08 Whiteoaks of Jalna

by Mazo de La Roche

  The spell was broken by the reappearance of the little green snake, who, unlike the orchestra of locusts, was conscious of the intruders from tip to tip, quivering with fear and hatred of them, rearing his head against their presence, determined to separate them into the three lonely wanderers they had been when they entered the wood.

  Without speaking, Alayne turned and walked swiftly along the path, a curve of which soon hid her from their sight. Their hands fell apart. Renny stood irresolute for a short space, feeling a kind of anger against both girls, as beings of a different texture from himself who had a secret in common that was in its essence antagonistic to him. Then, without looking at Minny, he crashed through the underbrush and strode after Alayne.

  Minny’s eyes, as she resumed her berry-picking, had in them more of amusement than chagrin. After all, it was an amusing world. Mrs. Vaughan’s schemes come to nothing… Renny Whiteoak in love with that cold-blooded Mrs. Eden… Eden, himself—a wayward dimple indented her round cheek. She began to sing, softly at first, but gaining in volume, till the locust orchestra was silenced, believing Summer to have returned in all her strength and beauty.

  Alayne was conscious that he was following her and, dreading a meeting with him, she turned from the path at the first opportunity and took a shortcut through the woods toward a gate that opened on to the road. He followed the windings of the bridle path, believing her still to be ahead of him, but when he did not overtake her he suspected that she was wilfully eluding him, and retraced his way to the shortcut. He overtook her just as she reached the road. She heard the opening of the gate and turned to him. Here in the public road she felt more courageous than in the quiet of the wood, less likely to show the feeling which she fought so desperately to control. He had been the permanent object of her thoughts all the summer, yet this was the first time they had been quite close together. She had desired to return to New York without such a meeting. Now that it had been forced upon her, she felt her strength drained by the effort of resisting her own love for him no less than by the bitterness of having discovered him in the act of kissing Minny Ware.

  “Alayne,” he said, in a muffled voice, “you are trying to avoid me! I don’t think I deserve it. Upon my word I don’t!”

  “I would rather be alone. It’s nothing more than that.” She began to walk slowly along the road.

  “I know—” he exclaimed. “You’re angry. But I give you my word—”

  She interrupted furiously: “Why should you explain things to me? As though it mattered to me! Why did you leave her? Why did you follow me?” Though her lips questioned him her eyes looked fixedly ahead.

  He walked beside her in the dust of the road. A jolting wagon loaded with turnips overtook and passed them.

  He said: “You can’t refuse to have this much explained, surely. I had not been two minutes beside Minny when you came up. My kiss on her arm was no more than her eating a blackberry. A few minutes before that, I had stopped by the paddock and kissed a two-year-old mare. One kiss was as important as the other. To me—to the mare—to Minny!”

  He looked down into her pale, firmly modelled face, with its look of courage, of endurance, its what she called “Dutch” look of stability Yet about her mouth was a look of fatigue, as though she were played out by the isolation and the ingrown emotions of the last months.

  He continued: “I wish I could make you believe in my love as I believe in it myself. There’s nothing on earth I could want so much as to have you for my own. Do you believe that?”

  She did not answer.

  A motor car whizzed by them, raising the dust in a cloud. “Come,” he said, “let us get off this road. It’s so hot and dusty, it will give you a headache.”

  But she trudged doggedly on.

  “Alayne,” he persisted, “why don’t you say something— if it’s only to say that you don’t believe me—that you’re sick of the sight of me?”

  She tried to answer, but her mouth was parched and her lips refused to move. She felt that she must go on forever, walking along this road, with him following her, longing to cry out, yet unable to speak, as in a nightmare. She would go on till she stumbled and fell.

  He did not speak again, but walked beside her, trying once rather pathetically to suit his stride to hers. At the foot of the steps that led to the church he stopped.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “To your grandmother’s grave. I haven’t seen it yet. Do I hear Finch playing in the church?”

