The Jalna Saga – Deluxe Edition: All Sixteen Books of the Enduring Classic Series & The Biography of Mazo de la Roche (349 page)

He saw through her, and he was touched and ashamed. He realised that he must have been an uncomfortable visitor of late. Yet she had never once been sharp with him. Then, as he felt compassion for Augusta he thought less about his own plight, but days passed before he could make up his mind to walk into the trap.

At last he did, and found that his nerves, instead of reacting painfully, were quite tranquil. He felt firmer in his mind than he had for months.

Now he played each evening to Augusta, bending above the keyboard with flying hands, his forelock dangling. He played his favourite Chopin, finding in his masculinity assuagement for his own futile passion. He realised that the architecture of his existence was being built up and that he himself had little to do with the founding of it.

O
N A MORNING
in early February, when Finch had gone to the village to post a letter for Augusta, he was surprised to see, scattered over the green, a number of horsemen, some wearing red coats. He remembered then having heard the gardener say that the Hunt was to meet that day in Nymet Crews. Just as he dropped the letter in the box and turned away, the huntsman rode up, followed by the pack of hounds. He stopped outside The White Swan and, a moment later, the publican himself came out, carrying a glass on a small tray. The huntsman bent forward, took the glass, and emptied it in one gulp. He shouted good morning to another man in a red coat who was riding a tall bright chestnut with white eyelashes on one eye. Several others came cantering up, among them half a dozen ladies and young girls, some riding astride and some side-saddle. There was a charming little girl of twelve on a black pony. She sat very upright and had a flaxen pigtail on each shoulder.

Finch strolled about examining the horses. He realised that he knew much more about them than he had thought. When he was at home he was always made conscious of his own
ignorance. Groups of people had gathered on the pavement to watch the assembly. The idiot wheeled his little cart excitedly up and down, his moon face raised to each horseman in turn. The schoolchildren had been let out and stood stolidly gazing, kept in order by their mistress. There were quite a number of farmers and their sons riding, to judge by the grey and brown coats. One old mare, ridden by a pink-cheeked youth, came lolloping up, her rough woolly legs caked with mud. Finch judged that the white-moustached old gentleman with the eyeglass and the top hat well back on his head was riding an Irish horse. He wished, with a sudden pang of homesickness, that Renny were there. How he would have enjoyed all this!

They hung about waiting for latecomers, talking in small groups. The village green lay in bright sunshine. The ducks on the pond quacked without intermission. The hounds relaxed against the sunny wall of the inn garden. One of the riders was having trouble with his horse. It wheeled and backed continually. He dismounted and examined the bit and saddle. He took off his hat and wiped his forehead, the sun shining on his yellow hair and florid face. Again he mounted and, at the same moment, the stragglers trotted up, and all fell into procession.

As the hounds, trotting close together with waving tails, disappeared along the cobbled village street, followed by the hunters, their scarlet coats and the gleaming flanks of their mounts bright in the morning sun, Finch wished he might have been one of the group of cyclists who followed after.

As he climbed the long hill to Lyming a mist advanced from the moor, blurring the landscape and reducing the sun to a pallid metal disc. The sun seemed lost to the world until, suddenly, its reflection glared up at Finch from a puddle. Far away he thought he heard the sound of a horn. The song of
the missel thrushes, that had but lately arrived, came muted through the mist. As he walked along the drive he saw that the preceding night had been cold enough to form thin ice. It lay like a skein of silver thread along the edge of a rivulet left by the recent floods. In its bitter kiss the pointed tongues of the ferns were caught.

He went into the house and gave Augusta the newspaper he had brought. He was telling her about having seen the huntsmen when, quite near, as it seemed, they heard the mournful, musical baying of the hounds. Augusta threw a shawl about her and they hastened out to the drive. Along :he slope beyond the orchard they saw a blot of red against he fog. Another and another appeared, and the baying of the hounds did not cease.

“The fox has likely run through Ram’s Close and is going toward the Millford covers,” said Augusta. “If you will run to the bottom of the orchard, Finch, you will quite likely see them cross the stream, unless they go round by the lane. If you were going to stay here with me, you should certainly buy a horse and join the Hunt. What a pity a fog has risen!”

