Books 13-16: Return to Jalna / Renny's Daughter / Variable Winds at Jalna / Centenary at Jalna

by Mazo de La Roche

“I thought stepmothers were cruel.”

  “Nonsense. I myself had a stepmother, and a very sweet woman she was.”

  “Does Dennis like her?”

  “He will when he gets used to her.”

  Mary was thankful when one of the farm wagons from Jalna overtook them and they rumbled in it, behind the two stout percherons, and were deposited at the gate of the Rectory — which, behind its tall greening hedge, looked the proper cozy setting for Auntie Meg. She met them and enfolded them in a warm embrace. She was having a cup of tea from a tray in the living room and at once brought two extra cups and poured some for each of them.

  “And I have some thin slices of fruit loaf — really nice and fresh, with good raisins in it that you might like. You know how it is with me. I eat scarcely anything at table but must have a little snack now and again to keep me going. This is really the first food I’ve had today.”

  “I know what you are about meals,” Renny said sympathetically. “It’s a wonder you don’t starve. Mary and I are due for lunch in a short while, so we don’t need anything to eat now but we’ll gladly drink a cup of tea with you.”

  Mary was hungrily eyeing the slices of fruit loaf but she politely began to sip her tea. Renny was explaining to his sister the reason for the tour, while she, without seeming to do so, was sweeping clean the tray. Every now and then she would smile at Mary, a smile of such peculiar sweetness that the little girl forgot how hungry she was and how wet were her feet.

  Renny, drinking a second cup of tea, was saying, “With the centenary of Jalna coming next year, I thought it a good thing to give the youngest of the family an idea of what it means to us.”

  “You couldn’t do a better thing,” said Meg. “Modern times are so strange. One can’t be sure what children are thinking. One must guide them as best one can.”

  Renny spoke firmly to the child. “Tell Auntie Meg what you know about the centenary at Jalna.”

  With a slight quaver in her voice Mary answered, “Everybody’s got to come.”

  Meg gave a pleased smile. “And who is everybody?” she asked, helping herself to another slice of fruit loaf.

  “Everybody in the family.”

  Meg now said, in the dictatorial tone of someone hearing the Catechism, “Name them.”

  “All the ones that live — that live — ”

  “Convenient.” Renny supplied the word.

  “Convenient,” Mary said with a pleased smile at her aunt, who, taking another large bite of fruit loaf, mumbled through it:

  “And who comes from a distance?”

  “My brother and Uncle Wakefield and Roma.”

  “Isn’t she clever?” exclaimed Renny. “She knows everything.”

  “It would be nice,” said Meg, “if we could celebrate the centenary by a wedding. Adeline’s, for example.”

  “It would indeed, but whom is she to marry?”

  “There’s that dear boy, Maurice, who loves her to distraction and always has. How would you like to see your favourite brother married to Adeline, Mary?”

  “I have no favourites,” said Mary. “My brothers are all just men.”

  “I know, dear,” Meg spoke patiently, “but you must have a man for a wedding. Whom would you choose for a bridegroom — a fairy prince — for Adeline?”

  “Mr. Fitzturgis,” said Mary promptly.

  Renny and Meg groaned in unison. They had unhappy memories of Adeline’s engagement to the Irishman. Renny took some credit to himself that it had been broken off.

  At that moment the Rector entered the room. He had a genial greeting for the two visitors and a look that was half-admiring, half-reproachful for his wife. They had been elderly widow and widower when they had married. He still had not grown accustomed to encountering her and her relatives always about the house, and he deplored her habit of frequent little lunches from trays.

  “She never eats a proper meal,” he said to Renny.

  “She never has. Yet she thrives. See how plump she is, while I, who eat like a horse at table, am thin as a rail.”

  “what is a rail?” asked Mary.

  “A rail,” observed the Rector, “is a kind of water bird — rather rangy and thin.” He went and opened a window, exclaiming, “How stuffy it is in here!” During the years after the death of his first wife he had lived in a pleasurable draft from open windows; now in his second marriage he was always complaining of the stuffiness of the rooms.

