The Jalna Saga – Deluxe Edition: All Sixteen Books of the Enduring Classic Series & The Biography of Mazo de la Roche (270 page)

Wakefield began to scramble down from his stepladder. “Let me out of here,” he said. “I’m getting upset.”

He hastened toward the door, but as he reached Piers’s side he espied a half sheet of crumpled paper lying on the floor. He bent and examined it.

“What’s this, I wonder?” he said.

“Give it here,” said Piers.

Wakefield handed it to him, and Piers, smoothing it out, cast his eyes over it. His expression changed.

“This evidently belongs to Finch,” he said, slowly. “He must have pulled it out of his pocket with his handkerchief.” He looked steadily at Finch. “Now that you’re making a clean breast of it, Finch, will you give me leave to read this aloud?”

“Do what you darned please,” sobbed Finch.

“It’s a note from someone to you.” He read, with distinctness:

DEAREST FINCH—

After you were gone last night, I was very much disturbed. You were preoccupied—not like your old self with me. Cannot you tell me what is wrong? It would be a terrible thing to me if the clarity of, our relationship were clouded. Write to me, darling Finch.

A
RTHUR
.

Piers folded the paper, and returned it to the child. “Give this back to Finch,” he said. “He’ll not want to be separated
from it.” He turned then to Renny. “Did you take it in, Renny? His friend Arthur calls him ‘dearest’ and ‘darling.’ Could you have believed it possible that one of us should ever have got into such a disgusting mix-up?”

Renny said, his eyes fixed on the spaniel: “This Arthur Leigh calls him ‘dearest’ and ‘darling.’”

“Yes! And rants about the ‘clarity of their relationship’!” He gave a flourish of his hand toward Finch. “Is it any wonder he looks a wreck—alternately boozing with butchers and tailors and spooning with a rotter like Leigh?”

“I thought you were a little fool,” said the eldest Whiteoak, “but now I’m disgusted with you. You’ve been deceiving me, and wasting time when you should have been studying. As for this neurotic affair with Leigh—I tell you, I’m sick at heart for you.”

Finch could not defend himself. He felt annihilated. He held Arthur’s note in one shaking hand and in the other he gripped his handkerchief, but he did not hold it to his face. He left the misery of his face exposed to the eyes of his brothers. Sobs shook his lips. Tears ran down his cheeks unheeded.

Wakefield could not bear it. Slipping past Piers and Renny, he threw his arms about Finch’s neck.

“Oh, don’t cry,” he implored. “Poor old Finch, don’t cry!”

Renny said: “This is very bad for you,” and took him under the arms and put him into the passage outside.

The little boy stood there motionless, his heart pounding heavily. He was oppressed by the strife among his elders. He had a feeling that something frightening was going to happen.

Mrs. Wragge came out of the kitchen carrying a corn broom and a dustpan. She began angrily to sweep something off the red brick floor into the pan.

“If that ’usband of mine,” she affirmed, “don’t quit throwin’ refuge on my clean floors, it’ll be the worse for ’im.”

“There’s another bit, over in the corner,” said Wakefield, pointing.

Mrs. Wragge collected it, straightened her back, and looked curiously at the door of the washroom.

“What might they be doing in there so long?” she asked. Wakefield replied with dignity: “They
might
be doing almost anything, Matilda. What they
are
doing is washing a dog.”

“I thought the master’s voice sounded as though he were a bit put out over something.”

“Not more than usual, Matilda.”

“Well, it’s none of my business.”

“You bet it isn’t.”

“But, just the same, when Wragge told me that Mr. Finch had come ’ome with his collar hangin’ loose and ’is fice dirty at this time in the morning, I says, ‘Look out for squalls.’”

