The Jalna Saga – Deluxe Edition: All Sixteen Books of the Enduring Classic Series & The Biography of Mazo de la Roche (308 page)

Piers and Mooey were descending the stairs, not with a rush as Renny had done, but slowly and carefully, to suit the legs of the little boy. All the way down Mooey was talking, reiterating the fact that he was not afraid, that he was not going to fall.

“Don’t keep repeating that,” Pheasant heard Piers say. “It’s babyish.”

“I’m not a baby,” said Mooey stoutly; and after a moment of deep thought, he added—“Oh, hell, I’m not f’ightened!”

“What’s that I hear my baby saying?” said Pheasant.

“He, has nothing,” said Piers, in the doorway, “between babbling like a babe in arms and cursing like a trooper.”

“Oh, he hears too much, the poor darling!” and Pheasant held out her arms to him.

He flew into them, burying his face in her lap. The firelight brought out a ruddy tinge in his brown hair.

“Look!” exclaimed Pheasant, touching it. “I believe he’s going to have a tinge of the Court red in his hair.”

“I hope not. One of them in the family is quite enough. What’s that you’re knitting?”

“A new jersey for baby. See, doesn’t the colour become him?” She held it under his bright face.

“Where are the others?” asked Piers, sitting down, facing her across the fire.

“Renny and Alayne went upstairs. Wake went tagging after them. Really, Piers, I think she gets awfully fed up sometimes—never having him to herself.”

“Does she? What does she want him to herself for?”

“Well, after all, they’re practically newly married. And days go by when she scarcely sees him alone unless she tramps through the snow to the stable and corners him there. And she told me herself that when she does he’s quite likely to ignore her and to stand gazing at some old horse as though he’d never seen it before. For my part, I have great sympathy with her.”

Piers listened to all this with a broadening grin. He threw himself back in his chair, thrust his hands deep in his pockets, and said:

“Now what do you suppose the latest is? A birthday party for young Finch! With the family, ancients and babes, dancing around a birthday cake, with a cheque for a hundred thousand tucked away in the middle of it!”

F
INCH
felt that he must see George Fennel that night. He had not seen him for more than a fortnight, and ever so often the desire to open his bosom to this particular friend came upon him. It was not that George was sensitively receptive or understanding. In truth he often stared at Finch from under his tumbled dark hair with an expression in which humorous contempt mingled with bewilderment at Finch’s rhapsodies or despairs.

There was nothing rhapsodical or despairing about George Fennel. Like Finch, he loved music better than anything else, but his pleasure in it was calm. If a piano were not at hand he would play on a banjo. If the banjo were out of order his brother’s mandolin would do. If all else failed, well, there was the mouth-organ in his pocket! From these diverse instruments he drew much the same sensation—one of quiet comfort, of cheerful oblivion against the world. Finch’s ecstasies, like Finch’s despairs, were inexplicable to him; but he was fond of Finch, and he had a suspicion that this hungry-eyed friend possessed some strange inner quality that might either bring him fame or “land him in the soup.”

What Finch found in George was the never-failing comfort of a friend who is always the same. George always met him with the same degree of warmth. Discussed by the hour, with stolid cheerfulness, the things that interested him. The only subject that caused George’s serenity to flame into excitement was the subject of spending money like water. Then his eyes would beam and his quick sentences explode in reckless gaiety at the very thought of such felicity. All their lives the pockets of the two youths had been almost empty. It was George’s invincible idleness that made the thought of a superfluity of money so captivating. Money without working for it. That was what Finch was going to have, and its advancing brightness already was touching Finch’s lanky figure.

That figure, as George opened the rectory door, stood silhouetted against the moonlit snow with an air almost mysterious, the face in darkness, for the dim light in the hall marked no features but his eyes.

“Oh, hello, Finch!” said George, in a laconic welcome.

“Hello, Jarge!” boomed Finch, feeling suddenly hilarious. He entered, stamping the snow from his boots and flinging his cap and coat on the rack. “What’s your latest crime?”

“Murdering Mozart,” said George. “I’ve been playing him on the mandolin.” He banged the door and kicked the snow that Finch had brought in off the rug into the corner. “Awfully cold, isn’t it?”

