“It is a serious thing you’re proposing, Wake. You’re proposing to dedicate yourself to a girl who may have quite different ideas for her future in her head.”
Wakefield answered eagerly—“But our ideas are the same on almost every subject. I’ve purposely brought up different test questions, and it’s amazing how our ideas fit in.”
“But don’t you think you could offer her more if you went in for a profession?”
“There you’re wrong!” cried Wakefield. “Pauline hates city life. She’d pine away without her foxes and her fields. She is far more suited to the life we lead than—well, Alayne, for instance.”
Renny got to his feet, and the spaniels who had been waiting outside the door for him, began to scratch on it and whine. He said:
“Very well. Take your year. But remember, you must do some reading when you have the time. And remember, too, that you’re only seventeen and that there are a good many girls in the world.”
“But only one for me!” He gripped Renny’s arm. “Look here, you won’t let anyone know about Pauline, will you?”
“Not a soul.”
There was strong opposition from the older members of the family when that evening they were told that Wakefield was leaving school for a year. There was all the more opposition as there had been no conclave to discuss the proposal. Renny announced his decision in a matter-of-fact tone, just as Augusta, Nicholas, Ernest, and Piers were settling down to a game of cards. Alayne was buried in a book of essays and Pheasant had Mooey on her knee, reading him the story of Bluebeard. Wake was at the fox farm, and Finch had gone into town to consult his agent about the proposed tour. The parrot Boney was sitting muffled on his perch. The lamps were lit. It was the first cold evening and the crackling fire was agreeable, as was that sense of shut-in-ness, even imper-viousness, which the Whiteoaks had the power of creating, as though by the united beating of their hearts they built a wall around them.
Augusta, Nicholas, and Ernest laid down their cards with one accord: Piers, on the other hand, examined those he held with apparent concentration.
“It is nothing short of ridiculous,” boomed Augusta, “for that child to be allowed to say whether or no he will go to University.”
“Egad! It’s not the way we were brought up,” said Nicholas.
“Mamma,” declared Ernest, “would have taken a stick to one of us if we had ventured such a proposal. A whelp like you!’ she would have shouted, and, as like as not, drawn blood from us. And serve us right!”
At his words a vision of the old woman came to them as they sat close together in the room where, for seventy-five years, she had played cards, supped tea, gossiped, wrangled, and domineered over her descendants. They saw her, in her beribboned cap, her purple velvet tea gown, her shapely old hands flashing with rings, her teeth prominent in a grin or getting out of her control and being noisily sucked back into position, her eyes bright with the desire to draw the full savour from life. And, as though their vision of her had produced the sound of her harsh old voice in Boney’s ears, he reared himself on his perch, flapped his wings and screamed:
“Shaitan! Shaitan ka batka! Chore! Chore!”
As his wings sank to his sides, feathers fell from beneath them and settled slowly to the floor.
“It beats all,” said Nicholas, “how he understands. He knew we were talking of her—”
“And it made him swear,” added Piers, throwing down his cards. “Now, if you don’t mind my saying so, I think you’re quite wrong about Gran’s attitude toward Wake’s leaving school. I think she’d look on it as a good idea to let him develop physically, and not rush him through ‘Varsity.”
Alayne spoke for the first time. “Wakefield never grew out of his delicacy until he went to school,” she said, in her cool voice.
“And—mark my words,” said Nicholas, “if he leaves it for a year he’ll never go back. That’s just what you did, Piers.”
“Have I ever regretted it?” asked Piers.
“That’s quite beside the mark. You are an outdoor fellow. Wakefield would repay a classical education. I have had dreams of sending him to Oxford, though that seems hopeless now.”
“Oxford would unfit him for life here,” said Piers.
“Did it unfit my brother and me?” demanded Ernest truculently.
Piers’s only answer was a grin.
Renny said—“Well, I have promised him a year off, and I can’t see that it will do him any harm. If I forced him to go back now he would only be dissatisfied and unhappy.”
