02 Morning at Jalna (20 page)

“Explain,” said Augusta. “It would be a lovely thing to do.”

As Belle unfolded the plan of acting the sacred events, all five occupants of the room became equal — the three young Whiteoaks, the lithe half-breed, the freed slave. She indeed was the instructor. The others hung speechless on her words till Tite exclaimed:

“I will take the part of a soldier.”

“Do you feel that you can do it properly?” Augusta asked.

“Just watch me,” he said fervently.

Exalted, Annabelle stared admiringly at Augusta. “Little Missus,” she said, “you sure ought to be the Madonna, ’cause you have the right face and the beautiful hair.”

Tite stared at Gussie, as though he had never before seen her clearly.

“What shall I be?” came from Ernest.

“You gonna be our Lawd,” said Belle.

“And me?” demanded Nicholas. “Somebody horrible, please.”

“Pilate,” at once said Belle. “I guess Tite and me will jes’ have to be the mob.”

“Right,” agreed Nicholas. “Let’s get things moving while there’s time.”

They cleared the room for the play — all but Tite who went to the woodshed and returned carrying two pieces of scantling nailed together in the form of a cross. This he laid on the floor.

“You’ll not really crucify me?” Ernest, in spite of the fact that he had been chosen for the part of Jesus, was beginning to be a little frightened.

“We not gonna tech a hair of yo’ dear little head,” promised Annabelle, and put her arm about him. She brought a piece of white linen and wrapped him in it.

“He should be naked,” said Tite.

Ernest’s modesty was revolted by this. Annabelle exclaimed, “No, no. He look jes’ fine the way he is.” She laid her blue scarf about Augusta’s shoulders and brushed her long hair. Belle was in her element. She placed each child to the best effect. Nicholas washed his hands in a basin of water and said loudly, “I find no fault in this man.”

Tite shouted “Crucify him!” and leaped about Ernest in what resembled an Indian war dance. He picked up Ernest and laid him on the cross. Augusta knelt at his feet, shedding real tears. Nicholas forgot he was Pilate and joined Tite in dancing and uttering wild yells. Belle forgot she was civilized and leaped up and down, her head almost striking the ceiling, while she screamed, “Save us, Lawd!” Ernest lay on the cross, his little pink hands clenching and unclenching in imagined pain. Nero barked with all his strength. The situation was entirely out of control.

The room was stuffing hot. No one in it perceived the faces at the window. It was not until there came a thunderous knock on the door (Tite had bolted it) that it was thrown open and Wilmott, Adeline, and Philip were disclosed on the threshold. After the din in the room the silence that fell was frightening.

XX

Punishment

The silence was broken by Wilmott who said — in a voice no one in the room had heard before — “I’m ashamed of you. Ashamed of every one of you.”

Philip boomed, “It’s an orgy. Nothing less than an orgy.”

“What would have been the end to it,” Adeline said, “if we had not come on the scene, I hate to think.” She added, in a voice quivering with curiosity, “But I wish I knew. I wish I knew.”

Tite kept his head. He stood up, very dignified and straight. He said, “We did get a little excited, but” — he waved an inviting hand — “if you, lady and gentlemen, will sit down, we’ll act out the play and you’ll see that we meant no harm.”

Annabelle was crying without restraint.

When the door had been opened Nero had shot out into the snow. Now he was scratching on the door to come in again.

Wilmott said, “The first thing for you young people to do is to tidy up.”

“Ernest,” said Philip, “take off that white thing. Gussie and Nicholas, get ready to come home.”

“Shall we put on our snowshoes?” they asked.

“Let me explain,” said Tite.

“I want no explanations from you.” Philip’s frown would have made most young men quail but Tite’s face was impassive. He said, addressing Wilmott, “You know me, Boss, and you know I would do nothing to disgrace you. What we were acting was a religious play. We were carried away by our feelings. It’s a beautiful thing, Boss, to be carried away by religious inspiration.”

“Take Annabelle to her room,” Wilmott said tersely. He stood with folded arms as Tite led the weeping mulatto away. “I’m terribly sorry this has happened,” he added to Adeline.

