They had now entered the pine grove. A shadow had fallen over the brightness of the morning like the wing of a great bird. In here there was a cathedral hush, broken only by the distant calling of crows. They sat down on a fallen tree, on the trunk of which grew patches of moss of a peculiarly vivid green, a miniature forest in itself.
“I don’t believe I’d mind,” said Finch, “going about with a fiddle and playing tunes at the weddings of country people. It seems to me I’d like it.” Then he added, with a shade of bitterness in his tone, “I guess I’ve just the right amount of brains for that.”
“I do not see why you should speak of yourself in that way,” exclaimed Alayne. “You have a very interesting face.” She made the statement with conviction, though she had just discovered the fact.
Finch made a sardonic grimace that was oddly reminiscent of Uncle Nicholas. “I dare say it’s interesting, and I shouldn’t be surprised if old Fiddler Jock’s was interesting, especially when it was frozen stiff.”
She felt almost repelled by the boy’s expression, but her interest in him was steadily growing.
“Perhaps you are musical? Have you ever had lessons?”
“No. They’d think it a waste of money. And I haven’t the time for practising. It takes all my time to keep from the foot of the form.”
He seemed determined to present himself in an unprepossessing light to her. And this after all the anxious care over his toilet. Perhaps the truth was that, having seen a gleam of sympathy in her eyes, he was hungry for more of it. But it was difficult to account for the reactions of Finch Whiteoak.
Alayne saw in him a boy treated with clumsy stupidity by his family. She saw herself fiercely taking up cudgels for him. She was determined that he should have music lessons if her influence could bring them about. She drew him on to talk, and he lay on the ground, sifting the pine needles through his fingers and giving his confidence more freely than he had ever given it before. But even while he talked with boyish eagerness, his mind more than once escaped its leash and ran panting after strange visions. Himself, alone with her in this dark mysterious place, embracing her with ecstasy, not with the careless passion of Renny’s caressing of the strange woman. After one of these excursions of the mind he would draw himself up sharply and try to look into her eyes with the same expression of friendly candour which she gave him.
As they were returning to the house and Alayne’s thoughts were flying back to Eden, they came upon a group in the orchard consisting of Piers and several farm labourers, who, under his supervision, were preparing a number of barrels of apples for shipment. Piers, with a piece of chalk in his sunburned hand, was going about marking the barrels with the number of their grade. He pretended not to notice the approach of his brother and Alayne, but when he could no longer ignore them he muttered a sulky “Good morning,” and turned to one of the labourers with some directions about carting the apples to the station.
Finch led Alayne from barrel to barrel with a selfconsciously possessive air, knowing that the farm hands were regarding them with furtive curiosity. He explained the system of grading to her, bringing for comparison apples from the different barrels. He asked her to test the flavour of the most perfect specimen he could find, glossy, red, and flawless as a drop of dew.
“Mind that you replace that apple, Finch,” said Piers curtly in passing. “You should know better than to disturb apples after they are packed. They’ll be absolutely rattling about by the time they reach Montreal.” He took a hammer from one of the men and began with deafening blows to “head in” a barrel.
Finch noticed Alayne’s discomposure, and his own colour rose angrily as he did as he was bid. When they had left the orchard Alayne asked: “Do you think Piers dislikes me?”
“No. It’s just his way. He’s got a beastly way with him. I don’t suppose he dislikes me, but sometimes—” He could not finish what he had been going to say. One couldn’t tell Alayne the things Piers did.
Alayne continued reflectively:
“And his wife—I just noticed her a moment ago disappearing into the shrubbery when she saw us approach. I am afraid she does not approve of me either.”
“Look here,” cried Finch, “Pheasant’s shy. She doesn’t know what to say to you.” But in his heart he believed that both Piers and Pheasant were jealous of Alayne.
He parted with her at the front door and went himself to the side entrance, for he was afraid of meeting his sister. He entered a little washroom next the kitchen—which served as a sort of downstairs lavatory for the brothers—to wash his hands. The instant he opened the door he discovered Piers already there, but it was not possible to retreat, for Piers had seen him. He was washing before going to the station with the fruit. His healthy face, still red from the towel, took on an unpleasant sneer.