Finch struck his hands together trying to bring feeling into them. “Cold, yes, but glorious coming across the fields! You’d think it was the first snow that had ever fallen, it’s so white. And the shadows! Every smallest twig—as though it were done in blue-black ink. And my own shadow—I wish you could have seen it! It simply leaped and danced along beside me like a wild thing!”

“Now I wonder what made it do that,” said George, looking at him round-eyed.

“Don’t be so beastly prosaic, Jarge! If you had been there you’d have danced too.”

“I don’t see myself out on a night like this unless there is a girl or a party at the other end. I wish it hadn’t stopped snowing though, because if it had kept on all night at the rate it was falling I shouldn’t have been able to get into business on Monday.”

Although George was a year younger than Finch, his course at the University had already come to an end and he had gone into a broker’s office. He had chosen the career of broker’s clerk because it seemed to him an easy life and one in which money was talked about largely even though not seen. He led the way upstairs to his own small room. It was as uncomfortable as a room could well be, its only warmth rising through an uncovered stovepipe hole from the kitchen below, but a kind of soft glow that emanated from George’s compact person and the memory of hilarious times they had had there gave it a peculiar charm for Finch. He sank down on the sagging sofa and took out a pipe. George had never seen him smoke anything but a cigarette, and he looked on with astonishment while Finch filled it from an old pouch that had once belonged to Nicholas. Finch was a little embarrassed. He had had the pipe with him on his last visit to the Rectory, but had lacked the courage to produce it. He fancied that he looked more of a man when it hung from the corner of his mouth, though he could never hope to look so thoroughly at ease with it as Piers with his.

“What’s the idea?” asked George, lighting a cigarette. “Trying to look like a Famous Author, an American Ambassador or a British Prime Minister?”

From a cloud of smoke Finch answered—“I don’t know what you are driving at. I’ve been smoking a pipe for some time—off and on. It’s less trouble and more economical.”

George chuckled. “You’re choosing an original time for economy. Just when you’re twenty-one and more money in the offing than you’ll know how to spend.”

“Well, I suppose it’s simply that I’ve come to the age for smoking a pipe,” said Finch, with dignity. “Besides, it’s good for me. You know, my nerves are pretty rocky. You’ve no idea how odd I feel sometimes. Absolutely up in the air for next to nothing.”

“I’d feel odd, too, if I was about to fall heir to a fortune.”

“I wish,” observed Finch, rather nettled, “that you wouldn’t talk as though I were a millionaire. What is a hundred thousand dollars!”

“I’ve no idea. I can’t imagine such a sum.”

“You say that, and you a broker!”

George, a junior clerk in a broker’s office, liked the appellation. He became serious. “Oh, well, one’s business is so impersonal.”

“Yes, but look here. A hundred thousand isn’t so very much in these days. My two uncles each went through that much and have scarcely a penny left.”

“And yet they grudge you your chance!”

Finch flushed deeply.

“Sorry,” said George. “But I couldn’t help hearing things. They didn’t take many pains to hide their feelings about it.”

“I don’t blame them!” cried Finch, twisting his long fingers together. “I don’t blame them a bit... for anything they said.”

“Perhaps, but it makes it hard for you.”

“Oh, yes, awfully hard.” He had to compress his sensitive upper lip on the pipe to keep it from quivering. He was lost in unhappy thoughts for a moment, then his eyes sought George’s with a look of almost triumph in them. “But they are quite different about it now. They’re awfully decent to me. I went into my Uncle Ernest’s room this afternoon. He and Uncle Nick and Renny and Piers were there. I could see when I went in that they had been talking about me. I felt uncomfortable for a bit. Then I found out that what they’d been talking about was a
dinner
for me—on my
birthday.”
No amount of compression would keep the lip still now. He clenched his teeth on the stem of the pipe.

George was impressed. “A dinner, eh? That’s very decent of them. I wonder who thought of it first.”

“I don’t know, but it was Piers who first spoke of it. It’s to be just a small dinner party; but we scarcely ever have people in, you know, and I think on the whole it will be less of a strain for us if we’ve a few guests to look after. Don’t you agree?”

