Bell nodded. “I think I do.”
“Well, there’s a small house on the place, completely hidden among oaks and pines, which my brother is willing to let for a low rent to the right tenant. No one would trouble you there, unless you wanted.”
Bell was excited. “It’s the sort of thing I’d like, though it’s a long way from the South Seas.”
“You might try it,” said Finch. “Perhaps it wouldn’t suit you at all.” He was easily rebuffed. “Better not risk it.” He glanced at his wristwatch. He was tired and there were other people here who wanted to talk to him, an aspiring young girl pianist who was panting to pour out her soul.
“But I want to try it!” Bell said eagerly. “I’m not at all set on going to an island.”
“There’s nothing picturesque about the place I’m telling you of,” said Finch. He was already standing up. “It’s just that it is a place you might like to write in. You’d find something just as quiet anywhere in the country.”
Bell could not say that he wanted to be where he might see Finch sometimes but he asked:
“You spend a part of your year at home?”
“Oh, yes.” Finch’s thoughts already seemed removed far from this room. Young Bell felt like saying, — “I’d like to be somewhere near you,” but he could not. Instead he asked, — “What sort of man is your brother?”
Finch was suddenly very much in the room. He gave a little laugh, as though at some heart-warming remembrance, and said:
“He’s past sixty but he’s the best horseman I know. He’s got red hair and not a single white one in it — that I’ve ever seen. You might not like him. Some people don’t.”
“But you do!” exclaimed Bell warmly. “I can see that.”
A smile lit Finch Whiteoak’s face. “He’s been a father to me,” he said.
And now here was Bell opening the door of the Fox Farm, like a host, padding into the living room in old grey felt slippers and placing a chair for Renny Whiteoak to face the intricate fragility of the snow-decked boughs of the evergreens, the twigs of the oaks, against the burnished afterglow in the west. He had lived at the Fox Farm for only six months. He would have told you this was the happiest time of his life, looking back no further than the beginning of the war that had made his boyhood seem another life scarcely remembered. This was his first winter, a mild one, and he had been very snug, delighting in his aloneness in the little house in the woods, in being cut off from his family, in making new friends, of whom he never saw any more than he wished to. In those months he had written three short stories, all of which lay in a drawer of his writing table, each twice rejected. He had not yet made up his mind to send them out again. He was in no hurry, indeed he had not much faith in his powers. Or perhaps it was that he so enjoyed his present way of living that he shrank from disturbance of it.
When Renny Whiteoak came to see him it was his habit to place the two shabby, comfortable old chairs with their backs to the room and facing the woods, he himself taking the one with the sagging springs. He would then produce two glasses of whisky and water and the two would settle down for an hour’s talk. This happened twice a week, and once a month Bell took dinner at Jalna.
“Well,” said Renny, genially, “how goes the writing?”
He was the only person to whom Bell had spoken of his hopes and that under a promise of secrecy. Renny was flattered by Bell’s confidence. He looked gravely judicial when Bell would read one of his stories aloud to him. Though they weren’t the sort of stories he himself liked, being concerned with odd and even macabre experiences of the mind, he thought they were good. Secretly he hoped Bell would outgrow the desire to write such peculiar stuff and turn to something showing more of the virtues of a man.
“How goes the work?” he asked, when they were settled.
“If you can call it work,” said Bell, his small face set in a comic sneer.
“Damned hard work, I should say,” persisted Renny. “I’d hate to tackle it.”
Bell sprang up and went to the mantelshelf. “This is all I’ve done today,” he said. He put into Renny’s hand a peculiarly-shaped knot of wood from a branch of cedar that he had carved into the likeness of a chipmunk, so alert in its posture, so bold and yet timorous, that Renny laughed and curved his hand about it in pleasure.
“It’s good,” he said. “It’s capital. Now there is talent!”
Bell made a little grimace at the unintentional implication. “I like my menagerie,” he said. On the mantelshelf there were a dozen carvings of other small animals, contrived from oddly shaped pieces of wood.
“Why don’t you try your hand at a human head?” Renny asked.
“I’d like to do yours — if I were able.” He gave an admiring glance at the hard-looking head set with such spirit on the lean shoulders.
“What about old Clapperton!” laughed Renny. “I wish you’d find a particularly ugly knob of wood and make a suitably sinister head of him. God, how I dislike that old fellow!”
“What is his latest?”
“Oh, he’s begun whining again about his ideals and his dreams. Asinine old crooner!”
“And what do his dreams portend?”
“Another go at his model village. I’ve told you how his wife persuaded him to give up the idea. Now he is playing with it again and in deadly earnest, I’m afraid.”
“Have you been to his house?”
“I just came from there.”
“I have the impression that his wife and her sister keep him very much in his place.”
“They do. But he’s getting tired of it. He had his own way for too many years. He’s becoming restive.”
“When I meet him,” said Bell slowly, “I feel like running the other way. He strikes a false note here. He doesn’t belong.” A mischievous smile hovered across Bell’s face. “Let’s get rid of him.”
“I wish we could,” Renny returned sombrely.
“He never meets me,” Bell stroked his towhead, “without rubbing me the wrong way,” and he stroked more firmly, as though to rub himself the right way. “He advised me, the other day, to see a psychiatrist. I’m in a despondent state, he says, brought on by the war. I almost told him that I’m despondent only when I’m with him.”
“I’ll get him out of here yet,” said Renny, but his words brought no conviction to himself or to Bell. Eugene Clapperton was too firmly entrenched.
Through the window they now saw Adeline coming toward the house. She wore a white pullover and a pale grey skirt. Large flakes of snow were falling and some had come to rest on her head forming, as it were, a wreath of white flowers. It was as though one of the young silver birches had refused longer to be earth-bound and, its roots being released, was moving lightly through the snowy wood. They saw her in the pale twilight place her feet in her father’s footprints, in an almost symbolic following of him.
“She’s been following me,” Renny said, with a pleased paternal look.
Bell jumped up. He said, — “I must open the door.”
“Let her wait. She won’t mind.” They could see her, leaning against an oak, her arms folded, prepared to wait.
Bell moved nervously about the room. “It’s so untidy,” he muttered. He had always hoped she would come, and now that she was here he