Books 13-16: Return to Jalna / Renny's Daughter / Variable Winds at Jalna / Centenary at Jalna

by Mazo de La Roche

  Evidently there had been no stirrings outside the house during the day, for the glistening crust of the snow was unbroken by any footprints except on the windowsill of the front room, where the snow was marked by tiny prints made by the claws of small birds, as they ate the crumbs scattered for them. The sill was made visible by the ruddy yellow light that streamed across it from the room within. The house, set down like a box, with two pointed gables added, in the seclusion of snow and snow-decked trees, had an air of repelling any intrusion on its fastness.

  Yet, the next moment after Renny had knocked, the door was thrown open and Humphrey Bell welcomed him with obvious pleasure. Over-heated air poured out from the room, yet Bell himself seemed not too warm in a heavy grey sweater. He was a small, slight young man, so admirably proportioned that he might have been almost impressive had his hair and face been less colourless. Indeed, at first glance, he might have been taken for an albino, till it was seen that his eyes were a clear flower-like blue and well able to bear the light.

  “So it’s you, Colonel Whiteoak,” he exclaimed. “Just the man I’d like to see.”

  “Don’t ‘Colonel’ me,” Renny said. “War’s over.”

  “I’m glad you feel like that. I hate everything military.”

  Renny came in and Bell slammed the door against the winter night.

  “Yet,” said Renny, “you stood up to it pretty well. You’d a long time in a German prison camp too.”

  Bell drew up a chair for him beside his own, so that the two faced out of the window where the moon, in its first power of shadow-casting, threw the blue silhouette of a young pine on the snow. Behind them was the small, cheaply furnished room, to which Bell somehow managed to give an air of coziness. Perhaps it was because he was obviously so happy to live there. The war had turned him onto a different path from the one on which his feet had first been set. He was the son of a doctor in a New Brunswick town, the only son in a family of four daughters, all considerably older than he. A late arrival and the darling of his father’s heart, he was destined for the study of medicine. He had had no inclination toward that profession but had accepted it because six natures, all more dominating than his own, had urged him to it. When the war came he was in his first year in a medical college. In spite of all his family could do to dissuade him he took a course in flying at a time when the life of the average flyer was very short. It was his duty to join a medical unit, his sisters thought, anything on land or sea would have been better than aviation. He had survived his first months of flying to be shot down in Germany and to be a prisoner till the end of the war. In the cloistered life of the camp, surrounded by men, some of whom would have been obnoxious to his family, he discovered himself. After the war he wanted to live as far as possible from that family. He discovered that, though he loved his parents, the atmosphere of the town where he was expected to settle down and become a partner in his father’s practice was suffocating to him. The thought of devoting his life to treating the ailments of the sick repelled him. He found in himself no dedication to that service. When he returned home the glad anticipation of the reunion became a bewildered disappointment to the family. Even the three brothers-in-law he had acquired during his absence were disappointed in him, though they had never before met him. There was disappointment all about him, mounting higher every week, like a quick-growing hedge, closing him in. He did not know how to escape, yet escape he must. He was constantly aware that the eyes of nine disappointed people were on him, wondering what he would do. Do I look like a doctor? he would ask himself. Would any patient have confidence in me? Miserably he compared his own qualities with the staunch qualities of his father.

  Suddenly and from an unexpected quarter the way was opened to him. An old friend of the family, a bachelor, died, leaving him a legacy sufficient to support him for several years, if he were careful. He made up his mind to go to some distant place, perhaps the West Indies or Mexico, and try to write. He would write something that would make his family realize that he had done well to give up the study of medicine. If he never was able to write anything worth printing, still he had done well to give up medicine. He had gone down to Boston and there he had heard Finch Whiteoak play the piano, in one of a series of concerts. After the concert he had met the pianist in the house of a New Brunswicker living in Boston. Bell was so moved by Finch’s playing that he feared to meet him, lest disappointment would follow. He shrank from small disappointments for himself even more than he shrank from inflicting large disappointments on others. But Finch Whiteoak was fascinating to Bell. He could not keep his eyes from Finch’s hands. There was an inspired look in Finch’s long, grey-blue eyes, Bell thought. He found himself talking freely, gladly of the formless, pent-up thoughts within him. After the years in school, after the years in the army, the prison camp, and after that, his family’s plans for him rising like a barbed-wire fence round him, their disappointment like a dark deep ditch — now his freedom lay in his hands and he did not know where to place it. He was like a man carrying a sapling in his arms over a piece of bare land, trying to choose a place to plant it. From the sheltered corner of the room Bell had looked out defensively at the other guests, willing them to keep away.

  “I thought of going to the West Indies or Mexico or even to some island in the Pacific,” he said, feeling the weight of his plans in his chest. “I thought my money would last longer there and I could write — try to find out what I’m good for.

  “You’d not be good for anything very long — on an island in the Pacific. You’d marry a native and have a lot of funny-looking kids and get lazier all the time. You’re a Northern type. You need sharp winds and frosty air.”

  “Perhaps you’re right,” muttered Bell. “But it must be somewhere that doesn’t cost too much.”

