Ursula replied cuttingly: “I am sure, Mr. Prescott, that you know all about these poor people. And why should you not—certainly?”
She was so positive that even he would understand this full insult that she began to raise her hand to Bob, who was listening ardently. But she had hardly lifted her hand halfway when Mr. Prescott laughed openly and loudly. Her hand dropped back.
She was baffled. There was actually an amused twinkle in his eyes; he was almost cordial, and all the eloquence had come back to his face. This protean quality in him confused her.
“Anyway,” he was saying, “I don’t ‘oppress’ them. I pay them more than the prevailing rate. The contractor didn’t approve of it. Bad precedent, he appeared to think. What is sacred about a precedent, either good or bad?”
He put his foot down on the ground, then looked at it thoughtfully. All at once, she knew he had forgotten her. When he glanced up again, he had every indication of faint surprise, as if he had expected her to be gone. This freshly annoyed Ursula. Also, she noticed for the first time that he had not removed his hat, had not even touched it in slovenly recognition of the conventions.
“You don’t care for precedents, Mr. Prescott?” she heard herself saying.
With renewed mortification, she saw he had recognized her inanity, for he merely shrugged. He was looking again, over his shoulder, at the dismal tract of land. The skies steadily darkened, and now the wind had become definitely cold. Ursula waited. She saw that Mr. Prescott did not intend to answer her foolish question. Something spiteful rose in her.
“A very unlikely spot for a fine house, don’t you think, Mr. Prescott?”
He returned to her, smiling disagreeably. “Not for very long, however, Miss Wende. You see, I have bought up a great deal of the land all around it, at least seventy acres more.”
“No!” cried Ursula, forgetting everything now. She thought of Mr. Jenkins, and then began to laugh. She could not stop herself. Once, she put up her gloved hand to her lips. But she could not stop laughing. Mr. Prescott stared at her, frowning, waiting for her to finish.
“I’m glad I have amused you,” he said, sullenly, when she could catch her breath. And he smiled, with some dark amusement of his own. “I suppose you would not tell me if friends of yours have become interested in the properties around here, since I have bought yours?”
“Oh, I should not, really I should not!” exclaimed Ursula, with delight.
“I see,” he said, and they smiled at each other with huge enjoyment. He continued: “What fools they are, to think I’d be such a fool, myself. Of course, I know that Andersburg must grow this way, and that all property in this area will eventually be very valuable.” He waited, but Ursula only smiled. “I bought your land first. Then, in the last day or two, I bought up the rest. Yours was the key plot, and naturally it had to be bought first. I don’t mind telling you that I intend to use only your fifteen acres for my house and grounds. The rest will be retained by me for a high price, and will not be sold for any purpose other than houses comparable to mine.”
He shrugged again, a coarse and heavy gesture. A hand tapped on the window of his carriage, and he glanced in that direction. He returned to Ursula. He said: “Would you like to see my son, Miss Wende? He is in my carriage.” His expression was almost friendly.
“Your son?” asked Ursula, opening her eyes innocently. “I thought you were not married, Mr. Prescott.”
“Of course I’m not married,” he answered, with impatience. “But I adopted a child some time ago. A little boy. He is now two years old, and a very likely little fellow.”
“I should like to see him, indeed,” said Ursula.
Without another word, this peculiar man beckoned to his coachman and spoke to him curtly. The servant promptly got off his seat, jumped lightly to the ground, and opened the carriage door. Ursula saw a flurry of feminine petticoats, the swirl of a cloak, and the outlines of a bonnet. She sat up straighter on her seat, and a little thrill of fear went through her. But when she saw that all this finally subsided into the figure of a young woman in the uniform of a nursemaid, the fear disappeared.
