At this reference to Wake’s future, Meg drew a deep sigh and sat down. Nicholas was scowling at her, his eyes almost closed.
“Sorry, Uncle Nick,” she said. Patience giggled. Maurice winked at Patience.
Every head was bent. Nicholas muttered:
“For what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly thankful. For Christ’s sake. Amen.”
Adeline formed the words of the grace in unison with Nicholas. She said a loud Amen. Renny stood and swept the carving knife along the steel. He cast a swift look about the table. The face of his grandmother, of Eden, of Alayne flashed into his mind.
“It’s a pity,” he said, “that we’re not all here!”
“Yes, yes,” agreed Ernest. “How Mamma enjoyed the dark meat of turkey! And that looks like a particularly delicious one.”
“And the stuffing,” added Nicholas. “I’m very fond of it, too.’’
“She was not the only one,” said Renny. “There was Eden. He should be here.”
“Please don’t remind me of Eden now!” said Meg. “It is too sad.”
Piers stared straight in front of him. Pheasant dropped her head and a dark colour dyed her neck.
Mooey said — “I forget Uncle Eden.”
“Hush!” said Meg, frowning at him.
“I don’t forget him,” said Patience. “I often remember him.”
“Do you really?” said Renny, smiling at her. “Do you really?”
“That bird will be cold,” observed Nicholas, his chin in his hand.
Wakefield put in — “Finch is looking very hungry.”
The spell was broken. Renny carved the turkey with expedition. Everyone began to talk. They agreed that Mrs. Wragge had never cooked a better dinner. Her gravy had never been smoother, richer, her cranberry jelly never more perfectly set, her cauliflower whiter or enfolded in a more creamy sauce. The plum pudding was so rich that it could hold itself together and no more. The brandy flared, reflected in the eyes of those about the table. The children all had some. Even baby Philip had his share from Pheasant’s spoon. They would have sat long over the dessert, the nuts, and raisins but the children were impatient for the Tree.
As soon as they had left the table Piers mysteriously disappeared and Wakefield announced that Santa Claus would soon be there. Finch was once more established in his chair by the fire, left to smoke a cigarette in quiet while the others trooped into the library. He could hear the resonant tones of Santa Claus calling out the children’s names, the joyful cries of the children as they opened their packages. He could hear Wake’s laughter, Renny’s chaffing of Santa Claus, Meg’s and Pheasant’s higher tones. It was all as it should be. He went softly to the door of the drawing room from where he could see the tree, starry with lighted candles, powdered with silver-dust. He had a glimpse of Santa Claus’s red cap and white beard, of Renny with Philip in his arms. He watched unseen, then went back to his chair. His illness was over, he felt. Every day, from now on, he would come downstairs.
Meg came carrying a large flat book that looked like a scrapbook, and a number of other packages.
“These are all for you,” she said, “but I shall give you the book first as it’s the most important.”
He looked at the packages embarrassed.
“But I haven’t a present for anyone,” he said.
“As though that mattered! Do look at the book!”
He took it in his hands and opened it.
“Who is it from?” he asked suspiciously.
“Can’t you guess?”
His thin cheeks coloured. He laid the book on one side. “I think I’ll open the packages first.”
He was pleased, he was touched, by their thought for him. The ties, the gloves, the cigarette box, the pullover. They were just what he wanted, he said. His brothers and uncles came in to see him open his presents, except Piers who had again disappeared. Pheasant stayed behind with the children.
“Do look at the book!” urged Meg.
Finch took it up and began to examine the newspaper cuttings pasted in it. The print was blurred before his eyes. He looked up at the faces above him. “I haven’t my glasses,” he said. “I can’t read without them.”
“Do run and fetch his glasses, Wake,” said Meg.
“No. I’ll read it aloud to him. Is it something nice? Is it perhaps something about his playing?” Wake pretended not to know although Meg had already told him about the book. He began to read, in rather a pompous tone, an article on Finch’s playing, from a French musical journal. Wakefield read the French carefully. The others listened attentively to take in the sense.
