The Jalna Saga – Deluxe Edition: All Sixteen Books of the Enduring Classic Series & The Biography of Mazo de la Roche (372 page)

The maid appeared with tea and Finch asked:

“Did Eden cheer up before he left?”

“A little. He is coming back to dinner and then we shall hear all about it. It is so wonderful to have you and Eden to come and go—as cousins. You can’t imagine what it means to me, at this time.”

Finch did not answer until they were again alone, then he said:

“Eden may think of you as a cousin. I don’t.”

She held the green glass jug, on which rings of lemon floated on the iced tea, poised above the tray. “How do you think of me, then?” she asked, giving him a direct and challenging look.

“Well, in the first place,” he answered, taking the glass she had filled, “I have never known cousins, so they have no fixed status in my mind, and, in the second, you seem to me much too remote for such a relationship.”

“I wonder if I should feel pleased at that speech,” she said, with a deliberately musing air.

“I don’t attempt to say things to please you, Sarah,” he answered boyishly, “for I have no idea of what would give you pleasure.”

“Have I changed so?

He returned sharply—“Did I ever know?” And, as he spoke, a springing emotion, akin to fear, clouded his eyes and he could not see her plainly. He wished he had never consented to spend these hours with her, which he was already beginning perilously to enjoy.

But she answered with gentle composure:

“It is very easy for you to please me. Just by coming to see me as you have been doing, and talking of your work.”

She went on then to talk of Eden, affectionately but lightly, and of her present life. But, though she spoke lightly, she kept, without her own volition, it seemed, an air of enchantment about them, as though they two were helpless actors in some magic play.

They heard the hum of the car outside. A melancholy droop depressed her mouth as she realised that their time together was over. Was she playing with him, or was she in earnest? Did he want her play or her earnestness? These questions stabbed Finch as he turned to the door where Eden entered.

He came in smiling, with an air almost radiant.

“It went like a house afire,” he said gaily. “They were perfect dears and were game for anything. They sat looking frightfully intelligent and well-groomed and asked me all manner of questions… God, I’m thankful it’s over! And more tired than you’d believe.” He dropped into a chair and smiled at them with the relief of one who has successfully passed through an ordeal. A girl, Finch thought, might have envied Eden the colour in his cheeks, the brightness of his eyes.

Sarah asked—“Shall I send for more tea?”

“No, thanks. I don’t want to spoil my appetite for dinner. And I had something there. A bit of pink fluff. An ice… oh,
it was all so tasteful—tea, hostess, guests, and furnishings— and I hated it so, until I began to read. And the scraps of conversation I heard before the show began! ‘My dear, you can’t buy a well-fitting silk slip in either London or Paris. You can’t buy them
at all…
I had five teeth out and
every one
of them was abscessed… I have four little girls and it’s
such fun
seeing that each one gets her proper number of calories.’ But they were so nice to me that I couldn’t help liking them, even when I gasped in the atmosphere they created.”

“I suppose you hate this house of mine,” said Sarah.

“I think I should,” he replied, looking about, “if you weren’t in it.” He realised for the first time that Finch was in the room as an accustomed guest. He had accepted his presence without thinking of it. He looked at Finch curiously. What went on in that long head with the mousy fair lock dangling over the troubled brow? He found himself on the point of blurting out—“You’re not reviving that affair, I hope!” But he was able to say, instead:

“So, you’re here too.”

“Yes,” agreed Finch, wondering if Eden resented his presence.

“He’s going to play to us—something of his own,” said Sarah.

Eden said enviously—“They were all asking about your recital. They all seem to be going. I suppose you will make three times as much out of that concert as I shall out of my ten Thursdays.”

“Well,” answered Finch, “perhaps I shall. I don’t know. I wish it were over.” He became silent and fell into thought, his eyes fixed on Sarah.

