“If only Mother wouldn’t use slang,” groaned Nina to herself; and Aunt Lavvy, more discriminating, thought: “If only poor Florrie didn’t try to please Nina by using slang.”
“It’s not a house, you know, Mrs. Maxwell. Nor even a flat, exactly. They call it a studio flat. And we found we actually have a wee musicians’ gallery on the premises—or rather a gallery without the musicians. Isn’t it quaint?”
“It would be much quainter if you found you had the musicians on the premises without the gallery,” said Ursula, bending over her sums, at the table; she had no right at all to be aware of the social entertainment part of the room; still less to enter into it. It sounded quite gracefully witty in her mind before she actually said it, but directly it was out, she knew it was a failure. It fell into the web of conversation, parting it, instead of drawing it together by tiny silken stitches.... Ursula sat with her head bent and eyelids lowered, while the hot scarlet shame dragged up over her neck. She was conscious of Nina’s astonished disapproval, of Mrs. Fraser’s perfunctory little laugh, of Gums preparing a tactless reproof. But most of all, she was conscious of having been merely clumsy where she had hoped to be effective.
“Can’t Ursula do her lessons—her studies—in the dining-room yet, Miss Roberts? They must have cleared away by now. Why, it’s nearly lunch-time.”
Whereupon Mrs. Fraser naturally said she must go home. And Mrs. Maxwell naturally tried to amend her blunder by inviting her to lunch. And Nina was apprehensive as to the quality of the lunch—quantity there always was. And Aunt Lavvy, usually to be relied upon for those deft silken stitches that were Ursula’s envy, was still not quite serenely herself—it was so disconcerting to be associated, even by a few courteous questions, with financial losses and banks and defaulting clerks.
Finally, Hal saw Mrs. Fraser into her car; and then, instead of returning into the house, disappeared into the shrubbery.
[VI]
HE sat uncomfortably on a damp, tree-stump and stared at William’s earthworks. Was it possible that he had kept back a one-pound treasury bank note? Kept back—taken—stolen.... Rats! Of course he hadn’t stolen it. Tramps stole, and burglars, and—sometimes—servants. Bank-clerks, too, occasionally. “But—but not us.”
If he hadn’t—taken—it, though ... and here it was, folded in his coat’s inner pocket—why not have produced it when Aunt Lavvy had turned round from the telephone, and said: “Hal——”? Why not have said: “Here you are, Aunt Lavvy. The chap made a mistake, and handed me out six of ’em.”
It was incredible that he should have lied then. That was the real lapse. He could remember the mood in which he had—the horror deepened ... the mood in which he had stolen the note, although it had receded to unfamiliarity.
Hal was magnificently independent of weather, and the colour of the sky and the haze of sunshine over bright September boughs, and such-like absurdities from which frailer natures weave their moods. So that he could, simply from his own fitness of body, feel with a sudden thrill of well-being that the world was an altogether costly place, as he strode along the prim tree-planted roads of Buckler’s Cross on that drizzling morning of dead summer. He had often enjoyed life before, but now, for the first time, he found conscious pleasure in hauling his blessings into parade....
Maisie—he had paused a moment at her gate, and watched her in the front garden, snipping the faded dahlias from their stems—a click of the scissors, and the big clumsy bloom toppled heavily sideways. The rain filmed her long ragged black hair, and glittered in tiny points as she bent and rose again. What a small head she had. If someone were to snick it off, how lightly it would fall among the roots of the Michaelmas daisies. Her old jersey was the same bluish tint as her eyes——
He did not stop to hail her cheerily, but walked quickly on. And he thought of her quite separately from Dorothy—which was a distinct advance.
Footer next term. And the following October, Oxford. Oh—costly! Maisie—in a punt ... having tea in his rooms ... old Nina would fix it. He’d begin to collect stuff for his rooms at Christmas.
Perhaps the pond would freeze this Christmas. If so—skating! Maisie, in a little fur cap.... He was rather a nut on the ice. A frosty Christmas would be no end of a rag.
And, beyond all these superficial reasons for elation, in defiance of the ugly road and the moist trickle down his neck, Hal, rather amused at himself for the imagery, wished he could pick up a small sharp knife and cut cleanly out from the shining curve of his future, the one black speck that spoiled it. That beastly business of his subscription to the Memorial to the Winborough Boys fallen in the Great War!
It would crop up quite early in the term, he knew. And his father had promised him an extra five bob for it. Five bob! Well ... but he was Head of the School. And, in a matter like this, to be mean! If it were anything less solemn and patriotic and all that. He had known, personally, Roger Groves, and Latimer Major, and Brown, and Corbett—all among the Fallen. His would be the first name on the list. He ought to set an example of two quid, at least. The Guv’nor didn’t see it. He disapproved on principle of memorials when they took the shape of gym-halls and playgrounds and free libraries ... said that the Fallen would prefer the funds to be spent on providing employment for their discharged comrades. Hal allowed some sense in this, but he doubted if old Latimer were of the kind to worry much either way, wherever he was. But he would have understood, fast enough, that Hal, the first of Winborough’s athletic divinities, setting down his subscription prominently at the top of the list, could not put forth his Guv’nor’s principles as an excuse for shabbiness.
Five shillings. Add fifteen from his own pocket-money—and more than this would absolutely cripple him for the term—and still he was a pound short of what he wanted to give. Hal went into the Bank with Aunt Lavvy’s cheque.
Banks are impersonal things; the money that pours out from them is unlimited. It does not belong to the clerk, nor even to the branch manager. So that, when he came out, and discovered, carelessly counting the notes before thrusting them into his pocket, that he had one pound more in hand then he had to pass over to Aunt Lavvy, he could not, in his swift exultation, visualize any destination for the note except the Memorial.
His imagination, already more exuberantly goat-footed than normal, that morning, had had no time to subside, before this overwhelmingly magical response came to his wish that the blemish might be neatly removed from the radiance of all his tomorrows. His flood of relieved gratitude was as simple as that of some boy of ancient Greece who recognizes, by a gift dropped to his feet from Olympus, that he is indeed beloved of the gods.
Could God really work miracles in this altogether decent fashion, prompt, without excess, and without fuss? Hal didn’t call it God—he felt, dimly, that this would be “swank.” But acknowledging that “luck” had with intention singled him out, he called it luck with a shy reverence that confessed a salute to the Deity behind it.
The lapse had occurred then. An uncanny moral lapse—but not a guilty one. The guilt was later, when, his spirit snubbed by the fact that the pound had not materialized out of nowhere to make him happy, he had not once rapped out: “Here you are, Aunt Lavvy, the chap made a mistake, and handed me out six of ’em....”
But he had funked it, seeing then that he might have to explain his luck-loves-me mood in front of Nina and Mrs. Fraser and his mother and Ursula and Miss Roberts—— Anyhow, what were they all doing crowded up in the drawing-room?
“But when did you notice it, Hal?”
“Why didn’t you take it back at once?”
He could have pretended only to discover it in his pocket then ... it had got loose from the little bundle—“Good Lord, yes, here it is!”
