07 Jalna

by Mazo de La Roche

  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 insect 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 insp
iration 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.”

  Everything was in terms of Piers. Alayne asked:

  “What is your book? Not so interesting as the mushrooms?”

  “It’s very good. It belongs to Piers. One of Jules Verne’s.”

  Alayne had hoped that they might talk about the book, but she had read nothing of Jules Verne. She asked instead:

  “Have you known Piers many years? I suppose you have, for you were neighbours, weren’t you?”

  Pheasant stiffened. She did not answer for a moment, but bent forward plucking at the coarse orchard grass. Then she said in a low voice, “I suppose Eden has told you about me.”

  “Nothing except that you were a neighbour’s daughter.”

  “Come, now. Don’t hedge. The others did, then. Meg—Gran—Uncle Nick?”

  “No one,” answered Alayne firmly, “has told me anything about you.”

  “Humph. They’re a funny lot. I made sure they’d tell you first thing.” She mused a moment, biting a blade of grass, and then added: “I suppose they didn’t want to tell you anything so shocking. You’re so frightfully proper, and all that.”

  “Am I?” returned Alayne, rather nettled.

  “Well, aren’t you?”

  “I had not thought about it.”

  “It was one of the first things I noticed about you.”

  “I hope it hasn’t turned you against me,” said Alayne, lightly.

  Pheasant reflected, and said she did not think so.

  “Then what is it?” persisted Alayne, her tone still light, but her face becoming very serious.

  Pheasant picked up one of the misshapen apples of the old tree and balanced it on her palm.

  “Oh, you’re different; that’s the principal thing. You don’t seem to know anything about real life.”

  Alayne could have laughed aloud at the answer, that this ignorant little country girl should doubt her experience of life. Yet it was true enough that she did not know life as they in this backwater knew it, where no outside contacts modified the pungent vitality of their relations with each other.

  She sat a moment in thought and then she said, gently:

  “You are mistaken if you think that I should be easily upset by anything you would care to tell me. Not that I want to urge your confidence.”

  “Oh, it’s not a matter of confidence,” exclaimed Pheasant. “Everybody in the world knows it but you, and of course you’ll hear it sooner or later, so I may as well tell you.”

  She laid the apple on the grass, and, clasping her ankles in her brown hands, sat upright, with the air of a precocious child, and announced: “I’m illegitimate—what Gran in her old-fashioned way calls a bastard. There you are.” A bright colour dyed her cheeks, but she flung out the words with pathetic bravado.

  “I am sorry,” murmured Alayne, “but you do not suppose that that will affect my feelings for you, do you?”

  “It does most people’s.” The answer came in a low husky voice, and she went on hurriedly: “My father was the only child of an English colonel. His parents doted on him. He was the delight of their old age. My mother was a common country girl and she left me on their doorstep with a note, exactly the way they do in books. They took me in and kept me, but it broke the old people’s hearts. They died not long after. My father—”

  “Did you live with him?” Alayne tried to make it easier for her by a tone of unconcern, but her eyes were filled with tears of pity for the child who in such quaint phraseology— “the delight of their old age,” indeed—told of the tragedy of her birth.

  “Yes, till I was married. He just endured me. But I expect the sight of me was a constant reminder—of what he’d lost, I mean.”

  “Lost?”

  “Yes, Meg Whiteoak. He’d been engaged to her, and she broke it off when I appeared on the scene. That’s why she has that glassy stare for me. All the Whiteoaks were against the marriage, of course. It was adding insult to injury, you see.”

  “Oh, my dear.”

  The significance of looks and chance phrases that had puzzled her became apparent. She was pierced by a vivid pain at the thought of all the unmerited suffering of Pheasant.

  “You have had rather a hard time, but surely that is all over. Meg cannot go on blaming you for what is not your fault, and I think the others are fond of you.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.”

  “I should be if you would let me.” Her hand moved across the grass to Pheasant’s. Their fingers intertwined.

  “All right. But I warn you, I’m not a bit proper.”

  “Perhaps I am not so proper as you think.” Their fingers were still warmly clutched. “By the way, why doesn’t Piers like me? I feel that it will not be altogether simple to be your friend when he is so—well, distant.”

  “He is jealous of you—for my sake, I think. I just think that, mind you; he’s never said so. But I think
he finds it pretty beastly that you should be thought so much of and me so little, and that you should be made so welcome and me so unwelcome, when after all we’re just two girls, except that you’re rich and I’m poor, and you’re legitimate and I’m up against the bar sinister, and Piers has always taken such an interest in the place and worked on it, and Eden only cares for poetry and having his own way.”

  Alayne was scarlet. Out of the tangle of words one phrase menaced her. She said, with a little gasp: “Whatever made you think I was rich? My dear child, I am poor—poor. My father was a college professor. You know they are poor enough, in all conscience.”

  “You may be what you call poor, but you’re rich to us,” answered Pheasant, sulkily.

  “Now listen,” continued Alayne, sternly. “My father left me five thousand dollars insurance, and a bungalow which I sold for fourteen thousand, which makes nineteen thousand dollars. That is absolutely all. So you see how rich I am.”

  “It sounds a lot,” said Pheasant, stolidly, and their hands parted and they both industriously plucked at the grass.

  The significance of other allusions was now made plain to Alayne. She frowned as she asked: “What put such an idea into your head, Pheasant? Surely the rest of the family are not suffering from that hallucination.”

  “We all thought you were frightfully well off. I don’t know exactly how it came about—someone said—Gran said—no, Meg said it was—” She stopped short, suddenly pulled up by a tardy caution.

  “Who said what?” insisted Alayne.

  “I think it was Uncle Nick who said—”

  “Said what?”

  “That it, was a good thing that Eden—oh, bother, I can’t remember what he said. What does it matter, anyhow?”

  Alayne had to subdue a feeling of helpless anger before she answered, quietly: “It does not matter. But I want you not to have the notion that I am rich. It is ridiculous. It puts me in a false position. You knew that I worked for my living before I married Eden. Why did you think I did that?”