“Well,” he observed, “of all the asses I’ve ever known! The suit—the tie—the hair—good Lord! Has she taken you on as her dancing partner? Or what is your particular capacity? Pheasant and I want to know.”
“Let me alone,” growled Finch, moving toward the basin and twitching up his cuffs. “Somebody has to be decent to the girl, I guess.”
Piers, drying his hands, moved close to him, surveying him jocularly.
“The tie, the hair, ‘the skin you love to touch,’” he chuckled. “You are all the toilet advertisements rolled into one, aren’t you?”
Finch, breathing heavily, went on lathering his hands.
Piers assumed the peculiarly irritating smile characteristic of Mr. Wragge.
“I do ‘ope,” he said, unctuously, “that the young lidy appreciates all your hefforts to be doggish, sir.”
Goaded beyond bearing, Finch wheeled, and slapped a handful of soapy water full in his brother’s face. A moment later Renny, entering the washroom, found young Finch sprawling on the floor, the birthday tie ruined by a trickle of blood from his nose.
“What’s this?” demanded the eldest Whiteoak, sternly looking first at the recumbent figure, then at the erect, threatening one.
“He’s too damned fresh,” returned Piers. “I was chaffing him about dressing up as though he were going to a party when he was escorting Eden’s wife to the bush, and he threw some dirty water in my face, so I knocked him down.”
Renny took in the boy’s costume with a grin, then he gently prodded him with his boot.
“Get up,” he ordered, “and change out of that suit before it’s mussed up.”
When Finch had gone, he turned to Piers and asked: “Where is Eden this morning?”
“Oh, he’s writing in the summerhouse, with a few sprays of lilies of the valley on the table beside him. Pheasant peeked in and saw him. I expect it’s another masterpiece.”
Renny snorted, and the two went out together.
XVI
“IN THE PLACE WHERE THE TREE FALLETH”
ALAYNE found Eden in the summerhouse, a vine-smothered, spiderish retreat, with a very literary-looking pipe in his mouth, his arms folded across his chest, and a thoughtful frown indenting his brow.
“May I come?” she breathed, fearing to disturb him, yet unable to endure the separation any longer.
He smiled an assent, gripping the pipe between his teeth.
“Have you begun the—you know what?”
“I do not know what.”
“The n-o-v-e-l,” she spelled.
He shook his head. “No; but I’ve written a corking thing. Come in and hear.”
“A poem! I am so glad you are really beginning to write again. It is the first, you know, since we have been married, and I was beginning to be afraid that instead of being an inspiration—”
“Well, listen to this and tell me whether I’m the better or worse for being married.”
“Before you begin, Eden, I should just like to remark the way the sunlight coming in through those vines dapples your hair and cheek with gold.”
“Yes, darling, and if you had been here all morning you might have remarked how the inse
ct life took to me. They let themselves down from every corner and held a sort of County Fair on me, judging spider stallions, fat ladybugs’ race, and earwig baby show. In each case the first, second, third, and consolation prize was a bite of me.”
“You poor lamb,” said Alayne, settling herself on the bench beside him, her head on his shoulder. “How you suffer for your art!” She searched his face for the mark of a bite, and, really finding one on his temple, she kissed it tenderly.
“Now for the poem,” be exclaimed. He read it, and it gained not a little from his mellow voice and expressive, mobile face. Alayne was somewhat disconcerted to find that she had no longer the power to regard his writing judicially. She now saw it coloured by the atmosphere of Jalna, tempered by the contacts of their life together. She asked him to read it again, and this time she closed her eyes that she might not see him, but every line of his face and form was before her still, as though her gaze were fixed on him.
“It is splendid,” she said, and she took it from him and read it to herself. She was convinced that it was splendid, but her conviction did not have the same austere clarity that it had carried when she was in New York and he an unknown young poet in Canada.
