Ursula said quietly: “Matthew.”
Slowly he turned from the window. In the gloom, she could not see his face or his blue eyes, but she knew he was watching her. He came back to the easel, and stood beside her, looking at what he had painted.
Ursula faltered: “It is not like the statue.”
“No,” said Matthew.
“It does not imply what the statue implies.”
“No,” he repeated.
He stretched out his long thin hand and turned the painting so that its raw back faced them, and the painting was gone.
If there had been something dramatic, something violent, in his gesture, Ursula would not have felt the enormous despondency that came to her. But there had been a finality about it, an ending.
It was her private tragedy that she could not speak to Matthew from her heart or her emotions. She had nothing but banalities to use. She said: “I think you have missed what the sculptor meant to imply. This was the beginning of life.”
“It never is,” said Matthew. His voice was low and indifferent.
“Perhaps not. But Michelangelo implied that.”
Matthew said nothing.
“And Mary,” continued Ursula, foolishly desperate, “knew that her Son would rise again. She was not hopeless.”
“She should have been,” said Matthew, in his usual lethargic tones. Again, Ursula felt him look at her. It was even darker in the room; his eye-sockets were without expression. “It might have been no use, but she should have tried to help him.”
“How could she?” asked Ursula, trying to speak reasonably.
“It might have been no use, but she should have tried,” repeated Matthew.
“Perhaps she did,” said Ursula.
There was no sound or movement in the room.
“There are some things beyond the strength of any human being to change, or to help,” said Ursula, thrusting against the void in the darkness.
She heard the scratch of a match. It tore the blackness with a thin flare of light. Then the gaslights went on. Matthew blew out the match.
He stood and looked at the charred stump in his fingers. So far as he was concerned, his mother might not have been in the room. He carefully deposited the stump in the china dish on the mantlepiece.
She stood up. “Fifteen minutes until dinner, dear,” she said. Matthew did not turn. Ursula went out of the room. The gaslight was bright, but to her it was as if she walked through water, so misty were her eyes.
She closed the door behind her. There was no joy in her now that Matthew had painted, painted anything at all. There was only terror and foreboding. She repeated silently to herself: There are some things that are hopeless from the very beginning.
CHAPTER XXXIV
It was queer, but Ursula, standing in the hall, felt a sudden sharp relief to see the commonplace light shining through Thomas’ half-shut door. She pushed it open, smiled brightly, and said: “Tommy!”
Thomas’ room was crowded with furniture, but it was warm and disheveled and human. He sat at his desk, his school-books untidily heaped about him, his head bent over his school papers. He lifted his rough brown head at his mother’s entrance; he scowled briefly. He started to rise, as she had unremittingly taught him, rose half-way, and sank down again. “Hello, Ma,” he added.
He stared at her, half smiled. His smile had its earlier goading quality, but at least it was a smile. “Come for the twilight confidences?” he asked.
At another time, Ursula might have been provoked. Now she actually laughed. She advanced with good humor into the room, sat down near the fire. She lifted her russet brows. “And so?” she said.
“It happens I’ve got the most stinking problem in trigonometry to work out,” he replied.
“Let it wait,” said Ursula.
Thomas shrugged his big and bulky shoulders. “Old Wilcox won’t like that, Ma. There’s nothing in the world half so important to old Wilcox as mathematics. He says mathematics are mystic, by God!”
“Tommy,” rebuked Ursula, but mildly.
“They’re only worth-while for figuring out feet of lumber.” Thomas threw down his pen, frowned at the neat problems on his paper.
“You like the lumber business, don’t you, Tommy?”
“Eh?” He stared at her, as though she had said something absurd. “Why, of course, I’m going into it, aren’t I?” His expression became malign. “Or is our Oliver going to take over?”
Ursula controlled herself. She said: “‘Our’ Oliver isn’t going into the business at all, Tommy. He is going to study law, at Harvard.”
“A lawyer!” He burst into a raucous laugh. “Pa had better watch out. Nothing like a lawyer to cheat the—the money out of you!”
