down on the back of an envelope. A quiver of nervous excitement ran through him. He believed they were good. He believed the idea was good. He found that he wanted to discuss the poem with Alayne Archer, to read those singing first lines to her. He wanted to see her face raised to his with
that look of mingled penetration and sweet enthusiasm for his genius—well, she herself had used the word once; in fact, one of the reviewers of Under the North Star had used the word, so surely he might let it slide through his own mind now and again, like a stimulating draught. Genius. He believed he had a spark of the sacred fire, and it seemed to him that she, by her presence, the support of her admiration, had the power to fan it to a leaping flame.

  He tried to sketch her face on the envelope. He did not do so badly with the forehead, the eyes, but he could not remember her nose—rather a soft feature, he guessed—and when the mouth was added, instead of the look of a spring flower, gentle but defiant, that he had tried to achieve, he had produced a face of almost Dutch stolidity. Irritably he tore up the sketch and his poem with it. She might not be strictly beautiful, but she was not like that.

  That evening, in his hotel, he took a good deal of care with his dressing. His evening clothes were well fitting, and the waistcoat, of the newest English cut, very becoming. If it had not been for that Indian coat of tan, his reflection would have been very satisfying. Still, it made him look manlier. And he had a well-cut mouth. Girls had told him it was fascinating. He smiled and showed a row of gleaming teeth, then snapped his lips together. Good Lord! He was acting like a movie star! Or a dentifrice advertisement. Ogling, just that. If Renny could have seen him ogling himself in the glass, he would have knocked his block off. Perhaps it were better that genius (that word again!) should be encased in a wild-eyed, unkempt person. He scowled, put on his hat and coat, and turned out the light.

  Mr. Cory lived on Sixty-first Street, in an unpretentious house, set between two very pretentious ones. Eden found the rest of the guests assembled except one, an English novelist who arrived a few minutes later than himself. There were Mr. Cory; his wife; his daughter, a large-faced young woman with straight black shingled hair; a Mr. Gutweld, a musician; and a Mr. Groves, a banker, who it was soon evident was to accompany Mr. Cory on his trip to Canada; Alayne Archer; and two very earnest middle-aged ladies.