The young woman was carrying a child in her arms, a child richly dressed. She came diffidently towards Ursula’s carriage. Even before she looked at Ursula, she looked at Mr. Prescott, and her fixed and obsequious smile could not hide the hatred in her large blue eyes. She was quite a pretty creature, but it was quite evident that Mr. Prescott did not see either her prettiness or her sex. For him, she was only a convenience. She had hardly reached him before he snatched the child from her arms. He dismissed her with a movement of his head, as if she were an importunate dog. She retreated from him, then stood waiting. Ursula caught a glimpse of the look that passed swiftly between her and the young coachman, and the look made her brows contract.
Mr. Prescott had forgotten all about the nursemaid. He held up the child for Ursula to see, and now, to her utter bewilderment, he was all gentle tenderness. There was about him an air of almost idolatrous absorption, a kind of exulting pride and triumph. “His name is Oliver!” he was saying. “Look at him, Miss Wende. Is he not a fine boy?”
Ursula politely attended to the child. She was not fond of children. She was too well acquainted with them, for her father’s students had often come to the house. Yet, in spite of herself, she immediately became interested. The little boy was rather larger than usual for his age. He wore a round fur-trimmed hat. But under that absurd hat, entirely too ostentatious for a baby, was a full and rosy face, full of shy intelligence. The features were not the average baby’s features, all rosy bluntness and vacuity. They were not sharp or keen, either; rather, they expressed an awareness beyond their age, and a firm delicacy. There was strength in the eye-sockets even now, and the forehead was good and clear. The child’s eyes, large, dark, fearless and smiling, caught and held Ursula’s final and complete attention.
“What a dear!” she said, involuntarily. Quite without meaning to, she held out her arms, and took the boy from Mr. Prescott, lifting him into the carriage and settling him on her knee. She gazed at him with pleasure, rubbing his cheek with her gloved finger. She had never kissed a baby before, but now she impulsively bent and kissed that red cold cheek. “A dear!” she cried again, holding the baby close to her breast. He looked up at her, no longer smiling, but intent and very quiet. He showed no inclination to discourage her demonstrations.
“I see you like children,” said Prescott, and with such gentleness that Ursula was startled out of her preoccupation with little Oliver. She held the child against her breast, and regarded Prescott thoughtfully. She had been about to say: “Certainly not. I do not dislike them, but I am a mature woman and so cannot help finding children extremely boring.” But with her queer awareness that she could never be honest with this man who had made her honest, she answered evasively: “Who could help loving this darling?”
Apparently he had not detected her evasion. He came closer to the carriage, rested his elbow on the side, and stared at her with deep penetration. Again, she felt the power in him, the magnetism which both drew and repelled her. She bent her head over the baby. The child smiled at her gravely and steadfastly, as if he understood her.
Ursula, though she did not turn away from the baby, spoke softly to Prescott: “I heard, only today, of your kindness to our orphan asylum. All of us know it is in a fearful condition, but inertia, or selfishness, or indifference, has kept us from doing much about it, ourselves.”
“Yes, I know,” replied Prescott, bitterly. “The children are poorly clad, they eat the food of beggars, they have little or no medical attention, they are forgotten and abandoned, then hired out at an early age at work unsuited to them. It is my intention to put a stop to this, at the earliest possible time.”
Ursula was intensely moved. She smiled softly at this man of so many amazing contradictions. “You must be very fond of children, yourself,” she said, wonderingly.
To her faint alarm, a look of concentr
ated fanaticism flashed into his eyes. “I am fond of them because they are the only decency in the world!” he exclaimed. “The only cleanness and goodness. They are what men were intended to be, and are not. There is no evil in children, no cruelty, no madness, no greed, no heartlessness.”
Astounded, Ursula could only keep an incredulous silence, but it was a silence maintained with difficulty. Again, she thought of the children of her friends, the pupils of her father. Remembering this, she wanted to exclaim, in answer to Prescott: “Oh, what nonsense! Children are only people, except that mature men’s natural instincts are kept in precarious restraint, while children’s are not.”
