Nicholas longed to continue his persuasions, but something in Renny’s face forbade him. He looked on the point of leaping to his high horse. Either he had set his face against interference in his affairs or he was simply, as Piers had said, unaware of their precarious condition. Perhaps he was right and the others wrong! Perhaps there was nothing to worry about. Nicholas made up his mind to one thing however. He would write to Alayne and sound her on the subject of her return. He missed her presence in the house. She had brought something different into it to which he had become accustomed—her dignity, her interest in the affairs of the world, her half-sad gaiety.
XXV
ALAYNE AND LOVE
MISS ARCHER AND ALYANE sat in the charming little living room of the house on the Hudson, surrounded by a bright coloured litter of folders advertising a world tour. Outside there was a raw wind, but in the room the gently sizzling radiator diffused a comforting warmth, and the vivid illustrations of the folders lent a touch of the exotic to the somewhat austere effect of the neutral tinted hangings and the black dresses of the women.
Alayne did not approve of the custom of wearing mourning, but Miss Archer was old-fashioned and insisted that she should. The black accentuated the pallor of her face, the fairness of her smooth hair. It intensified too the shadows under her eyes and the compressed line of her lips. She sat regarding her aunt with wonder.
For Miss Archer, after the first prostration of grief over the loss of her sister, had risen most astonishingly to the call of the world from which Miss Helen’s delicacy had so long shut her off. First it had been the car. Then excursions in it, farther and farther afield. Visits to New York to view exhibitions of pictures by very modern young painters, over which she was unfailingly enthusiastic, for, though conventional in her life, she prided herself on being broad-minded, abreast of the times. No painter, no composer of modern music, scarcely a novelist, could shock her. But her conventional soul had received a shock by Alayne’s marriage to Renny. She had taken to Eden at first sight. His air of deference to her, his poetry, the beauty of his person had charmed her. The breaking of that union had been a disaster. But she had heard nothing of Renny that had drawn her to him. His photograph had, in truth, repelled her. When by signs, rather than by words, she became cognisant of a breach between Alayne and him, she felt gratitude to the Good which she was convinced guided mortal affairs, and set about the planing of a world tour.
She had secured congenial companions in a professor of economics and his wife, old friends of hers and of Alayne’s lather. She sat now in the clear light from the electric lamp examining a fresh supply of “literature” concerning a tour which went round the other way from the last. She was now puzzled as to which one they should take. There remained in her mind only the question of whether they should turn to the right or to the left, both ways leading inevitably back to the house on the Hudson. Professor and Mrs. Card did not seem to care much which way they went so long as they went. Alayne too left the choice in Miss Archer’s hands.
She sat there now in pleasurable indecision, her abundant white hair smoothly coiled, her large face, with its almost transparent pallor, alert and somewhat excited. Alayne sat watching her, comparing her in her mind to Augusta. Opposed to Miss Archer’s indeterminate nose and gentle mouth she pictured Augusta’s beak, the majestic curve of her nostril into her lip. Opposed to Miss Archer’s white hair and transparent pallor, Augusta’s crown of magenta-tinted black, her sallow, speckled skin. She recalled the complications of Augusta’s dress, the beads, pins, brooches, and bracelets. In Alayne’s mind she compared unfavourably with Miss Archer, and yet there was something about Augusta one could never forget. She remembered how Augusta had shed tears at her wedding in the church at Nymet Crews. What would Augusta think if she knew the turn things had taken? She thought of Professor Card and the intimate information concerning all they saw on the trip that would be diffused from him. She thought of the never-failing curiosity with which he and Mrs. Card and Miss Archer would view these strange lands, the pleasant curiosity they would feel about all on board. She thought of Nicholas home at Jalna again, his gouty leg propped on an ottoman while he introduced, by sips, into his system, more of that which had produced the gout. He and Ernest would have much to say of their trip, but it would be familiar gossip of people and things they knew. That was one of the striking things about the Whiteoaks. They lacked curiosity about things that did not concern themselves. Their own life, the life of the family, that was the important thing and they would have carried it with them round the world. If they could have been introduced into this room, she thought, with her aunt and Professor and Mrs. Card, all the curiosity, the eagerness would have been on one side. Augusta would have suggested a game of whist. Renny would perhaps have tried to sell the professor a horse... Oh, why had she thought of him! For weeks she had scarcely allowed the thought of him to trouble her, now it came in a swift feverish rush making her feel stifled in the little room, sickened by the sight of the gaily coloured folders.