  “No, no. Finch is in bed. He tried to drown himself this morning.” Let her have that. Perhaps it would shock her out of this terrible quiet.

  “Yes,” she said calmly. “Eden told me. No wonder!” “God, how you hate us!”

  “No—I fear you.”

  He said, almost irritably: “All this is so unreal! Can’t you, or won’t you, talk about our love? You know it exists. Why blink it? We can’t come together, but surely—just before we part we can speak of it. I am going away tonight. You needn’t be afraid that you’ll see me again.”

  She began to go up the steps toward the churchyard. He caught her dress and held it. “No. You shall not go up there! I can’t follow you there.”

  She raised her face to his with a sudden piteousness in her eyes. “Where shall I go, then?”

  “Back into the woods.”

  They turned back, and had to step into the ditch, rank with dusty goldenrod and Michaelmas daisies, out of the way of a lorry loaded with calves. She stumbled; he put his hands on her and supported her. She felt that she must fall.

  Again they were in the golden-green well of the woods. The red sun was low. Overhead the half moon drifted, a pale feather, along the sky.

  They stood for a moment listening to the beating of their own hearts. Then she raised her heavy eyes to his and whispered: “Kiss me—”

  He bent. She drew his head down, closed her eyes, and felt for his mouth with her lips.

  With their kisses they mingled the endearments pent up so long in their hearts.

  “Alayne, my precious one.”

  “Renny—oh, my darling love.”

  He drew away a little and cast an oblique glance at her. “Is it true—?”

  “Is what true?”

  But he could not go on. He could not ask her if what Eden said to him were true—that she would be willing to live in hell for the sake of seeing him now and again—that she had come back to Jalna to be near him, and not for Eden’s sake.

  “Is what true?” she whispered again.

  “That we must part.”

  She broke into restrained but bitter crying.

  A great flock of crows passed above the treetops, calling to each other, crying wildly.

  “They are mocking us!” she said.

  “No, we don’t exist for them. We only exist for each other… Alayne, I can’t go away tonight as I said.”

  “No, no! We must meet sometimes and talk—while I am still here. Oh, Renny, hold me close—I want to get strength from you.”

  “And I want to make you as weak as I am,” he murmured, against her hair. He drew her closer. Some magnetic current from his hands frightened her. He began to kiss her again. What mad thoughts were born of his kisses against her eyes, her throat, her breast!

  She disengaged herself and began to return along the bridle path. He followed her, his eyes dark and brilliant, the lines about his mouth patient and stubborn.

  It seemed that he could follow her thus across the world, lean, primitive, untiring.

  Where their paths separated, they said a muttered goodbye, not looking at each other.

  XXIV

  WEAVING

  FINCH did not return home for a week. He remained under Meg’s protective care, feeling the not unpleasant languor that follows the overstrain of hysterical emotion. He spent the first days in bed, listening indolently to the various noises of the house, the cooing of Patience, the singing of Minny Ware, the activities of the old Scotch housekeeper. O
ver and over again, as he lay there,. he reviewed the events of his life since the New Year. His playing with the orchestra, his shadowy acquaintance with the other members of it: Burns, from the abattoir, Meech, the tailor’s assistant. Their faces came and went. He thought oftenest of his friend, George Fennel, with his square hands, so deft on the banjo strings, his thickset figure, and his eyes beaming beneath his rumpled hair. He had not seen George since his return from New York. George had spent his summer as swimming instructor at a boys’ camp, and they had not written to each other. Friendship withGeorge was such an easeful thing. When you were separated from him you did not write to him or perhaps often think of him, but once you were together again the gap of separation was bridgedas though it had never been. Looking back on the cold nights when he and his friend had slipped from the house of George’s aunt, and hastened to some dance hall to play with the orchestra, Finch thought that this had been the happiest time of his life. The adventurous freedom of it, the exciting risk, the playing of dance music for the rhythmically swaying bodies of bright-eyed boys and girls, the creeping home toward morning with money in their pockets! As he lay in bed he hummed their favourite dance tunes.

