Books 9-12: Finch's Fortune / The Master of Jalna / Whiteoak Harvest / Wakefield's Course

by Mazo de La Roche

  “That boy! I should hate to act with him. He’s got horrid hands.”

  Wakefield pushed away his plate. As he did so she glanced at his shapely brown hand, then swiftly into his eyes.

  “I can’t make you out,” she said.

  “Neither can I make myself out. I’ve never been this way before. I mean wanting so frightfully to do something for somebody. It isn’t that you’re pathetic or appealing. On the contrary, you strike me as being extremely self-sufficient. It’s just some quality in myself that is released by your nearness.”

  “That’s all right then. You’ll get over it as soon as we part.”

  “I suppose I shall but it’s disintegrating while it lasts. I simply can’t eat.”

  “That’s a pity because the food is so good.” She helped herself to Worcester sauce.

  He watched her eat with interest. He continued: —

  “Perhaps, if you won’t let me lend you a little money, there is something else I could do. Has anyone been rude to you? I’d love to knock him down.”

  “Everyone is nice to me. If you won’t eat I won’t.” She laid down her knife and fork. “Please, Mr. Whiteoak!”

  “I’ll eat on one condition only. If you’ll call me Wakefield and come out to lunch with me every day for a fortnight.”

  “Very well. I agree!” She gave him a smile that was almost motherly. “I think you’re sweet.”

  With an air of triumph he took up his knife and fork. “That sweetness, my girl, conceals an iron will.” He attacked a chop.

  But, though they might talk of other things, the subject that held never-ending fascination was the play. They were so enthralled that they all but forgot the afternoon rehearsal. They hurried on to the stage breathless, to find the others being amiably harried by Fielding, with the exception of the leading lady, Phyllis Rhys. She and Ninian Fox were enjoying a whiskey and soda in his office. The theatre was very cold.

  Wakefield was impatient of the easy-going slackness of the actors, the way they mumbled their lines. His idea was to do the thing beautifully from the start. He was irritated by Fielding’s tolerance and good humour. He and Molly threw themselves gayly into their first amusing brother-and-sister scene. Everyone smiled at them. When they were free they went to sit together on a coil of rope in the wings. They lighted cigarettes.

  “Will you come to our place to tea tomorrow?” asked Wakefield.

  “After having had lunch with you? Don’t you think that’s rather too much?”

  “Not for me. I want you to meet my brother. I should like to know what you think of him and his wife. Do you generally stand by first impressions or do you sometimes reverse your judgment?”

  “I think first impressions are always the truest.”

  “Now tell me what were your —”

  “I shall do nothing of the sort.”

  The youth who was to understudy Wakefield put his head round the corner.

  “You’re wanted,” he said, with a smile that showed small, widely spaced teeth, then vanished.

  “I hate that fellow,” said Wakefield. “I know he thinks he can do Frederick better than I can.”

  “Anyhow he’s making himself generally useful.”

  “Will you come to tea, Molly?”

  “Yes, Wakefield.”

  The rehearsal proceeded on its confused and muddling way.

  Wakefield was anxious that the house in Gayfere Street should look its best the next afternoon. He had acknowledged Sarah’s position there by asking her if he might bring Molly Griffith to tea. Sarah had agreed. She had even seemed pleased.

  That morning he went down into the kitchen to prepare the way with Henriette. She was sitting at the kitchen table eating bread and margarine and drinking tea, her large weak eyes gazing upward through the window at the legs of the passers-by.

  “Legs, legs, legs.” she was saying to herself, as Wakefield came into the kitchen, “legs coming and going — God only knows where and why. I’d give a good deal if they’d stop.”

  “Oh, good morning, Henriette,” said Wakefield, cheerfully. “I’ve come to tell you that I’m having a friend to tea and I’d like it to be even nicer than usual. I’ll bring home some petits fours.”

  While he spoke, Henriette had been slowly and painfully rearing herself to her feet. With each twinge in her joints she gave a groan. Now she towered above Wakefield.

  “Aven’t the teas pleased you?” she asked, with a tremor in her voice.

  “They’ve been perfect. I said even better than usual, didn’t I?”

