08 Whiteoaks of Jalna

by Mazo de La Roche

  “Not more than usual, Matilda.”

  “Well, it’s none of my business.”

  “You bet it isn’t.”

  “But, just the same, when Wragge told me that Mr. Finch had come ’ome with his collar hangin’ loose and ’is fice dirty at this time in the morning, I says, ‘Look out for squalls.’”

  The door of the washroom opened. Renny and Piers, followed by Finch and the spaniel, came out. Renny picked up Wake and threw him across his shoulder. Upstairs he set him down in the hall and rumpled his hair. “Feel better?” he asked. Wake nodded, but he kept his eyes turned away from Finch. He could not bear to look at him…

  Finch lay on his bed all day. He was in a strange state, between sleeping and waking. He could not think clearly, and his head hurt him terribly. He felt as though the inside of it had become solid, while over the surface, sharp pains trickled down into his neck. He had an abominable taste in the mouth. He had a light-headed, feverish feeling. It was impossible for him to arrange the events of the last twelve hours in proper sequence. He had never been so confused, so hopeless, in his life. All the muddle-headedness, the fear, the groping of his years, seemed to have harried him, jostled him, spiritually dishevelled, to this. He was an outcast in his own home, unspeakably alone. He asked himself the old question, What am I? He examined his hand as it lay clenched on the quilt beside him. What was it? Why had it been formed? Given those strange and delicate muscles—the power to draw music from the aching heart of the piano? That music was more real than the hand that made it. The hand was nothing, the body was nothing. The soul surely less than the grass. He lay as motionless as though the soul had indeed left the body.

  After a time, the thought of music again came to him. He remembered something by a Russian composer, which his teacher had played to him. It had been too difficult for Finch to play, but he had the power of remembering it, of inwardly hearing it, in its entirety, as though it were again being played.

  He lay, letting it sing through him, through every nerve in his body, like a cleansing, rushing wind. At last he felt peaceful and slept.

  IX

  ALAYNE

  THREE WEEKS LATER, Alayne Whiteoak sat alone in the living room of the apartment which she shared with Rosamond Trent. She had just finished reading a new book, and she was about to write a review of it for one of the magazines. She wrote a good many reviews and short articles now, in addition to her work as reader for the publishing house of Cory and Parsons.

  This was an English novel of Oxford undergraduates who waved white hands, who talked endlessly and cleverly, always on the verge of the risque. She wished he had not sent her this particular book—but then it was only one of many like it. She felt that she could not do it justice because she had come to it prejudiced. It was not her sort of book. She sighed and looked at the books piled about her. She thought of the procession of books that, in the last year and a half, since her return to New York, had passed through her hands. A strangely dressed procession, carrying brazen “blurbs,” trampling her spirit, tiring her.

  She had none of the angry irritation of a professional reader whose own creative power is being stifled by continuous critical reading. She had little creative power in writing. She did not even desire it, but she wanted certain things from life which life apparently was to withhold from her. She wanted open space about her, and she wanted freedom to love. She desired spiritual growth.

  When she had first come back to New York, her reaction from the troubled ingrown life at Jalna was a desire to submerge her personality in the routine of work, to drown in the roar of the city remembrance of that strange household—love of Renny Whiteoak. And for a while it seemed that she had succeeded. Rosamond Trent had been almost pathetically glad to welcome her back to the apartment on Seventy-first Street. “You know, Alayne dear, I never hoped much from that marriage of yours. Not that your young poet was not an adorable creature, but still, scarcely the type that husbands are made of. It has been an experience for you—I shouldn’t have minded a year of it, myself—but now the thing is to put it behind you and look steadily forward.” Her voice had had an exultant little crow in it as once more she took Alayne under her wing.

