Mazo wavered.
Caroline looked Mazo firmly in the eyes.
“You are not to attempt it,” Caroline said. “It would ruin the story. It would be madness.”
“But twenty-five thousand dollars…” moaned Mazo.
“What is twenty-five thousand dollars?” Caroline demanded scornfully. “I won’t let you do it.”
Whiteoaks of Jalna, its ending unchanged, was serialized in the Atlantic Monthly.
When the Atlantic Monthly editor read the manuscript of Whiteoaks of Jalna he was jubilant. He thought the sequel was superior to the original. He felt Mazo’s abilities were increasing. When the editor at the Canadian branch of Macmillan read it, he called it a “stunning performance.”
Within two weeks of its publication in book form in 1929, Whiteoaks of Jalna was in second place on the national bestseller list in the United States. For Mazo the triumph was personal as well as literary. Her gratitude to Caroline was profound and lasting.
By April 4, 1928, the day Caroline turned fifty, Mazo and Caroline were talking of travelling abroad. At last they could see for themselves places they had only read about and imagined. At last they could get away from the glare of publicity in Toronto and just be themselves. By January 15, 1929, the day Mazo turned fifty, the pair were enjoying the summer-like temperatures of Italy.
Mazo and Caroline had embarked from New York City on the steamship Vulcania. Unfortunately, Mazo had to endure more publicity before she found blissful anonymity. Her American publishers, eager to make use of her presence to generate extra sales of Whiteoaks of Jalna, arranged an elaborate lunch on board the ship just before it left. Mazo was the guest of honour. The sixty-five invited guests included prominent journalists, representatives of the Literary Guild and the Book of the Month Club, and all the important book buyers in the city. After the lunch, a photographer from the New York Times took pictures of Mazo on the deck.
Mazo kept the photograph in which she was wearing a great bunch of violets and looking rather like a movie star. But that night in her stateroom she cast herself on her berth completely exhausted and burst into tears. Now I know how movie stars feel when they take an overdose of sleeping tablets and end all publicity! thought Mazo.
Fortunately, the thrill of her first Atlantic crossing soon lifted her spirits. Despite several days of seasickness, Mazo enjoyed the voyage. Mazo and Caroline spent six weeks in Naples and three months in Taormina, and then they took a slow boat to England. After a short stay in London, they moved to Devon, the ancient home of Grandpa Lundy’s paternal ancestors. Soon Mazo was writing a book-length biography of Bunty. Her mind turned to those painful days in Bronte.
Mazo felt as though Devon were protecting her. She felt happy and secure. But as she recalled those scenes in Canada, all else faded. Those scenes were her reality.
Writing and remembering brought back the pains in her head and neck, so once again Caroline did the actual writing when Mazo could not put pencil to paper. Mazo just spoke aloud the words that occurred to her. As the months passed, and Mazo and Caroline moved from one rented house to another in Devon, the book progressed. Finally, in October 1929, while the women were living in a splendid old farmhouse called Seckington, Portrait of a Dog was finished. The very same day, Mazo began a new novel: Finch’s Fortune. The new novel would be the third installment of the Jalna series.
Mazo wrote in Finch’s Fortune: “There they were, crowded into a taxi, making their way through the traffic of the London streets – Finch on one of the dropseats, almost dislocating his neck in the effort to see out of both windows at once. It was too unreal, seeing the places he had heard of so familiarly all his life. Westminster Bridge, the Houses of Parliament, Trafalgar Square, the lions, Buckingham Palace! They thundered at him like a series of explosions. It was too much. It was overwhelming.”
As she wrote these lines, she was using memories from the recent past, when she and Caroline arrived in England. Mazo’s trip to London and Devon became Finch’s trip to London and Devon, so Finch’s trip was like a documentary in some ways. But Mazo was also inventing.
In Finch’s Fortune, Finch Whiteoak turns twentyone and receives the enormous inheritance his grandmother has left him. Although Finch generously gives large amounts of money to Piers and Meg, offers money to Renny, and takes his uncles on a longed-for trip to England, the family still criticizes him. Yet Gran seems to have shown wisdom in leaving her money to Finch. Renny, the head of the household, is showing poor judgment. He is spending all his time in the stables, neglecting his wife Alayne, and refusing to advise Finch on how to invest his money.