  This open window affected Meg and Renny not at all, but it was right at Mary’s back. She grew colder and colder. Shivering, she watched her aunt empty the teapot, demolish the last currant from the fruit loaf; heard her uncle and the Rector discussing the lateness of the season; she thought of the different houses she had visited that morning and longed for home.

  At last they were on their way there. Holding tightly to Renny’s hand, getting out of the path of motor cars, every yard of the way familiar to her, her blood moved more quickly, her spirits rose. She inquired:

  “Uncle Renny, why do some ladies get fat?”

  “It’s the life they lead.”

  “Does the life they lead make them get fat in different parts of them?”

  “It certainly does.”

  “Auntie Meg is fat all over.”

  “She certainly is.”

  “But Patience is fat only in her tummy. Why?”

  “Ask your mother.”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “It’s none of my business.”

  “Do you always mind your own business?”

  “I try.” After a little he said, “I hope you’re not tired or cold or hungry.”

  “Oh, no. I’m all right.” But he could feel that she was lagging.

  “Good girl,” he said, and to encourage her began to sing, in a not particularly tuneful voice, an old song he had learned from his maternal grandfather, a Scottish doctor:

  Oh, hame came oor guid man at eve,

  And hame came he,

  And there he spied a saddle-horse

  Whaur nae horse should be.

  “And hoo came this horse here?

  And whase can he be?

  And hoo came this horse here

  Wi’oot the leave o’ me?”

  “Horse?” quoth she.

  “Aye, horse,” quoth he …

  “Tis but a bonny milch coo

  My mither sent to me.”

  “Milch coo!” quoth he.

  “Aye, milch coo,” quoth she …

  “But saddles upon much coos

  Never did I see.”

  By the time he had finished the song they had arrived at his brother’s house. The wicket gate stood invitingly open, the fox terrier Biddy came in rapture to meet them, and Piers Whiteoak opened the door.

  “We’re holding back lunch for you,” he said to Renny. “I suppose you’ll stay. Have you any idea what time it is?”

  “To tell the truth I haven’t. Mary and I have been on a tour. Tell Daddy about it, Mary.”

  Seated on Piers’s knee, the warmth from his robust body reaching out to comfort her little thin one, the beam from his fresh-coloured face encouraging her, she could think of nothing to say but — “We saw all the family.”

  “Well,” said Piers, “there’s nothing very new about that, is there?”

  “Oh, but we saw them in a different way,” said Renny. “In the past we took it for granted that our kindred was the most important thing in the world for us. Now the youngsters must be taught.”

  “what about Archer?” asked Piers.

  “That boy’s an oddity — but, beneath his oddities, he’s a Whiteoak all right.”

  Piers grunted. He took off his daughter’s shoes and socks and held her little cold feet in his warm hands. “So you visited all the family houses,” he said to her.

  “Yes, every one.”

  “And which do you like best? I mean including our own home.”

  Certainly Piers expected her to choose her own, but at once she an
swered — “Jalna.”

  Renny gave a delighted grin. “There,” he exclaimed, “she chooses Jalna! I’ve explained to her about its centenary. Now, Mary” — he looked at her intently out of his dark eyes — “tell us why you like Jalna best.”

  Without hesitation, she answered, “Because it has television.”

  Crestfallen, the brothers stared at her in silence a moment, then broke into a shout of laughter.

  Piers’s wife, Pheasant, setting a platter of lamb chops on the table, heard this last. “There’s a modern child for you,” she said, and added wistfully — “when I was a child, how romantic Jalna seemed to me! All the family who lived there were glamorous.”

  “Even me?” Piers asked flirtatiously.

  “Even you.”

  After twenty-seven years of marriage, they still were lover-like.

  While they were enjoying the lamb chops a persistent ringing came from the telephone. Piers answered it and, returning to the table, said, “It was from Jalna. Alayne, wanting to know if you were here and why you had not sent word. She sounded a bit annoyed.”

  “By George, I forgot.”

