“How lovely!” cried Gemmel.
“Oh. I’m so glad to be here!” cried Garda.
“Anything more you want?” asked Wakefield.
“Nothing more…. You’ve been so kind…. Thank you…. Goodbye … goodbye.”
An hour later, in their bedroom, Gemmel said to Garda: —
“I knew Molly would feel badly about Father but I’d no idea how badly. Did you ever see anyone cry so? I thought she’d die of her grief.”
XXX
FINCH AT HOME AGAIN
THE SCENE IN the car which carried Meg, Sarah, and Finch was very different. Maurice too was there, in the driver’s seat. During most of the drive he played the part of listener but the two women talked ceaselessly, pouring out the news to Finch and asking him a thousand questions. Finch too was eager and excited, glad to be home again after a considerable absence. Everything his eye rested on came to him with the brightness of familiarity. The scene seemed to offer itself for inspection and approval. The country seemed to say — “War has not really touched me yet. I’m young and unhurt.” His eyes rested on lake, on fields; now on Sarah’s face, now on Meg’s.
When they passed the gates of Jalna he wished he might have alighted from the car and gone into the house alone. He craned his neck to have a good view of it. There was not a soul in sight, not even horse or dog or circling pigeons. The house looked very quiet and a little remote.
When they reached Vaughanlands, Sarah almost dragged him out of the car.
“Hurry! Hurry!” she exclaimed. “Baby is dying to meet his papa!”
Baby’s papa felt suddenly shy. He was afraid he would not be enthusiastic enough to please Sarah. He stood with Maurice, inspecting a new collie.
“You think more of that dog than you do of your own son!” cried Sarah angrily.
Finch laughed. “Very well, show me the prodigy.” He followed her into the house.
Meg had already hurried upstairs as fast as her increasing weight would allow. She appeared on the landing, the infant in her arms. Sarah had him dressed in old-fashioned long robes, a mass of frills and fine tucks. He was pink-faced and fair.
“There!” cried Sarah delightedly. “Didn’t I tell you? He’s the image of you”
“Poor little devil,” said Finch. Gingerly he bent and kissed the tiny face. He sniffed the scent of talcum and warm flannel.
“He’s nice,” he said. “What did you say his name is?”
Meg gave him a warning look. He would have the girl in hysterics. “You’re impossible, Finch. You know quite well what his name is. Dennis Finch.”
Finch’s sensitive ear was afflicted. “The two don’t go well together,” he said, and he pronounced the name grievously, dwelling on the hissing sounds.
“I know,” said Sarah, “but he had to have both names. Names of the only two men I’ve loved.”
The only two! Finch thought of his dead friend, Arthur Leigh, her first husband, and of how he had loved Sarah. How could she be so cold to his memory! She read his thoughts.
“I don’t care,” she said. “It’s true. It’s true. It’s true.”
“Well, I loved him, anyway,” said Finch, “and I shall never forget him. I’d like to call the baby Dennis Arthur. Is he christened yet?”
“My God, no!” cried Sarah. “Do you think I would have him christened before you came? Everything is waiting for you and you spoil it all!”
“Now, you two mustn’t quarrel,” said Meg. “It’s disgraceful at a moment like this. Sarah is quite right about the names. Arthur wouldn’t be at all appropriate.”
“I want it,” said Finch stubbornly.
“Have it then! Have everything your own way. Oh, I have lived for this day! I have planned for it — dreamed of it!” She almost screamed these words, then went to her room and slammed the door behind her.
“Now you’ve upset her,” said Meg, patting the baby’s back. “She’s a terribly difficult girl.”
Finch fingered his son’s finery. “I’ll bet I was never decked out like this,” he said.
“No. You wore Piers’s old baby clothes. Now go and make it up with Sarah.”
“I don’t want to. I want to stay with you.” Like a boy he rubbed his cheek against her shoulder. The baby stared up at them out of opaque eyes.