  Finch ran his hand over his forelock, pushing it back. “Look here,” he exclaimed, “I have an idea. My oldest brother owns quite a big place in Ontario. Certainly it’s not as secluded as a South Sea island but he has five hundred acres and quite a lot of it is in woodland. Fine trees there. Do you like trees?”

  Bell nodded. “I think I do.”

  “Well, there’s a small house on the place, completely hidden among oaks and pines, which my brother is willing to let for a low rent to the right tenant. No one would trouble you there, unless you wanted.”

  Bell was excited. “It’s the sort of thing I’d like, though it’s a long way from the South Seas.”

  “You might try it,” said Finch. “Perhaps it wouldn’t suit you at all.” He was easily rebuffed. “Better not risk it.” He glanced at his wristwatch. He was tired and there were other people here who wanted to talk to him, an aspiring young girl pianist who was panting to pour out her soul.

  “But I want to try it!” Bell said eagerly. “I’m not at all set on going to an island.”

  “There’s nothing picturesque about the place I’m telling you of,” said Finch. He was already standing up. “It’s just that it is a place you might like to write in. You’d find something just as quiet anywhere in the country.”

  Bell could not say that he wanted to be where he might see Finch sometimes but he asked:

  “You spend a part of your year at home?”

  “Oh, yes.” Finch’s thoughts already seemed removed far from this room. Young Bell felt like saying, — “I’d like to be somewhere near you,” but he could not. Instead he asked, — “what sort of man is your brother?”

  Finch was suddenly very much in the room. He gave a little laugh, as though at some heart-warming remembrance, and said:

  “He’s past sixty but he’s the best horseman I know. He’s got red hair and not a single white one in it — that I’ve ever seen. You might not like him. Some people don’t.”

  “But you do!” exclaimed Bell warmly. “I can see that.”

  A smile lit Finch Whiteoak’s face. “He’s been a father to me,” he said.

  And now here was Bell opening the door of the Fox Farm, like a host, pad
ding into the living room in old grey felt slippers and placing a chair for Renny Whiteoak to face the intricate fragility of the snow-decked boughs of the evergreens, the twigs of the oaks, against the burnished afterglow in the west. He had lived at the Fox Farm for only six months. He would have told you this was the happiest time of his life, looking back no further than the beginning of the war that had made his boyhood seem another life scarcely remembered. This was his first winter, a mild one, and he had been very snug, delighting in his aloneness in the little house in the woods, in being cut off from his family, in making new friends, of whom he never saw any more than he wished to. In those months he had written three short stories, all of which lay in a drawer of his writing table, each twice rejected. He had not yet made up his mind to send them out again. He was in no hurry, indeed he had not much faith in his powers. Or perhaps it was that he so enjoyed his present way of living that he shrank from disturbance of it.

  When Renny Whiteoak came to see him it was his habit to place the two shabby, comfortable old chairs with their backs to the room and facing the woods, he himself taking the one with the sagging springs. He would then produce two glasses of whisky and water and the two would settle down for an hour’s talk. This happened twice a week, and once a month Bell took dinner at Jalna.

  “Well,” said Renny, genially, “how goes the writing?”

  He was the only person to whom Bell had spoken of his hopes and that under a promise of secrecy. Renny was flattered by Bell’s confidence. He looked gravely judicial when Bell would read one of his stories aloud to him. Though they weren’t the sort of stories he himself liked, being concerned with odd and even macabre experiences of the mind, he thought they were good. Secretly he hoped Bell would outgrow the desire to write such peculiar stuff and turn to something showing more of the virtues of a man.

  “How goes the work?” he asked, when they were settled.

  “If you can call it work,” said Bell, his small face set in a comic sneer.

  “Damned hard work, I should say,” persisted Renny. “I’d hate to tackle it.”

  Bell sprang up and went to the mantelshelf. “This is all I’ve done today,” he said. He put into Renny’s hand a peculiarly-shaped knot of wood from a branch of cedar that he had carved into the likeness of a chipmunk, so alert in its posture, so bold and yet timorous, that Renny laughed and curved his hand about it in pleasure.

  “It’s good,” he said. “It’s capital. Now there is talent!”

  Bell made a little grimace at the unintentional implication. “I like my menagerie,” he said. On the mantelshelf there were a dozen carvings of other small animals, contrived from oddly shaped pieces of wood.

  “why don’t you try your hand at a human head?” Renny asked.

  “I’d like to do yours — if I were able.” He gave an admiring glance at the hard-looking head set with such spirit on the lean shoulders.

  “what about old Clapperton!” laughed Renny. “I wish you’d find a particularly ugly knob of wood and make a suitably sinister head of him. God, how I dislike that old fellow!”

  “what is his latest?”

  “Oh, he’s begun whining again about his ideals and his dreams. Asinine old crooner!”

  “And what do his dreams portend?”

  “Another go at his model village. I’ve told you how his wife persuaded him to give up the idea. Now he is playing with it again and in deadly earnest, I’m afraid.”

  “Have you been to his house?”

  “I just came from there.”

  “I have the impression that his wife and her sister keep him very much in his place.”