But that would have been a lie, too, and secret acknowledgment that he had no claim on the note from the beginning. Before he could decide what to do, he had said: “Sorry, Aunt Lavvy——” But now he repudiated the absurd childish mood which had led to his acceptance of bounty from nowhere. For a few moments, he had been more than self-conscious schoolboy; for a few moments, he had held happiness like a flask of wine, shot gold with slanting sunbeams, high above his head. For a few moments he had held it there, shouting....
These emotional chaps—all over the place—came to grief sometime.... “I warn you, Bunny. Besides, it isn’t done.”
There was a stagnant smell round the “earthworks”—rotting leaves, and moisture, and a flat grey sky....
He was, without excuse, without fine shades of “but” and “because,” a thief and a liar—and deadly miserably ashamed of himself.
Hal dragged himself to his feet, and wondered drearily to whom his first abasement and confession should be. If it were Winborough, of course he would go straight to the Head. School was so—uncomplicated, compared with home.
Nina was his natural confidante, as far as he had ever needed one, which was only a very little way. But Nina—thought such a lot of him. You need not necessarily choose your highest pedestal to fall from. Bunny? Before he could decide, Bunny came sauntering dejectedly down to the earthworks.
“Hello!”
“Hello!”
“Just finished doing old Nina’s bed. She’s frightfully fed-up with me,” Bunny explained inconsequently. “It wasn’t the frog she minded, it was that Fraser person.” Then, with a sudden wrench: “I’m in a deuce of a mess!”
And Hal found himself listening, with his habitual air of half-humorous authority, to Bunny boasting of his caricature and tuck-shop scrapes. Bunny always laughed and boasted when he was a little bit afraid. His eyes pleaded absolution from his senior’s jawing.
“You’ll just have to be a martyr to art and stand the racket from old Bateman. I can’t help you there. But how much d’you owe at Swayne’s? fifteen bob? Right, I’ll drop him a line presently, and say I’ll pay it on the first day of the term for certain. It needn’t get round to the Guv’nor—he’s sick with you as it is for not getting a move.” Fifteen shillings he could spare Bunny from his next term’s pocket-money, and the pound would have to go back to the Bank from whence it came. And the mean five shillings left from the two pounds of that morning’s glorious reckoning, would head the subscription list for the Memorial. He would bend his head to the discipline when it came. But meanwhile, Hal’s tormented self-respect had craved just once more to be the one to help.
“Can you really manage it, old thing?” Bunny dug one heel into the ground, the off-hand gratitude in his voice an imperfect crust to conceal the burning lava of worship within. Hal did not pour out the tale of his crime to his young brother—he could not contemplate reversing their present satisfactory attitude of give-and-take. Besides, Bunny’s almost certainly flippant treatment of the whole matter, sunnily hailing Hal on level ground, would jar badly. With a curt nod, Hal dismissed him, unburdened now, whooping the whole way up the garden.
Not Nina, and not Bunny, then. And Grace was too inconveniently one with Stanley to be considered. Ursula he still lumped together in his mind with Miss Roberts and Lottie as “schoolroom gang.” The Guv’nor would be so—so fatherish, when told: “That any son of mine——” was inevitable. And Mother——
The shock broke over him again. That he was a thief. And that they would all have to know it, all. So what was the sense of rejecting first one and then the other, as a first hearer? He might as well go straight to William! Unless Aunt Lavvy——
If Aunt Lavvy were privately confided in, her instinct would undoubtedly be to shield Hal. He could not help knowing that he was a favourite with her; that, almost as though she were a young girl again, she loved his bigness, his slow chaff of her pretty rosy little weaknesses, his arm round her shoulders. Given the missing treasury note, she could quite easily arrange the matter with the Bank so that no other member of the family need hear anything about—an hour’s theft.
“After all, I found it in my bag with the other notes—two of them had stuck together. Indeed, I do hope you will forgive me for not having looked more carefully when you telephoned....” She might explain it thus. Anyhow, Aunt Lavvy, bless her, could be trusted to manipulate the affair with her most neat-witted diplomacy. Only—would he, by this, be shirking punishment?
But though he was dazed and shocked at his own matter-of-course acceptance of the note, he still did not own to guilt at that point.... It was something that happened to him, not something that he had done. He had not yet begun to figure the special terror that this involved. But, if not guilty, need he seek punishment?
And for the silence which was deliberate and cowardly in the drawing-room just now? “Won’t it do,” Hal wondered, for the first time in his existence of straightforward rights and wrongs, trying to hold the scales on his own responsibility, doing question and answer both, worrying over cause and effect, balancing and fine adjustment, “Won’t it do if I only leave myself that five bob to plank down first on the subscription list?”
By promising Bunny that fifteen shillings, he had doled himself out quite a fair prospect of suffering. Five shillings from the magnificent Head of the School, and next on the list, thirty shillings, say, from that dud Parkinson. The ignominy would have to be endured with shut teeth. “Won’t that be enough?” Hal pleaded with himself, as he thought, enthroned as judge.... Never again, with Whoever—Whatever—had tripped him up with vision and swift miracle, that morning; had cheated him for ever of self-confidence, and given him bewilderment in its stead.... Ought a fellow’s punishment—beastly word—be finely tempered to what he had not felt wrong when he did it? or ought it to be for how wrong it looked after it was done?
Hal, in his first conflict with ethics, was about as happy as a bear in boxing-gloves, putting together the minute works of a watch. His only mitigation was that he did not recognize “the whole foul mess” as ethics, or he would have regarded his entanglement with any process so priggish, as his final humiliation.
“I’ve had enough of this——” and with a sigh of relief at a vigorous decision, he strode determinedly in search of Aunt Lavvy.
But the luncheon-gong was being sounded as he came up the few perforated iron steps that led back from the garden into the drawing-room. And Hal had to submit to another hour with a one-pound treasury note that did not belong to him hidden in his pocket, accumulating reproach with every wasted moment. By now he was violently anxious to deliver it up to Aunt Lavvy, albeit not quite sure what, even then, and after a full confession, might yet remain behind with him.
Directly after lunch, he followed her to her room:
“May I come in, Aunt Lavvy?”
“Of course, my dear boy.” She sank into one of her round chintz armchairs with their dumpy old-rose and silver-grey cushions, and smiled up at Hal, standing with his hands in his pockets—no, with one hand in one pocket—in front of the empty fireplace.
“Not too loud, if this is to be secrets,” she whispered, with a nod at the door leading to Ursula’s room, “well, and so vacation is nearly over. Don’t correct me, Hal. I’m practising for next year when you’re at the ’Varsity. It would be too, too terrible if I spoke of ‘holidays’ then, wouldn’t it?” Then, as his silence became formidable—“Is it really something serious, Hal dear? I ought to have seen you were not in the mood for nonsense. Tell me.”
He brought out a crumpled oblong of thin paper, blurred with a dull brown and green design.
“Here you are,” he said gruffly.
But the situation was fifty times stiffer than he had imagined it. He wished that Aunt Lavvy would hurry up and begin to fold it into pliable shape.
“Where did you find it?” she asked, startled.
“I didn’t find it. I had it.”
