07 Jalna

by Mazo de La Roche

Nicholas made subterranean sounds of mirth that had in them a measure of relief, but he offered no explanation. Instead, he took her hand and drew her to her feet.

  “Come,” he said, “and I’ll show you my room. I expect you to visit me often there, and tell me all about New York, and I’ll tell you about London in the old days. I’m a regular fossil now, but if you’ll believe me, I was a gay fellow once.”

  He led the way to his room, heaving himself up the stairs by the hand railing. He installed her by the window, where she could enjoy the splendour of the autumn woods and where the light fell over her, bringing out the chestnut tints in her hair and the pearl-like pallor of her skin. It was so long since he had met a young woman of beauty and intelligence that the contact exhilarated him, made the blood quicken in his veins. Before he realized it, he was telling her incidents of his life of which he had not spoken for years. He even unearthed a photograph of his wife in a long-trained evening gown, and showed it to her. His face, massive and heavily lined, looked, as he recalled those bygone days, like a rock from which the sea has long receded, but which bears on its seamed and battered surface irrevocable evidence of the fury of past storms.

  He presented her, as a wedding present, with a silver bowl in which he had been accustomed to keep his pipes, first brightening it up with a silk handkerchief.

  “You are to keep roses in it now, my dear,” he said, and quite casually he put his fingers under her chin, raised her face, and kissed her. Alayne was touched by the gift, a little puzzled by a certain smiling masterfulness in the caress.

  A moment later Ernest Whiteoak appeared at the door. Alayne must now inspect his retreat. No, Nicholas was not wanted, just Alayne.

  “He intends to bore you with his melancholy annotating of Shakespeare. I warn you,” exclaimed Nicholas.

  “Nonsense,” said Ernest. “I just don’t want to feel utterly shelved. Don’t be a beast, Nick. Alayne is as much interested in me as she is in you; aren’t you, Alayne?”

  “She’s not interested in you at all,” retorted Nicholas, but she’s enthralled by my sweet discourse; aren’t you, Alayne?”

  They seemed to take pleasure in the mere pronouncing of her name; using it on every occasion.

  To Ernest’s room she was led then, and because of his brother’s gibe he at first would not speak of his hobby, contenting himself with showing her his watercolours, the climbing rose whose yellow flowers still spilled their fragrance across his windowsill, and the complaisant feline tricks of Sasha. But when Alayne showed an unmistakable interest in the annotation of Shakespeare and an unexpected knowledge of the text, his enthusiasm overflowed like Niagara in springtime. Two hours flew by, in which they established the intimacy of congenial tastes. Ernest’s thin cheeks were flushed; his blue eyes had become quite large and bright. He drummed the fingers of one hand incessantly on the table.

  So Meg found them when she came to carry Alayne away for an inspection of the house and garden. Eden was off somewhere with Renny, Meg explained, and Alayne had a sudden feeling of anger toward this brother who so arrogantly swept Eden from her side, and who was so casually polite to her himself.

  It was warm enough to have tea on the lawn, Meg announced, and when she and Alayne returned from their tour of the mass of overgrown lilacs, syringas, and guelder-rose trees that was called “the shrubbery,” and the sleepy kitchen garden where the rows of cabbages and celery and rank bed of parsley were flanked by scarlet sage and heavy-headed dahlias, they found that Rags had arranged the tea things on the wicker table. Some of the family were already disposed about it in deck chairs or on the grass, according to their years.

  Alayne’s eyes missed no detail of the scene before her: the emerald-green lawn lying in rich shadow, while the upper portions of the surrounding trees were bathed in lambent sunshine which so intensified their varying autumn hues that they had the unreal splendour of colours seen under water. Near the tea table Grandmother dozed in her purple velvet tea gown. Nicholas was stretched, half recumbent, playing idly with the ears of Nip, whose pointed muzzle was twitching expectantly toward the plates of cakes; Ernest stood courteously by his chair; on the grass sprawled bare-kneed Wake with a pair of, rabbits, and bony longlimbed Finch, whom she now saw for the first time. Eden, Piers, and Renny did not appear, but before the second pot of tea was emptied young Pheasant slipped into the scene, carrying a branch of scarlet maple leaves, which she laid across the knees of Nicholas.