Again, she held herself back, but with some effort. She might often have been a prig; to herself she had rarely been a hypocrite. Since knowing this man, she had learned to think honestly; she saw now that she must also learn hypocrisy. Despising herself, therefore, she made herself say in a sweet tone: “There are so few who understand children or care to know them.”
How was it possible for a man so obviously intelligent to be so fatuous and so silly?
His face was so eager and so stirred, that her sudden repulsion died away. He said: “Yes, that is completely true. Miss Wende, I have told you that my mother boarded workers from the mills and from the ditches. They were a disgusting lot, and vicious. They cuffed me about, and kicked me, teased and tormented me. I grew to hate them, and their kind—the smell of them, the shape of their faces, their voices.” His own voice changed, became quietly savage. “There are some people, stupid people especially, who grow rapturous about the man with a hoe, or a shovel, or at a machine, and think that any virtue the world possesses lives in these. I know better. I’d like to take the nice advocates of the poor,” and now his voice became louder and more excited, “and force them to live for a while with those they pity and admire so much. That would cure them, I warrant you!”
What an extraordinary man, and so full of obvious inconsistencies, thought Ursula. She wondered at the huge blind spot in his thinking, and knew, then, that while he might work with complete objectivity, he thought with his emotions on any matter connected with other men.
All at once, she was tired, and her head began to ache. The vitality he exuded confused her; her reactions to him, for all their excitement, were both novel and wearying. She held little Oliver out to him with only one thought: to go home and sit by her small fire and watch the evening come on.
He took the child and held him almost fiercely in his arms. Oliver looked up at his face with intense gravity.
“I want to do what I can for children, all children,” said this preposterous man, staring at Ursula as if he were defying her. “I want to give them everything they want, to make the world a happy place for them, and a clean one.”
“And you think that by denying a child nothing, by giving him his way, by refraining from disciplining him and teaching him responsibility, that he will be happy?” asked Ursula.
“A child has a right to everything,” replied Prescott, and again he was fanatical. “Nothing should be demanded of him, but everything should be demanded of his parents. He owes nothing to anyone, but everyone owes everything to him. He is the world’s responsibility.”
Really, thought Ursula, the man is not only a barbarian, he is an egotist. Of course, it is easy to see that he is thinking of his own childhood and the deprivations and mortifications he must have suffered at the hands of the cruel. He does not love children so much as he loves the memory of his helpless young self, whom he now wishes to avenge. I wonder if all altruism, charity and devotion does not really stem from hidden memories of undeserved suffering and injured vanity?
Only a short time ago she had been thinking that the men she knew were colorless, lacked form and substance compared with this man. Now she saw them as calm and safe and reasonable civilized human beings with whom it was pleasant to talk even if the conversation were something less than stimulating. She sighed, smiled wearily.
“It is very kind of you to feel so strongly about children, and to care for them so much,” she said, with mendacity. Prescott did not answer. He was busy fastening a button on little Oliver’s coat, and he did this with absorption. Ursula raised her voice. “I really must go home,” she said.
He had heard this. He gave her a smile so open, so friendly and gentle, that she was more startled than ever.
“Yes, of course. It is getting cold,” he said. He shifted Oliver to his left arm, held out his right hand to Ursula, without bothering to remove his glove. She hesitated. Then she gave him her hand, and she felt the warmth and strength of his fingers. They looked at each other in an odd and sudden silence.
“Good night,” he said, and then again, in a lower voice, mysteriously troubled, “good night.” But he did not release her hand. He looked down at it. “Oliver likes you. He is very reserved with strangers. Perhaps I could bring him to call on you soon?”
“By all means,” said Ursula, faintly. “I am always at home to my friends on Sunday afternoons.”
He released her hand now. Again, the dull resentment was thick on his features, and they had stiffened.
Ursula murmured a word to Bob, who flicked Mr. Jenkins’ horse with his whip, and drove on. Ursula fell back on the leather cushions. Her fingers tingled a trifle. She was very tired.