This was just what Meg liked — to have one of her brothers clinging to her, in spite of his wife. Now that she came to think of it, she believed she hated all their wives. She cast Dennis Finch, or Dennis Arthur, or whatever his name was, on to the bed in the spare room and clasped Finch to her deep bosom.
“You are a naughty boy!” she said.
An infantile love for Meg welled up in him. He wanted to lie on her bosom, as the baby had done. He wanted to toddle by her side holding to her skirt. He wanted her to pay no attention to anyone but him. He stood rubbing his cheek against her shoulder while she brooded over him.
At last she pushed him away. “Now go and make it up with Sarah. I must take baby back to his cot and then see about lunch. I have a Swedish maid and I smell something burning.”
“I’ll look after the baby. I’ll carry him to Sarah.”
“That’s a good idea. Oh, how nice it is to have you back! All four brothers at home. If only Eden were here! Do you know, Finch, I can sometimes see him as he was at the last, leaning over the banister in that light blue dressing gown, watching me bring an eggnog up to him. He was so weak he’d lean hard on the banister — and that look in his eyes! But he’d smile.” Tears choked her.
“I remember.”
Why should she recall Eden at this moment! Finch pushed the thought of Eden from him when Meg left him. He refused to let the thought of death touch him. He stood motionless in the passage between his wife and his son, undecided what to do. Obscure physical feelings pressed in on him from both directions. What should he do next? Go to Sarah and try to reestablish their old relations or make them over, if possible, into something new? Go to that mysterious being in the spare room who seemed to be lying there sardonically viewing the parents that had given him life? It was settled for him by the sound of Sarah’s footsteps coming toward the door. He darted into the room with the child and knelt by the bed.
She came and looked in. She was one of those rare women who can make a scene, weep or scream, and immediately afterward look as smooth as a cat.
Full of self-protective duplicity, Finch knelt by the baby, gazing into its pink face.
“He’s a miracle,” he said.
“Then you really love him?”
“He’s yours and mine. Isn’t that enough?”
“Then why were you so detached when you first saw him? You asked his name and if he were christened, as though he were a stranger’s child.”
“Everything went out of my head. I felt bewildered. It was all so new and strange.”
He thought — “I’m acting. I’m insincere. But I can’t help it. Something new has got to come out of this.”
She knelt beside him. She was radiant. He saw how easy it was for her to forgive him — if only he would worship at her new shrine.
“You adore him, don’t you, Sarah?”
“I’m like a tigress with her young.” She laughed but she was in earnest.
“And I am nothing but the poor old tiger now, eh, Sarah?”
She gave him an absent-minded caress. “See his hands. He’ll play the piano too, with such hands. Do you really want to add Arthur to his names?”
“Not if you don’t.”
“I agree. Dennis Arthur Finch. I really believe it’s more euphonious.”
Lunch was over before Finch set out for Jalna. It had snowed all the night before and that morning the wind blew, heaping the snow in drifts. The walk would be too much for Sarah. A cap on his head and a muffler round his neck, Finch ran through the drifts across the lawn, leaped the fence, and found the path to Jalna.
He saw smoke rising from the chimney of the fox farm. The girls were settling in. He thought of the
four of them, each so different from the others! He had got to know Gemmel and Garda very well on the voyage but Althea remained a mystery. He had not exchanged a dozen remarks with her. She had so openly avoided him that he might well have taken offence, but she was like that with everyone, outside the family, her sisters said. He liked the thought of them in that house. He would go to see them with Wakefield or by himself.
Boyhood reached out to him from the snowy wood where pine needles lay scattered on the drifts. He felt almost miraculously isolated and free. In a sense he was more bound than ever, being the father of a child, yet he had a perverse, wild sense of freedom. Something had happened to him, had given a fresh glow to his day. The air through the pine trees was vibrant with this something. What had the child given him? Somehow it had given him freedom, he was persuaded of that. Sarah’s eyes had not that possessive look in them. Her attention was riveted on the child — a tigress with her young! Journeying toward her he had been filled with the same desolate fancies which her approaching nearness always brought, a sense of frightening loneliness. But now her emotions were focused on the child! Freedom ran through his thoughts like a wind through shocks of ruffled wheat. He hugged it to him like a fairy bride.