The door of the washroom opened. Renny and Piers, followed by Finch and the spaniel, came out. Renny picked up Wake and threw him across his shoulder. Upstairs he set him down in the hall and rumpled his hair. “Feel better?” he asked. Wake nodded, but he kept his eyes turned away from Finch. He could not bear to look at him…

Finch lay on his bed all day. He was in a strange state, between sleeping and waking. He could not think clearly, and his head hurt him terribly. He felt as though the inside of it had become solid, while over the surface, sharp pains trickled down into his neck. He had an abominable taste in the mouth. He had a light-headed, feverish feeling. It was impossible for him to arrange the events of the last twelve hours in proper sequence. He had never been so confused, so
hopeless, in his life. All the muddle-headedness, the fear, the groping of his years, seemed to have harried him, jostled him, spiritually dishevelled, to this. He was an outcast in his own home, unspeakably alone. He asked himself the old question, What am I? He examined his hand as it lay clenched on the quilt beside him. What was it? Why had it been formed? Given those strange and delicate muscles—the power to draw music from the aching heart of the piano? That music was more real than the hand that made it. The hand was nothing, the body was nothing. The soul surely less than the grass. He lay as motionless as though the soul had indeed left the body.

After a time, the thought of music again came to him. He remembered something by a Russian composer, which his teacher had played to him. It had been too difficult for Finch to play, but he had the power of remembering it, of inwardly hearing it, in its entirety, as though it were again being played.

He lay, letting it sing through him, through every nerve in his body, like a cleansing, rushing wind. At last he felt peaceful and slept.

A
LAYNE

T
HREE WEEKS LATER,
Alayne Whiteoak sat alone in the living room of the apartment which she shared with Rosamond Trent. She had just finished reading a new book, and she was about to write a review of it for one of the magazines. She wrote a good many reviews and short articles now, in addition to her work as reader for the publishing house of Cory and Parsons.

This was an English novel of Oxford undergraduates who waved white hands, who talked endlessly and cleverly, always on the verge of the risque. She wished he had not sent her this particular book—but then it was only one of many like it. She felt that she could not do it justice because she had come to it prejudiced. It was not her sort of book. She sighed and looked at the books piled about her. She thought of the procession of books that, in the last year and a half, since her return to New York, had passed through her hands. A strangely dressed procession, carrying brazen “blurbs,” trampling her spirit, tiring her.

She had none of the angry irritation of a professional reader whose own creative power is being stifled by continuous
critical reading. She had little creative power in writing. She did not even desire it, but she wanted certain things from life which life apparently was to withhold from her. She wanted open space about her, and she wanted freedom to love. She desired spiritual growth.

When she had first come back to New York, her reaction from the troubled ingrown life at Jalna was a desire to submerge her personality in the routine of work, to drown in the roar of the city remembrance of that strange household—love of Renny Whiteoak. And for a while it seemed that she had succeeded. Rosamond Trent had been almost pathetically glad to welcome her back to the apartment on Seventy-first Street. “You know, Alayne dear, I never hoped much from that marriage of yours. Not that your young poet was not an adorable creature, but still, scarcely the type that husbands are made of. It has been an experience for you—I shouldn’t have minded a year of it, myself—but now the thing is to put it behind you and look steadily forward.” Her voice had had an exultant little crow in it as once more she took Alayne under her wing.

Mr. Cory felt it badly that the marriage had been so unsuccessful. He still had a fatherly interest in Alayne, and it had been through him that the two had met. Eden’s two slim books of poetry were still in print, but the sale of them had dropped to almost nothing. Still, now and again in some literary article reference was made to the wild beauty of the lyrics, or to the fresh vigour of the long narrative poem,
The Golden Sturgeon.
No new manuscript had been submitted to the publisher by Eden, but once, in a magazine, he had come upon a short poem by him which was either childishly naïve or horribly and deliberately cynical. Mr. Cory, after reading it several times, could not really decide. In either case he had
a poor opinion of it. He had been uncertain whether or not to show it to Alayne. He had cut it out and saved it for her, but when next she came into the office, and he looked into her eyes, he decided against it. No, she had had enough suffering. Better not remind her of the cause of it. So, instead, he begged her to come oftener to his house, insisted that she come to dinner that very night, and when he was alone he tore the poem into small pieces.

Tonight Alayne felt stifled by the air of the city. She went to the window, opened it wide, and sat on the sill, looking down into the street. There were few pedestrians, but a stream of motor cars flowed by, like an uneasy, tortured river that could find no rest. The smell of oil, of city dust, dulled the freshness of the spring night. The myriad separate sounds, resolved into one final roar, sucked down human personality as quicksand human flesh and blood. Looking down into the city, a spectator might fancy he saw wild arms thrown upward in gestures of despair, as by drowning people.

