Books 13-16: Return to Jalna / Renny's Daughter / Variable Winds at Jalna / Centenary at Jalna
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The two young women sprang up and hurried to the box where the bumping continued, Althea with long, silent steps, Gemmel making sharp sounds with her high heels. They bent over the box where convulsive movements were taking place inside a piece of flannel. Althea tenderly unwrapped the creature. From between his shells his greenish legs stretched forth, feeling for security. His little snakelike head protruded, his mouth stretched in a pink yawn. He was the size of a tea plate.
“Oh, the darling!” cried Gemmel.
Althea held him rapturously in her long white hands.
“You have slept so long,” she whispered to him, “and now you are hungry. You shall have a dandelion. I have them growing in a box upstairs. Watch him, Gem, while I fly up and get him one.”
Noiselessly she left the room and they did not hear her run up the stairs. She had set the tortoise on the floor and now he began, with prehistoric deliberation, to cross the room.
“I don’t like animals crawling over my rugs,” said Mr. Clapperton.
“Oh, Eugene, I think he’s sweet.”
“He’s disgusting to me. All those animals your sister and you bring into the house are nasty. There was that enormous worm that wove its cocoon in a window curtain and in the spring a moth came out and laid eggs and the eggs turned into grubs. There was the nest of young skunks! There are the dancing mice and the toad!”
“No one,” declared Gemmel hotly, “could reasonably complain of any of those excepting the skunks and we got rid of them.”
“But not of their odour.” With disgust he watched the tortoise creeping toward him. He drew up his feet. “Take it away,” he ordered.
“Oh, how funny,” she laughed. “what a picture!”
He kicked at the tortoise, rolling it over on its back. Althea came into the room carrying a dandelion in her fingers. She gave a cry of dismay and dropped to her knees beside the tortoise whose legs weakly sought a foothold in the air.
“Poor darling!” she cried and righted it. “Oh, Eugene, how could you be so cruel?” She stared with hate at her brother-in-law who returned the look with no lessening of that quality.
“I didn’t hurt it.”
“You did! He’s lame.”
“Nonsense.”
Althea offered the dandelion and the tortoise, ending his long fast, opened his mouth wide and, with a hissing sound, drew in the blossom. The three watched him, fascinated. Then, quite uninjured by the kick, he resumed his purposeful walk.
“I want you,” said Eugene Clapperton steadily, “to take him upstairs and keep him there. I want you to keep all your pets in your own room.”
She answered, in a shaking voice, “I will. And myself, too.” She snatched the tortoise, his flannel wrapping, his box, and fled.
There was a silence after she left, embarrassed and angry on the husband’s part, amused and angry on the wife’s. After a little he said:
“That girl irritates me so I say more than I should. She’s enough to drive a man crazy.”
“You knew what she was when I married you.”
He returned bitterly, — “It’s no fun marrying your wife’s relations. In your case, two queer sisters.”
“One of them is gone. Some day Althea will marry.”
He gave a derisive laugh. “I’d like to know who would marry her.”
“Oh, she’s had her chances! She’s not like me — jumping at her first offer.”
He answered angrily, — “I have been indulgence itself to you, haven’t I?”
She looked at him in cold silence.
“Haven’t I?” he repeated. “I did a lot for you before we were married and I’ve done a good deal since. I gave up building my dream village for you and I’ve regretted it.”
“Is that what you were muttering about to Mrs. Piers?”
“Muttering, eh? Muttering!”
“Well, you weren’t talking in an ordinary tone.”
“I daren’t choose my way of talking,” he said harshly, “in my own house!”
“I’m sorry, Eugene,” she returned coaxingly. “I should have said you spoke in a low tone. I caught a few words that made me guess you’d brought up the question of the village again.”
“I was only telling Mrs. Piers how I regret the project. You should not have made me give it up.”
“But, my dear, you asked me what I should most like for a wedding present and I said at once I’d like to know that never, never would any more small houses disfigure the property. That’s true, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“And you gave me your word to stop building, didn’t you?”