The snow was deep in the ravine and, as Renny one day had done, he struggled through it and up the other side. He found Wakefield waiting for him.
“I saw you coming,” he said.
Finch glanced at him sharply. Wake looked like a stranger, he thought. He had always envied Wakefield the light heart he carried but now he saw him as a man with bitterness in his breast. And a pale stoicism was in his face as though he had made up his mind to suffer no more.
“Why —” stammered Finch — “what’s the matter, Wake? You’ve something bad to tell me!”
“Bad enough. I can’t marry Molly.”
After he had spoken he stood with downcast eyes, looking at the snow. The wind swung round to the north and blew a cloud of powdery snow over them. The sun, which had been but well on its way up the heavens, was already beginning to decline. Finch put his arm about his brother’s shoulders and drew him along the path.
“What happened?” he asked.
Wakefield gave a harsh laugh.
“You ask me as though I could tell it all in a sentence! Well, I guess I have told it all. We can’t marry. That’s enough for me.”
“But why? For God’s sake, tell me why, Wake.”
Wakefield raised his eyes to Finch’s face. “I oughtn’t to tell you this, I suppose. But I can’t help it. Remember, it’s to go no further.”
“No need to tell me that.”
“We can’t marry because Renny is Molly’s father. Her mother was an Englishwoman — a Mrs. Dayborn — who helped school the horses at Jalna after the last war.”
Finch stood facing the wind, unable for a moment to realize the import of this statement. As Wakefield’s face was cold and set, Finch’s broke up into compassion and dismay. It was like touching something that had no feeling, to tighten his hand on Wake’s arm.
“Are you sure?” he asked.
“Yes. We’re all sure — those of us who know of it. There’s no use in your getting upset, Finch. The marriage is off. We’ve got to make a new life for ourselves. But at this moment the thing I most want to do is to go overseas and be killed.”
It was characteristic of Finch and a certain comfort to Wakefield that he asked no questions. He accepted the tragic truth about Molly’s parentage as something from the passionate past of their eldest brother which neither of them could make clear or change by a thousand questions and answers. He recalled certain remarks of Eden’s concerning an attachment between Renny and a girl who could do anything with a horse. He recalled how, on the night of his recital, when they were seated at a table in the restaurant, he had suddenly thought — “Why, Molly Griffith carries her head as Renny does, and her hair grows in a point like his!” He had been going to remark this but something had interrupted him. Now he said: —
“This is awful for you, Wake…. I wondered what was wrong but I never dreamed of anything so … so devastating. I don’t know what to say … I wish I could help you. I can see what it’s done to you. What does Renny feel?”
“Oh, he’s sorry.”
“Sorry! I should think you’d almost hate him.”
“I do.”
“There’s one thing, Wake. You have your belief. Your religion. You’re not like a fellow who has nothing spiritual for ballast.”
“I have nothing spiritual for ballast.”
Finch broke out excitedly, “But, look here, you can’t do that! You can’t throw aside your faith just when you need it more than you ever have! Now is your priest’s chance to help you. Go to him.”
“I have been and it’s no use. He was kind. He couldn’t have been kinder. But something inside me has gone hard and cold.”
“That will change.”
“I hope so.”
“Can you depend on him to keep it quiet?”
Wake opened his eyes and stared at Finch. “He is less likely to tell it than I.”
“How many know of it? At Jalna, I mean. Besides we three principals” — Wake gave a short laugh — “only Alayne and the uncles. They’ve been very kind. Especially Uncle Ernest…. Oh, I shall get over it, I suppose, but — just now — I want — what I said.”
They turned at the sharp crunch of footsteps in the snow and saw Renny approaching, followed by Merlin. The blind spaniel recognized Finch and jumped joyously about him but he was stiff from rheumatism.