Miss Archer was saying—“Leaving the Red Sea we pass through the Strait of Babel-mandeb... Does not the very name thrill you? I can reach a peculiar state almost bordering on hallucination by the mere repetition of the name... And Penang... Doesn’t it make you feel as though you were losing your very identity when you say Penang! I am so thankful that, even with age and all the ups and downs of life, I have never gotten over my enthusiasms.” Her clear grey eyes beamed into Alayne’s. She noticed the dark shadows under them, and took her hand and pressed it close.
“You have been so wonderfully good to me through all this time of trouble, dear Alayne. Now I must think of you, instead of myself. You are not looking as well as you should. But this trip will be highly beneficial, it will bring the colour to your cheeks... Just close your eyes and visualise you and me riding in a rickshaw... Or in the bazaars of Cairo... Watching the sunset at Penang... My mind will fly back to Penang!” The pressure on Alayne’s hand became firmer. ’You are happier, dear, aren’t you? I love you too well not to have been aware of your unhappiness. But, day by day, I see a look of reassurance coming back into your eyes. Am I not right?”
Alayne nodded, clasping her fingers about those of Miss Archer, who continued:
“We all make mistakes in our lives. You have inherited your father’s capacity for self-analysis. I am afraid that you are reproaching yourself for something.”
“No, no... I am just drifting.”
“Alayne, cannot you confide in me? I do not urge it, but it would make me so happy”
“There is nothing to confide. We cannot get on together. That is all.”
“Must you see him—before we set out on our trip?”
“No. Not necessarily.”
“But you write to him?” Miss Archer’s clear mind could not reconcile itself to such a situation, but she clung with tenacity to the hope of a disclosure of feeling.
“Yes. Commonplace notes... To keep the family from guessing.”
“And he replies?”
“Yes. In the same tone.”
“Oh, he has failed you in your need for understanding: I feel that.”
“Perhaps... We are just—not suited. He possibly thinks that I have failed him.”
“But your love for him is—quite gone?”
Alayne withdrew her hand and rose with a gesture of irritation. She went to the window and looked out into the rain. “There is no use in my trying to explain my feelings for him. Or in trying to describe him to you. He is like no one you know He is like no one else. I shall never be the same again after having lived with him. I couldn’t make you understand... If I could think of a comparison well... this, we’ll say... The ground that is torn open by an earthquake will close together again—but its formation will be different. It will not be as it was before.”
“He must be a very peculiar man. From what I have heard of the family I feel that they are the victims of strange complexes and frustrations.” Her ingenuou
s face was alight with the congenial task of psychological analysis.
Alayne looked blank. She scarcely seemed to hear Miss Archer. Then she said:
“The spiritual and the animal are so closely connected in him. They can’t be separated. One would just have to take him as he is. Accommodate oneself... accommodate is a mild word for what I mean... But it’s just that. The animal and spiritual in him...”
Miss Archer drew back. She made an almost repelling gesture toward Alayne. Little ripples of discomfort broke the tranquillity of her smooth face as the falling of a stone disturbs a placid pool.
“Don’t, Alayne, please,” she said. “It makes me shudder to think what you must have been through.” Then she moved quickly to Alayne’s side and put her arm about her. “It will all come right! I know it will. What we both need is to view our lives from a long way off. Utterly detached, in mother hemisphere. Then we shall see the truth without morbidity or—dreadful remembrances.”
Alayne embraced her, laying her cheek against the shining white hair, inhaling the delicate scent from her small faslidious person.
