Authors: Mazo de la Roche
Tags: #FIC045000 – FICTION / Sagas
“It enters into all good works.”
Renny regarded them with a good deal of curiosity. How, he wondered, could the girl endure him?
Eugene Clapperton continued, — “I have my ideal and you have yours. Mine is to help others. Yours is —” he hesitated, running his hand over his smooth grey head.
“To look out for myself,” finished Renny.
“Well, if you like to put it that way. What I was going to say is that your ideal is to keep Jalna the same as it was when your grandfather built it a hundred years ago.”
“You’re right.
“A hundred years is a long time. You’ve got to take account of the changes that take place in our civilization,” and Eugene Clapperton beat with the soles of his shoes on the carpet, as though he were a leader in the march of civilization.
The master of Jalna tied a knot in his weather bitten forehead. “I don’t think much of civilization,” he said. “We go away to the wars to fight for it and, when we come home, do we find things any better? No. There are shoddier and shoddier houses being built. Shoddier goods are being made, with more and more high-falutin’ names given them. You can’t ride on the roads with comfort because of trucks and motor cars. Thank God, I have enough paths on my own estate to give me a gallop when I want it. Inside my own gates I keep things as they were.”
Eugene Clapperton stopped tapping his soles on the floor, as though at the mention of Jalna the march of progress had ceased, but he said:
“And I admire you for it. But — my property is my own affair. It is my own business, Colonel Whiteoak, what I put on it. I wouldn’t allow even my dear wife to interfere with that.” His eyes rested commandingly on his wife. He felt a new power welling up within him.
“But, Eugene,” she broke out, “you promised — you promised”
“what did I say, Gem? I promised that it would be a long time before I’d ever turn my thoughts to building again. And it has been. Quite a long while.”
“Not four years.”
“Ah, but four years can seem a long while, girlie. You’ll be proud and pleased to see my building project in operation.”
Renny Whiteoak did not know how to talk to this man in his present mood. He had but one wish and that was to insult him. He restrained his rising temper and said, — “Well, if Mrs. Clapperton is not able to influence you, I cannot expect to.”
“No one can influence me. My mind is made up.” With a tremor of excitement Eugene Clapperton realized that his mind had been made up only since Renny had entered the room. Here was a man, he thought, who brought out the fighting qualities in him. Here was an opponent worthy of defeat.
“The house you live in,” said Renny, “was built before Jalna. Mr. Vaughan, who built it, would turn over in his grave if he knew that you were planning to build streets of ugly little houses on Vaughanlands. There are already far too many ugly little houses and ugly big factories about. Once it was one of the loveliest parts of the Province.”
“I’ve heard all that before,” returned Eugene Clapperton.
“The truth about you is,” said Renny, “that all this talk of ideals and dreams is bosh. It’s plain greed that moves you. You know there’s lots of money in these jerry-built bungalows and you want it.”
Mr. Clapperton began to tremble all over. His knees could be seen shaking inside his pin-striped trousers.
Renny looked apologetically at Gemmel Clapperton whose crooked smile was an odd mixture of forgiveness and applause. The door from the hall was thrown open by the Great Dane who pressed his shoulder against it as a man might and stalked to where Renny sat. Eugene Clapperton hoped he would spring on Renny, give him a fright, or, at any rate, utter one of his blood-freezing growls. The Great Dane rose, placed a paw on either of Renny’s shoulders and looked into his face.
“It’s all right,” said Gemmel, and sprang up to grasp the dog’s collar. He growled.
“Let him be.” Renny gently pushed away her hand. He raised his hard aquiline profile to the Great Dane’s muzzle and it bent and drew its warm wet tongue across his forehead.
“I’ve never known him make friends before,” she exclaimed.
Her husband gave her an angry look. He said —
“Please leave the room. I have something to say to Colonel Whiteoak that can’t be said in front of a lady.”
Renny rose, and the dog dropped his forefeet to the floor with a soft thud. “There is no answer,” he said “to anything I’ve accused you of. You know it’s true.”
