“Somebody stop that damned machine.”
But still the melody, like a narcotic, weakened the purpose of the bidders. They looked at each other and lazily smiled. They were friends—not competitors.
“I might have settled down,
With little Mary Brown,
If I’d only listened to you!”
The things they might have done—if they’d only listened to somebody.
Piers’s stalwart figure came pushing through the crowd. With a furious look at Wakefield he stopped the music and banged down the lid of the gramophone. “I’ll have something to say to you about this later,” he said.
The nice young couple decided that they would rather own a gramophone than a pig and, although they had a good many bidders against them, they secured it. It brought twenty dollars.
Wakefield felt elated by the possession of so much money. Ten dollars was the most he had ever had in his life. He saw himself as an engaged man, if only he could find a few more things to sell! Once he had the money in his hand he went over to the Vaughans’ and spent the night there in order to avoid Piers. The next day he went into town and bought a dozen long-stemmed pink roses and a two-pound box of chocolates, which he sent to Pauline. He also bought tickets for the newest play, and a white silk evening muffler for himself.
“Well,” Nicholas asked of Renny, “how did you make out by the sale?”
“Not so badly. Less than we expected but still—enough to take a load off our minds.” He told the amount that had been realised.
“Not a large sum,” observed Nicholas, “but better than a poke in the eye with a stick. It will make things easier for a while, eh?”
“Yes. We had reached the point where we couldn’t go on.”
“Rags said something to me this morning about their wages. I think it would be better if you were to pay them off and let them go.”
“No, no, I couldn’t do without Rags about me. I’ll pay him a little and he’ll be satisfied.”
Alayne had just come into the room. She stopped and gave him a sudden penetrating look. He reached out his hand and drew her to him.
“Isn’t she pretty, Uncle Nick?” he asked gaily. “I think she gets prettier every day.” He laid his forehead against her side so that she could not look into his eyes.
Her inherent reserve made such demonstrations before other people distasteful to her. She drew away. She looked down at him suspiciously. What had he done with her cheque?
Nicholas declared—“I agree.” But he shrewdly suspected Renny of placating her. And, in truth, she was at that moment looking heavy-eyed and colourless, for she had had a bad night with little Adeline. She went to a table and began searching among papers for a magazine she had mislaid. Could it be possible, she thought, that he had deceived her—done something else with the money? She forgot what she was looking for. A sense of injury rose in her like a tide. She said, with her back to him:
“It is pleasant to think that I can look pretty after such a night as I had.”
Nicholas craned his neck to look at her. “Bad night! Well, well. The child again?”
“Yes. Laughing and talking to herself by the hour.”
“Tck! You should put her in a room by herself.”
“There is nowhere to put her. Besides she is too young to sleep in a room alone. She throws the covers off.”
“I’ll have to take her in hand again,” said Renny. “She was good for nights after that.”
“I think we should all be mental cases,” she returned drily, “if you and she often went on that way.”
He did not like her tone. It both hurt and offended him. He thought a moment and then went over to her.
“What are you looking for?” he asked.
“The September number of the Atlantic Monthly. I had it here only yesterday. The way things disappear in this house is a mystery to me.”
“It is queer, isn’t it?” he agreed affably. Then he added, in a whisper—“When you have found it, come up to my room. I want to give you something.”
She looked at him puzzled, then continued her search among the pile of papers and farm magazines in a halfhearted way.
It was unseasonably hot. Her feet dragged as she climbed the stairs. She saw every worn spot on them and the dark streak on the wallpaper running parallel with the steps. Today she did not see the walnut newel post carved into clusters of grapes, or the slender spindles of the banister.
He was standing in the doorway of his bedroom. He came to her and pushed a roll of banknotes into her hand.
“What is this for?” she asked, mystified.
He grinned down at her. “I’m paying my debt. Three hundred bucks. You don’t forget, do you?”
“No… but are you sure you can spare it?”
“Good Lord! I hope so—after the sale! I’m in Easy Street.”
“Renny, did you pay the Wragges their wages?”
“Of course I did!”
“What did Uncle Nicholas mean, then? I heard what he said. And you said you must pay them something.”
“Well—it’s a month since you lent me that money. Another month’s wages is due them, d’you see?”
Could she believe him? Yet she must try. “Thank you,” she murmured. Then she exclaimed—“How could you say that I looked pretty today? I never looked plainer in my life!”
“You’re always pretty to me,” he said, and put his arm about her shoulders.
For a moment she relaxed and laid her face against the tweed of his coat. There seemed no air to breathe in the house. She could not endure the smell of stables that came from him, the smell of hot, healthy flesh. She asked petulantly:
“What have you been doing to overheat yourself?”
“Helping to load some apples. Piers is short of a man. The barrels are pretty heavy.” He spoke deprecatingly and released her.
She went into her room, laid the banknotes on her desk and, pouring water from the ewer into the basin, began to wash her hands.
He stood just inside the door watching her. “You’re always washing, aren’t you?” he said.
“Those notes are filthy. It’s really not safe to handle them. They actually smell.”