Bunny, practised in confession, would have added appeal, whether of eyes or tongue. But Hal was waiting for Aunt Lavvy’s help before he could add anything to the bald statement, though she would understand, even back to the irrelevance of Maisie and the Michaelmas daisies ... perhaps she would of her own accord propose to “put things right” with the Bank. He had come to her eager for this gift of “put-things-right,” and venerating her for possessing it.... His throat was gritty, and his knees felt weak.
“Well!” exclaimed Aunt Lavvy at last in an indignant whisper. And again, after several seconds had loudly ticked away—“Well”....
Hal turned his back and rushed out of the room.
What had happened to the world of usual things that, on the same morning as he had betrayed his own code, Aunt Lavvy had failed him?
He stumbled into the den which he shared with Bunny, and where William slept. Bunny was there, sprawling across William’s bed, reading “Penrod.”
“Thought you’d gone out. I say, what about a spin to Badgery Wood this afternoon?” He looked up for an answer, and saw Hal’s face. “I say ... what—what is it?”
Half an hour ago, Hal had been nervous that Bunny, hearing the tale, would be exasperatingly flippant about it. But now, after that terrifying glimpse of Aunt Lavvy metamorphosed by anger, he rather wanted to hear his brother’s light-hearted: “What’s the odds?”
When he had finished, Bunny sat staring at the floor, his face getting redder and redder.
“Well?” impatiently. And, echoing Aunt Lavvy: “Well?” Hal rapped out again.
Bunny was crying.
And then Hal gave in to the fact that one swerve from the usual had carried him into a wholly unfamiliar world of behaviour, and that he could not find any way back again from strangeness.
“When you’ve quite done,” he growled; adding, “You’d have been surprised if I’d burst out blubbing when you let on to me about your precious scrapes, out in the garden just now.”
“This isn’t a scrape,” gulped out Bunny.
Hal stopped being a mere schoolboy.
“You mean ... it’s worse? It’s the sort of thing one gets put in gaol for?”
Bunny nodded, and dabbed his eyes, too shocked and miserable even to care that he had been seen crying.
Hal sat down on the edge of the bed, hands interlocked across his knees, his broad shoulders bent forward.
“That’s just it”—after a long pause. “It puts the wind up me a bit to realize that if I could freeze on to that quid—I could do almost anything. I could do anything,” he repeated, cutting out the “almost.” “And the fact that I wasn’t really that sort of chap—that of course I was always frightfully down on lying and cheating and—and thieving—the sort of things a decent fellow doesn’t do—it wouldn’t stop me. Like it hasn’t stopped me this time. It’s awful not to be certain that one has any sort of a self that one can rely on.”
“Murder?” whispered Bunny, his imagination, always on a loose rein, beginning now to gallop. “Could it just as easily have been murder, you mean? And is that how criminals do it—in the same way as you....”
“I suppose so.”
“Then—nobody’s safe—not even ordinary people?” They both felt horror very close to them ... stirring their hair with its breath.
“And—feeling so oddly bucked just before——”
“They might have meant that. Like premonition upside down.” Bunny had a swift glimpse into the neat ironies in life’s working-out. But when Hal gruffly bade him explain himself, he pretended, out of an odd deference to his senior’s less flexible speech and fancy, that he could not. This was not the time to swank any superiority over Hal. You only did that in the days when he was indubitably the Magnificent, and in self-defence you paraded any small advantages that were yours. The significance of any need for chivalry smote Bunny with a fresh pang ... he fought back a great lump which swelled up in his throat. “Need any one know?”
“The money’s got to go back somehow, hasn’t it?”
“Aunt Lavvy——”
“I’ve just come from Aunt Lavvy.”
“Oh—good!” Bunny sighed, faintly relieved.
“No.” Hal contradicted him with a touch of grimness. “Not a bit of good. She’s as hard as nails.”
“Aunt Lavvy?”
And Hal suddenly made a brilliant, if embittering, discovery: “Scratch an Aunt Lavvy,” he flung into the face of Bunny’s incredulity, “and you find a paying guest underneath.”
[VII]
GRACE WATSON knocked at the door of the attic Miss Roberts shared with Lottie:
“Am I disturbing you? I looked into the nursery on my way up, and saw Lottie there with my babies, so I thought you might be alone.”
The governess beamed a welcome with her teeth, and hustled Grace out of two consecutive chairs into a third which was dubitably more comfortable.
“And I thought it would be a great help to talk over this terrible affair quietly with some one sensible,” continued Grace, who believed too firmly in the wonders achieved by quiet “talking-over.”
“Oh dear!” Miss Roberts began, tentatively, to be shocked and grieved.
And then, in sedate sentences, for even in the midst of spiritual turmoil Grace’s language never became correspondingly wild and tattered, she told the story she had just heard from her mother.
“Mother’s in the drawing-room crying, and wondering how she can bear to break it to Father this evening. He’s been so proud of Hal, you know—his eldest son.”
“He may be shielding somebody,” exclaimed Miss Roberts, brightly. “Bunny, for instance!” She had a thrilling mental picture of Hal, a head taller than Bunny, with one arm flung round his young brother’s shrinking—and unmistakably guilty—shoulders, while in those fearless steady tones of one whose own conscience knew no burdens, he confessed to a crime which was not his. Such luscious fancies sprang too easily into Miss Roberts’ mind, showing that a corner of it was in an unaired condition, for all its surface chattiness. But she was only paid thirty pounds a year, and for Lottie’s sake she slept with the attic window open all the year round, and went for a brisk walk every day in all weathers. The Maxwells, for their thirty pounds a year, could hardly expect further hygienic sacrifice from her. Then, leaving the Bunny idea in a state of incompletion: “Surely dear Miss Lavinia will settle the whole affair happily for you? That is to say, as far as it can ever be happy, knowing that Hal——” She shook her head mournfully; but the mournfulness was not very deeply rooted. Truth to tell, Miss Roberts drew more pleasure from the present excitement of the idol overthrown, than she had ever drawn from the negative rejoicing in Hal’s unquestioned integrity.
“I don’t know,” Grace replied slowly. “I haven’t seen Aunt Lavvy, but Mother says—Mother was overwrought, I suppose. She imagines that Aunt Lavvy has suddenly turned into a sort of fiend who will talk of nothing but her own good name with the Bank, which must be restored at all costs. But naturally Aunt Lavvy was a little bit annoyed, and said one or two things she didn’t mean. Mother ought to have made allowances. That’s what I’m so afraid of, Miss Roberts: that everybody in this house will be so stupefied that Hal of all boys could have committed a common theft——” Miss Roberts made shocked noises. “You can’t talk things over with any good results unless you call them by their proper names,” said Grace, firmly settling the neat little bow at her throat.
“How clear-headed you are!” admiringly, from Miss Roberts.
“Oh, I’m not. At least, if I am, it’s only what I’ve picked up from Stanley. And that reminds me, Mother actually doesn’t want me to tell Stanley when he comes home: ‘Oh do for heaven’s sake keep it in the family!’ she cried. I was rather hurt, as this is the first time that she’s mentioned Stanley as though he weren’t quite one of the family.” She paused a moment, and then clinched her argument: “Because, after all, he lives in the house.”