Thomas’ crudeness usually revolted and angered Ursula, so that almost all conversations between mother and son ended in caustic exchanges which left Ursula with a feeling of futility. Now she welcomed the crudeness. It was earthy. She studied Thomas in silence.
She had never discussed any child, in his absence, with any of the others. It was, according to her code, not only bad taste, but unfair. She had confined herself to a rebuke if any of them commented, unkindly, on a brother or sister who was not present. But now she said: “Tommy, you don’t seem to get on well with anyone but Julie, and ‘getting on’ with others, and having some regard and kindness for them, is absolutely necessary to your own happiness.”
Thomas smirked cynically. He leaned back in his chair, folded his big arms across his chest, as William did, and waited for further comments from his mother. She also waited. So he said, with impatience: “I am happy. I don’t know what it means to be ‘unhappy’. You are always talking about ‘unhappiness’, Ma, as if it were a kind of disease waiting around everywhere to be caught. Anyway, I don’t think it’s important to sit down and wonder if you are happy or unhappy. That’s a disease in itself.”
He has common-sense, thought Ursula, with a strange rush of gratitude. She found herself smiling. Thomas smiled back, and this time without nastiness, for he was very shrewd and understood his mother better than she knew.
“You are right, in many ways,” she said, thinking that if she had more time, and that if William, when he was at home, did not always overthrow whatever influence over her children she had attained, she could reach a really sound rapport with all of them.
Thomas, himself, was also pleased. “Let’s look at the family, and see if your accusation that they’re hard to get on with is just,” he said. “There’s Julie. You don’t understand Julie. She’s just as entitled to be a minx as Matt has the right to go around in a big fuzzy cloud of thoughts.” He paused, pleased again when his mother laughed, though he detected a note of hysteria in her laughter. “Julie’s Julie, and you ought to get used to the fact,” he continued. “When she was younger, she ought to have been thrashed a lot more. Yes, yes, I know,” he said, when Ursula was about to interrupt. “Pa didn’t ‘approve’ of thrashing. Some kids need it. Julie did. But there’s a lot in Julie you don’t see. She isn’t a fool. She knows what she wants, and she intends getting it. Maybe you think that’s not so good, not all of the time. I think it is. Somebody’s got to get things; most of the others are too stupid to get them. Sure, she’s selfish. So am I. Everyone is who amounts to anything. Julie and I understand each other.”
The dressing-bell sounded, but neither Ursula nor Thomas cared. The boy was too earnest. For the first time in his life he appeared to want his mother to comprehend him.
“In your code, Ma, getting something at the expense of someone else, either of his ‘happiness’ or his money or his own desires, is immoral. I don’t think it is. There’s just so much of anything in the world, and not enough of everything to go around, so that nobody has as much of everything as he needs and wants.”
“Go on,” said Ursula, quietly.
“Your moral laws, Ma,” said Thomas, speaking more rapidly now, “if generally applied all over the world, would result in nobody
getting enough of anything. And, besides, the weak would prosper, and, as they compose the majority of the people in the world, they would soon crowd out the strong. We’d all starve to death together.”
“I think, Tommy, that your ideas are a sign of weakness, and not of strength,” protested Ursula.
“You don’t think that at all, really,” said Thomas, with good-natured scorn. “You know, I’m beginning to like this talk. You see, I’ve always known what you thought of me, and maybe you’re right. But you can’t change my nature. I, myself, like it.”
Ursula, though she felt she ought not to, could not help laughing.
“When Pa goes away,” Thomas went on, shrewdly, “I can almost hear you think: Now I’ll have some influence over the children, and I’ll try to teach them the way they should go.” He watched the slow rise of his mother’s flush, and nodded slyly. “You see, I am right. But you can’t ‘influence’ us much. We are the way we are. Perhaps Pa helped us to become more so.”
Ursula stared at the floor.
Thomas went on with even greater vigor: “Now, there’s Barbie. ‘I don’t like her. I never did. She wants things just as much as Julie and I want them. But she has a ‘code’ and it’s a lot like yours. I don’t like your code. I don’t think it’s sensible, not the way the world is. Anyway, Barbie’s strong, and that ought to please you.”