  A mood of gentle hilarity possessed them all. As she ate cucumber sandwiches and cheese cakes, Alayne felt more in harmony with the life that was to be hers among this family. She was relieved by the absence of the three who did not join the party. With Eden away, she could more readily submerge herself in the family, explore the backwater of their relations with each other. In the case of Piers, she felt only relief from a presence that was at least covertly hostile. As for Renny, she could not make him out. She would need time for that. Just now his dominating personality, combined with his air of abstraction, puzzled and rather irritated her.

  Eden had told her that Renny did not like his poetry, that he did not like any poetry. She thought of him as counting endless processions of foals, calves, lambs, and young pigs, always with an eye on the market. She would have been surprised, could she have followed him to his bedroom that night, to find how gentle he was toward little Wake, who was tossing about, unable to sleep after the excitement of the day. Renny rubbed his legs and patted his back as a mother might have done. In fact, in his love for his little brother he combined the devotion of both father and mother. Meg was all grown-up sister.

  Wake, drowsy at last, curled up against Renny’s chest and murmured: “I believe I could go to sleep more quickly if we’d pretend we were somebody else, Renny, please.”

  “Do you? All right. Who shall we be? Living people or people out of the books? You say.”

  Wake thought a minute, getting sleepier with each tick of Renny’s watch beneath the pillow; then he breathed: “I think we’ll be Eden and Alayne.”

  Renny stifled a laugh. “All right. Which am I?”

  Wake considered again, deliciously drowsy, sniffing at the nice odour of tobacco, Windsor soap, and warm flesh that emanated from Renny

  “I think you’d better be Alayne,” he whispered.

  Renny, too, considered this transfiguration. It seemed difficult, but he said resignedly: “Very well. Fire away”

  There was silence for a space; then Wakefield whispered, twisting a button of Renny’s pyjamas: “You go first, Renny. Say something.”

  Renny spoke sweetly: “Do you love me, Eden?”

  Wake chuckled, then answered, seriously: “Oh, heaps. I’ll buy you anything you want. What would you like?”

  “I’d like a limousine, and an electric toaster, and—a feather boa.”

  “I’ll get them all first thing in the morning. Is there anything else you’d like, my girl?”

  “M—yes. I’d like to go to sleep.”

  “Now, see here, you can’t,” objected the pseudo-groom. “Ladies don’t pop straight off to sleep like that.”

  But apparently this lady did. The only response that Wakefield could elicit was a gentle but persistent snore.

  For a moment Wake was deeply hurt, but the steady rise and fall of Renny’s chest was soothing. He snuggled closer to him, and soon he too was fast asleep.

  XIV

  FINCH

  THE COMING of Alayne had made a deep and rather overwhelming impression on young Finch. She was unlike anyone he had ever met; she filled his mind with curiosity and tremulous admiration; he could not put the thought of her aside on that first night. Her face was between him and the dry pages over which he pored. He was driven to rise once in the middle of wrestling with a problem in algebra and creep halfway down the stairs, just to watch her for a few minutes through the open door of the drawing-room, where the family sat at bridge and backgammon. Her presence in the house seemed to him a most lovely and disturbing thin
g, like a sudden strain of music.

  He longed to touch her dress, which was of a material he could not remember having seen before, and of a colour he could not name. He longed to touch her hands, the flesh of which looked so delicate and yet so firm. As he crouched over his uncongenial tasks in the untidy bedroom, strange thoughts and visions blurred the dog’s-eared page before him. A chill breeze coming in at the window carried the sounds and scents of the late autumn countryside: the rustle of leaves that were losing their fresh resilience and becoming sapless and crisp; the scrape of two dead branches, one on the other, as though the oak tree to which they belonged strove to play a dirge for the dead summer; the fantastic tapping of a vine against the pane, dancing a skeleton dance to the eerie music of the oak; the smell of countless acres of land lying heavy and dank, stupefied by the approach of barrenness.

