Chapter III: Part I: Dulce Domum (3)

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.

And now he was maimed--spoilt. His family knew, and that was why he came into dinner with such a poignantly defenceless feeling about him. His family knew, but they might easily forget in a little time, if the rest of the world could be kept in ignorance. Ursula’s simply-splendid Hal was menaced, but not yet actually destroyed. And she was aware that since she alone recognized the menace, she was--somehow--responsible.

After some restless tossing, she fell asleep.

[XI]

THE LABURNUMS spent the next day in viciously proving how much too small it was for its occupants.

It was Sunday, and the men were at home. All the morning and afternoon it rained. Everybody had slept badly.

On the previous day, uneasy ancient feuds were swelling up in their pods of silence. Now they suddenly burst from tight enclosure, and were very definitely present and visible. Bitter words had been spoken; accusations flung from one member of the family to another. They were repeated, and rolled round, within limits of the walls of the house--loyalty would not suffer any outlet to beyond--and rolled back again to their owners. It seemed impossible that so much grievance and anger had lain stagnant until Hal’s lapse from the average had sanctioned everybody’s lapse. Had Mr. Maxwell really been brooding for years on Florrie’s criminal carelessness in letting Ronnie die? Had Florrie Maxwell from the very beginning hated and distrusted and been jealous of her friend, Lavinia? Was all Aunt Lavvy’s sweetness and affection for the family hitherto, a mere disguise for her malignant stubborn will, that cared not how she wrecked them all to keep her white reputation at the bank from the faintest suggestion of grubbiness? And Hal--had he never been the splendid Hal, the traditional eldest son, the athletic hero of his almost first-class public-school? And if Mr. Maxwell had resented having the Watsons in the house, and did not consider Stanley as one of the family, why had he waited until now to say so? And _whose_ territory was the schoolroom-nursery?... The politeness of Miss Roberts and Nurse had become an Awful Politeness; Nurse was an indignant ally on the side of Hal, her first male nursling; and Miss Roberts, flattered by Gracie’s confidences, and thoroughly sympathizing with the Watson point of view, followed their lead of strict impartiality and constant references to the probable state of mind of the bank-clerk, and the injury done to Miss Lavvy, who had always been so kind.

There was no room for all the currents and cross-currents and complications of feeling. They were jostled and bruised together; rebounded, reeling, from one contact, only to bump up against another. There was only just room at the Laburnums for everyday harmony to fit itself in, with no fraction of margin where emergency emotions might expand at ease ... they were learning that at last. The first big out-of-the-ordinary upset showed them how they were cramped. Perpetually banging doors jarred a dozen headaches, as those who sought an empty room or one special person in the room, irritably vented their disappointment at an unexpected encounter with the wrong occupant. Snatches of irrelevant quarrel drifted about. Crashing voices were overheard, and those who did not shout, whispered and rustled and cast meaning looks. Alliances were suddenly formed that were a surprise even to themselves, and the old unassailable partnerships of ten and twelve years had come unglued.

And that rough intruder, Passion, was the unseen tenant at the Laburnums.

Nobody cared to meet anybody face to face, and they were doing it sixty times an hour. Florrie Maxwell had no means of avoiding; Aunt Lavvy unless either of them stopped in their bedrooms; and the servants, mercilessly curious, were all over the bedrooms, clattering slop-pails, purposely slow at their jobs, until one o’clock. Besides, Aunt Lavvy had recently discovered that a gentlewoman’s gracious passage through a day should lead her inevitably from a fragrant toilet and a dainty meal, to a pretty boudoir or parlour, and not back again to the disturbed scene of the toilet. In other words, she sat in the drawing-room. So did Mrs. Maxwell, with intervals in the dining-room, when she could bear no longer the torture of Aunt Lavvy placidly behaving as though nothing had happened.

But Stanley and Grace were in the dining-room; Stanley good-humouredly detached from the Upset (the comprehensive name they had begun to use, for want of a better, in allusion to all that was happening), and Grace offended, because what “father” had said naturally involved “mother.” Sometimes she slipped away to talk things over with Miss Roberts. “If only they would all be as sensible as you” was soothing to hear; besides, whenever by quiet policy they re-settled a by-issue, they had a pleasant illusion that, as representatives, they had thereby settled the main issue once and for all.