Renny’s weather-beaten face now showed little sign of the stress and strain he had been through. Its decisive aquiline contours, its high colouring, gave it a kind of invincible sanguineness. He kissed Finch and exclaimed: —
“Hello! Back again! Well, it’s good to see you. You look well.”
He cast a quick glance from one brother to the other, obviously wondering what Finch thought of Wakefield’s changed looks and whether Wakefield had told him of the broken engagement.
Finch coloured under the glance but Wakefield was impassive. His eyes were fixed on a gap in the evergreens where, beyond the stables, he could see the snowy fields, fold upon fold, in white drifts. Renny put a hand on an arm of each and drew them toward the house.
“Come along in,” he urged, “the uncles are wanting to see you.”
Wakefield frowned and turned himself away. A strange antagonism filled him at the touch of Renny’s hand but Finch moved obediently at his elder’s side. They heard a shout and Piers came running toward them.
“Hi!” he shouted. “Wait for me!”
When he saw that they waited he slackened his steps and marched toward them with a military step. Finch was startled to see that he was in uniform. “He looks more than ever like Grandfather,” he thought. After shaking hands he said: —
“I didn’t know you were in training, Piers.”
“I have been, all the fall and winter.”
“Home Guard,” put in Renny tersely.
“Home Guard be damned!” said Piers. “I’m leaving for England in a fortnight.”
Renny could scarcely have looked more astonished if one of the pines in the ravine had lifted its roots and declared its intention of going to the war.
“But you can’t!” he exclaimed.
Piers opened his eyes wide. “I should like to know why!”
“Who will look after Jalna?”
Piers’s eyes became still more prominent. “Why should I be the one?”
“You always have stayed at home.”
“I know I have. I’ve stayed at home while the rest of you have gone out and done things. But — there’s a war on now! And I’m going to be first on the scene! Of course, it would have been a very nice arrangement for you to go off like a conqueror with Rags at your heels — Wake and Paris to get their wings and drop bombs on Berlin — Finch to do some sort of war work in London — and I wait here till I fight the Germans on the doorstep of J
alna! Thanks for nothing! I’m leaving with the next contingent!”
Renny’s face changed. He stood speechless, grinning at Piers’s pugnacity. Piers wheeled, turned, tramped up and down in the snow, he looked fine in his uniform. The window of the sitting room was thrown up and Ernest called out: —
“What’s all the excitement about? Come, Piers, and show yourself! Finch, my boy, your Uncle Nick and I are waiting to see you.”
XXXI
LEAVE-TAKINGS
IT WAS A time of such upheaval at Jalna that Piers’s going overseas was not such a shock to the household as might have been feared. It was not till he had actually departed that the full force of the blow was felt. Then it really was a blow. His going was so sudden, so inexorable, that nothing that might follow seemed impossible. Sometimes in the minds of the old uncles and Meg and Pheasant and Alayne, one disaster after another loomed as probable.
There had been so much to do before Piers sailed that there was little time for reflection. He was here, there, and everywhere, talking over the care of orchards and farmlands with his men, arranging for the future of his wife and sons in the event of his not returning, making his will — though he had little enough to leave. A family dinner party was given for him, the night before he left, at which he got drunk and made a very good speech.
Then suddenly he was gone! It was as though the sound of a bugle had died. It was as though there were a palpable rent in the fabric of Jalna. Whoever came or went, Piers had always been there. With his complexion as fresh as a spring morning, his eyes as blue as June skies, with the hardness of winter in his back and sinews, he had strode over the land throughout the seasons.
His uncles had placed him, in his uniform, beneath the portrait of his grandfather in his uniform. Piers’s health had been drunk, he had been wished Godspeed and been full of pride. Whiteoaks had gone out to fight for England throughout the centuries and why not he?
The Jalna Saga – Deluxe Edition: All Sixteen Books of the Enduring Classic Series & The Biography of Mazo de la Roche Page 391
