Authors: Mazo de la Roche
Tags: #FIC045000 – FICTION / Sagas
Meg gave a pleased smile. “And who is everybody?” she asked, helping herself to another slice of fruit loaf.
“Everybody in the family.”
Meg now said, in the dictatorial tone of someone hearing the Catechism, “Name them.”
“All the ones that live — that live — ”
“Convenient.” Renny supplied the word.
“Convenient,” Mary said with a pleased smile at her aunt, who, taking another large bite of fruit loaf, mumbled through it:
“And who comes from a distance?”
“My brother and Uncle Wakefield and Roma.”
“Isn’t she clever?” exclaimed Renny. “She knows everything.”
“It would be nice,” said Meg, “if we could celebrate the centenary by a wedding. Adeline’s, for example.”
“It would indeed, but whom is she to marry?”
“There’s that dear boy, Maurice, who loves her to distraction and always has. How would you like to see your favourite brother married to Adeline, Mary?”
“I have no favourites,” said Mary. “My brothers are all just men.”
“I know, dear,” Meg spoke patiently, “but you must have a man for a wedding. Whom would you choose for a bridegroom — a fairy prince — for Adeline?”
“Mr. Fitzturgis,” said Mary promptly.
Renny and Meg groaned in unison. They had unhappy memories of Adeline’s engagement to the Irishman. Renny took some credit to himself that it had been broken off.
At that moment the Rector entered the room. He had a genial greeting for the two visitors and a look that was half-admiring, half-reproachful for his wife. They had been elderly widow and widower when they had married. He still had not grown accustomed to encountering her and her relatives always about the house, and he deplored her habit of frequent little lunches from trays.
“She never eats a proper meal,” he said to Renny.
“She never has. Yet she thrives. See how plump she is, while I, who eat like a horse at table, am thin as a rail.”
“what is a rail?” asked Mary.
“A rail,” observed the Rector, “is a kind of water bird — rather rangy and thin.” He went and opened a window, exclaiming, “How stuffy it is in here!” During the years after the death of his first wife he had lived in a pleasurable draft from open windows; now in his second marriage he was always complaining of the stuffiness of the rooms.
This open window affected Meg and Renny not at all, but it was right at Mary’s back. She grew colder and colder. Shivering, she watched her aunt empty the teapot, demolish the last currant from the fruit loaf; heard her uncle and the Rector discussing the lateness of the season; she thought of the different houses she had visited that morning and longed for home.
At last they were on their way there. Holding tightly to Renny’s hand, getting out of the path of motor cars, every yard of the way familiar to her, her blood moved more quickly, her spirits rose. She inquired:
“Uncle Renny, why do some ladies get fat?”
“It’s the life they lead.”
“Does the life they lead make them get fat in different parts of them?”
“It certainly does.”
“Auntie Meg is fat all over.”
“She certainly is.”
“But Patience is fat only in her tummy. Why?”
“Ask your mother.”
“Don’t you know?”
“It’s none of my business.”
“Do you always mind your own business?”
“I try.” After a little he said, “I hope you’re not tired or cold or hungry.”
“Oh, no. I’m all right.” But he could feel that she was lagging.
“Good girl,” he said, and to encourage her began to sing, in a not particularly tuneful voice, an old song he had learned from his maternal grandfather, a Scottish doctor:
Oh, hame came oor guid man at eve,
And hame came he,
And there he spied a saddle-horse
Whaur nae horse should be.
“And hoo came this horse here?
And whase can he be?
And hoo came this horse here
Wi’oot the leave o’ me?”
“Horse?” quoth she.
“Aye, horse,” quoth he …
“Tis but a bonny milch coo
My mither sent to me.”
“Milch coo!” quoth he.
“Aye, milch coo,” quoth she …
“But saddles upon much coos
Never did I see.”
By the time he had finished the song they had arrived at his brother’s house. The wicket gate stood invitingly open, the fox terrier Biddy came in rapture to meet them, and Piers Whiteoak opened the door.
“We’re holding back lunch for you,” he said to Renny. “I suppose you’ll stay. Have you any idea what time it is?”
“To tell the truth I haven’t. Mary and I have been on a tour. Tell Daddy about it, Mary.”
Seated on Piers’s knee, the warmth from his robust body reaching out to comfort her little thin one, the beam from his fresh-coloured face encouraging her, she could think of nothing to say but — “We saw all the family.”