“In my opinion it’s a great, great pity,” said Alayne.
Renny looked at her without seeming to see her, but he added:
“It may be a pity in one way, but in another it will be quite a relief. I mean, in regard to expense.”
Ernest said, irritably—“How different things are from when we were young! Why, there seemed to be money for everything. I really can’t see where it’s all gone to.”
“My father’s brother,” put in Nicholas, “spent many years in India, and I’ve often heard my father tell how, when he went back to England, he used to send his linen to India to be laundered, for they could not do it in England to please him.”
“There’s a very different spirit nowadays,” said Ernest.
“All the way to India! How ridiculous!” said Alayne.
“There was nothing ridiculous about it,” answered Nicholas. “My uncle wanted his washing properly done, and he did not mind trouble or expense.”
“That’s what I say,” added Ernest. “It’s the spirit of thoroughness.”
Augusta observed—“One must accommodate oneself to different times. I economise in every possible way. I used to keep two gardeners, now I keep one—and him on half time. I do a good deal myself, and it’s not easy for a woman of my years. I spend my evenings gathering snails and slugs. I peer about the garden with an electric torch. One night I had a flowerpot filled with them and I covered it with a saucer and set it in the conservatory for the maid to get in the morning, as I always do. But I quite forgot to salt them down and the consequence was that they pushed the saucer aside and, when I came down in the morning, there was not a plant or a pane of glass without its snail or slug.”
“I don’t see what that has to do with the point we are discussing,” observed Nicholas.
“It has just as much as sending laundry to India has,” returned Augusta.
“I should like to know,” asked Ernest, “how I should have done my Annotation of Shakespeare if I had not been to University?”
Alayne shut her book sharply and rose to her feet. This was one of the moments when she could not endure them. They had no reason in them—only a devouring instinct.
“I hear Baby crying,” she said. “I must go up to her.”
“I’ll go,” offered Pheasant. “I must take Mooey to bed.”
Mooey wriggled on to his backbone. “No, no, I don’t want to go to bed! I want to hear another story!”
“Bluebeard is quite enough for tonight, darling.”
“But it frightens me,” objected the little boy. “I don’t like all those bloody heads hanging in a row.”
“But you said, just a few minutes ago, that you loved them!”
“I know, but that wasn’t bedtime. I don’t like to think of them hanging in the cupboard in a row.”
Piers said—“I’ll hang yours up beside them if you don’t go along!”
Mooey reluctantly slid to his feet, his picture-book in his hand. He gazed fascinated at the heads of Bluebeard’s wives for a moment before he resignedly began the round of kissing everyone good night.
Alayne said to Pheasant—“Thanks so much. But I think I had better go.”
When the two young women and the child were gone, Piers asked:
“Can’t we get on with the game now? It’s all settled about Wake, isn’t it, Renny?”
Renny nodded, with a sombre look at the faces surrounding him.
“You don�
��t look any too well pleased about it yourself,” observed Nicholas.
“I don’t pretend to be pleased, but I agree that he’s doing the right thing.”
Nicholas picked up his cards. “Have it your own way,” he said, “but, mark my words, you’ll live to hear Wakefield reproach you for it.”
Ernest also took up his cards. “In any case,” he muttered, “we weren’t consulted about it.”
Augusta arranged hers into the different suits. She gave a preliminary offended look at her opponents, a preliminary admonishing look at Piers, her partner, and, in a deep voice, made her bid.
Renny sat motionless, his long legs, encased in grey woollen stockings, stretched toward the fire. On its glowing bed he saw changeful pictures. They formed themselves, evoked by subconscious thought, into shapes delightful, sensual, repellent, flowing one upon another in fiery intimacy. He was in a state independent of happiness or unhappiness, isolated, aloof, acquiescent.
The reflection of his head and shoulders, coloured by firelight, was thrown on the polished door of a mahogany cabinet. The parrot sat gazing for a long time at this reflection, then, spreading its wings, flew against the door and sought to cling there, scratching with its claws and giving angry cries.
