Authors: Mazo de la Roche
Tags: #FIC045000 – FICTION / Sagas
“Oh, I wish, I wish,” she exclaimed, “that I had someone like you to help me—about life. I know nothing—and Arthur, although he is such a darling to me, is ignorant. He doesn’t really know any more than I do.”
Renny thought: “The trouble with you both is that you know far too much.” He said: “I’m afraid you have come to the wrong man for advice. I don’t understand women. I couldn’t possibly.”
She said, slowly: “I don’t quite mean advice.”
“What, then, precisely?”
She pushed the white fur back from her throat. “Something more subtle, I guess. Your friendship—if it wouldn’t bore you too much.”
He thought: “Ha, my girl, you’re one of the deep kind!” And said: “Good. We shall be friends.”
In the theatre, seated between mother and daughter, he experienced a feeling of exasperation, of being trapped. The two pretty women seemed like jailers, and this place a
prison. He hated the “arty” atmosphere, the cold, chaste walls, the curtain. The lack of an orchestra depressed him. For him a theatre should blaze in gilt and scarlet, the curtain should present some florid Italian scene, and his spirit should be borne on the crash of music as on an element. He hated the chatter of women’s voices before the curtain rose. In the buzz of it he talked to the two on either side of him and forgot which was mother and which was daughter. He began to be unaccountably nervous for Finch. He had not wanted him to go in for anything of this sort, but now that he was… His throat tightened. He had trouble in taking a deep breath.
The play began. It increased his low spirits. The religion of the old man, his quoting of the Scriptures, made Renny want to howl. And Finch, when at last he appeared! His wild hair, his dirty face, his rags, his bare feet! Something deeply conservative in Renny disliked very much the sight of bare feet on the stage. The legs of a chorus girl, that was quite different, but a man’s—his brother’s—bare feet were distinctly ugly. And the way Finch blew on his whistle, the mad way he danced about, and sat on the floor and jumped up again, and begged for scraps of food, and slept in the chimney-corner, and was always appearing suddenly and disappearing! And his Irish brogue!
The applause thundered. Finch was the bright star of the evening. His face was white and wild with exultation as he was applauded again and again. Mrs. Leigh and Ada clapped their hands with delicate enthusiasm. Renny sat between them wearing a displeased grin very like his grandmother’s when her pride had been hurt.
After the play there was a little gathering in the director’s room. Friends crowded about the actors. Finch, not quite
rid of his makeup, showed a dingy smear on his cheek. He trembled when he came to speak to Mrs. Leigh and Renny.
“Oh, my dear.” cried Mrs. Leigh, her hand squeezing his arm, “you could not have been better! We are all thrilled by you.”
Renny said nothing, regarding him with the same grin of disapproval. To Finch it seemed to say: “Wait until I get you alone, young man.” His feeling of triumph was gone. He felt that he had been making a fool of himself for the amusement of the audience. Not again during the week did he recover his buoyancy and complete abandon in the part.
Returning home in the train next day, Renny thought about Finch, and not only Finch, but all those younger members of the family who were his half brothers. What was wrong with them? Certainly there was some weakness, bred in the bone, that made them different from the other Whiteoaks. The face of their mother flashed into his mind. She had been governess to him and Meg before his father had married her. They had given her rather a rough time both as governess and as stepmother. He had been the thorn in her side when she had been their governess; Meg, when she had become their stepmother. Her face flashed into his mind, coming between him and the wintry fields outside. He realized for the first time that she had been a beautiful young woman. A warm face, warm blue eyes that darkened with emotion, an exquisitely modelled chin and throat. He remembered seeing her temper flare when Meggie had sat, stolid and plump, blankly refusing to take any interest in her music lesson. He remembered her sobbing with exasperation over his misbehaviour. But when she had become their stepmother she had held herself somewhat aloof from them, encircled by the love of her husband, absorbed by her too frequent motherhood.
Renny recalled vividly now the fact that when he had come upon her she had nearly always been reading. Poetry, too. What a mother for men! He had come upon her reading poetry to his father, while he stared at her, listening, his eyes enfolding her. She had loved him, and had not long survived him. Poor young Wake had been a posthumous child.
