He disliked meeting people and would skulk out of reach when there were callers. He had avoided Eden and Minny for weeks. When he saw them in the distance on his walks he turned down a lane or climbed a stile to escape. He went to and from the house by the back entrance to avoid passing the lodge.
Today, however, the clock in the church tower struck the three-quarter hour as he left the village. He would be late for lunch unless he went by the drive. Augusta could forgive anything but unpunctuality at meals. It had never been a failing of the Whiteoaks. He made up his mind, after several hesitations and turnings away, that he must pass the lodge. He remembered with relief that Eden and Minny were usually at table by this hour.
As he was closing the gate cautiously so that it might not clank, Minny’s voice called to him from the porch. She came lurrying down the flagged walk to intercept him. The wind blew the hair back from her very white forehead which she had drawn into a pucker of anxiety. It also blew her thin dress against her body, exposing the modulating conformations of breast and hip and thigh.
“Oh, Finch,” she called, “we’re having the most awful rime with our chimneys! They smoke and smoke! I do wish you would come in and see what a state we’re in. It’s a perect shame that Eden should be so uncomfortable.”
Finch saw that she was blue with cold, yet she did not give a thought to herself. He made as if to walk on. He said hurriedly:
“Sorry. I’m late for lunch already. Aunt Augusta is a regular martinet about meals.”
“Whatever have we done?” cried Minny angrily. “You haven’t been near us for a month! You go the other way when you see us coming!” She ran through her little gate and caught him by the arm. In her thin-soled high-heeled slippers she splashed through a small puddle.
He looked down into her face. “Minny, don’t mind what I do! I’m a beast. I don’t know what’s wrong with me but— just now—I’m not fit company for anyone.”
She patted his arm. “Poor old boy! Eden has the blue devils sometimes, too. Thank goodness, I don’t! If I did, what would become of us?”
Eden appeared in the doorway. He said loudly:
“Don’t ask that fellow to come in, Minny! He thinks of no one but himself. Let him go!”
“He’s just been explaining. He is not feeling quite himself. But he wants to come in, don’t you, Finch?”
Finch turned back with her. He was surprised to see how pale Eden was. He had dark shadows under his eyes and, as he turned petulantly away at their approach, his shoulders were shaken by a harsh cough.
Both back and front doors of the lodge stood open. The interior was dense with smoke that was blown down the chimney and out of the great fireplace with each blast. Not only was the table not yet laid for lunch but the remains of breakfast still stood on it. In here was a chill more damp and penetrating than that outdoors.
Eden kept his back to Finch. He stood talking in a high irritable tone to a loutish boy with sooty face and hands.
“Can you tell me what your master’s going to do when he does come back?”
Minny added—“Yes, I wish I knew how soon he can put it in order. Just look, Finch. They’ve swept out all that soot!” She pointed to a bucketful that stood on the hearth. “After he’d got that out we thought surely the chimney would draw and Eden built up a huge fire. He was so cold. But it was worse than ever and we can’t get the fire to go out.”
Eden began to put ashes on it. A descending gust sent a puff of black smoke and a swirl of ashes over him. He backed away swearing under his breath.
The boy stood regarding his efforts with dull interest. He kept rubbing his ear against the corner of the mantelshelf as a pig might scratch itself against a gatepost. “Master’ll put un in order,” he observed.
“But what will he do?” asked Minny desperately.
“Put un in order.”
“He’s going to have a damper made,” said Eden.
“Will that take long?” asked Finch.
The boy rubbed his ear with a circular movement on a corner of the shelf. “A proper long time it’ll take.”
“If only the wind would fall!” cried Minny.
The youth turned his eyes heavily toward the open door. “He won’t fall. He’s a master gale, he is.”
Eden asked—“Do you know anything about this chimney? Has it ever done this before?”
The youth had ceased rubbing his ear in order to comprehend a question requiring so sharp a mental effort to answer. After weighing it conscientiously he began again the circular movement against the shelf. He then replied:
“He’em alius smokin’ in November gales. Widow used to send for we.”
“And what did you do?”
“Swept un.”
A fresh cloud of smoke enveloped them.
“Look here!” cried Finch. “This will never do! You mustn’t stay here. Why, it will be the end of Eden! You’d be better out of doors.”
“And it’s been so damp too the last month,” said Minny. She led him to the kitchen and showed how the moisture on the wall collected into a little runnel that trickled across the floor. Finch asked in a low voice—“How long has he had that cough?”
“About a week.”
“But you should have told me! He must get away at once.”
Minny’s expression became pathetic. “But how can we, Finch? It’s all we can do to make ends meet here.”
“I’ll attend to that.”
They returned to the other room. The fire had died down. Heavy raindrops were spattering into it. The wind too was dying. The youth had gone off for his dinner. Eden went to the mantelshelf and began to rub his ear against it, looking mischievously out of the sides of his eyes at Finch and Minny.
“Us had better pip out,” he said, in a singsong. “There seems to be nothing else left for we! ’Tis a proper failure us have made of our life, Min.”
