The Jalna Saga – Deluxe Edition: All Sixteen Books of the Enduring Classic Series & The Biography of Mazo de la Roche (318 page)

Finch climbed up to his own berth. He hung over the edge of it, looking down on Ernest, feeling somehow that he had saved him from some danger. But it turned out that it was Miss Trent whom he was to save, and, in saving her, make a splendid investment for himself. To the muffled throbbing of the engine they discussed the intricacies of her affairs, with which Ernest was astonishingly familiar, far into the night.

L
ONDON

T
HERE
they were, crowded into a taxi, making their way through the traffic of the London streets, Finch on one of the drop-seats, almost dislocating his neck in the effort to see out of both windows at once. It was too unreal, seeing the places he had heard of so familiarly all his life. Westminster Bridge, the Houses of Parliament, Trafalgar Square, the lions, Buckingham Palace! They thundered at him like a series of explosions. It was too much. It was overwhelming.

His uncles simultaneously pointed out places on opposite sides of the street. They were amused and touched by the expression of his face. It was nearly twenty years since they had been in London. They perceived changes even in that hurried drive. Old landmarks gone, new buildings towering in their place. A certain depression tempered the pleasure of the return.

They had engaged rooms at the same hotel where once they had been familiar guests. It was no longer a fashionable hotel and had lost something of its air of elegance. But they were delighted to find that the hall porter was the same, scarcely changed except for greying. He recognised Ernest,
after a moment of hesitation, but Nicholas only because he was in the company of Ernest. This heavy old man with the drooping shoulders, the sombre face where, only in the eyes, the old light smouldered, was a very different gentleman from the former Mr. Nicholas Whiteoak.

Finch leant across his window ledge and looked down into the street. Tawny yellow sunlight gave it mystery. The shadows of pedestrians were elongated. A flower-seller with his barrow of spring flowers had taken his stand below. Three disabled returned men were at the corner playing the Londonderry Air on two violins and a sort of legless piano held on the knees. A fourth man timidly held out a hat toward the passers-by. From the position of the piano-player’s head Finch guessed that he was blind. He closed his own eyes and listened to the wild plaintive strain. Beneath the music he heard the turgid rumble of the city’s life. London... It was too unreal to be here. He could not believe it.

He wanted to buy violets from the flower-seller, to give money to the musicians, to do something for the terrible-looking old woman in the feathered hat, shuffling along the opposite side of the street. He wanted to make a gallant gesture to the plump lady in the flower-boxed window across the way as she paused in her conversation with her parrot to look at him. He must go out again. He could not endure the indoors. They had been out all afternoon, had just come back in time for tea, but he must go out again, this time uncleless.

They were to be only a week in town before going on to visit Augusta. The fine weather might not hold, so Nicholas and Ernest had decided to go to the Park on that first afternoon. They had sat in the little green chairs watching the riders cantering in the Row. Finch had sat between them, and they, hands clasped on their sticks, had leaned forward to talk
across him. Their quiet tones had broken into excited exclamations once when they had recognised a burly purple-faced rider as an old acquaintance. They had been more or less certain of the identity of half a dozen others. A handsome girl riding a black horse was so like another handsome girl, sat her mount with so like a grace, that she must surely be a daughter. It was most exciting.

They had walked through the gardens, shown Finch the Serpentine and the waterfowl, the flaming rhododendrons, the rosy foam of the hawthorns in bloom, pointing out this and that to him with their sticks as though he had been their little boy. But the new apartment houses in Park Lane were horrible to them. Strange, they said, that nothing could have been done to prevent that. They were disgusted with Finch for thinking that Park Lane was still a fine street.

To go forth uncleless was now his idea of happiness. He got his hat and went down to the street. Before he could stop himself he had bought a bunch of violets from the flower-seller, and so had to set out with these inadequately wrapped in paper in his hand. He dropped a sixpence into the hat for the musicians. He stood listening as once more they played the Londonderry Air. Sensitive as his nerves were to music, they did not shrink before the discords. He was no more affected than a skylark might be affected by the oddities of other singers. But the look in the eyes of these men hurt him deeply.

He went past densely crowded corners, crossing streets in the jam of evening traffic. He found himself in a little bar in North Audley Street with a whiskey and soda before him. He longed to talk to the barmaid, for he thought she looked interested in him, but had not the courage. He had never been in a bar before.

He strolled along the street, looking in the shop windows. One, in which works of art from the East were displayed, held him. He saw a blanc-de-Chine figure rather like the Kuan Yin that Gran had given him. The little white hands of the goddess were like the half-opened buds of some night-blooming lily. Her tiny feet, set wide apart, were like resting white birds. He should have liked to lay his violets at them.

