Authors: Mazo de la Roche
Tags: #FIC045000 – FICTION / Sagas
Suddenly he became very polite to Barker and assisted him to alight. Solicitously he guided him in the direction of his home and bade him a loving goodnight. He locked the garage and went rather unsteadily into the house. Still wearing his coat and hat he lighted the stove and put on the kettle to make himself a pot of tea. While the kettle was boiling he went softly through the pantry into the dining room. He stood listening. There was a muffled middle-of-the-night stillness in the house. Upstairs in the big mahogany bed the Clappertons slept. On the top floor Althea and the Great Dane, and near her in a little room with a sloping roof, Tania.
Raikes opened the sideboard and took out a bottle of brandy. Eugene Clapperton disapproved of alcohol but he kept one bottle of brandy in the house for emergency. Now Raikes filled a flask he carried in his pocket from the bottle and returned to the kitchen. He made the tea, fetched milk from the pantry, and poured himself a cup. Half-sitting, half-leaning against the sink, he drank two cupfuls. He had pushed his hat to the back of his head and the unshaded light fell on his long face which wore an expression of gentle melancholy. Above his head the kitchen clock, with roses on its massive face, ticked loudly. Its hands pointed to two o’clock.
He took the teapot into the dining room and replenished the brandy bottle with tea. His hands shook and he winced as some of the hot liquid was spilled over his thumb. Now the sideboard was closed and he gave the room an admiring glance before he left. He wished he owned a grand house like this, with furniture as fine. He felt sorry for himself — a lonely man, with no one to love him — a lonely Irishman, in a strange land. He thought of Mrs. Clapperton and the odd way she had looked at him that night, and not only on that night. Well — in him she could see a real man, not a pimp like old Clapperton.
THE CONCERT PIANIST
There was no greater pleasure than walking, Finch Whiteoak thought. At this moment it was a more profound pleasure than playing the piano. Seated before the instrument, even at his best, there was the mind alert, ready to pounce on the fingers if they faltered, ever so slightly. There was the mind, conscious of his audience, quivering with anger if everything was not right in the concert hall. Even when he played in solitude, there was the mind, exalted, fiery, casting its shadows on the keyboard. But — in walking through these wintry woods — the mind was gone. It was scarcely there to direct the legs. There was the blood coursing hotly through the body, the eyeballs cool and relaxed, the nostrils widening to draw in the icy air. He had tramped for five miles along the country road. Now returning through the woods of Jalna, the pines, the oaks, the slim naked birches, stood waiting for him as friends. Willingly would he spend the rest of his life among them. He had had enough of people. Their inquisitive eves, their mouths saying the same things over and over.
Scarcely aware of what direction he took he passed the house, turned down into the ravine, and up the opposite steep, a little breathless, for here it was heavy going, toward the Fox Farm. In the still of the sunless day, with the sky drooping heavy with more snow, snow that would bring deeper, thicker silence to the wood, the house looked like one in a German fairy tale. The door might have opened and a strange dwarf looked out, or a little old woman with a shawl over her head. Surely the smoke that rose from the chimney was remarkable. It rose slowly, downy and white, and spread itself like a toadstool above the house. This was the first time Finch had been home since the coming of young Bell. It seemed strange to find him here. Yet quite ordinary everyday occurrences often seemed strange to Finch. The power, or weakness, of wonder had been given him at birth. How strange, he was forever thinking to himself. Some combination of sounds on the piano which he had heard a thousand times would suddenly strike him, as though it were the first, and he would pause, in that delicious wonder. Now this smoke that curled so closely at the chimney’s mouth, then spread itself like a greyish-white toadstool, held him. His face wore what Renny called his idiotic expression.
Watching him through the window was Humphrey Bell. He kept himself concealed and watched. He felt a quickening of the pulse at the sight of that long sensitive face which had been imprinted on his memory since their meeting. Often he had wondered if the face were as interesting as he had thought and now he said to himself almost joyfully — it is!
Finch moved slowly toward the door and by the time he had reached it Bell stood there to welcome him. They exchanged greetings and Finch stared about the room with an air of approval.
“So,” he said, “you’ve dug yourself in, and mighty snug you are.”
The stove was glowing almost red hot.
Bell said, — “I’m sorry if it’s too warm but the truth is I was so long nearly frozen in prison camps that it seems as though I can’t be too warm now. Won’t you take off your windbreaker?”
Finch took it off and Bell placed two chairs side by side facing the window.
“Do you mind?” he asked shyly. “I always set the chairs this way when your brother comes.”
“That is fine,” said Finch. “which brother?”
“Renny. The other one has never been.”
“Piers is wrapped up in his work and his family. How do you like Renny?”
