Gazing at it without admiration he replied, “God forbid.”
“God forbids lots of things, doesn’t He?” said Mary.
“what I mean is that I don’t like the style of this house — its architecture. It’s a new house, built to take the place of a fine old house that once stood here. It was burnt to the ground — do you remember?”
“Oh, yes, and Uncle Finch built this new one. It’s pretty.” She saw the large picture window in the living room and, looking out of it, a woman wearing a white pullover.
“That’s Sylvia,” said Mary. “Must we go in?”
She was shy, but Sylvia Whiteoak came out to meet them. Mary had a strange feeling, an uncomfortable feeling about this new wife of Finch’s, possibly because she herself was so patently shy. Also she had heard it said that Sylvia had once suffered a “bad nervous breakdown.” Mary did not at all like the thought of that. It was mysterious, and Mary half-expected to see Sylvia come to pieces before her very eyes. Also Mary was becoming colder and hungrier. Much as she liked to be with Renny, she almost wished the tour were over.
He was telling Sylvia about it. “You are the third on our list,” he was saying. “I picked Mary up at her own home. First we visited Jalna. Next the Fox Farm.”
“How are Humphrey and Patience?” said Sylvia. “I like them both so much.”
Even that simple remark made Sylvia seem strange to Mary. You did not say you liked or disliked anybody in the family. They were a part of it, so you neither liked nor disliked them. They were just there.
“You are the third on our list,” repeated Renny, not noticing her remark. “After you we shall call at the Rectory — then to Piers’s in time for Mary’s lunch.” Mary wondered if that time would ever come. Her little cold hand lay acquiescent in Renny’s. She curled and uncurled her toes against the damp sodden soles of her shoes.
“How interesting,” said Sylvia in her pleasant Irish voice. “But what is the object of the tour?”
“It’s to make Mary conscious of the connection — the family bond that — well, you know what I mean. She goes to each of our houses in turn. She sees some of the family in every one of them. It gives her a feeling of what we are to each other.”
For the first time Mary spoke up. “It’s a tour,” she said.
“Now I understand,” said Sylvia, “and I’m proud to be included, even though Finch is not here. Won’t you come in and have a drink? I can make a quite good cocktail.”
Renny looked at his wristwatch. “It’s half-past eleven. Too early for a cocktail. But I shouldn’t mind a small glass of sherry, if you have it.”
Inside the music room that was dominated by the concert grand piano, Sylvia brought sherry in a plum-coloured glass decanter. The window was so large that the newly awakened trees crowded almost into the room. Mary saw how one maple tree had young green leaves and a kind of diminutive bloom, while the tender leaves of another were of a strange brownish shade, but in time they would be green.
Sylvia was holding a box of chocolates in front of Mary. She took one but, when she bit into it, discovered that the filling was marzipan. This she disliked above all flavours. It made her feel positively ill, yet she had to swallow the morsel she had bitten off.
“I had a letter from Finch this morning,” Sylvia was saying. “His tour is nearly over and I’m sure he will be thankful. These tours are so tiring!”
They are indeed, thought Mary. She too would be thankful when her tour was over. She kept the sweet hidden in her hand. She could feel her palm getting sticky from the melted chocolate. She wondered what she could do to be rid of it.
“Do have another,” Sylvia was urging her.
“No, thank you.”
“But surely you can eat two chocolates!”
“Of course, she can,” said Renny. He took one from the box and put it into Mary’s hand. She bit into it and it was marzipan.
“Thanks,” she murmured and might have added “for nothing.”
She sat, holding the two chocolates in her two hands, while Sylvia and Renny sipped sherry and ate biscuits. At last, in desperation, she asked, “May I go to the bathroom, please?”
“I’ll show you where it is,” said Sylvia.