Miss Roberts was sitting up in her attic room that Sunday morning; but Ursula and Lottie were hanging about in the schoolroom, barely tolerated by Nurse, who, recognizing them as Hal-ites and nurslings of the second generation and not the despised third, yet could not forget that their presence officially stamped the nursery as a schoolroom.

At one moment, Lottie felt that inaction was unbearable, and stole up into Aunt Lavvy’s empty room to see if anything within her scope could be done to sweeten matters and lighten them. She found to her content that the plump little pincushion on the dressing-table was almost void of pins; and, returning to the nursery, waited for Nurse’s temporary absence, to tear off several rows from the long bristling paper in the work-basket. Gleefully, she confided her purpose in Ursula, and then trotted back to prick the pins into the cushion to form a huge and elaborate L.

William, not a nice child, had chosen this day of crisis for a bilious attack, which meant a stay in bed, so that Hal was denied the solace of his “den” to himself, and had to endure a series of stray visits, with William listening, and afterwards making thoughtful remarks with the Bunny bias clearly visible in their roll. Nina came to release her pent up nerves in a storm of “_Why_ did you do it?” and “How _could_ you?” His mother came, sat down on William’s bed, and talked cheerily to Hal about various topics, with frequent pauses in which he felt her dumb push towards an assurance that she did not care “any old way” about that “silly old pound.” And when Bunny entered, and just threw himself down moodily and glowered at William, Hal was so burdened by the atmosphere of criminal’s cell, that he suggested a tramp in the rain. Bunny’s gaze of sheer horror conveyed clearly his reproof--“What--as though nothing had happened?” But he merely said: “You couldn’t get out without meeting somebody or other----” so that Hal shrugged his shoulders, and remained where he was.

“... Shut up, William!” Bunny shouted presently, when William had not uttered a word, and refused to hear the youngster’s righteous expostulations; and knocked over a tooth-glass, breaking it.

A knock at the door, and Stanley Watson came in: “Look here, Hal old chap, you mustn’t think me interfering----”

“Oh Lord----” Bunny dived for the door. He had never agreed with Hal in thinking Stanley humorous; and a fourth statement of the bank clerk’s point of view “which, just because he is _not_ one of the family, we ought, by the law of common justice, to recognize before our own----” was more than his overwrought condition could stand.

Mr. Maxwell, who, alone of the family, could have remained secluded in his study, walked about the drawing-room, laboriously drawing his wife’s attention to the fact that he was not paying any special heed to Aunt Lavvy; grumbling because the Watsons were “all over the dining-room”; and suggesting from time to time that Florrie had better run up and have a look at William, whose illness might be more serious than it visibly appeared....

“I suppose you’re trying to say I’m one to let my sons die and not care!”

Mr. Maxwell chose to regard the fact that she had “taken it like that”--his perfectly innocent remark--as significant of guilty memory. Had he been honest with himself, he would have acknowledged that he had scratched the memory of Ronnie into such an itching and inflamed condition that he simply could think and speak of nothing else, and that his remark about William had indeed been intended for wounding reminder. Like all jovial men, he had an especial talent for this.

“Our William is a particularly robust child. He cannot live less than ninety years. So I’m sure, Tom, that Florrie has no need to worry about him,” said Aunt Lavvy, who, except on the subject of Hal and the bank and Mr. Fennimore’s impending visit, was just as sweet and nice as she had ever been.

The midday dinner-gong sounded brazenly. And William, who felt better, appeared in a dressing-gown to ask if he might come down to dinner.

“I believe the little Busy-Gnomes have been in my room this morning,” Aunt Lavvy smiled at Lottie, who quivered with pleasure up to the very bow at the crest of her head. For a blissful instant it seemed to her, as it had also seemed to Grace and Miss Roberts after “talking it over,” that the problem was solved by dint of single effort.

But when the roast beef and apple-tart were over, and after the two servants had cleared away the plates ready for fruit, and left the room, the master of the house startlingly got up and cleared his throat--“I want to say something to you all....”

