The Jalna Saga – Deluxe Edition: All Sixteen Books of the Enduring Classic Series & The Biography of Mazo de la Roche (222 page)

It was uncanny, Piers thought, as he went on to his room. How ever had Eden guessed? Was it because he was a poet? He had always felt, though he had given the matter but little thought, that a poet would be an uncommonly unpleasant person to have in the house, and now, by God, they had a full-fledged one at Jalna. He didn’t like it at all. The first bloom of his happy mood was gone as he opened the door into his bedroom.

He shared it with sixteen-year-old Finch. Finch was now humped over his Euclid, an expression of extreme melancholy lengthening his already long sallow face. He had been the centre of a whirlpool of discussion and criticism all tea time, and the effect was to make his brain, never quite under his control, completely unmanageable. He had gone over the same problem six or seven times and now it meant nothing to him, no more than a senseless nursery rhyme. He had stolen one of Piers’s cigarettes to see if it would help him out. He had made the most of it, inhaling slowly, savouring each puff, retaining the stub between his bony fingers till they and even his lips were burned, but it had done no good. When he heard Piers at the door he had dropped the stub, a mere crumb, to the floor and set his foot on it.

Now he glanced sullenly at Piers out of the corners of his long light eyes.

Piers sniffed. “H-m. Smoking, eh? One of my fags, too, I bet. I’ll just thank you to leave them alone, young man. Do
you think I can supply you with smokes? Besides, you’re not allowed.”

Finch returned to his Euclid with increased melancholy. If he could not master it when he was alone, certainly he should never learn it with Piers in the room. That robust, domineering presence would crush the last spark of intelligence from his brain. He had always been afraid of Piers. All his life he had been kept in a state of subjection by him. He resented it, but he saw no way out of it. Piers was strong, handsome, a favourite. He was none of these things. And yet he loved all his family, in a secret, sullen way, even Piers who was so tough with him. Now, if Piers had been like some brothers one might ask him to give one a helping hand with the Euclid; Piers had been good at the rotten stuff. But it would never do to ask Piers for help. He was too impatient, too intolerant of a fellow who got mixed up for nothing.

“I’d thank you,” continued Piers, “to let my fags, likewise my handkerchiefs, socks, and ties alone. If you want to pinch other people’s property, pinch Eden’s. He’s a poet and probably doesn’t know what he has.” He grinned at his reflection in the glass as he took off his collar and tie.

Finch made no answer. Desperately he sought to clamp his attention to the problem before him. Angles and triangles tangled themselves into strange patterns. He drew a grotesque face on the margin of the book. Then horribly the face he had created began to leer at him. With a shaking hand he tried to rub it out, but he could not. It was not his to erase. It possessed the page. It possessed the book. It was Euclid personified, sneering at him!

Piers had divested himself of all his clothes and had thrown open the window. A chill night wind rushed in. Finch shivered as it embraced him. He wondered how Piers stood it
on his bare skin. It fluttered the pages of a French exercise all about the room. There was no use in trying; he could not do the problem.

Piers, in his pyjamas now, jumped into bed. He lay staring at Finch with bright blue eyes, whistling softly. Finch began to gather up his books.

“All finished?” asked Piers, politely. “You got through in a hurry, didn’t you?”

“I’m not through,” bawled Finch. “Do you imagine I can work with a cold blast like that on my back and you staring at me in front? It just means I’ll have to get up early and finish before breakfast.”

Piers became sarcastic. “You’re very temperamental, aren’t you? You’ll be writing poetry next. I dare say you’ve tried it already. Do you know, I think it would be a good thing for you to go down to New York in the Easter holidays and see if you can find a publisher.”

“Shut up,” growled Finch, “and let me alone.”

Piers was very happy. He was too happy for sleep. It would ease his high spirits to bait young Finch. He lay watching him speculatively while he undressed his long, lanky body. Finch might develop into a distinguished-looking man. There was something arresting even now in his face; but he had a hungry, haunted look, and he was uncomfortably aware of his long wrists and legs. He always sat in some ungainly posture and, when spoken to suddenly, would glare up, half defensively, half timidly, as though expecting a blow. Truth to tell, he had had a good many, some quite undeserved.

