08 Whiteoaks of Jalna

by Mazo de La Roche

  Renny showed embarrassment, as well as impatience. “Very well,” he said, curtly. “Let him go ahead with the play. But no slacking, mind.”

  “And you’ll come one night?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thanks very much. I’m tremendously grateful.” But, in truth, he felt only relief and a weary haste to be off.

  “That’s all right. And I hope you will like the horse.”

  “I know I shall.”

  They shook hands and parted.

  Out in the close-pressing snowflakes, the wind urging him with gusto toward the glowing windows of the house, Leigh felt Finch farther removed from him than ever he had been since their friendship had begun. He saw him now as an integral part of the pattern of Jalna. He could not now separate him, familiar and dear as he was, from the closely woven, harsh fabric of his family. He almost wished he had never seen him among his vigorous kin. And yet, if he had not, he should never really have understood him, known whence had sprung the spark which was Finch. And, too, in spite of his feeling of chill, of fatigue, of having his energy sapped by this place, he experienced an odd sense of exhilaration as he ran up the steps to the door, grasped its great icy knob in his hand, opened it, pushed it shut against the wind and snow, was met by the rush of warmth, bright colour, loud voices. The uncles were now there, Aunt Augusta, Piers, and Pheasant. Meg and Maurice had come to tea from Vaughanlands, Meg with a fat six-months-old baby girl in her arms. Fresh tea was brought to him, toast, and plum jam and cakes. They all stared at him, but talked to each other, ignoring him. Never, never, he thought, could an outsider become one of them.

  VI

  CLOUTIE JOHN

  THE OPENING NIGHT of the play Finch was wrought up to such a pitch of excitement that he wondered if he would ever feel natural again. At one moment he wished nothing better than that the earth might open and swallow him, put him speedily from sight before the time came for him to set foot on the stage. At the next he was walking on air in joyous anticipation, his eyes bright, his lank lock of fair hair almost into them. His lips would tremble as though he were going to cry or laugh, but his conversation consisted mainly of monosyllables.

  Leigh was nervous, too. He had the part of the hero, mixture of courage and cowardice, to play, and his soul yearned over Finch, who had not only to make his first appearance at the Little Theatre, but to make it before Renny. Leigh had intended that the elder brother should see the performance late in the week, but Mrs. Leigh, unadvised by him, had sent the invitation to dinner, naming Monday There was nothing to do but make the best of it, induce a complacent state of mind in the difficult guest by good wine and charming feminine companionship. For the latter, Leigh put all trust in his mother and sister. In his haste and perturbation, he took time to speculate as to which of them would interest Renny the more, upon which his quick glance might linger. For himself, the two so claimed his life, his love, that he wondered whether he should ever care for any other woman. He hoped not. His mother, his sister, Finch—these were enough.

  Finch, coming into the drawing-room, where he now felt happily at ease, found Ada Leigh already there. She said, with her peculiar, slanting look at him, across a lighted candelabrum: “I suppose you’re awfully nervous.”

  He was in one of his moments of elation. “Oh, I don’t think so. I don’t believe I’m as nervous as Arthur is.”

  “I think you are. You’re trembling.”

  “That’s nothing. It doesn’t take anything to make me shake. Why, I can’t pass a teacup without slopping the tea over.”

  “Ah, but this is different. You’re frightened.” She was smiling teasingly He felt that she wanted him to be frightened. He drew nearer to her and saw the reflection of a pointed flame in her eyes.

  “I am not afraid,” he insisted. “I’m happy.”

  “Yes, you are afraid.” There was a little gasping sound in her voice.

  “Afraid of what, then?”

  “Afraid of me.”

  “Afraid of you?” He tried to look astonished, but he began to feel afraid, and yet oddly elated.

  “Yes… and I of you.”

  He laughed now and he ceased trembling. Quick pulses began to beat all over his body. He took her hand and began to caress her fingers. He examined her pink nails as though they were little shells he had found on some strange shore.