  Mr. Cory felt it badly that the marriage had been so unsuccessful. He still had a fatherly interest in Alayne, and it had been through him that the two had met. Eden’s two slim books of poetry were still in print, but the sale of them had dropped to almost nothing. Still, now and again in some literary article reference was made to the wild beauty of the lyrics, or to the fresh vigour of the long narrative poem, The Golden Sturgeon. No new manuscript had been submitted to the publisher by Eden, but once, in a magazine, he had come upon a short poem by him which was either childishly naïve or horribly and deliberately cynical. Mr. Cory, after reading it several times, could not really decide. In either case he had a poor opinion of it. He had been uncertain whether or not to show it to Alayne. He had cut it out and saved it for her, but when next she came into the office, and he looked into her eyes, he decided against it. No, she had had enough suffering. Better not remind her of the cause of it. So, instead, he begged her to come oftener to his house, insisted that she come to dinner that very night, and when he was alone he tore the poem into small pieces.

  Tonight Alayne felt stifled by the air of the city. She went to the window, opened it wide, and sat on the sill, looking down into the street. There were few pedestrians, but a stream of motor cars flowed by, like an uneasy, tortured river that could find no rest. The smell of oil, of city dust, dulled the freshness of the spring night. The myriad separate sounds, resolved into one final roar, sucked down human personality as quicksand human flesh and blood. Looking down into the city, a spectator might fancy he saw wild arms thrown upward in gestures of despair, as by drowning people.

  Alayne thought of Jalna. Of the April wind as it came singing through the ravine, stirring the limbs of the birches, the oaks, the poplars, to response. She remembered the smell that rose from the earth in which their roots were twined and lovingly intertwined, a smell of quickening and decay, of the beginning and the end. She saw, in imagination, the great balsams that guarded the driveway and stood in dark clumps at the lawn’s edge, shutting in the house, making a brooding barrier between Jalna and the world. She saw Renny riding along the drive on his bony grey mare, drooping in the saddle, and somehow, in that indolent accustomed droop, giving an impression of extraordinary vigour and vitality… He was no longer on his horse. He stood beside her. His piercing red-brown eyes searched her face. He moved nearer, and she saw his nostrils quiver, his mouth set… God, she was in his arms! His lips were draining the strength from her, and yet strength like fire had leaped from his body to hers…

  Alayne made a small, moaning sound. She pressed her hand to her throat. Was she to have no peace? Was the remembrance of Renny’s kisses to torture her always? Ah, but if she could, would she part with the delight of that torture?

  She remembered his last passionate kiss of goodbye, and how she had clung to him and breathed, “Again,” and his putting her away from him with a sharp gesture of renunciation. “No,” he had said, through his teeth. “Not again,” And he had moved away and taken his place among his brothers. Her last sight of him had been as he stood among them, taller than they, his hair shining redly in the firelight.

  Tonight she felt invisible cords, charged with desire, drawing her toward Jalna. She experienced a mystic ecstasy in the secret pull of them. She gave herself up to it, all her senses absorbed. She became unconscious of the strangely compounded street roar. She did not even hear, until it was twice repeated, the buzz of the bell of her own door.

  When at last she heard it, she was startled. She had a feeling approaching apprehension as she went to the door and opened it. In the bright light of the hallway stood young Finch Whiteoak. Like a ghost created by her thoughts he stood, tall, hollow-cheeked, with a tremulous smile on his lips.

  “Finch!” she exclaimed.

  �
�Hullo, Alayne!” He got out the words with an effort. His face broke up into a smile that was perilously near the contortion of crying.

  “Finch, my dear, is it possible? You in New York! I can scarcely believe it is you. But you must tell me all about it.”

  She drew him in, and took his hat and coat. It seemed so strange to see him away from Jalna that she felt she might be laying eyes on him for the first time.

  “I ran away,” he muttered. “I just couldn’t stand it… I’ve been here three weeks.”

  Alayne led him to a sofa and sat down beside him. “Oh, Finch! Poor dear. Tell me all about it.” She laid her hand on his. Isolated thus, they were intimate as they had never been at Jalna.

  He looked at her hand lying on his. He had always been moved by the whiteness of her hands.

  “Well, things seemed absolutely set against me—or me against them. Darned if I know which. Anyhow, I failed in my matric. I suppose you heard that. Aunt Augusta and you write sometimes to each other, don’t you? Well, Renny stopped my music lessons. I wasn’t even allowed to touch the piano. And I guess that was all right, too, for I’d sort of gone dotty about music. I couldn’t forget it for a minute. But I’m like that, you know. Once I get a thing on the brain, I’m done for.” He sighed deeply.

