Books 9-12: Finch's Fortune / The Master of Jalna / Whiteoak Harvest / Wakefield's Course Page 3

  Every eye was on him. A warm receptivity drew them close to him. The hour became beautiful to him. He looked at Uncle Nicholas sucking at his pipe, the deep lines of his face relaxed into tenderness as he cherished the weight of Mooey’s soft body, his years numbering only five less than eighty. At Uncle Ernest smiling in the firelight, his fingertips against the pulsing of Sasha’s throat. At Piers, with his fresh ruddiness, still standing, for he seemed, like one of his own horses, either to stand or lie down. At Finch, nursing his thin knee, reflecting his own grin of triumph. At Mooey in his blue jersey suit, his white bare legs, his waving brown hair and blue eyes. Here they were collected, six males, in the generous accord of kinship, of common interest. He said to Piers:

  “Tell him, if you like.”

  “Tell him what?”

  “About his birthday.”

  If a bomb had been thrown at Finch he might have been less staggered. To be told about his birthday! That day which was advancing on him like a juggernaut. That day when he would come into possession of that to which he could never feel that he had the right. When he must, under the eyes of his uncles and brothers, take, as it were, the food out of their mouths. Though, in truth, none of them had seen the colour of old Adeline’s money for thirty years before she had died. All that time she had been hoarding it and living on Renny—and Renny’s father before him.

  “My birthday,” he stammered. “What about it?”

  Piers had been watching Finch’s face. He had read his thoughts there as one might observe the shadows of frightened birds. He answered tolerantly:

  “Only that we’re going to celebrate it. Give you a party of sorts. Isn’t that the idea, Renny?”

  Renny nodded, and Ernest said—“Yes, we were talking about it before you came in. We thought a nice little dinner—some of your own friends—and Nicholas and I, if you don’t think we’re too old.”

  “Champagne,” put in Nicholas heavily. “I propose to buy the champagne. And drink some too, though it will play the devil with my gout.” Something in Finch’s face had touched him. He gave him a smile that was not grudging.

  They were not pulling his leg. They were not trying to make a fool of him. They were in dead earnest about the birthday party. His throat contracted so that he could not speak for a moment. Then he got out:

  “Why—I say—it’s frightfully good of you! I’d like it, of course. But, look here, if it’s going to be much trouble or expense—please don’t bother! But I’d like it all right!”

  But, even as he stammered the words, doubt assailed him. Could he really stand the strain of a party on that birthday? Wouldn’t it be better if he were to sneak away so that the brazen glare of its sun might not beat on him as the central object of its rising?

  “Look here!” he cried. “I don’t think you’d better do it! I really don’t think you’d better do it!”

  “Why?” Four vigorous voices boomed the question at him.

  “Because,” he almost whispered, “I—I really think—I’d just like to spend the day quietly.”

  He was not, at any rate, allowed to spend the next few minutes quietly. Laughter engulfed him, closed over him, submerged him. And when, at last, there was comparative silence again, he heard himself mumbling, with scarlet face:

  “Oh, well, if you really want to give a birthday party for me, you can do it! I don’t give a darn.”

  II

  THE TWO WIVES

  WHILE the men of the family were gathered in the lamplight in Ernest’s room, the two women of the family and the youngest brother, Wakefield, a boy of thirteen, were sitting in the twilight of the drawing-room below. The windows of this room faced southwest, so that a reluctant daylight still made the occupants visible to each other. Finch had been playing the piano to them before he had been drawn upstairs by the magnet which a group of the Whiteoaks in talk together invariably became to one of their number outside the circle.

  “I don’t see why he should have gone,” remarked Pheasant. “It was so nice having him play to us in the twilight.” She had drawn her chair as close as possible to the window to catch the last light on the diminutive jersey she was knitting for Mooey. She felt rather than saw the way with the needles now, her cropped brown head drooping on her slender neck above them.

