The Jalna Saga – Deluxe Edition: All Sixteen Books of the Enduring Classic Series & The Biography of Mazo de la Roche (309 page)

Finch mumbled—“I don’t know what I want, George, and that’s a fact, except that I don’t want to go on with my University course. I could howl when I think of all the money Renny’s wasted on me. He’s got to let me pay it back. If I could just have a few months to myself—to think—to get used to myself. There’s no use in talking—you can’t imagine what it’s like to be such a duffer as I am!”

They smoked in silence for a space, George regarding Finch’s bowed head affectionately, Finch’s mind playing, in spite of himself, about the white owl. George said suddenly:

“Well, you have your own life. Your own work, whatever it’s going to be; and if you don’t want to work at all you are your own man, no one can force you. Do you realise that?”

Finch started. “What’s that? Oh, yes, my own man! Of course... I can do what I like.”

“Yes,” went on George, solidly. “You can do what you like just when you like. Now I think the first thing you should do is to take a trip. Travel round a bit and see things. You’d get a different slant on your life. You’d get used to yourself. You’d get away from the family.”

Finch began to laugh. “Funny you’d suggest that. It’s just what I have been planning—with one big difference. I’m thinking of taking my uncles with me.”

“You’re not in earnest!”

“Yes, I am! They’ve been wanting for years to visit the Old Country again. Their sister lives in England, you know. They are getting old. Haven’t much time to waste. I know what it would mean to them. And if it came through me, you understand, well... it would make a kinder feeling.”

George rumpled his hair in deep puzzlement. “It’s your idea, then, to start out to see the world, and do this thinking you talk about, with an ancient uncle on either side of you,” he said musingly. “And your sightseeing would be to visit an ancient aunt. Well, all I can say is, you are the world’s champion philanthropist!”

“Rot! I’ll go off on my own whenever I like. And I’m awfully fond of my aunt. I’ve been wanting to visit her all my life... My position is so peculiar, George. I can’t quite explain, but it amounts to this. I can’t really enjoy my money, and all the possibilities it opens up to me, until I’ve done something—not necessarily a big thing—but something quite decent for each of the others. It’s as though there were a spell on me that I must work through.” His eyes were fixed, with an expression George thought hallucinated, on the smoke from his pipe that hung in a level blue plane before him.

“Of course, of course,” he agreed, yet thought—“What a queer egg! But one must take him as he is.” Like the piano, the banjo, the mandolin, Finch was accepted by George for the peculiar qualities that gave companionship in season.

“What have you thought of doing for Piers?” he asked; and he remembered, a little grimly, times when Piers had bullied Finch.

“I don’t know. Something he’ll like for his work, or perhaps something for Pheasant. I’m not going to be in a hurry about it. They’d say at once that I was showing off. No, it’s got to come slowly, beginning with the uncles.” His gaze that had been remote, now moved, with speculative interest, to the stovepipe hole in the floor. A low murmur of voices came from the kitchen below.

“Yes,” said George, “they’re still at it—Lizzie and her steady—and they get no forrarder, as far as I can see.” He moved to the extreme edge of his chair and peered through the opening as though into a cage at the Zoo. Finch also moved nearer, crouching beside him, their heads touching.

They could see one end of a clean kitchen table on which stood a dish of red apples. They could see a pair of man’s hands, middle-aged and horny, paring an apple with a thick-handled pocket knife. The apple was being pared meticulously so that the paring should not be broken, but removed whole from stem to blossom. The two above watched, fascinated, seeing the fine rosy skin of the fruit drop from it, leaving the fruit itself, white as a woman’s breast, in the coarse fingers. The paring was pushed across the table to an unseen person; the apple was halved. Then a slice was cut from it, impaled on the knife and put into the mouth of the peeler himself. They glimpsed his grizzled forelock as his head advanced to it. Another slice was impaled and presented to the mouth across the table, and so, a slice at a time, the apple was demolished. The clumsy hands gathered up seeds and core, disposed of them somewhere, picked up another apple and began to pare it. There was an indistinct mumbling of talk.

Finch returned to his seat with a sigh. “How long has this been going on?” he asked.

“About five years.”

“God, isn’t life wonderful?”

“Love is certainly a queer thing. Especially when it takes them like that.”

“I expect it’s queer no matter how it takes you.”