  He reviewed his friendship with Arthur Leigh. How different from his friendship with George, which had begun in babyhood and continued at the same temperate level to their school days. He had not seen Arthur either since his return. Leigh had been in Europe with his mother and sister. Difficult to bridge a gap of absence with them, Finch feared. He had an inexplicable dread of meeting Leigh, and, more especially, his sister Ada again. Now that he had passed his exams, he would be going to the University in October. Arthur would be there. What would he think of Finch’s having all that money left him? Perhaps it would not seem so very much to Arthur, for the Leighs were rich. Their faces rose before him too, Arthur’s sensitive, questioning, rather supercilious; Ada’s ivory-pale, heavy-lidded, provocative; and Mrs. Leigh like a sister rather than a mother, more golden, less bronze than Ada, her eyes more blue than grey, desiring to please rather than dubiously offering to be pleased. How little he knew of girls! And yet they were often in his mind, when, lying awake, he would make fantastic pictures of the girl who might possibly love him. Sometimes their faces were mocking variations of the face of Ada Leigh, sometimes they were impossible faces with disproportionately large, mournful eyes or wide red mouths like flowers. Sometimes they showed no face at all, only a flat, white disc borne above heavy breasts that pressed against flowing garments.

  He reviewed his life in New York as costing clerk. His determined efforts to learn the routine of business, his rides on the Fifth Avenue buses, his visits to Alayne’s apartment, the jolly kindness of Rosamond Trent. Looking back at this period, he seemed not to have been himself at all, but a strange translation into a being of another world, already becoming so shadowy that it was hardly to be grasped at.

  He went over the happenings of the summer—his practising, his playing in the church at night, the walks home by moonlight, the secret meetings with his grandmother. When his imagination reached the point of her death, her funeral, the reading of the will, and the scene afterward, a protective instinct drew a film, like a fine veil, between the eyes of his spirit and these pictures, so that it might not be bruised by the cruelty of them.

  These various experiences presented themselves as sections of a screen, which shut him off from what might have been a shrinking contemplation of his future at Jalna. He lay supine, indolently dreaming of life, not daring to think how close he had been to death.

  Meg’s notion of rehabilitating him in his old niche, or something better, was to feed his body with the best that her kitchen could provide. Her intuition, and some self-reproach, told her that he needed tempting food and plenty of it. He was tempted like an invalid and ate like a field labourer. Renny, coming to visit him and finding him propped up over half a broiled chicken, thought, and declared vehemently at Jalna, that Meggie was perfect. Her remarks about Alayne had faded as breath from a glass. These were women’s ways and beyond his ken. But he could take in the significance of Meggie’s plump white hand stroking Finch’s lank hair, or a crisp section of broiled fowl surrounded by green peas. The family at Jalna were told that Finch had had a “ nervous breakdown ” (most convenient of illnesses) just as he arrived at the Vaughans’ house, had been taken in, and was being nursed back to health by the blameless Meggie, and that it would be a good thing if they could bring themselves to treat him with indulgence on his return. It was a relief to all to have him out of the house for that week. The sight of his angular, drooping form and the knowledge that here was the heir to old Adeline’s fortune might have produced other nervous breakdowns. As it was, the talk rolled on and on without even the insignificant let or hindrance of his presence. Augusta was shortly returning to England. Never again would she endure another Canadian winter. She had had the good fortune not to have been born in Canada. She had no intention of dying there of the cold. This she affirmed with the thermometer at eighty-five degrees in the last fever of summer. She urged her brothers to return with her for a visit.

  Meg thought that a talk from Mr. Fennel would be good for Finch. She did not tell the rector that he had done anything so desperate as attempt to take his own life, but she intimated that he had lost control of himself in a very strange and inexplicable fashion. Mr. Fennel shrewdly guessed that there had been a disturbance at Jalna over the will, and that Finch, made ill by the excitement, was being kept at the Vaughans’ till the smell of the fat died away. He came to see him and talked, not religion or behaviour, but about his own young days in Shropshire, and how he had wanted to be a stage comedian, and did Finch so much good by his wit and sagacity that he was able to be out of bed that evening, and the next morning steadied himself still more by an hour at the piano.

