“Do come and tell me the joke! But first draw the curtains. The sky looks so black.”
Eden drew them and came to her side.
“Aren’t they a fascinating pair?” she asked, with a flicker of her lashes toward the two he had just been thinking of.
He nodded. “Finch certainly looks absorbed.” He decided then that it was this absorption in Sarah that he envied him—not the nearness of the girl herself.
“They’re made for each other,” she continued.
“Why?”
“Well—they’re both artistic and rather odd and don’t quite seem to fit in anywhere.”
“What a future hell you suggest for them!”
“Not at all. There’s nothing like similar tastes for a perfect married life. Maurice and I would often have nothing to talk about only that we’re both so fond of pigs. Sometimes when we’re quite alone and bored to death or worried he’ll begin to grunt like a pig, and I’ll simply have to laugh.”
“Are you going to ask Finch to play?”
“I don’t know. I’d like to, but I hate to break in on their conversation.”
“I shouldn’t mind that.”
When Finch went to the piano Eden took his place beside Sarah. She seemed neither to regret nor to take pleasure in the change.
Finch played with a rapt expression, seeming not to see the keyboard but as though his fingers were directed by an inner vision. Maurice slumped in his chair, smoking and gazing ceilingward, lost in a tranquil reverie induced by the music. For a while Wakefield and Pauline listened dreamily, then he began whispering to her things he would not have dared to say in the sunlit silence of their meeting place.
“I like your nose. It’s a perfectly adorable little nose because it starts off as though it were going to be prim, and then it has an amusing tilt at the tip that exactly corresponds to the tilt of your upper lip. You know, there are tribes that rub noses instead of kissing, and yours is the very first nose I’ve seen that I’d like to rub with mine! Of course, there’s nothing new about kissing but it seems to me there’d be something frightfully new about kissing you.”
She listened smiling and, when his hand stole closer and his fingers held hers, she returned the pressure.
When Finch got up he looked about him. He came and sat on the other side of Pauline on the sofa.
“I love your playing,” she said. “But I don’t know how to make any proper remarks about it.”
“You don’t care for music, do you?”
“Oh yes, I love it!”
“Wake told me you didn’t care for it.”
“How could you say that, Wakefield?” She flushed under her olive skin.
“Because you told me so.”
“No, I didn’t!”
“Yes, you did!”
They began to laugh and Finch laughed with them. He felt happy when he looked into Pauline’s laughing face. He wished he might take her home, walk through the darkness of the late summer night with her.
When it was time to go he said to his sister:
“I suppose we’re to take Pauline home. Still—the road is torn up near her house, isn’t it? If Wake would drive the car I could go across the fields with her.”
Meg looked worried. “I think you had better drive the car. Sarah would think it very strange if you didn’t take her home.”
“No, she wouldn’t. Sarah never thinks anything is strange.”
“Don’t you want to take her?”
Wakefield strolled up. “I’m going to take Pauline across the fields,” he said.
She came, wearing sturdy shoes and carrying her evening slippers in a velvet bag. Maurice and Meg accompanied them to the drive where the car stood. Meg and Pauline had their arms about each other. Maurice and Sarah were finishing what seemed an enthralling conversation. They saw the light from an electric torch moving across an adjoining field.
“I wonder who that is,” said Meg, peering into the darkness.
“Whoever it is is looking for something,” observed Wakefield.
“Yes. He turns the flash this way and that.”
“I do wonder who it is.”
“It’s Renny,” said Pauline suddenly.
“But how do you know?”
“I just know.” Instantly she wished she had not said that. She was angry with herself for having so little control over her tongue. They would think she was a very queer girl.
But nothing was said to indicate that they thought her queer. Maurice shouted to the unseen shifter of the light:
“Hullo, there!”
“Hullo!” answered the voice of the master of Jalna.
“What are you looking for?”
The light moved toward them and Renny’s voice continued:
“One of Piers’s horses that has strayed. The men are out at a concert in the village. Piers and Pheasant are at a show.”
“Why should it be in my place?” asked Maurice testily.
“Because all your fences are broken.”
“What a black night it is!” exclaimed Meg pacifically.
As he drew nearer to them—he had vaulted the fence— he turned the torch on them and, in its light, they became strangely significant, like a painted group by a master of composition. Meg, with her gleaming shoulders and arms, one of them holding the cloaked figure of the young girl to her. The white face of Sarah, surrounded by the four male forms. They were intensely clear to him, pallid and trancelike in the light he turned on them which, to them, appeared as a long beam emanating from his breast.
At last he stood beside them and they could see his face.
“Pauline said it was you,” observed Meg.
“Clever child. Have you had a good evening?”
“Lovely,” she answered, in a low voice.
“I like a party,” he continued. “I’ll give one myself one of these days.”
