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 ingenuous 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, those 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.
She went to the window and flung it open. The damp night air swept in. It was heavy with the smell of wet earth, dead leaves. It swept down from the north bearing the scent of the dead leaves of Jalna... Oh, if she might have a child of Renny’s! If, when the new leaves thrust out, she too might quicken!
What had she been doing? Casting sweet love from her. Trying to create chill order in her life out of the entanglements of desire... Out of the darkness his face appeared before her and she felt faint with longing to see him in the flesh.
At breakfast she told Miss Archer that it was necessary for her to return to Jalna before she could make final arrangements for the trip. She had dreaded her aunt’s questioning at this announcement, but she need not have dreaded it. Miss Archer was existing in such a daze of preparation, such an enchantment of anticipation, that nothing surprised her.
She saw Alayne depart that evening with confident cheerfulness.
Alayne had not sent word that she was coming. She did not quite know how she was to get to Jalna. She hoped that by now the Vaughans would have left the house. From Pheasant she had learned of their prolonged visit. But, even if they were not gone—well, she must see Renny—that was all there was to it.
She was, at times, conscious that her headache had not left her. For three days now it had been thudding against the back of her neck. Its thudding mingled with the throbbing of the train. Sometimes she quite forgot it in the feverish activity of her brain. She put up her blind and looked out into the new day. Noticed how white and graceful her hand and arm were. She had not considered her physical being for weeks. She was surprised to see snow lying in the furrows of the fields and feathering the shrubs alongside the track. She saw workmen’s cottages with lighted windows and fowls emerging from their coops. An old grey horse stood in a snowy field, the wind tossing his long grey mane. Soon they passed through a manufacturing town and she saw a crowd of foreign-looking workmen going toward the factories. The train did not stop there but rushed through, giving her just a glimpse of its black sordidness and the brightness of the rising sun touching nothing but the gilt cross on the church.
While she was at breakfast they crossed the border and here there was more snow, but it was soft snow and was soon wet under the sun. The air was clear and bright, but quick-moving clouds cast their shadows on the fields. She sat in her seat with her things about her while the train sped past Weddell’s, the station nearest Jalna. She saw Wright in the new car waiting for the barrier to be raised so that he might cross the track. The wholesome, kind look of him pleased her. Why, this little village looked like home!
She had secured a porter and was waiting for a taxi when her attention was caught by three men who were getting into a shabby car. Her heart missed a beat, seemed to turn in her breast when she saw that one of them was Renny. His companions were Crowdy and Chase. She took a few hurried steps toward him and called his name. In the chill light faces looked wan. All but Renny’s. More than ever his looked fierce and highly coloured. He took off his hat and came toward her laughing in delighted surprise. She had forgotten how red his hair w
as, how red his face, how tall and thin and sharp and strong he was.
If he had been angry at her when she left, had brooded on what he thought her bad behaviour toward him, and kept his heart shut against her, he forgot all this when he saw her standing there in the wan light, her face pale with blue shadows beneath the eyes, her hair bright beneath her close-fitting black hat. He noticed at once that she had bought herself a new fur scarf. It set her off wonderfully, he thought.
They stood facing each other, she in tremulous wildness, he in amazed gratification.
“But why,” he demanded, “didn’t you write?”
“I only made up my mind at the last minute.”
“But you could have telegraphed.”
“I couldn’t make up my mind to that.”
“Oh, that mind of yours!” he laughed. “You’re always making it up or not being able to make it up, aren’t you?”
She drew close to him. She asked, in a choking voice— “Are you glad I’ve come?”
“What a question!”
“Oh, if only we could ever be alone! What are those dreadful men doing here with you?”
Books 9-12: Finch's Fortune / The Master of Jalna / Whiteoak Harvest / Wakefield's Course Page 35