  Then she was in his arms. He who had never kissed a girl! He felt suffocated… It seemed to him an unreal dream that he was kissing her. She was snuggling under his chin… Over her head he looked out into the darkness beyond the window, and saw the cluster of candle flames reflected like a cluster of bright blooms. He saw the reflection of his own head, the pale green of her dress like a shimmering pool in the darkness, over which his head was bent. How unreal it all seemed! He embraced her, excited by the beautiful reflection, by a new sense of power, of daring, but he felt that he was acting a part. They kissed in a tremulous dream.

  Mrs. Leigh and Arthur were coming down the stairs together. There was plenty of time for the two in the drawing-room to draw apart, he to pick up a book and she to rearrange some flowers in a black bowl. No longer the darkness beyond the window reflected the entwined figures of the impassioned pursuers of experience.

  Arthur went to Finch and threw an arm across his shoulders. “Darling Finch,” he said, in his low, musical voice, “I’m so glad you’re not nervous any more. You’ve a beam of absolute assurance in your eyes. I’m the one who is nervous.”

  How comforting Arthur’s caressing arm was! Finch rejoiced in the yoke of friendship thus laid across his shoulders. He saw Ada’s eyes fixed on them, dark with jealousy.

  If only Renny were not coming to dinner, he should be happy, he thought. He could not conceive of Renny’s fitting into the delicately adjusted contacts of that group. Yet, when Renny came, looking distant and elegant to Finch in his dinner jacket, he fitted in marvellously well. More strangely still, he did not adjust his conversation to the light current which usually flowed easily about the table, Mrs. Leigh always guiding its course, but he brought with him something of the more vigorous, harsh atmosphere of Jalna. His red head, his shoulders that had the droop of much riding in the saddle, his sudden, sharp laughter, dominated the room.

  Finch had never seen Mrs. Leigh so gay, so like a girl. She seemed younger than Ada, who was rather silent, seeming in soft veiled glances to study the newcomer. But, when her eyes met Finch’s, a look of swift understanding passed between them. Finch was so exhilarated by his experience of lovemaking, so proud of Renny, that his face was full of brightness. He looked charming. An observer would have found it interesting to compare him with the slouching, deprecating, often sullen youth who appeared at home.

  Renny ate and talked with zest. Arthur, delighted with the success of his plans, found his dislike of the elder brother turning to appreciation of his generous and fiery temper. He felt his own manhood strengthened by contact with this sharper fibre. He felt that it would be good for him to have a man of this sort coming to the house, good for Ada, too, who was beginning to expect admiration from all males.

  Arthur and Finch were leaving for the theatre before the others. Mrs. Leigh and Ada were upstairs preparing to put on their evening wraps. While Arthur was ordering a car, the two brothers were left alone in the drawing-room for a moment.

  Why, thought Finch, am I cursed by this sense of the unreality of things? There is Renny, sitting in the Leighs’ drawing-room, smoking. Here am I, yet I can’t believe we are here, that we are real. Is it because nothing seems real outside of Jalna? Are we all like that, or just I? Why do these feelings come over me and spoil my pleasure? He put his thumb to his lips and nervously bit the nail.

  Renny turned his head toward him. “Don’t bite your nails. It’s a beastly habit.”

  Abashed, Finch stuffed his hand into his pocket.

  “Renny,” he asked, after a moment, almost plaintively, “does this room seem real to you?”

  Kenny’s brown ga
ze swept the cream and rose and silver of the room. “No,” he said, “I don’t think it does.”

  Thank God, oh, thank God! Things were unreal to Renny, too!

  “Well, look here,” he went on, anxiously, “do you see it in a tremendous kind of haze, as in a dream, still, yet moving, like a reflection in a bubble?”

  Renny stared. “It is something like that.”

  “And I! Do I seem unreal to you?”

  “Decidedly.”

  He could never have let himself go like this with Renny at home. But it was really wonderful.

  “And do you seem unreal to yourself, Renny? Do you wonder why you do certain things? Wonder if you are anything more than a dream?”

  “I dare say. I think you’re excited tonight. You’d better hang on to yourself or you’ll forget your lines.”

  “Do you suppose I’ll have stage fright?”

  “I think you’ve got it already.”

  “What do you mean, got it already?”

  “You’re afraid of life, and that’s the same thing.”