“Whatever is exciting Boney?” asked Augusta, looking over her shoulder.
“He knows there is sugar for him in the cabinet,” said Ernest.
Renny bent and picked up the bird, which now panted, with outstretched wings, on the floor, and lifted it to his shoulder. He stroked its bright plumage and, after an angry cry of “Shaitan! Shaitan ka batka!” it nestled against his cheek, stretching its ruffled neck to peer into his features, with an air of almost sinister sagacity.
XIII
CARE FLIES FROM THE LAD THAT IS MERRY
STRENGTH AND HAPPINESS flowed in on Wakefield in the days that followed. Sunny noon succeeded frosty morning. The sunny hours surrendered themselves to dusk and moonlit night. In the evenings, tired out from his work, he changed into flannels and went through the wood to the fox farm. Sometimes he heard the foxes barking as he neared the house. The feeble electric light burning in the hall beckoned him. When he was inside, sitting close to Pauline in the living room, his eyes laughed into hers. He told her of all he had been doing that day, of how he had made a suggestion to Piers that Piers had been glad to follow, of how Renny had said that he was getting to be a good judge of a horse.
Sometimes Clara Lebraux came in and sat with them but she never stayed long. She went back to her book in the dining room and thought with astonishment—“My little girl has grown up. That boy loves her.” The thought of a connection with the Whiteoaks by a possible marriage of Pauline and Wakefield pleased her.
Pauline looked forward all day to her evenings with Wakefield. The thought of his coming, the comfort of his presence, helped to ease the pain of her longing for Renny. She scarcely saw him now, for she hid when she heard his voice, and once, when he came while her mother was out, she did not answer the door. A more subtle woman than Clara would have noticed that Pauline paled or flushed when Renny’s name was mentioned, that she shrank from talking about him. Clara saw only life as it came to her hour by hour.
Sometimes when Wakefield’s profile was turned toward Pauline and she saw, not his large luminous eyes or his sensitive mouth, but the curve of his nose, the sweep of his nostril and jaw becoming accentuated as he developed, she saw in him a resemblance to Renny that stirred her to her depths. Then when he turned his face to her he found her looking at him so intently that he was filled with a sudden exhilaration. He longed to say something that would charm her, fill her with wonder, but all his glibness had left him.
Piers paid him at noon on Saturdays, like any other of the labourers, and Renny paid him when he remembered to. He went from one to the other of them, sometimes so tired that he could hardly walk, but determined to prove himself as good a man as any.
On Saturday afternoon was his reward. Then he took the old car and drove into town. He was incorrigibly extravagant and spent like water what he had earned by the sweat of his brow. He bought ties to make himself look handsome. Ordinary chocolates were not good enough to take Pauline. He must search the shops for the most gay and beribboned. If roses were on sale at a special price, he would have none of them but bought tight little made-up nosegays that wilted the next day. He was so gay and happy in the house that everyone loved him. The children laughed in anticipation when they saw him coming.
One evening he and Pauline took their tea in a picnic basket to a quiet spot on the lakeshore. Wakefield built a fire and boiled their kettle over it. While he gathered the driftwood Pauline spread the cloth and set out the sandwiches and cakes. The lake lay quiet except for an occasional ruffling. It spread silken to the blue horizon. The sun was slipping down among a cluster of tulip-tinted clouds which the tranquil surface of the water reflected in duskier tones.
As Wakefield bent to collect the driftwood he longed to be alone with Pauline on some tropic island where he might work for her with no thought but to provide them with food and shelter. Where they would lie at night in their hut of reeds, listening to the sweep of the surf… Now they had this hour of love and isolation, but how soon it would be over! How soon they would be apart in the darkness!
He lighted the fire on the stones. The flames slyly licked the sides of the kettle. Pauline put a sandwich into his hand.
“How happy you look!” she exclaimed.
“I am happy—but I am unhappy too.”
“I am the same.”