“It goes to show how little the dark races can control themselves. Now if I had been here I should have taken them in hand and made the play truly religious.” Her eyes shone. She looked down in wonder at the cross on which her small son had been stretched.

“You probably would have been jumping and screaming with the best of them,” said Philip in an undertone.

It was seldom that the children were taken out at night in the big red sleigh with the buffalo robes. But now they were tucked snugly into the back seat, the fur rug up to their chins, their flushed cheeks tingling in the icy air, their ears filled with the splintered music of the sleigh bells. The night was so clear that every sound, every sight, became brilliantly intensified. The moon rose up into the blueness of the sky, casting the shadows of the trees in splendour on the snow, turning the manes of the horses into flying metal.

Adeline delighted in the dashing over the smooth road, the boundless glittering solitude. “Can’t we go home the long way by the church, Philip? I do adore sleigh riding on a night like this. It’s as though we owned the earth.”

So they went the long way, but Nero went the short way and was waiting on the porch for them when they jingled up the drive between the rows of snow-laden spruces and hemlocks. Adeline and the children went indoors (Ernest ready to drop from sleepiness) but Philip took the horses and sleigh to the stables.

When he returned on foot, his long strides crunching the snow, moonlight still flooded the land, the moon in its majestic power reducing the earth to no more than its footstool. Inside the hall Philip listened. He could hear his family moving about in the sitting room. Ernest was saying, “Mamma, I’m hungry,” in a whiny voice, and her reply, “And so am I. It takes a sleigh ride to give one an appetite.” She had so enjoyed this that she had forgotten the disgraceful scene at the cottage and beamed at her children. All divested themselves of their wraps and when she sank into a chair and Nicholas knelt at her feet to draw off her fur-lined boots, Ernest climbed on to her lap and repeated, “Mamma, I’m hungry.” Nero picked up one of the snow boots, gave it a thorough shaking, and carried it under the sofa.

In a sonorous voice Philip remarked from the doorway, “So — this is the way you young ’uns are being punished. Well, you won’t feel so pert when I’ve done with you.”

Adeline chimed in with, “And you’ll feel still less pert when I’ve done with you.” She pushed Ernest off her lap, and reached out to give Nicholas a slap.

He evaded it and said, “We were not really to blame. It was Tite and Belle. She’d seen something like it in the South.”

“You should not have taken part in such a performance,” answered Philip. “That couple are a bad example to you. Very well, you’re off — the three of you — to England in the spring — to schools which will discipline you as you’ve never before been disciplined.”

The thought of being left at home while Augusta and Nicholas went to England had been almost unbearable to Ernest. Now the news that he was to accompany them to a terrifying English school was even worse. As always when he was upset, Ernest’s stomach clamoured for food. He whined, “I’m hungry.”

“To bed! All of you,” ordered their father.

“Thank you for a lovely sleigh ride,” said Ernest.

“That sleigh ride,” said Philip, “was to please your mother. You just happened to be there.” He smiled into his blond moustache. “You may count yourselves lucky that you’re not to be thrashed till the morning.”

Three pairs of mournful eyes looked into his.

“We’re to be thrashed in the morning?” quavered Nicholas.

“Before or after breakfast?” asked Ernest.

Philip considered. “Before breakfast,” he said. “Razor strop.”

“What about Gussie?” asked Nicholas.

“Her mother will deal with her.”

“I’d rather you did,” said Augusta, sedately.

“
What?
You’d rather I did?”

“Yes, Papa.”

“You hear that, Adeline?”

Adeline looked smug. “You see,” she said, “they really stand in awe of me.”

“Might I,” asked Ernest, “have one little dry crust of bread?”

Philip sprang up, went through the wide doorway to the dining room, and returned with the biscuit jar which was in the shape of a wooden barrel with silver bands. “Take these,” he said, “and eat them in your rooms. Then straight to bed.”

He dragged Nero from under the sofa and rescued Adeline’s snow boot from him. “A buckle is missing,” he said, and spoke sternly to Nero who immediately spat it out.

Augusta took it to her mother, asking at the same time, “Would you mind telling me what my punishment is to be, mamma?”

“A dose of rhubarb powder,” grinned Adeline. “Twill be both punishment and cure, for it has an abominable taste and will likely save you from a bilious attack.”

