Authors: Mazo de la Roche
Tags: #FIC045000 – FICTION / Sagas
He stood in the ditch, his stick hooked over his wrist, holding the bird. He would absorb the last of its warmth into his own body. Its vitality, its song, should pass into him, and he would hold it so while he lived. Its spark should not be lost.
“You shall not die, lapwing,” he said. “You shall live in me. In the spring you shall cry to your mate through me in my music.”
The eyes of the lapwing, which had been shut when he picked it up, now opened, and the glazed eyeballs stared up at him. Out of its long, sharp beak he fancied he heard these words
“Clodhopper! Do you think I can live in you? I who am a hen lapwing! Can you make the nest on the earth for me? Can you carry my eggs in your body until the shell is just the right shade of greenish brown, with just so many specks for concealment? Can you place them point to point? Can you warm them to life? Feed them?”
“They shall live in my music,” answered Finch.
“The flight, the swooping, the crying of my younglets live in your music?”
“Yes.”
“What of the tens of thousands of worms they and I should have devoured?”
“The worms shall die in my music.”
“Birds fly and worms die in your music! Never can you compose three bars as beautiful as my tremulous and variable notes. Outcast of your own flock, do not imagine that you can steal virtue from me! My song turns to dust in my throat. My tongue cleaves to my beak. My eggs are silent notes that never can be touched to life.”
He pressed her in his hands and she felt cold. A motor car passed, spattering him with mud.
He hastened along a lane between high banks towards a cottage where a thatcher lived. By the cottage there was a duck-pond, on the dark, ice-cold water of which several ducks and a drake were swimming. In the middle of the pond stood the thatcher’s wife, red-cheeked, with a shock of coarse black hair. She wore high leather boots, from which she was scrubbing the mud with a corn broom.
Finch went to the edge of the pond and said:
“Good morning, Mrs. Rush. Will you please lend me your trowel? I want to bury this bird. I found it dead in a ditch by Ram’s Close.”
“Good morning, sir. What, a peewit? He’em dead sure enough! They pore creatures don’t watch proper where they be flyin’. They’m half-mazed with their own hurry-scurry. Where be ’ee goin’ to bury un, sir?”
Finch hesitated. “I scarcely know... Just here, by your pond, if you don’t mind... But you mustn’t hurry to fetch the trowel.”
He stood watching her as she scrubbed her boots with the broom, noticing how the dark water crept in between the laces. When she had finished he followed her to the cottage, against one end of which bundles of faggots were piled to the thatch, and against the other was a shippen, from where came the lowing of a cow.
As he strode down the road, carrying the trowel and the lapwing, an idea came to him. He would bury the lapwing by the side of Ralph Hart... Why should not the dead bird bear the dead boy company? He gloated over the thought of their being buried side by side, as over a strain of music... Then a doubt of his own sanity assailed him for a moment, but he put it from him... He was sane enough, he was sure of that. But his mind was the playground of queer sensations. What in life would bring him peace?
As he descended the steep hill into the village he had a feeling of shame at what he was doing. He hid the lapwing under his coat and endeavoured to conceal the trowel.
The children were just let out of school. They passed him, running in laughing groups, their cheeks glowing, their stout legs purple from cold. He turned down the narrow street that led to the churchyard. He avoided the sexton, who was digging a grave, and slipped behind the gravestones to the distant corner where Ralph lay. From here was a noble view of the moors. The sun sent his spears of light through broken clouds, striking the humped shoulders of the tors. A sodden wreath of everlastings lay on Ralph’s grave, but it was marked by no stone. Finch dug a hole close beside it and laid the lapwing there, smoothing its feathers before he replaced the turf. He straightened himself then, stared up into the sky and across the moor with a dazed look. He felt that life was as mysterious to him, as
non-understandable, as when he had emerged from the shelter of his mother’s womb.