“I know.” Mary thought of how she had watched this house being built, before ever Sylvia had married Uncle Finch and come there to live. In the bathroom she put the two chocolates into the lavatory and turned the handle. A great rush of water swept them away. Not a decent little rush such as came at home, when you turned the handle, but a cataract like Niagara that swept the chocolates out of sight forever. But Mary’s palms were still sticky from them. She wiped her hands on a white damask towel and was troubled to see the brown stains left on it. These she folded out of sight and trotted back to the music room.
When Sylvia and Renny were left alone she said, “what a shy little thing Mary is! It’s a wonder, with three older brothers. One would expect her to be forward.”
“She’s very like her paternal grandmother. She’s named for her. She came as governess to my sister Meg and me. Then she married my father.”
“I want so much to be friends with the children of the family,” said Sylvia.
“There are only two. This one and Finch’s boy, but before long Patience will make her addition to the tribe.”
“Finch’s boy.… Tell me about Dennis. I did not see much of him in the Easter holidays. Finch and I were busy settling in, and Dennis seemed always to be off about his own affairs. He’s not a very friendly child. Is he shy too?”
“Quite the reverse. A self-possessed little fellow — small for his age. He’ll be fourteen next December and looks eleven.”
“He has no resemblance to Finch.” Sylvia spoke wistfully. If the boy had been like Finch she was sure she would have understood him — sure that he would have been easy to make friends with. Finch was such a friendly soul. Finch reached out toward people.
“Unfortunately Dennis takes after his mother,” Renny said cheerfully. “She was a bit of a devil. You’ll make Finch happy. She only made him miserable.”
Mary had returned to the room. She overheard these last words, from the strange talk of grown-ups, from which she shrank. Sylvia now took her hand and said:
“You do like me, don’t you?”
Mary despairingly searched her mind for an answer.
“I like youso much,” went on Sylvia.
She was at it again, talking about things that Mary preferred to keep private. She looked into Sylvia’s lovely pale face and murmured, “I think I must be going. Thanks for the nice chocolates.”
“Have another.”
Mary drew back from the proffered box.
“Better not,” said Renny. “It’s her lunchtime. But first we must go to my sister’s. We’re making the rounds, Mary and I.”
“Is she walking all the way?”
“A walk like this is nothing to her, is it, Mary?”
“Oh, no,” said Mary. “Are we going now?”
Sylvia kissed her and soon they were outdoors again.
Striding along the path Renny remarked, “That’s one of these newfangled houses. All very well, if you’ve never lived in anything better.”
“I’d not like to live there,” Mary said stoutly. “I’d rather live at home.”
“Or at Jalna,” he suggested.
She agreed with an emphatic nod. She was suddenly happy. The wind had ceased, the sun come out warm and almost spring-like. Suddenly on a mound a cluster of trilliums rose out of the wet earth, their white blooms held up like chalices, as though they had that instant sprung up from pure joy.
Renny and Mary stood looking down at them.
“You know better than to pick, don’t you?” he said.
“I’ve known that all my life.” She was proud of her knowledge of growing things. “It kills the bulb.… Is Sylvia Dennis’s stepmother?”
“Yes.”
“I thought stepmothers were cruel.”
&nb
sp; “Nonsense. I myself had a stepmother, and a very sweet woman she was.”
“Does Dennis like her?”
“He will when he gets used to her.”
Mary was thankful when one of the farm wagons from Jalna overtook them and they rumbled in it, behind the two stout percherons, and were deposited at the gate of the Rectory — which, behind its tall greening hedge, looked the proper cozy setting for Auntie Meg. She met them and enfolded them in a warm embrace. She was having a cup of tea from a tray in the living room and at once brought two extra cups and poured some for each of them.
“And I have some thin slices of fruit loaf — really nice and fresh, with good raisins in it that you might like. You know how it is with me. I eat scarcely anything at table but must have a little snack now and again to keep me going. This is really the first food I’ve had today.”
“I know what you are about meals,” Renny said sympathetically. “It’s a wonder you don’t starve. Mary and I are due for lunch in a short while, so we don’t need anything to eat now but we’ll gladly drink a cup of tea with you.”