  For a moment Renny was subdued, but soon his naturally good spirits were restored. He liked being with Pheasant and Piers. The brothers had many interests in common: the livestock, the farm with its orchards and small fruits. Since Renny’s unprecedented success with the racehorse, East Wind, Piers had troubled his head less and less about being in debt to him for the rent of the farmlands. Renny was a generous elder brother. If he had money on hand for his needs, he gave little thought to what was owing him. On the other hand he had not been scrupulous, when he was hard up, in days past, about acquiring the wherewithal from his wife’s private means or from his brother Finch who had inherited a fortune from his grandmother.

  Seated beside her brown-eyed, brown-haired mother, Mary dallied with the hot food on her plate. So long had she gone hungry, she had lost appetite. Now that she was warm and no longer straining to keep up with Renny’s strides on the wet paths, the windy road, she could look back on the tour with pride and even pleasure.

  “You should have heard us singing as we came down the road,” Renny was saying. “Do you remember that old song, Piers?” and he sang:

  Oh, hame came oor guid man at eve,

  And hame came he,

  And there he spied a saddle-horse

  Whaur nae horse should be.

  “I had it from my maternal grandfather. He was a self-opinionated old Scotch doctor. Do you remember him, Piers?”

  “I can’t very well remember him, for he died before I was born.”

  “Well, you’ve heard of him often enough — Dr. Ramsey — your own grandfather.”

  “You forget,” said Piers, “that we are half-brothers?”

  An unpleasant reminder that, to the master of Jalna. He wanted the relationship to be intervolved, with no break. He frowned and asked, “Then who was your maternal grandfather?” He would not do him the courtesy of remembering him.

  “He was a London journalist — drank rather heavily, I believe.”

  “Oh, yes. I remember now. Well, never mind — we had the same paternal grandfather, and what a man he was! Philip Whiteoak!” He mused on the name a moment, then added: “I’m glad you named one of your sons for him and that the boy is the very spit of him.”

  “He’s a rascal,” said Piers. “He’ll be coming home from college soon and I have a thing or two to say to him about his extravagance. Christian will be coming from Paris, too.”

  “And Maurice from Ireland,” cried Pheasant. “All three brothers at home! Won’t that be lovely, Mary?”

  Mary was not at all sure it would. In truth, home seemed pleasanter to her, more her very own, when those three unruly, loud-talking young men were away. After lunch, with clean dry socks and shoes on, and a warm sweater, she wandered again into the garden. Somehow there was a difference in all the growing things. It was as though they heard spring singing in the distance, and were poised to listen. She discovered the moth, that morning freed from the prison of its cocoon. It was clinging to a newly opened leaf, in a ray of pale sunlight. It attracted the attention of a bird which hovered above it. But the moth, in self-protection, raised its wings, vibrating them. From its hind wings two spots like eyes glared in threat. The bird, alarmed by this insect ferocity, flew away. Yet it did not fly far. Somewhere by its hidden nest it burst into a cheeping song that was the only one it knew.

  Mary thought of all the houses she had that morning visited, of the people in them. They all were parts of the family. They were the family — her world. They were separate, yet they were one. Their faces were distinct, yet merged into the weather-beaten countenance of her Uncle Renny.

  II

  Finch’s Return

  Homecomings, thought Finch, are the very best things in life. Home-leavings, a kind of death. Though he had faced the publicity attendant on the life of a concert pianist, he had shrunk from it. In the exhilaration of a public performance he would, for the time, forget his audience. Would, in fact, feel himself one with them. But, at the end, they were his enemies. Then he did not face them in courage but, exhausted, with a smile that women reporters would describe as a “naive, friendly grin” or a “shy, boyish grin.” One thing was certain, audiences liked him. They liked his gangling boyish figure as he crossed the platform. They liked the shape of his head, the expressive movements of his long bony hands.