“He’s just like you said. To see him cantering on horseback — well, it’s just poetry.”
“And you like living here?”
“You couldn’t have done a better thing for me than to send me here. I’ve dug myself in as completely as a rabbit in his burrow.”
The simile was almost too good. Finch chuckled. Then he said, — “The family tell me you have dinner with them occasionally. I’m glad of that.”
“They’ve been mighty kind to me. Not only Colonel Whiteoak — but Mrs. Whiteoak and the two old uncles. I’d rather go there than to any other house I’ve ever been.”
“what about Adeline?”
Finch had seated himself but Bell stood leaning against the window frame, his hands in his pockets, his eyes on the pallid scene outside. “Oh, she,” he answered. “She’s so serene and untouched by life that I daren’t think of her.”
“She’s really just a big child. She’ll be an interesting woman some day.”
“She has the most lovely bones,” said Bell dreamily. “Her good looks aren’t just pretty flesh and fine eyes and chestnut hair.”
“She’s like my grandmother. I can tell you, Bell, she had an arresting face when she was a hundred. Age could not change her bones. Lord, I remember her old hands and how wrinkled and yet how shapely they were! She wore a lot of rings.”
“I wish I’d seen her. I have seen her portrait.”
“I only knew her when she was very old.” After a moment he added impulsively, — “She left me all her money.”
“You were her favourite?”
“Gosh, no. I never quite knew why she did it. I wished she hadn’t.” He sat, lost in thought for a little, his long grey-blue eyes darkened by some painful memory. Then he asked abruptly, — “what do you do to pass the time?”
“Oh, I write some rather feeble short stories. They must be feeble, I suppose, or they’d get accepted. I don’t write the bitter disillusioned stuff that most literary guys who’ve been to the war can turn out in words of one syllable and no punctuation. I like long words and I like the niceties of punctuation, and I like to embroider and elaborate. Neither can I write about sex. I’m too restrained and vague.”
“Give yourself time,” said Finch. “You’ve only been at it six months.”
“The thing for me to do,” said Bell, “is to stick to carving silly things like those,” and his eyes moved from the scene outdoors to the small carvings on the mantelshelf.
“I don’t believe you’re happy here — in spite of what you said about being as snug as a rabbit in its burrow.”
“Oh, yes, I am,” Bell protested quickly. “I’ve never been so almost completely happy.” He began to laugh silently, rumpling his silvery tow hair till it made a halo round his head. “But — I have one headache and it’s an aggravating one, I can tell you.”
“what?”
“Mr. Clapperton.”
“Oh, him! You and my Uncle Nicholas should get together.”
“We have. Your uncle invariably says Clapperton is a horrid old fellow.”
“what has he done to annoy you?”
“Now, listen. He never meets me on the road or in the village but he stops me and begins to pour out his obnoxious advice.” Bell spoke in a high afflicted tone. “He says I’m mentally ill. That it’s proved by the way I shut myself up alone here. By the way I look and talk. He says that I must see a psychiatrist. He says that fifty percent of the people one meets are mentally ill. He says that one out of every ten should be in a mental home. By God, I’ll be in jail for doing him an injury, if he doesn’t let me alone!”
“why don’t you avoid him?”
“I can’t. He smells me out. He’s everywhere — with his know-it-all smirk and his cheap philosophizing.”
“Have you met his wife and her sister?”
“Once he dragged me almost by force to his house to see his pictures. I suppose no worse collection of pictures exists anywhere. Yet they inspire him to live a finer life, he says. I don’t know how the two women endure him. They’re quite nice, though a little odd.”
Bell really was worked up, but in Finch’s presence he calmed himself, brought whisky, and sat down facing the window.
It was March and should have been spring but there was no sign of it in these woods. The snow was deeper than it had been all through the winter, the air thicker in portent of more snow. There was a deeper silence. No small animal ventured from its burrow to leave a footprint on the snow. Of the migratory birds crows had thrown their challenge across the sky and one morning a robin had been seen. “The first robin!” Adeline had cried. “Now I must wish on him.” And she had, combining superstition and religion, murmured, — “Please, may I go to Ireland, oh God!”
Finch said, — “Young Adeline is dying to go to Ireland.”
Bell looked surprised. “I thought she was perfectly happy here. Why should she want to go to Ireland — of all places?”
“She was there once, with her father, and she wants to go again. My nephew Maurice is going this spring. He owns a place there. If she goes someone must go with them from here. Perhaps Renny. Perhaps me.”
As he spoke Finch was looking out of the window but he was conscious of a change in Bell. He gave him a sidelong look. The tip of Bell’s thumb was caught between his teeth, his eyes were downcast. He asked:
“How long would she be away?”
“Probably a couple of months.”