Miss Roberts tried to convey by her expression that she entirely agreed with Grace, but that at the same time she did not consider the fact that she herself lived in the house lifted her to an equal level of privilege and family-membership as Mr. Stanley Watson.
“It would be a terrible thing for Hal if it got known as far as Winborough or the ’Varsity, that he had taken money that didn’t belong to him. It might ruin his career. But if we all keep our heads, and don’t get hysterical—I met Bunny racing down the stairs just now with his eyes as red as fire, so I suppose he knows.”
“I confess I am surprised that Bunny should have taken it that way. He is a dear boy, but not very serious, as a rule.”
“Hal was his idol.” Grace spoke gently. “Schoolboys don’t say much about their feelings, you know, but I suspect this has gone rather deep with Bunny.”
“How you see everybody’s point of view,” murmured Miss Roberts, dripping appreciation.
“Stanley always says the one thing he can’t bear is intolerance. He can lead one right through history from the early pre-Egyptian period, and show step by step how bigotry alone has dragged great men and great nations to their ruin.”
“How interesting to hear him!” cried Miss Roberts, who, lest she be misunderstood, was not in the least a humbug nor a sycophant, but merely suffered from a nature devoid of the critical faculty.
Grace got up to go. “I think you had better tell Lottie, Miss Roberts, and Ursula, too. They are bound to notice something wrong, and Ursula, especially, has a habit lately of bursting out with such odd things.”
“She’s at the awkward age, of course”; but Miss Roberts had been having trouble with Ursula for the past year or two, and did not display quite as much gums and enthusiasm as she usually did in defence of her pupils.
“Miss Roberts, aren’t we going for a walk this afternoon?” Lottie trotted in, with the moral shine about her of having that morning helped Bunny remake Nina’s bed, and that afternoon kept Honor Rose amused for three-quarters of an hour while Nurse dressed.
“Yes, dear, now. And tell Ursula I wish her to come too. I’ve something to tell you both.”
“Something nice?”
“I’m afraid not—but,” brightly, “things can’t always be nice, can they?”
Grace, with a low: “Thank you so much. You’ve been such a help,” left the room.
The tidings of “something wrong” were beginning to creep about the house, to make themselves felt uneasily ... but Nina was still in ignorance, for the straightforward reason that Hal himself and every one else dreaded too much the ordeal of breaking it to her. In the end it was William who voluntarily undertook the task.
“I’ve just been with Lottie,” he informed Nina, in the passage outside the door of her room. “And she’s just been with Miss Roberts.”
“Get on with it,” laughed Nina, knowing that no dynamo on earth would urge William beyond his own stolid conception of speed.
“Grace told Miss Roberts, and Mother told Grace. Aunt Lavvy told Mother.”
“Well, what?” Nina was careless of the abyss on whose brink she stood.
“That Hal stole the pound belonging to the Bank.”
“You’d better be careful what you’re saying, young man.” Nina laughed scornfully. “Hal, indeed!”
William looked at her with round eyes that held something of pity. “You’d rather it was Bunny. But it wasn’t. It was Hal. I’m sorry he did it, but I’d rather for once it was him.” He paused. Then, with a disgusting lapse from chivalry: “You never thought much of Bunny next to Hal, did you?”
Nina stood for a moment rigid, as though the whole of her life were in suspension. Then, angrily brushing William aside, she marched straight into the boys’ den. To Hal’s moody vision, she seemed strangely out of proportion in her big hard-ringing incredulity. He clenched his hands, dreading the next few minutes; wishing that a powerful wave could lift him bodily and set him down again on the leeward side of them.
“William has the cheek to say——”
“Yes. It’s true.”
“You didn’t?”
He was silent.
“Hal, not ... you?”
“Why shouldn’t it be me?”
“Stealing?” Her mouth was drawn in pain as though she were sucking at some bitter fruit.
He nodded. No hope of explaining with any success to Nina, as to Bunny, the slippery differences which separated his act from stealing. He had only just learnt himself that such differences existed; and Nina certainly would not and could not admit them, except as an attempt at cowardly shirking of consequences.
He had hardly glanced at consequences, yet.
“I wish I was dead,” Nina broke out suddenly.
“Don’t be a damned idiot.”
“It’s as ghastly for me as for you. Can’t you see that? I’ve always backed you up.”
No, there were no surprises in conduct from Nina, as there had been from himself, from Aunt Lavvy and from Bunny. Every one of the raging contemptuous accusations which stammering she hurled at him, had already sounded across his mind during the past hour. Nina, like all those cool clear people who hold that it is bad form to show or even to feel emotion, was betrayed by a genuine blow into melodrama.
“I’ve always backed you up. If you had got into any decent scrape.... But—Good Lord!—the commonest board-school cad would have more sense of honour.... Men sometimes steal when they’re hungry—starving—but you—— What do you suppose they’ll say at Winborough? A girl from our school was expelled once for pinching half-a-crown that didn’t belong to her—serve her right—but she was a snivelling little rat, and her people were no class. I suppose you’d cheat at games now. Oh, I—I don’t want ever to see anybody again ... they’ll be laughing at me even if they don’t say it straight out. I’ve swanked about you, and you’ve let me down.”
It was all in that last phrase.
“I never asked you to swank about me,” said Hal slowly. He was standing with his back to her, looking out of the window, and bidding good-bye to a Nina deferential in spirit, though offering, for appearance’s sake, a casual surface to his lordly good humour. A Nina persistently engaged in his service, preoccupied with his interests, obstinately compelling family and outsiders to acknowledge his supremacy. Hal sighed, relinquishing his glorious past.
“I wish to God you’d shut up and go away.”
With her hand on the door, Nina turned: “How was it found out?”
“Found out?” Hal was glad of a cue to be angry in his turn. “What the devil do you mean—found out? I told Aunt Lavvy directly——”
“Directly she asked you? It was at the ’phone, and you lied about it. I was there and heard you. You pretended to look in your pockets.”
Hal shrugged his shoulders. “All the same I told Aunt Lavvy myself. Directly after lunch.” But “directly I came to my senses ...” was what he had been going to say before.
“I suppose she’ll try and shield you. I wouldn’t in her place.”
“You would. But she won’t. She’s livid.”
“Aunt Lavvy!” A short scornful laugh from Nina. Aunt Lavvy, with all her gentle wisdom, her sweet eyes, her pretty dainty habits, her silvery sense of humour, her tolerance, her tact, and the secret niche of favouritism which Hal and Nina jointly occupied in her heart—livid indeed!
She would be deeply sorry, yes! Nothing more damaging than that.
“Better go and find out for yourself.”
“I will, then.”
But Aunt Lavvy was down in the drawing-room, having tea.
Tea, as the first public re-union since lunch, was also the tangible betrayal of moral disorganization at the Laburnums. Aunt Lavvy, Miss Roberts, Ursula and Lottie were present. Mrs. Maxwell and Grace had been invited to tea with Mrs. Fennimore, the banker’s wife; and, after a hurried talk-over with Miss Roberts, Grace had decided it the wiser policy and the truest service to her country—i. e., the family—to go as though nothing had happened, and make excuses for Mrs. Maxwell, whose blotched and tear-swollen condition still kept her to her room. “You see, Miss Roberts, nobody outside the house knows anything yet, and we mustn’t let them begin to suspect....”