Eugene Clapperton’s voice came with a choking sound. Temper was upsetting to him and he did his best to keep cool. “There’s not a word of truth in what you say. Money doesn’t matter to me. I’ve all I want. I’m not like you, Colonel Whiteoak — always pressed for money. From what I’ve heard there’s little you wouldn’t do to get hold of a few extra dollars.”
His wife now hurried from the room.
The men stood facing each other. Renny said, — “You’re right. And at this moment I’d shake the weasand out of you for next to nothing.”
He grinned into Eugene Clapperton’s grey face and strode out of the house.
HUMPHREY BELL
The new moon that looked bright and cold as ice seemed perched on the bare branch of the oak. Actually perched on the branch was a small owl, staring out of golden eyes at Renny Whiteoak as he appeared on the snowy path. The air had turned colder, and the snow that had been melting was now a hard crust crunching beneath his heavy boots. Leaving Eugene Clapperton he had turned his angry steps across a field and into this little bare wood where there was a small house named the Fox Farm, because people who bred foxes once had lived there. Later it had been occupied by Gemmel and her sisters. It was here that Eugene Clapperton had met her and from here she had been married. After that the house had stood lifeless and empty for a time. It belonged to Renny and he regarded it as not at all like the bungalows Eugene Clapperton was building but as a pleasant little house, isolated in a bit of woodland, of which the tenants must be congenial, it mattering little what rent they paid. In truth, he preferred that they should pay a low rent because, in some mysterious way, the less they paid, the closer the small house was drawn into Jalna.
For the past six months the Fox Farm had been let to a veteran of the war, Humphrey Bell. He lived there but had made no appreciable impression on the place. His soft voice, his insignificant personality, were powerless to overcome the imprint the former tenants had left upon the house. Three sisters had preceded him. Uncle Ernest and his wife, during the short term of their elderly married life, had occupied it; and, before them, a mother and daughter, Renny having loved the mother and the daughter having loved Renny. The faces of these past tenants seemed always to be peering from the windows, the skirts of the women fluttering as they moved in and out of the doors, their voices still echoed in Renny’s ears when he entered the house, the voices of the three Welsh sisters that were sweet as music, the precise New England voice of Uncle Ernest’s wife — how dear that little old woman had been to Renny — the voices of Clara Lebraux and her young daughter, Pauline! The voices of the six women came to Renny’s ears like the sound of distant bells as he drew near the house.
Evidently there had been no stirrings outside the house during the day, for the glistening crust of the snow was unbroken by any footprints except on the windowsill of the front room, where the snow was marked by tiny prints made by the claws of small birds, as they ate the crumbs scattered for them. The sill was made visible by the ruddy yellow light that streamed across it from the room within. The house, set down like a box, with two pointed gables added, in the seclusion of snow and snow-decked trees, had an air of repelling any intrusion on its fastness.
Yet, the next moment after Renny had knocked, the door was thrown open and Humphrey Bell welcomed him with obvious pleasure. Over-heated air poured out from the room, yet Bell himself seemed not too warm in a heavy grey sweater. He was a small, slight young man, so admirably proportioned that he might have been almost impressive had his hair and face been less colourless. Indeed, at first glance, he might have been taken for an albino, till it was seen that his eyes were a clear flower-like blue and well able to bear the light.
“So it’s you, Colonel Whiteoak,” he exclaimed. “Just the man I’d like to see.”
“Don’t ‘Colonel’ me,” Renny said. “War’s over.”
“I’m glad you feel like that. I hate everything military.”
Renny came in and Bell slammed the door against the winter night.
“Yet,” said Renny, “you stood up to it pretty well. You’d a long time in a German prison camp too.”