Finch listened quietly at first, with bent head. Then the words and all that they implied began to beat like hammers on his brain. The blood surged to his head. How could Sarah have done this horrible thing to him? How could the others stand about him, tormenting him? He felt that he could scarcely breathe. But he got up steadily and took two strides to Wakefield. He took the book from his hands and laid it on the leaping flames of the fire. He turned to Meg.
“This,” he said, “is what I think of it. Tell her.”
He sat down in his grandmother’s chair and looked defiantly at them.
“Oh no, not that!” cried Meg. “Not after all her trouble!”
She made as though to rescue the book from the fire.
“Let it alone!” said Finch hoarsely. He took the poker from the hearth and poked the book down among the flames. It looked bright and new, as though the fire could not harm it.
Wakefield came and sat on the arm of Finch’s chair and said quietly — “All right, old man. Perhaps it’s best to burn it. You don’t need to be told how you can play. Just put everything, but getting well, out of your mind.”
Renny said to Maurice — “Sarah is a stupid woman. No one but a stupid woman would have done such a thing. I stick to that.”
“I feel sorry for the poor girl.”
“I don’t. She simply refuses to be shaken off.”
“Well, after all, she loves him.”
“Does she! I doubt it. I think she loves only herself.”
“She thinks you are against her.”
“So she has told me.”
Maurice gave him a significant look. “You know it is to your advantage to be friends with her.”
He answered grimly — “I know it only too well.”
Ernest and Nicholas showed their disapproval of Finch’s actions by turning their backs on him and talking in low tones. Nicholas lighted his pipe and settled down to examine all the Christmas cards that had come to the house. He had Rags bring a small table and he spread them out on it. Ernest read the first page of Lost Horizon, sent to him by Alayne. He was glad that he had sent her those dainty handkerchiefs.
Meg went back to the children, passing Piers in the doorway.
“Meggie!” called Wakefield sharply and, when she returned, gave her a look that said — “Please don’t tell Piers what has just happened!”
She pouted a little, for she had wanted to tell Piers, and passed on. Wakefield went to the wood basket where, among smooth logs of silver birch, a grotesquely shaped pine root lay. He placed it on the burning book and said, smiling at Finch:
“So — that’s the end of that!”
Piers came straight to them.
“How do you feel?” he asked Finch.
“Splendid!” answered Wakefield for him. “He’ll be a new man in a week.”
Finch sat drumming his fingers on the arms of the chair. He felt excited, almost exhilarated. He felt that he had, by his act, cut himself off definitely from Sarah, before them all. The burning of those collected references to his playing gave him a new power of resistance. He watched the flames darting upward about the pine root, fed by the kindling of the book beneath.
Suddenly he saw that the resinous root had been the home of a colony of ants. Out of every crevice they came running in terror. From every spongy chamber their minute black bodies emerged, flyin
g from the terror of fire.
“Look!” he cried. “Look — the ants! Take it off!”
Now the forerunners of the insects discovered a projecting arm of the root which touched the side of the hearth. Along this they led the way, the black army following them in dense columns, their panic subsiding as they realized there was escape.
The surprised grin on Piers’s face turned to a frown. He snatched up the hearth brush and began to sweep the ants back onto the glowing coals. Wakefield gave a whistle of dismay.
Finch leapt up and caught Piers’s arm.
“You can’t do that!” he shouted. “Don’t! It’s horrible!”
The army of ants, regardless of the fate that had overtaken their first detachment, rushed with all speed from the flames behind them. They began to spread themselves over the hearth and onto the rug.
“You young fool!” said Piers. “Do you want them all over the room?”
“But you can’t burn them alive! It’s horrible!” Finch struggled to wrench the brush from Piers’s hand.
Wakefield exclaimed — “Never mind, Piers! Let them come! Remember St. Francis!”