  “It’s the same old thing,” said Alayne quietly. “They can’t keep away from each other. It’s that amazing fascination they have for each other.” Then, remembering that Wakefield was curled up in a wing chair in a dim corner of the room, she added, with a constrained lightness in her tone—“I’ve never known a family so attached.”

  Wakefield asked, in the clear, probing voice of the precocious child:

  “Have you known many families, Alayne? You are an only child, and almost all the friends you ever talk about are only children. I don’t see how you can know what other large families are like.”

  “Don’t be so cheeky, Wake,” said Pheasant.

  “No, but truly,” he persisted, raising his face, a small white disc, in the shadow of the chair, “I don’t see how Alayne knows really anything about large family life.”

  “I know all that I need to know,” returned Alayne, with a little asperity.

  “All you need to know for what, Alayne?”

  “Why, for understanding this particular family. Its peculiarities and its moods.”

  He was sitting cross-legged, his hands clasped before him, and he began to rock gently on his buttocks, as boredom gave place to enjoyment. “But I don’t think, Alayne, that understanding a family’s peculiarities is all you need to understand when you’ve got to live with them like you’ve got to live with us, Alayne, do you?”

  “Wakefield, you should not say the name of a person you are talking to so often!”

  “You mean that I should not say your name because I talk to you so often?”

  “No, I mean that you should not say my name so often when you talk to me!”

  “Then, why don’t you say what you mean, Alayne?”

  “Wakefield!”

  “Now you’re saying my name every minute! In fact, you’re saying nothing else. Isn’t that rather unreasonable?”

  Pheasant was making suffocating sounds. Alayne controlled her desire to quarrel with her small brother-in-law. She said:

  “Well, perhaps it is. What is it that you think I should understand since I must live with you all?”

  Continuing to rock himself, he answered—“It’s why we’re so fond of each other and why we can’t keep away from each other. That’s what you ought to understand.”

  “Perhaps you’ll be good enough to explain it to me.”

  He unclasped his hands and spread the fingers. “I couldn’t possibly explain. I feel it, but I can’t explain it. Doesn’t your woman’s infruition tell you?”

  Alayne forgave him his precocity, his impudence, for that exquisite mistake. She laughed delightedly. But Pheasant, not far from childhood herself, saw nothing amusing in the word. She said:

  “I think it’s a very good word. It sounds like a very good psychological kind of expression.”

  “I am wondering,” said Alayne, for she was rather tired of the little boy’s presence in the room, “why you don’t go up to join the others. How can you be happy away from them?”

  “I’m not happy,” he answered sadly. “I’m just killing time. I’d join the other men like a shot, only that I’m not on speaking terms with any of them.”

  “But why? What has happened?”

  “Oh, just one thing and another. I hate talking about old quarrels and bygone feuds. I feel myself getting friendly towards them even now I think I will go upstairs.” But he lingered, for he loved the society of women. In his own rather aloof way he loved his two sisters-in-law. He respected Alayne, but it was his delight to draw her into a quarrel. He patronised Pheasant, whom he called “my good girl” or even “my good woman.” His delicacy kept him indoors in rough weather such as this. So he passed his time threading his way in a
nd out of the various relationships of the family, his sensitive nerves alive to all that went on. He was happy, yet he was lonely. He was reaching the age when he began to be afraid that he was not understood.

  The twilight was turning to dusk, and Pheasant rose to light the squat lamp that stood on the centre table.

  “Light the candles instead,” pleaded Alayne. “Let us have something different for this evening.”

  “Yes, do!” cried Wakefield. “It may cheer us up.”

  A shout of laughter came down to them from Uncle Ernest’s room.

  “Just think of the good time they’re having,” said Wakefield ruefully.

  Alayne had risen too. She went to him and stroked his head. “Are you sure you’re not yet friendly enough to join in?” she asked.

  “Not yet. Besides, I like the candlelight.”

  The candlelight, she thought, liked him. It played across the clear pallor of his face and in the brown depths of his eyes as though in a conscious caress. It had a mind to Pheasant too, as she sat down under the branching silver arms, shining with a kind of tremulous serenity on her thin young hands as they moved above the scarlet of the little jersey.