He went on to suggest, into a circle of stricken silence, that it was Hal’s duty to publicly apologize to their dear Aunt Lavvy for ...

(Was he going to put it--actually--into words?... No, he couldn’t! he couldn’t! Ursula’s breath was held back by an iron pressure of suspense.)

“----for the injury he has recently done her. Now, my son,” genially not disowning him.

None of them had expected this. The upset had not yet been acknowledged in so many words as existent, except between groups of two or three. Now, in defiance of the sore atmosphere, it was thrown on to the dining-room table.

Mr. Maxwell’s motive was to propitiate. The roast beef had stimulated his imagination; and while showing him more luridly than ever how dreadful would be the results to his own prestige, and to Hal’s future, if Aunt Lavvy told the whole truth to Fennimore, it likewise suggested to him--falsely--that all the dear little lady wanted to appease her was probably a slight testimony to her importance in front of them all.

Hal, victim of the strategical error, had never dreamt he was to be trapped into active ignominy. It seemed to him, as it does to most people at one or another nightmare of their lives, that the moment was so awful that it simply could not really exist, could not lead to another as bad. He heard himself stumble out a rather shaky: “Sorry, Aunt Lavvy, if I ... if I ...” then, fiercely self-despising, managed a gruffer, firmer voice, and stood up straight, pushing back his chair: “I’m sorry if I was a rotter to keep back that quid, Aunt Lavvy.”

“If?” repeated Aunt Lavvy, sadly. “If? Oh, Hal!”

“I didn’t mean ‘if.’ I just meant that I was sorry.” He looked very white, and his forehead was damp with sweat. Even Stanley Watson pitied him in the pillory, and threw off a magnanimous:

“Oh, leave the boy alone now.”

“I’m glad you realize what a serious matter a theft can be, my dear boy,” said Aunt Lavvy, stretching out a plump hand for the fruit-dish, “but I don’t want you to believe, though I’ve forgiven you personally, that either for my own sake or for the sake of the clerk at the Bank, I can do anything else but give Mr. Fennimore a clear, straightforward explanation, this evening, of what has happened. Honor Rose, look at this lovely plum your Aunt Lavvy is getting ready for you.” But intention and time were clearly stated at last.

“Nina, d’you want my handkerchief?” proposed Lottie. “Oh no, you’re laughing--I thought you were crying!”

“She is crying,” William announced, with a certain stolid exuberance.

Nina, in fact, was in hysterics.

[XII]

OUTSIDE the dining-room door, Ursula and Hal became aware of each other--separately fled from the turmoil. They hesitated, self-conscious after what had passed.

“I suppose that sort of thing’s not dangerous? She’ll be all right, won’t she?” Hal jerked his head in the direction of Nina’s sobs.

“Oh Lord, yes. Some girls--not Nina’s kind, though--often get hysterical.”

“Do they?” Perhaps Hal wished that boys did, too. He walked slowly away upstairs. And Ursula, giving him time to disappear, rushed for her room, banged the door behind her and bolted it, all in one swift movement, as though she were desperately in escape from the ugliness she had left in the dining-room: Aunt Lavvy and Miss Roberts and Grace crowding round Nina’s noisy agitation, admonishing her, thrusting forward remedies; Miss Roberts making futile dabs and sprinkles with the water-jug; Stanley trying to catch hold of Nina’s wrists and saying with a stern note of authority the while: “You _must_ be quiet. You _must_ be quiet”--and, aside: “The one way to treat hysterics--if you’d only leave her to me!” Her mother upbraiding her father for having brought about the scene; Lottie’s shrill: “May I fetch your salts, Aunt Lavvy? May I? Let me, or would you rather I didn’t?” Honor Rose frightened, and in tears; Mr. Maxwell’s: “Can’t you keep that kid of yours out of the way, Grace, when she’s not wanted?”... The smell of roast beef.... A sudden clamour and concentration of hatred.