Bell drew up a chair for him beside his own, so that the two faced out of the window where the moon, in its first power of shadow-casting, threw the blue silhouette of a young pine on the snow. Behind them was the small, cheaply furnished room, to which Bell somehow managed to give an air of coziness. Perhaps it was because he was obviously so happy to live there. The war had turned him onto a different path from the one on which his feet had first been set. He was the son of a doctor in a New Brunswick town, the only son in a family of four daughters, all considerably older than he. A late arrival and the darling of his father’s heart, he was destined for the study of medicine. He had had no inclination toward that profession but had accepted it because six natures, all more dominating than his own, had urged him to it. When the war came he was in his first year in a medical college. In spite of all his family could do to dissuade him he took a course in flying at a time when the life of the average flyer was very short. It was his duty to join a medical unit, his sisters thought, anything on land or sea would have been better than aviation. He had survived his first months of flying to be shot down in Germany and to be a prisoner till the end of the war. In the cloistered life of the camp, surrounded by men, some of whom would have been obnoxious to his family, he discovered himself. After the war he wanted to live as far as possible from that family. He discovered that, though he loved his parents, the atmosphere of the town where he was expected to settle down and become a partner in his father’s practice was suffocating to him. The thought of devoting his life to treating the ailments of the sick repelled him. He found in himself no dedication to that service. When he returned home the glad anticipation of the reunion became a bewildered disappointment to the family. Even the three brothers-in-law he had acquired during his absence were disappointed in him, though they had never before met him. There was disappointment all about him, mounting higher every week, like a quick-growing hedge, closing him in. He did not know how to escape, yet escape he must. He was constantly aware that the eyes of nine disappointed people were on him, wondering what he would do. Do I look like a doctor? he would ask himself. Would any patient have confidence in me? Miserably he compared his own qualities with the staunch qualities of his father.
Suddenly and from an unexpected quarter the way was opened to him. An old friend of the family, a bachelor, died, leaving him a legacy sufficient to support him for several years, if he were careful. He made up his mind to go to some distant place, perhaps the West Indies or Mexico, and try to write. He would write something that would make his family realize that he had done well to give up the study of medicine. If he never was able to write anything worth printing, still he had done well to give up medicine. He had gone down to Boston and there he had heard Finch Whiteoak play the piano, in one of a series of concerts. After the concert he had met the pianist in the house of a New Brunswicker living in Boston. Bell was so moved by Finch’s playing that he feared to meet him, lest disappointment would follow. He shrank from small disappointments for himself even more than he shrank from inflicting large disappointments on others. But Finch Whiteoak was fascinating to Bell. He could not keep his eyes from Finch’s hands. There was an inspired look in Finch’s long, grey-blue eyes, Bell thought. He found himself talking freely, gladly of the formless, pent-up thoughts within him. After the years in school, after the years in the army, the prison camp, and after that, his family’s plans for him rising like a barbed-wire fence round him, their disappointment like a dark deep ditch — now his freedom lay in his hands and he did not know where to place it. He was like a man carrying a sapling in his arms over a piece of bare land, trying to choose a place to plant it. From the sheltered corner of the room Bell had looked out defensively at the other guests, willing them to keep away.
“I thought of going to the West Indies or Mexico or even to some island in the Pacific,” he said, feeling the weight of his plans in his chest. “I thought my money would last longer there and I could write — try to find out what I’m good for.
“You’d not be good for anything very long — on an island in the Pacific. You’d marry a native and have a lot of funny-looking kids and get lazier all the time. You’re a Northern type. You need sharp winds and frosty air.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” muttered Bell. “But it must be somewhere that doesn’t cost too much.”
Finch ran his hand over his forelock, pushing it back. “Look here,” he exclaimed, “I have an idea. My oldest brother owns quite a big place in Ontario. Certainly it’s not as secluded as a South Sea island but he has five hundred acres and quite a lot of it is in woodland. Fine trees there. Do you like trees?”
Bell nodded. “I think I do.”
“Well, there’s a small house on the place, completely hidden among oaks and pines, which my brother is willing to let for a low rent to the right tenant. No one would trouble you there, unless you wanted.”
Bell was excited. “It’s the sort of thing I’d like, though it’s a long way from the South Seas.”
“You might try it,” said Finch. “Perhaps it wouldn’t suit you at all.” He was easily rebuffed. “Better not risk it.” He glanced at his wristwatch. He was tired and there were other people here who wanted to talk to him, an aspiring young girl pianist who was panting to pour out her soul.
“But I want to try it!” Bell said eagerly. “I’m not at all set on going to an island.”
“There’s nothing picturesque about the place I’m telling you of,” said Finch. He was already standing up. “It’s just that it is a place you might like to write in. You’d find something just as quiet anywhere in the country.”