  Alayne began to walk restlessly about the room looking intently at objects, the minutest details of which she already knew by heart, picking up a small china figure and holding it in her two hands, as though to absorb something of its cool smoothness. She saw her reflection in the mirror over the mantelpiece and furtively examined it, wondering whether or not her looks had failed her in the past year. Sometimes she thought they had. And, if they had, or were failing her, small wonder, she thought. She had been through enough to fray the velvet edge of any woman’s bloom. Her first marriage—that disastrous marriage with Eden. His infidelity. The torture of her thwarted love for Renny. Her separation from Eden. Her return to New York and the exactions of her work there. Her second visit to Jalna to nurse Eden through his illness. His affair with Minny Ware. Their divorce. Her marriage to Renny last spring. All this in four years and a half!

  Small wonder if she had changed! Yet—had she changed? That was what she was trying to make out in the glass. But one could never really tell in candlelight. It was so flattering. Wakefield, for instance, who often looked sallow in the daytime, had a white flower-petal skin in this light, and there was the lovely pointed shadow of Pheasant’s eyelashes on her cheek.

  She drew a step closer to the glass, pretending to be interested in Pheasant’s work, but her eyes returned to the scrutiny, almost sombre, of her own reflection. She saw the glint of the candlelight on the brightness of her hair, how it touched her cheekbones and the explicit curves of her mouth. No, she was not going off in her looks, but she had become quite definitely a woman. There was no girlishness in that face, the contours of which had come to her from the Dutch ancestry of her mother. She fancied that the salient expression of her face was one of stolidity. It showed, too, endurance, but not patience. Intellectuality subservient to passion. That capability for passion that might submerge all else seemed to her to have been grafted on to her original personality, her original conception of herself, at any rate, as a new species of tree capable of bearing extravagant flowers and fruit, might have been grafted on one of conventional species.

  She had been married to Renny almost ten months, and she understood no better than before she had married him what his conception of life and love truly was. What did he think? Or was he guided only by instinct? What did he really think of her, now that he had got her? He had no taste for self-analysis. To dig into the depths of his desires, his beliefs, and produce the ore of his egoism for her inspection, would have been abhorrent to him. And apparently he had no curiosity about her beyond the most primitive. His absorption in his own life was immense. Did he expect her, she wondered, now that she was harnessed to his side, to gallop through her life without question, sniffing the bright air, grazing in the comfortable pasture, and returning at night to the dark privacy of their mutual passion? He had none of her relentless desire to see things clearly. His conception of their relationship was so simple that it was almost repellent to her finical mind.

  She turned hurriedly from the glass, for she saw Wakefield’s eyes on her. She began once more to pace up and down the room, her hands clasped behind her back, as she had often seen her father pace in his study. She smiled ironically, wondering if all these stirrings in her mind might possibly be reduced to the old feminine questions—“Does he still love me?” “Does he love me as much as ever?”

  She heard him coming down the stairs noisily (as he always did) as though there were not a moment to spare. He seemed to her like the winter wind, sharp, full of cold energy, rushing by her. He must not pass the door of the drawing-room, perhaps go out again, without speaking to her! She went swiftly to the door, but, just as she reached it, he opened it wide. He stood, startled and smiling to find her so close to him.

  “I was coming to find you,” he said.

  She returned, with childish reproach in her voice:

  “I have been here all the afternoon. I heard you going upstairs ever so long ago.”

  “Yes? I heard the piano as I passed, so I supposed Finch was playing to you. You know I can’t sit down and listen to music in the middle of the afternoon.” He put his arm around her. His eyebrows shot up as he saw the lighted candelabrum. “Well, you are a ghostly looking trio! What’s the matter with the lamp?”

  Pheasant answered—“We like the candlelight. It’s so mysterious.”

  His eyes rested appraisingly on the slender curve of her neck. “It’s becoming, at any rate. I didn’t know you’d such a pretty little neck, Pheasant.”

