Authors: Mazo de la Roche
Tags: #FIC045000 – FICTION / Sagas
“Oh, yes, sir. But —” Mooey’s face became tense — “somehow … it’s funny … I don’t like riding very spirited horses.”
He looked anxiously at Dermot to see the effect of this confession on him. Dermot looked unperturbed.
“You’ve ridden a good deal?”
“Ever since I can remember.”
“Had a good many falls?”
Mooey nodded.
“It hurts, doesn’t it?”
“You bet. Especially falls from polo ponies. I’ve helped school them a lot. But I don’t think it’s the hurt I mind. It’s not knowing what the horse will do next.”
“Yes,” agreed Dermot gravely. “It’s the feeling of uncertainty. I ride nothing but a steady old cob myself nowadays and I’ve another I’ll give to you if you like him. You can try him anyhow. You may ride or not, just as you like.”
“Thank you, Cousin Dermot.” If his mother could hear she would be pleased with his manners, he thought.
They went into the garden after tea. Mooey walking carefully and slowly by Dermot’s side. It was strange to him to be alone with an old person after living with his young parents and his two small brothers. Dermot laid his hand on his shoulder as they walked and Mooey braced himself to be a support to him. They passed through the arbor over which the ancient pear trees were trained, into the formal gardens lately put in order again after years of neglect. How different it all was from Jalna! The flowers looked tender and full of moisture and their stalks green and juicy. The very smell of the hay in the nearby field was different. The birds’ voices had a strange note in them as though of an old mysterious tale they told. From a knoll where a gnarled beech tree sent its tapering roots across the grass and deep below they could see the gently rolling countryside with white cottages dotted on its greenness, and the flash of a stream. It came to young Maurice as a place he had long dreamed of and now discovered.
As he lay in bed that night he thought over all the happenings of the day — the confusion of the landing at Cóbh in a choppy sea, the long railway journey, the discussing with Wright of everything they saw, the meeting with Cousin Dermot. His home seemed so far away that he felt it was in another world. He was too newly arrived in this world to know its ways. He felt suspended, as it were, in mid-air between two worlds. He looked back at his home across immeasurable space and saw the familiar objects of his short life. He saw his brothers, as he had last seen them, waving him goodbye. He saw his father, fresh-coloured and stalwart, his blue eyes prominent with that look that made one tremble. He saw his mother’s face.
No — no, he mustn’t think of her! He couldn’t bear it. Not in this large quiet room, in this tall four-poster. It had been different on board ship. There he could lie, a part of all the strange movement of ship and sea, giving himself up to imaginings. He was a part of nothing here. But so long as he kept his thoughts from his mother he was not afraid. Yet there was nothing to take her place when he thrust her out of his mind in self-defence. Just a black void was left. Then bits of her would appear. The smooth creamy-brown back of her neck and the lock of brown hair that nestled there. Her left forefinger on which there was a scar where a dog had once bitten her. Her mouth when she smiled. No — he mustn’t think of that! He dived down under the bedclothes and pulled them over his head. He began to cry.
After a while a hand was laid on him. He started in fear, then thought it was Wright. He drew down the sheet a little way and said huskily: —
“I’m all right. What do you want?”
But it was Cousin Dermot. He sat down on the side of the bed and laid his hand on Mooey’s hot head.
“Do you mind if I stay with you for a little?” he said. “I get rather lonely at night.”
“Yes, please stay,” said Mooey eagerly. “I get a little lonely too.”
Dermot stayed a long while and, when he left, Mooey was fast asleep.
THE NEWS IN GAYFERE STREET
A
T THE END
of June Sarah told Finch that she was going to have a child. He was little short of astounded. He had never expected this. It had seemed to him that parenthood was against the nature of each of them. He could not picture himself as a father, even though he was more interested in children and tenderer toward them than Piers was. Yet Piers seemed the inevitable and perfect father. He could not picture Sarah as a mother. Sarah simply couldn’t be a mother. She hadn’t the body for it or the instinct. She was a cold crystal receptacle for passion. Anything more would shatter her. He walked about their room, confused and almost horrified.