Wakefield said—“I am taking Pauline home.” Meg relinquished her and he took her arm possessively in his hand.
Finch looked at the car with shrinking. He did not know what he should say to Sarah in the brief intimacy of the drive home. He felt afraid of her.
Then Sarah said, as though she had read his thoughts:
“It is too nice to go indoors. Let us walk to the fox farm with the others.”
“What about your slippers?” asked Finch.
“They’re strong enough.”
“I’ll come too!” exclaimed Renny. “We’ll send someone over for the car in the morning.”
They set out along the road and, before they had gone far, the horse was discovered grazing in a ditch. He did not start when the light from the torch was turned on him, but raised his head and looked at them with benign approval. He even ambled toward them, a wisp of grass and a trailer of vine hanging from his jaws, green saliva from his underlip. Renny grasped a handful of his mane and they all walked abreast along the road.
Wakefield was disappointed at not having Pauline alone. He pressed her hand and, under cover of the talk of the others, whispered:
“You darling! You darling!”
They said good night at her gate. When Renny took her hand her fingers clung desperately to his for a moment, then she ran into the house, waving goodbye from the doorstep.
She hesitated outside the open door of her mother’s bedroom.
A drowsy voice called:
“Is that you, Pauline?”
“Yes, Mummy. Did I wake you?”
She came into the room.
“No. I haven’t been asleep yet. I was just dropping off. Come in and tell me if you had a nice time.”
Pauline came and sat on the side of the bed. She had turned on the light in the hall and by it she could see, though not clearly, her mother’s sunburned face and throat against the pillow, and her tumbled fair hair. Clara Lebraux looked up adoringly at her daughter. The light shone full on her.
“You look awfully nice,” she said. “Was your frock admired? I am afraid they would wonder how
I could afford it.”
“Oh, Mummy, before I thought I told Finch that it was a present from Renny! I shouldn’t have done that, should I? But I told him not to tell.”
“Let’s hope he won’t! But after this you mustn’t have any more presents from him. You’re too big for that now. They might talk.”
“If only they knew what he has been to us I’m sure they wouldn’t object.”
Clara gave a little laugh. “Never mind! Tell me about the party. Did you dance?”
“No. It was very quiet. I suppose because of Mrs. Leigh. I think it is the first time she has been any place. Finch played to us. He’s wonderful, Mummy. And we talked and the dinner was delicious. Wakefield came in afterward, and just when we were leaving Renny appeared. He was looking for a horse that had strayed and they all walked home with me.”
“Did he find the horse?”
“Yes. He brought it along. It was one of the big farm horses and you should have heard its feet clumping on the road.”
Again Clara laughed. She drew her arms from under the bedclothes and stretched them wide across the pillows.
“Pauline,” she asked, “which of those boys do you like best?”
Pauline answered evasively—“I like the way you look tonight, Mummy.”
“Yes. This sort of light becomes me. My charms are guessed at rather than seen.”
“Don’t be silly! You never look nicer than you do in the broad sunlight.”
“I’m not interested in myself. I want to know which of those three boys you like best. Eden—Finch—or Wakefield?”
“Wakefield.”
“I thought so.”
“But I’m interested in Finch. There is something about him—oh, I don’t know what it is—but often his face comes before me when I haven’t been thinking of him at all.”
“And you think a good deal of Wakefield?”
Pauline nodded. “But I don’t believe I like Eden very well. He says rather uncomfortable things and he always gives me the feeling that he’s hiding something. Something that would make you unhappy if you knew.”
“I’m afraid you’re too sensitive, Pauline. It’s not a good thing. Your father was too much that way. I’m not a bit. I’m made of pretty tough stuff.” She put up her arms and drew Pauline’s face down to hers. They exchanged a long kiss. “How sweet you smell,” murmured Clara. “You’re like a bunch of spring flowers… You’ll tell me what is in your heart, won’t you?—when the time comes?”
Pauline murmured assent but, when she was in her own room, she thought—“How deceitful I am! The time is here and I dare not tell her.”
She went and sat by her window, looking out into the blackness that was still pierced by one star as, earlier that night, Eden had done.
“How many girls,” she thought, “have sat looking out of their windows, just as I am, not knowing what to do, feeling wicked because they love someone they have no right to love…” The night seemed to her to be full of an aching longing for an unattainable dawn.
As a hyacinth unfolds but still does not give out perfume until a certain moment, so she had unfolded. Now, as a hyacinth gives forth her secret when the time is perfect for her, so Pauline poured out her love, but she dared not speak his name, even to her mother. Over and over she said it to herself—“Renny—Renny—Renny”—as once she had repeated the names of the Saints… Again she felt herself walking beside him in the night. Heard the clip-clop of the farm horse’s heavy feet. If only they might have walked on and on through the night together! If only the farm horse might have become a fabulous charger, and they have mounted it and been swept away from the others.