Finch was filled with compunction because of his forget-fulness of them. Minny was one of the bravest, sweetest girls he had ever known. Now she was kneeling on the cold hearth, the bellows in her hands, fanning the struggling flames. The wind had fallen.
He hurried to the house and told his aunt of the condition in the lodge. Augusta did not, as he had expected, declare that Eden and Minny must come to her at once. If the chimney began to smoke again there would be time enough. But she had a hamper packed with a hot lunch and Finch carried it excitedly to the lodge. She had put in a bottle of sherry, too. When he arrived a fresh fire was blazing and Minny had washed up the breakfast things. Eden was writing at one end of the long table. He looked up eagerly at Finch.
“Here’s one of the best things I’ve done,” he exclaimed. And he read aloud a charming lyric.
“Did you just write that this morning?” asked Finch.
“I’ve been working on it a week!”
Eden made no further reference to Finch’s neglect of them. He allowed his own instincts to govern his life and, except for an occasional flash of temper, he was willing that others should do the same. If Finch wanted to keep to himself, well—he probably needed the solitude.
Minny spread out the lamb chops and mashed potatoes, the hot apple tart which Augusta had refused to cut into herself so that it might be unbroken for them. The room felt hot and steamy.
After lunch they sat talking and smoking. It was arranged that they leave for the South of France in two days. Finch would write a cheque for Eden at once.
Now that he had been with them again he had a moment’s regret that they would be leaving. In the back of his brain, however, was a feeling of relief that the lodge would be empty, that he could come and go as he liked without fear of meeting them.
When they parted, Minny flung her arms about his neck and kissed him gratefully. “What should we do without you, Finch!” she said. “You are our guardian angel!”
XXVII
CHRISTMAS—AND AFTER
WHEN the lodge was shut up and Eden and Minny had left for France, Finch resigned hims
elf with morose satisfaction to an increasing melancholy. The gales from the moor, the vaporous sunshine that wavered across the tors, the deep, spongy, relaxed quiet of the intervals between gales, combined to dissolve his resistance.
He was woken in the morning by Ellen coming into his room with a can of hot water. She drew apart the window curtains and closed the window. She carried a candle, and her shadow, grotesque and ponderous, leant across the ceiling above him. It was strange to think that this sinister, pendulous shadow belonged to the spare, upright, deprecating woman. He watched woman and shadow over the edge of his blanket, usually pretending to be asleep.
But sometimes he asked—“Is it a fine morning, Ellen?”
She would answer—“Oh, no, sir! It is frosty.”
When he got up, he would see the sun rising, a round, red ball, and the grass of the meadow would be white and shaggy, like an old man’s beard. The fleece of the ewes would look rosy in the thick sunlight as they nibbled the frosty grass or raised their heads and gazed toward the gate where the shepherd would enter. He would come at last, bending under a truss of hay, and the ewes would lumber heavily down the sloping field to meet him. Every week Finch could see how their girth was increasing. He longed to see the young lambs with the sick longing of one who expects to be underground by the next lambing season.
His body steamed as he washed himself in the cold room. Through the window he could see the winter spinach that Ralph Hart had planted, lusty and dark green... Even at that early hour he would ponder on the decay of Ralph’s strong young body. He would think of the lapwing buried beside him, think of it as uttering faint yet beautiful cries that stole through the sodden earth, crept up through Ralph’s ribs, and echoed in his empty skull.
He thought of a process of disintegration going on in himself. He pictured himself as, by degrees, being reduced to a vegetable growth, unable to move from the one spot... his legs resolving themselves into twining roots, his arms spread into great flabby leaves outstretched on the wet earth... his head a huge cluster of sickly buds that would burst, at last, into pallid nightmarish flowers.
He would sit before the piano trying to wrench from it some magic essence that would restore him, but the piano no longer was his friend. When he opened it the keyboard grinned up at him—the keys like white cruel teeth. Sometimes when he was sure that he was alone the power of playing would return to him. He would release his spirit in strong, full-sounding harmonies. He would compose, groping his way from rhythm to rhythm, but he could not tell whether or not what he composed were good.
Sometimes he would sit with his arms folded on the rack dreaming of the times when he and Sarah had played together. He would see her standing, tall and graceful, her cheek laid against her violin. He would see the curve of her wrist as she raised the bow. He would try to recall minutely all their meetings, the words they had spoken. He would begin with the first meeting, when she had come in late for tea, and proceed with them, omitting no gesture that he could recall, to the day of her marriage with Arthur. He would live again through the weeks by the sea, be racked again by the increasing hunger for her, the hopelessness of it. He would relive the scene on the cliff, when he had clasped her to him—taken and received one passion-breeding kiss. He would set his mouth in the form of a kiss and his lips would burn and his eyes grow feverish. He would spring up from the piano and walk the floor. Once he shouted—“I will have her! By God—I will!”
He pictured himself as following her to France, meeting her on the street with Arthur, and going straight up to her with the words—“You belong to me and you cannot deny it!” He saw himself kissing her in front of a street full of people.
He would crouch so long before the piano indulging in these imaginings that, when he rose, he would find himself rigid and cramped. If Augusta looked into the room at him he would cover his face with his hands until she had retreated. “The boy really must be a genius,” she thought, “or he would not act so queerly.”