Poetry in them—music in them—that was the trouble. Eden was full of poetry, and he had inherited his mother’s beauty, too… Where was he now? They had heard nothing of him in the year and a half he had been away. How ghastly to think that Alayne was tied to him… At the thought of Alayne an ache struck him in the breast, an ache of longing for something that he could not possess. His soul groped, searching for a way to turn aside from the longing. He wondered at himself. He, for whom it had been so easy to forget…
He shifted his body on the seat, as an animal, puzzled by pain, changes its position, bending his lean red face to stare out of the window on the far side of the car. He saw a frozen stream there and the rounded black forms of a clump of cedars.
Of what had he been thinking? Ah, yes, the boys! Eden. A damned fool, Eden. But Piers was no fool. Sound as a nut. A Whiteoak, through and through. Then Finch, the young whelp, deceiving him. Posturing, play-acting before a parcel of highbrows. And mad about music, too. Well, he’d got to work in earnest now if he were going to amount to anything… There was Wake, fanciful little rascal. No knowing what he’d be up to in a few years…
Like an eagle whose nestlings were turning out to be skylarks, Renny regarded his brood, his love, his pride in them, clouded by doubt.
At the station Wright was waiting for him with a dappled grey gelding harnessed to a red sleigh. The drifts were too high for motoring. Wright also brought his great coon coat, in which he enveloped himself on the platform.
As they flew along the glistening road, past drifts where the fine snow was ruffled in a silver mist, Renny felt that he could not drink in enough of the freshness of the day. He took great breaths, he let the wind whistle in his teeth. The sharp hoofs of the gelding sent hard pieces of clean snow on to the fur robe on their knees.
When they arrived at the stables Piers was there. He asked as Renny alighted: “Well, how did the matinee idol get on?”
“He took the part of an idiot. Too damned well.”
“He would,” said Piers.
T
HE
O
RCHESTRA
B
ESIDE
Arthur Leigh, Finch had one other friend. This was George Fennel, the rector’s second son. But his friendship with George lacked the sense of adventure, the exhilaration of his friendship with Arthur. Arthur and he had sought out each other. They had bridged barriers to clasp hands. But George and he had been thrown together since infancy. Each thought he knew all there was to know about the other. Each was fond of the other and a little despised him. Their bonds were hatred of mathematics and love of music. But where Finch toiled and sweated over his mathematics, and ached with desire for music, George made no effort to learn what was hard for him, concentrating with dogged purpose on the subjects he liked, early determining that, square peg as he was, he would be fitted into no round hole. He played whatever musical instrument was handy without partiality. He liked the mouth organ as well as the piano, the banjo as well as the mandolin. He made them all sing for him of the sweetness of life.
He was a short, thickset youth, yet somehow graceful. His clothes were always untidy and his hair rumpled. Arthur Leigh thought him boorish, commonplace, a country clod.
He did what he could to draw Finch away from him, and Finch, during that winter, till the time of the play, had never seen so little of George. But after the play he had yearned toward George. For some reason which he could not have explained, he was no longer quite so happy at the Leighs’. Not that his passage with Ada had made any palpable difference. He did not follow his advance by another step or by a repetition. She seemed to have forgotten it. Mrs. Leigh was even kinder than before. She asked many questions about the family at Jalna, and when she learned that one of the uncles was a student of Shakespeare, and that one of the young men was a poet, she took to talking quite seriously to Finch about literature. She was disappointed that Renny was unable—Arthur thought unwilling—to accept two subsequent invitations to dinner.
Whether it were this new interest, this refined probing into the relationships, temperaments, and tastes of his family, or some change in Arthur’s attitude toward himself, which made him less happy in the Leighs’ house, he did not know, but he felt the change, which was not so much a change as a development, a new aspect in Arthur’s affection for him. Arthur had become oversensitive, exacting, critical of him. Finch was now often finding out that he had, by some gruff or careless remark, hurt Arthur; that he had, by some coarseness or stupidity, offended him; that, when he loudly aired his opinions, Arthur winced. Yet they had hours of such happiness together that Finch went home through the snow joyous in all his being. The trouble was, he decided, that Arthur loved him so well that he wanted him to be perfect, as he was perfect, not knowing how impossible that was.