“I only wish I could handle more of them!” He came to the desk and picked up the notes and held them to his nose. “I don’t smell anything wrong with them. They smell nice to me.”
She exclaimed sharply—“Put them down! You don’t know where they may have come from!”
He put them down and stood looking at them. He almost wished he had not given them to her. She was drying her hands on a smooth damask towel.
He went to the child’s cot and looked down into it. “What a nice crib cover! Did you embroider those forget-me-nots on it?”
“Yes. Baby picks out the embroidery with her fingers and eats the silk. She took out a whole spray this morning before six o’clock.”
He gave an embarrassed laugh, for he felt that the child’s faults had come from his own body. He said:
“Well, things are looking up. We’ve had this sale. That will mean considerably less stock to feed. Wake has asked Piers to let him help with the apple-packing, so he will make a little money. Finch has gone to town to make final arrangements for his concert. He’s getting a very good soprano to help him out. And, since Sarah has gone home, she has rounded up about a score of women who have agreed to pay Eden ten dollars each for a series of readings from modern poetry. I feel positively highbrow myself, mixed up with this sort of thing. Well, the poor fellow will make two hundred dollars out of it. It will tide him over until something else turns up.”
How could he talk to her about Eden! He must realise that she did not want to hear of Eden or his doings—indeed she had told him so. Could he forget, in his anxiety for his brother, that Eden had been her husband, that they had had their secret of the senses together? Could he forget that in this house, while he was still her husband, Eden had made love to Pheasant? No one else in the family forgot
it. No one of them spoke of Eden to her—except Renny. She stood, patting almond cream on her hands, her eyes, darkened by pain and reproach, fixed on his.
He saw the shadow in them but only dimly realised the source of it. He said:
“Well, Eden reads poetry damned well. You’ve said so yourself.”
“Yes. He reads poetry beautifully.” And she forced herself to add—“I’m very glad this had been arranged for him.”
“At one of the meetings he is to read his own poems. That ought to sell some of his books, eh?”
“Yes. I suppose it should sell some of his books.” She picked up the money, put it in the small drawer of her desk, and locked the drawer.
He said—“I must be off. I have plenty to do. I must go to Mistwell. What do you say to riding with me?”
“I can’t. This is Alma’s afternoon off. I must look after Baby.”
“Get Pheasant to look after her.”
“Pheasant can’t control her at all. She allows her to eat anything, and Adeline is always pulling Nooky’s hair or scratching him.”
He exclaimed irritably—“Women have reared half a dozen with no more fuss than you make over this one!”
“I daresay,” she said coolly, and she walked past him and went up the attic stairs to the nursery. As she reached the top she exclaimed:
“How stifling it is up here!”
Without answer he turned away and descended to the hall. The rooms on either side of it were now empty and he stood there meditating, thinking how he loved the old house, how irrevocably his own life was bound up in it and in the good land that lay about it. He would go through anything to keep it intact, to protect it from deterioration. He liked to stand here when the house was silent, for then there was a deep and reassuring communion between him and it. He went to the door of his grandmother’s bedroom and opened it and stepped inside. There was a quiet coolness there and a beautiful bluish light filtered through the curtains. Sarah Leigh had occupied this room during her visit. It was the first time anyone had slept here since old Adeline’s death, but Sarah had seemed an appropriate guest for it and her pale body no desecration to the painted bedstead. Renny felt that the room had not seemed strange to Sarah or Sarah an alien to the room… This had been Gran’s fortress. He drew in a deep breath of the air which to anyone else would have seemed close but which to him was freighted with the essence of the stuffs which furnished it, which had been her cherished possessions and worn by the touch of her hands. He passed his own hand over the smooth leather surface of the bed.
He went out then, closing the door behind him.
In the stable—and here was his own fortress—he went from stall to stall with Wright, looking over each horse with complete absorption in its welfare. The stalls left empty by the horses parted with at the sale were not easy to face. Never before had so many gone at one time. There was a two-year-old that he had loved. If he had it to do over again he should not let her go.
A boy brought round his roan and he mounted her. His feet were more at home in the stirrups than on the ground. As he passed the house he looked up at the windows thinking that Alayne and the child might be looking out but they were not. The three old people were, however, sitting outside in the sun and they waved to him. Something startled the roan, making her rear, and he showed off a bit to make the aunt and uncles smile.
As he rode his mind dwelt on the plans and perplexities of the various members of the family. Wake’s education. Its growing expenses and its possible object, what he would make of the boy. A tolerant, amused smile softened his lips when he thought of Wake’s attachment to Pauline. Meg had told him of the angry confession of love on the night of her dinner party. Well, he hoped the attachment would last until Wake was old enough to marry. There was no one he had sooner see him marry than Pauline.
Then there was Finch, a queer unhappy sort of fellow, though he seemed to have a little more character, to be able to stand up for himself a little better than formerly. It was to be hoped that his recital would come off well. For his own part Renny did not like Finch’s playing any better for those years of study abroad. His own compositions were queer, shuddering, shameless sort of things that seemed to express feelings better kept to oneself. But Eden thought they were remarkable and he was probably a good judge.