Finch left her side and ran through the long grass of the orchard, where every blade, from tip to root, was hung with beads of moisture. He went in leaps till he reached the wall at the foot. From the top he looked down on the eight or ten riders who were crossing the stream. Others who had already crossed were galloping up the steep of Ram’s Close in the direction of the hounds.

The opening in the bank through which the riders passed, in order to cross the stream, was narrow. A rider would dismount, drive his horse before him with a slap on the flank, himself cross the stream on the stepping-stones, capturing the horse on the other side and remounting. In
some cases this answered very well, but in others the horses were averse from entering the stream and, once they were loosed, meandered about in the mud, tried to return the way they had come, or, having got into the stream, floundered with as much apparent alarm as if it had been a river.

Finch, perched on his ivy-covered wall, chuckled at the antics of the perspiring horses and riders. He would have liked to shout his approval when the little pigtailed girl, having got her pony across in good order, mounted him and galloped up the field, showing a back plastered with mud from a fall.

One rider, a man in a grey coat, was in difficulty. His horse, tall and raw-boned, could not be persuaded to cross the stream. Time and again he drove it before him with shouts and cuts, but, just as it had floundered over mud and stones to the opposite bank, it invariably wheeled about, facing its master with ears laid back and plunged back to its starting-point. When it reached there it turned its face toward home, and its rider was forced to chase it halfway across a ploughed field before it could be captured.

One by one the others disappeared up the grassy slope of Ram’s Close. With a furious shout the grey-coated man made a final attempt to force his beast across the stream. This time he succeeded. The horse mounted the opposite bank with a natural, unflurried air and broke at once into a sprightly canter. The man slithered across the stepping-stones and began, with blood-lustful imprecations, to run after him up the slope. It was steep. Sweat poured down his face. He was mud to the thighs.

Finch squatted on his wall, his mouth stretched in a hilarious grin. The horse hesitated and looked over his shoulder at the man.

He shouted: “Stop! You...! Stop!”

With a toss of its mane the horse cantered on. Finch saw then that some of the preceding riders had opened the gate at the crest of the rise and had neglected to shut it. The man saw it too.

“The gate!” he bawled to Finch. “Shut it!”

Finch bounded along his wall. He leaped from it and sped toward the gate. His sudden appearance startled the horse and it broke into a gallop, passed through the gate, and disappeared over the crest of the hill.

The man, without another glance at Finch, laboured on.
As
he went through the gate which Finch held open for him, he panted:

“If ever I lay hands on un—God help un!”

Finch saw that he was a neighbouring farmer. He disappeared after his horse, calling on the Almighty to witness what he would do to him when captured.

If only young Wake were here, how he would have enjoyed the spectacle! For the second time that morning Finch found himself thinking of those at home with longing.

He trotted across Ram’s Close to the far end, where another steep slope disclosed a rich panorama of red ploughed fields, green meadows and dense copses, and an encroaching arm of moorland. From afar came the silver call of the huntsman’s horn and the confused, musical whimpering of the hounds, but nothing was to be seen. The country side lay in apparent unbroken peace.

In the next field a man was ploughing, followed by a flock of rooks, walking sedately, peering into the freshly turned furrows. As the horn sounded anew he dropped his plough and ran toward the bank which separated the field from Ram’s Close. He scrambled through the holly bushes that topped it. As he drew near Finch, he called:

“Be goin’ to see Hunt, zur? They’ll kill, I’ll warrant, down in Childerditch Wood.”

Finch ran by his side. They crossed the field and entered a lane. A little later they were joined by two men who had been cutting trusses of hay from a rick. The fog had passed, leaving the air of a surpassing clearness.

One of the men, an old one with a white beard who jogged along easily without once falling behind, seemed to know by instinct just where they would have the best chance of a sight of the Hunt. He spoke in such broad Devon that Finch could barely make out what he said.

From the lane they turned into a road and saw a score of people on foot, on bicycles, and in motors hurrying along it.