Piers regarded his thin frame with contemptuous amusement. He offered pungent criticisms of Finch’s prominent shoulder blades, ribs, and various other portions of his anatomy. At last the boy, trembling with anger and humiliation, got
into his nightshirt, turned out the light, and scrambled over Piers to his place next the wall. He curled himself up with a sigh of relief. It had been a nervous business scrambling over Piers. He had half expected to be grabbed by the ankle and put to some new torture. But he had gained his corner in safety. The day with its miseries was over. He stretched out his long limbs.

They lay still, side by side, in the peaceful dark. At length Piers spoke in a low, accusing tone.

“You didn’t say your prayers. What do you mean by getting into bed without saying your prayers?”

Finch was staggered. This was something new. Piers, of all people, after him about prayers! There was something ominous about it.

“I forgot,” he returned, heavily.

“Well, you’ve no right to forget. It’s an important thing at your time of life to pray long and earnestly. If you prayed more and sulked less, you’d be healthier and happier.”

“Rot. What are you givin’ us?”

“I’m in dead earnest. Out you get and say your prayers.”

“You don’t pray yourself,” complained Finch, bitterly. “You haven’t said prayers for years.”

“That’s nothing to you. I’ve a special compact with the Devil, and he looks after his own. But you, my little lamb, must be separated from the goats.”

“Oh, let me alone,” growled Finch. “I’m sleepy. Let me alone.”

“Get up and say your prayers.”

“Oh, Piers, don’t be a—”

“Be careful what you call me. Get out.”

“Shan’t.” He clutched the blankets desperately, for he feared what was coming.

“You won’t get up, eh? You won’t say your prayers, eh? I’ve got to force you, eh?”

With each question Piers’s strong fingers sought a tenderer spot in Finch’s anatomy.

“Oh—oh—oh! Piers! Please let me up! Ow-eee-ee!” With a last terrible squeak Finch was out on the floor. He stood rubbing his side cautiously. Then he almost blubbered: “What the hell do you want me to do, anyway?”

“I want you to say your prayers properly. I’m not going to have you start being lax at your age. Down on your knees.”

Finch dropped to his knees on the cold floor. Kneeling by the bedside in the pale moonlight, he was a pathetic young figure. But the sight held no pathos for Piers.

“Now, then,” he said. “Fire away.” Finch pressed his face against his clenched hands.

“Why don’t you begin?” asked Piers, rising on his elbow and speaking testily.

“I—I have begun,” came in a muffled voice.

“I can’t hear you. How do you expect the Almighty, to hear you if I can’t? Speak up.”

“I c-can’t. I won’t!”

“You
shall.
Or you’ll be sorry.”

In the stress of the moment, all Finch’s prayers left him, as earlier all his Euclid had done. In the dim chaos of his soul only two words of supplication remained. “Oh, God,” he muttered, hoarsely, and because he could think of nothing else, and must pray or be abused by that devil Piers, he repeated the words again and again in a hollow, shaking voice.

Piers lay listening blandly. He thought Finch the most ridiculous duffer he had ever known. He was a mystery Piers
would never fathom. Suddenly he thought: “I’m fed up with this,” and said: “Enough, enough. It’s not much of a prayer you’ve made, but still you’ve a nice intimate way with the Almighty. You’d make a good Methodist of the Holy Roller variety.” He added, not unkindly, “Hop into bed now.”

But Finch would not hop. He clutched the counterpane and went on sobbing, “Oh, God!” The room was full of the presence of the Deity to him, now wearing the face of the terrible, austere Old Testament God, now, miraculously, the handsome, sneering face of Piers. Only a rap on the head brought him to his senses. He somehow got his long body. back into bed, shivering all over.

Eden threw the door open. “One might as well,” he complained in a high voice, “live next door to a circus. You’re the most disgusting young—” and he delivered himself of some atrocious language. He interrupted himself to ask, cocking his head, “Is he crying? What’s he crying for?”

“Just low-spirited, I expect,” replied Piers, in a sleepy voice.

“What are you crying for, Finch?”

“Let me alone, can’t you?” screamed Finch, in a sudden fury. “You let me alone!”

“I think he’s snivelling over his report. Renny was up in the air about it,” said Piers.

“Oh, is that it? Well, study will do more than snivelling to help that.” And Eden disappeared as he had come.