  What did it all mean? Why had he been put into this strange confusion of faces, voices, bewildering sounds of night and day? Who was there in the world to love him and care for him as Alayne loved and cared for Eden? No one, he was sure. He belonged to the lonely, fretful sounds which came in at the window rather than to warm human arms and clinging human lips.

  His mind dwelt on the thought of kissing the mouth of Eden’s wife. He was submerged in an abyss of dreaming, his head sunk on his clenched hands. A second self, white and wraithlike, glided from his breast and floated before him in a pale greenish ether. He watched it with detached exultation in its freedom. It often freed itself from his body at times like these, sometimes disappearing almost instantly, at others floating near him as though beckoning him to follow. Now it moved face downward like one swimming, and another dim shape floated beside it. He pressed his knuckles into his eyes, drawing fiery colours from the lids, trying to see, yet afraid to see, the face of the other figure. But neither of the floating figures had a discernible face. One, he knew, belonged to him because it had emerged from his own body, but the other, fantastically floating, whence came it? Had it risen from the body of the girl in the drawing-room below, torn from her by the distraught questing of his own soul? What was she? What was he? Why were they here, all the warmblooded hungry people, in this house called Jalna?

  What was Jalna? The house, he knew very well, had a soul. He had heard it sighing, moving about in the night. He believed that from the churchyard sometimes the spirits of his father and his father’s wives, his grandfather, and even the dead infant Whiteoaks, congregated under this roof to refresh themselves, to drink of the spirit of Jalna, that spirit which was one with the thin and fine rain that now began to fall. They pressed close to him, mocking him—the grandfather in hussar’s uniform, the infants in long pale swaddling clothes.

  His temples throbbed, his cheeks burned, his hands were clammy and very cold. He rose, letting his books fall to the floor, and went to the window. He knelt there and leaned across the sill, holding his hands out into the rain, in an attitude of prayer, his thin wrists projecting from the frayed edges of his sleeves.

  By degrees peace descended on him, but he did not want to look back into the room. He thought of the nights when he had shared the bed with Piers. He had always been longing for the time when he might sleep in peace, free from his brother’s tormenting. Now he felt that he would be glad of Piers’s wholesome presence to protect him from his own thoughts.

  Why did God not protect him? Finch believed desperately and yet gloriously in God. During the Scripture study at school, while other boys were languishing in their seats, his eyes were riveted on the pages that seemed to burn with the grandeur and terror of God. The words of Jesus, the thought of that lonely figure of an inspired young man, were beautiful to him, but it was the Old Testament that shook his soul. When the time came for questions and examinations in Scripture, Finch was so incoherent, so afraid of disclosing his real feelings, that he usually stood at the foot of the class.

  “A queer devil, Finch Whiteoak,” was the verdict of his schoolfellows, “not in it with his brothers.” For Renny’s athletic prowess was still remembered; Eden’s tennis, his running, his prize-winning in English literature and languages; Piers as captain of the Rugby team. Finch did nothing well. As he travelled back and forth to school in the train, slouching in a corner of the seat, his cap with the school badge pulled over his eyes, he wondered, with a bitterness unusual at his age, what he would do with his life. He seemed fitted for nothing in particular. No business or profession of which he had ever heard awakened any response of inclination in him. He would have liked to stay at home and work with Piers, but he quailed before the thought of a life subject to his brother’s tyranny.

  Sometimes he dreamed of standing in the pulpit of a vast, dim cathedral, such as he had seen only in pictures, and swaying a multitude by his burning eloquence. He, Finch Whiteoak, in a long white surplice and richly embroidered stole—a bishop—an archbishop, the very head of the Church, next to God Himself. But the dream always ended by the congregation’s fleeing from the cathedral, a panicstricken mob; for he had unwittingly let them have a glimpse of his own frightened, craven soul, howling like a poor hound before the terror of God.

  “Wilt thou break a leaf driven to and fro? and wilt thou pursue the dry stubble?”