Finch joins his uncles on their trip to England and there begins to see his family in better perspective. He also meets a distant cousin with whom he falls in love. But she seems to love someone else – Finch’s best friend. Finch suffers his second breakdown. Will he recover?
Mazo and her young adopted children, Esmée and René.
10
Children
Our little family of two suddenly had become four.
While Mazo was writing Finch’s Fortune, she and Caroline were enjoying themselves. They visited London several times and met fascinating people like Walter Allward, a Canadian sculptor who was working on a memorial for Vimy Ridge, the battle of the First World War in which many thousands of Canadians had been killed or wounded. They also went to see a Canadian actor, Raymond Massey who had a role in a play at the Savoy theatre. Massey introduced Mazo to other actors who were enthusiastic about the potential of Jalna as a play.>
Then in 1930 Mazo and Caroline took a four-month trip to North America to visit their old friends, relations, and acquaintances. They returned to England slowly, stopping in the Canary Islands, Casablanca, Algiers, Majorca, Naples, Taormina, Rome, Fiesole, and Paris. By the time they got back to Devon, Mazo had finished Finch’s Fortune, written several short stories, and begun a non-Jalna novel called Lark Ascending.
During these seemingly idyllic years of wandering and scribbling, Mazo and Caroline must have yearned for something more, for suddenly in 1931 they acquired two small children. The girl was about two-and-a-half years old, and the boy was about nine months. Mazo and Caroline named the girl “Esmée Verschoyle de la Roche.” They named the boy “René Richmond de la Roche.”
Where had the children come from? Whose children were they? Mazo and Caroline gave different information to different people, and some of the “information” was pure fiction. They never even told the children who they were.
Mazo told one person that the children had been left badly off by a dear friend of hers. She told another person that she and Caroline had met the children’s parents in Italy, that the father had died six months before the boy’s birth, and that the mother had died soon after the birth. Mazo told one person that the children’s parents had been killed in a car accident, and she told another that the parents had died of tuberculosis.
Some people speculated that Mazo was the birth mother of the children. Others speculated that Caroline was the birth mother. But, since (like most women of their day) Mazo and Caroline lied about their age, telling people they were younger than they were, no one except close relatives knew that both women were about fifty when the children were born. This fact makes their having given birth to either child very unlikely.
The whole truth has yet to be revealed, but a few more facts are known today. Recently Esmée (now Mrs. Rees) managed to obtain her birth and adoption certificates through a lawyer in England. Her birth certificate shows that Esmée’s original given-names were Margaret Elizabeth. It also shows that Esmée was born November 11, 1928 at Snug Cot, Selsea Avenue, Herne Bay. Herne Bay is a small town on the east coast of England in Kent County.
The full name of Esmée’s mother was Sybil Andrews Tester. The name of Esmée’s father is not given on the documents. The name Norah Andrews Tester appears on an appendix to the birth certificate. Presumably this is Sybil’s sister or mother.
A recent onl
ine search of public records in the United Kingdom indicates that a person named Sybil Andrews Tester was born about 1906 in Lancaster, Lancashire, England. This Sybil had an older sister named Norah Andrews Tester, born about 1903.
What of the other child that Mazo and Caroline adopted? Who was he? Unfortunately, all that is known is that he was born June 12, 1930 and that Mazo and Caroline always referred to him as Esmée’s natural brother. René died in 1984.
Were Esmée and René really brother and sister?
The children’s colouring differed. Esmée’s eyes were greyish blue, her eyelashes and eyebrows were dark, and her hair was the colour of pale honey. René’s eyes were brown and his hair was reddish gold. But the children do look alike in the black-and-white photographs of them taken when they were first adopted.
The children’s temperaments also differed. Esmée was lively, a little overbearing, and undemonstrative. René was gentle and affectionate. But birth order and different initial environments would help explain the children’s having different temperaments. Besides, most siblings do not look or act exactly alike.
Likely the children shared the same mother. Probably they also shared the same father.
