Books 5-8: Whiteoak Heritage / Whiteoak Brothers / Jalna / Whiteoaks of Jalna

by Mazo de La Roche

  Alayne answered only with a shrug. Renny continued to stare out across the moving brilliance of the water, puffing at his pipe. With a sort of taciturn tyranny he overrode the younger girl’s desire for chatter and chaff. She too fell silent, plucking at the grass, and then, after a sidelong glance at the other two, she rose and began slowly to descend the path.

  “Why are you going, Pheasant?” called Alayne sharply

  “I think someone should help Meggie to lay the cloth.”

  “Very well. If I can be of use, please call me.”

  Now a shudder of excitement ran through her. It was the first time in weeks that she had been alone with Renny. She almost wished that she had followed Pheasant.

  For some time he had avoided her. Their rides, which had been interrupted by the heavy snowfalls of January and the illness of Eden, had not been resumed. Although they lived in the house together, they were separated by a wall, a relentless wall of ice, through which each was visible to the other, though distorted by its glacial diffusions. Now on the cliff, in the sunshine, the wall seemed likely to melt, and with it the barrier of her intellectual self-control. If she could only know what he was feeling! His very silence was to her a tentative embrace.

  Like incense, the sweetness of the wood smoke rose from the beach. Wake’s little naked figure was darting here and there like a sandpiper.

  She studied Renny’s profile, the carved nose, the lips gripping the pipe, the damp hair plastered against the temples. It was so immobile that a heavy depression began to drown her mood of passionate excitement. Looking at him, remembering Eden, she began to feel that she had had enough of Whiteoaks. She had bruised her soul against their wanton egotism. This Renny whom she loved was as remote, as self-sufficient, as that rock out yonder. His look of passionate immobility might be the mask of nothing more than a brooding desire to acquire some mettlesome piece of horseflesh for his stalls. Yet how could that be, and she have that feeling that his very silence was an embrace! Two shadowy arms seemed to spring from his shoulders toward her, crushing her to him, kissing her with the passion of his kisses in the orchard with, added to them, all the hunger of these months of self-restraint.

  His fleshly arms had not moved. One lay across his thigh, the other slanted toward his pipe, the bowl of which lay in his palm.

  He took his pipe from his lips, and spoke in a low, husky voice. His words overwhelmed her. She was like a mariner who, fearing certain shoals, watching with both dread and desire for the light that warned of their nearness, is suddenly blinded by that light full in the eyes. Excitement, resentment, depression, all left her. She was conscious only of his love.

  “I love you,” he said, “and I am in hell because I love you. And there is no way out.”

  The magical experience of sitting on the cliff with Renny, hearing these words from his mouth, in his restrained voice, filled Alayne with a sense of reckless surrender rather than tragic renunciation. Like a crop from virgin soil, this first profound love gushed upward from her being to embrace the hot sun of his passion.

  With Renny it was very different. A man who had loved women both casually and licentiously, who could not speak their language, who had thought to have and craved to have no other sort of feelings toward them, he felt himself betrayed by this new and subtle passion that went deeper than mere possession, that could not be gratified and forgotten. In his eyes was something of the bewilderment of the animal that finds itself wounded, unable to exercise the faculties which had been its chief delight. Love, which had hitherto been to him as a drink of fresh water, now tasted of the bitter salt of renunciation.

  He muttered again: “There is no way out.”

  She said, almost in a whisper: “No, I suppose there is nothing to be done.”

  It was as though a traveller, pointing to the rising moon, had said to another: “There is no moon.”

  He caught that strange denial of her words in her tone. Looking into her face, he perceived the warmth and pathos there. He exclaimed, with a groan: “I would cut everything—take you away, if only—he were not my brother!”

  In an odd, choking voice that seemed to come from a long way off, she reminded him: “Your half brother.”

  “I never think of that,” he said, coldly. His attachment to his brothers was so tenacious that it always had annoyed him to hear them spoken of as half brothers.