Hal, aware that by some pressure of invisible law he would have to appear at dinner, renounced his tea, and, like his mother, shut himself up in his room. He shut himself up there too long, so that the prospect of ever leaving it and facing publicity swelled to abnormal difficulty.
Bunny forlornly marched away for a solitary walk; and William, with the precaution of a large bun annexed from the tea-table, had followed him. He did not catch up with Bunny, but was satisfied to march unobserved about a hundred yards behind him. He saw him fling himself face downwards in a field; sat down and waited ... and finally arrived home about eight minutes in Bunny’s rear.
Nina, bursting open the door in her search for Aunt Lavvy, had thrown a look of disgust at the “schoolroom mess” present, and rushed out again.
Lottie asked if she might carry up a cup of tea and some cake to poor Hal. Aunt Lavvy’s face became smooth and uninterested. But Miss Roberts, to Ursula’s horror, gave assent: “Do, dear, that will be very nice of you.”
“You’re not to, Lottie,” Ursula cried passionately.
“Really, Ursula——”
“She’s only curious. Let her take Mother a cup if she wants a canteen job.”
Aunt Lavvy said, with the faint lisp in her voice a little more assertive than usual: “Do you know, Lottie darling, I’d have given you the job of bringing my tea upstairs if I’d only had a little sitting-room of my own. Food in one’s bedroom is not very tempting, is it? But just today——”
She sighed. Then smiled bravely, with the corners of her mouth—not with all of it—when Miss Roberts sympathetically asked whether she had a headache, and replied: “No, I mustn’t indulge myself by pretending I have. The headache pose is fatally tempting to old ladies. You’ll know one day, Miss Roberts.”
“That was meant for Mother,” reflected Ursula; “and sending Miss Roberts down for stronger tea—she’s never done it before—was to impress Gums and the servants that she has a right to it because she pays.” Ursula was making the same discovery as erstwhile Hal had made. “‘Just today’ was a stinger for Hal. And ‘the little sitting-room of her own’ she aimed at——”
Ursula, subconsciously, winced with fear.
“Are you going to split on Hal to the Bank?” she asked, wondering what made her voice sound so noisy.
Again that curious glassy obstinacy passed over Aunt Lavvy’s usually mobile prettiness. She replied nothing, but with careful selection she put aside the slices of the Swiss Roll and cut herself a piece from the uncut portion.
“Ursula, really, this is going too far. This is disloyal. When your Aunt Lavvy is doing her best to behave as though nothing had happened——”
“Why should she? Something has happened. But it’ll be like that all the time, I know. Mother will come down to dinner trying to look as though she hadn’t cried, and we’ll all look as though of course she hadn’t. And Father will simply shut up and not play. He’s never supposed to join in when the rest of us pretend. And Grace will talk tactfully to Stanley about the babies, and how town is looking, and her tea-party, and the leaves falling. And Gums will ‘draw out’ Lottie, and we’ll all of us not stare at Hal, and feel beastlier than we’ve ever felt before, and goodness knows what Nina and Bunny will do, because I haven’t seen them since it happened. But it might be a bit better—not much, but a bit—if we could all be as glum as we liked.”
“Would you have said that during the war, Ursula? Why, I think it was splendid how every one hid their own feelings and were cheerful.” Miss Roberts, having been officially given charge of the situation by Grace—who had not got it to give—and asked to take care of it until a quarter to six, was feeling the hours unwontedly taut and thrilling.
“This isn’t the war. It’s us.”
[VIII]
MR. MAXWELL and Stanley returned together from the golf-house about six o’clock, and were at once anxiously taken possession of by their wives. Presently, Hal received the summons he expected to the study.
It was not to be the old thunderous “You young rascal” business, such as Bunny always encountered, but a Serious Talk; the kind that began: “Don’t be afraid of me, my boy....”
Hal was afraid. A wrathful parent was a thing that might happen to any fellow. There was, however, a strange solemnity, proving his crime in an unspeakable category, about a father who suddenly treated him as an equal. “I want your confidence, my boy. After all, I’m your father. What was your motive?”
If Hal had kept the money to extricate himself from some tangible male scrape—such as a bar-maid—he might have been able to respond to the spirit of gruff intimacy which the crisis had brought about. It was obviously impossible to pour out in his own defence a lot of vaporous drivel about Michaelmas daisies and the goodness of God. He was miserably certain in his own mind that his father was going to drag in religion pretty soon—real religion, the Sunday kind.
And sure enough, Tom Maxwell, really staggered in his pride and his safe trust in permanence, by Hal’s lapse from everyday honesty, was unable to find any other contribution to the scene than the Eighth Commandment.
“Yes, I know,” muttered Hal.
For the last six years they had talked only of sport: cricket, football, boxing, rowing, and, occasionally, to humour the older man, golf. On this basis, they had presented an appearance of chumminess which, the world declared, was so typical of the modern unformidable relations between two generations.
Now—“Can I go, father?”
“Suppose it gets talked about round here? Suppose your Aunt Lavvy refuses.... Your future career.... A good name travels by road, a bad name by express.” Mr. Maxwell was too dispirited even to disavow his originality by a pretence of inverted commas.
Hal’s dread of public humiliation did not stretch beyond Winborough. That was bad enough, and too bad to face. Home was only an episode that occurred three times a year.
Mr. Maxwell went slowly back to his wife, and closed the bedroom door behind him. “He won’t confess. I did my best.”
“She’ll tell.” Florrie Maxwell, with shaking fingers, tried to fasten up her plentiful black hair.
“Nonsense. What nonsense you talk, Florrie. One would think Lavvy was a vindictive woman. She’s as fond of the children as we are. After all these years! Besides, the thing that matters is not whether everybody gets to know, but that Hal should have——”
“Hal’s Hal to me, whatever he did. I want to save him being punished, that’s all. But Lavinia is vindictive. You’ve never seen it. You’ve only seen that she’s got a best-china-tea-set face and a pretty refined voice, and knows just the right thing to say.... D’you think I’ve liked it, having her always in the house to put matters right with you or Nina or Bunny, after I’ve maybe been too quick or clumsy and blundered somewhere? I’d have rather they stayed wrong, thank you. A paying guest’s one thing, for you know exactly what you’re getting from her; and how much ‘Aunt Lavvy’ here, and ‘Aunt Lavvy’ there, you can allow her for the money. But what she’s been doing in the house for the last fifteen years ... unless it was for you to keep on comparing her with me, as I’ve seen you doing over and over again. And the children, too. But they can be excused, because she’s clever, and she worked for it, and the Lord gave her silver hair and a sweet voice, and it’s worth a bit of play-acting to be the one in the house that everybody comes to first. But you, Tom, to have been taken in too—she’s selfish and hard, for all her soft ways, and as obstinate.... Well, you’ll see in the next few days, and I’m glad of it, because for you to have thought she was the sort of lady you’d rather have married—and I’ve seen you thinking it over and over again. Oh, I may talk too loud and laugh too heartily, and perhaps I’m not dainty enough, and my dresses don’t look like Lavvy’s.... Nina says they always gape where they do up.... For all that, when it comes to a wife, you’re better off with me than with her, or else you ought to have known beforehand which was the kind you admire, and not have special manners for her and the ordinary kind will do for me....”
