Authors: Mazo de la Roche
Tags: #FIC045000 – FICTION / Sagas
“I’m afraid.”
“Of me?”
“No, of myself.”
“You said something like that once before—about being afraid. Are you afraid of life?”
“Not a bit. I’m just afraid of my own feelings.”
To hear that she was afraid made Finch afraid, too. A shiver of sympathy, ecstatic yet terrified, ran through him. There seemed a menace in the bitter nip of the night air, in the large glittering stars. His arm relaxed and dropped to his side. He took off his hat and passed his hand over his hair, looking down at her pathetically.
“It’s frightful to be afraid,” he said. “I’m afraid of myself, too, often. And of my feelings. It takes the strength right out of me.”
She gave him a scornful little smile.
“I don’t think I understand your kind of fear.”
“I think I understand the difference,” he said. “I think yours is a hot fear, and mine is a cold. Yours makes you want to fly away and mine paralyzes me.” His eyes sought hers, eager for understanding.
She was searching for her key in a brilliant-studded handbag. He saw the shadow of her lashes on her cheek.
“If only you would let me kiss you,” he breathed, “I think we could understand each other.”
“Too well,” she answered, with a catch in her voice. She fumbled with the key against the lock.
He took it gently from her and opened the door.
The next morning he and Leigh left early for Jalna. Finch would have liked to linger in the hope that he might have a few minutes alone with Ada, but Leigh was impatient to be off. Having it in his mind to meet Eden and hear him read his poetry, he could tolerate no delay in reaching the appointed spot, even though Finch declared that Eden would scarcely be there so early. Leigh left his car near the gate, and, descending into the ravine, they made straight for the rustic bridge across the stream. Eden was not there. Still, Leigh’s desire for haste was gratified. He perched on the railing of the bridge and extolled now the beauty of the sky, now that of his own reflection in the pool below.
“If I were as charming a fellow,” he said, “in my actual person as I am in that shadowy reflection, I’d have the world at my feet! Lean over and look at yourself, Finch.”
Finch peered into the pool, as he had done a thousand times. “Mostly nose,” he grumbled.
Leigh chattered on for a while, but soon the coolness of the ravine penetrated him. There had been a dew almost as heavy as a rain. Even now moisture fell from the tips of leaves in clear drops like the first scatter of a shower. While Finch was absent the Michaelmas daisies had come into bloom. Their starry flowers, varying from the deepest purple to the blue of the September sky, hung like an amethyst mist above the banks of the stream. The leaves of fern and bracken showed a chill sheen, as though they had been cut from fine metal. The clear delicate sunlight
had not yet dispelled the heavy night odours of the ravine.
“I wonder,” said Leigh, “whether your brother should come here this morning. It doesn’t seem quite the right spot for anyone with lung trouble.”
“He’s over that. At any rate, he looks pretty fit. Our doctor says that he needed rest and good food more than anything. Still,” he looked dubiously at the wet boards of the bridge, “it does seem rather damp for him.”
“Perhaps we had better go to him.” Leigh would have liked to tell his mother that he had sought the poet in his retreat, perhaps glimpsed the wife about whom an atmosphere of mystery seemed to have gathered.
“I think I hear him coming.”
“Hullo, what’s that?”
“An English pheasant. Renny is stocking the woods with them.”
She whirred heavily out of sight, young ones fluttering after her. A rabbit hopped down the path, but, seeing the two on the bridge, turned, showed a snowy stern in three successive leaps, and disappeared into a thicket.
Eden’s legs appeared, descending the path; then his body became visible, and last his head, touched by the flicker of sunlight between leaves. He was carrying some rolled-up papers. “A poet, and beautiful!” thought Leigh. “How I wish the girls were here!”
“Hullo,” grinned Finch, “we thought you had got stage fright.”
Eden stood at the end of the bridge, his eyes on Leigh. Leigh thought: “He’s smiling at me, looking at me, and yet he doesn’t really seem to see me. I don’t think I like him.”
Finch said: “This is Arthur Leigh, Eden… He has been wondering if it’s too damp for you here.”