But up here, in her room, was refuge and loneliness and space. Ursula’s grateful love for her room at that moment was so extreme that she longed to express it. It looked chilly and grey with the drops of rain dripping down the window, and falling dankly from the opposite drain-pipe of the next-door house. She suddenly determined that this was the moment for her first fire, her first _possession_ of a fire. She would put it off no longer. From the little cupboard she brought sticks and newspaper and some small lumps of coal. It was a very tiny grate, and quite soon it was alight, with an exciting crackle of wood and spurts of flame.... Ursula crouched down in front of it, in dreamy ecstasy. Her gaze roamed about the familiar objects, so as to become acquainted with them in their new shimmer and glow. She sprang up and twitched the red curtains across the window, shutting out the disappointing wall beyond ... you could so easily dream a perfect view, with the curtains drawn, and the room bewitched by warm flame. In future nights she would lie in bed hearing the red embers creak and flop, and more than ever she would be herself, owning herself, gravely exultant in self-possession.... Perhaps Mother and Father might give her for Christmas a small round clock-creature with a small round face and no hair--but friendly. And then time would be privately hers, too, as well as space. For now she shared time with everybody else who could hear the striking hours from the big clock in the hall.

When the Maxwells stayed on the river near Cookham for one summer holiday, Ursula nosed about until she found a willow tree up a back-water, where the branches swept round her boat like a tent and enclosed it. When they went, as they usually did, to the seaside, she would discover for herself special places on the leeside of a deserted breakwater, or between hedge and tree-trunk in a corner of a field. Wherever she could find an equivalent for the room, she was happy. It was her funny instinct (and certain small animals have it, too) to burrow and squirm her way into some hedged-in space, and curl up with a sigh of content, naming it hers. Her romantic sense of property was, maybe, over-developed from the edged contrast of life in a family where the sense of property barely existed at all, and who only in a crisis, and then but dimly, felt the need for more room. In everything else she was more or less like the other Maxwells.

But--watch Ursula as she claims a privacy even so fleeting as an empty train compartment. Already, as the door slams on her before the platform has been well left behind, the rushing haven is intimately hers. She leans eagerly forward, hands clasped between her knees, and enjoys it--a slim girl in a rather pathetically skimpy navy-blue coat and skirt, which always associates itself with the Ursula type of flapper, a dull, fair rope of hair falling over one shoulder, staid lips, pale as apple-blossom, curved in a slight smile of triumph, brows level above her softly thoughtful eyes.... Ursula!... She is not showy, but she may claim loveliness later on. There is a delicate artistry in the cut of her head and chin and neck, and in the brave square moulding of her eyelids. Ursula.... Not a musical name! She would have liked to be called Naomi or Rosalind or Pamela....

Aunt Lavvy’s cough and rustle on the other side of the locked door--and:

“I shall have to give up my room to her,” thought Ursula, “so that she shan’t tell old Fennimore tonight.” And she knew that the necessity had been stammering up in her ever since, the evening before, Hal had looked at her across the dinner-table.

That was why she had slept uneasily; and why she had squatted so long motionless, and fiercely loving her solitude, in front of her first fire--her last fire.

People can only be bribed by something you are sure they want. And, except Ursula, nobody at the Laburnums could imagine, in this crisis, anything that Aunt Lavvy desperately wanted.

Aunt Lavvy wanted the little room next to her bedroom, for a sitting-room. She wanted to be able to say she had a suite--two rooms adjoining. She had wanted this with tranquil obduracy for several years now. And Ursula, aware of it, had taunted the locked door between, with elvish dances and curtsyings.

At first the idea of bribing Aunt Lavvy with the room had occurred quite simply as an eleventh hour expedient to save Hal. But directly afterwards, Ursula saw her deed spring out in brilliantly illuminated letters, like the advertisements in Piccadilly Circus by night, as a Sacrifice.

And a Sacrifice, of course--if it be big enough--would make all the difference of colour and wind and enchantment to the days following it--days that would be as though they were of running liquid gold.

Ursula was tremendously excited by the prospect of Sacrifice. She had always dreamt how it would touch life with miraculous fingers, touch and transform it. Life that was hitherto all right, but only just all right, and not even vigorously wrong, humdrum and patchy and drab and lacking in power, a picture in muddy paint! Ursula held out her longing arms towards glamour....

Sacrifice! And, after it had happened, everything different!

So the child made up her mind, gambling for splendour.

But it meant giving up the room. Giving up--room.