  “I was just thinking,” said Wakefield, “that she looks like Anne Boleyn. What a nice little neck for the headsman!” He uncurled himself and came over to the two, pushing his dark hair from his forehead, smiling up at Renny.

  Pheasant dropped her knitting and clasped her neck with her fingers. “Oh, don’t, Wake! You make me shiver!”

  That was just what he liked. “You may well shiver, my girl,” he said. “You’re just the sort who would have lost her head in those days!”

  Renny drew the boy to his side and kissed him. “How have you been today, youngster?” he asked, with a solicitude that had once been touching to Alayne, but of late had more often irritated. He felt nothing of her irritation, but Wakefield did. He pressed against his brother, putting his arms under his coat, and looked sideways at Alayne, as though to say—“I can get nearer to him than you can.” He murmured—“Not very well, thanks, Renny.”

  Renny sighed. “Too bad.” He bent and kissed him again. “Now, I’ll tell you something to cheer you. Cora has had a fine little foal this afternoon, and they’re both as well as possible.” He turned to Alayne. “You know, out of four foals she’s lost two, and the others were weakly—but this! Why, it’s a regular rip!”

  “How splendid,” said Alayne, trying to feel excited. Her voice was drowned in the enthusiasm of Pheasant and Wakefield.

  Was it a filly? Was it like the dam or the sire? A filly. The very image of Cora. Up on its legs. A very grenadier of a foal. They talked all at once, their eyes shining. Mooey’s jersey dropped to the floor.

  Renny disengaged himself from Alayne and Wakefield and stood in the middle of the room making quick gestures as he talked, his highly coloured face alight. He repeated to them the story of Cora’s sagacity, of her greeting to him after her labour, imitated that whinny so fraught with meaning.

  Alayne watched him, scarcely hearing what he said, preoccupied by her love for him, by the fascination his presence had for her. She waited impatiently for him to finish his recital, eager to draw him away upstairs, where she might have him to herself, away from these others who seemed always coming between them. She held a pinch of his tweed coat in her fingers and, when the opportunity came, she drew him towards the door. “Come upstairs,” she said, “I have something in my room I want to show you.”

  “Can’t
we see it later?” he asked. “Won’t it be cold up there for you?”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  “I’ll come, too!” Wakefield clasped Renny’s arm.

  “No,” said Alayne sharply. “It’s much too cold for you up there.”

  But he walked doggedly behind them into the hall and followed them up the stairs. Renny hesitated at the door of his room. “Is it in here you want me to go?” He spoke like an obedient but slightly unwilling child.

  “No; in my room.”

  She stood with her hand on the doorknob letting him go past her into the room, but, as Wakefield attempted to pass, she gave him a look so forbidding that he drew back and leaned across the banister pretending to gaze at something in the hall below to hide his chagrin.

  She closed the door behind her and looked at Renny with a sudden feeling of wry amusement. She was like a gaoler, she thought.

  This room had been his sister’s before her marriage. It now bore little evidence of the padded, curtained, frilled comfort that had been Meg’s delight. It was almost austere, the cretonne of mauve and cream, the few pictures in a small group together. In the summer, when she had furnished it with furniture that had been her mother’s and stood a single porcelain vase on the mantelpiece with a spray of delphinium in it, the effect had been charming. The window had been open and the drawn-back curtains had discovered the warm beauty of the garden. But now, in the chill of winter, with the February snow furring the pane, the room looked aloof and colourless, even to her. To Renny, it struck a chill to the heart. She realised that she should not have brought him here, at this hour, in this temperature.

  “Well,” he asked, looking restively about, “what is it you want to show me?”

  “This.” She indicated an embroidered mauve bedspread she had been making and had that afternoon laid in its graceful simplicity on the bed.

  He frowned, looking at it. “It looks like a stage bed. The whole room has a stagey effect to me. It’s unreal. It’s not comfortable. There’s nothing inviting about it. Of course, I know it’s in frightfully good taste and all that, but—” he gave the grin that was so like his grandmother’s—“it’s lucky I usually come in here in the dark or I might get depressed!”