Authors: Mazo de la Roche
Tags: #FIC045000 – FICTION / Sagas
Finch felt a relief that was almost painful, in being once more at Jalna. His other absences had seemed as nothing to this last. It had cut him off, thrown him into a new and mystifying life. He had been struggling for months against the torture of his nerves.
Now he would relax, he would learn to sleep again, the pains in his neck and temples would subside. He would plunge his spirit in the cool deep of the woods, try to put out of his mind all he had been through.
His relief was so great, he was so tired in that first week, that he did indeed sleep better. There was a temporary dulling of all his overwrought senses. He talked, scarcely knowing what he said, but it passed for sense. There did not seem to be much wrong with him. Over and over again he traced the paths through wood and field. He stood watching the farm labourers at work. He stood watching Renny, Piers, and Mooey schooling the horses. He walked when all the house was dark and the stable dogs barked at the sound of his steps but he would not set his foot outside the gates of Jalna.
At the end of the week he longed to see his old friend, George Fennel, the Rector’s son. George was so tranquil, so receptive, so easy to talk to. Finch could not understand the change that had come over Alayne. He had strained toward the hour when they would be alone together. He felt sure that she would understand. But now she was changed. She was withdrawn into herself. She was almost silent and, though she appeared to listen attentively to what he said, her answers came at random. Her face had a closed-in look and she gave Finch no encouragement to open his heart to her.
He could not talk to George Fennel as he might have talked to Alayne, still he craved the comfort of George’s sturdy presence, and one night, after a hot sunset, he walked to the Rectory across the fields and along the paved road that he liked to remember as the dusty country one he had known as a boy.
He saw Mr. Fennel in the vegetable garden digging potatoes. He was in his shirt and, his beard now grey, was crisp and lively from heat. His face had grown rosy with years and he beamed affectionately at Finch.
“Glad to see you back,” he said, holding out an earth-stained hand. “We’re all proud of you, Finch. You’re becoming famous, they say. Well, well, it’s nice. Yes, very nice.”
Finch’s hand sank in his. He felt the dry film of loam between their palms. He wanted to hang onto the Rector’s hand. He wanted to lead him somewhere, far away from himself, but Mr. Fennel returned to his spade and, in answer to Finch’s stammered greeting, said:
“I suppose you want to see George. I think you’ll find him in his room. Lucky you came before he went out.” There was a humorous twinkle in the Rector’s eyes as he heaved up a spadeful of small, sallow potatoes.
George was in his room, which was next the roof and blazing hot. He was changing into snowy duck trousers and a mauve, silk, tunic shirt. His stocky figure exuded heat and purposefulness. He beamed at Finch as his father had done, but there was something mysterious in his bearing.
“It was hot as blazes in town,” he said. “You simply don’t know anything about it here. The pavements were melting. The motors stank. I have got a lot of mosquito bites from sitting by the lakeshore last night and they all itched at once.” He plastered hair cream on his tousled hair and brushed it into repose.
“Look here,” said Finch, “if you’re going out, don’t let me keep you.”
“Oh, I have time for a chin before I go.”
George was different. He who had always been comfortably untidy was now slick as a ribbon. And look at his nails! Clean, polished, and being polished again! For the first time in his life Finch felt suspicious of his friend.
He said rather stiffly — “I’ll not keep you, Jarge!”
He thought, by using the old familiar “Jarge,” to draw him closer. “I just dropped in as I was passing.”
“Right,” said George, and put his face closer to the looking glass.
Finch sank into the depression in the sofa and took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. George had not even noticed that he was wearing glasses.
He now asked Finch how Sarah was, if he had liked living in Europe, and whether he had broadcast in England. Then after a silence, during which George hung his town clothes on stretchers, he said, reddening:
“I want you to meet Sylvia. I’ve talked a lot about you to her. She’s dying to meet you.”
So that was it! Sylvia! And this was what was left of their confidence and friendship! Finch listened to all George had to tell of Sylvia, he examined three photographs and half a dozen snapshots of her. He even walked as far as Sylvia’s gate with George but he declined to go in. He had a glimpse of her waiting on the verandah. George and she were engaged.