“Isn’t it wonderful that we should feel alike?”
He was on the watch for an answer in her eyes, but she lay looking out across the lake, only now and again giving him a swift, half-pleading glance.
He thought to himself—“I am a man in love. At first there was my grandmother at one end of the family, and me at the extreme other end. An old, old woman and a delicate little boy. And now Gran is in her grave and there are new little boys in the family and I am a man—as good as any of them—and I am in love. My love is as wide and deep as this lake. Nothing can ever change it.”
Pauline was sifting the sand through her fingers. He took them in his and kissed them one by one. He thought that his love was as deep and wide as the sea. Nothing could change it.
Just as the sun sank, a flock of wild ducks appeared skimming above the surface of the water with outstretched necks and beating wings. There was a metallic sheen on their heads. They moved in swift, unpremeditated unity.
“Look! Aren’t they adorable things?” cried Pauline.
He held her hand close. He wished that he and Pauline were as free as these wild birds flying with their mates. But while they watched, the explosion of a gun startled them. The V-shaped formation of the ducks was broken. They were scattered like flying leaves. Another shot was fired, and those of the flock that were left strained forward with a frantic beating of the wings, striving, as they did so, to form once more the pattern of their flight.
The rosy surface of the lake was broken by the fluttering of those which were dying. Renny’s spaniels rushed from the undergrowth and swam out into the lake. He followed them gun in hand to the shore.
Pauline stood tense as the dogs carried the ducks to his feet and laid there—what, a moment before, had moved so free and strong. She saw Renny as cruel, relentless, and, when he came toward her with a triumphant smile, she turned to Wakefield, a look of pain in her eyes.
XIV
WAKEFIELD AND PIERS
IT WAS November but the sun had a beneficent warmth in it. Piers and Wakefield, heading in barrels of apples in front of the stone apple-house where they had been stored, had thrown off their coats and were working in the jerseys which revealed Piers’s muscular shoulders and Wakefield’s slender body. The trees were leafless, so that they had the full benefit of the sun, and from a large heap of discarded apples a scent delicious and spicy rose to their nostrils. Some white pullets hovered about the appl
es, now and then leaving the mark of a sharp beak in a Northern Spy or pippin, while a guinea fowl circled nervously about the group.
“Are these all right, Piers?” asked Wakefield, indicating some barrels he was about to head in.
Piers came and looked them over. “They’ll do,” he said approvingly.
Wakefield took up his hammer and began vigorously to hammer down the top. Piers looked at him curiously, wondering how his transparent affair with Pauline was progressing.
“You’ll be a young ass,” he said, not unkindly, “if you get tangled up with a girl at this stage of your life.”
Wakefield looked up at him innocently.
“What do you mean—tangled up?” he asked.
“Well, any silly boy-and-girl engagement.”
“I suppose you didn’t consider your engagement to Pheasant a silly boy-and-girl affair.”
“She was seventeen and I was twenty. I was a man. Times were different.”
“Don’t worry about me,” returned Wakefield nonchalantly.
“But you are fond of Pauline, aren’t you?”
“Oh, I like her very well.” What would Piers say if he knew that Pauline had promised to wear a ring—when he could get one for her!
Piers said—“It would be a good idea, Wake, if you would leave your wages with me and I would save them for you. You’re not used to handling much money, you know, and I have an idea that you’re frittering it away.”
“No, I’m not,” said Wakefield earnestly. “I pinch every penny before I spend it, I assure you.”
Young liar, thought Piers, but he returned to his own barrel.
After a little he asked carelessly—“Do you often see Renny at the fox farm?”
“Very seldom. I don’t think he goes there often.”
“Well, it’s a good thing if he doesn’t. There was gossip about him and Mrs. Lebraux.”
“What would the gossips do without us?”
“Renny doesn’t like being gossiped about, though.”
The Jalna Saga – Deluxe Edition: All Sixteen Books of the Enduring Classic Series & The Biography of Mazo de la Roche Page 306