And having several times worked up to a climax without achieving it, Mrs. Maxwell went on with the suspended work of fastening that thick untidy tail of black hair. She was rather tremulous, but hopeful, now that she had at last relieved herself, that Tom would give the cue for a sentimental reconciliation. As a matter of fact, the poor woman believed that she had expressed her secret bitterness far more poignantly than was actually the case. Her personality was not fitted to translate pathos ... with those dropping hairpins, and the bodice of her purple stuff dress dangling limply downwards from the waist, where she had just now slipped her arms out, to wash.
Her husband was angry. He fumbled for his justification. Florrie knew quite well why Miss Lavinia had become Aunt Lavvy, and why she had stayed on in the house after they could have afforded to manage without her. If the world accepted her welcome entrance in the character of delightful-old-Aunt, her sudden exit as a superfluous lodger would have upset the whole illusion. No need for Florrie to pretend that she wouldn’t have minded Buckler’s Cross knowing it had been a vulgar financial arrangement. And then, Florrie owned up barely half her own shortcomings as though these were all, which he felt vaguely was an injustice to his tolerance; not only had he suffered her loud voice and coarse laugh and her dresses that were always failures, and her lamentable lack of tact; but she had no delicate little reserves; and her fresh complexion had deepened to mauve with tiny scratching red lines where the colour was most violent; and she was too intimate with inferiors, hoping vainly thus to ingratiate herself ... and ... oh, thousands of minor irritations! If she owned she was one thing, she ought to own to the rest, in fairness to what he had to put up with.
Her dressing-table ... useless china ornaments and stands and trays pushed about anyhow, and her brush with the handle broken off years ago and never mended; she wielded it from the jagged stump. A lace collar that had not been put away; a bottle of medicine, half empty, dusty; pins and safety-pins and brooches; a photograph of her parents; and a twist of paper screwed into the support of the looking-glass so that it should not swing backwards....
He was conscious of a tired nausea at the sight of her dressing-table.... What did Lavvy’s look like? Ah, that was it? She did not see that Lavvy could still represent to him a woman mysterious and fragrant, coming down to dinner from behind closed doors. He remembered now having once said to Florrie in a burst of confidence after a successful “musical evening,” that they ought to be right-down proud of having Lavvy to live with them, because anybody could spot that she was better-class than themselves.
If Florrie had been offended then, why didn’t she say so? Hang it, he had included himself in the inferiority!
He was accumulating grievances, while he moved about the room, changing from his golfing tweeds into “something comfortable,” while Florrie waited, with turbulent heart, for the miracle of understanding to take place in him.
The children. They carried their confidences to Lavvy, and Florrie was jealous. Women were always jealous, and never logical. If, instead of being cattish, she had studied the reason why Grace and Nina and Hal and Ursula and Bunny and Lottie and William preferred Aunt Lavvy, except for the perfunctory “of course Mother comes first” ... Florrie was so brusque and boisterous with them—laughed at their bruises and snubbed their sorrows; furthering her ridiculously overdone theory of “not putting up with any nonsense.” Had Florrie been tenderer——
Then Ronald might have been alive still.
And Hal would probably not have disgraced them all by keeping money which did not belong to him.
Queer—how this stormy business with Hal had tossed up the forgotten jetsam of the years! How long was it since he had grieved for Ronald? The child was only three when he had died of the measles.... “Better let ’em all have it together, and get it over” ... that was Florrie. And Ronald had got it over—promptly.
But if Florrie had only taken a decent mother’s care of the little chap....
And Mr. Maxwell said so, quite suddenly, having reached this point in his reflections without giving his wife any clue as to how he got there. She had hoped he was all the while dreaming back to their courtship. Perhaps he might break out with: “By George, Flo, d’you remember that drive home from Richmond in the hansom, after the Wilkinsons’ ball?”
But ... Ronald? She stared, stupefied. And then she gulped: “You might as well say straight out I’m a murderess.”
“I didn’t say that, but it doesn’t do to be too slapdash with babies. Tender at the two ends, tough in the middle, is most persons’ lives!”
“I’ve brought up seven healthy ones for you. Or perhaps Lavvy brought them up?” Her uncontrollable grievance had possessed her again, and she linked it on to his, with: “I suppose—if Lavvy had been Ronald’s mother——”
“He might not have,” Tom Maxwell answered her. And left the room.
Downstairs in the hall, on the salver, a letter awaited him, just come by the seven o’clock post. And next to the letter stood Bunny:
“It’s for you, dad.”
“Ah—thank you, my boy!”
With eyes more than usually bright and dark, Bunny watched him read it. He had known from the postmark and uncertain handwriting, “Mr. Maxwell” instead of “T. Maxwell, Esq.,” that it was from the tuck-shop to which he owed fifteen bob. Hal’s note, written after lunch, and containing a postal order for that sum, was too late to save him from exposure. But Bunny was glad of it. His imagination had given birth to a scheme in bold colourings and with some surprising dramatic effects, directly he had spotted that letter on the salver.
“I thought I’d forbidden you to owe to the tradesmen round your school, Bunny.”
But it would have been “Bernard,” and a much sterner tone, if Hal’s crime had not dwindled a mere scrape to insignificance.
“Yes, I know, dad. I’m sorry. You’ve guessed now, of course, why Hal kept back that quid from the Bank?”
“You asked him——?” And the burden of depression lightened with Bunny’s answer:
“Yes, I was dead scared that old Swayne would write to you. He’d threatened to; so I owned up to Hal—and he sent off the fifteen bob today, and told me not to worry any more. It—was awfully decent of him, wasn’t it, dad?”
“Theft is never decent, my boy.”
“But it makes a difference,” Bunny urged, “that he grabbed the note to shield me from your wrath?”
“To shield me from your wrath” was overdoing it. And if Mr. Maxwell had remembered more about boys in their teens, he would have realized here that Bunny’s confession was too glib and well-produced to be natural. If Bunny had been relating a true state of affairs, his manner would have been either sullen or abashed, and his speech a stumbling incoherence.
“It makes a difference, yes. Go and tell Hal I want him.”
Hal listened disgustedly to Bunny’s account of the altered situation.
“You costly young fathead. What in the name of Mike made you spin him a yarn like that?”
“Just an idea,” Bunny explained airily.
“Idea your grandmother! Well, you can march straight down again, and tell him it’s all bunkum.” Hal hated theatricals. And no small part of his shame at the recent situation was the fact that it seemed to twitch everybody’s behaviour well away from the normal.
Bunny had known Hal well enough not to expect from him a quick flush of emotion, a grateful hand laid on his shoulder, a gruff: “It’s—awfully decent of you, Bunny, old man. I shan’t forget ...” which was the way a boy accepted another boy’s sacrifice in the noblest type of school fiction. But he had just hoped to persuade Hal to acquiesce in the inspired falsehood.
“The letters crossed. You did send off fifteen bob for me today. Wasn’t it the same quid?”
“No.”