“But why should I have a bilious attack?”

“You know as well as I do how excitement affects your liver.”

The two small boys were already on their way upstairs with the biscuits and now Augusta followed them. She wanted nothing to eat, the horrid vision of the rhubarb powder hovered before her. She felt ill.

Her room was deluged by moonlight. She closed the door behind her. She gave herself up to the silence and the moonlight. She was experiencing one of her lonely times. She seemed to belong to no one, no place. Not even to Jalna. Yet the thought of going away frightened her. If only she could fly away with her dove and be lost — the two of them — in some ancient and beautiful land! But, though she felt light spiritually, she was more conscious of her body than ever before. Her arms and legs felt heavy, her head strangely light. She felt a strange dizzy resentment towards the way her parents treated her. Their half-jocular sternness, their refusal to consider her as almost grown up. If Guy Lacey were here, she thought, he would protect me.

XXI

The Plan

The weather changed that very night. A boisterous wind, with the promise of spring in it, galloped across the land. The three young Whiteoaks had no snowshoes for the morning walk to Wilmott’s, so they were obliged to wear galoshes and trudge through deep snow. Everything, they thought, was against them. They were a sombre trio. Sombre too was Wilmott and darkly tragic was Tite. Annabelle did not appear with the mid-morning cocoa. Wilmott dismissed the children early. It was Easter Saturday.

On the way home they heard the cawing of crows. The black-winged birds swept across the windy sky like pirates across a storm-tossed sea. “Caw-caw-caw,” they shouted as though in challenge to the sleeping earth. Like flails their wings beat the sky.

“It’s slushy,” said Nicholas. “We couldn’t wear our snowshoes even if we had them.”

“There will be no more snowshoeing this year,” said Augusta.

Ernest asked, “Do you suppose Mr. Wilmott is going to keep our snowshoes for himself and Tite and Belle?”

“Quite likely,” said Augusta.

She trudged doggedly on through the slushy snow. She clasped her bare hands, red from cold, together, as though in prayer. She said, “Life has become very dreary.”

“Do you think it will become better or worse?” asked Nicholas.

“Worse,” she replied.

“Still more dreary?” asked Nicholas.

“Still more dreary,” she replied.

“Dreary, my eye!” said Ernest.

A spatter of ice-cold rain fell.

“Papa did not lay a hand on me,” said Ernest. “I told him I have a cold coming on.” Then with a sly look at Nicholas, he asked, “Did the razor strop hurt?”

“Shut up!” shouted Nicholas and gave Ernest a push that landed him flat on his behind in an icy puddle.

From where he sat, Ernest gave a teasing look at his sister. “How did you like the rhubarb powder, Gussie? Was it hard to get down?” Ernest would never have spoken so to Augusta, had he not been sitting in that icy slush and feeling so miserable.

Augusta turned away her head. “I’m going to bring it up,” she moaned and ran into a dense thicket of cedars.

“Now you’ve done it,” said Nicholas and he gave Ernest a smack on the head.

It did not hurt because of the woollen toque he wore, but it terribly hurt his feelings and he sat where he was in the icy slush for some little time after the others had disappeared among the trees. The flock of crows again passed overhead, cawing, it seemed, in derision of him. “Cawcaw-yah-yah-yah!” they screamed. Again a spatter of icy raindrops fell, as though from their wings.

Ernest gathered himself together and trudged homeward. It seemed that he would never arrive. He did not much care if he never arrived. He had a mind to lie down in the snow and be frozen to death. His family would be sorry then. They would cry — even his father. Ernest pictured the scene with satisfaction. The sufferings of Gussie and Nicholas were as nothing compared with his. What were a few whacks with a razor strop or a dose of rhubarb powder compared with his sufferings?

It was a rule of the house that galoshes should be left in the porch unless the side entrance was used. But Ernest walked straight in, leaving snow clots on the rug. Little Philip ran to meet him. It was surprising how, in the past months, he had developed from a baby into a small boy. In spite of his light blue dress, trimmed with braid, in spite of his long hair that hung in golden clusters to his shoulders, he looked and moved like a boy.

“Me go too,” he said, attempting to follow Ernest up the stairs.