He entered the shop and enquired the price. He was astonished to find how high it was. He told the attendant that he had one very much like it at home. He did not say where his home was, but he was aware as they continued in conversation that the man knew he was not an Englishman, and he wondered how. Finch told him that he was not going to buy anything, but the man’s interest did not flag. He seemed willing just to stand and talk about the various objects admired by Finch. Although he had barely arrived in London, he began to think of what presents he should like to take home to the others. The years that his grandparents had spent in India, the things they had brought from there, had created in their descendants an interest in things oriental. He should like to take that wicked-looking scimitar to Piers, who had a fancy for old weapons, and had been given his grandfather’s long cavalry sword. And for Meggie that embroidered screen. And Wakefield would like that carved ivory pagoda. He thought of Wake with sudden tenderness. Poor young devil—he had never been anywhere, seen anything. And, for that matter, where had Piers been, and what had Piers seen? And here was he seeing and doing so much!

When he had left the shop he looked again into the window and saw a picture of a snow-white cockatoo, with a coral-coloured crest, and he suddenly remembered Pauline
Lebraux, and thought he should like to take the picture to her. He saw her clearly for a moment, with her dense dark hair and long black-stockinged legs, standing before the cockatoo, hands clasped in rapt admiration.

Either the things he had seen in the shop, the kindness of the man, or the thought of little Pauline, he did not consider which, gave him a feeling of deep elation as he went on his way down the street.

He stopped before the window of an elegant saddler’s to choose the perfect saddle for Renny.

He walked on and on. It seemed that he would never tire. At a corner, surrounded by a few stragglers, he came upon an old man, standing bare-headed, reciting Shakespeare. He had a grand old head, a battered face, and a voice hoarse from declaiming in the foggy air.

“Speak of me as I am, nothing extenuate, Nor set down aught in malice.”

As he was! Finch looked at him, tattered, broken, despair in his eyes. Speak of him as he was! Oh, who could do it? Who could bear to think of him as he was?

He stood listening to the voice that was sometimes drowned by the passage of an omnibus, broken by the jeering interruptions of one of the stragglers. Yet once, Finch was sure, he had been a good actor. He had the artist’s instinct of knowing when he was appreciated. He finished, with his eyes full on Finch. He bowed, with a fine mixture of humility and tragedy, above the half-crown dropped into his hat.

“Well, it was a good deal to give him,” Finch thought, as he walked away, “but I’ve paid more to see poorer acting.”

He wandered on, losing all sense of direction. He was in streets of small shops and cinemas, frequented by the
working class. They were a slow-moving, respectable-looking lot, with knobbly features, under the electric lights. They were exactly like crowds he had mingled with at home, when he had stayed in town for the night, and he and George Fennel had been members of an orchestra. Different from the New York crowd with its predominance of foreign faces.

He had bacon and eggs and coffee in a Lyons shop, sitting at a table next a young couple with the most stunned expression he had ever seen. He wondered what they had done, or were going to do, that they should have that expression. The woman did not eat, but just nibbled the tip of her finger, while the man poked squares of bread into his mouth, where they were consumed, apparently without chewing or swallowing, like letters dropped into a pillar-box.

The week they were to have spent in London lengthened into two. Nicholas and Ernest renewed old acquaintances, and were alternately elated and depressed by the revivification of their past. Finch went with them to dine at the house of the magenta-faced rider in the Row, who, after some conversation with the boy, came to the conclusion that the Whiteoaks were degenerating.

Ernest took Finch to Westminster Abbey, and he stood awestruck, his forelock drooping, above the wreath which the Sultan of Zanzibar had lately laid on the tomb of the Unknown Warrior.

Finch went on the Sunday morning to Hyde Park and stood among a group of tattered Welsh miners, listening to Socialistic and anti-Socialistic orators. He heard the latter turn the mettlesome force of an obscene vocabulary on an Irish interrupter.

He listened to the arguments of a young lady, who looked half frozen in the wind, on behalf of the Catholic
League. She spoke well, and he was moved by the sight of the crucifix upright on the ground beside her.

He pictured himself as a leaf blown back across the sea from a root transplanted. Here, in England, his grandfather, Captain Whiteoak, had been born. Here his mother, daughter of a London journalist who was always hard up, had been born. Here she had wandered about, distraught, after her father’s death, wondering what to do, before she had decided to go to Canada as a governess. Three-quarters of him were English. All but that fourth quarter. That had come like a stormy wind out of the West—a fierce gale from Ireland—in the person of Gran.

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YMET
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REWS