After that Eden spent each morning in the summerhouse, not seeming to mind the increasing dampness and chill as the autumn drew on. The Whiteoaks seemed to be able to endure an unconscionable amount of either heat or cold. Alayne began to be accustomed to these extremes of temperature, to an evening spent before the blistering heat of the drawing-room fire, and a retiring to a bedroom so chill that her fingers grew numb before she was undressed.
From the summerhouse issued a stream of graceful, carelessly buoyant lyrics like young birds. Indeed, Piers with brutal jocularity remarked to Renny that Eden was like a sparrow, hatching out an egg a day in his lousy nest under the vines.
It became the custom for Eden, Alayne, Ernest, and Nicholas to gather in the latter’s room every afternoon to hear what Eden had composed that morning. The four became delightfully intimate in this way, and they frequently—Nicholas making his leg an excuse for this—had Rags bring their tea there. As Grandmother could not climb the stairs, Alayne felt joyously certain of no intrusions from her. The girl found almost past endurance the old lady’s way of breaking her cake into her tea and eating it from a spoon with the most aggravating snortlings and gurglings. It was pleasant to pour the tea in Nicholas’s room for the three men from an old blue Coalport teapot that wore a heathenish woolly “cosy”; and after tea Nicholas would limp to the piano and play from Mendelssohn, Mozart, or Liszt.
Alayne never forgot those afternoons, the late sunshine touching with a mellow glow the massive head and bent shoulders of Nicholas at the piano, Ernest shadowy in a dim corner with Sasha, Eden beside her, strong in his shapely youth. She grew to know the two elderly men as she knew no other member of Eden’s family except poor young Finch. They seemed close to her; she grew to love them.
Piers, when Meg told him of these meetings, was disgusted. They made him sick with their poetry and music. He pictured his two old uncles gloating imaginatively over Alayne’s sleek young womanhood. Eden, he thought, was a good-for-nothing idler—a sponger. Meggie herself did not want to join the quartette in Uncle Nick’s room. It was not the sort of thing she cared about. But she did rather resent the air of intimacy which was apparent between the uncles and Alayne, an intimacy which she had not achieved with the girl. Not that she had made any great effort to do so. Persistent effort, either mental or physical, was distasteful to Meg, yet she could, when occasion demanded, get her own way by merely exerting her power of passive stubbornness. But passive stubbornness will not win a friend, and as a matter of fact Meg did not greatly desire the love of Alayne. She rather liked her, though she found her hard to talk to—“terribly different”—and she told her grandmother that Alayne was a “typical American girl.” “I won’t have it,” Grandmother had growled, getting very red, and Meg had hastened to add, “But she’s very agreeable, Gran, and what a blessing it is that she has money!”
To be sure, there was no sign of an excess of wealth. Alayne dressed charmingly, but with extreme simplicity. She had shown no disposition to shower gifts upon the family, yet the family, with the exception of Renny and Piers, were convinced that she was a young woman of fortune. Piers did not believe it, simply because he did not want to believe it; Renny had cornered Eden soon after his return and had wrested from him the unromantic fact that he had married a girl of the slenderest means, and had come home for a visit while he “looked about him.” And so strong was the patriarchal instinct in the eldest Whiteoak that Eden and Alayne might have lived on at Jalna for the rest of their lives without his doing more than order Eden to help Piers on the estate.
On one occasion Eden did spend a morning in the orchard grading apples, but Piers, examining the last of the consignment and finding the grading erratic, to say the least of it, had leaped in a fury into his Ford and rushed to the station, where he had spent the rest of the day in a railway car, wrenching the tops from barrels and regrading them. There had been a family row after this, with Renny and Pheasant on the side of Piers, and the rest of the family banded to protect Eden. They had the grace to wait till Alayne went to bed before beginning it. She had gone to her room early that night, feeling something electric in the air, and no sooner had her door closed than the storm burst forth below.