“What’s up?” demanded Renny.
Maurice and Nicholas shouted to Piers to brush back the ants.
“Couldn’t we get a dustpan,” said Ernest, “and gather them up?”
Piers pushed Finch into his chair. He squatted solidly before the hearth and, as the ants reached it, brushed them back onto the coals. Even though he did, some escaped and hid themselves in the rug or among the birch logs.
Finch’s face was distorted. He got up and said, in a shaking voice, to Piers:
“It isn’t necessary! It was brutal!” He was ghastly pale.
Wakefield took him by the arm and said soothingly — “Come and lie down for a bit. You’re tired.”
Finch jerked himself away and swiftly left the room. He almost ran up the first flight of stairs. The din of the children with drums and horns pursued him. He kept repeating to himself — “Ugh! It was disgusting! To see them frizzling — it was horrible!”
In the drawing room Renny said severely — “I knew how it would be! You had no right to drag him down here! He wasn’t fit for it.”
At the second flight of stairs Finch’s strength failed him. He sat down on the bottom step. He heard Wakefield coming after him. “Don’t come!” he called out. “I don’t want any of you near me!”
He was so weak that he almost crept up the remainder of the steps. He went into his room and bolted the door. He flung himself on the bed, repeating passionately — “The brute! The brute!” It seemed to him that the room was full of ants. They swarmed from every crack, from every smallest crevice. From every direction they came swarming toward the bed. In four black columns they mounted its four legs. They were all over the quilt dancing, writhing, uttering minute cries of agony as the heat of his body destroyed them. Their bodies turned into small black notes, the notes of a dancing, mincing tune of pain. All through his being he heard it. He was the instrument on which it was played….
Maurice and Meg had gone through the ravine to the fox farm, Patience dancing between them through the snow on which the evening shadows lay icy blue. Husband and wife had spent the walk in discussing the question of whether or not Sarah should be told of the fate of her present to Finch. Meg thought she should. Maurice thought not. They compromised by deciding to tell her that Finch had not yet had the quiet necessary for appreciating the scrapbook. Tomorrow Meg would go to her and tell her what had happened.
Piers and Pheasant had stayed to supper and had carried off two sleeping little boys and one very wide awake, excited one.
Roma had been sick and Adeline had a tantrum before they were safe in bed.
Nicholas and Ernest, Renny and Wakefield had sat late about the fire talking. The uncles, mellowed by whiskey and soda, following an indulgence in wine which they allowed themselves only in the festive season, had talked with fluency and wit of their bygone days. They had been equally ready to draw Wakefield on to tell of his life in the monastery, to talk with comforting assurance and faith of his future in the religious life. But at last they were tired out and, after peering out at the snow, consulting the barometer and eating a few sweets as a final challenge to longevity, they went slowly upstairs. It had been a good Christmas, marred only by Finch’s hysterical behaviour.
Wakefield did not remain long behind them. The thought of Finch was on his mind, as, on his last visit home, he intended to sleep with him and he wanted to leave an impression of himself for Finch’s strengthening in his absence. Before he went upstairs he went over to Renny’s chair and kissed him good night. He gave a little laugh.
“What’s the joke?”
Wake stood smiling down on Renny’s weather-beaten aquiline face. “I was thinking,” he said, “that though you’re such a horsey chap, you’d make a grand-looking monk.”
Renny sat alone now, his long legs stretched before the dying fire, his brown eyes staring meditatively into its embers. The four dogs, as though stirred by one impulse, rose and moved closer to him.
No one had drawn him on to talk. They were all conscious of inner reserves in him, of a certain taciturn aloofness. They all noticed that no gift had come from Alayne to him. She had sent a beautiful book to Adeline. On his part he had chosen Adeline’s present to Alayne with great care, a red-and-white plaid silk blouse, quite unsuited to her…. He sat thinking of this, picturing her surprise and pleasure in its unique beauty. He pictured her putting it on for her Christmas dinner with her aunt…. He rose, went to the piano and standing by it picked out with one finger, very softly, the air of “Loch Lomond.” It was one that his Scottish mother had sung to him when he was a small boy.