“Are you positive?” he asked.
“Positive. The doctor says so — definitely.”
“When will it … happen?”
“In December.”
“December!” he exclaimed, as though it were a month of doom.
She laughed gayly. “It will be my Christmas present to you.”
“Good God!”
“Aren’t you glad?”
“Are you?”
“I don’t realize it yet. It’s been fun having this secret to myself for a whole week.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“I wanted to think it over.”
“And still you say you don’t realize it!”
“Well — I feel a new person.”
“Have you made any plans?” His tone was almost impersonal.
“I’m leaving that for you.” There was a malicious gleam in her narrow greenish eyes.
He had a sudden feeling of anger, as though she had played a trick on him, yet this was a moment that should have brought out his tenderness and his nobility — if he had these qualities! So he thought and turned to look into the street that she might not read his thoughts.
A woman was passing pushing a pram. He pictured a pram standing in the narrow hall below. He pictured Sarah pushing one. Pictured Henriette pushing one. He pictured himself pushing one and laughed.
“Why are you laughing?” she asked.
“Trying to think of myself as a father.”
“You’ll be a perfect father! Oh, Finch, I hope it’s a boy and like you! What do you hope?”
“I hope it’s a girl and …” in an insane moment he almost said — “like Henriette.” He caught himself in time and said — “like you.”
She threw her arms about him from behind. “There can never be another like me!”
“You can’t have it here, can you?” asked Finch.
“With Henriette as midwife! No — I’ll find a proper place.” She spoke with confidence. He had a rush of tenderness, picturing as a dreadful upheaval all she would have to go through.
He had to be away for several weeks on a tour. It was a success. He came back feeling well and happy. But he found a changed Sarah. She had been suffering from ills peculiar to her condition. She was pale and despondent. She threw herself into his arms and wept. She said she must have sea air and wanted to go to the Cornish coast.
Finch wondered why she should choose the place where she had spent the honeymoon of her first marriage, but he said: —
“Very well. We’ll go there, if we can find a house. It’s pretty difficult at this late hour.”
“Henriette knows of one through a friend of hers. She is cook in a family who find they can’t go. There’s nothing I want to do so much.”
The thought of being by the sea drew Finch almost equally. He had been too long among crowds. His dismay at the thought of the coming child was calmed by the picture of a lonely cottage on a Cornish cliff, of lonely wanderings over the rocks when the tide was ebbing.
The place turned out to be neither a cottage nor remote. But the white house, one of a group of half a dozen, was airy, open to the west wind and furnished with just the sort of things Finch liked. They had brought Henriette with them. There was a gale and lashing rain the day they arrived. It was always so wherever they went. It rained and it blew all the first day. Henriette was in a mood of deep despondency. It was her belief that nature should be kept under control as it was in the London parks. When she saw the ragged cliffs, the momentous boulders, the raging sea and the great slate quarry — now overgrown by grass and flowers — in the hillside behind the house, she shook her head and her pendulous underlip trembled.
“It was never meant to be,” she said.
But Sarah was happy to settle down here for a month. She ran from room to room placing things to her taste. Every time she and Finch met she threw both arms about him and pressed herself close to his breast.
“I’m so blissfully happy,” she said. “I scarcely think of the baby. It’s just you and I together by the sea. Do you think it will be fine tomorrow?”
“I’m sure of it,” he answered, laying his cheek against the glossy convolutions of her plaits.
But there was an unreality about her to him. She was a new, a dual being, the one he knew and the one unseen and unborn. And both these were bound up in each other and antagonistic to him. He had no sense of having begotten the child. As he saw Sarah’s form enlarge with its growth he felt a shrinking from her and a distaste for all that was to come. Her greed and her erratic appetite set him on edge. He thought with horror — “Am I going to turn against her again? I mustn’t! I mustn’t! I’ll not let myself. Every time I feel one of these sensations, I’ll go straight to her and kiss her.” But this brought no relief.
The sun came out warm and bright. Finch took Sarah for walks on the smooth grassy downs along the cliff. She delighted to go as far as the nearest resort and sit in a sheltered spot watching the bright-coloured surf bathers riding through the foam. But when Finch spoke of joining them himself she was horrified.