Since the departure of his uncles, he and Augusta had seen less and less of the pair at the lodge. Eden had shown a desire to bring Minny to the Hall now that there was more room, but Augusta had had enough of company. Her manner became discouraging, even chilly. She felt herself tired out and she relaxed, finding the presence of Finch so congenial to her that she wished he might stay indefinitely. Finch, in truth, was eading a double life. In the presence of Augusta he was apparently cheerful, interested in all the small doings of neighbours and villagers that were the chief subject of her conversation at Nymet Crews. When a letter came from home he was almost painfully eager to hear news of the family. But no one wrote to him and he wrote to no one... When he was alone he relapsed into a state of deep melancholy, out of which he was only roused by some such incident as the finding of the lapwing. Then he was roused to a state bordering on exaltation.
The suicide of Ralph Hart, coming at a time when his nerves were swept by the storm of his hopeless love for Sarah, was a shock from which they were in no haste to readjust themselves.
He could not play the piano in the evening to Augusta without becoming unstrung. He would be forced to stop in order to wipe away the sweat that trickled down his forehead and sprang out on his palms. He would offer a stammered apology, avoiding Augusta’s calm gaze. She would say then—“I think we have had enough music for tonight, dear. I am rather tired, and I can see that you are.”
She saw more than he imagined she did. She thought that, in his present state, he was better off with her than in
his own home. He was a fanciful boy and, she guessed, had had some sort of spiritual upset in connection with his cousin. She could not fail to notice Finch’s repulsion from her, his tendency to sneer at her. Arthur had sent photographs of himself and Sarah taken in Paris. Augusta was for having them framed at once, but Finch exclaimed—“For heaven’s sake, Aunt, don’t force me to see that smug-looking pair every time I raise my eyes! Please wait till I am gone!”
Ellen told her mistress that she had found rosemary strewn over the floor of Finch’s room and that sometimes he stole out of the house at daybreak. Augusta stared at her. “We will not worry about that, Ellen,” she said. “Rosemary is quite clean and easily swept up. And, so long as Mr. Finch is stealing out at that hour and not stealing in, I have no cause for anxiety.” But she was anxious. She suggested that he go to London or Leipzig to continue the study of music.
“Like this?” he exclaimed. And, as though at his bidding, his nerves had begun to quiver, and she had been made still more anxious by the sight of him standing trembling before her, with nothing whatever to tremble at.
His appetite reassured her. He was always hungry, as he had ever been. Mutton, winter greens, suet pudding were swept clean from his plate and, if a dish of nuts and raisins were carried to the drawing-room he was sure to finish them. Yet he grew thinner.
He disliked meeting people and would skulk out of reach when there were callers. He had avoided Eden and Minny for weeks. When he saw them in the distance on his walks he turned down a lane or climbed a stile to escape. He went to and from the house by the back entrance to avoid passing the lodge.
Today, however, the clock in the church tower struck the three-quarter hour as he left the village. He would be late for lunch unless he went by the drive. Augusta could forgive anything but unpunctuality at meals. It had never been a failing of the Whiteoaks. He made up his mind, after several hesitations and turnings away, that he must pass the lodge. He remembered with relief that Eden and Minny were usually at table by this hour.
As he was closing the gate cautiously so that it might not clank, Minny’s voice called to him from the porch. She came lurrying down the flagged walk to intercept him. The wind blew the hair back from her very white forehead which she had drawn into a pucker of anxiety. It also blew her thin dress against her body, exposing the modulating conformations of breast and hip and thigh.
“Oh, Finch,” she called, “we’re having the most awful rime with our chimneys! They smoke and smoke! I do wish you would come in and see what a state we’re in. It’s a perect shame that Eden should be so uncomfortable.”
Finch saw that she was blue with cold, yet she did not give a thought to herself. He made as if to walk on. He said hurriedly:
“Sorry. I’m late for lunch already. Aunt Augusta is a regular martinet about meals.”
“Whatever have we done?” cried Minny angrily. “You haven’t been near us for a month! You go the other way when you see us coming!” She ran through her little gate and caught him by the arm. In her thin-soled high-heeled slippers she splashed through a small puddle.
He looked down into her face. “Minny, don’t mind what I do! I’m a beast. I don’t know what’s wrong with me but— just now—I’m not fit company for anyone.”
She patted his arm. “Poor old boy! Eden has the blue devils sometimes, too. Thank goodness, I don’t! If I did, what would become of us?”
Eden appeared in the doorway. He said loudly:
“Don’t ask that fellow to come in, Minny! He thinks of no one but himself. Let him go!”