And he was not even aware of her love. She was sure of that. He still looked on her as his little friend. But it seemed to her that she had never loved him as a child loves, from the day her father died. Something passionately unchildlike in the love she had borne her father had that day been transferred to Renny. From that day the heart of a woman beat in her breast.
IX
THE SALE—AND AFTER
THE DAY OF THE SALE came bright and hot but not so hot as to be enervating. It had been so well advertised that a dense crowd had collected before the appointed time. Renny and Piers had been up since before six and Wright, the head stableman, looked spruce and full of importance. The horses to be sold had been groomed until their coats shone like ripe chestnuts. Their hooves had been washed and their manes and tails brushed until each separate hair glistened. The appearance of Piers’s Jerseys was equally fastidious. Not a straw clung to the velvet smoothness of their hides. And their tails ended in curls. When he looked at the stock to be offered the eyes of the auctioneer brightened, for such a fine lot had not lately come under his hammer. The crowd was good-natured and cheery even though the times were bad. Indeed many of them had come with no intention of buying but merely because whatever went on at Jalna was of interest to the countryside.
One after another the stately procession of animals was led forth. Above arched the golden-blue gulf of the sky, from beneath rose the smell of trampled earth and the acrid smell of dung. Men jostled each other to get nearer to the auctioneer, from whose lips came a stream of anecdotes and ironic jests at their reluctance to bid. Now and then a cow uttered a moo heavy with boredom or a horse raised its voice in a clarion neigh. Piers’s wire-haired terrier bitterly resented the crowd and barked herself hoarse on its outskirts.
Not one of the brothers was more anxious to make money than Wakefield. And behind his impulse lay the divine urge of love. Like Finch, in his boyhood, his pockets were generally empty. It seemed as much as Renny could do to educate and clothe them. But, unlike Finch, Wakefield did not in the least mind begging from any member of the family, and would go all the way to Vaughanlands to get fifty cents out of Meggie. No amount of money, trifling or considerable, remained long in his pocket. He liked to buy anything, if it was only a pair of bootlaces.
Now there was Pauline, whom he loved, to buy for. No longer was he thinking of only himself. He wanted to send her books and flowers and take her to the theatre. He cast about for something he himself might offer at the sale.
In a corner of the sitting room was an old gramophone. It had been a good one but was seldom used now. After some persuasion Renny agreed that it would not be greatly missed and that Wakefield might put it up at the sale. So, that day he was in the highest spirits and, pushing a wheelbarrow with the gramophone in it, circled the crowd to find a conspicuous place until the time when the auctioneer should ask for it.
He chose a spot near a young married couple who had come with the object of buying a pig. He thought the young wife had a nice face and the man looked as though he had money in his pocket.
He set down the wheelbarrow and, opening the gramophone, ostentatiously dusted the record inside with his clean silk handkerchief. Ostentatiously he put in a new needle and wound up the machine. Already the young couple and several others turned to watch him.
In a moment the teasing strains of “Sing Something Simple” rose from the bowels of the wheelbarrow. Like an insidious stream it wormed its way among the bystanders. First one and then another turned to look, their attention diverted for the moment from the grand Jersey cow that was under the hammer. After a little, a nasal tenor—just as the auctioneer dramatically paused in his urging— began:
“Sing something simpul,
Here’s a ditty that’s sweet and simpul…”
The auctioneer flung an irate glance in the direction of the gramophone and the crowd burst out laughing. The attention of the man who was about to bid was distracted and the beast brought less than she might have done.
Wakefield considerately moved a little farther off, but the jolting of the wheelbarrow did not stop the music and the drone of the tenor came back to the crowd:
“For God knows it’s simpul,
So get together and let’s be simpul…”
The young married couple and several besides followed the wheelbarrow. Ther
e was a charm in Wake’s aspect, a mysterious light in his eyes, that, added to the music, fascinated them. The haunting tenor persisted:
“Even though you’ve never sung a song before,
Even though you stutter and your throat is sore,
Sing up like a birdie on a perch—
Like a congregation in a church—”
Another animal had been led out and the auctioneer, deafened by his own voice, did not realise the damage the gramophone was doing to his cause. The horses had been sold and most of the cows. Now he was down to the calves and pigs. He was tired and beginning to sweat. Wakefield turned to the other side of the record. He now had quite a number of people about him. They were hypnotised by the new tune and by the melancholy refrain:
“If I’d only listened to you!”
Piers stepped on to a chair beside the auctioneer and shouted:
Books 9-12: Finch's Fortune / The Master of Jalna / Whiteoak Harvest / Wakefield's Course Page 53