  He was growing quieter now as he hung across the sill, letting the fine mist of rain moisten his hands and head. Below, on the lawn, a bright square of light fell from a window of the drawing-room. Someone came and stood at the window, throwing the shadow of a woman into the bright rectangle. Which of them? Meg, Pheasant, Alayne? Alayne, he felt sure. There was something in the poise... Again he thought of her lips, of kissing them. He drew in his hands, wet with rain, and pressed them against his eyeballs. “For thou writest bitter things against me, and makest me to possess the iniquities of my youth.” Why could he remember these torturing texts, when nothing else would stay in his head? “Make me to hear joy and gladness; that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice.” He pressed his fingers closer, and there began going through his brain things that a Scottish labourer on the farm had told. The man had formerly been a factory hand in Glasgow. Finch remembered an endless jigging song he had sung in a kind of whisper, that had ribald words. He remembered a scene of which he had been an undiscovered witness.

  It had been in the pine grove, the last remnant of the primeval forest thereabout. This grove was as dark as a church at twilight, and was hidden in the heart of a great sunny wood of silver birches, maples, and oak, full of bird song and carpeted with glossy wintergreen leaves, which in springtime were starred with windflowers and star-of-Bethlehem and tiny purple orchids. There was little bird song in the pine grove, and no flowers, but the air in there was always charged with the whisperings and the pungent scent of pine needles. The deeply shaded aisles between the trees were slippery with them, and there what little sunshine filtered in was richly yellow.

  It was a place of deep seclusion. Finch liked nothing so well as to spend a Saturday morning there by himself, and give himself up to the imaginings that were nearly always free and beautiful among the pines.

  He had gone there early on that morning to escape Meg, who had wanted him to do some disagreeable task about the house. He had heard her calling and calling as he had run across the lawn and dived into the shrubbery. He had heard her call to Wake, asking if he had seen him. He had stretched his long legs across the meadow and the pasture, leaped the stream, and disappeared from the sight of all into the birch wood. His pulses had been throbbing and his heart leaping with joy in his freedom. Among the gay, light-foliaged trees he had passed, eager for the depth and solitude of the pines, which with an air of gentle secrecy they seemed to guard. But he had found that he was not alone. In the dimmest recess, where the grove dipped into a little hollow, he had discovered Renny standing with a woman in his arms. He was kissing her with a certain fierce punctiliousness on the mouth, on the neck, while she caressed him with slavish tenderness. While Finch stood staring, they had parted, she smoothing the strands of her long hair
as she hurried away, Renny looking after her for a space, waving his hand to her when she looked back over her shoulder and then sauntering with bent head toward home.

  Finch had never been able to find out who that woman was, though he had looked eagerly in the faces of all the women he had met for a long time. He had even gone to the pine grove and lain there motionless for hours, hoping, yet fearing, that she and Renny would return, his heart beating expectantly at every sound; but they had never come. He often gazed with envious curiosity into Renny’s lean red face, wondering what thoughts were in his head. Piers had observed once to him that women always “fell” for Renny. He could understand why, and he reflected forlornly that they would never fall for him.

  He heard Wakefield calling to him plaintively from his bed: “Finch, Finch! Come here, please!”

  He went down the hallway, passing Meg’s door, which was covered by a heavy chenille curtain that gave an air of cosy seclusion to her sanctum.

  “Well?” he asked, putting his head into Renny’s room, where Wake sat up in bed, flushed and bright-eyed in the yellow lamplight

  “Oh, Finch, I can’t sleep. My legs feel like cotton wool. When do you think Renny’ll come?”

  “How can I tell?” Finch answered, gruffly. “You go to sleep. That’s all nonsense about your legs. They’re no more cotton wool than mine are.”

  “Oh, Finch, please come in. Don’t leave me alone! Just come and talk for a little while. Just a minute, please.”

  Finch came in and sat down on the foot of the bed. He took a lone, somewhat dishevelled cigarette wrapped in silver paper from his pocket, unwrapped and lighted it.

  Wake watched him, the strained look of loneliness passing from his little face.

  “Give me a puff or two,” he begged, “just a few puffs, please, Finch.”

  “No,” growled Finch, “you’ll make yourself sick. You’re not allowed.”

  “Neither are you.”