George reflected, trying to put himself in the place of these high-spirited, skittish Whiteoaks. The dinner party then was to be a bridge between the day before Finch’s birthday and the day after. Across this bridge the family might march in gala procession. He said—“I like the idea. It should certainly help you out.”

“I wish it were all over,” said Finch, with almost a groan. “There’s another thing I’m dreading. That is telling Renny that I’m not going back to ‘Varsity. I simply can’t do it.”

George regarded him without surprise. “I think you’re very sensible. I had to
give
it up. Too much of a strain. I suppose you’ll go in for music?”

“Lord, I don’t know! That is, if you mean my making a career of it; I don’t believe I have it in me.”

“What rot! You’ve got more talent than any chap I know. Everyone who hears you play thinks you’re wasting your time doing anything else.”

“I know I am. Yet I don’t believe I’ll ever be good at concert work. When I played at that recital last month I played my very worst. My teacher was awfully disappointed. He’d slaved over me. He expected something really good from me. And I’d practised like hell. But—you know how it was—I nearly broke down twice.”

“You’ll get over all that nervousness,” said George comfortingly.

“No, I shan’t. If I had felt nervous I’d be more hopeful about myself. But I didn’t. I just felt half-dead. I didn’t care about anything. Nothing looked real to me. The piano didn’t look real. And when I nearly broke down it wasn’t because I was nervous, or forgot. It was just that I felt too bored to go on. It was as though something inside the piano said to me— ‘You blasted fool, do you think you can bring me out whenever you want, and show me off? I’ll show you off for what you are-just a hopeless idiot.’”

George looked solemn at this. “I think the trouble with you, Finch, is that you take yourself too seriously. All your family are inclined to take themselves too seriously. It’s in the blood. All that talk about the Court nose! And the Court temper! I tell you, it isn’t done nowadays. It isn’t worthwhile feeling yourself different from other people. As to there being something inside the piano that jeers at you and tells you things, when what you are is just frightened, that’s letting your imagination get the upper hand of you. When I was a kid I used to imagine things, so I know all about it. That big stuffed owl that stands in the niche of the stairway was one of the things I got nervous about. I knew quite well that
he was only a queer specimen my grandfather had shot in the North somewhere. I knew he was moth-eaten. But I got it into my silly young head that there was something queer about him... that he didn’t like me.”

“Did you really?” Finch leant forward, his eyes full of intense curiosity. He had never heard George talk like this before, and it brought them very near each other.

“Yes. And I’d never go up the stairs without wondering if it wasn’t in his mind to nip me on the left leg as I was passing. I could have sworn that he moved on his perch.”

Finch saw before him George—not the sober-eyed youth who faced him—but a little boy creeping up the stairs, his frightened gaze held by the owl’s dark stare, his soft hair rising into a halo.

George gave a chuckle. “Well, one night, on my way to bed, I was so sure that he was going to nip me that I went up the stairs in about three leaps. My heart was pounding so I could hardly breathe. I stood at the top, hanging on to the banister and glaring down at my left leg to make sure it was all right. Just then Father came out of his study and looked up at me. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, and I whined that I was afraid the owl was going to nip my leg. Well, he ran up the stairs and picked me up and carried me back to the niche where the owl was. He said—‘Now put your leg right under his beak, and, if he bites you, I’ll throttle him.’ So I did, and of course nothing happened. Even after that I was a bit nervous. But the next night I got my courage up and 1 stopped on the step that was on a level with his niche. I stuck my leg in and I squeaked—‘Bite me, old owl, if you dare!’ And when he didn’t, I gave him a good swift kick and ran on upstairs... Ever since then I am done with imaginings.” His eyes beamed into Finch’s. “Of course, I’m not comparing the
fancies of a silly kid to the fancies of a grown man, but their root is in the same place, and the place is fear. I think if you had had someone like my father to take you in hand you mightn’t be so full of fancies today. He did more for me that night than he ever knew of.”

Finch nodded. “If one of my brothers had found out that I was afraid of a stuffed owl, he’d have told me things about its habits that would have curdled my blood.”

“Look here, old fellow, take my advice. Get yourself in hand and make up your mind that you’ll not let anything frighten you out of doing what you want to. You do want to be a great pianist, don’t you?”