  Now, at the end of a tour (and at this moment he hoped he would never have another) he had come home to his own house, his own wife. He had possessed neither for very long. The paint on this ranch house was still fresh. The house had been built on the site of one which had been burned. This new marriage was built on the ruin of his first marriage. His house, he was willing to admit, did not harmonize with the other houses of the neighbourhood — or Jalna, with its faded red brick, almost covered by vines, its stone porch, its five chimneys, rising from the sloping roof where pigeons eternally cooed and slid, where their droppings defaced the leaves of the Virginia creeper and the windowsills, where smoke was always coming out of one or more of the chimneys and where the old wooden shingles so often managed to spring a leak.

  This house of Finch’s was something new, something different. The family must get used to it. As for himself — he was proud of it. He loved it, he told himself — returning to it. He loved his wife and was hoping, with all the fervor of a nature too often swept by hopes and despairs, that his family would love her and she them.

  Now he and she were together in the music room. Together as they always would be in the future, he thought — and she tried to believe, for she took no happiness for granted. Now, in wonder, she held one of his hands, with its beautifully articulated fingers, in hers.

  “I’m thinking of the power in it,” she said.

  “I should like to dig in the earth with it.” He clenched it, as though on a spade. “I’m tired of taking care of myself. A kind of beastly preciousness — that’s what one feels of one’s body on a tour. God, when I think of the rough-and-tumble of my boyhood! when I think of the life my two older brothers lead — it’s natural — ”

  “But you’re doing what you’ve always wanted, aren’t you?” she said gently.

  “Yes,” he granted. “I guess it’s just that I’m tired. You’ve never seen me at the end of a tour. I shall be different in a day or two.… Oh, Sylvia, if only you could know what it is to me to come home and find you waiting for me!… You do like the house, don’t you?”

  “It’s perfect. There’s nothing I would change in it. And nothing could be more different from my home in Ireland — I was so ill and unhappy there.”

  “Do you see much of my family?” he asked, as though he felt that seeing a good deal of them would complete her cure.

  Certainly she knew them quite well, for she had visited at Jalna. Now she said, “I have had dinner there twice a week and have had them here. All the family have been sweet. I’ve tol
d you in letters.”

  What a charming voice she has, he thought, and he remembered how sweet had been the voice of his first wife, Sarah. Both of them Irish. But how different! Sarah — with her odd gliding walk, her jet-black hair and green eyes, almond-shaped. Something rigid about her body — while Sylvia was loosely put together, pale-coloured as a wandering wood spirit. So he thought of her, as he sat holding her hand — thought of her as elusive, where Sarah had been so relentlessly, almost desperately yet coldly clinging.… Looking into Sylvia’s blue eyes, he sought to put Sarah out of his mind forever.

  But now Sylvia was speaking of Sarah’s child. She was saying, “Dennis will soon be coming home for the holidays. It’s so exciting to picture a child in the house.”

  “He’s thirteen. Will be fourteen next Christmas. We used to call him Holly. An odd little fellow. Small for his age. Looks about eleven.”

  When in a few weeks Dennis returned from school, that was Sylvia’s first thought: how small he was — how compact, firm, and yet how guileless — with his pale hair and green eyes, he was veiled in her mind — the child of another woman by Finch, yet now to be hers to care for, to love. Why, he looked small enough to tuck into bed at night — to snuggle up to one and tell his boyish troubles. She felt, at the moment, quite ridiculously sentimental about him.

  As he sat on the arm of Finch’s chair, with an arm about Finch’s neck, she looked into their two faces with affectionately critical eyes.

  “There’s no resemblance,” she said. “You two are as different as you can be.” She rather wished the boy had looked like Finch. His unlikeness seemed to set him apart. Suddenly she wondered how she would talk to him. She’d had no experience. But she would find out. Bit by bit they would draw close to each other. She and Finch were setting out with a ready-made family. Three of them! A family to be reckoned with.

  Finch removed his son’s arm from his shoulder.

  “Shouldn’t you like to run off for a while?” he said.

  Dennis from his perch looked down into Finch’s face. “where?” he asked.

  “Oh, anywhere. To Jalna. To the stables.”

  “I’ve been there already. I’d rather be here with you.”