  “I didn’t ’ear it that way. But then my ’ead buzzes so I don’t ’ear half that’s said to me. As for bringing cakes ’ome, I’ve shopped in London for forty years and my father was a French chef. I think I know a petite four when I see one.”

  “Sit down, Henriette, do sit down! I only wanted to buy them because it’s such fun.”

  She lowered herself into her chair with a groan. “Fun, did you say? Fun? I wish I found such things funny.”

  “Well, you see, Henriette, it’s new to me.”

  She looked at him disparagingly. “Yes,” she said. “You’re very new.”

  “I’ll bring home some flowers for the table,” he said.

  “Yes,” she agreed. “I like flowers, though they do make me think of funerals.”

  “I’ll bring such gay-coloured ones they can’t possibly do that.”

  “The gayer they are the more they make me think of funerals. I realize how short their little lives are and how our lives pass — mine in this ’ere kitchen.”

  He ran up the stairs two steps at a time. He was afraid he would be late for rehearsal. He and Sarah and Finch had been to a play the night before and he had slept late. He was extraordinarily happy. He had recovered from the shock of Finch’s reunion with Sarah. He was beginning to think that it might not after all be so had having her in the house. Finch certainly seemed to have a new confidence and had returned to his practising with fervor. But Wakefield realized that the greatest cause of his happiness was his friendship with Molly Griffith. He poured out himself to her in their leisure periods. She heard so much from him about Jalna and his family that she had dreamt of them the night before and in her mind she began to confuse them with the characters of the play she was acting in.

  The rehearsals were becoming more serious. Robert Fielding was, Wakefield thought, too fussy about the grouping on the stage. He would stare at the actors in an agony of consideration, then try some other grouping. Not till the leading lady showed irritation and Ninian Fox impatience could he bear to let the acting proceed. When he was taking his own part things went better, for he played it with zest and Ninian Fox directed with a firm touch. Wakefield was angered by his attitude toward Molly. He treated her as a beginner with no experience. He intimated that, though she did the lighter scenes well, he had grave fears that she would never succeed in the more emotional ones.

  Mr. Trimble, the sandy-haired author of the play, invited Wakefield and Molly to lunch with him. The three got on well and Wakefield learned more about his part than he had in rehearsals. “Now I feel that I’m really getting inside Frederick,” he said. “Don’t you feel like that about Catherine?” he asked Molly.

  She shook her head. “Not yet. Mr. Fox has made me self-conscious.”

  “You’ll get over that, won’t she, Mr. Trimble?”

  “I find Mr. Fox very irritating,” he returned. “But I was prepared for that. I’d been told a good deal about him.”

  In the afternoon things went better. Wakefield and Molly were in good spirits when they set out to walk to Gayfere Street. The day was clear and cold. They discovered that they walked well together. “I wish you could walk with me in the Welsh hills,” she said.

  “I shall!” he exclaimed, above the traffic. “I’m sure I shall.”

  He pictured her in the hills and himself striding beside her. His blood ran quickly in his veins and he had a swift sense of power. After all, this crowded
street was glorious — almost as free as the hills. Perhaps it was that Molly brought the hills with her.

  He stopped to buy flowers from a barrow.

  “You choose,” he said.

  “What flowers suit your room?”

  “None. Anyway there isn’t much choice. Do you like violets?”

  “I love them.”

  He bought six bunches.

  “Goodness gracious!” she said. “You’re reckless.”

  As they strode on he admired the way she carried herself, the long graceful sweep of her thigh, the strength and buoyancy of her step. He compared Sarah’s short, gliding steps, her rigidly held torso, unfavorably to this easy and generous walk. And she could move beautifully across the stage, too. Ninian Fox had praised this in her.

  “I’m nervous,” she said, as they turned into Smith Square.

  “Of what?”

  “Of meeting your people.”

  “You might well be, if you were to meet them en masse. But these two! Finch is very easy to know. And as for Sarah — well, she’s a queer, remote creature. A devil too, I assure you. I expect you’ll dislike her but it doesn’t matter. Be nice to Henriette. She hates visitors.”

  “I’m more nervous than ever.”