In April 1931, Mazo and Caroline took the children to their Devon home, the farmhouse called Seckington. A few months later, the family left that house, which was too small and inconvenient, and moved to The Rectory in Hawkchurch Parish. The Rectory was a picturesque old dwelling with stone-mullioned windows arched like those of a cathedral. On the main floor there was a drawing room, dining room, and study. On the second floor there were three bedrooms, two dressing rooms, two nurseries, the bathroom, and a small room that Caroline used for typing. On the third floor there were bedrooms for the cook and the house parlourmaid.
The nurse – the woman who looked after the children – slept in the nursery. The man who worked as the gardener, chauffeur, and handyman slept in his own cottage.
Mazo and Caroline had begun to live an imitation of upper-class English life.
Mazo was not an acquisitive person, but Caroline wanted to live in a setting that suited their new circumstances. Caroline liked The Rectory. She felt it was a lovely, peaceful spot. While Mazo did her writing, Caroline had a wonderful time going around to the country auctions, buying furniture for the big old house.
Meanwhile the children spent most of their day with the staff. Charles Chant, the gardener/chauffeur/handyman, was a kind person who would seat the children on his shoulders while he marched along the garden paths. One of René’s first words was “Cha” for Chant. He called the cook “Coo-coo.” Both children shrieked with laughter as their nurse, or “nanny,” gave them their baths. They also enjoyed their hour or so after tea time with Mazo and Caroline, when all four danced to records on the gramophone. “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic” was a favourite.
Mazo watched from the window of her study at The Rectory. Nurse had put little Esmée and René out on the gravel sweep, where it was dry, to enjoy the morning air. Nurse had provided the children with toys for their amusement before leaving them, but they were not playing. They were content to stare up at the moving clouds and the rooks, blown like flying leaves across the sky.
The children were dressed alike in fawn-coloured woollen suits and caps. Esmée was sitting in the chair. René occupied the perambulator.
“Caw! Caw! Caw!” cried the rooks. The black crow-like birds looked as though they were swimming in the wind. Now they were dipping low toward the dark mass of the ancient yew tree. Now they were rising high above the church tower.
The clock in the tower began to strike heavy, clanging strokes in the heavy air.
The children started as the first loud stroke assailed their sensitive ears. They looked at each other in alarm. But they recovered themselves almost at once and gazed up at the sky. They seemed to think that the strokes came from somewhere in the sky’s grey vastness.
Ten of them! It was ten o’clock.
The window of the nursery opened above Mazo’s head on the second floor.
Nurse threw two rusks down to the children like manna from the skies.
“Here are your rusks!” called Nurse. “Come Esmée. Take Baby his. There – on the grass – don’t you see?”
Esmée rose from her chair and stumped to the strip of grass under the nursery window. She saw the rusks but she was not sure that she would pick them up. From the row of windows just above her head came a pleasant warm smell. In there was the kitchen, but Esmée did not realize that, although once she was inside she was very much at home.
Nurse leaned out of the window, peering down at the children. René leaned over the side of the pram to see the rusks lying on the grass.
“Pick them up at once,” ordered Nurse. “And give one to Baby.”
Esmée picked up the rusks and, trotting briskly to the pram, presented René with his. They began to crunch them, staring at each other…
Mazo jotted down a description of the scene. With only a few changes, she would include it in a little book about the children titled Beside a Norman Tower.
Mazo finished Lark Ascending during the first few weeks at The Rectory. This novel, about a lazy painter named Diego Vargas and his hard-working cousin, Josie Froward, was indirectly a satire on Mazo and a tribute to Caroline.
Josie runs a bakery and sells antiques to support Diego and his equally self-centred mother, Fay. Similarly Caroline worked many years in the Ontario government to support Mazo and her mother, Bertie. Josie always finishes Diego’s paintings. Similarly Caroline always critiqued Mazo’s writing. Josie finally leaves Diego and Fay and marries a good man who appreciates her. Of course Mazo hoped Caroline would never leave her.
Immediately after completing this novel, set in New England and Sicily, Mazo began writing once again about Canada. Now Mazo’s imagination returned to the Whiteoaks and took up the story where Finch’s Fortune had left off.
