Elders and Betters (31 page)

Terence looked at Anna in sympathy, interpreting her outbreak in the light of his changing conception of her.

“Oh, well, I daresay these things slip out,” she said, subsiding into a seat.

“It sometimes seems that people are not fair on Anna,” said Terence to Bernard.

“She has that odd attribute, carelessness of the impression she makes.”

“It would be a great thing to be free of the effort of making a good one. But what would happen to most of us without it?”

“Worse than to Anna,” said Bernard, believing what he said. “But as you see, bad things happen to her.”

“I believe my ears ought to be tingling,” said Anna, glancing at the pair.

“It is good of you all to come and start us on our new life,” said Thomas. “It prevents the gaps from yawning too wide before our eyes. To have them filled on the surface is something.”

“I suppose the new life will not really seem to begin until after the funeral,” said Anna.

“Anna may be an enemy to herself,” said Esmond, “but other people do not escape.”

“You seem to speak from personal knowledge,” said Terence to Anna.

“Well, my life had in effect to start again after Aunt Sukey's death. Yes, I know what I am talking about. I wish I did not.”

“It is a pity that we have to know so much,” said Terence. “I often feel that I cannot sustain the weight of my knowledge. And with every day it gets worse.”

“I feel rather an empty, ignorant person on the whole. Apart from one's own individual depths, of course. I suppose everyone has those.”

“I wish I did not know that they had. I am really not equal to it. I wish I could know so much, that I knew that I knew nothing.”

“Your young brother and sister must find you a perplexing elder,” said Anna.

“I never talk to them,” said Terence. “I have only just realised that. I wonder what they would think, if I did?”

“You can easily try,” said Anna.

“I should have to break through that intense family shyness. And of course I should find that especially hard. But I must not let it conquer me. Julius, may I suggest that we hold some intercourse?”

“What?” said Julius.

“Because Mother is dead?” said Dora.

“There, you see what sort of reason strikes them as adequate. They may even think that I am trying to take their mother's place.”

“Well, it wouldn't be a bad attempt to make,” said Anna, resting her eyes on the children, as if in compassion.

“I should not be a success in the character. I have too gentle a nature. I could not manage that wise firmness.”

“Well, it does not do to weigh children down, of course.”

Terence's face darkened, and he turned to listen to Bernard.

“We are wondering which of my father's sisters was the more beautiful. We are all saying what we think.”

“Aunt Sukey,” said Anna.

“Mother,” said Dora, looking surprised at there being any question.

“Uncle Benjamin doesn't seem like their brother,” said Julius. “I think Mother looked the best.”

“That is what I should say, my boy,” said Thomas. “I should use those very words.”

“Aunt Sukey had the advantage in a conventional sense,” said Tullia.

“Then Aunt Sukey had it for you,” said Terence. “That is the sense that counts. Beauty in any other sense means a lack of it. A face that is beautiful for what is in it, is a plain face to the person speaking of it. I would not give a fig for praise of looks in an unconventional sense.”

“Then I think you may keep your figs, my son,” said Thomas.

Julius and Dora broke into laughter, continued it with more abandonment for their repression, looked for their mother's reproof and fell into silence, realising that she was gone from their lives, as their deportment was uncontrolled on the occasion of her death.

“We must think of Aunt Sukey in the days when she was well,” said Bernard.

“Even when she was ill, she was the best-looking person I have known,” said Anna.

“I think I am with you, my daughter,” said Benjamin.

“It was as a pair, that they made their impression,” said Tullia.

“I thought they were better apart,” said Terence. “To my mind they showed up each other in the wrong way.”

“It is a pity that no one has inherited their looks,” said
Anna. “It seems hard, when there were two of them to hand them down.”

“What about my Tullia?” said Thomas.

“Oh, I did not mean to say the wrong thing. I never seem to go long without some blunder. I see my life before me as a succession of traps.”

“You are not yet extricated from this one,” said Esmond.

“Well, then, I will leave myself in it. There is no point in struggling out of it, to get involved in another. It would be no good to contradict myself now. Nothing I said, would mean anything.”

There was some laughter, in which Tullia joined.

“I don't see anything so funny in thinking that our elders attained a higher standard of looks than we do.”

“It is the most natural thing,” said Tullia, in a light tone, glancing at the window.

“Esmond is our own show specimen, and he does not hold a candle to them.”

“I still await a word about my Jessica's daughter,” said Thomas, putting his arm round the latter.

“No, I am not taking any risks on that subject,” said his niece, shaking her head. “It is better to be silent than to fall short, or damn with faint praise, or anything.”

Tullia's laughter led the rest.

“I am glad I am so humorous,” said Anna.

“What a lot we laugh, even though Mother is dead!” said Dora.

“Mother liked us to laugh, my little one,” said Thomas.

“That isn't why you were laughing, is it,” said Julius.

“She didn't seem much to like us to, when Aunt Sukey died,” said Dora.

“She didn't laugh then, herself,” said Julius.

“I think she would have liked to laugh more than she always could,” said Thomas. “She would be glad for anyone else to do it.”

“Perhaps she would be glad, now that she knows more
than she used to,” said Dora, seeking to reconcile the view with facts as she remembered them.

“Yes, you must always think of Mother as she is now.”

“But then we shall think of her as somebody different. Perhaps she would mind that.”

“I shall think of her as the same,” said Julius. “It seems to be better not to think about dead people too much. But I shouldn't ever think about them as different. It would not be thinking about them at all.”

“Have you been out into the air to-day?” said Thomas, as if there must be something wanting in the influences on his son.

“No, we didn't know we might,” said Dora. “Not when the blinds were down.”