Mary was hungrily eyeing the slices of fruit loaf but she politely began to sip her tea. Renny was explaining to his sister the reason for the tour, while she, without seeming to do so, was sweeping clean the tray. Every now and then she would smile at Mary, a smile of such peculiar sweetness that the little girl forgot how hungry she was and how wet were her feet.
Renny, drinking a second cup of tea, was saying, “With the centenary of Jalna coming next year, I thought it a good thing to give the youngest of the family an idea of what it means to us.”
“You couldn’t do a better thing,” said Meg. “Modern times are so strange. One can’t be sure what children are thinking. One must guide them as best one can.”
Renny spoke firmly to the child. “Tell Auntie Meg what you know about the centenary at Jalna.”
With a slight quaver in her voice Mary answered, “Everybody’s got to come.”
Meg gave a pleased smile. “And who is everybody?” she asked, helping herself to another slice of fruit loaf.
“Everybody in the family.”
Meg now said, in the dictatorial tone of someone hearing the Catechism, “Name them.”
“All the ones that live — that live — ”
“Convenient.” Renny supplied the word.
“Convenient,” Mary said with a pleased smile at her aunt, who, taking another large bite of fruit loaf, mumbled through it:
“And who comes from a distance?”
“My brother and Uncle Wakefield and Roma.”
“Isn’t she clever?” exclaimed Renny. “She knows everything.”
“It would be nice,” said Meg, “if we could celebrate the centenary by a wedding. Adeline’s, for example.”
“It would indeed, but whom is she to marry?”
“There’s that dear boy, Maurice, who loves her to distraction and always has. How would you like to see your favourite brother married to Adeline, Mary?”
“I have no favourites,” said Mary. “My brothers are all just men.”
“I know, dear,” Meg spoke patiently, “but you must have a man for a wedding. Whom would you choose for a bridegroom — a fairy prince — for Adeline?”
“Mr. Fitzturgis,” said Mary promptly.
Renny and Meg groaned in unison. They had unhappy memories of Adeline’s engagement to the Irishman. Renny took some credit to himself that it had been broken off.
At that moment the Rector entered the room. He had a genial greeting for the two visitors and a look that was half-admiring, half-reproachful for his wife. They had been elderly widow and widower when they had married. He still had not grown accustomed to encountering her and her relatives always about the house, and he deplored her habit of frequent little lunches from trays.
“She never eats a proper meal,” he said to Renny.
“She never has. Yet she thrives. See how plump she is, while I, who eat like a horse at table, am thin as a rail.”
“what is a rail?” asked Mary.
“A rail,” observed the Rector, “is a kind of water bird — rather rangy and thin.” He went and opened a window, exclaiming, “How stuffy it is in here!” During the years after the death of his first wife he had lived in a pleasurable draft from open windows; now in his second marriage he was always complaining of the stuffiness of the rooms.
This open window affected Meg and Renny not at all, but it was right at Mary’s back. She grew colder and colder. Shivering, she watched her aunt empty the teapot, demolish the last currant from the fruit loaf; heard her uncle and the Rector discussing the lateness of the season; she thought of the different houses she had visited that morning and longed for home.
At last they were on their way there. Holding tightly to Renny’s hand, getting out of the path of motor cars, every yard of the way familiar to her, her blood moved more quickly, her spirits rose. She inquired:
“Uncle Renny, why do some ladies get fat?”
“It’s the life they lead.”
“Does the life they lead make them get fat in different parts of them?”
“It certainly does.”
“Auntie Meg is fat all over.”
“She certainly is.”
“But Patience is fat only in her tummy. Why?”
“Ask your mother.”
“Don’t you know?”
“It’s none of my business.”
“Do you always mind your own business?”
“I try.” After a little he said, “I hope you’re not tired or cold or hungry.”
“Oh, no. I’m all right.” But he could feel that she was lagging.