“Well,” said Piers, “there’s nothing very new about that, is there?”
“Oh, but we saw them in a different way,” said Renny. “In the past we took it for granted that our kindred was the most important thing in the world for us. Now the youngsters must be taught.”
“what about Archer?” asked Piers.
“That boy’s an oddity — but, beneath his oddities, he’s a Whiteoak all right.”
Piers grunted. He took off his daughter’s shoes and socks and held her little cold feet in his warm hands. “So you visited all the family houses,” he said to her.
“Yes, every one.”
“And which do you like best? I mean including our own home.”
Certainly Piers expected her to choose her own, but at once she answered — “Jalna.”
Renny gave a delighted grin. “There,” he exclaimed, “she chooses Jalna! I’ve explained to her about its centenary. Now, Mary” — he looked at her intently out of his dark eyes — “tell us why you like Jalna best.”
Without hesitation, she answered, “Because it has television.”
Crestfallen, the brothers stared at her in silence a moment, then broke into a shout of laughter.
Piers’s wife, Pheasant, setting a platter of lamb chops on the table, heard this last. “There’s a modern child for you,” she said, and added wistfully — “when I was a child, how romantic Jalna seemed to me! All the family who lived there were glamorous.”
“Even me?” Piers asked flirtatiously.
“Even you.”
After twenty-seven years of marriage, they still were lover-like.
While they were enjoying the lamb chops a persistent ringing came from the telephone. Piers answered it and, returning to the table, said, “It was from Jalna. Alayne, wanting to know if you were here and why you had not sent word. She sounded a bit annoyed.”
“By George, I forgot.”
For a moment Renny was subdued, but soon his naturally good spirits were restored. He liked being with Pheasant and Piers. The brothers had many interests in common: the livestock, the farm with its orchards and small fruits. Since Renny’s unprecedented success with the racehorse, East Wind, Piers had troubled his head less and less about being in debt to him for the rent of the farmlands. Renny was a generous elder brother. If he had money on hand for his needs, he gave little thought to what was owing him. On the other hand he had not been scrupulous, when he was hard up, in days past, about acquiring the wherewithal from his wife’s private means or from his brother Finch who had inherited a fortune from his grandmother.
Seated beside her brown-eyed, brown-haired mother, Mary dallied with the hot food on her plate. So long had she gone hungry, she had lost appetite. Now that she was warm and no longer straining to keep up with Renny’s strides on the wet paths, the windy road, she could look back on the tour with pride and even pleasure.
“You should have heard us singing as we came down the road,” Renny was saying. “Do you remember that old song, Piers?” and he sang:
Oh, hame came oor guid man at eve,
And hame came he,
And there he spied a saddle-horse
Whaur nae horse should be.
“I had it from my maternal grandfather. He was a self-opinionated old Scotch doctor. Do you remember him, Piers?”
“I can’t very well remember him, for he died before I was born.”
“Well, you’ve heard of him often enough — Dr. Ramsey — your own grandfather.”
“You forget,” said Piers, “that we are half-brothers?”
An unpleasant reminder that, to the master of Jalna. He wanted the relationship to be intervolved, with no break. He frowned and asked, “Then who was your maternal grandfather?” He would not do him the courtesy of remembering him.
“He was a London journalist — drank rather heavily, I believe.”
“Oh, yes. I remember now. Well, never mind — we had the same paternal grandfather, and what a man he was! Philip Whiteoak!” He mused on the name a moment, then added: “I’m glad you named one of your sons for him and that the boy is the very spit of him.”
“He’s a rascal,” said Piers. “He’ll be coming home from college soon and I have a thing or two to say to him about his extravagance. Christian will be coming from Paris, too.”
“And Maurice from Ireland,” cried Pheasant. “All three brothers at home! Won’t that be lovely, Mary?”
Mary was not at all sure it would. In truth, home seemed pleasanter to her, more her very own, when those three unruly, loud-talking young men were away. After lunch, with clean dry socks and shoes on, and a warm sweater, she wandered again into the garden. Somehow there was a difference in all the growing things. It was as though they heard spring singing in the distance, and were poised to listen. She discovered the moth, that morning freed from the prison of its cocoon. It was clinging to a newly opened leaf, in a ray of pale sunlight. It attracted the attention of a bird which hovered above it. But the moth, in self-protection, raised its wings, vibrating them. From its hind wings two spots like eyes glared in threat. The bird, alarmed by this insect ferocity, flew away. Yet it did not fly far. Somewhere by its hidden nest it burst into a cheeping song that was the only one it knew.