“Well, but it works out to the same. When you hung on to Aunt Lavvy’s pound, wasn’t it because lending me that fifteen bob made you fifteen bob short?”
“No. Nothing to do with it. She’d had her ’phone call from the Bank, and asked me about that extra pound note, before you came out to me at the earthworks about your tuck-shop scrape.”
Bunny immediately collapsed into tears again.
“Oh—don’t!” Hal was unhappy and frightened beyond ordinary exasperation now. He simply could not understand what had occurred to Bunny, to weaken him like this. Nor could Bunny, except that his own scrapes always left him something to do, something to suffer, some poise to maintain, and an inner conviction that, in spite of all the surface fuss, they really did not fundamentally matter. Whereas Hal’s loss of moral prestige did matter. And it had, moreover, robbed Bunny of a prerogative. Bunny liked being the bad boy of the family. Hal’s usurpation of the position was unnatural; and when Bunny tried to adjust the look of things—only the look of them—Hal resisted and made brutal statements of fact. And Bunny felt helpless.... Especially as he had lulled his quivering and damaged faith in Hal into a belief that the money had really been annexed in his own interest, and that, therefore, the tuck-shop scrape was at the bottom of all the recent widdershins action of the world.
Still showing stained cheeks, and with listless feet, Bunny returned to his father, and repeated Hal’s dogged denial of his tale. And Mr. Maxwell spread about the house how Bunny had tried to shield his elder brother by pretending his elder brother was shielding him. And Bunny gained more halo, and was correspondingly more downcast and wretched, wearing it uneasily, as a woman in a resplendent new hat which does not suit her.
[IX]
DINNER forced the scattered agitations of the Laburnums round the same table. It was Hal’s reluctance, and not his sense of climax, which brought him last into the dining-room. The occasion was very much as Ursula had foretold, except that she had not reckoned on the swift personal misery which conquered her at the first sight of Hal, hitherto invulnerable, now exposed without his armour of unconscious lordliness.
Up till now, she had been aware of the blow which the family had sustained, without, as it were, becoming intimate with it. But now—“I can’t bear it,” she told herself, fingers interlocked and crushed together under the cloth, knees rigid, and heart pounding at a ridiculous pace....
Aunt Lavvy was saying to Stanley: “I’m afraid all your favourite books are too solemn for me, Stanley. I tried hard to read more than seven pages of ‘Archæological Splendours of the Dolomites,’ but it was doleful work!”
Did none of them see ... that unless he could be quickly protected, big splendid Hal was injured for life?
Surely Aunt Lavvy would not make him face the world—school and ’Varsity and Buckler’s Cross—as he now faced the family, apologetically, and with careful eyes that fixed themselves only on inanimate objects. Oh, surely she would not tell?
But Ursula knew she would.
Aunt Lavvy was wearing her prettiest lilac dress, with a strip of black velvet ribbon round the throat, and a cobwebby lace fichu held in its place by a pearl miniature brooch. But Mr. Maxwell was pointedly not admiring her, with a—“There you are?” to the false suspicions of his wife; and Florrie Maxwell was thinking of her sons Ronald and Hal, but mostly of Ronald; and Grace tried, in low tones and by dumb pressure of hand, to cheer her up. Bunny moped, and Nina displayed an attitude of savage silence that defied any reminder of her lifelong championship of a Hal without peer. Lottie, who only had milk and biscuits, passed things to Hal far more often than was necessary; and Stanley and Miss Roberts and Aunt Lavvy divided the conversation between them.
“And they’re the only three not of the family,” thought Ursula, to whom alone that night the foggy atmosphere was pellucid. “And they’d none of them do a thing to help Hal, either!”
She lifted her lids suddenly, and met Hal’s gaze full upon her. It was as though he pleaded: “Get me out of this ...” and then his eyes were downcast again, leaving her with the responsibility.
Stanley Watson and his father-in-law remained over their wine, after the others had left the table with a precipitation that suggested escape rather than withdrawal. Stanley immediately tackled the delicate subject from the point of view neither of Hal nor of Aunt Lavvy, but the bank-clerk:
“Just because our natural desire is to shield Hal, we ought to remember that all the time the poor chap who made the mistake in cashing the cheque will get into trouble unless the guilt is clearly acknowledged in other quarters. Don’t you agree with me, sir?”
“No,” said Mr. Maxwell resentfully, wondering what his eldest daughter had ever seen in this long-winded prig of a fellow.
Afterwards, he tackled Grace in a corner of the drawing-room.
“But I do so respect Stanley for being able to be just and impartial about it, when, of course, we’re all so over-heated, father dear.”
“I don’t save your husband rent and rates all the year round so that he should be just and impartial when I don’t want him to be!” and Mr. Maxwell strode wrathfully away to his study.
Grace, in a sudden shower of tears at the unkind reminder of an obligation, flew in search of her confidante, Miss Roberts. The nursery slid back into a schoolroom directly the babies were in bed; but finding there only Ursula, Bunny, Nina, Lottie, and William in pyjamas—five in hot conclave—she gave them a mere glimpse of her piteously working features, and ran on up to the attic bedroom.
“Now, what’s the matter with ‘our sensible one’?” Ursula mimicked her mother’s usual introduction of Grace to strangers.
“I expect Stanley’s taking Aunt Lavvy’s side, and father’s rowed her about it,” was the solution laid down by William’s drawl.
“And she tells Gums everything, and they say, ‘it’s been such a relief to talk matters over and get something settled,’” Lottie contributed towards enlightenment. She was a child who could usually be trusted by her elders not to tittle-tattle, but William need not suppose he was unrivalled in the intelligence department.
“Stanley—Aunt Lavvy—Gums——” Ursula sat sideways on the big rocking-horse, her small smooth head, with its lustreless gold hair brushed back to a long plait, tilted against the wallpaper, on which the legend of Miss Muffet and the spider was stamped in nauseous pale-blue-and-mustard repetition. “Hasn’t anything funny struck you about just those three being against us?”
“Against Hal, you mean?”
“Isn’t it the same thing?”
Silence duly acknowledged that it was. Nina might be horrified, and Bunny shocked, and William tactlessly quick to emphasize a Bunny no longer inferior, but even in their disillusion they were all untried in the endeavor not to let Hal’s humiliation escape beyond the radius of the Laburnums itself.
“Well, what about them?” asked Lottie.
“I know.” Bunny listlessly supplied the correct answer to Ursula’s flung question. “They’re just the only three in the house who aren’t family.”
Ursula nodded at him. “And it’s a mistake to have people living with you who don’t belong to the family,” she said. “In a crisis, they’re black-legs.” She was not sure of the exact meaning of black-legs, but it expressed her secret angry conviction of a citadel betrayed from within.
“I don’t believe Aunt Lavvy’s really not one of us, and I’m going to her now,” and Nina dashed off in a spasm of fierce impulsive energy.
“We should look awf’ly silly,” Lottie remarked after a pause, “if she came back and said that Aunt Lavvy said that of course she wouldn’t tell on Hal, and never meant to, and why hadn’t any of us asked her about it before.”
William chimed in: “After all, no one except Hal himself and Mother have heard Aunt Lavvy say a word about telling Mr. Fennimore when he comes to supper tomorrow.”