“Good girl,” he said, and to encourage her began to sing, in a not particularly tuneful voice, an old song he had learned from his maternal grandfather, a Scottish doctor:
Oh, hame came oor guid man at eve,
And hame came he,
And there he spied a saddle-horse
Whaur nae horse should be.
“And hoo came this horse here?
And whase can he be?
And hoo came this horse here
Wi’oot the leave o’ me?”
“Horse?” quoth she.
“Aye, horse,” quoth he …
“Tis but a bonny milch coo
My mither sent to me.”
“Milch coo!” quoth he.
“Aye, milch coo,” quoth she …
“But saddles upon much coos
Never did I see.”
By the time he had finished the song they had arrived at his brother’s house. The wicket gate stood invitingly open, the fox terrier Biddy came in rapture to meet them, and Piers Whiteoak opened the door.
“We’re holding back lunch for you,” he said to Renny. “I suppose you’ll stay. Have you any idea what time it is?”
“To tell the truth I haven’t. Mary and I have been on a tour. Tell Daddy about it, Mary.”
Seated on Piers’s knee, the warmth from his robust body reaching out to comfort her little thin one, the beam from his fresh-coloured face encouraging her, she could think of nothing to say but — “We saw all the family.”
“Well,” said Piers, “there’s nothing very new about that, is there?”
“Oh, but we saw them in a different way,” said Renny. “In the past we took it for granted that our kindred was the most important thing in the world for us. Now the youngsters must be taught.”
“what about Archer?” asked Piers.
“That boy’s an oddity — but, beneath his oddities, he’s a Whiteoak all right.”
Piers grunted. He took off his daughter’s shoes and socks and held her little cold feet in his warm hands. “So you visited all the family houses,” he said to her.
“Yes, every one.”
“And which do you like best? I mean including our own home.”
Certainly Piers expected her to choose her own, but at once she answered — “Jalna.”
Renny gave a
delighted grin. “There,” he exclaimed, “she chooses Jalna! I’ve explained to her about its centenary. Now, Mary” — he looked at her intently out of his dark eyes — “tell us why you like Jalna best.”
Without hesitation, she answered, “Because it has television.”
Crestfallen, the brothers stared at her in silence a moment, then broke into a shout of laughter.
Piers’s wife, Pheasant, setting a platter of lamb chops on the table, heard this last. “There’s a modern child for you,” she said, and added wistfully — “when I was a child, how romantic Jalna seemed to me! All the family who lived there were glamorous.”
“Even me?” Piers asked flirtatiously.
“Even you.”
After twenty-seven years of marriage, they still were lover-like.
While they were enjoying the lamb chops a persistent ringing came from the telephone. Piers answered it and, returning to the table, said, “It was from Jalna. Alayne, wanting to know if you were here and why you had not sent word. She sounded a bit annoyed.”
“By George, I forgot.”
For a moment Renny was subdued, but soon his naturally good spirits were restored. He liked being with Pheasant and Piers. The brothers had many interests in common: the livestock, the farm with its orchards and small fruits. Since Renny’s unprecedented success with the racehorse, East Wind, Piers had troubled his head less and less about being in debt to him for the rent of the farmlands. Renny was a generous elder brother. If he had money on hand for his needs, he gave little thought to what was owing him. On the other hand he had not been scrupulous, when he was hard up, in days past, about acquiring the wherewithal from his wife’s private means or from his brother Finch who had inherited a fortune from his grandmother.
Seated beside her brown-eyed, brown-haired mother, Mary dallied with the hot food on her plate. So long had she gone hungry, she had lost appetite. Now that she was warm and no longer straining to keep up with Renny’s strides on the wet paths, the windy road, she could look back on the tour with pride and even pleasure.
“You should have heard us singing as we came down the road,” Renny was saying. “Do you remember that old song, Piers?” and he sang:
Oh, hame came oor guid man at eve,
The Jalna Saga – Deluxe Edition: All Sixteen Books of the Enduring Classic Series & The Biography of Mazo de la Roche Page 511