  “They do. But he’s getting tired of it. He had his own way for too many years. He’s becoming restive.”

  “when I meet him,” said Bell slowly, “I feel like running the other way. He strikes a false note here. He doesn’t belong.” A mischievous smile hovered across Bell’s face. “Let’s get rid of him.”

  “I wish we could,” Renny returned sombrely.

  “He never meets me,” Bell stroked his towhead, “without rubbing me the wrong way,” and he stroked more firmly, as though to rub himself the right way. “He advised me, the other day, to see a psychiatrist. I’m in a despondent state, he says, brought on by the war. I almost told him that I’m despondent only when I’m with him.”

  “I’ll get him out of here yet,” said Renny, but his words brought no conviction to himself or to Bell. Eugene Clapperton was too firmly entrenched.

  Through the window they now saw Adeline coming toward the house. She wore a white pullover and a pale grey skirt. Large flakes of snow were falling and some had come to rest on her head forming, as it were, a wreath of white flowers. It was as though one of the young silver birches had refused longer to be earth-bound and, its roots being released, was moving lightly through the snowy wood. They saw her in the pale twilight place her feet in her father’s footprints, in an almost symbolic following of him.

  “She’s been following me,” Renny said, with a pleased paternal look.

  Bell jumped up. He said, — “I must open the door.”

  “Let her wait. She won’t mind.” They could see her, leaning against an oak, her arms folded, prepared to wait.

  Bell moved nervously about the room. “It’s so untidy,” he muttered. He had always hoped she would come, and now that she was here he felt unprepared. Renny settled it for him. He leant forward and tapped on the window. Adeline looked over her shoulder smiling, then, with a swift gesture, she touched first her breast and then the trunk of the tree, to indicate that she was satisfied to wait where she was. But Renny rapped on the pane again and beckoned. He strode into the little hall to open the door.

  Bell looked wildly about the room, wishing that he might transform it into something that would surprise and delight her. But the room remained shabby and small. “Like me,” he thought.

  Father and daughter entered together, the resemblance between them so strong that an observer would not have pictured any other man who could have begot her, yet she was delicate of flesh and appealing of outline, where he was weather-beaten and sculptured with a fierce flourish.

  Bell had turned on the unshaded electric light. Beneath it his head gleamed silvery, even his eyelashes, but his eyes were blue and inviting.

  “Come in, come in,” he said, and tried to sound as though he weren’t afraid of her coming.

  They shook hands, then Adeline’s eye was caught by the carved chipmunk still cradled in Renny’s hand. If Bell wished to delight her he had done it.

  “Oh,” she exclaimed and, when Renny had put it into her hands, she held it at a distance to drink in its charm, then, holding it close, she bent her head to kiss it. “I’ve never seen anything so sweet,” she murmured.

  “Look,” said Renny, “he has made others.” He indicated the collection of small beasts and birds on the mantelshelf.

  “Darlings!” cried Adeline, to first one and then another. “But I like the chipmunk best.”

  “Better than the squirrel?” asked Bell.

  “Much better. Squirrels have hard cold faces, cold greedy eyes, but the little chipmunk has eyes like a fawn.”

  “Keep it, if you like it,” said Bell.

  “Really?”

  She was genuinely delighted and lingered behind Renny a moment in the room to thank him again. Bell watched them disappear into the wood that was now almost dark. He went back to the living room and rested his forehead against the mantelshelf.… “You fool,” he said to himself — “you blasted thundering fool.”

  He went to where a small looking glass hung and stared at his reflection. “I won’t let her do this to me,” he said, scowling at the young man’s face that stared back at him. “I won’t give in. It’s not as though I had anything to offer her. Good God! A carved chipmunk! And she cares more for it than she does for me … She doesn’t even know she is doing anything to me.” He pressed his hand to his forehead, as though to press back the confusion o
f his thoughts. He went to the window and saw that all through the wood there was a new consciousness of the moon. Now the smallest twigs showed themselves conscious of her presence, casting their minute shadows on the crusty surface of the snow. His own cat came out of the wood and looked up at the window, the moonlight shining greenly in her eyes. She mewed silently, her tail limp from cold.

  Bell went to the door and let her in. He thought, — “This is what I’m headed for … an old bachelor, living alone with his cat! Probably Adeline thinks of me as just that … A white-haired old fellow living alone with his cat … Doing a little carving — trying to write. God, I hope her father hasn’t told her I’m trying to write.… I needn’t worry. They’ll never talk of me …” He picked up the cat and held her against his breast. She smelt of frosty fur. “Poor pussy — poor pussy!” Her whole sinuous frame shook with the energy of her thankful purring.

  “I’ll warm your milk tonight,” he assured her, and smiled at the picture of himself warming milk for his cat, in a little saucepan, in his little kitchen.

  But, lying on the sofa, with the cat purring on his chest, he felt a great unharnessed power within himself. It surged up to write a poem to Adeline, to write a play about her or sculpture in marble her lovely head. Or was the power nothing but a wild desire to have her alone with him in this small house — to offer his love to her as the dark wood offered itself to the moon?