Eden found himself at dinner between Miss Archer and one of the earnest ladies. Opposite were the English novelist, whose name was Hyde, and Miss Cory. Eden had never seen a table so glittering with exquisite glass and slender, shapely cutlery. His mind flew for an instant to the dinner table at Jalna with its huge platters and cumbersome old English plate. For an instant the faces of those about him were blotted out by the faces of the family at home, affectionate, arrogant, high-tempered—faces that, once seen, were not easily forgotten. And when one had lived with them all one’s life— But he put them away from him and turned to the earnest lady. Alayne Archer’s shoulder was toward him as she listened to Mr. Groves on her other side.
“Mr. Whiteoak,” said the lady, in a richly cultivated voice, “I want to tell you how deeply I appreciate your poetry. You show a delicate sensitiveness that is crystal-like in its implications.” She fixed him with her clear grey eyes, and added: “And such an acute realization of the poignant transiency of beauty.” Having spoken, she conveyed an exquisite silver spoon filled with exquisite clear soup unflinchingly to her lips.
“Thanks,” mumbled Eden. “Thank you very much.” He felt overcome with shyness. Oh, God, that Gran were here! He would like to hide his head in her lap while she warded off this terrible woman with her stick. He looked at her, a troubled expression shadowing his blue eyes, but she was apparently satisfied, for she went on talking. Presently Mr. Cory claimed her attention and he turned to Alayne Archer.
“Speak to me. Save me,” he whispered. ‘I’ve never felt so stupid in my life. I’ve just been asked what my new poem was about and all I could say was—’a fish’!”
She was looking into his eyes now and he felt an electrical thrill in every nerve at her nearness, and an intangible something he saw in her eyes.
She said: “Mr. Groves has something be wants to ask you about supplies for a hunting trip to Canada.”
Mr. Groves leaned nearer. “How about canned goods?” he said. “Could we take all our supplies over from here, or must we buy them in Canada?”
They talked of tinned meats and vegetables, till Mr. Groves turned to examine cautiously, through his glasses, a new dish offered by the servant. Then Miss Archer said softly:
“So you are feeling shy? I do not wonder. Still, it must be very pleasant to hear such delightful things about your poetry.”
Looking down over her face he thought her eyelids were like a Madonna’s. “I tried to make a sketch of you today, but I tore it up—and some verses with it. You’ll scarcely believe it, but I made you look quite Dutch.”
“That is not so surprising,” she answered. “On my mother’s side I am of Dutch extraction. I think I show it quite plainly. My face is broad and rather flat, and I have high cheek bones.”
“You draw an engaging picture of yourself, certainly.”
“But it is quite true, is it not?” She was smiling with a rather malicious amusement. “Come, now, I do look a stolid Dutch Fräulein; acknowledge it.”
He denied it stoutly, but it was true that the Dutch blood explained something about her. A simplicity, a directness, a tranquil tenacity. But with her lovely rounded shoulders, her delicately flushed cheeks, those Madonna eyelids, and that wreath of little pink and white flowers in her hair, he thought she was a thousand times more charming than any girl he had ever met.
Hyde, the novelist, was saying, in his vibrant tones: “When I come to America, I always feel that I have been starved at home. I eat the most enormous meals here, and such meals! Such fruit! Such cream! I know there are cows in England. I’ve seen them with my own eyes. I ran against one once with my car. But they don’t give cream. Their milk is skimmed—pale blue when it comes. Can anyone explain why? Mr. Whiteoak, tell me, do you have cream in Canada?”
“We only use reindeer’s milk there,” replied Eden.
After dinner Hyde sauntered up to him.
“You are the lucky dog! The only interesting woman here. Who is she?”
“Miss Alayne Archer. She is an orphan. Her father was an old friend of Mr. Cory’s.”
“Does she write?”
“No. She reads. She is a reader for the publishing house. It was she who—” But he bit that sentence off just in time. He wasn’t going to tell this bulgy-eyed fellow anything more.
Hyde said: “Mr. Whiteoak, had you a relative in the Buffs? A red-haired chap?”