“I’m as seasoned to damp as an oyster,” answered Eden, shaking hands with Leigh so warmly that he obliterated the first impression of inviolable detachment.
Leigh said: “I hope you are not going to be as reticent as one. I’m very keen to hear some of your poems, if I may. Did Finch tell you?”
“Yes.” The eyes of the brothers met. Understanding flashed between them. Finch thought: “I’ve made him happy. It’s glorious, this doing things for others. I can’t imagine why other rich people don’t try it!”
Eden talked freely to Leigh of his coming trip to France, unconscious that Leigh knew Finch’s motive for borrowing the money. Leigh thought: “Doesn’t he think me capable of putting two and two together? Perhaps he doesn’t care. He knows he can make three or five of them whenever he wants.”
The sun rose high, pouring warmth into the ravine, which appeared to stretch itself, languorous and supine, under that delayed caress.
They sat down on the bridge, which was now dry, while Eden, in his deep mellow voice, read poem after poem. Some had been read before, to Alayne, but not all. They were the essence he had drawn from the past summer, what he had formed into strength and brightness from those shadowed months. As he listened to his own words, and saw the rapt faces of the two boys, he wondered whether the solution of his life might not lie in such moments. Might not the suffering he knew he had caused in the lives nearest him be justified, even be necessary to the creation of his poetry? The evil in him was inseparable from the good, like the gods, whose
energies were directed first into one channel, then another. So he seemed to himself, and so less coherently he seemed to Finch, who never dared to hope that anything he might create would justify his own clumsiness in life.
There was a third listener to the reading, of whom the others were unaware. This was Minny, who, wandering into the ravine from the direction of Vaughanlands and hearing voices, had stolen from trunk to trunk of the trees till she was within sight as well as hearing. It chanced that this morning she wore a dark dress instead of the usual gay colours, so she was able to conceal herself behind a great clump of honeysuckle within a few yards of the bridge. She crouched there, her feet pressing into the moist earth, the succulent growth all about her exhaling a sweet, sticky odour, and, almost touching her face, a large and meticulously woven spider’s-web in which two jewel-like flies were caught. She felt no discomfort in her situation, but rather an increased sense of adventure. As a doe might have crept close to watch the browsing of three stags, she observed with ardent interest every detail of their faces, their attitudes and gestures. She absorbed the beauty of Eden’s voice, but the words he uttered made no more impression on her than the words of the songs she sang. Though her body ached from its crouching position, she did not grow tired or impatient, remaining after the reading was over to listen to the discussion of the poems which followed. She heard their titles without hearing them—“The Dove; Thoughts of You and Me; Resurgam; Thoughts on Death; The New Day”—yet so sympathetic was she that when Leigh’s bright face broke into merriment she smiled, too, and when the voice of Eden took on a tragic note her lips reflected this in a mournful curve. When the smoke of their cigarettes drifted about her she
pitied herself that she could not share this pleasure. When Eden, dropping his voice, related something that produced a gust of hilarity, she would have given all she possessed to have known what he said.
She hoped, and tried to will it so, that the two boys would depart first, leaving Eden on the bridge. Contrary to the usual vanity of such hopes, this was what happened. All three got to their feet, but Eden did not accompany the boys when they ascended the path. Instead, he stood motionless, looking in her direction, and, after a few moments in which she was wondering whether or not to reveal herself, he called: “Come along, come along, Minny! Don’t you think You’ve been hiding long enough?”
She stood up, straightening her dress. She was not at all ashamed, but advanced toward him, laughing.
“How long have you known I was here?”
“All the time. I saw you playing at Indian, creeping from one tree to another. You’re a little hussy.”
She liked that. Her laughter became teasing.
“I heard every word you said!”
“No, you didn’t!”
“Yes, I did!”
“What was it I told them that made them laugh?” “Shan’t repeat it!”
“Because you did not hear.”
“I don’t care! I heard all your poetry.”
“It isn’t becoming in a young girl to spy on men.”
“Men! Listen to the child!”
“Well, the others are boys, but I suppose you’ll admit that I’m a man.”
“You!
You’re the greatest baby of all!” “Me! I’m a disillusioned profligate.”
