But it was impossible to dwell long upon depressing topics on Christmas morning. Colin was soon racing round the garden pursuing Marmalade with the water pistol, while Colette trotted backwards and forwards from the scullery to the kitchen helping Sophie.
The breakfast was wonderful. Ham and boiled eggs and steaming coffee and jam and fresh rolls and, most marvellous of all, an Island speciality, the goche détremper, a milk cake always baked early on Christmas morning to appear on the breakfast table. Colette helped Sophie to open the oven door and take it out. Its exquisite milk-white freshness was faintly tinged with golden brown on top, and its lovely crisp smell filled the whole kitchen and floated out to greet the churchgoers as they drove into the courtyard, cold and famished.
Ranulph put in an appearance at breakfast time and ate more than his fair share of the goche détremper, which seemed hardly fair as he had done nothing either in the way of devotions or stocking-opening to warrant such an appetite.
No sooner was breakfast over than it was time for church again. André usually escaped from a second church-going on Christmas day on the plea of the farm, but to-day Ranulph, with a malicious twinkle in his eye, declared himself perfectly able to do all that was necessary on the farm in order that André might enjoy the felicity of accompanying his family. Rachell was grateful and delighted, and André went miserably upstairs to find his top hat.
With the family at church, and Sophie shut in the kitchen with the turkey, Ranulph spent an extremely profitable morning. Quick and efficient as he was he had done all that was necessary on the farm in half the time that it would have taken André. His work ended, he went into the little room adjoining the stables, half office and half outhouse, to enter the number of eggs he had collected in the egg book. He had only been here once or twice before, and that in the company of André, when politeness had forbidden a too great inquisitiveness. Now, closing the door behind him, he looked round with interest. The little narrow slip of a room, known to the family as the “corn bin” because the hens’ food was kept there, was André’s private sanctum. No one but himself and the hens had any interest in it. From certain signs it was obvious to Ranulph that André withdrew to it, as Rachell to her bedroom and Michelle to La Baie des Mouettes, to possess his soul. Ranulph went to the middle of the room, put his hands in his pockets and stared. He meant to go through this room thoroughly, as a thief the pockets of an unconscious man, and get to the bottom of André. He had no qualms of conscience about lifting the lid off another man’s secrets. He had long ago dispensed with a conscience as a tiresome and hampering article, constantly interfering with desire.
There was nothing in this room at first sight to throw any light upon André. On one side of the little room stood the corn bins, opposite them was an old roll topped desk containing the farm account books and the egg book, with an almanack hanging over it, opposite the door was a window which looked out across a rough field towards a distant line of stunted trees and held to the left just a glimpse of the sea. Under this window was a table with a chair in front of it, and under the table was a roughly-made bookcase with a sacking curtain to protect the books. Now what books could André possibly want in the corn bin? The roll topped desk already contained a dictionary, and various noble tomes on manure, cows, bee-keeping, hens and mangelwurzels. What more could the man want? Ranulph dragged out the little bookcase, lifted the sacking curtain and looked. Plato, Shakespeare (Michelle had declared to him that there was apparently not a Shakespeare on the premises), Keats, Essays of Elia, Moby Dick, Molière, Euripides, Undine, the Arabian Nights (had André stolen these two from the children?) Dante, a book on pigs (this last evidently uneasy in its company), Goethe. An assorted lot. No wonder André was such a bad farmer. Obviously he withdrew to this sanctum to study pigs—the presence of the pigs between Dante and Goethe showed that an attempt on pigs was actually made—studied them for a couple of minutes and then turned to—what? To the cloudy splendours of Shakespeare—rainbow tinted mists of poetry wreathing and coiling over the still black tarns of insight; to the gentle calmly flowing stream of the Essays; to the sparkling waterfalls of French comedy. But did he only read? What was that table standing there? Ranulph turned abruptly from the books, went to the desk and began pulling out the drawers and ransacking their contents—but not to find the egg book—that he found at once and cast contemptuously aside. Account books and old bills and farm records and advertisements, these he cast from him like autumn leaves whirling before a north-easter—the desk was already so hopelessly untidy that André would never notice confusion had been worse confounded—until he found what he sought.
He lifted them out and carried them to the table—a handful of notebooks and school exercise books (filched from Colin?) filled with André’s small neat writing. For André, so wildly untidy that his passage through a room was like the passing of a tornado, wrote neatly. These little books, filled apparently with poems and essays, were written with the loving care, neatness and beauty of an etching engraved on copper. The form was perfect, what of the substance? Ranulph drew up the rickety chair to the table and read. He read for an hour without stirring. There was no sound in the room but the occasional turning of a page and the scurry of a mouse as it pattered across the wooden floor. Outside the window, over the gorse-starred field, the sun rose to its glorious zenith and the line of the distant sea was molten gold. Then Ranulph closed the books. One, which had been at the bottom of the pile, he slipped into his pocket, the rest he carried reverently back to the drawer from which he had taken them, and closed it. He removed all traces of his presence, arranging the room exactly as he had found it, and went out, closing the door with the quietness of a doctor leaving a sick room. For assuredly André was a sick man. If he could write like that in his fugitive leisure moments, and bind his life to a wheel of toil that he must hate and loathe, the conflict in him must have exhausted his body and dragged his soul nearly in two. His life must be a veritable crucifixion, the upward surge of the artist crossed out, bound down always by the arms of necessity and frustration.
Ranulph went to his own room over the stable and sat down by the window and marvelled. Hitherto he had thought of his brother as a weak fool. Weak in practical ability and driving power he might be but as an artist he was supreme. His were not the lesser gifts of a retentive memory garnering the thoughts of others and dishing them up with a fresh sauce, nor yet of a quick wit ready to note and seize the humour and piquancy of contrast, but the greater gifts of the creator, born to endue passing things with immortality. He had too the passionate observation of the true lover of beauty. No procession of clouds, no fall of a leaf or flash of a bird’s wing had passed by him unseen, and out of these moments of fugitive beauty, caught and held, he had created an enduring beauty. With perfect simplicity, with thoughts that were his own, clothed in phrases coined by himself, he had built of captured moments an unchanging monument to changing nature. Those particular sunsets and storms and unfoldings of spring had passed and gone, but in André’s poems they were alive for ever. Ranulph got up and walked about the room. What was to be done about it? André in his harried life had only had time to produce that handful of poems and essays, and they, as far as Ranulph could see, unless something were done about it, were doomed to be thrown on the dustbin with the egg accounts. He was an example of the greatest tragedy of all, a life denied its true vocation. Some words frequently quoted by Peronelle when in the midst of the Browning epidemic seemed to say themselves in the room.
“The honest instinct, pent and crossed through life,
Let surge by death into a visible fire
Of rapture; as the strangled thread of flame
Painfully winds, annoying and annoyed,
Malignant and maligned, thro’ stone and ore,
Till earth exclude the stranger: vented once
It finds full play, is recognized atop
Some mountain as no such abnormal birth,
Fire for the mount, not streamlet for the vale!”
Ranulph swore suddenly and loudly. No! André should not wait for death to fulfil himself in this only life he had to live upon the earth. He should do it now. Who knew if there was any after death? Browning, with the easy optimism of a man with private means, seemed to think so, but Ranulph himself thought not. He began to walk round and round the room. His mind, hitherto occupied over the problems of Michelle, Jacqueline, and Colin, began to be busy over their father. He muttered as he walked. He would set André free before he died. The path was not clear to him yet, but he knew that he would do it. He, the failure, would keep his brother from following a like path.
André, Rachell, Michelle, Peronelle, Jacqueline, Colin, Colette. A rope of seven strands bound the advocate of independence, but he was so busy with his thoughts for them that morning that he had no time to notice how the touch of the rope had set him free from the fetters of his own obsession.
VI
To dine with grandpapa on Christmas Day was more than any one could bear, but since grandpapa could not possibly be expected to absorb turkey and plum pudding by himself at the festal season there was nothing for it but to bring him back to Bon Repos after church.
Ranulph, meditating in his own room, heard the spanking clip-clop of grandpapa’s trotting horses mingling with the thump-thump of the ambling Lupin. Ten minutes later the dinner bell rang. Ranulph surveyed himself in the scrap of looking glass that hung on his wall. His hair was rumpled and his coat buttoned crooked, but he decided to leave them as they were. It would annoy the old man. It was not in his power to revenge himself for the blows his father had dealt him in the past, but little pin pricks of annoyance he could and would drive in. His untidiness would, unfortunately, annoy Rachell too, but never in this world can one aim a blow at another but some innocent victim catches the rebound. He strolled at his leisure into the kitchen. This also was intended as a pin prick. They were all waiting for him, and grandpapa was fuming.
“Didn’t you hear the bell, sir?” he demanded.
“Certainly, sir,” replied Ranulph, “otherwise I should not have been here. You will eat the more that I have kept you waiting.”
Grandpapa blew out his cheeks and humphed. Their glances caught and held, like magnet and steel. It had been so at their first meeting. Ranulph wondered uneasily if it were possible that his father could recognize him. He wrenched his eyes from the old man’s compelling, troubled gaze, and looked at his brother. André, irritated by his rudeness, was looking at him, and was astonished beyond measure to see admiration, reverence, and even affection in the older man’s regard. There had always been a veiled hostility between them, born of their mutual love for Rachell and of André’s jealousy, but now, for some reason unknown to André, it seemed gone. In spite of himself a movement of liking stirred in him and stretched out to meet Ranulph’s affection. Rachell, intercepting their glances, blessed Yuletide the peace-maker.
The dinner was perfect and grandpapa, who had had the forethought to bring his own drinks with him, André, the fool, being a teetotaller, expressed himself as not too dissatisfied. The turkey, stuffed at one end with herbs and at the other with chestnuts, according to the Island custom, was browned to a turn and held out gallantly against the inroads of everybody’s second helpings. The plum pudding, when carried in by a purple-faced Sophie, was seen even under its covering of blue flame to be of the colour of folded wallflower buds and stiff with fruit. . . . After a quarter of an hour there was none left.
“You’re all eating too much,” announced grandpapa, passing up his plate for more. “What? What? You all eat too much. You always have.” He became aware that Colette was eating plum pudding, and his eyes nearly popped out of his head. “To give that child plum pudding,” he told Rachell, “is equivalent to digging her grave. And don’t say I haven’t told you.”
“It’s only a thimblefull,” Rachell pleaded.
“I never remember such heavenly weather at Christmas,” said André nervously, terrified that grandpapa might revert to the topic of the dead children.
“What?” said grandpapa, “yes. Warm. Damned unseasonable. Well, as I was saying, if you overfill a child’s stomach—”
Trouble was dawning in Rachell’s face and Ranulph threw himself into the breach. Turning to grandpapa he began to talk as the du Frocqs had never heard him talk before. He talked as brilliantly as André wrote, and with the same creator’s gift. Picking out the most gaily-coloured of his memories he built for them, bit by bit, the story of his travels, building up with skilful words an edifice of colour and scents and adventure that took their breath away. André listened spellbound and the children, reaching mechanically for nuts and oranges, never took their eyes off him. Rachell, her eyes slipping lovingly from face to face, was perhaps, more interested in their pleasure than in the story, but she gave Ranulph his due as a narrator. Even grandpapa seemed curiously interested in the tale, or perhaps, not so much by it as by the teller. He sat twisting his wine glass between his fingers and glancing every now and then quickly and sharply at Ranulph, at his eyes, at the shape of his head, his hands. But for the most part, he sat looking at the cloth and listening. Even so had he once sat in his library and listened while Jean his son, outside in the garden and unaware of him, had told some tale or other to the infant André. He had marvelled then at the boy’s power of telling a story and he marvelled now at this man’s power. They had told a tale in just the same way, with the same varied inflection of voice, stressing the lights and shadows of the story, the same power of painting pictures in the minds of their listeners, the same power of making a dead past live. Once more he raised his eyes sharply to Ranulph’s face, and kept them there. Like the steel to the magnet, Ranulph’s eyes slipped round to his, were held and gripped, and for the first time the story faltered. Grandpapa, strangely moved, got abruptly to his feet, spilling the dregs of his wine glass across the table.