Ursula said nothing.
“There’s Matt,” said Thomas. “I detest Matt. You think he doesn’t want anything. You are wrong. He wants himself. He wants to sit in himself. He just loves himself. He can’t find anything outside himself better than he is. Ma, I advise you to leave him alone.”
“Thomas,” murmured Ursula in distress, remembering the terrible picture she had seen only fifteen minutes ago.
“You think he is a genius,” Thomas countered, relentlessly. “Maybe he is. He thinks so, too. That’s enough for him. He doesn’t want to do anything with it. It’s enough for him to have it, God bless his little soul!”
“Oh, Thomas!” exclaimed Ursula.
Now Thomas pointed a big thick finger at his mother, and said, with emphasis: “See here, Ma. Remember when the depression started ’way back, and kept getting worse, though I guess most of it’s over now? Pa used to talk gloomily at the table about things going to pot, and the lumber business and everything else going down. All of us were interested. You thought Matt wasn’t. But he was! He was scared.”
Ursula stared intently at her son.
“You remember he began to take a little more interest in his ‘art’ then? He began to paint again. He kept at it for all of six months, until Pa said things had got back on their feet. Then out went the teachers, and the dreadful idea of ‘commercialism’. He could hug his ‘art’ right back into his arms again, and keep it from being ‘profaned’. Oh, he never told anyone that, but I knew it all the time.”
He is right, thought Ursula. But he is not completely right. He is incapable of the subtleties.
She saw that Thomas was watching her, and, if it were possible, his narrowed brown eyes had even become a little soft, as if he pitied her.
Suddenly the softness, if it had been there at all, went from Thomas’ eyes. He thrust out his thick underlip. “There’s Oliver. You think Oliver’s just about perfect. So does Barbie. Maybe you’re right. You like him because he’s never caused you any trouble. I’d like to be able to say he’s a prig, like Matt. He isn’t; I’ll be honest in that, anyway. In lots of ways, he’s stronger than we are. He wants things too. He’ll get a lot of what he wants, maybe more than we’ll get.”
“What does Oliver want, Tommy?”
“He wants not to be poor. But he wouldn’t do anything he thinks is rotten to keep from being poor. Perhaps you think that is wonderful.” Thomas paused, rubbed his forehead. “I’m going to try to keep him from getting what he wants.”
Ursula said: “Tommy, that is vicious.”
He laughed. “Maybe.”
“And Oliver does have a ‘right’, too. Your father adopted him, and loved him. And I think he still loves him.”
Thomas did not reply. He stared at his mother with a hateful half-smile. After some moments, he continued: “He’s going to be a lawyer, you say. He’ll try to stand in the way—” He stopped abruptly.
“Of what, Tommy?”
Thomas did not answer. He stood up. “I heard the dinner-bell,” he said.
It was singular that after this conversation, so much of which had been sensible and astute, Ursula felt a weight of misery and depression such as she had not felt even after her conversation with Matthew.
CHAPTER XXXV
Barbara thought it a trifle precious of her mother to tiptoe softly into the school-room, some mornings, indicating by a bend of her head that she was not to be noticed but only to be permitted to listen for a few moments. She would watch Ursula seat herself at a distance, smiling somewhat faintly and uneasily, and pretending to a deep interest. She well understood that Ursula was seeking a close intimacy with her daughters, and that she believed it her duty to follow their lessons, and Barbara experienced compassion, discerning that Ursula felt only boredom and futility.
Perhaps all this was because Barbara was angered by her sister’s own knowingness about these visits, and by Julia’s smirk of contempt. Sometimes Barbara was so exasperated that she wished at one and the same time to slap Julia and call her mother a fool.
Miss Edna Vincent would give Ursula a quick sweetish smile, but she never paused, not even for a word of greeting. Ursula had indicated this was unnecessary. Miss Vincent was not perturbed by Ursula’s presence. She was a woman whose tranquillity was rarely shaken. Her broad dim face peered peacefully at everyone beneath an untidy tangle of straw-colored braids, and her voice, a little thin and shrill, had a lilting quality which Ursula loathed.
