The Jalna Saga – Deluxe Edition: All Sixteen Books of the Enduring Classic Series & The Biography of Mazo de la Roche (371 page)

A last flash of lightning illuminated the dim room, showing each the face of the other in an intense and sickly light. The noise of a door being sharply shut came from the back
of the house, then steps sounded in the kitchen. Pauline sat upright and looked at Renny wildly.

“You look quite all right,” he said soothingly. “I shall tell her that I came in and found you a bit upset because of the storm… being alone in it…”

He rose and went into the dining room. He turned on the light there, then went to the door that led into the kitchen. Clara Lebraux had just taken off a streaming coat and hung it across a chair. Her footprints showed wet on the floor. She looked at him without surprise but made a grimace of disgust.

“I’m soaked through,” she said,” and I have on my best coat and hat and shoes.” She took off her hat and laid it, a sodden lump of straw, on the table. “Look at that!”

He looked from the coat to the hat and from the hat to her. Her hair clung in wet locks against her round boyish head. Even her face was wet and some colouring from the trimming of her hat had made streaks across her forehead. He said:

“Too bad! I don’t suppose they’ll ever come right again.” He picked up the hat and twirled it around on his finger. “I never saw it before,” he said disparagingly, “and I don’t believe I should have liked it at its best. Anyhow you look better bareheaded. Better go bareheaded after this, eh?”

“That bus,” she observed, “was absolutely jammed. I stood most of the way from town. When I got out I stepped right into the storm.”

He made a sympathetic sound but his look was abstracted.

“Where is Pauline?” she asked suddenly.

“In the other room.” He spoke in a low but casual tone. “She was rather upset—being alone in the storm, I suppose.”

“Well, I never! Is she all right now?”

“Yes. But rather sorry for herself. I shouldn’t take any notice, if I were you.”

“I have some new things for her. That will cheer her up. I’ve never seen such bargains!” She looked at him enthusiastically out of pale-lashed eyes. “You might furnish your home from attic to cellar and dress your family from the skin out for next to nothing—if only you had it!”

She picked up a small suitcase and set it firmly on the table. “I must get the things out of this before the wet soaks through.”

He lifted the case and set it down again. “Did you carry this all the way from the bus?”

She nodded, and a damp, tow lock fell across her forehead.

“Why the devil,” he exclaimed angrily, “don’t you tell me when you are going to do things like that?”

“It was nothing. I am as strong as a horse. You know that.”

She began to lay out the things she had bought. Pauline, pale but with a touching air of dignity, came to the door. Clara said, without looking at her:

“Come and see what I have bought you. No—not here. We’ll carry them to the dining room. You’ll be surprised.”

Pauline looked at Clara with a sudden remorseless scrutiny. She saw her streaked, tow hair, her hot, tired face wet with rain, and the forehead stained by the colouring of her hat, her red, roughened hands, her cheap shoes, oozing wet. So this was the sort of woman Renny—if he had been going to love either of them—would have preferred to her!

She remembered the frequent quarrels between her father and mother, how she had always passionately, in her own mind, taken her father’s side, even when she had been
too young to understand what the quarrel was about. A wild anger against Clara rose in her, filled her heart to bursting. She hated her in that moment. She said distantly:

“What is that on your forehead? It’s all stained.”

“My forehead? Oh—” she peered at her reflection in the small glass that hung above the sink… “That’s the life-blood of my poor hat. Just see what a wreck it is!” She began to scrub her face with a clean roller towel that hung on the back of the door. Pauline looked at the hat with distaste.

“Is it clean now?” Clara turned and faced them.

“Quite clean,” replied Renny. There was a warm, almost protective note in his voice, as though he had been aware of the coldness in Pauline’s.

He and Clara carried her purchases into the dining room and laid them on the table there. Out of doors there was a gleam of watery light from the sinking sun. The windows of the room had remained open during the storm and the curtains hung limp and wet. The roan stood grazing in the long grass; dark patches stained her sides. She raised her head and looked through the window out of melancholy eyes. She uttered a small complaining whinny.

Renny looked at his watch.

“I must be off!” he exclaimed.

Clara said—“Just look at this sweet frock! And I only paid three dollars and ninety-five cents for it!” She carried it, hanging from her hand, toward Pauline. “Let me see if it’s the right length, darling.”

Pauline backed away. She could not let her mother touch her. She felt disloyal. She hated herself. She would not raise her eyes to Renny’s.

“Don’t trouble her,” he said. “She’s unnerved. You shouldn’t go off and leave her alone in a storm.”

“Good heavens! I could not know it was coming!”

“You should have known. Mothers ought to know those things. Oughtn’t they, Paula?

Pauline, without answering, fled from the room and up the stairs.

Clara made a gesture of despair. “Whatever has come over the girl?”

He gave a short laugh. “Perhaps she’s in love.”

“But who with? Young Wakefield?”

“Well—he is—with her.”

“Has she said anything to make you think so?”

“No.”

“It would be a pity. There’d be no hope.”

“Not for a good many years.” Again he looked at his watch. “Now I must be off!” He put his leg over the sill and, in a moment, was on the roan’s back.

“That saddle must be drenched!” she exclaimed.

“True for you, woman!” he replied, grinning, and she watched him go splashing through the puddles.

E
DEN
was afraid of the Women’s Club before which he was to give talks about modern poetry. He told himself, and it was nearly true, that he disliked women. He had loved Alayne and he looked back on the days of his love for her as the happiest time of his life. Minny Ware had had a sensuous attraction for him but he had never liked her. He loved his sister and his aunt—and had loved his grandmother— because they were inextricably woven into the fabric of his life. Also, he told himself, there were no other women like them. His passing affairs with women in foreign cities had left no mark on him beyond the memory of a parting with dislike. He understood them too well, he thought. He felt a strain of femininity in himself, a careless treachery, a power of appeal, and he hated these qualities. Of one thing he was sure. He was not grasping. A very little money would suffice for him.

Renny had given him money for a new suit to wear at the readings, and Eden had chosen the material with care, had it made by a good tailor, for, if there was anything he hated, it was to appear as an unkempt poet. Renny also had
provided him with money to buy copies of the poems of the various authors from whose works he was going to read. Meg had been shocked at the pile of books he had thrown down on the table in the sitting room.

“But, Eden,” she had exclaimed, “couldn’t you have got them from the lending library?”

“No,” he had answered irritably. “I shall be scribbling in these.”

“But I could take out the scribbling with a good eraser when you had done with them.”

He had opened one of the books without answering.

“You had quite a lot of poetry books at Jalna, before you went away,” she insisted.

“I can’t go back there to hunt them up.”

“Then there’s that huge
Anthology of British Poets.
The book Wakefield always sat on at table when he was a little boy.”

He did not reply. He was reading:

“The fatherless children, Colour, Tune, and Rhyme
(The sweet lad Rhyme), ran all uncomprehending,
Then, at the way’s sad ending,
Round the raw grave they stayed. Old Wisdom read,
In mumbling tone, the Service for the Dead.”

She continued:

“It seems so much to spend on books. Why, this one is marked two-fifty!”

“My God!” he exclaimed. “Am I never to be out of hearing of the howl of hard times!”

Meggie had been offended, and he had hunched himself, sulkily enough, over his purchases for the rest of the day.

He had spent a good deal of time in reading and preparation for these talks on modern poetry and, now that the day
for the first one had come, he was thoroughly depressed. Had he chosen the right poems and the right things to say about them to these women? He longed for the support of another male.

The meeting was at four o’clock, and Sarah had invited him to lunch with her. It was a hot day of Indian summer. The ride into town on the bus had been stifling, the air heavy with dust. He had felt like a captive.

It was the first time he had seen the house which Arthur Leigh had bought and furnished for Sarah. As he noted its luxury he remembered her life with her aunt, and how Mrs. Court had counted every sixpence.

The lunch was perfect and deftly served. Eden was acutely conscious of the intimate and expensive setting as they smoked their cigarettes and drank coffee in the drawing-room. He looked at Sarah speculatively. What was she? Was she shallow? Was she cruel? That mouth of hers looked cruel, though it curved in sly mischief and the voice that came out of it was sweet as honey. Three months had passed since she had gone through that ordeal in the waters of the St. Lawrence, and its shadow had in a degree lifted from her. Something of the brooding look had gone out of her eyes. They laughed back at him, eyes pale and grey beneath their black lashes.

A new spring of happiness, in truth, rose in her today. There were bowls of flowers in her room. A pug dog was sleeping on a velvet cushion near her feet. Eden’s smooth fair head, on which there was a greenish sheen, was bent toward her. His large eyes, with their unseeing look, attracted her, while filling her with a strange suspicion. What did he think of her? What was in his mind? What adventures in life lay before her? Arthur Leigh had roused passions in her which
he had never been able to satisfy, and now their renewed stirrings filled her with a sensuous elation which she took care to conceal.

A small clock delicately chimed the hour of three. Eden looked at it apprehensively. He said:

“In an hour I shall be there. I shall feel like a dying man in a desert with a flock of vultures sitting around him.”

“You’ll be all right when the time comes. They’ll be charmed with anything you say to them.”

“Honestly, Sarah, I’m frightened. If only you were coming! Why don’t you belong to this club?”

“It would be too strange,” she said. “I could not do it.”

“But come with me just for this once! They would not mind, and I could look at you while I talked.”

“No, no, Eden. I cannot come. Do you remember how my aunt called me Mouse, and Mole? Those names still suit me—in a sense. I am no good at mixing with other people. Especially other women. But I can’t see why you should dread doing this. They will every one feel so friendly toward you—so ready to be pleased with you.”

“If only there weren’t ten Thursdays ahead of me! An arid waste of Thursdays! There’s something sinister in the very word! I feel sure that the world will come to an end on a Thursday.”

“Let us hope you will get your ten in first.”

When he had gone (she had sent him off in her car and made him promise to return to dinner) she picked up the pug and held him against her cheek. His coat was like fine velvet and his breath came in snuffling gasps. He endured her for a moment, then began to kick and, when she had put him down, returned to his cushion and curled up on it, his black, wrinkled nose pressed into its softness.

She watched him with a small, mischievous smile. She would have liked to torment him but she realised that it would not take much to make him hate her. Her hands lay in her lap, white, small, strong, ringless. She laid the left hand on the palm of the right and examined it with intense interest, as though it were the hand of a stranger whose character she was trying to read from it. Then, one by one, she pressed and pointed the fingertips which had become slightly blunted from violin-playing. “It looks better so,” she murmured… She turned it over, still as the hand of a stranger, and laid a kiss in the palm. Then she closed her fingers and held her own kiss tightly. She sat dreaming for a long while.

In his sleep the pug growled.

Sarah listened for a step in the hall.

The pug woke, rushed barking to the door, its tail curled like a handle above its bouncing behind. Sarah rose and stood rigid, her pale eyes shining, expectant. The maid entered and announced—“Mr. Finch Whiteoak.”

“Am I late?” asked Finch, taking her hand.

“I don’t know. I haven’t been watching the time.”

“What have you been doing?”

“Thinking.”

“Not unhappy thoughts, I hope.”

“No. I am not unhappy now. I’m in an odd state. Suspended between the past and the future. I feel no responsibility to anyone, for the first time since I was thirteen— when I went to live with my aunt.”

Finch bent to pat the pug, which pawed against his knees, wholeheartedly approving of him. He noticed Sarah’s clenched hand. She saw his look and said:

“You’ll never guess what I have here.” She held her hand, still closed, out to him.

He felt that she wanted him to take it in his but he would not. Yet he was conscious of its soft strength.

“What then?” he asked, and the pug stood on its hind legs sniffing suspiciously.

“A kiss!” she exclaimed, laughing, and opening her hand as though to let it escape.

He saw it as a pale moth fluttering upward. He saw the quick movement of her breast and the oblique glance at him.

He followed the imaginary flight with his eyes. “Who gave it to you?” he asked.

“Myself,” she answered. “An old love.”