While they stood so linked, a sedan car stopped before the door. Rosamond Trent alighted from it and advanced energetically toward the porch. Inside she greeted them enthusiastically. Alayne thought for the hundredth time that no one she knew wore such becoming hats as Miss Trent.
She drew off her gloves and asked if she might smoke a cigarette. Miss Archer always kept a silver box filled with a good brand for visitors, though she inwardly deplored every puff of smoke in the air and crumb of ash on the rug. Rosamond Trent espied the SS folders.
“Heavens, how thrilling!” she exclaimed, picking one up and examining the picture of a group sporting in a swimming pool. “How these bring back my own trip round the world!” For it was she who had really put the idea into Miss Archer’s head. “Hong-Kong—Honolulu—Colombo—Penang—”
Miss Archer caught her hand and held it. “I knew she’d say it!” she laughed. “Miss Trent, just before you came in, Alayne and I were saying how hallucinated the word Penang makes us feel. We actually see something that is not present.”
Miss Trent glanced shrewdly at her friend. “Alayne looks it,” she said.
They discussed the trip for a while, then Miss Archer said:
“I am just going to leave you two together while I run across to Professor Card’s. I want to get a new book on the East that he has promised me.”
They saw her briskly cross the lawns under an umbrella. They sank back in the relaxation of an old intimacy.
“Well,” said Rosamond Trent, through the cloud of smoke she always achieved when smoking. “I’m back in the advertising business again. I enjoy it too, though it was hard to give up the antiques after such a marvellous start. If it hadn’t been for the Wall Street crash I’d soon have had a grand business. I suppose you are still hanging on to your stock, Alayne?”
“Yes. I’m glad Aunt Harriet doesn’t know how much of Aunt Helen’s money I have had to pay out to hold on.”
“Just be thankful you had it to fall back on! I haven’t a doubt that it will all come right.”
Alayne smiled faintly. She could not feel very cheerful over the affair, remembering that she had used her influence for rather than against Finch’s investing, and that her friend had borrowed ten thousand dollars from him which he was not likely to see again.
In her dismay at the financial crash Rosamond Trent had told Alayne of the loan from Finch. Now, guessing Alayne’s doubts, from the dubious droop of her mouth, she wished she had not been such a fool as to confess. She ejaculated with a sweep of the hand. “I will work these fingers to the bone to pay back every cent I owe!” She glared at her plump, manicured fingers as though she already saw them stripped of flesh.
At the extravagance of the word and the gesture that accompanied them Alayne felt an access of irritation. She had always thought of Rosamond as a creature of simple sincerity—a very real person. Now she seemed suddenly unreal—the reflection of an artificial life. Her air of knowngness, her obvious assurance that she was living in the very core of the world, were of the stuff of self-delusion. And she herself had brought Rosamond into touch with Finch. It was she who had been at the bottom of Finch’s losses in the New York stock market—first by her example, then by her friend’s borrowing from him. Whether or not Finch was holding his stock she did not know. She had written to him asking, but no answer had come. She had been deeply fond of Finch. Now she felt that she could not hold him, could not hold him any more than she could hold any Whiteoak. They could give one no comfort, they could not be held—but how real they were!
She felt stifled in the little room. Rosamond’s voice came from a long way off. She was saying:
“You mustn’t mind me speaking plainly, Alayne. But we have no secrets from each other, have we? You know positively all there is to know about my life. Now I can sense the fact that you are no more satisfied in this marriage than in your first. You need new scenes to take your mind off it. Many a time I’ve wondered how you endured life so far from all that makes it worthwhile.”
Alayne did not answer. She let her friend talk on and on. Rosamond was thinking, she knew, that her poor heart was too full for words. Miss Archer came back, accompanied by Professor and Mrs. Card. The air bristled with information about the trip. Miss Archer had out her Trip Abroad book and wrote down numerous addresses and helpful hints.