XXII
CLARA
IN SPITE OF the disastrous ending of Finch’s first coming downstairs its effect on him was good. In the days following Christmas he began to find the long hours in his room irksome. He found that he wanted to know what was going on below. Added to this his room was on the shady side of the house, tall trees stood outside it. He pictured with longing the sun-flooded living rooms. Wakefield stayed on for two days and on both of them helped Finch to dress and supported him downstairs. Finch clung to him, laughing at his own weakness, looking forward to settling himself in his grandmother’s chair by the fire.
His uncles rose late so he was in possession of the big room alone while his nerves were readjusting themselves to their new surroundings. Things began to look not quite so strange to him. His appetite improved and scarcely a day passed when Meg did not send him some delicacy to tempt it.
He liked to sit where he could look out on the two little girls playing with their sleighs in the snow. They had got bright new ones at Christmas and it was strange to see how Roma endured the cold and how a brilliant yet delicate pink came into her cheeks. Adeline was kind to her, careful of her. Up and down the snowy drive she ran with her on her sleigh.
Ernest and Nicholas had already begun to emulate the hibernating of their mother, though at their age she had still been an active woman who feared no weather. They were satisfied to shut themselves in from the still, penetrating cold or the hard-blown, biting particles of snow. When Renny came into the room where these three sat he brought with him the stimulating virility of the winter, the snowy footprints of dogs. His uncles greeted him with the latest news from Europe, according to the fortnight-old London Times, Finch with his eager, questioning smile.
Renny was restless in these days. He was irritable and hot-tempered with his men and in the stables they said that, if his wife did not come back to him, it was time he made up to another woman.
In truth he often had in his mind the thought of another woman. He longed to see Clara Lebraux, to have one of his old talks with her. There was no one in his life to whom he could talk as freely as he did to her and he missed this generous companionship.
He suddenly made up his mind that he would go to see her. He told himself that ther
e was no reason on earth why he should not see her, but he took good care that the family should not know of his intentions. He motored to town and from there took a train for the village where she lived with her brother, fifty miles away.
It was a dreary-looking place he thought, as he alighted from the train and captured the one down-at-heel taxi that waited there. It was mid-January. The January thaw had come and there was trampled slush in the station yard. What houses he could see were wooden and of a dingy grey.
Characteristically he had sent no word to Clara of his coming, taking it for granted that, as a woman, she would be at home. He directed the driver to the poultry farm owned by Clara’s brother.
As the taxi stood by the gate while the driver enquired at the door for the name, Renny peered through the steaming window for a sight of Clara. If she were about he would go straight to her. He saw a stretch of poultry-houses with wired-in runs, he saw an ugly cinnamon-coloured frame house. Was Clara doomed to live always in ugly houses? The door opened and he saw her standing there. He jumped out of the taxi, paid the driver and presented himself laughing at her astonishment.
It was rather astoundment that Clara felt. She leant against the door, scarcely believing her eyes.
“So you are surprised to see me?” he said.
“Terribly,” she answered in a low husky voice.
“Are you going to invite me in?”
She pulled herself together with an effort. “You are the last person I was expecting but I can’t tell you” — her face softened to a look of passionate welcome — “but I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you!” She put out her hand and he took it in both his. The grip of her strong fingers brought back all their past.
“You’re looking well,” he said, as they went into the living room together. “This life evidently agrees with you.” His eyes took in the conventional ugliness of the room, the bleak view from the window.
“Oh, I am well enough.”
“What do you do, Clara? Do you help your brother with the poultry?”
The Jalna Saga – Deluxe Edition: All Sixteen Books of the Enduring Classic Series & The Biography of Mazo de la Roche Page 351