  Her hand which was lying on his clenched itself. She withdrew it and repeated: “He stopped your music.” Between her and Finch rose a vision of Renny’s carved profile, its inflexibility denying the warmth of the full face. “Yes? And then what?”

  “Well, it seemed as though I’d got to have something besides plain work. A kind of ballast. I felt that I couldn’t stick it unless there was something. So I went to play-acting. The Little Theatre, you know. I’d made a friend of a splendid chap named Arthur Leigh. He’s perhaps a bit girlish—well, no, not girlish, but over-refined for the taste of my brothers. Anyhow he liked me, and encouraged me a lot about my acting. He even got after Renny and persuaded him to come and see the play I was in. Well, it all turned out badly. I was taking the part of a halfwitted Irish boy, and Renny thought it came too darned easy to me. I did it too well. He was frightfully fed up with me and my talents, he said.”

  He sat silent a moment, pulling at his flexible underlip; then he said: “You can’t imagine, Alayne, how beastly life seems to me, sometimes.”

  “Can’t I?”

  “Oh, I know you’ve had a lot of trouble—Eden, and all that—but still, in yourself, you’re a reasonable being and… oh, dash it all, I can never express myself!”

  “I know what you mean, Finch. And perhaps it is so. I don’t believe I am capable of suffering as you are.”

  “Well, I always bring it on myself. That’s one thing,” he said darkly.

  “Is it possible that Renny could not appreciate the fact that you were doing a piece of good acting?” How she loved to drag in that name, to caress it with her tongue, even while her heart was angry against him!

  “The trouble was,” answered Finch, “that he hated seeing me in that part. I was in my bare feet, and dirty. I hadn’t much on but an idiotic expression. Renny’s awfully conventional.”

  “But think of some of the men—horse dealers and such—that he goes about with, seems to make friends of. That’s not conventional.”

  “If you said that to Renny, he’d say: ‘Yes, but I don’t get up on a stage with them and charge people admission to watch my antics.’ Most of all, it was the halfwittedness of the part. He thinks I’m a bit that way already.” He pulled his lips again, and then went on more quickly, so that the tale of his misdeeds might be done with. “So there was no more playacting. The next thing was an orchestra. George Fennel— you remember the boys at the rectory, Alayne—and myself and three other chaps got it up—a banjo, two mandolins, a flute, and the piano. All the practising was done on the sly. We played for club dances. You know the sort of club it would be. Cheap restaurants. But we made quite a lot of money—five dollars apiece, each night.”

  Alayne looked at him with a mingling of admiration and amusement. “What amazing boys! Had you planned to do anything special with all this money?”

  “We bought quite a good radio. We had that at the rectory, of course.”

  “Where did Mr. Fennel think that came from?”

  “Oh, he never asks many questions. He’s awfully unpractical. He probably thought we’d rigged it up out of some odds and ends of wire. Then some of the money went toward hearing some good music—Paderewski, Kreisler. But I saved most of it. That’s how I got here, to New York. And then too we’d blow in quite a bit on grub. I’m always hungry, you know.”

  There was a peculiar expression on his face, as he said this, that startled Alayne. A sudden break in his voice. She thought: “Is it possible the boy is hungry now?” She said: “You’re like I am. I’m always getting hungry at odd times. Here it is, only half-past eight, and I’m starving. But of course I didn’t eat much dinner. Supposing, Finch, that you tell me quickly how things came to a head, and then we can have the details over some supper.”

  He agreed, in his odd, hesitating way, and then, in a muffled voice, told of the last performance of the orchestra, of his return to Jalna, of the scene in the washroom. “It wasn’t only that I’d been lit, and was feeling dazed—oh, absolutely awful—but there was something else. I’d pulled my handkerchief out of my pocket, and with it a note from Arthur Leigh. There, was nothing to that, but he’d called me ‘darling Finch’ and Renny and Piers went right up in the air over it.” His face twitched as he remembered the scene.

  “Finch, do you tell me that they read your letter?”

  “I told Piers he might.”

  “But why?”

  “I forget.”

  It was useless; she could never understand them.