“Then you’re a profligate baby! Your wife has made a baby of you. Coming all this way to nurse you when she doesn’t really care a damn for you.”
“I suppose you wouldn’t have done that?”
“Of course I should.”
His laughter joined hers. They sat down on the bridge together.
As he held a match to a cigarette for her, he looked deep into her narrowed, mirthful eyes. “I wish I understood you!”
“It’s a good thing for your peace of mind that you don’t.” An obscure pity moved him to change the subject. “How did you like my poems?”
“Ever so. Two of them sounded awfully like two songs I sing.”
“It’s a wise poem,” he replied gravely, “that knows its own creator.”
“I suppose they’ll make you famous one day.”
“I hope so.”
“What a pity you didn’t get any of the money
I”
“Ah, my naive young brother saw to that!”
“I should think you’d hate him for it.”
“I don’t hate anyone. I only wish people were as tolerant of me as I of them.”
“I hate someone.”
“Not me, I hope.”
“You’d never guess.”
“Tell me, then.”
“Your wife.”
“Do you really? My sister has done that.”
“Not at all. I hate her on my own.”
His gaze slid toward her swiftly, but he made no comment on this. They puffed in silence, each acutely aware of
the other. He heard her suck in her breath once as though putting some sudden restraint on herself. Now the sun beat down on them hotly, inducing a mood of dreamy acquiescence.
After an interval, she said: “I’ve been to the shore on the last three mornings. It seemed lonely there without you.”
He was astonished.
“Have you really? What a shame! And you didn’t let me know!”
“I thought you’d expect me. I wouldn’t disappoint you!” “My dear child!” He took her hand in his.
At his touch her eyes filled with tears, but she laughed through them. She said: “What a silly I am to care so much!”
T
HE
F
LITTING
T
HERE
followed a succession of perfect September days, so alike in their unclouded sunshine—a sunshine which was without the energy, for all its warmth, to produce additional growth—that it seemed possible they might continue forever without visibly changing the landscape. Michaelmas daisies, loosestrife, with here and there a clump of fringed gentian, continued to cast a bluish veil beside the paths and stream. In the garden nasturtiums, dahlias, campanula, phlox, and snapdragons continued to put forth flowers. The heavy bumblebee agitating these blossoms might well think: “I shall suck honey here forever.” The cow in the pasture, which this year had never turned brown, might well think: ’There will be no end to this moist grass.” The old people at Jalna might well think:“We shall not grow older and die, but shall live on forever.” Even Alayne, collecting her belongings in Fiddler’s Hut, did so as in a dream. It seemed impossible that she should be going away, that life held the potentialities of change for her.
The action of the life to which she was returning seemed desirable to her. She could picture the things which she
would do on her return with perfect precision, yet when she pictured herself as doing them it was not herself she saw, but a mere shadow. She thought: “There is no real place for me on earth. I was not made for happiness. I am as unreal to myself as a person in a play—less real, for I could laugh at them or weep for them, but I can only stare stupidly at myself and think how unreal I am.”
She wondered whether the things with which the Hut had been so overfurnished would be left there. She had grown used to them, and they no longer seemed grotesque in the low-ceilinged rooms. She went about collecting the few things she wished to take away with her, and wondered what were Eden’s thoughts as he lay on the sofa reading, now and then giving her a swift look across the page.
An odd embarrassment had arisen between them. He no longer had need of her care; their relationship was meaningless. They were like two travellers, forced by the exigencies of the journey into a juxtaposition from which each would be glad to escape. If he came in tired, he no longer demanded her sympathy, but sought to conceal his weariness. She no longer tried to prevent his doing things which she thought would be bad for his health. His restlessness was a source of irritation to her, while her reserve, and what he thought her stolidity, made her presence weigh upon him.
Yet on this, the second day before her departure, a mood of pensiveness had come upon Eden. He felt a somewhat sentimental desire to leave a memory, not too troubled, of himself with her. He would have liked to justify by some simple, yet how impossible, act their presence together in these last weeks. They avoided each other’s eyes.
Eden, to override his embarrassment, began to read aloud scraps from his book: