The Jalna Saga – Deluxe Edition: All Sixteen Books of the Enduring Classic Series & The Biography of Mazo de la Roche (645 page)

Dennis was waiting for an answer. Finch asked instead:

“Is Wright driving you to the station?”

“Uncle Renny is taking me all the way to school.”

Dennis spoke with a certain pride but no reproach. He was indeed thinking, If my father knew what I did, perhaps he would kill me right here where I stand. But he kept his eyes on Finch’s face and the small steady smile on his lips.

“Good,” said Finch, with forced heartiness. He held out his hand and Dennis put his hand into it.

“You do pretty well in certain subjects,” said Finch and tried to recall what they were. He ended lamely, “I hope you’ll work hard to improve.”

Their hands separated. Both said, “Goodbye.”

Dennis picked up the suitcase and, bending under its weight, disappeared. He reappeared for a moment, standing suitcase in hand where the snowman had stood.

Finch returned to his book.

It was an unusually long winter, possibly because of a series of snowfalls from heavy skies, each of which seemed the beginning of a new season of hidden earth, hungry birds, early nightfalls and late dawns.

But at last it was ended — the silence of winter — ended with a shout of springtime victory. There were noisy floods raging — noisy crows cawing — noisy animals in the streaming barnyard: a noisy stallion whinnying in his loosebox; noisy cockerels essaying their first crow. There were trees singing in the wind as they felt the sap stir in their trunks. It was miraculous.

The development of Finch’s infant son during those winter months had been lovely to watch. So thought Pheasant and so agreed Piers. He had changed from a purple-faced, wrinkled gnome into a pink-and-white cherub. His bald head became covered by a curly down. He had dimples in his cheeks and smiled his good will toward all comers.

All the family (with the exception of his father, who still avoided him) declared that there never was a nicer baby or a better-behaved one. Piers would take him in his two hands under the armpits and dandle him. Piers could pull funny faces to make Ernest laugh, but to Ernest all faces were funny and he always was ready to laugh. Pheasant loved him so dearly and found the care of him such a pleasure that she felt it scarcely honest to accept the generous allowance Finch gave her for her trouble. “I hate to take this, Finch,” she would cry. “Baby is such a darling and as good as gold. Do come and see him in his bath. You’ll love him. Of course, I know that you do love him already, but when you’ve seen him in his bath … Oh, Finch, do come.”

But, on one pretext or another, Finch avoided this encounter with his younger son. “Finch,” said Piers, “is going to be one of those fathers who don’t like their sons. There are such, you know. I can’t understand it.”

Pheasant remembered Maurice, but she said nothing.

Of all those who admired Ernest, none was so fervent in homage as little Mary. He was her delight, from his first crowing in the early morning to the moment when he was tucked up beneath the old woolly blanket that had served Mary and her three brothers. He was better, she decided, than any other of her treasures. Better than the cocoon out of which the butterfly had seen the light of day. He was better than a spider. Better than a rose. Better than the lilies and carnations she had stolen from his mother’s grave. He was even better than the little silver thimble her Auntie Meg had given her at Christmas. Mary did not much like sewing, but when she took the thimble from its blue velvet case and capped the middle finger of her right hand with it, that was the signal for a delicious sensation of power. With the thimble on her finger Mary felt ready to face the emergencies of life.

But the baby Ernest was better than any of these. She could scarcely bear to wait till spring when she might take him out in the old perambulator that Piers had brought in from the shed and given a fresh coat of enamel. Mice had got into its cushions and Pheasant was making new ones. Ernest looked almost as interested as Mary in these preparations for spring.

It seemed to Mary that this baby, this living toy, was especially hers. She was not prepared for the possessiveness of Dennis when he returned to Jalna for the Easter holidays. She was dumfounded, speechless, when he came into the nursery where she was, as she felt, in complete charge, and demanded, “Well, what do you think you are doing?”

She was, as a matter of fact, brushing the baby’s curly fuzz with a little old ivory hairbrush that had been used for all Pheasant’s babies. Surely Dennis could see what she was doing; but he repeated, in a hectoring tone, “what do you think you are doing?” At the same time he looked at her out of his greenish eyes in a way that made her uncomfortable. His forehead was gathered into a frown.

She stammered, “I’m — brushing Baby’s hair.”

Dennis took the brush from her and threw it across the room. “I’ll let you know,” he said, “when this baby’s hair needs brushing. He’s mine.”

“Yours?” she breathed. “How can he be?”

Dennis was smiling at her now, but his smile made her even more uncomfortable than his frown.

“Because,” he said, and seemed to be lost in thought. Then he came and whispered right into her ear, “Because I saw him born.”

He drew back to see the effect of his words on her.

She looked no more than puzzled.

“You’re not to tell,” he said. “If you do, something terrible will happen to you.”

“Something terrible?” she repeated.

“Forget,” he said, and laughed out loud.

He looked hard at the baby. “How long,” he asked, “has he been so pretty?”

“He’s always been pretty,” Mary said.

“No — he hasn’t. He was ugly, ugly as sin. Do you know how ugly sin is?”

“He’s pretty now,” said Mary. “Can’t I brush his hair anymore?”

Dennis took the baby into his arms. He held him close, and rubbed his cheek on the curly fuzz.

Pheasant came into the room. “How do you like your baby brother?” she asked.

“Oh, well enough,” said Dennis, noncommittally. “I’m like my father. I don’t care much about babies.”

Conversation in the Kitchen

Mrs. Wragge had just taken a pan of buttermilk scones from the oven when Wright and Noah Binns descended into the warm basement kitchen from the chill outdoors. As yet there was very little spring growth, though the days were noticeably longer; even at this tea time the sun was slanting through the window to rest in rosy brightness on the copper urn that had been freshly polished.

“And what may that be?” asked Noah Binns, pointing a disparaging finger at it.

“That’s an urn,” answered Rags, “brought ’ere a ’undred years ago by the family. It came all the way from India, it did.”

“what’s its use?” demanded Noah.

“It can be used for tea but it’s reely ornamental. It’s kept in the library. It’s a favourite of the mistress.”

“I don’t see nothing ornamental about it.” Noah dropped heavily into a chair. “If it was mine I’d toss it into the dump heap.”

Rags laughed good-humouredly. “I put a deal of elbow grease on it,” he said, “to get that polish. Just see the glow where the sun strikes it.”

Wright remarked, “It’s the colour of Miss Adeline’s hair.”

“In my young days,” said Noah, “red hair was looked on as an affliction. In perticler fer young women. I look on it as an affliction today. I’ll never ferget the first time I set eyes on the old grandmother. She was fairly young then and I was just a boy. I’d heard a lot of raving about her looks but what I said was, ‘She’d be passable, if it wasn’t fer her red hair.’ That’s what I said, and I’d make the same remark today about her great-grandaughter. She’d be passable, if it wasn’t fer her red hair.”

“She’s a lovely young lady,” said Wright, now seating himself at the cook’s invitation.

Mrs. Wragge poured tea for everybody and heaped a plate with the scones, which were of the sort to melt in the mouth. She handed about a square of honey in the comb. Noah leaned forward in his greed and was the first to take a scoop from the golden square. Liberally he helped himself to the rich dairy butter and dropped five lumps of sugar into his tea.

Continuing the discussion of Adeline’s looks, the cook said:

“She has lovely eyes too.”

“Ah,” Wright agreed, “she gets them from her father.”

Noah cackled with laughter. He laughed as he swallowed and had to be thumped on the back by Rags to relieve his choking. He said, when he was able to speak, “Well, I’ve heared funny things but
him
with lovely eyes beats all.”

“They’re inherited from the old lady,” said the cook. “Mr. Wakefield has them too.”

“They’re welcome to ’em,” said Noah. “I see all I need to see with the pair I’ve got. I’ve watched the world goin’ downhill fer eighty years and longer. I look forward to more calamities before I pass on.”

“You’re a bit depressed after all that happened at Christmastime,” said Mrs. Wragge. “Have some more tea and another scone.”

Plate and cup replenished, Noah continued: “It was a hard season on everyone, and the hardest thing I had to do was to choose a Christmas card. It’s a terrible responsibility to choose the right card. You’ve got to choose careful, and they get dearer every year.”

“Do you send many cards?” asked Wright, with a wink at the cook.

“I send one only,” said Noah. “Every Christmas it’s the same problem. Sometimes I wish I’d never started it. Sometimes I’m driven to hope that, afore another Christmas, death will intervene and put an end to the worry of it.”

“You might tell us who the lady is,” said the cook, eaten up by curiosity.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” leered Noah. He was so overcome by the humour of the situation that again he choked.

When he had recovered and been given a third cup of tea and a third scone, there was silence for a space; then Wright remarked, “All our troubles seem small compared to the death of that sweet young lady.”

“Don’t start talking about her,” said Mrs. Wragge, “or you’ll have me crying, and when I start I can’t stop.”

“She’s always been like that,” said her husband, not without pride.

“That death,” said Noah, “was a terrible disappointment to me.”

The others at table stared at him uncomprehending.

“The weather,” he explained, “was so danged miserable and my insides so upset after the Christmas feasting that I wasn’t able to help dig the grave. I’d set my heart on that from the hour when I knowed the lady was doomed.”

“Sakes alive,” said the cook, “you give me the creeps.”

“You couldn’t know,” said Wright. “It’s impossible.”

Noah struck the table with his fist. “I knowed,” he said, “the last time I set eyes on her. That was three weeks before Christmas and she had on a new fur coat. ‘It’s a fine day,’ she said, and she looked up at the sky. ‘It’s agoin’ to be a fine winter,’ she said, ‘I look forward to it’ — and, at that very minute, I saw the grave waitin’ fer her and I said to myself, ‘Noah, you’ll dig her grave one of these times.’ It was a terrible
promonition
.”

“Gravedigging is a pleasure I can get on without,” said Rags, his eyes on his wife, who was close to tears.

“I’m an expert at it,” said Noah. “You need to love the work to be an expert. What I enjoy most is digging a grave for a young person. I know all the misery they’re to be spared.”

“That’s a wrong way to look at life,” said Wright. “There’s just as much pleasure in it as misery.”

“If you had your life to live over again, Mr. Wright,” asked the cook, “what would you be, if you could choose?”

“Just what I am, where I am,” said Wright sturdily. “It suits me.”

“And you, Jack?” she asked her husband, with a coy look. “what would you choose to be?”

Rags threw back his head. “Me?” he said. “Oh, I’d be master of Jalna. I can’t think of a better life.”

“You can choose him, if you like,” said Noah Binns, “but I wouldn’t lead the life he’s led, not fer a million dollars.”

“He enjoys himself,” said Rags, “as much as ever he did, and that’s saying a good deal.”

“Time takes away our pleasures,” said Noah, “but there’s one pleasure it’s left me and that’s champing my dentures.” The others at table sat spellbound while he, with obvious enjoyment, champed his false teeth together.

Spider or Rose

Wakefield, restored in health, had sailed for England, in the hope of having his play produced — in the hope also of securing a part for himself in any play. He had, through his illness, lost so much time that he felt himself to be bankrupt in funds and in theatrical connections, though certainly not in talent and initiative. Renny was meanwhile supporting him generously, but with strict injunctions to return to Jalna in time for Adeline’s wedding.

“But it will be impossible,” Wakefield had exclaimed, “if I’m acting in a play in London!”

“You’ll manage it somehow,” Renny had said. “I find that when I very much want to do something, I usually contrive to do it.”

Wakefield had given one of his trustful boyish looks at his elder. He could not have revealed how much more important to him were his own enterprises than the marriage of those two young people. Renny would not have understood, or would have chosen not to understand. A new and desperately urgent life was thrusting up out of the colonial past, but he ignored it, not so much in antagonism as in absorption by his own manner of life. He simply could not imagine a change in Jalna itself.

The vine-clad house, surrounded by its lawns, its meadows, its pastures, and woods, were to him the enduring symbol of the life his grandparents had carved out of the wilds of a new country, and to which his uncles and parents had adhered. He saw no reason for changing it. The word “nationalism” had not occurred to him. He saw no stigma in the word “colonialism.” He was proud of his country but disliked the idea of boasting about it. Some months ago he had been able to buy two hundred acres adjoining Jalna. A small house, badly in need of repair, stood on this, and a leaky barn. As was usual with him, he informed his wife of this transaction only after its completion. Yet he had, on occasion, consulted her, but that was when he had wanted to borrow money from her. Alayne was not averse to his purchase of this property, because she knew that all about them prices for land were rising. He had bought this at a bargain. Now she counseled him to sell when a profitable moment came. He listened to her counsel gravely and nodded as though in agreement, but he had no intention of selling. He liked this neglected farm as it was. House and barn, put in order, would be very useful to him and to Piers. The two spent happy hours inspecting it. They looked with protective pride at its trees, of which some were fine. Never would these be cut down, they said, to make way for little boxlike bungalows.