Mary thought of all the houses she had that morning visited, of the people in them. They all were parts of the family. They were the family — her world. They were separate, yet they were one. Their faces were distinct, yet merged into the weather-beaten countenance of her Uncle Renny.
Finch’s Return
Homecomings, thought Finch, are the very best things in life. Home-leavings, a kind of death. Though he had faced the publicity attendant on the life of a concert pianist, he had shrunk from it. In the exhilaration of a public performance he would, for the time, forget his audience. Would, in fact, feel himself one with them. But, at the end, they were his enemies. Then he did not face them in courage but, exhausted, with a smile that women reporters would describe as a “naive, friendly grin” or a “shy, boyish grin.” One thing was certain, audiences liked him. They liked his gangling boyish figure as he crossed the platform. They liked the shape of his head, the expressive movements of his long bony hands.
Now, at the end of a tour (and at this moment he hoped he would never have another) he had come home to his own house, his own wife. He had possessed neither for very long. The paint on this ranch house was still fresh. The house had been built on the site of one which had been burned. This new marriage was built on the ruin of his first marriage. His house, he was willing to admit, did not harmonize with the other houses of the neighbourhood — or Jalna, with its faded red brick, almost covered by vines, its stone porch, its five chimneys, rising from the sloping roof where pigeons eternally cooed and slid, where their droppings defaced the leaves of the Virginia creeper and the windowsills, where smoke was always coming out of one or more of the chimneys and where the old wooden shingles so often managed to spring a leak.
This house of Finch’s was something new, something different. The family must get used to it. As for himself — he was proud of it. He loved it, he told himself — returning to it. He loved his wife and was hoping, with all the fervor of a nature too often swept by hopes and despairs, that his family would love her and she them.
Now he and she were together in the music room. Together as they always would be in the future, he thought — and she tried to believe, for she took no happiness for granted. Now, in wonder, she held one of his hands, with its beautifully articulated fingers, in hers.
“I’m thinking of the power in it,” she said.
“I should like to dig in the earth with it.” He clenched it, as though on a spade. “I’m tired of taking care of myself. A kind of beastly preciousness — that’s what one feels of one’s body on a tour. God, when I think of the rough-and-tumble of my boyhood! when I think of the life my two older brothers lead — it’s natural — ”
“But you’re doing what you’ve always wanted, aren’t you?” she said gently.
“Yes,” he granted. “I guess it’s just that I’m tired. You’ve never seen me at the end of a tour. I shall be different in a day or two.… Oh, Sylvia, if only you could know what it is to me to come home and find you waiting for me!… You do like the house, don’t you?”
“It’s perfect. There’s nothing I would change in it. And nothing could be more different from my home in Ireland — I was so ill and unhappy there.”
“Do you see much of my family?” he asked, as though he felt that seeing a good deal of them would complete her cure.
Certainly she knew them quite well, for she had visited at Jalna. Now she said, “I have had dinner there twice a week and have had them here. All the family have been sweet. I’ve told you in letters.”
What a charming voice she has, he thought, and he remembered how sweet had been the voice of his first wife, Sarah. Both of them Irish. But how different! Sarah — with her odd gliding walk, her jet-black hair and green eyes, almond-shaped. Something rigid about her body — while Sylvia was loosely put together, pale-coloured as a wandering wood spirit. So he thought of her, as he sat holding her hand — thought of her as elusive, where Sarah had been so relentlessly, almost desperately yet coldly clinging.… Looking into Sylvia’s blue eyes, he sought to put Sarah out of his mind forever.
But now Sylvia was speaking of Sarah’s child. She was saying, “Dennis will soon be coming home for the holidays. It’s so exciting to picture a child in the house.”
“He’s thirteen. Will be fourteen next Christmas. We used to call him Holly. An odd little fellow. Small for his age. Looks about eleven.”
When in a few weeks Dennis returned from school, that was Sylvia’s first thought: how small he was — how compact, firm, and yet how guileless — with his pale hair and green eyes, he was veiled in her mind — the child of another woman by Finch, yet now to be hers to care for, to love. Why, he looked small enough to tuck into bed at night — to snuggle up to one and tell his boyish troubles. She felt, at the moment, quite ridiculously sentimental about him.