Bell gave a little embarrassed laugh. “Don’t think me too inquisitive,” he said, “but I can’t help asking this. Someone — I think it was Mrs. Clapperton — told me that there is a sort of engagement between Adeline and her cousin. Is she — are they going over there as an engaged couple?”
“I think almost everyone in the family wishes they were but it isn’t so. Adeline hasn’t shown any preference for Maurice and they’re too sensible to press her. Her father wouldn’t allow any urging. He’s in no hurry to give his daughter to a man who is to live three thousand miles away.”
“whoever marries her,” said Bell, “will get a lovely wife.”
“He will, and a high-spirited one. He’d need lots of character.”
“It would be strange,” Bell now turned his inviting blue eyes on Finch, “to live in the house with one woman — one whom you loved desperately — and no one else … I used to live in the house with five women. Of course, that was very different. If you lived alone with a woman you deeply loved, everything she said or did would be terrifically important. And all the time you’d be watching yourself, in fear you might say or do something that might hurt her. And if by any chance she gave you a hurt you’d have to hide it from her. You’ve been married. Isn’t that so?”
“There are worse things than being hurt,” said Finch. “There’s suffocation.”
“But not if you really loved her!”
“Well … you never know till you try it.”
“I expect he’ll marry her all right,” said Bell, turning again to the thought of Maurice. “He’s got money and good looks, the family behind him. He’s got everything.”
“Except Adeline’s love. He hasn’t that — yet.”
“This journey together will do the trick. I can just see them in some picturesque old Irish mansion — the sort of place to captivate a girl.” Bell forced a smile to his small sensitive mouth, as though the picture were a pleasant one.
Finch began to talk to him of Ireland, of old Dermot Court whose property had been inherited by Maurice. “Speaking of Ireland,” he went on, “my wife was an Irishwoman, a forty-second cousin. We separated and we came together again.”
“That was good, eh?”
“No. It didn’t last.”
Walking homeward Finch remembered his wife Sarah. Her dark form glided out of the pale muffled wood and stood on the rustic bridge waiting for him. He saw her sleek black head with its convolutions of plaits, her white hands gripping the snowy handrail of the bridge, as though to keep herself from running to meet him. He remembered the feel of those hands on his neck … and now she was dead, dead as that fallen ash tree, blown down by a gale in its prime.… Of her there was left only the memory of her sensual hold on him — his struggle to escape — but he could never be the same again. She had done something to him.… Yet — had he ever been whole — sound? He doubted it. And here at Jalna was their son. Here was Dennis who was always so glad to have him at home. It touched him to see the little boy’s pleasure in his return. But, when it came to being a father, he felt himself to be a failure as compared with Renny — Renny who had been a father to his brothers, to Eden’s daughter, and now a better father than himself to Dennis.
What bright elegance was Sarah’s! She was as finished as a china ornament. She was as ruthless as a storm. From her far-off grave in California she spoke to him in a moment’s communion and he hesitated on the bridge to hear that icy whisper. He looked back at his own deep footprints in the snow, blue caverns sunk in its whiteness. There was an oak tree that had somehow contrived against all the gales to retain two brown leaves. Now, in the still air, one of them detached itself and fluttered slowly downward like a weary bird.… The sound of the dogs’ barking came from the direction of the house. They barked angrily from the porch, wanting the door opened. In a moment it opened and the barking ceased. The door closed with a bang.
Finch pictured the warmth and light inside the house. Whiteoaks had lived here for all but a century. Perhaps would live here for a century — two centuries — more. Who knew? He felt the pull of the house — urging him to hasten to it — not to lose any of the cherished hours under its roof, the only roof beneath which he felt sheltered, safe. Sometimes when he was on a tour, was playing the piano in a distant city, he would remember the piano in this house, and his spirit would return to it and his fingers return to that keyboard, and all else would be blotted out and the next day the critics would say he had played his best.
When he stood inside the hall where the bob-tailed sheepdog, the bulldog, and the Cairn terrier were humped by the stove pulling at the clots of snow between their toes, he stood warming his hands and listening to the voices of the two old uncles in the library, like the rustling of the two last oak leaves on the tree in the ravine, he thought. Urgent and steady came the tick of the grandfather clock. Now the sound of the dogs licking their wet paws, and a growl from the little Cairn as the sheepdog lay down too close to him.
Cap in hand he stood in the doorway of the library.
“I’ll not come in,” he said. “I’m too snowy.”
“Thank you, dear boy,” said Uncle Ernest. “I am so very susceptible to cold.”
“where have you been?” asked Uncle Nicholas.
“A good walk. Then I dropped in on Humphrey Bell.”
“Albino-looking fellow,” remarked Nicholas.
“He served in the Air Force. A very nice young man,” reproved Ernest.