She answered quickly, “I’d feel important if I slept in the basement.”
“I’ll bet you would. In any case, it’s not a bit like a girl’s room.”
“I don’t want it to be.”
“You wish you were a boy, then?”
“No! I just want it to be like Daddy’s room.”
Maurice did not think it was an attractive room but he felt that he was expected to praise it. “It’s very nice,” he said.
“Those pictures are famous horses. Here are his pipes,” she ran her finger across the rack on which they hung. “There are nineteen of them. He just took one with him. His clothes are still in the cupboard. I use only half of it.” She displayed the interior of the cupboard where her childish garments hung among tweed and serge and corduroy. “All his ties and shirts and things are in the drawers waiting for him.”
“You think a lot of him, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes. I suppose you do of your father too.”
“Yes, indeed.”
“Isn’t it awful their being gone so long?”
“Yes, it is pretty awful,” he agreed. “Especially, of course, for our mothers.”
Adeline looked at him almost sombrely. Then she said, “Well, we’d better go and find the others.”
Walking with her to the orchard, Maurice thought he had never before known what September heat could be; or perhaps he had forgotten. The sun seemed to have drawn the last drop of moisture from the land. The path beneath Maurice’s feet felt like cement. There was no breeze to stir so much as a grass blade. He wondered how the labourer he could see ploughing in a distant field could endure the heat. He glanced at Adeline. She looked warm — no more.
“This heat is awful,” he muttered.
“You’re dressed all wrong. But, if you call this hot, you should have been here last week. It took a terrific storm to clear the air. It’s nice now. There’s Auntie Pheasant with the boys.”
Philip had returned to the orchard. Boards laid on trestles made a table for the array of baskets which Pheasant and Nook were packing with the reddest apples, Maurice thought, he had ever seen. Philip was bringing them the apples from a great mound on the ground. Pheasant cried:
“It’s a perfect shame to be working on your first day home, Mooey, but these apples must be put on the train at two o’clock. We’re slaves here, aren’t we, Adeline? Don’t be so rough with the apples, Philip! And look here, Nook, don’t you go putting the best ones on the top or we shall get a bad name.”
“I don’t do it to be dishonest,” said Nook. “But just because they look prettier that way.”
“Everyone expects the best apples to be on the top,” said Adeline, tersely. “I looked into some baskets at the market and they all had. And I asked the man and he said they all had.”
“I’d put the best on top,” Philip declared, “and I’d put rotten ones underneath.”
“You little scoundrel!” Pheasant gave him a look, half-stern, half-laughing.
“Not rotten,” said Adeline. “Just not quite so round and rosy. They’d taste just as good.”
“What would those underneath be like in Ireland, Mooey?” asked Pheasant, her eyes caressing him.
“Oh, they’d be rotten enough.”
He took off his jacket and set to work. But he was slow, unaccustomed. The heat was almost intolerable to him. Every time he was near to Pheasant she touched him. She could scarcely believe that she had him back. She said:
“No one of us is going to do a hand’s turn of work this afternoon. We shall just give ourselves up to the joy of having you back. We’re going to have a picnic tea on the lawn and Mrs. Wragge is making ice cream!”
“Hurrah!” shouted Philip.
“Hurrah!” shouted Nook, putting a misshapen apple in the bottom of the basket he was packing.
Maurice felt like one in a dream. The half-forgotten life of his childhood had opened to receive him, had taken him back. Its walls had closed behind him. He thought of September in County Meath. He drew back to him the picture of Glengorman in September, the hushed cool meadows, the river that seemed scarcely to move, and how it gave back, almost unbroken, the reflection of the slow-flying heron. And the life with Dermot Court! He had been the cherished child of the old man. From the moment he had entered the house he had done just as he had pleased, he could do no wrong. He had been the white-haired boy.
And now he was home again — where it had once seemed to him that he could do nothing to please his father. Now he was one of many. He did not know what to say to his young brothers. All about him was an activity in which he would be expected to take a part. There was something new, purposeful and practical, in his mother. She was asking:
“Can you drive a car, Mooey?”
“Yes, indeed I can,” he answered.
“Oh, that’s splendid! You will be able to drive the truck to the station. It takes such a lot of Wright’s time and puts him completely out of temper.”
A strange feeling of loneliness came over Maurice.
A MONTH LATER Finch Whiteoak was walking along the country road, on his way from the railway station to Jalna. He had taken the local line from the city, not sending word home to say when he would arrive. He wanted the exercise of the walk after the long rail journey across the continent and he wanted to be alone. Yet he was scarcely alone, for with him walked, ran, trudged, or loitered the many selves of his childhood and boyhood who had traversed this road.
It was October and the countryside had already felt the sharpness of frost. Summer was reluctantly giving way to the coming of winter. Like the banners of a defeated army the trees hung out their scarlet, their gold, and their green. Finch took off his hat that he might feel the crispness of the air on his head. Three days, four nights on the train — he could still feel the vibration.
He had a vision of himself as a small boy seated beside his grandmother in her phaeton, moving sedately along the road on a summer’s day, behind the glistening flanks of the bays. He could see her handsome old face, framed in her widow’s veil which fell voluminously over her shoulders and down her back. Her expression was purposeful, as it always was when she set out on any expedition, however small. Sitting beside her in the phaeton with Hodge, the coachman’s, back looming in front of him, with the hooves of the bays thudding rhythmically on the smooth road, he had felt more secure, more sheltered from the world than at any other time. Well, she had been dead sixteen years, a long while. A good deal had happened to him since then. He threw back his shoulders, as though he were freeing them from a burden, and took a long breath. He would let the freshness of the morning penetrate through all his being.
He had not seen Jalna for a year. During the winter and spring he had given a series of concerts in the large cities. Now he was returning from a trip to the Pacific Coast where he had played to Canadian and American servicemen. He was going home for rest he badly needed. He felt humiliated that he was so often tired, that periodic long rests were so often necessary to him. What was wrong with him, he wondered? There was his youngest brother, Wakefield, who had been a delicate boy with a weak heart and a poor appetite, while he himself had been strong and able to digest anything — always hungry. Yet Wakefield had outgrown his weakness. He was a flyer who had seen long hard service, had been decorated for great courage, and now was an instructor in a flying school out West. He had had hard experiences in his private life too.
Finch Whiteoak was a distinguished-looking