“Yes. A brother—Renny. Did you know him?”
Hyde’s eyes bulged a little more.
“Did I know him? Rather. One of the best. Oh, he and I had a hell of a time together. Where is he now? In Canada?”
“Yes. He farms.”
Hyde looked Eden over critically. “You’re not a bit like him. I can’t imagine Whiteoak writing poetry. He told me he had a lot of young brothers. The whelps,’ he used to call you. I should like to see him. Please remember me to him.”
“If you can manage it, you must come to see us.”
Hyde began to talk about his adventures with Renny in France. He was wound up. He seemed to forget his surroundings entirely and poured out reminiscences ribald and bloody which Eden scarcely heard. His own eyes followed Alayne Archer wherever she moved. He could scarcely forbear leaving Hyde rudely and following her. He saw the eyes of Mr. Cory and Mr. Groves on him, and he saw gleaming in them endless questions about hunting in the North. It seemed as though walls were closing in on him. He felt horribly young and helpless among these middle-aged and elderly men. In desperation he interrupted the Englishman.
“You said you would like to meet Miss Archer.”
Hyde looked blank, then agreed cheerfully: “Yes, yes, I did.”
Eden took him over to Alayne, turning his own back firmly on the too eager huntsmen.
“Miss Archer,” he said, and saw a swift colour tinge her cheeks and pass away, leaving them paler than before. “May I introduce Mr. Hyde?”
The two shook hands.
“I have read your new book in the proof sheets,” she said to Hyde, “and I think it is splendid. Only I object very strongly to the way you make your American character talk. I often wish that Englishmen would not put Americans into their books. The dialect they put into their mouths is like nothing spoken on land or sea.” She spoke lightly, but there was a shadow of real annoyance in her eyes. She had plenty of character, Eden thought; she was not afraid to speak her mind. He pretended to have noticed the same thing. The Englishman laughed imperturbably.
“Well, it’s the way it sounds to us,” he said. “Then my man, you remember, is a Southerner. He doesn’t speak as you do here.”
“Yes, but he is an educated Southerner, who would not prefix every sentence with ‘Gee’ and call other men ‘guys,’ and continually say, ‘It sure is’—I hope I’m not being rude?”
But Hyde was not annoyed. He was merely amused. No protests could change his conception of American speech. He said to Eden: “Why don’t you Canadians write about Americans and see if you have better luck?”
“I shall write a poem about Americans,” laughed Eden, and the glance that flashed from his eyes into Alayne’s was like a sunbeam that flashes into clear water and is held there.
Would they never be alone together? Yes, the pianist was sitting down before the piano. They melted into a quiet corner. There was no pretending. Each knew the other’s desire to escape from the rest. They sat without speaking while the music submerged them like a sea. They were at the bottom of a throbbing sea. They were hidden. They were alone. They could hear the pulsing of the great heart of life. They could feel it in their own heartbeats.
He moved a little nearer to her, staring into the room straight ahead of him, and he could almost feel her head on his shoulder, her body relaxing into his arms. The waves of Chopin thundered on and on. Eden scarcely dared to turn his face toward her. But he did, and a faint perfume came to him from the wreath of little French flowers she wore. What beautiful hands lying in her lap! Surely hands for a poet’s love. God, if he co
uld only take them in his and kiss the palms! How tender and delicately scented they would be—
The pianist was playing Debussy. Miss Cory had switched off the lights, all but a pale one by the piano. The sea was all delicate singing wavelets then. He took Alayne’s hands and held them to his lips.
As he held them, his being was shaken by a throng of poems rushing up within him, crying out to be born, touched into life by the contact of her hands.
X
ALAYNE AND LIFE
ALAYNE ARCHER was twenty-eight years old when she met Eden Whiteoak. Her father and mother had died within a few weeks of each other, during an epidemic of influenza three years before. They had left their daughter a few hundreds in the bank, a few thousands in life insurance, and an artistic stucco bungalow in Brooklyn, overlooking golf links and a glimpse of the ocean. But they had left her an empty heart, from which the love that had been stored increasingly for them during the twenty-five years flowed in an anguished stream after them into the unknown. It had seemed to her at first that she could not live without those two precious beings whose lives had been so closely entwined with hers.