Bell could not say that he wanted to be where he might see Finch sometimes but he asked:
“You spend a part of your year at home?”
“Oh, yes.” Finch’s thoughts already seemed removed far from this room. Young Bell felt like saying, — “I’d like to be somewhere near you,” but he could not. Instead he asked, — “what sort of man is your brother?”
Finch was suddenly very much in the room. He gave a little laugh, as though at some heart-warming remembrance, and said:
“He’s past sixty but he’s the best horseman I know. He’s got red hair and not a single white one in it — that I’ve ever seen. You might not like him. Some people don’t.”
“But you do!” exclaimed Bell warmly. “I can see that.”
A smile lit Finch Whiteoak’s face. “He’s been a father to me,” he said.
And now here was Bell opening the door of the Fox Farm, like a host, padding into the living room in old grey felt slippers and placing a chair for Renny Whiteoak to face the intricate fragility of the snow-decked boughs of the evergreens, the twigs of the oaks, against the burnished afterglow in the west. He had lived at the Fox Farm for only six months. He would have told you this was the happiest time of his life, looking back no further than the beginning of the war that had made his boyhood seem another life scarcely remembered. This was his first winter, a mild one, and he had been very snug, delighting in his aloneness in the little house in the woods, in being cut off from his family, in making new friends, of whom he never saw any more than he wished to. In those months he had written three short stories, all of which lay in a drawer of his writing table, each twice rejected. He had not yet made up his mind to send them out again. He was in no hurry, indeed he had not much faith in his powers. Or perhaps it was that he so enjoyed his present way of living that he shrank from disturbance of it.
When Renny Whiteoak came to see him it was his habit to place the two shabby, comfortable old chairs with their backs to the room and facing the woods, he himself taking the one with the sagging springs. He would then produce two glasses of whisky and water and the two would settle down for an hour’s talk. This happened twice a week, and once a month Bell took dinner at Jalna.
“Well,” said Renny, genially, “how goes the writing?”
He was the only person to whom Bell had spoken of his hopes and that under a promise of secrecy. Renny was flattered by Bell’s confidence. He looked gravely judicial when Bell would read one of his stories aloud to him. Though they weren’t the sort of stories he himself liked, being concerned with odd and even macabre experiences of the mind, he thought they were good. Secretly he hoped Bell would outgrow the desire to write such peculiar stuff and turn to something showing more of the virtues of a man.
“How goes the work?” he asked, when they were settled.
“If you can call it work,” said Bell, his small face set in a comic sneer.
“Damned hard work, I should say,” persisted Renny. “I’d hate to tackle it.”
Bell sprang up and went to the mantelshelf. “This is all I’ve done today,” he said. He put into Renny’s hand a peculiarly-shaped knot of wood from a branch of cedar that he had carved into the likeness of a chipmunk, so alert in its posture, so bold and yet timorous, that Renny laughed and curved his hand about it in pleasure.
“It’s good,” he said. “It’s capital. Now there
is
talent!”
Bell made a little grimace at the unintentional implication. “I like my menagerie,” he said. On the mantelshelf there were a dozen carvings of other small animals, contrived from oddly shaped pieces of wood.
“why don’t you try your hand at a human head?” Renny asked.
“I’d like to do yours — if I were able.” He gave an admiring glance at the hard-looking head set with such spirit on the lean shoulders.
“what about old Clapperton!” laughed Renny. “I wish you’d find a particularly ugly knob of wood and make a suitably sinister head of him. God, how I dislike that old fellow!”
“what is his latest?”
“Oh, he’s begun whining again about his ideals and his dreams. Asinine old crooner!”
“And what do his dreams portend?”
“Another go at his model village. I’ve told you how his wife persuaded him to give up the idea. Now he is playing with it again and in deadly earnest, I’m afraid.”
“Have you been to his house?”
“I just came from there.”
“I have the impression that his wife and her sister keep him very much in his place.”
“They do. But he’s getting tired of it. He had his own way for too many years. He’s becoming restive.”
“when I meet him,” said Bell slowly, “I feel like running the other way. He strikes a false note here. He doesn’t belong.” A mischievous smile hovered across Bell’s face. “Let’s get rid of him.”