As he sat on the arm of Finch’s chair, with an arm about Finch’s neck, she looked into their two faces with affectionately critical eyes.
“There’s no resemblance,” she said. “You two are as different as you can be.” She rather wished the boy had looked like Finch. His unlikeness seemed to set him apart. Suddenly she wondered how she would talk to him. She’d had no experience. But she would find out. Bit by bit they would draw close to each other. She and Finch were setting out with a ready-made family. Three of them! A family to be reckoned with.
Finch removed his son’s arm from his shoulder.
“Shouldn’t you like to run off for a while?” he said.
Dennis from his perch looked down into Finch’s face. “where?” he asked.
“Oh, anywhere. To Jalna. To the stables.”
“I’ve been there already. I’d rather be here with you.”
Sylvia asked, “Are there any boys of your age in the neighbourhood?”
“I’ve had enough of boys,” returned Dennis. “I’ve been with over a hundred of them all the term.”
Finch got up and gave his shoulders a restive twitch. He went and looked out of the window. The cool unseasonable weather had given way to glowing summer heat. The flowers, as though weary of waiting, had burst into bloom — had, with undue haste, matured.
“The border looks well,” said Finch, “considering it’s been made so short a while.” His eyes were caught by a mass of pansies. He said: “You might go and pick some pansies for Sylvia. You’d like them for the table, wouldn’t you, Sylvia?”
Dennis went off obediently. They watched him, as he squatted by the pansy bed. “How sweet he is!” she exclaimed. “Most boys would think it a great bore.” She added suddenly, “He’s very reserved, isn’t he?”
Finch stared. “Reserved! The opposite, I should say. Too clinging. Don’t let him pester you.”
“what I want is to be friends with him,” she said.
In a surprisingly short while Dennis returned with a neat bunch of pansies. He marched straight to Finch and offered them to him. “Take them to Sylvia,” said Finch sharply. “Don’t be stupid.”
Dennis laid them on the small occasional table near Sylvia. She gathered them up tenderly. Dennis’s eyes were on the table. “That table,” he said, “belongs to Auntie Meg.”
To Finch it seemed that Dennis had purposely spoken of the occasional table because its ownership had been the subject of heated discussion at the time when this house was being furnished.
Now Finch said, “It does not and never did belong to her. Can’t you go off somewhere and amuse yourself?”
“Nothing amuses me so much as being with you.”
Finch gave him a swift glance. Was it possible the boy was ragging him? But no — the small, cool face was gently reflective — the green eyes fixed on Finch’s face with longing. Sylvia took the pansies to the pantry to find a vase for them. Finch steadied his nerves and sought to produce a fatherly tone.
“Look here, old fellow,” he said, “if you will leave Sylvia and me for a bit — we have things to talk over, you know — then you and I will go to Jalna to see Uncle Renny, who has been away ever since I came home. Will that be all right?”
To Finch the fatherliness in his voice sounded hollow and forced, but Dennis smiled in pleasure.
“How good you are!” he exclaimed.
Now surely that was an odd remark for a modern boy of thirteen to make. It sounded positively Victorian. And the way he said it, with his small hands clasped against his chest and his eyes shining! It was almost funny.
Anyhow he went, and Finch followed Sylvia to the pantry and admired her arrangement of the pansies. They were in two amethyst glass bowls. “One is for the music room,” she said, “and the other for Dennis’s room — if you think he’d like it.”
“Good Lord,” exclaimed Finch. “If anyone had put flowers in my room when I was a boy I’d have dropped dead from astonishment.”
“Then perhaps I’d better not.”
Sylvia set the second bowl of pansies in the dining room. She felt oddly, purposefully happy, as though a new invigorating element had come into her life with the coming of the boy. When she saw him set off in the car with Finch to go to Jalna she called out, “Don’t be late for lunch, you two.”
“We two,” repeated Dennis to Finch. “That’s the way it used to be, when we had the house to ourselves.”
Finch stopped the car with a jolt. “Just what do you mean by that?” he demanded sternly.
“I mean I’m not used to women.” Dennis had flushed but he answered with composure.
“Of course you’re used to women. You’ve always had a woman in the house with you.”
“Not in our new house.”
“Now, look here, Dennis, you are to be specially nice and friendly toward Sylvia or — I’ll know the reason why.” Finch made no effort to keep the irritation out of his voice. He longed to enjoy his home without the pushing presence of this odd child. He had been an odd sort of child himself, but God knew he had never been pushing.