“You may go into the garden,” said Tullia. “But you need not go too near the gate.”

“Isn't it right for us to be out of doors?”

“Yes, of course it is, or Father and I would not allow it.”

The children ran to the door, subduing a tendency to betray signs of relief.

“Poor little things!” said Anna.

“We have no idea what impression this tragedy is making on them,” said Terence. “We must wait for the time when they write their lives.”

“Why should they do that?”

“People don't seem to need any reason. Unless one of them writes the life of the other, when they may need a little more.”

“I should never see any ground for writing mine. I shouldn't have the presumption to expect anyone to read it.”

“I think mine would be of the greatest interest. It would reveal the twisted experience of a human soul.”

“My experience is straight enough,” said Anna. “Too straight to have any appeal, I suspect.”

“Then haven't you a vague, yearning sense of unfulfilment?”

“Well, yes, I daresay I have. Yes, I suppose so sometimes.”

“I could not bear to have that,” said Terence. “I would rather suffer. I am glad that my mother suffered.”

“You mean that you can't get her suffering out of your head,” said Anna, nodding with an air of grave shrewdness.

“No, I do not. That is the truth. I mean that it was a good thing for her to suffer. It is too much for me to think anything else.”

“The feelings will pass in time.”

“They have begun to do so, but they will recur all my life. And I almost hope they will. I could not bear to be a shallow person.”

“I should say you are not,” said Anna, just throwing her eyes over his face. “The children do not know the truth of the matter, I suppose?”

“I do not know,” said Terence. “It has been kept from them; and it ought to have been kept from me, when I have all the sensitiveness of a child.”

“That is not always so great as is thought. I do not remember the struggles and misunderstandings that are said to be the lot of childhood.”

“I still have them,” said Terence. “I wonder if it is the gift of perennial youth, I don't think people have that in any other form.”

“I wonder how many of us escape a guilty feeling, that our maturity ought to mean some secrets or mysteries or something.”

“The feeling is not guilty,” said Terence. “You will know that, when you have one that is. My life contains a fair proportion of secrets. I told you how like I was to a child. I do not often allow myself to think of them. Perhaps that is what is meant by putting away childish things.”

“I suppose we assume or pretend that we have put them away,” said Anna.

“Other people do it for us. They like us to carry burdens. You would not believe the duties that my father has put on
me to-day. He simply assigns to me the part of a man. Is not that Miss Lacy in the hall?”

“Do you know her step?” said Anna.

“Yes, for years I listened for it. How like me to listen for it still!”

“Were you so anxious for her to come?”

“No, I used to go and hide. Somehow that strikes me as an amusing and charming thing.”

“How did it strike her?” said Anna.

“I never knew. She remains a mystery to her pupils. It is when children don't know people, that they show the helplessness of their age; otherwise they show something different. No doubt she knew that.”

“Do you want to hide to-day?”

“Yes, I dread her behaving as if nothing extraordinary had happened.”

“Well, I suppose death is ordinary enough.”

“Not this kind of death. I do not wish people to go as far as that. Acting should only be carried to the proper point.”

Miss Lacy's voice was heard in an effort that did perhaps pass this stage.

“Well, my niece and I have come to spend an hour with you. We are getting tired of each other's company, and are glad of friends at so easy a distance.”

Anna looked from Florence to Terence, and in a moment rose and, as if by a carefully unconsidered movement, cleared the way between them.

“It is good of you to come to this shadowed house,” said Terence, to the guest. “I hope it will not cast its darkness over you. I am persuading myself that life is so bad, that it is reasonable to want to be rid of it.”

“I suppose it often is,” said Florence.

“I want you to say that it always is. My mother's life must not have been worse than the average.”

“I do not see why it should have been.”

“I think it was rather worse. But I think mine is too; so she only had to bear what I do. And I want to keep mine
until the last possible moment. I would much rather have labour and sorrow than nothing.”

“That is a strange view.”

“But almost an universal one.”

“And you don't take very kindly to labour, do you?” said Anna, from her distance, where she sat with her eyes on the pair.

“Well, a breadwinner is in such an ungraceful position, always trying to gain something. It is quite dreadful actually to be named after it.”

“Women like men to do some work,” said Florence.

“I have heard of the hardness of women, but does it really go so far?”

“Just as men like women to do the work that is their own.”

“It must be the weakness of human nature,” said Terence. “I have heard of that too. But I don't think we need dwell on it. It is better to forget those depressing things that cannot be helped.”

“Some women will not marry a man who has no profession.”

“Surely they could face poverty together. That is another thing I have heard of.”

“That falls too hard on the woman,” said Florence.

“But what about the self-sacrifice of women? I seem to have heard of so many things.”

“No one should ask sacrifice of anyone else.”

“You know that my family asked it of Anna,” said Terence. “Even my mother did.”

“Oh, that was because she really saw things in that way,” called Anna from her place.

The words produced a silence, that was broken by Miss Lacy.

“So Reuben has not gone into the garden with the younger ones. Are they then so much younger?”

“I am not here for lessons to-day,” said Reuben. “I just came with Father and Anna. I never go out with the children unless Aunt Jessica tells me to.”

“Then are you never to do so again?” said Terence. “I think you have no choice but to take matters into your own hands.”

“Poor child!” said Tullia. “Sitting here amongst these melancholy men and women! Pray let him go out and cast off the impression. I hope it is not an ineradicable one.”

“Would you like me to be with them, my dear?” said Miss Lacy, half-rising from her seat.

“Well, I expect they would be better for comfort and guidance and everything. I don't know why we should look for such things from our friends, but at these times people feel entitled to them.”