“Been seeing much of girls lately?”

“No. Too busy.”

“You liked Ada Leigh, didn’t you?”

“H’m—h’m. She’s been in France with her mother.”

“I don’t believe you’ve a great opinion of that sex, Finch.”

“Oh... I don’t know,” he sighed deeply. “I haven’t had much experience of them.”

George folded his arms and spoke rather ponderously. “A really dazzling one comes into our office sometimes, about investments, you know. A rich widow. She always seems to want my advice about things. 1 can’t see why, because I’m only a junior. She always seems to want to know just what I think about. everything. Some women are odd, aren’t they?”

“How old is she?”

“I couldn’t possibly tell. Once they’re past twenty I’m all at sea.”

“But you’ve a way with you, large,” said Finch affectionately. George unfolded his arms and unknit his brow. “How about a little music?” he asked.

On the way down the stairs, Finch had stopped to look at the stuffed white owl. He had thrust his hands under its great folded wings and felt the deep downiness there. He had put his face close to the black beak, the glittering eyes. A sensuous pleasure had run over his body at the feel of the owl’s downiness. He thought of the pure whiteness where his hands were hid...

All the way home he exulted in thoughts of it. The face of the earth seemed to him like the owl’s breast; the stars had the cold glitter of the owl’s eyes; the bitter wind was its hoot... It had left its perch and swept through the open door of the Rectory with him, and had become one with the night, the beating of its wings the rhythm of the universe.

He left the road and took his customary shortcut through the fields, though the path had long been obliterated. The snow lay in great drifts, light as mounds of fallen feathers. He dashed through them, bounding, with each leap, as high as he could. All his instinct revolted against being grown up. He wished only to be a wild, half-mad boy, that the passage of time might not touch him... He pulled off his cap and ran bare-headed, dancing with his shadow, trying to wrest his spirit from his body, and toss it, a glistening essence, into the frosty air. He fancied how the great owl would pounce on it, a tender morsel for its starry-eyed young, and sweep Poleward with it, uttering a whoo-hoo that would shake the universe.

He left the fields and ran through the pinewood. He left the pinewood and ran through the birchwood, where the silvery trees bathed themselves in the moonlight as in a sea, laying their round boles in it, keeping nothing of themselves from it, shivering in their naked whiteness as they drowned themselves in it.

He ran through the apple orchard, where the gnarled black shapes of the trees were like old men dancing. There was an icy pathway there from which the wind had blown the snow, and he slid along it, cap in hand, in long graceful glides.

He ran through the young cherry orchard, where the trees stood in straight rows like timid, half-grown girls, and,
as he emerged into the garden, he saw the lights of the house welcoming him.

As soon as he saw them the shadow of the owl grew smaller, but still, he thought, it followed him, swooping, lower and lower, towards his legs. A sensation of terror took hold of him. He ran panting, his consciousness trickling from his brain to his nether parts. Would it catch him before he reached the door?

It was level with him, its eyes afire. He plunged across the lawn, and flung himself against the door. It flew open, and, at the same instant, he felt a cruel nip on the left leg!

“My dear boy,” said Uncle Ernest, “what a draught you’re letting in. Shut the door quickly! And you may as well bolt it for the night.”

I
T CAME
on the first day of March. He had narrowly escaped being born on the twenty-ninth of February, which, in addition to having been born with a caul, would have singled him out with a directness almost ominous. As it was, he was quite satisfied to have first seen the light with the arrival of spring; and, on this particular birthday, the season did not, as was its wont, appear crouching under the cloak of winter. On the contrary, it was a day of remarkable mildness for the time of year. Rain had fallen steadily all the preceding day and night, and by the time the sun had emerged from the rain clouds there were already patches of bare ground on the lawn. By noon that part of it which was not in shadow lay revealed to the warmth of the sun. Last year’s grass had retained something of its colour, and even seemed to have grown, as the hair of a dead person is said to flourish morbidly for long after burial.

The withered forms of last year’s asters and calendula lay sodden on the soaking soil of the flower border; under the hedge last year’s leaves lay in a discoloured ridge. Yet all was enlivened by a boundless hope. The abnormally large drops
of rain and melted snow that were strung on every twig and blade and ledge were glancing with radiant brightness. The sky was swept clean of all that came between its sun and the earth. No return of cold and snow could efface the promise of this day.