The two brothers lay in the moonlight. Finch was quiet save for an occasional gulp. Piers’s feelings toward him were magnanimous now. He was such a helpless young fool. Piers thought it rather hard that he had been born between Eden and Finch. Wedged in between a poet and a fool. What a sandwich! Of a certainty, he was the meaty part.

His thoughts turned to Pheasant. She was of never-failing interest to him: her pretty gestures, her reckless way of throwing her heart open to him, her sudden withdrawals, the remoteness of her profile. He could see her face in the moonlight as though she were in the room with him. Soon she would be, instead of snuffling young Finch! He loved her with every inch of his body. He alone of all the people in Jalna knew what real love was. Strange that, being absorbed by love as he was, he should have time to play with young Finch and make him miserable. No denying that there lurked a mischievous devil in him. Then, too, he had suffered so much anxiety lately that to have everything settled, to be certain of haying his own way, made him feel like a young horse suddenly turned out into the spring pastures, ready to run and kick and bite his best friend from sheer high spirits.

Poor old Finch! Piers gave the bedclothes a jerk over Finch’s protruding shoulder and put an arm around him.

P
HEASANT AND
M
AURICE

T
WO WEEKS
later Pheasant awakened one morning at sunrise. She could not sleep, because it was her wedding day. She jumped out of bed and ran to the window to see whether the heavens were to smile on her.

The sky was radiant as a golden sea, and just above the sun a cloud shaped like a great red whale floated as in a dream. Below her window, shutting in the lawn, the cherry orchard had burst into a sudden perfection of bloom. The young trees stood in snowy rows like expectant young girls awaiting their first communion. A cowbell was jangling down in the ravine.

Pheasant leaned across the sill, her cropped brown hair all on end, her nightdress falling from one slim shoulder. She was happy because of the gay serenity of the morning, because the cherry trees had come into bloom for her wedding day; yet she was depressed, because it was her wedding day and she had nothing new to wear. Besides, she would have to go to live at Jalna, where nobody wanted her except Piers.

She was to meet him at two o’clock. He had borrowed a car, and they were to drive to Stead to be married. This was
outside Mr. Fennel’s parish. Then they were to go to the city for the night, but they must be back at Jalna the next day because Piers was anxious about the spring sowing. What sort of reception would the family at Jalna give them? They had been kind always, but would they be kind to her as Piers’s wife? Still, Piers would take care of her. She would face the world with him at her side.

She drummed her white fingers on the sill, watching the sun twinkle on her engagement ring, which thus far she had only dared to wear at night. She thought of that blissful moment when each had stared into the other’s face, watching love flower there like the cherry tree bursting into bloom. She would love him always, let him cuddle his head against her shoulder at night, and go into the fields with him in the morning. She was glad he had chosen the land as his job, instead of one of the professions. She was too ignorant to be the wife of a learned young man. To Piers she could unfold her childish speculations about life without embarrassment.

For the hundredth time she examined the few clothes she had laid in an immense shabby portmanteau for her wedding journey—her patent-leather shoes and her one pair of silk stockings, a pink organdie dress, really too small for her, four handkerchiefs—well, she had plenty of them, at least, and one never knew when one might shed tears—a nightdress, and an India shawl that had been her grandmother’s. She did not suppose she would need the shawl; she had never worn it except when playing at being grown up, but it helped to make a more impressive trousseau, and it might be necessary to have a wrap at dinner in the hotel, or if they went to the opera. She felt somewhat cheered as she replaced them and fastened the spongy leather straps. After all, they might have been fewer and worse.

She got out her darning things and mended—or rather puckered together—a large hole in the heel of a brown stocking she was to wear on the journey. She mended the torn buttonholes of her brown coat, sprinkled a prodigious amount of cheap perfume over the little brown dress that lay in a drawer ready to put on, and found herself chilled, for she had not yet dressed.

She hastily put on her clothes, washed her face, and combed her hair, staring at herself in the glass. She thought dismally: “Certainly I am no beauty. Nannie has trimmed my hair badly. I’m far too thin, and I haven’t at all that sleek look becoming in a bride. No one could imagine a wreath of orange blossoms on my head. A punchinello’s cap would be more appropriate. Ah, well, there have been worse-looking girls led to the altar, I dare say.”