  “But why should they have been angry? It was harmless enough, surely.”

  He flushed a dark red. “They didn’t think so. They thought it was beastly. Neurotic, and all that. Oh, you can’t understand. It was just the last straw.” He clasped his hands between his knees, and Alayne saw that he was shaking. She got up quickly. She was afraid he was going to cry, and she could not bear that. Something in her would give way if he cried. She must hang on to herself. She said, almost coldly: “So it was then you decided to run away?”

  “Yes. I stayed in my room all day. Lay on the bed trying to think. Then, when night came, I sneaked out with a suitcase of clothes and got a late bus into town on the highway. In the morning I took the train for New York.”

  “And you’ve been here three weeks?”

  “Yes. I’ve never written home either.”

  “What have you been doing, Finch?”

  “Trying to get a job.” He raised a miserable young face to hers. “I thought it’d be easy to get one here, but I simply can’t round up anything. There seemed to be dozens ahead of me whenever I answered an advertisement. Gosh, it’s been awful!”

  She looked down at him with compassion. “But why in the world didn’t you come to me before? It hurts me to think that you’ve been walking the streets here looking for work, and have never come to see me.”

  “I didn’t want to come until I had got something, but tonight—I just gave in… I—I was so frightfully homesick,” He reached out, took her hand, and pressed it to his forehead. “Oh, Alayne, you’ve always been so good to me!”

  She bent and kissed him; then she said, assuming a businesslike tone: “Now we must have something to eat. There are cigarettes. You smoke while I forage in the pantry.”

  In the glittering little pantry, with its air of trig unhomeliness, she discovered some potato salad bought at a delicatessen shop, a tin of vermicelli with tomato sauce, a lettuce, and some dill pickles. She and Rosamond took only their breakfast and lunch in the apartment.

  Strange fare, she thought, as she arranged the things on the tea-wagon, for a Whiteoak! She had made coffee, and now she remembered some jars of preserves given to her by the aunts who lived up the Hudson. She chose one o
f blackcurrants in a rich syrup. Last, she added some slices of rye bread and some little chocolate-covered cakes.

  Finch’s back was toward her as she entered the living room. His head was enveloped in tobacco smoke. He was examining her books. She noticed how loosely his coat hung on him. The boy looked half-starved, she thought.

  “Great Scott,” he exclaimed, turning round, “what a lot of new books, Alayne! How do you ever get the time to read them all?”

  “By not getting time for anything else,” she returned. “That one you have in your hand is very interesting. Take it along with you, Finch. I believe you might like it.”

  “Poetry,” he commented, turning over the leaves… He looked up from the book. Their eyes met, and he took a quick step toward her. “Alayne—have you ever—seen him —heard of him?” His face grew scarlet.

  “Eden?” She said the name with composure. “I’ve never seen him or heard from him, but Miss Trent, who shares the apartment with me, insists that she saw him one night last fall outside a theatre. Just a glimpse. She thought he looked ill. Your aunt told me in a letter that you had heard nothing.”

  “Not a thing. I’ve been afraid ever since I came here that I’d run up against him. He and I had an awful scene”—oh, Lord, why had he recalled that time to her?—“I guess he hates me, all right.”

  She had begun to set the supper things on a small table. He came to her and touched her arm timidly. “Forgive me, Alayne. I shouldn’t have spoken of him.”

  She looked up with continued composure. “It doesn’t upset me to speak of Eden. He is nothing to me now. I don’t believe I should feel greatly disturbed if I met him face to face. Now do sit down, Finch, and try to imagine that this food is not so sketchy. If only I had known you were coming…”

  How hungry the boy was! She talked incessantly to cover the fact, to give him a chance to eat without interruption. He swept the plates clean, and drank cup after cup of coffee. Over coffee and cigarettes he gave her news of each separate member of the family. Finally he told her in detail of the last performance of the orchestra, of the wild night in the streets afterward. He began to laugh. Finch’s laughter was infectious. Alayne laughed too, and as he imitated the maudlin outpourings of the different players they could no longer restrain themselves, and laughed till they were exhausted. Alayne had not given way to such primitive emotions since leaving Jalna, had had no impulse to do so.