“Give yourself time,” said Finch. “You’ve only been at it six months.”
“The thing for me to do,” said Bell, “is to stick to carving silly things like those,” and his eyes moved from the scene outdoors to the small carvings on the mantelshelf.
“I don’t believe you’re happy here — in spite of what you said about being as snug as a rabbit in its burrow.”
“Oh, yes, I am,” Bell protested quickly. “I’ve never been so almost completely happy.” He began to laugh silently, rumpling his silvery tow hair till it made a halo round his head. “But — I have one headache and it’s an aggravating one, I can tell you.”
“What?”
“Mr. Clapperton.”
“Oh, him! You and my Uncle Nicholas should get together.”
“We have. Your uncle invariably says Clapperton is a horrid old fellow.”
“What has he done to annoy you?”
“Now, listen. He never meets me on the road or in the village but he stops me and begins to pour out his obnoxious advice.” Bell spoke in a high afflicted tone. “He says I’m mentally ill. That it’s proved by the way I shut myself up alone here. By the way I look and talk. He says that I must see a psychiatrist. He says that fifty percent of the people one meets are mentally ill. He says that one out of every ten should be in a mental home. By God, I’ll be in jail for doing him an injury, if he doesn’t let me alone!”
“Why don’t you avoid him?”
“I can’t. He smells me out. He’s everywhere — with his know-it-all smirk and his cheap philosophizing.”
“Have you met his wife and her sister?”
“Once he dragged me almost by force to his house to see his pictures. I suppose no worse collection of pictures exists anywhere. Yet they inspire him to live a finer life, he says. I don’t know how the two women endure him. They’re quite nice, though a little odd.”
Bell really was worked up, but in Finch’s presence he calmed himself, brought whisky, and sat down facing the window.
It was March and should have been spring but there was no sign of it in these woods. The snow was deeper than it had been all through the winter, the air thicker in portent of more snow. There was a deeper silence. No small animal ventured from its burrow to leave a footprint on the snow. Of the migratory birds crows had thrown their challenge across the sky and one morning a robin had been seen. “The first robin!” Adeline had cried. “Now I must wish on him.” And she had, combining superstition and religion, murmured, — “Please, may I go to Ireland, oh God!”
Finch said, — “Young Adeline is dying to go to Ireland.”
Bell looked surprised. “I thought she was perfectly happy here. Why should she want to go to Ireland — of all places?”
“She was there once, with her father, and she wants to go again. My nephew Maurice is going this spring. He owns a place there. If she goes someone must go with them from here. Perhaps Renny. Perhaps me.”
As he spoke Finch was looking out of the window but he was conscious of a change in Bell. He gave him a sidelong look. The tip of Bell’s thumb was caught between his teeth, his eyes were downcast. He asked:
“How long would she be away?”
“Probably a couple of months.”
Bell gave a little embarrassed laugh. “Don’t think me too inquisitive,” he said, “but I can’t help asking this. Someone — I think it was Mrs. Clapperton — told me that there is a sort of engagement between Adeline and her cousin. Is she — are they going over there as an engaged couple?”
“I think almost everyone in the family wishes they were but it isn’t so. Adeline hasn’t shown any preference for Maurice and they’re too sensible to press her. Her father wouldn’t allow any urging. He’s in no hurry to give his daughter to a man who is to live three thousand miles away.”
“Whoever marries her,” said Bell, “will get a lovely wife.”
“He will, and a high-spirited one. He’d need lots of character.”
“It would be strange,” Bell now turned his inviting blue eyes on Finch, “to live in the house with one woman — one whom you loved desperately — and no one else … I used to live in the house with five women. Of course, that was very different. If you lived alone with a woman you deeply loved, everything she said or did would be terrifically important. And all the time you’d be watching yourself, in fear you might say or do something that might hurt her. And if by any chance she gave you a hurt you’d have to hide it from her. You’ve been married. Isn’t that so?”
“There are worse things than being hurt,” said Finch. “There’s suffocation.”
“But not if you really loved her!”
“Well … you never know till you try it.”
“I expect he’ll marry her all right,” said Bell, turning again to the thought of Maurice. “He’s got money and good looks, the family behind him. He’s got everything.”
“Except Adeline’s love. He hasn’t that — yet.”
“This journey together will do the trick. I can just see them in some picturesque old Irish mansion — the sort of place to captivate a girl.” Bell forced a smile to his small sensitive mouth, as though the picture were a pleasant one.
Finch began to talk to him of Ireland, of old Dermot Court whose property had been inherited by Maurice. “Speaking of Ireland,” he went on, “my wife was an Irishwoman, a forty-second cousin. We separated and we came together again.”
“That was good, eh?”
“No. It didn’t last.”
Walking homeward Finch remembered his wife Sarah. Her dark form glided out of the pale muffled wood and stood on the rustic bridge waiting for him. He saw her sleek black head with its convolutions of plaits, her white hands gripping the snowy handrail of the bridge, as though to keep herself from running to meet him. He remembered the feel of those hands on his neck … and now she was dead, dead as that fallen ash tree, blown down by a gale in its prime.… Of her there was left only the memory of her sensual hold on him — his struggle to escape — but he could never be the same again. She had done something to him.… Yet — had he ever been whole — sound? He doubted it. And here at Jalna was their son. Here was Dennis who was always so glad to have him at home. It touched him to see the little boy’s pleasure in his return. But, when it came to being a father, he felt himself to be a failure as compared with Renny — Renny who had been a father to his brothers, to Eden’s daughter, and now a better father than himself to Dennis.
What bright elegance was Sarah’s! She was as finished as a china ornament. She was as ruthless as a storm. From her far-off grave in California she spoke to him in a moment’s communion and he hesitated on the bridge to hear that icy whisper. He looked back at his own deep footprints in the snow, blue caverns sunk in its whiteness. There was an oak tree that had somehow contrived against all the gales to retain two brown leaves. Now, in the still air, one of them detached itself and fluttered slowly downward like a weary bird.… The sound of the dogs’ barking came from the direction of the house. They barked angrily from the porch, wanting the door opened. In a moment it opened and the barking ceased. The door closed with a bang.
Finch pictured the warmth and light inside the house. Whiteoaks had lived here for all but a century. Perhaps would live here for a century — two centuries — more. Who knew? He felt the pull of the house