“No,” said Ernest. “You can’t come.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m sick.”

“Sick?” repeated little Philip. “Why?”

“Why is anyone sick?” said Ernest. “I shall likely die, and you won’t care. Nobody’ll care.”

The little fellow took this to be a huge joke. He chuckled, then laughed with all his might.

“I ain’t tik,” he said through his laughter.

“What an ignorant way of speaking!” exclaimed Ernest. “
I ain’t tik!
I suppose you mean you’re not sick. Well, why don’t you say what you mean? That’s what I’d like to know.” He hung on the banister looking down with contempt at his baby brother.

Adeline called from her bedroom. “What do I hear? Someone being unkind to his poor little brother? Up to your room, sir, and change into dry things.”

Ernest dragged himself up the stairs but he did not change his wet clothes. He just threw himself on the bed and fell asleep.

He lay in bed for the next three weeks suffering from a severe attack of tonsillitis. During those weeks winter departed in a roar of floods and a flourish of snowstorms. Spring weather came in unseasonably warm. By the time Ernest was convalescent, the trees had clothed themselves in garments of rosy young buds, dandelions had appeared on the lawn, and chirping, grunting, bleating young creatures in poultry house and barn. Ernest could hear the gurgling of the stream as it threw off its bonds of winter. Nicholas, when he came to do his lessons in their bedroom after tea, could talk of nothing but fishing — what kinds of bait for different sorts of fish — where the best fish were to be found. Nicholas was supposed to come to the bedroom to be company for Ernest, but he did not do his homework. He talked of fishing and sailing a boat.

One Saturday in May Nicholas and Augusta were taken for a sail by Tite Sharrow. Tite had bought or had somehow acquired a small sailing boat. Without permission from anyone he took Augusta and Nicholas sailing on the sparkling expanse of the lake. They rowed down the river from Wilmott’s cottage, Tite at the oars, till they reached the lake. There, on its solitary wooded shore, they found the small boathouse where the sailing boat was sheltered. Tite, with the help of the two young Whiteoaks, drew it across the stony beach and set it dancing on the wavelets. He raised the sail. The May breeze played with it.

“Have you ever enjoyed a sail?” asked Tite.

“You know very well we have not,” answered Augusta. “But there’s nothing we’d like better.”

“Do take us sailing, Tite,” begged Nicholas.

“Would your father allow it?”

“We need not tell him,” said Nicholas. “Or our Mamma either. They have been severe with us, ever since the Good Friday party. We have no reason for being good.”

Tite held the boat steady while brother and sister clambered in. He said, “Freedom is the best thing in life, if you know how to enjoy it.”

Augusta, raising her face to the breeze, asked, “Why did you get married, Tite? Now you must always think of Belle.”

“Do you mean Belle hinders me?” he said.

“Well, you’re no longer free, are you?”

Tite showed his white teeth in an enigmatic smile. “Since I married Belle,” he said, “I have even more freedom. When I go away, she looks after my boss for me. When I am at home, she waits on us both. She does all the work. She is accustomed to being a slave. Freedom is of no use to her. With me it is different. I am descended from Indian braves and from a nobly born French explorer. I must be free or die.”

“And so must we,” said Nicholas, sniffing the spring wind. “Isn’t that so, Gussie?”

The small sailing boat, like a creature alive, sported over the waves, which increased in size as they ventured farther out on the lake. The early green verdure of the shore was one with the bluish-green waters. Water birds flew close to the land. Land birds tried their exulting wings at the lake’s edge.

All was motion. Everywhere was a fluid intermingling of the elements. Augusta felt that never before had she known what true happiness was. It was, she thought, freedom to go where you chose, when you chose. Her eyes sought the faces of her two companions. That odd smile, that so inscrutable smile, never left Tite’s lips. On the brow of Nicholas there was a frown of concentration as he bent all his powers on watching Tite at the sail. Yet there was a deep serenity on his face. Augusta said to him, “What if we never went back? Remember what Mr. Madigan said about running away.”

“It’s a good idea,” said Nicholas. After a little he remarked to Tite, “I wish we had a light sailing boat like this. It’s just what we need.”

“Why don’t you ask your Mamma to buy you one?”