“I was a fool, if ever there was one. That village had been my dream. Besides there was money in it. A good deal of money. It would have been a benefit to the community.”
She laughed derisively. “A benefit! All the neighbourhood would hate you for it.”
“The neighbours don’t care much for me, as it is. I’ve never fitted in. Nowadays I don’t fit into my own house. That tortoise is more at home here than I am. That great brute of a dog growls at me every time he sees me. Why Althea should want to keep a Great Dane I can’t imagine.”
“She has always liked animals better than people.”
“She certainly likes him better than she likes me.”
His wife came and sat on the arm of his chair. She stroked the back of his neck. “Poor old Tiddledy-winks,” she said, using her ridiculous pet name for him.
His hand was against the fullness of her breast, her heartbeats thudded in his ear, beating coherence out of his thought, filling his mind with sensual longings. “Oh, Gem,” he breathed, “I wish you’d have a baby. Things would be different somehow, if you had a baby.”
“You’re baby enough for me.” She held his head closer. He was soothed and mollified.
They sat quietly for some time.
Upstairs the dog began to bark. Eugene Clapperton said peevishly:
“I’ve never before had a dog in the house. I’ve never liked them. Every time I meet Renny Whiteoak I’m annoyed by the dogs that surround him.”
“Yes,” said Gem, “a bulldog, a bob-tailed sheep-dog, and a Cairn terrier. They’re sweet.”
“Not to me. They’re a nuisance from the day they’re born till they die. Why is that brute upstairs making so much noise?”
“Althea is getting ready to take him for a walk. He’s excited.”
“He has a brutally coarse bark, that’s all I can say.”
The barking grew louder and louder as the two descended the stairs. It was deafening as they passed through the hall. Althea looked shyly in at the Clappertons and said something but it could not be heard. Now the barking was outdoors. Now there was silence.
“This is how we should be all the time,” said Eugene Clapperton. “Alone together.”
She got up and moved restlessly about the room.
“I was a very foolish man,” he could not help saying, “to make you such a promise.”
“Well, it’s made and must be kept.” Now she had put on what he called her “sulky face,” but whatever expression she wore it was fascinating to him.
“I might remark,” he said, “that you promised to obey me when we were married. Have you kept your promise?”
“Oh, that!” she exclaimed contemptuously.
One of their long, wrangling discussions began. An unseen listener might have thought they did it to pass the time, so persistent, so purposeless, was the pattern their argument took. Althea and her dog returned from their walk and went quietly upstairs. Then the winter twilight fell and Gem turned on the lights. There was a special light under the painting of the shipwreck. The lurid sky, the white-crested waves now dominated the room. Eugene Clapperton absorbed the scene with satisfaction. It gave him who had spent all his working life in offices, a sense of peace and manly power. Nothing would induce him to part with the painting. The artist, a Victorian painter whose name did not live after him, meant little to Eugene Clapperton. It was th
e picture that mattered. He had bought it in an auction sale of household furnishings and, from the moment of its purchase, it had become an important thing in his life.
The lights had been on only a short while when a ring at the doorbell brought the Polish displaced person who acted as maid hurrying from the kitchen. In a moment she announced Renny Whiteoak. Eugene Clapperton, pleased by this interruption to a tiresome talk, yet a little suspicious of the reasons for such a visit, rose stiffly from his chair. He watched his wife as she gave her hand to the master of Jalna, jealous that she should so casually touch the flesh of another man.
They talked of the weather and of how spring would soon be coming to relieve the harshness of winter. It was then that Renny remarked,
“There’s going to be a lot of building this year and certainly it’s needed. People — lots of them — can’t find a roof to cover their heads.”
“True, true,” said Eugene Clapperton, sententiously. “I think that the way people are crowded together is very bad indeed. Bad for health. Bad for morals.”
“Let’s hope these development schemes will keep away from here.” There was something almost threatening in Renny’s tone. Clapperton replied:
“I quite agree that building in our neighbourhood might be a misfortune.”