As for Eden—it was heartening to see how he had improved physically, put on flesh and strength. If only there was someone of influence who would help him to an easy job! Renny went over in his mind the various men of means whom he knew and considered which of them might be likely to help. But he had rarely talked to them about anything except horses. They were businessmen and Eden knew nothing about business. It was a pity that Alayne was so down on him. He had done no more than many a young fellow would in the same circumstances. Probably Pheasant had inherited a certain looseness from her mother, though, God knew, since that incident her behaviour had been exemplary enough. Now here was Alayne planning a marriage between Sarah and Finch when, whatever way you looked at it, a marriage between Sarah and Eden seemed more desirable. Well, they would just have to work it out for themselves and, whichever got her, he did not envy him his bed.
He loved the roan and he talked to her as they cantered along. “Good old girl… In good fettle today, aren’t you? Glad the sale is over and one or two rivals out of the way… Well, and you’re a nice old pet, and you move like a rocking-chair… Steady on, now—are you going to shy at a bit of paper at your time of life? Very well, then… if you will gallop…” The air was glowing as the sun lowered himself from the zenith. His steady heat warmed the infinitesimal bodies of the hordes of midges that formed quivering patches on the air. As horse and rider passed through one of these patches they whirled into the eyes of the man and the distended nostrils of the beast.
The road was quiet, and from the ditch immense clumps of goldenrod, heavy with pollen, made a playground for butterflies, and the wild asters were a blur of blue and purple to those who sped by swiftly. Now, from a rise of ground, the lake, streaked in bands of green and ultramarine, could be seen and on it the leaning sail of a yacht.
With one hand Renny patted the neck of the roan to reassure her and with the other rubbed his eye, in which a midge was lodged. But he could not get it out and he rode on somewhat subdued and with a sinister gleam in the one open eye. He rode to the house of a farmer who had bought a Clydesdale at the sale and now complained that it had something wrong with it. He had intended to be haughty with the man but he changed his mind and was conciliatory. Certainly if there was a poor horse in the sale this fellow had got it.
Standing outside the barn near an old woman who was plucking the down from the breast of a live goose, the farmer extracted the midge from Renny’s eye with the corner of a handkerchief. So they began their interview in a spirit of kindness. And, as they talked in the stall beside the horse, and Renny looked at the farmer out of his reddened weeping eye—the other eye watering in unison—the man thought that Mr. Whiteoak had a real good face—in spite of things he had heard about him—a sad sort of face, not the face of a man who would cheat you. So they talked beside the great-hooved Clydesdale and what the farmer thought was proved to him to be quite wrong, and they parted in great amiability.
Renny turned into the road by the lake and had a cold lunch with a friend named Vale, a widower. He spent the afternoon with him and before he left they had a swim in the lake together.
As he turned his horse’s head homeward he thought again of his family. He wished Alayne might have come with him. She would have enjoyed the ride, and it seemed a pity that the care of the child so often kept her at home. He thought she was needlessly fussy about it, seeming unwilling to leave it to the care of Pheasant or Alma Patch. Yet he did not believe she was as fond of little Adeline as he was. What queer looks she gave him sometimes! He did not understand them, and to make the effort was beyond him. He doubted whether he could hold the complete love and confidence of any woman because of his invincible
disinclination to put himself in their place. He felt that if he were to hold a woman to him in any nearness to tranquillity, it would be necessary for him to subdue his inner self without ceasing and to put a continued watch on all he said and did. Yet he could love without asking for complete understanding. It seemed easy for him to arouse love in the other sex, easy to arouse antagonism. These two elements, like a badly matched team, were set to draw the burden of his passions.
His friendship with Clara Lebraux was comforting. There was no strain in it, no puzzlement, no hurt. They reached out to each other as naturally as the boughs of trees intermingle. And if, occasionally, his blood moved a little quicker because of her nearness to him, it was soon over and she knew nothing of it and it did no one any harm. He turned his horse into the side road that led to the fox farm, thinking that he would like to see her and Pauline before he went home, for he liked to know how things were faring with them and he received a certain peace from the hours spent in their house.
The shabby wooden house lay in cool shade as he went in at the gate. He loosened the roan’s bridle and left her to graze on the uncared-for grass plot. She raised her voice in a pleased whinny and, from the stable which he rented from Clara Lebraux, came an answering call, because in it were kept two horses that knew her well. Snatching a mouthful of grass, the roan hastened toward the stable making deep noises of pleasure in her powerful throat.
Renny went to the front door and tapped on it with his riding-crop. In a few minutes it was opened by Pauline.
X
RENNY AND PAULINE
SHE HAD BEEN at work among the foxes all afternoon, had come in tired out because of the sultriness of the air, and taken a bath in a small tin tub in her bedroom. She had just slipped on a fresh organdie dress with pink flower-sprays scattered over it when she heard the neigh of the roan. She peeped out of the window and saw Renny coming toward the house. For an instant her breath was taken from her and she pressed her hands against her lips with a feeling of terror. Clara had gone into town to do some shopping and Pauline was alone in the house.
Books 9-12: Finch's Fortune / The Master of Jalna / Whiteoak Harvest / Wakefield's Course Page 54