“He’s just been explaining. He is not feeling quite himself. But he wants to come in, don’t you, Finch?”
Finch turned back with her. He was surprised to see how pale Eden was. He had dark shadows under his eyes and, as he turned petulantly away at their approach, his shoulders were shaken by a harsh cough.
Both back and front doors of the lodge stood open. The interior was dense with smoke that was blown down the chimney and out of the great fireplace with each blast. Not only was the table not yet laid for lunch but the remains of breakfast still stood on it. In here was a chill more damp and penetrating than that outdoors.
Eden kept his back to Finch. He stood talking in a high irritable tone to a loutish boy with sooty face and hands.
“Can you tell me what your master’s going to do when he does come back?”
Minny added—“Yes, I wish I knew how soon he can put it in order. Just look, Finch. They’ve swept out all that soot!” She pointed to a bucketful that stood on the hearth. “After he’d got that out we thought surely the chimney would draw and Eden built up a huge fire. He was so cold. But it was worse than ever and we can’t get the fire to go out.”
Eden began to put ashes on it. A descending gust sent a puff of black smoke and a swirl of ashes over him. He backed away swearing under his breath.
The boy stood regarding his efforts with dull interest. He kept rubbing his ear against the corner of the mantelshelf as a pig might scratch itself against a gatepost. “Master’ll put un in order,” he observed.
“But what will he do?” asked Minny desperately.
“Put un in order.”
“He’s going to have a damper made,” said Eden.
“Will that take long?” asked Finch.
The boy rubbed his ear with a circular movement on a corner of the shelf. “A proper long time it’ll take.”
“If only the wind would fall!” cried Minny.
The youth turned his eyes heavily toward the open door. “He won’t fall. He’s a master gale, he is.”
Eden asked—“Do you know anything about this chimney? Has it ever done this before?”
The youth had ceased rubbing his ear in order to comprehend a question requiring so sharp a mental effort to answer. After weighing it conscientiously he began again the circular movement against the shelf. He then replied:
“He’em alius smokin’ in November gales. Widow used to send for we.”
“And what did you do?”
“Swept un.”
A fresh cloud of smoke enveloped them.
“Look here!” cried Finch. “This will never do! You mustn’t stay here. Why, it will be the end of Eden! You’d be better out of doors.”
“And it’s been so damp too the last month,” said Minny. She led him to the kitchen and showed how the moisture on the wall collected into a little runnel that trickled across the floor. Finch asked in a low voice—“How long has he had that cough?”
“About a week.”
“But you should have told me! He must get away at once.”
Minny’s expression became pathetic. “But how can we, Finch? It’s all we can do to make ends meet here.”
“I’ll attend to that.”
They returned to the other room. The fire had died down. Heavy raindrops were spattering into it. The wind too was dying. The youth had gone off for his dinner. Eden went to the mantelshelf and began to rub his ear against it, looking mischievously out of the sides of his eyes at Finch and Minny.
“Us had better pip out,” he said, in a singsong. “There seems to be nothing else left for we! ’Tis a proper failure us have made of our life, Min.”
Finch was filled with compunction because of his forget-fulness of them. Minny was one of the bravest, sweetest girls he had ever known. Now she was kneeling on the cold hearth, the bellows in her hands, fanning the struggling flames. The wind had fallen.
He hurried to the house and told his aunt of the condition in the lodge. Augusta did not, as he had expected, declare that Eden and Minny must come to her at once. If the chimney began to smoke again there would be time enough. But she had a hamper packed with a hot lunch and Finch carried it excitedly to the lodge. She had put in a bottle of sherry, too. When he arrived a fresh fire was blazing and Minny had washed up the breakfast things. Eden was writing at one end of the long table. He looked up eagerly at Finch.
“Here’s one of the best things I’ve done,” he exclaimed. And he read aloud a charming lyric.
“Did you just write that this morning?” asked Finch.
“I’ve been working on it a week!”
Eden made no further reference to Finch’s neglect of them. He allowed his own instincts to govern his life and, except for an occasional flash of temper, he was willing that others should do the same. If Finch wanted to keep to himself, well—he probably needed the solitude.