All three were silent, and the pug, rising from its cushion, sniffed at each of them in turn with an air of polite contempt.
It was almost dark now. The faint light that there was rested with a tentative caress on Sarah’s profile, on Finch’s drooping hands, on Eden’s shining hair. Sarah still held Finch in that circle of enchantment, that feeling of being moved by a power outside himself. But she could not, nor did she make the effort to, draw Eden into it. He did not give himself, for freedom was necessary to his spirit. In his isolation he had a solitary pleasure in the delicate game of love being played before him. Yet he honestly trembled for Finch, for whom he thought marriage would be a snare and an imprisonment.

They were quiet all through dinner, each repelling any advance toward intimacy from one of the others. Yet each felt a deeper peace than was usual and a desire to prolong this hour.

Three thin trails of cigarette smoke followed them back into the drawing-room. Like these fragrant trails of smoke, formless and cloudy thoughts rose from the mind of each. Freedom, thought Sarah, to be passively free like this, without effort and without movement… This perfumed, flowery room we go into… The delicious bond between me and Finch… She went to a bowl of yellow roses and pressed her face, in which there was no softness, against their petals.

If only the time did not go so fast, thought Eden. If only I could be here and yet not be seen, not be expected to make any effort. Yet no woman could ask less of me than Sarah, because her mind is centred on herself and Finch… I shall make straight for the chair I had before… It is the most comfortable and stands back from the centre of the room.

Finch thought—If only I were not tormented by memory… If only I could forget that I loved her in England… And hated her in England… If I could forget Arthur… If I could love his memory. This is one of the nights when the
piano is friendly to me… If I can play as well on the night of my recital as I shall play tonight…

Sarah said—“Where shall we sit? Oh, you’re taking that chair, are you, Eden? We’ll sit on the couch, then, Finch, and we’ll share this little table between us.”

The light touched the
créme de menthe
as they raised the small glasses to their lips; there was an air of worship in the attitude of both men toward Sarah. But in both cases it was a cloak to hide other feelings. In Eden’s, a lassitude of body and mind that was not unpleasant, and a preoccupation with his own thoughts. In Finch’s, a shrinking from the passion that was already assailing him.

They still talked little, throwing out scraps of conversation that were no more real than paper flowers but, like paper flowers, served their purpose of imparting a surface gaiety.

After a while Finch played, and Sarah and Eden relaxed in their separate shadows, he to the contemplative state he desired, and she to the desirous contemplation of Finch’s reflection in a long mirror that hung behind the piano.

They scarcely noticed what he played. They only knew that the room was filled with harmonies as true as their conversation had been false. They knew that now Finch talked to them out of the integrity of his soul and that truth moved from their souls in answer. He was aware of Eden’s loneliness, of Sarah’s desire, but they were necessary notes in his music.

He played, at the last, a composition of his own, in which two voices appeared to follow each other in questioning and again questioning, but receiving no answer, sometimes seeming to have no relation to one another. There were few full harmonies, but always the lonely and passionate repetition of the question.

“What is it?” asked Eden, rather irritably, when Finch’s hands lay quiet on the keyboard.

Sarah answered for him—“It’s his own. He calls it ‘Body and Soul.’”

“‘Body and Soul,’” repeated Eden, and added, with a touch of malice—“He seems to have trouble in keeping them together.”

F
INCH’S
concert was a success. Not the triumph that, in moments of exhilaration, he had sometimes pictured it. But still an undoubted success. His audience seemed rather cold, he thought, but it became more responsive as the programme proceeded, and he was elated when his own compositions were well received. The soprano who had joined with him was an accomplished singer, though personally he hated her voice.

He felt that he might have played with less sense of strain had the family not come to hear him. His first impulse had been to beg them to let him succeed or fail without their possessive eyes on him, but, when he saw what preparations his aunt and uncles were making, what importance the entire clan placed on their support of him, he hid his misgivings and nerved himself to withstand the electric force of their united presence. “But, for heaven’s sake, don’t clap!” he had exclaimed. “If you do, I’ll know it, and it will throw me off.”