  Henriette gave them a watery smile of welcome. Wakefield noted with humiliation the toast crumbs down her front. But she had put on a large brooch containing the plaited hair of her father, the chef.

  “This is Henriette who does for Finch and me,” said Wakefield. “Till you have tasted Henriette’s soup you don’t know what the joy of the palate can be.”

  Henriette’s smile grew firmer and she murmured that she made the best soup she could with what few bones she could get hold of.

  The sitting room was empty of people but seemed full of flowers. Roses, lilies, carnations, were everywhere. This is Sarah’s doing, thought Wakefield, and how like her to overdo it! He said: —

  “Our violets will be lost here. Leave them in the hall. You must take them with you when you go.”

  He was chagrined. He bad pictured Molly and himself decking the room with violets.

  “Oh, thank you,” said Molly. “But it’s really too much.” She put the violets in the hall, then went into the room and buried her nose among dark red carnations. As usual, music was scattered everywhere. Finch’s spectacles, his pipe and tobacco pouch, were on the floor. Wakefield went about tidying and growling his disapproval.

  “What an old scold you are!” she exclaimed. “You’d never do for our house, which always looks as though it had been stirred up with a stick.”

  He looked at her, surprised. “Does it? I think of your house as beautifully kept.”

  She gave a little bitter laugh. “Come and see.”

  They heard a step and Finch came into the room.

  “This is my brother,” said Wakefield. Molly and Finch shook hands.

  “How different you two are!” she exclaimed. She looked from one to the other, hesitated, then added, “But there’s a certain resemblance. I see it now.”

  “It’s our devotion to art,” said Wakefield.

  “Perhaps it’s our inability to make a living,” said Finch. He added: —

  “Sarah will be down in a moment.” He moved rather nervously about the room. He asked: —

  “How do you like the flowers?”

  “Very much. But I wish there weren’t so many of them. Why did Sarah do it?”

  Finch flushed. “In honor of Miss Griffith, I think.”

  “It’s like the First Night of a star,” said Molly. “I shan’t know how to thank her.”

  Wakefield went to look at the tea table. Certainly Henriette had done well as to cakes and there was a bright fire in the grate. She came sighing into the room with the teapot and looked appealingly at Wakefield.

  “Everything’s beautiful,” he smiled.

  “That’s a blessing,” she returned, in a lugubrious whisper, “for if I ’ad anything more to do I’d have dropped dead.”

  Sarah had come into the room. Molly and Finch had been talking rather shyly when she appeared in the doorway. Finch said, in the same shy voice: — “This is my wife, Sarah, Miss Griffith.”

  Molly had made no definite picture in her mind of the Sarah whose presence Wakefield so resented, yet she was startled and disconcerted by Sarah’s appearance. Perhaps, after the profusion of roses, lilies, and carnations, she had expected someone rather opulent, with hair that might justifiably be called tresses. Sarah came with her gliding step, looking, as Finch had once sneeringly remarked in the days when he was struggling not to love her, as though she were on wheels. She wore a kind of peignoir, very narrow and straight, of steel-grey moiré, fastened down the front by cut-steel buttons. The black plaits of her hair lay flat against her head, and from her small pale ears drops of tourmaline hung like frozen sea water.

  Finch said — “Miss Griffith admires your flowers, darling. I told her you had bought them for her and she said they made her feel like a First Night.”

  Sarah smiled, well pleased.

  “I said,” put in Molly Griffith, hastily, “they made me think of a star’s First Night, not mine.”

  Sarah still smiled but said nothing.

  “Tea is in,” announced Wakefield.

  “Oh, look, Finch!” cried Sarah. “The lovely cakes!”

  She snatched one from the plate and began to eat it before she sat down.

  Molly wondered whether she was going to like or hate her. She knew she was going to like Finch. There was an odd, hungry look in his eyes and his thin cheeks, but his laugh had a sudden hilarity and his mousy-fair hair was untidy like a small boy’s. “He keeps looking at Sarah in a puzzled way,” she thought, “as though he wondered why he loved her.”

  “Have you many friends in London?” Finch asked.

  “Very few. I don’t make friends easily.”