“Why do you say Mamma?” asked Nicholas. “It is Papa who does the buying.”

“But it is the wife who persuades,” said Tite.

“Does Belle persuade you?”

“We have no money,” said Tite.

“But how can you buy without money?”

“There are other ways.” And he added, with easy satisfaction, “I know them all.”

Augusta threw back her head, drank in the wild sweetness of the spring day, and remarked, “We are thinking — my brother and I — of leaving home.”

It was impossible to surprise Tite. Now he looked as though this was no more than he had expected. But he asked, “What would you live on, my little lady, and where would you live?”

Augusta answered, without hesitation, “We have friends. Mr. and Mrs. Sinclair. They have invited us to come to them at any time and to stay as long as we wish in Charleston. You see, Tite, our parents intend to take us to boarding school in England.”

“And we don’t want to go,” put in Nicholas.

“Young sir,” said Tite “you would receive a beautiful education in England — better than in any other place in all the world. It was in England that my boss got his education and no one in all this country has an education to match it. I wish I had your chance.”

“We don’t want to be educated,” persisted Nicholas. “We want to be free.”

“And to have strange adventures,” added Augusta.

“In the English schools,” said Nicholas, “we’d be looked on as barbarians. We’d be bullied. Even our little brother would be bullied.”

“Take my advice” — Tite’s narrow eyes rested speculatively on the two faces so eagerly turned to him — “get all the book-learning you can. It is something solid to hang on to. You can listen to the talk of other folks — the way they chatter — and all the while you reflect on how much more you know than they know. Reflection is a very nice pastime, miss” — he addressed Augusta in particular — “there is no better way of spending your time. Your face, miss, shows that you were made for reflection.”

“
And
adventure,” said Augusta.

“
And
adventure,” added Tite. “But look, the wind has veered. We must come about.”

For a time they were occupied with the sail. Nicholas was especially good at manipulating them. After a time they were becalmed, and as they lounged in the small boat Augusta was moved to tell Tite of her plan. It was the first Nicholas had heard of it. Nevertheless he listened without turning a hair. Indeed an observer looking on might have thought he had concocted the whole scheme, so self-possessed was he.

When Augusta and Nicholas returned home after the sail they entered the side door, which was usual, tiptoed past their mother’s room, from which came the sound of her voice telling a story to little Philip to keep him quiet while she coaxed the tangles out of his sunny hair. She interrupted her story to say, “This hair of yours, my little one, is like pure gold.”

Philip had lately reached the stage of feeling himself to be an individual, one with feelings different from those of his family or of anyone else in the world. Now he said, “No.”

“You silly little creature!” cried Adeline. “How can you know what colour your hair is? I tell you it’s pure gold and you’re the image of your papa who is the only man hereabout worth looking at.”

“No,” said Philip.

“Sit still,” cried Adeline, “or you’ll get smacked!”

“No,” said Philip.

“Are you going to obey?”

“No.”

Now there came the sound of a smart slap. Philip was set on his feet and at once ran loudly crying into the hall. When he saw Augusta and Nicholas trying to escape up the stairs his crying changed to laughter and he sturdily joined them, taking a hand of each.

“Gussie — Nicky,” he said ingratiatingly.

“Shall we let him come?” asked Nicholas.

Augusta nodded, and clinging to their hands he climbed the stairs. They could hear Adeline calling, “Philip — Philip — come here and let Mamma put a clean dress on you!”

“No,” said Philip.

They discovered Ernest on the second flight of stairs. He was playing his secret game. This was played with a few discarded chessmen, some scraps of paper, and coloured stones. He would write directions for the chessmen, move them from one step to another, at the same time making remarks such as — “Live long, O King” — or “Now is my Solitary Fate” or “Call the Wolves to their Tea.” Augusta and Nicholas had a respect for this game. Never had they tried to understand it but they realized the comfort it had been to Ernest while he was ill. He gave them a wary look, as they guided little Philip past him, up the stairs, taking care not to disturb his solitary pleasure.

It was not long before he joined them in Augusta’s room. Even they noticed how pale was his face and that he wore a red flannel bandage round his throat, from which came a pleasant odour of eucalyptus ointment.

Ernest said, “I heard talk when I was on the stairs.”