  After a moment of silence that seemed made manifest by a veil of wood smoke that rose and hung over them for a space, she said, with a tremor in her voice: “I will do whatever you tell me to.”

  “I believe you would,” he answered. With sudden realization, he knew that her life was to her as important as his to himself, and yet she was putting it into his hands with heroic selflessness.

  They became aware that those on the beach were calling to them and, looking down, they saw that they were beckoning. The cloth was laid; already Nicholas, with the help of Piers, was letting himself down heavily into the unaccustomed posture of sitting on the ground.

  “Tea is ready. Come down! Come!” echoed the voices.

  The two rose mechanically, like two untroubled puppets, under the blue immensity of heaven, and turned toward the path.

  “Your heels are too high for such a rough place,” he said. “Let me take your hand.”

  She placed her hand in his, and he held it in his thin, muscular grasp till they reached the shingle.

  XXIII

  JUNE NIGHT AT JALNA

  TWO MEMBERS of the picnic party did not return with the others to Jalna. Piers went through the ravine to Vaughanlands, and with Maurice Vaughan drove to Stead to a meeting of fruit growers. Finch too went to Vaughanlands, but he cycled along the country road and entered by the front road into the house. He knew Maurice was going out with Piers, and since the housekeeper was almost totally deaf, he might make music with all the wild fervour that he chose, with no one but himself to hear.

  All day Finch had been straining toward the hour. Yet he knew that he should at this moment be in his room at home “swatting” for the physics exam tomorrow. He should not have gone to the picnic at all, though he had compromised by taking a textbook with him to study at odd moments. In reality, he had not read one word of it. The book had been nothing more than a mask, behind which he had hidden for a while his angry, sullen face. When he had fastened it in its strap to the handlebar of his bicycle, he had muttered something about going to study with George Fennel. He had lied, and he did not care. This evening he must be free. His soul must stretch its wings in the spaces of the night. Music would set him free.

  This new freedom, which music had the power to cast over him like a bright armour, was most of all freedom from his own menacing thoughts and, better still, freedom from God. God no longer frightened him, no longer pursued him in his loneliness, following him, even to his bed, with face that changed from thunderous darkness to fiery whiteness, from old to young. On evenings when music had made him brave and free he marched home through the ravine, singing as he marched, and no more afraid of God than of the whippoorwills that called to their loves among the trees, or of the quivering stars.

  Sometimes the thought of being loved by God rather than pursued by Him, filled him with ecstasy, blinded him with tears. Often, and more often as the months flew on, he did not believe in God at all. God was nothing but a dragon of childhood, Fear personified, of which a Scottish nurse in tiny boyhood had sown the seed. Yet he did not want to lose this fear of God entirely, for it had in it the power of submerging the more terrible fear of himself. Once, in a strange flash of inwardness, he had thought that perhaps God and he were both afraid, each afraid of his own reflection as seen in the other’s eyes. Perhaps, even, God and he were one—

  In the forsaken house he sat very upright on the piano stool, only his hands moving firmly and with spirit over the keys. The piece he played was no more pretentious than that which any boy of talent might execute after an equal number of lessons. Nevertheless, there was something sp
ecial in Finch’s playing, in the way his sheepish air gave place to confidence when he sat before the piano, in the firm dexterity of his beautiful hands—such a contrast to his unprepossessing face—which kept him in his teacher’s mind long after the lesson was over. More than once the teacher had said to a colleague: “I have one pupil, a boy named Whiteoak, who isn’t like any of the others. He has genius of some kind, I am sure, but whether music is its natural expression, or whether it is just a temporary outlet for something else, I can’t yet make out. He’s a queer, shy boy.”

  Finch sat playing now, neither shy nor queer. The room was dark except for the moonlight that serenely fell across his hands on the keys. Through the open window the rich sweet scents of this June night poured in a changeful stream, now the odour of the cool fresh earth, now the heavy scent of certain yellow lilies that grew beneath the window, now the mixed aroma of wild flowers, last year’s leaves, and rich mould, that poured up from the ravine. The breeze blew in, now warm and gentle as love’s first kiss, now with a chill borne from some sequestered place not yet warmed by the summer sun.