T
HE
N
OVICE
T
O
F
INCH THE
house seemed very strange without Wakefield. The boy had always been at home, had always been in evidence. His voice had been heard raised in the airing of his opinions, in complaint or in the mere delight of hearing himself talk: his slender body had been gliding along the passages, sliding into rooms or darting from restriction. He had grown manlike in his love for Pauline and less interesting. In his natural buoyancy, unscrupulousness, and patronizing airs he had maddened and fascinated Finch. Finch had secretly envied him his assurance. He remembered him as a baby, sitting on Gran’s arm, not at all afraid of her, playing with her earrings and chains, tugging at her cap. Finch remembered how he had lain pensive in bed after his heart attacks. Now he was gone!
What had happened to him and Pauline? Why had they thrown aside their love like an unbecoming garment and put on the robes of monastery and convent? Curiously the news of Wake’s entering the monastery had been the greater shock. In imagination he tried to follow the steps in Wake’s life that had led to this. Surely something terrible had happened to him spiritually or he could never have given up the world so young, so untried. Finch discovered in himself a feeling of relief in the knowledge that Wake and Pauline were cut off from each other. By degrees he thought with resignation of Pauline kneeling before a crucifix in nun’s apparel.
He could think of this calmly, but the thought of Wakefield was black with mystery, almost unbearable. He began to think of him as dead. He woke once in the night convinced that Wakefield was dead and that the family had decided that his nerves were not in a fit state to bear the news and had concocted this tale of the monastery.
He got out of bed without waking Sarah and went to Renny’s room. Inside he could hear the crude ticking of the alarm clock and the soft snuffling of the Cairn puppy. Renny’s breathing came strong and deep. “What breathing!” thought Finch. “To breathe like that a man’s mind must be at peace.” He went close to the bed and put out his hand in the blackness. He touched the puppy and, giving itself up to the unexpected nocturnal caress, it turned up its warm round belly and wriggled. Finch pressed his fingers on the puppy and felt the soft flutter of its heart.
“Renny,” he said. “Renny!”
“Yes — who’s that?”
“Finch. I want to ask you something. May I turn on the light?”
He could feel Renny heave his body with the effort of answering. He muttered “Yes,” and flung his arm across his eyes as the unshaded light struck them. For an instant Finch saw his mouth unguarded by his eyes. He had a sudden desire to bend and kiss it.
But now the brown eyes stared up at him and Renny asked sharply — “Anything wrong?” Again he was on his pedestal and Finch a schoolboy. He answered, trying to keep his voice calm:
“It’s about Wake. I think you’re deceiving me.”
“
Deceiving
you?” Renny raised himself to stare.
Finch’s voice came loud and hollow.
“I believe Wake’s dead! I’m sure of it! You’ve made up this story of the monastery to deceive me. You think I’m not well enough to hear the truth. But I tell you I must know.”
Renny beat down the stammered words with a laugh. But he looked anxiously at Finch as he answered:
“I think you’re well enough for a good hiding. And you’d get it if you were ten years younger. You talk like an idiot! Wake dead! Well, I’m damned! What will you imagine next!”
He turned out of bed in striped pyjamas and went to his chest of drawers and began to search in one. “You must think we take it coolly.”
“You all seem different. There’s something wrong in the house. I feel it.”
“Hm, well, we’re depressed about his shutting himself off like this. But
dead
! Here’s one of his letters. Read that.” He put the letter, with its small, erratic handwriting, into Finch’s hand.
Finch’s body curved over the letter, the hollows in his cheeks accentuated by the ceiling light. It was the simple out pouring of a boy happy in a new life. A schoolboy’s letter, though it ended with the tentative urge toward conversion.
Finch laid it down and muttered shamefacedly — “It’s all right. I can see that. I don’t know what put such an idea into my head. I’m not well, Renny. My nerves are hellish.” He dared not look into Renny’s eyes.
The puppy was sitting smiling at them. Gaps showed where his milk teeth had come out. One ear was cocked, the other drooping. His forelegs looked as though they were about to give under the weight of his round body.
Renny pushed the puppy out of his way and got back into bed. He said:
“Now you go back to Sarah and forget this nonsense. You’ll be all right in a little while. A month at Jalna will make a new man of you.”