“And see you drown before my eyes! Never! My father was drowned, my first husband was drowned. Once I was almost drowned. Do you remember how you and Arthur saved me? The sea is my enemy!”
“Then why do you want to be beside it?” he asked coldly.
“To watch it,” she answered, with a sly smile. “One needs to watch one’s enemies.”
The morning walk was all she could do in a day. That left him free to wander on the shore in the afternoon. He would lie on the sands in the bay where the green waves scampered in like playful children trailing seaweed. He would loiter on the rocky headland when the waves had retreated, leaving their toys behind them. He would peer fascinated into pools where miniature forests and grottoes had been arranged by the salty fingers of the sea. Then he made himself no more than a receptacle for the mysteries of the shore.
A strange communion existed in these days between himself and Henriette. He had a feeling that Henriette knew a good deal about him. She too wandered on the shore, leaving large fiat footprints on the sand. Once he espied her in a solitary orgy of paddling, her heavy black skirt drawn up to her knees, disclosing enormous white legs that took dancing steps in the foam. The kitchen was briny with the treasures she had collected, shells of all sorts, starfish and limpets. Once she came trailing seaweed as long and limp as herself.
“It goes
pop
when you squeeze it,” she said. “I’ve popped it till I’m worn out.”
Another day she brought home a jellyfish. “You can see its innards,” she mourned. “It was never meant to be.”
She and Finch made a bargain that they would not speak of war in front of Sarah. She should have this time in peace. They kept the newspapers from her and she never asked to see them. She was satisfied with her magazines and library books. She became more and more engrossed in herself. She would send Finch across the downs to the distant village to buy some pastry or cheese she fancied. He marveled at the amount of Cornish cream she could eat.
He went in the early morning to bathe, his towel about his shoulders. He grew tanned and the hollows in his cheeks filled out.
They motored back to London on the last day of August. Three days later he ran down the basement stairs to Henriette.
“War is declared,” he said. “How shall I tell my wife?”
“I’ll tell her,” said Henriette. “I’m a good bearer of bad news.”
“I’m afraid it will be a great shock.”
“Yes, it will be enough to bring on a premature birth.”
“Had I better fetch a doctor before we tell her?”
“No. Just ’old yourself ready.” She plodded up the two flights of stairs.
She loomed dejectedly in Sarah’s doorway.
“The worst ’as ’appened,” she said.
Sarah sat up in bed.
“What’s wrong?” she asked wildly.
“War. It’s declared — in all its ’orrer.”
“War! Why — I thought that scare was over!”
“We kept it from you as long as we could. Now you must face it like the rest of us.”
It was strange, but this way of breaking the news suited Sarah. She took it quietly. She asked Finch: —
“Do you think we shall be bombed?”
He was sitting on the side of the bed with her in his arms.
“You must go into the country where you’ll be safe.”
“You too! I’ll not leave you!”
“There’ll probably be work here for me.” He knew that neither his eyesight nor his nerves would pass an army test.
“I shall die if we’re separated.”
“We’ll not talk of that yet.”
Her arms tightened about him.
“You’ve something in your mind! Something against me! I can feel it.”
“My one thought,” he said, “is to do what is best for you and — the child.”
“You’re as cold as ice!” she cried. “You don’t love me any longer. You hate the thought of the baby. If you loved it you’d call it our baby, not the child!”
“Give me time,” he said. “You can’t expect me to love something unborn.”
“You hate our baby,” she kept repeating.
He could not tell her that it was not a baby to him but one of those embryo creatures he had seen in pictures. Yet, he calculated, by now it must have features and hands.
“I’ll wager anything,” she went on, “that Renny loved Adeline before she was born.”
“If you compare me to him it must always be to my disadvantage.”
She dragged herself away from him and, crouching on the bed, made her pale face into a mask of hostility.
“Now you are deliberately tormenting me. You know that I hate Renny more than anyone on earth. Yet you accuse me — what are you accusing me of?”
“My God!” he cried, in exasperation. “I’m not accusing you of anything. I merely said that in my opinion …”