She had been brought up in an atmosphere of a home peaceful as a nest of doves, and this sudden transplanting into the noisy raillery and hawklike dissensions of the Whiteoaks bewildered her. Up in her room she quaked at the thought of her oddness among these people. When Eden came up an hour later he seemed exhilarated rather than depressed by the squall. He sat on the side of the bed, smoking endless cigarettes, and told her what this one had said and how he had squelched that one, and how Gran had thrown her velvet bag in Renny’s face; and Alayne listened, languid in the reassurance of his love. He even sat down at his desk before he came to bed and wrote a wild and joyous poem about a gypsy girl, and came back to the bed and read it loudly and splendidly, and Nip, in Uncle Nick’s room across the hall, started up a terrific yapping.
One of Eden’s cigarette stubs had burned a hole in the quilt.
Lying awake long afterward, while Eden slept peacefully beside her, Alayne wondered if she could be the same girl who had laboured over her father’s book and paid decorous little visits to her aunts up the Hudson. She wondered, with a feeling of apprehension, when Eden was going to bestir himself to get a position. After the affair of the apples he spent more and more time in the summerhouse, for he had begun another long narrative poem. Proof sheets of his new book had arrived from New York, and they demanded their share of his time.
Alayne, who was supposed to be the inspiration of this fresh wellspring of poetry, found that during the fierce hours of composition the most helpful thing she could do for the young poet was to keep as far away from him as possible. She explored every field and grove of Jalna, followed the stream in all its turnings, and pressed her way through thicket and bramble to the deepest part of the ravine. She came to love the great unwieldy place, of which the only part kept in order was the farm run by Piers. Sometimes Finch or Wakefield accompanied her, but more often she was alone.
On one of the last days of autumn she came upon Pheasant, sitting with a book in the orchard. It was one of those days so still that the very moving of the sphere seemed audible. The sun was a faint blur of red in the hazy heaven, and in the north the smoke of a distant forest fire made a sullen gesture. This conflagration far away seemed to be consuming the very corpse of summer, which, being dead indeed, felt no pain in the final effacement.
Pheasant was sitting with her back against the bole of a gnarled old apple tree, the apples of which had not been gathered but were lying scattered on the grass about her. The ciderish smell of their decay was more noticeable here than the acrid smell of smoke. The young girl had thrown down her book and, with head
tilted back and eyes closed, was more than half asleep. Alayne stood beside her, looking down at her, but Pheasant did not stir, exposing her face to the gaze of the almost stranger with the wistful unconcern of those who slumber. It seemed to Alayne that she had never before really seen this child—for she was little more than a child. With her cropped brown head, softly parted lips, and childish hands with their limply upturned palms, she was a different being from the secretive, pale girl always on her guard whom Alayne met at table and in the drawing-room at cards. Then she seemed quite able to take care of herself, even faintly hostile in her attitude. Now, in this relaxed and passive pose, she seemed to ask for compassion and tenderness.
As Alayne was about to turn away, Pheasant opened her eyes, and, finding Alayne’s eyes looking down into them with an expression of friendliness, she smiled as though she could not help herself.
“Hullo,” she said, with boyish brevity. “You caught me asleep.”
“I hope I did not waken you.”
“Oh, I was only cat-napping. This air makes you drowsy.”
“May I sit down beside you?” Alayne asked, with a sudden desire to get better acquainted with the young girl.
“Of course.” Her tone was indifferent, but not unfriendly. She picked up her hat, which was half full of mushrooms, and displayed them. “I was gathering these,” she said, “for Piers’s breakfast. He can eat this many all himself.”
“But aren’t you afraid you will pick poison ones? I should be.”
Pheasant smiled scornfully. “I’ve been gathering mushrooms all my life. These are all alike. The orchard kind. Except this dear little pink one. I shall give it to Wake. It’s got a funny smoky taste and he likes it.” She twirled the pink mushroom in her slim brown fingers. “In the pine woods I get lots of morels. Piers likes them, too, only not so well. Piers thinks it’s wonderful the way I can always find them. He has them for breakfast almost every morning.”
Books 5-8: Whiteoak Heritage / Whiteoak Brothers / Jalna / Whiteoaks of Jalna Page 74