Finch put his hand on the switch and looked enviously at the pair on the bed. “I’m awfully sorry, Renny,” he said, “to have got you up like this. I’m a damned fool. You see,” he put his hand to his head, “it’s the pain here. It makes everything seem different to me.”
“Neuralgia. That’s what the doctor said, isn’t it? Nervous strain. Just try to keep your mind off it. You’ll soon be all right.”
Finch looked at him out of the cage of his pain, and said huskily:
“I hope so. I can’t go on like this. It’s been getting steadily worse.”
“Ever try liniment?”
“I’ve rubbed on Baum Analgesique. But this pain is all over my head.”
“Look on the top shelf of that small cabinet. There’s a largish bottle. The label is stained. That mixture is put up for me by a vet. An old Scotch remedy. I’ve used gallons of it on horse and man. Always put it on the grooms when they get kicked. It smells like the devil and acts like a charm.”
Finch went to the little cabinet which he had seen planted against the faded wallpaper all his life. He remembered its mystery to him as a small boy, how he had been caught investigating the contents of a bottle of laudanum and had his seat warmed. The tenseness in his head was temporarily relieved. His nostrils drank in the smell of the liniment.
“Rub it in well,” said Renny. “It won’t hurt your hair.”
Finch acquiesced, feeling tired and peaceful. He stood under Renny’s eye, in the comfort of his jocular directions and rubbed on the liniment. It stung and it smarted his eyeballs. He gave himself up to its stinging and smarting and the pain was eased. His strong bony fingers rubbed and rubbed.
“My God!” exclaimed Renny. “You’ll have the skin off! Go to bed now. But you can’t go to Sarah smelling like a sick stallion. You’ll have to sleep in your old room. The bed may not be made up. Take that quilt from under the puppy. Take the liniment too. You may keep it. I’ll get another bottle. You’ll soon be all right.” He grinned up at Finch, showing all his strong teeth.
Oh, the wonderful, harsh comfort of him! Finch could have wept with the ease of it. He pressed the sticky black bottle against his chest and stole up the attic stairs. He was a boy again, creeping up the narrow dark stairway. The window of his room showed grey against the blackness. It stood open. A cold mist was blown across his bed.
He did not mind. He did not mind. Nothing mattered. The pain was still. It lay curled up sleeping like a snake in its nest somewhere in the middle of his head. He touched with his fingertips the sore places in the back of his neck. They quivered like jelly beneath his touch, horribly sensitive. When he touched them he felt as though he would scream, like some horrible instrument whose too sensitive keys had been drummed.
He curled his palm under his cheek and lay very still, absorbing the quiet cool night. It spread over him like a wing and all his pain was gone. Only the sore spots remained. He lay still and peaceful, as when he was a young boy, safe in the darkness after a day of bewilderment or unhappiness. He had shared this room with Piers till Piers had married. He could almost feel Piers’s sturdy body in the bed with him, feel that sense of both fear and security in his nearness.
Now the vine that always tapped on his window when there was a breeze began to talk to him. Shadow answered shadow as the early dawn disturbed the darkness. Oh, that peace of his own dear room! He rested on it. He drew it about him. It folded itself over him.
Purposely he kept Sarah out of his mind. She stood just outside it waiting the first chance to enter, ready to make herself thin as a knife, if she could but enter. But he turned his thoughts peacefully away from her. His mind was a blank; he was sinking into sleep when, not the thought of her but she in the flesh, stole into the room and bent over the bed.
“Why did you leave me?” she whispered.
He kept his eyes shut, pretending to be asleep, but she saw that he was awake.
“Why did you come up here?” she asked, and her black plaits fell across his body.
“It was the pain,” he answered, keeping his eyes tight shut. “I smell of liniment.”
She sniffed him, the cold point of her nose touching his face. “I don’t mind. It’s rather a nice stinging smell.”
“It’s beastly! Do go back to bed, Sarah.”
“No. I don’t mind the smell. I’ll get in here. I like this room because you were a boy in it.”
He scowled up at her. “There are no sheets. Just the mattress.”
She laughed so that he saw all her small teeth. “I don’t mind. It will be fun lying on just the mattress. I’d love to sleep on the ground with you. You know that.” She crept under the quilt and pressed close to him.