Once that he was settled in a certain position, his imagination rushing over its usual course, overflowing like a river in spate, no part of him must move a hair’s breadth or the spell would be broken. A pain came in his head and he took his hand from where it was in order to press it against the spot. But when he would replace his hand he could not remember where it had been. He tried it here, there, about his person and the keyboard, but he could not find the right place. His hand became enormous, a gigantic antenna waving in space, impossible to control. He wished that he might cut it off rather than have it plague him so.
To go on dreaming of Sarah, alternately loving and hating her—he felt that he could do this forever.
A concert for a charitable purpose was to be given in the schoolhouse. Augusta begged Finch to play at this concert— “just some simple little piece,” for it was not a musical neighbourhood. Yet everyone would appreciate it so much and she was so proud of her brilliant nephew.
He could not refuse. He would play something—perhaps Tales of Hoffman—which he knew so well that it would be impossible for him to break down. Augusta’s gentleness with him, her gratitude for his agreeing to do this, made him ashamed. He prepared himself for the concert by trying to live a more normal life in the week preceding it. He did not wander about the lanes so much. He sat with Augusta and even read aloud to her. Eden had left a number of books at the lodge. One of these was a novel of student life in Munich. When Finch read the intimate descriptions of the life toward which he had strained, of the gathering together for the study of music of all these young people, his heart ached with longing and despair. If only he could throw off these shackles that held him and join his life to theirs, discover of what stuff he was made!
Augusta could see that the book disturbed him. She said that she did not care for it and asked him to read another. He sat up late that night and finished it.
Every day, as the time of the concert drew nearer, the thought of playing at it became more horrible to him. He could not sleep for thinking of it. His nerves became so unstrung that he could not hand Augusta a cup of tea without slopping it. At last he got out, in a hoarse voice:
“There’s no use in my trying, Auntie! If I play at that concert I shall make an ass of myself. You’ll be ashamed of me.”
She gave him a penetrating glance. “Whatever am I to do with you?” she exclaimed in despair.
“I’m sorry,” he muttered, and went into the hall for his cap and coat.
She thought—“I wish Renny were here. Surely he could do something with the boy!”
Christmas came. A time of gales and floods. Cards and presents came from home, and a long letter from Alayne, urging him to write and tell her all about himself. She seemed to be very happy to be back at Jalna. It all seemed very far away to him, like a half-forgotten dream. Augusta had bought Christmas cards for him to send, and he had mechanically inscribed one for each member of the family.
On Christmas Eve Augusta doubted that the waits would face the gale. She hoped very much that they would come, for Finch’s sake. It would be something quite new to him. It was a good season for holly. Thick clusters of brilliant berries shone against the glossy branches that Augusta and Finch had placed in vases and above pictures. They had trimmed the windows and the mantelpieces with ivy, and lighted candles in all the candelabra.
Finch thought of the soaking land, the drenched moor, the streaming sky, black as a hole... the rain flowing in rivers down the pane... the gale crying out in its passion... He walked from one room to another watching the reflections of the dancing candlelight... He touched the holly berries and the cold fresh ivy with his fingers... He saw the images of himself and his aunt in a mirror... a woman of nearly eighty, and a boy of twenty-one... Both were equally unreal to him.
He went to a window and he could hear the water gurgling from the eave. He saw a glimmer of light moving along the drive. It was possible to make out a little group of figures struggling against the gale. They stopped before the door.
He called to Augusta and they stood together at the window. The blurred gleam from an electric torch was directed at a piece of music held by one of the waits. The others clustered close, their streaming faces peering at the music. In the feeble light their faces were without bodies. They clustered together like wet berries on a single stem. But why did they not sing, Finch asked himself. Then he saw that their mouths were stretched wide but that the force of the gale tore the sound away. Only once a faint howl penetrated the room. They heard the sacred Name uttered as in an appeal for succour. Then one of the giant firs at the edge of the lawn fell like a shadow, almost obliterating the singers.
“Take them money,” cried Augusta, “and tell them to go home!” She took a florin from her desk.
Finch found another in his pocket.
The waits touched their caps and staggered back along the drive out of sight. Finch raised his face and let the rain dash against it.
In the morning when Ellen brought his hot water, he asked—“Is it a fine morning, Ellen?”
“Yes, indeed, sir. And the bells are chiming luvely.”
The chimes came swinging through the mist and in at the open window The bells clamoured in ecstatic confusion.
He sat up in bed and looked out. There were rose-coloured streaks in the sky. Beneath the thin crescent of the old moon a rook was flying. He saw an owl skim past.
While he dressed he watched the sheep in the meadow. Some of them, he was sure, must soon drop their lambs. They were enormous and stood motionless as though listening to the chimes. He had got very fond of the ewes. He watched them in the evening when their fleece was reddened by the sunset, and in the morning when they looked so white against the green of the grass that one would have thought they had just been washed. He watched them on foggy days when they looked like fragments of the fog made solid.
Books 9-12: Finch's Fortune / The Master of Jalna / Whiteoak Harvest / Wakefield's Course Page 37