... That time--she was huddled on the floor again in front of the fire, one arm resting on the armchair’s seat--that time a year ago, when Nina gave a party; and she, with hair recently washed to fall in a loose shimmering cloud down her back, and wearing a new bluish-grey party-frock, graceful folds of pale soft satin, was so flushed and stimulated with the sudden achievement of real prettiness that she behaved as though she were a delicately intoxicated fairy--and laughed and talked as if it were _her_ party, and gave orders, and tossed herself about, and was imperious, and a flirt, and a queen ... until Nina said to her, when everybody had gone: “What _was_ the matter with you, kid? Everybody was laughing at you; and that good-looking man whom Bobbie Mathers brought, told Bobbie you ran after him till he was afraid to stay. How could you make such a fool of yourself?”

The room had seen her through, then; had mercifully hidden her shame and her stung vanity and her hot disgust with herself. Supposing, though, that same evening of blunder were still to come, and no place for her to be alone in after Nina had said: “Everybody was laughing at you....”

For a moment the memory was vivid again, and Ursula clenched her hands against the humiliation. Ambitious to be neither rich nor a genius, and scornful of sentimental slush, she had always hoped for fame as a hostess, a quaintly witty, worldly yet serene personality, who was an influence in a shining spacious atmosphere, where only supple minds and graceful figures were suffered. Her idea of the perfect setting in which to be serene and witty was acres of parquet floor, and one little twisty gold and brocade sofa, and a sort of mellow amber light in it, and miniatures, and low, cool voices, and long, cool necks.

And when she tried--only just tried--to realize her conception of a Social Personality, Nina said....

The good-looking man whom Bobbie Mathers brought, did not figure distinctly in her aftermath of rage and shame. He was merely an indecipherable part of it. Men ... they didn’t count yet. Sometimes Ursula’s imagination played games in which, queerly, she forsook her own part, and became a chivalrous ardent squire to one Ursula, touched up and ennobled, but in the main essentials herself. Narcissus and Narcissa.... It was good to be a male, a swashbuckler; and it seemed quite natural, as such, to fall in love with the demure grey-eyed Ursula.... “But you know your eyes aren’t grey at all, they’ve got green and brown and blue, all mixed in. Once, in a storm off Lagos, I saw the hollow of the waves just that colour a second before they shattered over the deck.... God, I’d like to have had you there with me!”

And Ursula took this, how? But it was impossible to _be_ Ursula as well as Ursula’s lover. So the girl in the scene remained always objective, seen but not felt. She was sweet, but adamant, this Ursula, and elusive with some mysterious want he could not satisfy. The man wondered what it was; and “I wonder, too,” reflected Ursula, puzzled, in her rôle of lover, by the subtleties of her own projection.

Games--but it was good-bye to them now! They would not play themselves elsewhere but alone in the room.

The summons to tea left her still crouching before her bowl of red fire. Tea!--if she as much as opened that door, all the widened feuds and jealousies and passions, pressing against the farther side, would tumble in. The door was a barricade. Who knows how much fresh horror had accumulated beyond it since dinner, or how many irretrievable blows newly dealt, or old injuries exhumed from burial?

Restraint was inside out. It might stop anywhere, or--it might never stop ... since Nina had begun to be hysterical, and Aunt Lavvy proved an enemy, and Bunny was shockable, and Father was beastly to Mother, Mother starting such odd sentences that she nearly finished--but not quite--so that you caught your breath; and Mother hating Aunt Lavvy, and Grace huffy, and Gums and Stanley blacklegging from the Maxwell Union, and Nurse speaking her mind, and the servants a nudging community of gossip, and all the rooms chaotically surrendered for quarrel, and Hal morally in the dock.... Nobody kind, oh, nobody kind, and Mr. Fennimore expected tonight!

The blessing of being out of it! Ursula forgot, for the moment, that if she stuck to her purpose, solitude was already a fugitive with a price upon its head. Revelling in the four quiet walls, she reached out an indolent hand for the crumpled sheet of newspaper in which to pick up more coal. She had no shovel.

It was last Sunday’s paper. She glanced at it, after laying the coal in the shaking hollows of flame. Glanced ... and then was absorbed.