The door into the hall stood wide open letting in the sun. It was on such a day as this that old Adeline would take her first walk of the year. Wrapped in innumerable cloaks, scarves, and petticoats, so that she looked a very battleship of a woman, she would come into view, supported by her sons, and present herself foursquare to the reviving world. “I’m out again!” she would exclaim. “Ha! 1 like the smell of the fresh air!”

Finch thought a good deal about her today, recalling their strange delayed intimacy that had drawn them so mysteriously together, wondering if it were possible to him to live in a way that would have won her approbation. Still, she had known him for what he was, had loved him, had accepted him as one of “the whelps” her son Philip had got by his second wife.

He stood in the porch sunning himself, and watched Rags furbishing up the hall. How shabby both hall and servant looked in the noonday brightness! The slender walnut banister and carved newel-post were elegant enough, but the wallpaper along the stairway showed dingy where small hands had been pressed against it. Certainly it had never been repapered in his time. The carpet on the stairs was threadbare. The Turkish rug on the floor had lost all its fringe. The fringe had reappeared miraculously on the cuff of. Rags’s coat. This cuff was being violently agitated as he polished the mirror in the hat-rack above which the carved head of a fox sneered down at him.

“Well,” he said, seeing Finch, “many happy returns of the d’y to you, sir!”

“Thanks, Rags.”

“We couldn’t ‘ave a finer d’y for the occasion, not if it ‘ad been hordered! It’s a fine thing to be twenty-one, sir, and to ‘ave all the money in the family.” He looked over his shoulder at Finch with an air of innocent envy.

Finch felt like taking the fellow by the scruff of his grizzled neck and shaking him. He said—“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Rags.”

The little Cockney proceeded imperturbably:

“It’s a ‘appy d’y for us all, I’m sure, sir. Mrs. Wragge was saying to me just a bit ago that she’d prayed for a fine d’y. I don’t go in for prayer much myself, but, as the saying is, strawrs tell which way the wind blows. Not that she is much like a strawr, sir. More like a strawr
stack,
I’d say. I ‘ardly dare to go into the kitchen this morning, she and Bessie are that worked up with excitement. And the thought of those caterers coming out from town with all their paraffinaliar!” He came to the door and shook out his cloth. He then produced a small, foreign-looking leather pocketbook from somewhere about his clothes. He proffered this to Finch with a bow.

“Will you accept this from me, Mr. Finch, as a little offering? I brought it ‘ome with me from the War. It belonged to a German officer. And I’ve always thought that if the d’y come when I ‘ad a pot of money, I’d use it myself. But the d’y ‘asn’t come, and it looks as though it never
would
come—not in
this
country, and at
this
job—so, if you’ll accept it, I’ll give it to you with my best wishes, and may it always be full!”

Finch took it, embarrassed. It was a handsome pocket-book, and there was something touching in Rags’s expréssion
as he offered it; but Finch always had the uncomfortable feeling that Rags was laughing in his sleeve at him.

“Thanks, very much,” he mumbled. “It’s an awfully good one.” He opened it, looked in it, shut it, Rags regarding him with an expression of mingled sadness and pride. He gave his duster another shake and re-entered the hall.

Mooey was descending the stairs on his little seat, a step at a time. Finch watched him, feeling suddenly very happy. Everyone was amazingly nice to him. Renny had given him a wristwatch. Piers and Pheasant, gold cufflinks. Uncle Nicholas a paperweight, and Uncle Ernest a watercolour from the wall of his own room. Alayne had given him a crocodile-skin travelling-bag, and Wakefield a large clothes brush which, he explained, would “come in handy to whack his kids with when he had any.” Meggie’s present was yet to arrive.

“Bump!” sang out Mooey. “I’m toming! Bump! Bump! Bump! I’m not f’ightened!”

Finch went to the foot of the stairs and snatched him up. He put him on his shoulder, and, out of the shadows of the past came a picture of himself, caught up thus by Renny. A queer thing life... One tall strong body, one little weak body after another... Some day Mooey would stand at the foot of the stairs and shoulder some tiny boy just as today he was doing... And Mooey would be twenty-one, and whose would be the tiny boy? Some little Whiteoak, out of a Whiteoak body...