This morning, when Ursula entered the school-room, was the first bright day of spring, following almost a month of cold and flailing rain. Barbara longed for her bicycle and the mountain roads. She was no sentimental gatherer of wild-flowers in the hills and woods; rather, she preferred the high and windy solitudes where no “nonsensical” thing could intrude. She did not love solitude as her brother, Matthew, loved it. Solitude, for Barbara, meant freedom, a vigorous yet exalted freedom both of the senses and the body. Sometimes she would encounter Matthew, walking, his head bent. She would race sturdily past him, her strong legs churning at the pedals, though she knew he did not see her. Sometimes she would come upon Thomas, determinedly jogging along, elbows flexed, conditioning himself on the steep roads for baseball or basketball or football, and scornful of sisters, especially of Barbara. The girl would wonder which she detested most: Matthew’s ghostly self-absorption in his sterile visions, or the animal exercise of Thomas. Barbara, like Ursula, was a born compromiser. Somewhere, between dreams and brute activity, lay the middle-road of satisfying and complete life.
Spring had always been to Barbara an eager and simple delight, for her nature, though at times discerning, was not complicated. But now there was for her, in the spring, a certain restlessness. She was afflicted by a loneliness and longing which she could not impale on the pin of common-sense.
Since very early childhood, Barbara had always been able to regard her family with entire detachment. She recognized her own similarity to her mother, and distrusted in Ursula what she distrusted in herself. She was more fond of Ursula than was any other member of her family and, though Ursula did not know this, Barbara alone, of all the children of her body, loved her. Barbara understood her father; she knew that he loved her, as one of his children, but that he did not like her.
Barbara thought Thomas a crafty animal, and her childhood dislike for him was becoming an intense aversion and disgust. His exploitation of his father infuriated her, but when he wounded Ursula the girl felt a desire to do violence upon him.
As for Matthew, Barbara rarely thought of him at all. In her opinion he was a hesitant-voiced shadow, strangely immovable, beyond
the touch or reach of others. Sometimes she was afraid of him, afraid of what lay behind his silent presence.
Julia was a simpler matter, almost as simple as Thomas. Unlike Ursula, Barbara did not believe that Julia was empty-headed. Behind all that brilliant comeliness, there was a very good, if calculating mind. It might, one day, be a dangerous mind.
The trouble, Barbara would think, was that the normal hatreds and stresses in all families had in her own family neither been guarded against nor reckoned with. Ursula had known of them, but she had been powerless to control them or to render them ineffectual by discipline and training. As a result, among the children when they were together, there was always an atmosphere of impending violence, a lack of consideration for one another, an open hatred.
Only one stood outside the ring of invisible tensions which gripped the Prescott family, and this one was Oliver. Barbara, given to frowning whenever her mother appeared in the school-room, was so engrossed with thoughts of Oliver, and with the queer yearning and loneliness that thickened her throat, that she only stared momentarily at Ursula, and then bent her head over her books.
“Dear Barbara,” said Miss Vincent mildly, with an indulgent smile at Ursula, “we were discussing the late—misunderstanding—between ourselves and Spain, and I am afraid that you haven’t heard anything at all. Do tell me if I am prosey, and I’ll try to correct it.”
Barbara said: “I’m sorry, Miss Vincent. My attention wandered for a moment or two.”
Julia jeered in her musical voice: “She was thinking how handsome Oliver looked—for two months—when he was in the Army, even though he didn’t get to ride with the Rough Riders!”
Barbara’s pale cheek flushed, but she said calmly: “No, I was thinking what a waste of life it is to be sitting here when I could be riding on the mountain roads on my bicycle.”
Ursula, who rarely made any comment in the school-room, was irritated at Barbara’s remark. It was strange that Barbara usually annoyed her more than did any of her other children, and in the annoyance lay a deep vein of disappointment. “What a silly thing to say, Barbie,” she said. “The time for study, for the preparation for life, is in youth.”