As The Master of Jalna opens, Renny is forty-five years old and living at Jalna with Alayne and their first child, an eighteen-month-old girl named Adeline. Finch is in Europe becoming a famous concert pianist. He has not married yet, for Sarah Court, the woman he loves, is still married to his best friend, Arthur Leigh. But Arthur drowns and Sarah is free again. Meanwhile Wakefield Whiteoak, now seventeen, thinks he is falling in love with an impoverished girl named Pauline Lebraux, whose mother is a friend of Renny. Then the family learns that Eden is dying of tuberculosis.
The children were playing at the dining-room table. Mazo was listening to them.
“How do you do, Mr. Brown?” asked Esmée.
“Very well, thank you, Mrs. Brown,” replied Rene.
“I’m not Mrs. Brown. I’m Mrs. Jones.”
“Then I’m Mr. Jones.”
“You can’t be! You’re a visitor. “
“Oh!”
“Have you brought your children to London?”
“Oh, yes.”
“How many have you, Mr. Brown?”
“Oh, I have ninety eleven, Mrs. Brown.”
“I’m not Mrs. Brown! I’m Mrs. Jones.”
“Oh!”
“Are you going to call me Mrs. Brown again?”
“Yes”
“Then I’ll smack you!”
“I’ll fow you in the fire!”
“I’ll bite your head off!”
“Mrs. Brown! Mrs. Brown!”
“Stop it!”
Mazo, barely able to contain her laughter, rushed to her study to write down the hilarious dialogue. She would use it in Beside a Norman Tower.
When Mazo finished a novel, she was always restless, eager for a change of scene. Thus, after Mazo finished The Master of Jalna, the whole family visited London. There Mazo and Caroline met famous writers like John Galsworthy, and Nurse took the children to see the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace. Then Mazo and Caroline took a brief trip to Scotland while the children stayed home with the servants. But finally, in the spring of 1933, Mazo’s restlessness
was so great that only a trip to Canada would do. Mazo, Caroline, a nanny, and the children sailed from Southampton in fair weather on the twentieth of May. Back in Ontario, they moved into a large house in Erindale near Trail Cottage for the summer.
Unfortunately, while on a shopping expedition to Oakville, Caroline was in a car accident and sustained serious injuries to a wrist, a leg, her head, and her back. Then a few months later, when she was still recuperating, she fell and broke her leg again. Rather than returning to England in the autumn, as they had planned, the family moved to Toronto and settled into a large house on Castle Frank Road. Here Esmée and René saw snow for the first time. They tobogganed over the snowdrifts on their front lawn. They made snowmen. Meanwhile, Mazo worked on a new novel: Young Renny.
In this fifth Whiteoak novel Mazo would surprise her publishers and her readers. For the first time, she would interrupt the orderly chronological sequence established in Jalna and Whiteoaks of Jalna. She would go back to before 1924, when Jalna begins. Young Renny would be set in 1906.
Renny is just eighteen. His twenty-year-old sister Meg is engaged to marry the young man next door: Maurice Vaughan. Renny and Meg do not like their stepmother, Mary Whiteoak. They feel closer to their grandmother, Gran Whiteoak. Renny’s father, Philip Whiteoak Junior, is alive. Eden is a boy of five. Piers is a baby nicknamed “Peep” who is teething. Uncle Nick and Uncle Ernest, in their fifties, have squandered their inheritances abroad on high living and dubious speculation respectively, and now they are freeloading at Jalna. Into this situation come two outsiders who cause trouble at Jalna. A gypsy woman seduces Renny. A distant cousin from Ireland befriends Gran, moves into Jalna, and spies on the family…
Mazo’s work on Young Renny was interrupted when she received word that Nancy Price, a well-known English actress, needed her help in developing a play based on the first two Jalna books. The play was to be mounted very soon on the London stage, and so, in January 1934, Mazo and Caroline made a quick, cold trip by ship to England. They did what they could to help, discovered that the play actually would not be mounted any time soon, and returned to Canada. Then in the warm months they moved back to England with the children. This time they chose to live at The Winnings, a large house near Wales, set in beautiful surroundings.
The Jalna Saga – Deluxe Edition: All Sixteen Books of the Enduring Classic Series & The Biography of Mazo de la Roche Page 548