  All these scents and warmths and coolnesses Finch wove into his music. He had a strange sensation that night that many years had fled by with averted faces since the hour of the picnic. That all those he knew, indeed all the people of the world, were dead. That he alone lived, and was creating by his will, his music, the June night of a new world.

  He felt the wondrous elation of creating, and at the same time a great sadness, for he knew that the world he was creating could not last; that it was no more than the shadow of a shadow; that the dancing streams, the flying petals, the swift winds that were born beneath his fingers would dry and wither and fall as the music sank to silence.

  A clock on the chimneypiece struck ten in a thin faraway tone. Finch remembered tomorrow’s examination. He must go home and study for a couple of hours, try to get something into that brain of his besides music. But, at any rate, his brain felt clearer for the music. He felt wonderfully clear-headed tonight. All sights and sounds seemed to him magnified, intensified. With luck he might in the next two hours absorb the very problems upon which the questions of the examination would be based. The worst was that, as he had told Meggie he was going to study with George Fennel, he must go a long piece out of his way in order that he might arrive from the direction of the rectory. The night was so mild that some of the family were almost certain to be about, and if he appeared out of the ravine, it would at once be suspected that he had been at Vaughanlands.

  Just one piece more! He could not tear himself away yet. He played on, losing himself in the delight of that growing sympathy between his hands and the keyboard. Then he gently closed the piano and went out on to the verandah, shutting the door behind him.

  A puff of warm air met him, as though it had been deliberately blown on him to entice him into the woods, to keep him there till he forgot all the things he had so painfully learned at school, and knew only the mathematics of the seasons, and the language of the trees. He mounted his wheel and rode across the lawn.

  The basin where the house stood was flooded by moonlight, like a shallow bowl with golden wine. The air was full of whisperings and stirrings. The very grass across which he glided seemed a magic carpet.

  He flew along the road, faster and faster, through the little hamlet, past the rectory (there was a light up in George’s attic room, and poor George swatting away!) What if he went in and spent the night with George? He could telephone to Jalna.

  No, he wanted to be by himself. George was too solid, too prosaic for him tonight. He could see his slow smile, hear his “Whatever puts such fool ideas into your head, Finch?”

  Down the lane into the old woods of Jalna. The black pine trees blacker than the blackest night. How did they manage it? No darkness could obliterate them. How lovely the little birch wood must look in the moonlight! All the silver birches in their own fair communion in the midst of the black pines! If he left his wheel here, he might go to the birch wood and see it in this first silvery night of June; take a picture of it back to his room in his mind’s eye.

  His “mind’s eye.” What a singular phrase! He thought of his mind’s eye—round, glowing, rapturous and frightened by turns.

  The mind has a thousand eyes,

  And the heart but one;

  Yet the light of a whole life dies

  When love is done.

  It must have been the eye of his heart which he had been imagining—that flaming, rapturous, terrified eye. “When love is done—” Love had not begun for him. He thought it never would. Not that kind of love. He was not at all sure that he wanted it.

  He was running lightly along the woodland path that wound among the pines. There were before him five slender young birches, sprung from the trunk of a fallen and decayed pine, like five fabled virgins from the torso of a slain giant. Beyond them the birch wood lay in the mystery of moonlight, the delicate, drooping boughs seemed to float above the immaculate boles.

  This was the spot where one morning he had seen Renny standing with a strange woman in his arms. The place had ever since been haunted by that vision. He was therefore scarcely surprised when he heard low voices as he reached the outer fringe of trees. Was Renny up to his love games again? He halted among the young ferns and listened. He peered through the strange misty radiance that seemed to be distilled from the trunks and foliage of the birches themselves rather than to fall from above, and tried to see who were the two who had sought this hidden spot. Every nerve in his body was quivering, taut as the strings of a musical instrument.