  In a burst of nervous excitement, Finch whispered, hoarsely: “What do you think? I kissed Ada Leigh in this room tonight!”

  “The deuce you did! No wonder you feel unreal. Did she like it?”

  “I think so. We were reflected in the strangest way in the window. Our selves, only more beautiful.”

  “H’m.” Renny regarded him with genial amusement. “Are you sure she didn’t ask for it?”

  “Of course I am.” He reddened, but he still leaned over Kenny’s chair in a confidential attitude.

  “Well, it’s an experience for you. She’s a pretty girl.” Finch breathed hard. “Don’t sprawl over me that way snuffling in my face. Have you a cold?”

  “Oh no.” He straightened himself again, abashed.

  Leigh’s voice called from outside.

  “Coming, Arthur!” Finch hastened out to his friend…

  Renny sat puffing at his cigarette, the glow of amusement still brightening his eyes. Young Finch making love! And it seemed like yesterday when he had turned Finch across his knee and warmed his seat. And now he was getting to be a man, poor devil!

  He looked about him. An unreal room. Not a bit like the drawing-room at Jalna. Nothing homelike about it, with all these little pictures speckled over the walls, all the delicate furnishings, the fragile ornaments. But it suited the two pretty women. Odd, mysterious women, attractive, yet uncomfortable.

  He rose as Ada Leigh, her face flowerlike above a white fur wrap, entered the room.

  “Mother will be down in a moment,” she said, stroking the fur of her deep collar.

  Renny observed her hand. “Yes? Will you take this chair?”

  “No, thanks, it’s not worthwhile sitting down. We must be going.” She dropped her cheek against the fur with a feline caressing movement and drew a deep, quivering breath.

  He stood near her, motionless, attentive. He thought: “What the devil’s the matter with the girl?”

  She raised her heavy-lidded eyes to his and said: “I wish I were not going tonight.”

  “I’m sorry. Are you going to tell me why ?”

  “There’s no time to talk… But I’m very unhappy.”

  He smiled at her in a puzzled way. He had no faith in her unhappiness. He was suspicious of her.

  “You’ll think me very stupid. Talking like this to you—a stranger. But you’re Finch’s brother. And you see—oh, I can’t explain!” Her eyes were raised beseechingly to his. “I’m so frightfully inexperienced—and—and—I thought I felt something I didn’t. I thought”—her expressive face quivered—“oh, I can’t go on!”

  He said gravely: “I shouldn’t worry if I were you. That sort of thing happens to all of us. We imagine that we feel things, and then we let ourselves in for things… But you’ll soon forget about it.”

  “Oh, I wish, I wish,” she exclaimed, “that I had someone like you to help me—about life. I know nothing—and Arthur, although he is such a darling to me, is ignorant. He doesn’t really know any more than I do.”

  Renny thought: “The trouble with you both is that you know far too much.” He said: “I’m afraid you have come to the wrong man for advice. I don’t understand women. I couldn’t possibly.”

  She said, slowly: “I don’t quite mean advice.”

  “What, then, precisely?”

  She pushed the white fur back from her throat. “Something more subtle, I guess. Your friendship—if it wouldn’t bore you too much.”

  He thought: “Ha, my girl, you’re one of the deep kind!” And said: “Good. We shall be friends.”

  In the theatre, seated between mother and daughter, he experienced a feeling of exasperation, of being trapped. The two pretty women seemed like jailers, and this place a prison. He hated the “arty” atmosphere, the cold, chaste walls, the curtain. The lack of an orchestra depressed him. For him a theatre should blaze in gilt and scarlet, the curtain should present some florid Italian scene, and his spirit should be borne on the crash of music as on an element. He hated the chatter of women’s voices before the curtain rose. In the buzz of it he talked to the two on either side of him and forgot which was mother and which was daughter. He began to be unaccountably nervous for Finch. He had not wanted him to go in for anything of this sort, but now that he was… His throat tightened. He had trouble in taking a deep breath.