Her father had been professor of English in a New York State college, a pedantic but gentle man, who loved to impart information to his wife and to instruct his daughter, but who, in matters other than scholastic, was led by them as a little child.
Her mother was the daughter of the principal of a small theological college in the state of Massachusetts, who had got into trouble more than once because of his advanced religious views—had, in fact, escaped serious trouble only because of his personal magnetism and charm. These qualities his daughter had inherited from him, and had in her turn transmitted them to her own daughter Alayne.
Though an earnest little family who faced the problems of the day and their trips to Europe anxiously, they were often filled by the spirit of gentle fun. The grey bungalow resounded to professorial gaiety and the youthful response from Alayne. Professor and Mrs. Archer had married young, and they often remarked that Alayne was more like an adored young sister to them than a daughter. She had no intimate friends of her own age. Her parents sufficed. For several years before his death Professor Archer had been engaged in writing a history of the American Revolutionary War, and Alayne had thrown herself with enthusiasm into helping him with the work of research. Her admiration had been aroused for those dogged Loyalists who had left their homes and journeyed northward into Canada to suffer cold and privation for the sake of an idea. It was glorious, she thought, and told her father so. They had argued, and after that he had called her, laughingly, his little Britisher; and she had laughed, too, but she did not altogether like it, for she was proud of being an American. Still, one could see the other person’s side of a question.
Mr. Cory had been a lifelong friend of her father’s. When Professor Archer died, he came forward at once with his assistance. He helped Alayne to dispose of the bungalow by the golf links—those golf links where Alayne and her father had had many a happy game together, with her mother able to keep her eye on them from the upstairs sitting-room window; he had looked into the state of her father’s financial affairs for her, and had given her work in reading for the publishing house of Cory and Parsons.
The first blank grief, followed by the agony of realization, had passed, and Alayne’s life settled into a sad tranquillity. She had taken a small apartment near her work, and night after night she pored over her father’s manuscript, correcting, revising, worrying her young brain into fever over some debatable point. Oh, if he had only been there to settle it for her! To explain, to elucidate his own point of view, in his precise and impressive accents! In her solitude she could almost see his long thin scholar’s hands turning the pages, and tears swept down her cheeks in a storm, leaving them flushed and hot, so that she would have to go to the window, and press her face to the cool pane, or throw it open and lean out, gazing into the unfriendly street below.
The book was published. It created a good impression, and reviewers were perhaps a little kinder to it because of the recent death of the author. It was praised for its modern liberality. But a few critics pointed out errors and contradictions, and Alayne, holding herself responsible for these, suffered great humiliation. She accused herself of laxness and stupidity. Her dear father’s book! She became so white that Mr. Cory was worried about her. At last Mrs. Cory and he persuaded her to share an apartment with a friend of theirs, Rosamund Trent, a commercial artist, a woman of fifty.
Miss Trent was efficient, talkative, and nearly always good-humoured. It was when Alayne joined Miss Trent that she settled down into tranquillity. She read countless manuscripts, some of them very badly typed, and the literary editor of Cory and Parsons learned to rely on her judgment, especially in books other than fiction. In fiction her taste, formed by her parents, was perhaps too conventional, too fastidious. Many of the things she read in manuscript seemed horrid to her. And they had a disconcerting way of cropping up in her mind afterward, like strange weeds that, even after they are uprooted and thrown away, appear again in unexpected places.
She would sit listening to Rosamund Trent’s good-humoured chatter, her chin in her curled palm, her eyes fixed on Miss Trent’s face, yet not all of her was present in the room. Another Alayne, crying like a deserted child, was wandering through the little bungalow; wandering about the garden among the rhododendrons and the roses, where the grass was like moist green velvet, and not a dead leaf was allowed by the professor to lie undisturbed; wandering, weeping over the links with the thin grey shadow of her father, turning to wave a hand to the watching mother in the window.