“Might be!” Renny repeated vehemently. “God knows it has been and is. Much of what was lovely country is ruined — what with putting up and cutting down. Do you remember the magnificent oaks and pines that were butchered — just to give some contractor a job to widen the road? But no, that was before you came here.”
“Sad, very sad,” said Eugene Clapperton sympathetically. “I’ve always liked a nice tree.”
His wife sat in silence, staring at him.
He went on, — “The model village I had in mind was a village of trees and flowers. Nice little houses, with nice people in them.”
“You built three little houses and you haven’t had particularly good luck with your tenants.”
“They pay their rent.”
“Yes. But one of them drinks and makes himself a nuisance. One has screaming children and a slovenly wife. One keeps his radio running all day and a part of the night.”
“You seem to know a great deal about my tenants.” Eugene Clapperton’s voice had a jealous note in it.
“I do. They’re within a stone’s throw of my stables. In fact, I’ve become very friendly with them. But there must not be any more. You agreed to that.”
A smile crept over Eugene Clapperton’s face. He clasped one bony knee in his hands, which were rather surprisingly coarse and strong. “Every man,” he said, “sets himself some sort of ideal and clings to it, more or less, through his life. My ideal was to be a benefactor, if you know what I mean. I wanted to make lots of money and I wanted to help others with my money. I’ve tried to live up to that, Colonel Whiteoak.”
“You old humbug,” Renny thought. But he grinned with apparent geniality at Clapperton who went on to say:
“I’m not going to relate the benefits I’ve conferred on others. One of them you know of,” and he smiled with tenderness at his young wife.
She entered the conversation for the first time.
“No one is likely to forget,” she said, her voice coming gaspingly, as though she had been running, “how it was through you I had the operation on my spine and so was able to walk. You paid for everything, didn’t you?”
“Please don’t mention expense in connection with that, Gemmel,” returned her husband hastily. “You have repaid me a thousand times in becoming my wife.”
“But money did enter into it,” she protested.
“It enters into all good works.”
Renny regarded them with a good deal of curiosity. How, he wondered, could the girl endure him?
Eugene Clapperton continued, — “I have my ideal and you have yours. Mine is to help others. Yours is —” he hesitated, running his hand over his smooth grey head.
“To look out for myself,” finished Renny.
“Well, if you like to put it that way. What I was going to say is that your ideal is to keep Jalna the same as it was when your grandfather built it a hundred years ago.”
“You’re right.
“A hundred years is a long time. You’ve got to take account of the changes that take place in our civilization,” and Eugene Clapperton beat with the soles of his shoes on the carpet, as though he were a leader in the march of civilization.
The master of Jalna tied a knot in his weather bitten forehead. “I don’t think much of civilization,” he said. “We go away to the wars to fight for it and, when we come home, do we find things any better? No. There are shoddier and shoddier houses being built. Shoddier goods are being made, with more and more high-falutin’ names given them. You can’t ride on the roads with comfort because of trucks and motor cars. Thank God, I have enough paths on my own estate to give me a gallop when I want it. Inside my own gates I keep things as they were.”
Eugene Clapperton stopped tapping his soles on the floor, as though at the mention of Jalna the march of progress had ceased, but he said:
“And I admire you for it. But — my property is my own affair. It is my own business, Colonel Whiteoak, what I put on it. I wouldn’t allow even my dear wife to interfere with that.” His eyes rested commandingly on his wife. He felt a new power welling up within him.
“But, Eugene,” she broke out, “you promised — you promised”
“what did I say, Gem? I promised that it would be a long time before I’d ever turn my thoughts to building again. And it has been. Quite a long while.”
“Not four years.”
“Ah, but four years can seem a long while, girlie. You’ll be proud and pleased to see my building project in operation.”
Renny Whiteoak did not know how to talk to this man in his present mood. He had but one wish and that was to insult him. He restrained his rising temper and said, — “Well, if Mrs. Clapperton is not able to influence you, I cannot expect to.”
“No one can influence me. My mind is made up.” With a tremor of excitement Eugene Clapperton realized that his mind had been made up only since Renny had entered the room. Here was a man, he thought, who brought out the fighting qualities in him. Here was an opponent worthy of defeat.