  The play began. It increased his low spirits. The religion of the old man, his quoting of the Scriptures, made Renny want to howl. And Finch, when at last he appeared! His wild hair, his dirty face, his rags, his bare feet! Something deeply conservative in Renny disliked very much the sight of bare feet on the stage. The legs of a chorus girl, that was quite different, but a man’s—his brother’s—bare feet were distinctly ugly. And the way Finch blew on his whistle, the mad way he danced about, and sat on the floor and jumped up again, and begged for scraps of food, and slept in the chimney-corner, and was always appearing suddenly and disappearing! And his Irish brogue!

  The applause thundered. Finch was the bright star of the evening. His face was white and wild with exultation as he was applauded again and again. Mrs. Leigh and Ada clapped their hands with delicate enthusiasm. Renny sat between them wearing a displeased grin very like his grandmother’s when her pride had been hurt.

  After the play there was a little gathering in the director’s room. Friends crowded about the actors. Finch, not quite rid of his makeup, showed a dingy smear on his cheek. He trembled when he came to speak to Mrs. Leigh and Renny.

  “Oh, my dear.” cried Mrs. Leigh, her hand squeezing his arm, “you could not have been better! We are all thrilled by you.”

  Renny said nothing, regarding him with the same grin of disapproval. To Finch it seemed to say: “Wait until I get you alone, young man.” His feeling of triumph was gone. He felt that he had been making a fool of himself for the amusement of the audience. Not again during the week did he recover his buoyancy and complete abandon in the part.

  Returning home in the train next day, Renny thought about Finch, and not only Finch, but all those younger members of the family who were his half brothers. What was wrong with them? Certainly there was some weakness, bred in the bone, that made them different from the other Whiteoaks. The face of their mother flashed into his mind. She had been governess to him and Meg before his father had married her. They had given her rather a rough time both as governess and as stepmother. He had been the thorn in her side when she had been their governess; Meg, when she had become their stepmother. Her face flashed into his mind, coming between him and the wintry fields outside. He realized for the first time that she had been a beautiful young woman. A warm face, warm blue eyes that darkened with emotion, an exquisitely modelled chin and throat. He remembered seeing her temper flare when Meggie had sat, stolid and plump, blankly refusing to take any interest in her music lesson. He remembered her sobbing with exasperation over his misbehaviour. But when she had become their stepmother she had
held herself somewhat aloof from them, encircled by the love of her husband, absorbed by her too frequent motherhood.

  Renny recalled vividly now the fact that when he had come upon her she had nearly always been reading. Poetry, too. What a mother for men! He had come upon her reading poetry to his father, while he stared at her, listening, his eyes enfolding her. She had loved him, and had not long survived him. Poor young Wake had been a posthumous child.

  Poetry in them—music in them—that was the trouble. Eden was full of poetry, and he had inherited his mother’s beauty, too… Where was he now? They had heard nothing of him in the year and a half he had been away. How ghastly to think that Alayne was tied to him… At the thought of Alayne an ache struck him in the breast, an ache of longing for something that he could not possess. His soul groped, searching for a way to turn aside from the longing. He wondered at himself. He, for whom it had been so easy to forget…

  He shifted his body on the seat, as an animal, puzzled by pain, changes its position, bending his lean red face to stare out of the window on the far side of the car. He saw a frozen stream there and the rounded black forms of a clump of cedars.

  Of what had he been thinking? Ah, yes, the boys! Eden. A damned fool, Eden. But Piers was no fool. Sound as a nut. A Whiteoak, through and through. Then Finch, the young whelp, deceiving him. Posturing, play-acting before a parcel of highbrows. And mad about music, too. Well, he’d got to work in earnest now if he were going to amount to anything… There was Wake, fanciful little rascal. No knowing what he’d be up to in a few years…

  Like an eagle whose nestlings were turning out to be skylarks, Renny regarded his brood, his love, his pride in them, clouded by doubt.

  At the station Wright was waiting for him with a dappled grey gelding harnessed to a red sleigh. The drifts were too high for motoring. Wright also brought his great coon coat, in which he enveloped himself on the platform.

  As they flew along the glistening road, past drifts where the fine snow was ruffled in a silver mist, Renny felt that he could not drink in enough of the freshness of the day. He took great breaths, he let the wind whistle in his teeth. The sharp hoofs of the gelding sent hard pieces of clean snow on to the fur robe on their knees.