But not to clap was impossible to them. In truth, the increased responsiveness of the audience was in part due to their passionate applause. They were proud of him and they
did not care who knew it. Whether Finch achieved a strong crescendo that made the drums of their ears vibrate or produced no more than a tentative trickle of sound, they gave him their undivided support. When Finch was recalled and bowed with outward composure he threw a glance of indignant appeal toward his family which was perceived only by Piers, and answered by an enigmatic grin.

In the Interval the soprano, who had just had a success in “Orpheus with his Lute,” observed to Finch:

“It’s strange how always there is one person in an audience who understands me. Who, as it were, sings with me, gives magnetism out to me. I know I’m funny that way, but if there is a single person of that sort in the audience, I am able to locate them.”

“What if he is at the back of the gallery?” asked Finch genially.

“It would be just the same. But he is usually in one of the front rows. Tonight it is a man with a handsome fair face. He is sitting between an old lady and a girl in green. There is a red-haired man at the end of the seat.”

Piers! Finch was delighted. Here was a joke for the family!

The three elders, Renny, Alayne, Piers, Pheasant, and Mooey sat together. It was Ernest’s first dissipation since his illness, and his eager nature, not yet subjugated by age, drank in all of brightness and colour that the evening offered. It was Mooey’s first night out. When Pheasant had suggested taking the little boy, it had seemed a ridiculous proposal. But she had insisted, urging that she wanted him to be able to say, in later years, that he had heard his famous uncle’s first concert in his own country. Then, too, the ticket would cost them nothing, so Mooey might as well have the
benefit of it, if benefit there was. And she had had her way and Mooey had behaved with the nonchalance of the habitual concert-goer. His clothes had been a problem until Augusta had produced a dark-blue velvet suit that had been Wakefield’s at the same age.

Wakefield himself sat with the Vaughans and Clara and Pauline Lebraux, on the other side of the hall. Eden and Sarah had seats in the top gallery where, as Eden said, they would hear comments from those who knew something about music.

A result of the concert was that Finch was able to make engagements to play in several of the American and Canadian cities. An agent was arranging a tour for him during the winter.

Renny carried off the newspapers which he found next day in the sitting room to his office in the stables, and there sat poring over them with knitted brow. On the whole, he thought the notices of the concert were very good, though a strange jumble of adjectives was used to describe the boy’s playing. Well, the hall had been three-quarters filled, and the takings respectable, and that was a good thing.

He lighted his pipe and leant back puffing at it. His mind revolved round his affairs, with Maurice’s subdividing of the property adjoining Jalna, as its pivot. That was what he could not forget, and that was what he seemingly could not prevent. For the thousandth time he pictured the appearance of the fields when jerry-built bungalows dotted them, when clotheslines hung from fence to fence, and mongrels and screaming children ran through his own woods, tearing up the flowers, tearing the beautiful bark from the birch trees, throwing stones at the birds. It gave him a gloomy pleasure to imagine the worst. If only Maurice had not had the land
divided into small lots there would have been hope of a tolerable neighbour, but he had been set in his own way as offering him the best chance of a large profit.

He could scarcely be angry with Maurice. He was having a rough time of it. With the help of a boy he was doing the work of the place, coming in at dark, tired out, and depressed with the sense of approaching failure. All that kept up his spirits was the hope of selling his lots.

Well, if things kept on as they were, on a steady decline, it would not be long before he was in the same pass as Maurice, selling off Jalna in paltry lots until the house would stand like a leaky old battleship surrounded by the small craft of a summer resort… At the thought a voice from the house seemed to cry out to him to save it from such ignominy. Without knowing what he did he sprang from his chair, strode to the windows and looked with passionate and possessive pride at the red brick walls, hung with a rich tapestry of autumn-tinted Virginia creeper, at the chimneys from which woodsmoke from his own logs curled.

A quiver passed over his face and it was with an effort that he turned it into a humorous grimace. His pipe had gone out. He relighted it and stood puffing steadily, for it was drawing badly, and he received from this simple act and the benign bulk of the house surrounded by trees a sense of direct comfort. Things would get better. They would get better. It could not go on like this. He pushed his hands into his pockets and his fingers closed on a penknife given him by his father when he was a boy.