“Oh, I shall be friendly all right,” said Dennis. “I only thought — ”
“I don’t want you to be — well — pushing.”
“Oh, I won’t be pushing,” said Dennis. “I know how to be quiet. Is Sylvia delicate?”
“She was — once.”
“How delicate? Did she have to stay in bed?”
Without answering Finch drove on. Dennis glanced up shyly at him but Finch’s expression was enough to prohibit further questioning. Even a child would be conscious of that. With his hands, palms together, pressed between his bare knees, Dennis sat quietly thinking. It was as though he tried to make himself as inconspicuous as possible. But his very smallness, his compact paleness, made his presence more noticeable to Finch. If he had been a different type of boy, thought Finch, he would have been easier to ignore, or perhaps easier to get on with.
But the boy’s peculiar presence seemed no barrier to Renny Whiteoak. They found him at Jalna, watching on television a horse race in Florida.
“One of the best things I’ve seen on TV,” he said, turning it off. “They do horse races well.”
“Don’t let me interrupt you,” said Finch.
“It’s over.” He got to his feet, took Finch’s hand and kissed him. He had in him abundant power of enjoyment, though combined with it he was capable of deep depression. Now he was all pleasure in his brother’s return.
“You look well,” he said, “for you. Was your tour a success?”
“I had good audiences.”
“How much did you make?”
From this practical question Finch resolutely shied. He knew that Renny had done well with his colt, East Wind, but it was an expensive thing to maintain a racehorse. Perhaps Renny was short of money and was considering the possibility of a loan from him. However, that apprehension was dispelled.
“I’ve had a good year,” Renny said tranquilly. “But show horses are my line, not racehorses.” He sat down and drew Dennis on to his knee. The boy looked confidently into Renny’s brown eyes.
“How do you like having a stepmother?” Renny asked with his genial grin. “Has she beaten you yet? Does she make you eat in the kitchen? And sleep on the floor?”
“I’ve just come. She hasn’t yet.” The boy laughed, his face close to Renny’s.
“But she will,” said Renny. “Just give her time.” His expression was now ferocious. “I had a stepmother and she did all those things to me, didn’t she, Finch? Made me eat from the dog’s dish off the kitchen floor, while Finch ate from a gold plate in the parlour. Isn’t that so, Finch?”
Finch nodded, without amusement. This teasing of Dennis, as though he were a six-year-old, bored him, but it was easy to see that Dennis liked it. He snuggled up to Renny, sniffing him with animal pleasure.
“who’s he like?” Renny asked, studying the child’s face.
“Certainly not me,” said Finch.
“Nor
her
,”
said Renny, referring to Sarah, Finch’s dead wife.
“Eyes and hands,” Finch spoke almost in a whisper.
Dennis blinked his eyes and spread out his hands.
“I’ve been taking violin lessons at school,” he said proudly.
Renny groaned. “Another artistic one. Oh, Lord, what’s the family coming to! Talent on all sides. Thank goodness, Adeline has none.”
“I have none, Uncle Renny,” laughed Dennis.
“Splendid! Fiddle away for all you’re worth — so long as you’ve no talent.”
“My father is a genius,” said Dennis.
“It’s time you went.” Finch could bear no more.
“Clear out.”
“See you later,” Renny said to Dennis, as man to man. “Go over to the stables and then tell me what you think of the new foal. Here’s Adeline. She’ll go with you.”
Adeline had that moment come into the room. Greeting her, Finch was struck afresh by her beauty. This he remarked to Renny when they were left alone. “She’s really stunning,” he said.
Renny agreed. Then, moving close to Finch, he said, “I have a wonderful scheme.” He fell silent, as though overcome by the splendour of his scheme.
What was it — Finch wondered — to enlarge the stables? He hoped not. He would not put any of his hard-earned cash into that all-engulfing maw. He looked with curiosity into his elder’s eyes which, through all vicissitudes, had retained their brightness.
Renny took his arm and led him into the dining room where hung the portraits of their paternal grandparents. He said:
“Take a good look at them. What do you see?”
But Finch looked at him rather than at the portraits. He thought, what is it in him that fascinates me? Is it his vitality? His zest for living? Yes — but even more it is because he is mysterious. That’s the quality in him that fascinates me. Yet he looks on himself as a simple, uncomplicated fellow!