They entered a gate through mud ankle-deep and found themselves on a ridge overlooking the covert, from where came the clamour of the hounds. There was silence in the group as all eyes were fixed intently on the unruffled scene below. Finch was delighted to see the man in the grey coat mounted on his horse galloping across the adjoining field. He headed the horse at a bank, over which it literally climbed, sending down clods of earth and stones, while the rider, purple-faced, held up his feet out of the way. He then galloped across the next field and disappeared into the wood.

Finch’s eyes wandered to the faces of those about him. Wholesome ruddy faces, turned in intense concentration on the one spot. How many generations of outdoor-living, sport-loving ancestors lay behind them! Two young girls stood near him. They had come in a motor car and were apparently prevented from hunting by accidents they had sustained at the last meet.

“They might as well hunt for a needle in a haystack,” said one. “We lost the last one there.”

An elderly man said—“Ay, the Hunt dance were a proper long one. They kept it up till red sky showed.” But not an eye wavered in the combined gaze bent on the wood.

Suddenly the old man nudged Finch. “Look ’ee/” he said. He pointed to a long open field that lay between the wood and a hillside covered with gorse.

Finch, following with his eyes the direction indicated, saw a small tawny body running across the field. Half a dozen voices babbled, “Look—Look!” But all looked in the wrong direction save him and the old man. Finch’s heart began to beat in heavy, precise thumps. He stared so hard at the fox that his eyes ached. He longed to help it. He longed for it to escape. Not one of these others was on the side of the fox. Yet in some mysterious way his heart was also with the Hunt. Those about broke suddenly into an excited shout of “Hoick—Hoick!” He kept his eyes riveted on that tawny streak, so isolated, flying across the field. It disappeared into die bushes. But, louder than any he shouted—“Hoick— Hoick!”

At the same instant there came a screech from the Whip, who had suddenly viewed the fox. In an instant the huntsmen were out of the woods. The hounds crossed the field in a long dappled stream. The riders, in scarlet coats and white breeches, in grey, in brown, in long black habits, followed after.

Finch was proud to find that he and the old man were the only ones who had seen the fox. The onlookers talked together like one family The opinion was that the fox had had too good a start. They would never get him. He had likely crossed the road and sought familiar burrows near Charity Wood. With one accord they shouldered their way through the gate and into the road. Those who had motor
cars scrambled into them. Those who had bicycles hopped on to them. Those on foot jogged doggedly through the mud.

About a quarter of a mile farther on they went into another field and ran across a furze-covered down toward another wood, into which they could now see the Hunt disappearing. But the wary old fox had escaped them. Scarcely a sound issued from the wood. A missel thrush sent up a sweet fluting from the tall bough of an alder. An affrighted rabbit bounded by, showing a flash of white scut.

When hounds and horses reappeared, jogging toward a fresh covert, Finch turned homeward. He had seen enough. Now he knew what the Hunt was. Had been exalted by it. He wished he had hired a horse and joined it that winter. He was surprised at himself. He must be something of a Court after all. But how glad he was that the fox had escaped. The old man had told him that he had been hunted time and again— enjoyed it. And certainly there had been no appearance of terror in his flight. He had sped down the field with an air of wary assurance.

How Piers would take to fox-hunting! Like a duck to water. Finch wondered how it was that the thought of his brothers kept recurring that day. One after another their faces had risen before him—Renny, Wakefield, Piers. He had thought of Meggie too, and Pheasant, and the little ones. Was it the thought of them that had made him happier? Or was it the forgetting of himself that morning? Whatever it was, he found himself tingling with a new vivid pleasure in life. Then he realised that for weeks he had been less unhappy. At that realisation his spirits shot up in renewed hope. He had freed himself without knowing it from the chains that had bound him. He had been free and had not known it...

In the orchard he found a clump of snowdrops in blow. They were clustered on a knoll beneath a lichen-covered apple tree, their pure bells shaking out faint fragrance above grey-green leaves. As he knelt, bending his face to them, he saw that all through the grass a thousand spears of daffodils were thrusting up, holding tight their gold till the moment came for flinging it across the grass. How lovely this orchard would be in another month! And he not here! No, he would not be here—he would be in the snow at Jalna. He was going home.