“Are we to stay here all the afternoon stuffing ourselves?” he demanded fiercely and a little wildly. “Is it necessary because you live at a farm that you should ape the manners of the lower animals? Look at those children.”
This was unfair, for though the children were eating nuts and the table was considerably littered with the debris there was nothing in the least piglike in their methods. You could not hear them eat and they did not slobber.
“We will go into the other room,” said Rachell with dignity, and, rising, she swept into the parlour, followed by grandpapa and André. To her great relief Ranulph took himself off. When he and grandpapa were together the air was positively oppressive with a surcharge of electricity. The children scampered off on their various occupations. Michelle and Peronelle to help Sophie wash up, Jacqueline and Colin to mysterious private business. Only Colette trotted in the wake of her elders to the parlour.
Rachell sighed with relief as she established herself and her menfolk in chairs before the fire, with sleepy Colette on her lap. The sun-filled parlour, shut away from the clamour of dinner and washing up, was fragrant and peaceful as the inside of a flower. Part of the tronquet de Noel, the yule log, was burning in the grate and its blue and yellow flames, whispering sweetly, lit up with the sunlight the soft little gillyflowers and forget-me-nots on the curtains, the delicate fluted china, the Chinese dragons and the rosewood table. Rachell looked round on all her treasures and was comforted. André, worn out, was soon asleep, and Colette, overcome by an excess of food and joy, leant her head against her mother and slept too. Only grandpapa, though he spread his handkerchief over his head and folded his hands across his stomach, seemed unable to pop off. He was restless. He snorted and sighed, and shuffled with his feet. Rachell, her chin resting on top of Colette’s head, considered him. He seemed upset about something. She felt sorry for him. He looked old to-day, and lonely. If his loneliness was his own fault it was none the less pitiful for that. He snorted again, gave up the chase of his forty
winks, whipped the handkerchief from off his head and looked round the room. His eye travelled with disfavour over the soft pale colours of it, and he sniffed at the scent of pot-pourri and burning wood with obvious dislike.
“Draughty,” he announced, “musty and washed-out looking. Damp. That’s what it is, damp. I’ve always told you this house was damp.”
Rachell smiled at him. Her pity this afternoon was stronger than her dislike.
“Don’t you like my room?” she asked.
“High falutin,’ ” said grandpapa. “I suppose you call it artistic?”
“I think it is beautiful,” admitted Rachell.
Grandpapa shifted his weight in his chair.
“Deuced uncomfortable furniture,” he said, “beauty be damned, I like comfort. . . . No, you needn’t ‘ssh’ me; the child’s asleep.”
He blew out his cheeks and his eyes travelled round the room again. They came to rest on the strips of Chinese embroideries sent home by a sailor du Frocq. He looked at them fixedly.
“Cousin Matthieu du Frocq gave them to me you know,” Rachell said, smiling at her blue butterflies and golden dragons dancing on the wall.
“He was a great traveller,” grandpapa announced. “Wild fellow too. Humph. Well. He’s dead now. Sailors and travellers—there’ve been several of ’em in the family. There’s a restless strain in us. That’s what it is. Restless.” He stared at the fire and Rachell wondered if he was thinking of his son Jean.
“Tell me about this fellow Mabier,” he demanded suddenly. Rachell told him the little she could tell without betraying Ranulph’s confidence.
“Humph,” muttered grandpapa, “a queer fellow. Restless. A traveller. That’s what it is, restless. . . . He told that story well; damn well.”
“Yes,” said Rachell.
“Story telling is a gift,” grandpapa informed her, “my son Jean had it.”