Alayne thought of Jalna. Of the April wind as it came singing through the ravine, stirring the limbs of the birches, the oaks, the poplars, to response. She remembered the smell that rose from the earth in which their roots were twined and lovingly intertwined, a smell of quickening and decay, of the beginning and the end. She saw, in imagination, the great balsams that guarded the driveway and stood in dark clumps at the lawn’s edge, shutting in the house, making a brooding barrier between Jalna and the world. She saw Renny riding along the drive on his bony grey mare, drooping in the saddle, and somehow, in that indolent accustomed droop, giving an impression of extraordinary vigour and vitality… He was no longer on his horse. He stood beside her. His piercing
red-brown eyes searched her face. He moved nearer, and she saw his nostrils quiver, his mouth set… God, she was in his arms! His lips were draining the strength from her, and yet strength like fire had leaped from his body to hers…

Alayne made a small, moaning sound. She pressed her hand to her throat. Was she to have no peace? Was the remembrance of Renny’s kisses to torture her always? Ah, but if she could, would she part with the delight of that torture?

She remembered his last passionate kiss of goodbye, and how she had clung to him and breathed, “Again,” and his putting her away from him with a sharp gesture of renunciation. “No,” he had said, through his teeth. “Not again,” And he had moved away and taken his place among his brothers. Her last sight of him had been as he stood among them, taller than they, his hair shining redly in the firelight.

Tonight she felt invisible cords, charged with desire, drawing her toward Jalna. She experienced a mystic ecstasy in the secret pull of them. She gave herself up to it, all her senses absorbed. She became unconscious of the strangely compounded street roar. She did not even hear, until it was twice repeated, the buzz of the bell of her own door.

When at last she heard it, she was startled. She had a feeling approaching apprehension as she went to the door and opened it. In the bright light of the hallway stood young Finch Whiteoak. Like a ghost created by her thoughts he stood, tall, hollow-cheeked, with a tremulous smile on his lips.

“Finch!” she exclaimed.

“Hullo, Alayne!” He got out the words with an effort. His face broke up into a smile that was perilously near the contortion of crying.

“Finch, my dear, is it possible? You in New York! I can scarcely believe it is you. But you must tell me all about it.”

She drew him in, and took his hat and coat. It seemed so strange to see him away from Jalna that she felt she might be laying eyes on him for the first time.

“I ran away,” he muttered. “I just couldn’t stand it… I’ve been here three weeks.”

Alayne led him to a sofa and sat down beside him. “Oh, Finch! Poor dear. Tell me all about it.” She laid her hand on his. Isolated thus, they were intimate as they had never been at Jalna.

He looked at her hand lying on his. He had always been moved by the whiteness of her hands.

“Well, things seemed absolutely set against me—or me against them. Darned if I know which. Anyhow, I failed in my matric. I suppose you heard that. Aunt Augusta and you write sometimes to each other, don’t you? Well, Renny stopped my music lessons. I wasn’t even allowed to touch the piano. And I guess that was all right, too, for I’d sort of gone dotty about music. I couldn’t forget it for a minute. But I’m like that, you know. Once I get a thing on the brain, I’m done for.” He sighed deeply.

Her hand which was lying on his clenched itself. She withdrew it and repeated: “He stopped your music.” Between her and Finch rose a vision of Renny’s carved profile, its inflexibility denying the warmth of the full face. “Yes? And then what?”

“Well, it seemed as though I’d got to have something besides plain work. A kind of ballast. I felt that I couldn’t stick it unless there was something. So I went to play-acting. The Little Theatre, you know. I’d made a friend of a splendid chap named Arthur Leigh. He’s perhaps a bit girlish—well,
no, not girlish, but over-refined for the taste of my brothers. Anyhow he liked me, and encouraged me a lot about my acting. He even got after Renny and persuaded him to come and see the play I was in. Well, it all turned out badly. I was taking the part of a halfwitted Irish boy, and Renny thought it came too darned easy to me. I did it too well. He was frightfully fed up with me and my talents, he said.”

He sat silent a moment, pulling at his flexible underlip; then he said: “You can’t imagine, Alayne, how beastly life seems to me, sometimes.”