  “You’re like me,” said Sarah. “I could travel over half Europe and never make a friend.”

  “You wear such unfriendly clothes,” said Wakefield.

  “But when I do make a friend, it is for always. I never change.”

  Finch’s eyes were on her.

  “What about enemies?” asked Wakefield.

  She poured herself a second cup of tea. “I am always willing to turn an enemy into a friend.” She turned to Molly. “After tea will you and Wake do one of your scenes together for us?”

  “I’m afraid not. We don’t know our parts well enough.”

  Wakefield added, “We discovered today, with Mr. Fox’s help, how little we do know.”

  “Not you,” said Molly.

  “He was after me too.”

  Sarah persisted. “Please do a scene. I love acting. Make them, Finch.”

  “If you want to see Wakefield make a monkey of himself, I don’t,” said Finch. “Have one of these nice scones.”

  “There goes the doorbell!” said Wakefield. “I’ll answer it and save poor old Henriette’s legs.”

  But she was there before him and brought the cablegram into the room on a silver tray. The tray shook as she held it toward Wakefield.

  “They always make me tremble,” she said. “There’d ought to be a law against them.”

  All eyes were on Wakefield as he read.

  SAIL FOR IRELAND IN FORTNIGHT SEE YOU IN LONDON

  WRITING RENNY.

  “He’s coming!” shouted Wakefield. “Renny’s coming! I knew he would! God, I hope we’ve done the right thing, Finch! How excited they must be at home! And how excited I am! Look, Molly, here he is.” He tore open the desk and took out a newspaper cutting to show her.

  “Is he coming to stay ’ere?” asked Henriette. “Not that I mind a crowd. It’s just me veins as goes back on me.”

  “Not he,” said Wakefield. “He’ll stay at a comfortable hotel.”

  “Ah, I suppose so,” mourned Henriette. “I can’t make anyone comfortable, no matter ’ow I try.”

  Sarah, Finch, and Wakefield
chorused that they were more comfortable than ever before in their lives and, only partially mollified, she drifted moaning from the room.

  Molly took the picture from Wakefield and saw a tall lean horse mounted by a tall lean man. Underneath was printed. “R. C. Whiteoak, Esq., on Mrs. Spindles.”

  “There he is,” repeated Wakefield. “What do you think of him?”

  “I like him,” she answered gravely. “And the horse too.”

  “He rode that mare in the New York Horse Show and won a big prize.”

  “Did he?” She held the picture from her as though she were long-sighted and added — “He brings the outdoors right into this room, doesn’t he?”

  Sarah put out her hand. “Let me see the picture, please.”

  She examined it with a little smile, then said, “I’m glad he’s coming.”

  Wakefield thought — “So you can flaunt your recapture of Finch in his face, my girl! That cruel little smile isn’t for nothing.”

  Finch was twisting his fingers together under the table.

  “Aren’t you glad he’s coming, Finch?” asked Sarah.

  “I’m always glad to see Renny,” he answered.

  VIII

  PREPARATIONS AND JOURNEYS

  ALAYNE HAD HOPED that there would be no family discussion over the visit to Ireland but she was disappointed. Piers and his family, Meg and her family, Uncle Ernest and Aunt Harriet came as usual to dinner on Sunday. Throughout the meal and for an hour afterward the controversy raged, threading its way in and out of the question of Johnny the Bird, into fields quite unconnected with horses and even into the remote past, when Nicholas and Ernest had words as to which of them actually owned a carriage and pair they had kept in London, in the early nineties.

  Perhaps because Meg and Maurice had been told nothing of the project till it was two days old, perhaps because they honestly thought the idea of buying Johnny the Bird was ridiculous and harebrained, they were heart and soul against it. They won Piers to their side, which stirred Renny to anger. The three made a solid implacable wall against his going. On his side, Renny had only the two old uncles (Nicholas nowadays became very much flustered when he argued, lost his breath and his heart thumped), Pheasant, and Aunt Harriet. Maurice and Meg both felt that Aunt Harriet, as a comparative newcomer, had no right to be so aggressive, but because she was charming to them and more especially to their daughter, Patience, they bore with her.