How different with George! George expected nothing of him and was not disappointed. They could spend an evening
together in his tiny bedroom in the rectory, working at an uninspired level of intelligence, chaffing, telling each other idiotic jokes, littering the floor with nutshells, and finally descending to the parlour for an hour of music before Finch must hasten home. Finch at the piano, George playing the banjo, his older brother Tom the mandolin, while the rector would sit smoking, the long pipe nestling on his beard, reading the
Churchman,
with rare imperturbability. Tom was a lazy fellow who did everything badly (except gardening, for which he had a genius), but Finch never tired of hearing George play the banjo, of watching him as he sat squarely on his chair, his thick hands playing with great dexterity and spirit, his eyes softly beaming from under his untidy hair.
George, like Finch, was always hard up. Sometimes they had not between them two coins to rub together. When Finch was with Arthur he was continually accepting favours, continually being given pleasures which he could only repay by gratitude. At times he felt that the fount of his gratitude must dry up from the unceasing flow.
“But you must not thank me!” Leigh would exclaim. “You know that I love to do things for you.”
But perhaps, when Finch on the next occasion was silently pleased, Leigh would ask, with a slight frown denting his smooth forehead “Are you pleased, Finch, old chap? Do you like the idea?”
How different with George! There was nothing about which he need be grateful to George. They were both about as poor in this world’s possessions as they well could be. Each owned a few shabby clothes, his schoolbooks, his watch, and a cherished object or two, such as George’s banjo and an old silver snuffbox which Lady Buckley had given Finch. When he was going to the rectory, Finch would fill his pockets with
apples; Mr. Fennel would carry a plate of crullers to the boys; they would both rifle Mrs. Fennel’s pantry. It was a pleasant and inexpensive give and take.
But now that George was seventeen and Finch eighteen they experienced great longings for more money to spend. Finch had tried several ways of earning it. He humbly had asked Piers if there were any work he could do for him on Saturdays, and Piers had put him to sorting apples in the twilight chill of the apple-house. Between handling the icy fruit, standing on the cement floor, and the draught from the open door, he had contracted an attack of bronchitis that had kept him in his bed for a fortnight. Piers had come to the bedside.
“How long did you work?” he had asked.
“Nearly all the day,” Finch had croaked.
“How many hours, exactly?”
“From nine till four; 1 think, and, of course, I laid off for dinner.”
“A day is from seven to five. Well here is two dollars. Better buy yourself a bottle of cough stuff. And the next time you want to earn some money, get a job in a conservatory.” He had thrown a new banknote on to the quilt. Finch had later spent the money on roses for Ada Leigh.
Bronchitis was bad, but missing school for weeks was worse. He had lain, feverish, his chest torn by coughing, lonely in his attic room, listening to the sounds that came from below for companionship, unable to eat the too substantial meals Rags had carried to him, worrying all the while lest he fail again in his examinations.
But, when he was better, the urge to earn some money had come again. This time he asked Renny for work, and Renny had given him a saddle horse to exercise. All the Whiteoaks could ride, but the horses seemed to know that
there was no masterfulness in Finch, and they tried all their favourite tricks when he rode them.
This one, just recovering from an accident, supposedly quiet as a sheep, had, in sportive caper, shied at her own gate, and given Finch a tumble on the driveway. Everyone, from Grandmother to Wakefield, had joked about Finch’s mishap, and because the mare, elated by her riderless condition, had galloped to the woods, and an hour had been spent in capturing her, her flank grazed by a broken branch, Renny had paid Finch, not with money, but with a curse. The pain of a wrenched ankle was borne in silence, but a scowl darkened his forehead as he limped to and from the station. To be a figure of fun, that was his supreme humiliation.
One evening George said to him: “I know a fellow who would rig up a radio for us for next to nothing.”
“H’m,” grunted Finch, tearing a bite from a russet apple. “If we only had that next to nothing.”
“They’re any amount of fun,” sighed George. “You can get wonderful concerts from New York, Chicago—all over, in fact.”