When, at last, she was sitting alone in the living room, it was time for bed and her head ached dreadfully. She was enveloped in a cloak of depression beyond anything she had ever experienced... There was none of the active pain of grief. There was no anger to kindle it. There was only this choking sense of aloneness. She thought of the projected trip with shrinking. How could she ever, she asked herself, have thought of it otherwise? The company, in which she was preparing to cast herself for six months, now was presented to her as austere and even desiccated... And, at the end of the six months, what? She now had an income on which she could live. The world appeared to her as a pallid waste. What had happened to her? Only a week ago she had enjoyed a meeting of the women’s club. But—had she enjoyed it? Could the paltry satisfaction of discussing world affairs with others, no wiser than herself, be called enjoyment? She remembered expressions of enjoyment she had caught on the faces of Piers, Pheasant, Renny, and even Finch. She thought of Eden’s joy in certain things. She remembered the joy she had had in his poetry. She felt that she had had a wide emotional experience in her life. She felt, with a sudden pang, that her response to it, after the first rush of feeling, had been Puritanical and prudish!
For the first time in her life she directed sneering thoughts towards herself. In her life at Jalna she had always been considering whether or not things were congenial to her. When she had married Renny she had known exactly what life, there, was. At the time of her marriage the thought of changing that life or of altering Renny’s habits had not even occurred to her. She had rushed into his arms her own outspread, but after the first embraces she had held him from her scrutinising him, being only too ready to see his faults... And Wakefield! From feeling tenderness toward him, she had come to feel resentment, and why? Because Renny had still continued to care for him as he had done before their marriage. And the servants! Why had she allowed their eccentricities to cloud her day? The leopard could no more change his spots than the Wragges their habits. All her life she had extolled the virtue of moderation, self-control. Yet she had plunged, with never a backward glance, into a family where there was little of either.
If he had not given her more of his time, why had she not gone in search of him as Pheasant went in search of Piers? Why had she not followed him to his stables and stood by his side dumb in admiration of the beauties of his beasts? If her clothes had smelled of the stables as well as his perhaps she would have become impervious to that odour. If she had tramped about with him in the mud she might not have counted his muddy footsteps on the rug. Good God, tho
se same rugs had been lying on the floors of Jalna before she was born! Mrs. Wragge, or others of her sort, had cracked the glazing on the dishes years ago. Why try to remedy it? What matter if Renny threw burnt matches on the floor or old Ben napped on her silk bedspread or Mooey threw her talcum on his head? Surely she was not such a fool as to expect her life with Renny to pass in an unbroken rhythm of joy! She could not expect continued intimate contact with a soul so aloof and shy as his. “For he is of finer stuff than I,” she thought in her heart.
If only she might live the past year over again! Her discipline of herself would have produced some richer fruit than a trip round the world with Miss Archer and the Cards. Why could not she and Renny give shapely expression to the best that was in them? What were his thoughts about it all? His brief letters told her nothing, but then she had heard him say that he had never written a letter of more than six lines in his life. And she had never told him that she considered a separation in so many words. It was possible that he thought that she had gone away in anger because of what he had said of her share in the killing of Barney. He had spoken bitterly, far too tragically, she had thought, for any man to speak of the death of a dog. But he was like that, and she had known he was like that and she should have comforted him. If one were to get on with him, one must bear with him and comfort him, for his blood was three-fourths Celtic. As against this, hers was Anglo-Saxon with a strong Teutonic strain.
In the midst of her regrets came the thought that perhaps it was well that she had cast loose from Jalna when she did and had come to the ordered domesticity of her aunt’s house. From here she was able to look back on the Whiteoaks and see them as she never could in their midst. During all these weeks she had been dreaming, imagining that she could find tranquillity in sinking back into the subdued pattern of her old life. Now she was broad awake. That pattern appeared to her not only subdued but colourless, its background flimsy.
The Jalna Saga – Deluxe Edition: All Sixteen Books of the Enduring Classic Series & The Biography of Mazo de la Roche Page 283
