His wife now hurried from the room.
The men stood facing each other. Renny said, — “You’re right. And at this moment I’d shake the weasand out of you for next to nothing.”
He grinned into Eugene Clapperton’s grey face and strode out of the house.
IV
HUMPHREY BELL
The new moon that looked bright and cold as ice seemed perched on the bare branch of the oak. Actually perched on the branch was a small owl, staring out of golden eyes at Renny Whiteoak as he appeared on the snowy path. The air had turned colder, and the snow that had been melting was now a hard crust crunching beneath his heavy boots. Leaving Eugene Clapperton he had turned his angry steps across a field and into this little bare wood where there was a small house named the Fox Farm, because people who bred foxes once had lived there. Later it had been occupied by Gemmel and her sisters. It was here that Eugene Clapperton had met her and from here she had been married. After that the house had stood lifeless and empty for a time. It belonged to Renny and he regarded it as not at all like the bungalows Eugene Clapperton was building but as a pleasant little house, isolated in a bit of woodland, of which the tenants must be congenial, it mattering little what rent they paid. In truth, he preferred that they should pay a low rent because, in some mysterious way, the less they paid, the closer the small house was drawn into Jalna.
For the past six months the Fox Farm had been let to a veteran of the war, Humphrey Bell. He lived there but had made no appreciable impression on the place. His soft voice, his insignificant personality, were powerless to overcome the imprint the former tenants had left upon the house. Three sisters had preceded him. Uncle Ernest and his wife, during the short term of their elderly married life, had occupied it; and, before them, a mother and daughter, Renny having loved the mother and the daughter having loved Renny. The faces of these past tenants seemed always to be peering from the windows, the skirts of the women fluttering as they moved in and out of the doors, their voices still echoed in Renny’s ears when he entered the house, the voices of the three Welsh sisters that were sweet as music, the precise New England voice of Uncle Ernest’s wife — how dear that little old woman had been to Renny — the voices of Clara Lebraux and her young daughter, Pauline! The voices of the six women came to Renny’s ears like the sound of distant bells as he drew near the house.
Evidently there had been no stirrings outside the house during the day, for the glistening crust of the snow was unbroken by any footprints except on the windowsill of the front room, where the snow was marked by tiny prints made by the claws of small birds, as they ate the crumbs scattered for them. The sill was made visible by the ruddy yellow light that streamed across it from the room within. The house, set down like a box, with two pointed gables added, in the seclusion of snow and snow-decked trees, had an air of repelling any intrusion on its fastness.
Yet, the next moment after Renny had knocked, the door was thrown open and Humphrey Bell welcomed him with obvious pleasure. Over-heated air poured out from the room, yet Bell himself seemed not too warm in a heavy grey sweater. He was a small, slight young man, so admirably proportioned that he might have been almost impressive had his hair and face been less colourless. Indeed, at first glance, he might have been taken for an albino, till it was seen that his eyes were a clear flower-like blue and well able to bear the light.
“So it’s you, Colonel Whiteoak,” he exclaimed. “Just the man I’d like to see.”
“Don’t ‘Colonel’ me,” Renny said. “War’s over.”
“I’m glad you feel like that. I hate everything military.”
Renny came in and Bell slammed the door against the winter night.
“Yet,” said Renny, “you stood up to it pretty well. You’d a long time in a German prison camp too.”
Bell drew up a chair for him beside his own, so that the two faced out of the window where the moon, in its first power of shadow-casting, threw the blue silhouette of a young pine on the snow. Behind them was the small, cheaply furnished room, to which Bell somehow managed to give an air of coziness. Perhaps it was because he was obviously so happy to live there. The war had turned him onto a different path from the one on which his feet had first been set. He was the son of a doctor in a New Brunswick town, the only son in a family of four daughters, all considerably older than he. A late arrival and the darling of his father’s heart, he was destined for the study of medicine. He had had no inclination toward that profession but had accepted it because six natures, all more dominating than his own, had urged him to it. When the war came he was in his first year in a medical college. In spite of all his family could do to dissuade him he took a course in flying at a time when the life of the average flyer was very short. It was his duty to join a medical unit, his sisters thought, anything on land or sea would have been better than aviation. He had survived his first months of flying to be shot down in Germany and to be a prisoner till the end of the war. In the cloistered life of the camp, surrounded by men, some of whom would have been obnoxious to his family, he discovered himself. After the war he wanted to live as far as possible from that family. He discovered that, though he loved his parents, the atmosphere of the town where he was expected to settle down and become a partner in his father’s practice was suffocating to him. The thought of devoting his life to treating the ailments of the sick repelled him. He found in himself no dedication to that service. When he returned home the glad anticipation of the reunion became a bewildered disappointment to the family. Even the three brothers-in-law he had acquired during his absence were disappointed in him, though they had never before met him. There was disappointment all about him, mounting higher every week, like a quick-growing hedge, closing him in. He did not know how to escape, yet escape he must. He was constantly aware that the eyes of nine disappointed people were on him, wondering what he would do. Do I look like a doctor? he would ask himself. Would any patient have confidence in me? Miserably he compared his own qualities with the staunch qualities of his father.
Suddenly and from an unexpected quarter the way was opened to him. An old friend of the family, a bachelor, died, leaving him a legacy sufficient to support him for several years, if he were careful. He made up his mind to go to some distant place, perhaps the West Indies or Mexico, and try to write. He would write something that would make his family realize that he had done well to give up the study of medicine. If he never was able to write anything worth printing, still he had done well to give up medicine. He had gone down to Boston and there he had heard Finch Whiteoak play the piano, in one of a series of concerts. After the concert he had met the pianist in the house of a New Brunswicker living in Boston. Bell was so moved by Finch’s playing that he feared to meet him, lest disappointment would follow. He shrank from small disappointments for himself even more than he shrank from inflicting large disappointments on others. But Finch Whiteoak was fascinating to Bell. He could not keep his eyes from Finch’s hands. There was an inspired look in Finch’s long, grey-blue eyes, Bell thought. He found himself talking freely, gladly of the formless, pent-up thoughts within him. After the years in school, after the years in the army, the prison camp, and after that, his family’s plans for him rising like a barbed-wire fence round him, their disappointment like a dark deep ditch — now his freedom lay in his hands and he did not know where to place it. He was like a man carrying a sapling in his arms over a piece of bare land, trying to choose a place to plant it. From the sheltered corner of the room Bell had looked out defensively at the other guests, willing them to keep away.
“I thought of going to the West Indies or Mexico or even to some island in the Pacific,” he said, feeling the weight of his plans in his chest. “I thought my money would last longer there and I could write — try to find out what I’m good for.
“You’d not be good for anything very long — on an island in the Pacific. You’d marry a native and have a lot of funny-looking kids and get lazier