  The next day George Fennel, back from camp, came to see him, and still further forwarded his recovery. George was beaming over his friend’s good fortune, and blithely indifferent to the disappointment of the rest of the clan. He sat, solid, rumpled, sunburnt, on the side of the bed, and discussed the endless possibilities of a hundred thousand dol-lars.

  “Why, look here,” he said, “you can get up a regular orchestra of your own, if you want. We could take it on a tour across the continent. Some sort of striking uniform— blue with lots of gilt. 1 suppose your family would object. My father would, too. He hasn’t much imagination. Hates anything stagey. But it’s the sort of life I’d like,” His eyes shone. He took from his pocket the usual crumpled cigarette packet that invariably contained from one to three enervated cigarettes, and offered Finch one. They puffed together in the sweet renewal of good fellowship after absence.

  “And look here,” he went on, “you should get yourself a concert grand piano. I’d like to hear you on a concert grand. Playing some of those things from the Chauve-Sonris. It would make a tremendous difference to you, having a piano like that. You might become famous… Of course, for my part, I like the idea of a swell orchestra. Great Scott, we had some fun with the old one, didn’t we? And we worked for what we got! My finger-ends used to get so sore that the banjo strings seemed red-hot. Do you remember the last night, and that girl who tried to make up to you? They were a pretty tough crowd. Do you remember what a time we had getting home, and how we bought milk from a milkman and it was frozen? I should never have got home if it hadn’t been for you.”

  George broke into his peculiar, sputtering laughter, then became serious. “Last night I had dinner in town with a Mr. Phillips. He’s got absolutely the best radio I’ve ever heard. It’s an expensive one, but he says it gives perfect satisfaction. We heard wonderful grand-opera music and some fellow on the piano—just the sort of thing you’d like. You really ought to have one of those. It would be good for you, too, because you could hear all the best things and not bother about the jazzy stuff… Good Lord, do you remember the way we used to pound out ’My Heart Stood Still’?”

  He sputtered again and
then made an even more significant suggestion. “Do you know, Finch, up in the North where I was there was a wonderful bargain in a summer cottage. It was a log-cabin sort of thing built by some American who finds it too far to come. He’s going to sell it awfully cheap. It would be splendid for you to own such a place to rest in, in the summer, and take your friends to, and recuperate and all that. It’s got an enormous stone fireplace and raftered ceilings, and the deer come almost up to the door. Why, one night this American said a porcupine kept him awake gnawing at the foundation.”

  “It would be splendid,” agreed Finch, his head suddenly very hot with excitement.

  “And there’s another thing I’ve just remembered,” pursued George. “There’s a chap up there who has a motor launch for sale. It’s the fastest one I’ve ever been on. Goes through the water like a knife. If you had that, with the cottage, you could have no end of fun. I wish I’d found out more about the launch. However, I think you’ll be safe in risking it. It’s quite different with a motor car. When you buy a car you should get one of the best English makes. There’s nothing like them for standing the wear and tear.”

  ‘The trouble is,” said Finch, “that I don’t get this money till I’m twenty-one.”

  “The time will soon pass,” said George, easily “I dare say these people would hold the cottage and launch for you. I’ll bet that you could raise money any day on your prospects. That’s often done.”

  Finch lay bewildered, speechless before the vista opening before him.

  His meeting with Arthur Leigh was very different and, though less riotously stirring, had an equally healing effect on his bruised spirit. He had a note from Arthur that ran:

  MY DEAR OLD FINCH—

  What is this dazzling news I hear of you? I met Joan on the street and she told me some about a huge bequest. I am delighted, and Mother and Ada almost as much so. Please come and spend a week with us (my womenfolk insist that it shall be no less) and we can talk day and night. It will take seven of them for all I want to say to you.