“The house you live in,” said Renny, “was built before Jalna. Mr. Vaughan, who built it, would turn over in his grave if he knew that you were planning to build streets of ugly little houses on Vaughanlands. There are already far too many ugly little houses and ugly big factories about. Once it was one of the loveliest parts of the Province.”
“I’ve heard all that before,” returned Eugene Clapperton.
“The truth about you is,” said Renny, “that all this talk of ideals and dreams is bosh. It’s plain greed that moves you. You know there’s lots of money in these jerry-built bungalows and you want it.”
Mr. Clapperton began to tremble all over. His knees could be seen shaking inside his pin-striped trousers.
Renny looked apologetically at Gemmel Clapperton whose crooked smile was an odd mixture of forgiveness and applause. The door from the hall was thrown open by the Great Dane who pressed his shoulder against it as a man might and stalked to where Renny sat. Eugene Clapperton hoped he would spring on Renny, give him a fright, or, at any rate, utter one of his blood-freezing growls. The Great Dane rose, placed a paw on either of Renny’s shoulders and looked into his face.
“It’s all right,” said Gemmel, and sprang up to grasp the dog’s collar. He growled.
“Let him be.” Renny gently pushed away her hand. He raised his hard aquiline profile to the Great Dane’s muzzle and it bent and drew its warm wet tongue across his forehead.
“I’ve never known him make friends before,” she exclaimed.
Her husband gave her an angry look. He said —
“Please leave the room. I have something to say to Colonel Whiteoak that can’t be said in front of a lady.”
Eugene Clapperton’s voice came with a choking sound. Temper was upsetting to him and he did his best to keep cool. “There’s not a word of truth in what you say. Money doesn’t matter to me. I’ve all I want. I’m not like you, Colonel Whiteoak — always pressed for money. From what I’ve heard there’s little you wouldn’t do to get hold of a few extra dollars.”
His wife now hurried from the room.
The men stood facing each other. Renny said, — “You’re right. And at this moment I’d shake the weasand out of you for next to nothing.”
He grinned into Eugene Clapperton’s grey face and strode out of the house.
IV
HUMPHREY BELL
The new moon that looked bright and cold as ice seemed perched on the bare branch of the oak. Actually perched on the branch was a small owl, staring out of golden eyes at Renny Whiteoak as he appeared on the snowy path. The air had turned colder, and the snow that had been melting was now a hard crust crunching beneath his heavy boots. Leaving Eugene Clapperton he had turned his angry steps across a field and into this little bare wood where there was a small house named the Fox Farm, because people who bred foxes once had lived there. Later it had been occupied by Gemmel and her sisters. It was here that Eugene Clapperton had met her and from here she had been married. After that the house had stood lifeless and empty for a time. It belonged to Renny and he regarded it as not at all like the bungalows Eugene Clapperton was building but as a pleasant little house, isolated in a bit of woodland, of which the tenants must be congenial, it mattering little what rent they paid. In truth, he preferred that they should pay a low rent because, in some mysterious way, the less they paid, the closer the small house was drawn into Jalna.
For the past six months the Fox Farm had been let to a veteran of the war, Humphrey Bell. He lived there but had made no appreciable impression on the place. His soft voice, his insignificant personality, were powerless to overcome the imprint the former tenants had left upon the house. Three sisters had preceded him. Uncle Ernest and his wife, during the short term of their elderly married life, had occupied it; and, before them, a mother and daughter, Renny having loved the mother and the daughter having loved Renny. The faces of these past tenants seemed always to be peering from the windows, the skirts of the women fluttering as they moved in and out of the doors, their voices still echoed in Renny’s ears when he entered the house, the voices of the three Welsh sisters that were sweet as music, the precise New England voice of Uncle Ernest’s wife — how dear that little old woman had been to Renny — the voices of Clara Lebraux and her young daughter, Pauline! The voices of the six women came to Renny’s ears like the sound of distant bells as he drew near the house.