Sometimes the other Alayne was different, not sad and lonely but wild and questioning. Had life nothing richer for her than this? Reading, reading manuscripts, day in, day out, sitting at night with gaze bent on Miss Trent’s chattering face, or going to the Corys’ or some other house, meeting people who made no impression on her. Was she never going to have a real friend to whom she could confide everything—well, almost everything? Was she never—for the first time in her life she asked herself this question in grim earnest—was she never going to have a lover?
Oh, she had had admirers—not many, for she had not encouraged them. If she went out with them she was sure to miss something delightful that was happening at home. If they came to the house they seldom fitted in with the scheme of things. Sexually she was one of those women who develop slowly; who might, under certain conditions, marry, rear a family, and never have the wellspring of her passions unbound.
There had been one man who might almost have been called a lover, a colleague of her father’s, but several years younger. He had come to the house, first as her father’s friend, then more and more as hers. He had fitted into their serious discussions, even into their gaieties. Once he had gone to Europe with them. In Sorrento, on a morning when the spring was breaking and they had been walking up a narrow pathway across a hill, filled with the wonder of that ecstatic awakening, he had asked her to marry him. She had begged him to wait for his answer till they returned to America, for she was afraid that her delight was not in him but in Italy.
They had been back in America only a month when her mother was taken ill. The next two months were passed in heart-piercing suspense and agony. Then, at the end, she found herself alone. Again her father’s friend, in old-fashioned phrasing, which she loved in books but which did not move her in real life, asked her to marry him. He loved her and he wanted to care for her. She knew that her father had approved of him, but her heart was drained empty, and its aching spaces desired no new occupant.
When the manuscript of young Whiteoak’s book was given her to read, Alayne was in a mood of eager receptivity to beauty. The beauty, the simplicity, the splendid abandon of Eden’s lyrics filled her with a new joy. When the book appeared, she had an odd feeling of possession toward it. She rather hated seeing Miss Trent’s large plump hands caressing it—“Such a ducky little book, my dear!”—and she hated t
o hear her read from it, stressing the most striking phrases, sustaining the last word of each line with an upward lilt, of her throaty voice—“Sheer beauty, that bit, isn’t it, Alayne dear?” She felt ashamed of herself for grudging Miss Trent her pleasure in the book, but she undoubtedly did grudge it.
She rather dreaded meeting Eden for fear he should be disappointing. Suppose be were short and thickset, with beady black eyes and a long upper lip. Suppose he had a hatchet face and wore horn-rimmed spectacles.
Well, however he looked, his mind was beautiful. But she had quaked as she entered the reception room.
When she saw him, standing tall and fair, with his crest of golden hair, his sensitive features, his steady but rather wistful smile, she was trembling, almost overcome with relief. He seemed to carry some of the radiance of his poetry about his own person. Those brilliant blue eyes in that tanned face! Oh, she could not have borne it had he not been beautiful!
It seemed as natural to her that they two should seek a quiet corner together, that he should, when the opportunity offered, take her hands in his and press ecstatic kisses upon them, as that two drops of dew should melt into one, or two sweet chords blend.
It seemed equally natural to her to say yes when, two weeks later, he asked her to marry him.
He had not intended to ask her that. He realized in his heart that it was madness to ask her, unless they agreed to a long engagement, but the autumn night was studded with stars and heavy with the teasing scents of burning leaves and salt air. They were gliding slowly along an ocean driveway in Rosamund Trent’s car. Rosamund was slouching over the wheel, silent for once, and they two in the back seat alone, in a world apart. He could no more stop himself from asking her to marry him than he could help writing a poem that burned to be expressed.
His love for her was a poem. Their life together would be an exquisite, enchanted poem, a continual inspiration for him. He could not do without her. The thought of holding her intimately in his arms gave him the tender sadness of a love poem to be written. Yet he must not ask her to marry him. He must not and—he did.
Books 5-8: Whiteoak Heritage / Whiteoak Brothers / Jalna / Whiteoaks of Jalna Page 68