“Is that when she means to, William? Who told you?”
It proved on closer examination that William had not been told. It had just drifted into his consciousness that Sunday evening after supper was the time when Aunt Lavvy would elect to inform Buckler’s Cross and the world that Hal Maxwell was a thief. They had all wondered exactly when ... but uncertainty penned them in no longer. Somehow they felt William had answered the unspoken query correctly.
“I shouldn’t be s’prised if Bunny went to Oxford now,” continued William in thoughtful tones.
Immediately, he was smote upon the head. “Why the devil should I?” demanded the second son of the Maxwells.
“Well—” William was in no way perturbed, “now that everything’s changed——”
“Nothing’s changed!”
And then Nina returned to them with the expression of one who has dashed her head with violence into hard clear glass where she expected to find only air.
“Time you were back in bed again, Sweet William,” was all she said. “And you, too, Lottie.”
“I was just saying,” William repeated, with a subtle relevance which was almost incredible, considering his years, “that I shouldn’t be s’prised if Bunny went to Oxford now.”
[X]
THE Laburnums next morning resembled a fever-patient whose temperature has inexplicably rushed up in the night.
Everybody in the disturbed household had either lain awake, quietly working up the dimensions of their grievance, viewed from all four points of the compass; or else had awoken with a start to remember that their average life was now occupied by a bogey of horror, which, during the few hours’ oblivion, had swelled to a frightfulness out of all proportion.
Aunt Lavvy’s bogey was “What must the Bank think of Me.” She lay and chafed at the thought that she had not yet freed herself, in the Bank’s eyes, from all complicity with the theft of the missing pound note. A good many little spinsters, with an otherwise well-balanced set of values, have this curiously over-rated respect for all male-run institutions connected with capital, income, investments, dividends and cheques. It struck her, while the rain spattered at the window, and the wind creaked the boughs, that she had probably been thrust—through Hal—nearer than ever before to the outer edge of that safe circle which enrings the Law abiding. Her impeccable name had perished.... She was entangled in an Unpleasant Affair with the Bank.... Oh, Mr. Fennimore must be told when he came. She would explain the whole situation to him, down to the final details. It was urgent.... She was not afraid, but angry, very angry. Sheer impertinence of Nina to have urged her so impatiently to save Hal at all costs. Hal, indeed!—and unless she looked after her own good name, who would do it for her? The Maxwell children did not really love her, as they always pretended to do; they merely used her as an auntly convenience. And now they all turned upon her as the cause of trouble, even though it was obviously hers and not theirs to be resentful and vindictive.... But that was always the way, living with families not your own.... She ought to have taken a flat at the time, and not heeded the Maxwells’ financial difficulties. A charming, bijou flat—then she could have owned a parma and primrose boudoir as well as a bedroom——
Ursula, who had been dreaming, woke up with a thumping heart, and stretched out her hand to fumble for the matches.... She wanted sight of dear familiar things to lull this dreadful uneasiness that sleep and the darkness and memory of yesterday had smuggled into the room.
Familiar things.... The tiny grate, in which she had not yet lit her first triumphantly solitary fire; a framed coloured picture, on the wall, of pierrots and a vivid blue background and balloons that were balls of gold fire; very popular for four-and-sixpence in the picture-shops at the time; and very popular with the flappers of a period grown beyond “Sir Galahad” and Burne-Jones, and far indeed beyond “The Souls Awakening,” to a taste that was “quaint” and “whimsical” or sometimes (proudly) “barbaric.”
Ursula, in her barbaric phase, had hung over the mantlepiece a necklace of beads and shark’s teeth once given to her by Aunt Lavvy, who had known a missionary.
The pierrot picture and the beads and the fireplace represented to her the supreme gems of the room.
The rag-mat on the linoleum was faded, and the other mat, near the door, did not match it. The wallpaper merely covered the wall with a yellowish-brown effect, and the chintz on the one rickety basket-chair was dim; the cushion a crewel-work relic. The white lumpy spread had been carefully turned back over the iron bedposts. The blind was awry, and showed, beyond the window, a corner of wall and a cistern belonging to the house beside the Laburnums. Warm red stuff curtains which Ursula rather liked, and a light wood dressing-table and washstand which she would have hated had they not also been, like everything else in the room, emphatically hers,—these, with another curtain run on a rod across the bulging corner, behind which were her dresses, completed the actual furnishings. She had coaxed Hal to fix up a shelf for her books—about a couple of dozen, with none of the battered look to them which indicates an owner who is also a lover. Indeed, Ursula valued them more because their rich, cosy appearance covered part of the wall, than for their contents. She treasured far more intimately the lumps and sticks of coloured sealing-wax, gold and lilac and black and emerald-green, and the squat seal, stamped with a “U,” which, with her ink-bottle, lay on the small bamboo table. Also the blue pottery jug on the mantleshelf, holding its bright spread of autumn leaves.
How can one explain the magic of enjoyed loneliness which made each object in the room, the room itself, the shape of it, and the door that kept it apart from the rest of the house, and the view contained in the window, precious and significant to the little girl, sitting up in the bed?
A single bedroom can hold a thousand different dreams—a double bedroom only one reality. And so we imagine wide-eyed sixteen in an obviously appropriate setting of spotless white walls and rosebud cretonne; with a deep-cushion window-seat, and a view of the sea and moonlight, or a wild-cherry tree in bloom.
Ursula was very far from being a woman yet; very far from being a child. She could be sullen—tomboyish—sedate—pert, without knowing yet which of these personalities was the fundamental herself. Actually, the fundamental herself was Ursula sedate, shyly impudent, deliciously clear-cut, her brows drawn low and straight over demurely amused eyes; her voice uttering with conscious gentleness some startling decision or idea. “I am the cat that—without defiance and without fuss—walks by itself.” That was the real Ursula, which would outlast the romp, the flapper and the stormy adolescent, but which was now only rarely visible through her inevitably tormented years of trying to imitate everybody she admired; and trying to grab and make permanent those glints and hints of splendour which shook pure lights from the leaves on late afternoons in May, or glowed suddenly in the lit wet hedges of October when, towards evening, the sun battled its way from under a day of rain.
Life at the Laburnums was—well, not exactly dull; not a bit dull, in fact, but lacking in wayward glory. No action was ever performed that filled her with bursting gladness, amazement, pride, or a queer big sorrow. Every one was just rather ragged and incomplete, getting over the patchwork somehow, yes—but Ursula’s veneration was for completeness. She once thought Aunt Lavvy had achieved it in porcelain fashion. Hence her phase of Aunt-Lavvy-worship. She once thought Nina had achieved it, in her sporting well-groomed golden-boy fashion, hence her phase of Nina—worship. And now—oh, couldn’t they see what Hal had lost? What he had lost for ever if Aunt Lavvy kept to her threat of “telling”? He had been invulnerable, a broad-shouldered, careless, lordly creature. It was, she felt dimly, and then with sudden sureness, Hal’s one asset, and the one asset of ten thousand Hals, that they were the type of youth who were ever unconscious of what they did, because what they did was so naturally the right and decent thing.