  At first he could make out nothing but the dew-wet mistiness of light and shade, the strange lustre that hung above a patch of greensward. All about him the air was full of mysterious rustlings and sighings, as though every leaf and blade and fern frond were sentient. Then the murmur of voices, the sound of long, passionate kisses drew his gaze toward a particular spot, sheltered by some hazel bushes. Scarcely breathing, he crept closer. He heard a low laugh, and then the voice that laughed said,“Pheasant, Pheasant, Pheasant,” over and over again.

  It was Eden’s voice.

  Then rushing breathless words from Pheasant, and then a deep sigh, and again the sound of kisses.

  Oh, they were wicked! He could have rushed in on them in his rage, and slain them. It would have been right and just. They had betrayed Piers, his beloved brother, his hero! In imagination he crashed in on them through the hazel bushes, trampling the ferns, and struck them again and again till they screamed for pity; but he had no pity; he beat them down as they clung about his knees till their blood soaked the greensward and the glade reverberated with their cries—

  He was dazed. He drew his hand across his eyes. Then he moved closer toward them through the hazels, not seeing where he was going, dizzy. Her voice gasped: “What was that?”

  He stopped.

  There was silence, except that the beating of his heart filled the universe.

  “What was that?”

  “Nothing but a rabbit or a squirrel.”

  Finch dropped to his knees. With great caution he turned and began to creep away from them. He crept till he reached the path into the pine wood, then he got to his feet and began to run. He sped along the needle-strewn path with great strides like a hunted deer. His mouth was open, his breath coming in sobbing gasps.

  When he reached the place where he had left his wheel, he did not stop. Nothing mechanical could move with the speed of his swift, avenging feet. He ran down the lane, waving his arms; he flew across the pasture, past a group of sleeping cattle; missing the bridge, he waded across the stream through the thick, clinging watercress; slipped, and sprawled on the bank into a great golden splash of kingcups; and pressed on toward the stables.

  Piers had just driven into the yard when he arrived. Finch ran up in front of the car, his wild white face and dishevelled hair startling in the glare of the lamps. His hand was on his side, where a pain like a knife was stabbing him. />
  “What’s the matter?” cried Piers, springing out of the car.

  Finch pointed in the direction whence he had come.

  “They’re there,” he said, thickly. “Back there—in the woods!”

  “What the devil is the matter with you?” asked Piers, coming around to him. “Have you had a fright?”

  Finch caught his brother by the arm and repeated: “In the wood—making love—both of them—kissing—making love—”

  “Who? Tell me whom you mean. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Piers was impatient, yet, in spite of himself, he was excited by the boy’s wild words.

  “Eden, the traitor!” cried Finch, his voice breaking into a scream. “He’s got Pheasant in the wood there—Pheasant. They’re wicked, I tell you—false as hell!”

  Piers’s hand was as a vise on his arm.

  “What did you see?”

  “Nothing—nothing—but behind the hazel bushes I heard them whispering—kissing—oh, I know. I wasn’t born yesterday. Why did they go so far away? She wouldn’t have let him kiss her like that unless—”

  Piers gave him a shake. “Shut up. No more of that. Now listen to me. You are to go straight to your room, Finch. You are to say nothing of this to anyone. I am going to find them.” His full, healthy face was ghastly, his eyes blazed. “I’ll kill them both—if what you say is so, Finch. Now go to the house.”

  He asked then, in a tone almost matter-of-fact, just where Finch had seen them, why he had gone there himself. Finch incoherently repeated everything. Something of their excitement must have been transmitted to the animals, for the dogs began to bark and a loud whinny came from the stables. The moon was sinking, and a deathlike pallor lay across the scene. Piers turned away, cursing as he stumbled over the tongue of a cart. A mist was rising above the paddock, and he ran into this obscurity, disappearing from Finch’s eyes, as though swallowed up by some sinister force of nature.