Then Bob said, without turning on his seat: “Funny fellow, that Mr. Prescott, ain’t he, ma’am? But a lot brighter’n I thought. Common sense, he has.”
Ursula came to herself, disbelievingly. She wanted to say: “But, Bob, he was denouncing your kind! He is dangerous to you, and to all those you know, who work with their hands and have nothing!”
However, she did not say this. She could only marvel at the stupidity of the human spirit, at its natural tendency to hate its own kind. Or, she reflected grimly, perhaps each man believes himself unique and extraordinary and set apart, so that the very denunciations of himself are believed to be directed against others. “Not me. You mean my brother,” he replies to all attacks.
Perhaps man’s belief that he is not as others, that he is superior to his replicas, is of ominous portent to the rest of humanity, thought Ursula.
CHAPTER V
The spring that year, Ursula always remembered, had been unusually balmy and warm, so that it was hardly past the middle of April when the lilacs bloomed.
Ursula was extremely fond of gardening, which usually calmed any slight ruffle in her mind, any vexation or trifling anxiety. It was not until this spring that she began to suspect that she was always serene because misfortune had never touched her, because emotion of any kind had never invaded her house. Years of complete tranquillity, of complacent absorption in herself and, to a lesser degree, absorption in her father, had enabled her to withstand August’s death with what her friends dubiously called “remarkable fortitude.”
She busied herself with planting and transplanting in the garden this year, as usual. But now, it was not “calming.” The very rush and murmur and bursting of spring heightened almost unbearably the novel restlessness from which she had begun to suffer. Mysteriously, however, this very restlessness made her natural love and awareness of spring more poignant, and the scents of the earth meaningful as they had never been meaningful before. She found herself pausing, in the very act of digging about a plant, to look at the hills, warm purple and intense blue, which stood in the distance behind her house; she would often lift her eyes to the sky, to watch a transfixed cataract of radiance plunging earthward between the clouds. And as she did so, her heart would rise on a sudden wing of mingled ecstasy and pain, as if, for the first time, she had discovered profound significance in everything.
Always, a pang came with the rapture, a hunger, a yearning, a passion for something which she had never experienced. It was this which gave purport to the smallest thing: a new leaf, a bud, the sight of a tiny brown root wet in the ground, the notes of a robin at twilight, the red shadow of her fire in a darkened room, the sound of rain again
st the windows of her bedroom, the call of the wind in the eaves. They all urged her to see what she had never seen before.
She became conscious that, though she was not in first youth, she was still young, that she was a woman, that her flesh was warm and firm. She had taken her feminine attributes for granted, but now, as she worked in her garden, she was aware of the strong thrust of her breasts against her bodice, the bend of her thighs, the suppleness of her ankles. When at night she brushed out her long russet hair, she would swing it before her lamp, and bemusedly watch the play of dark gold and copper in its smooth and living lengths. She would study the curve of her lips, her profile, the lines of her throat. And as all this happened to her, as it had never happened when she had been a girl, a strong ecstasy would snatch at her heart.
One twilight, when she was examining the first red tips of the peonies which had pierced the wet cold earth, she stood up, stared before her, really shocked, and very still. She remembered that a kind of urgent excitement had begun to rise in her every Thursday, that it heightened on Friday, that on Saturday her restlessness became almost unendurable, that on Sunday at “teatime” she often trembled when she heard a knock on the door. But Sundays always passed placidly, with an old friend or two dropping in for a brief chat and a cup of tea, and then the evening would come, and she would be alone before her fire, with the church-bells ringing softly and plaintively through the spring twilight. How lonely she would feel then, how yearning and saddened!
“No!” she said aloud to the heliotrope sky, with a kind of quiet fierceness in her vehemence. Not to have known. And why do I not now know that I have been even more stupid by unconsciously waiting for him, that awful barbarian, that impossible and dangerous man? She went swiftly into her house, closed and locked her door, as if to shut out something grotesque and threatening. She heard her breath in the dark kitchen, and it was loud and hurried. She carried a lamp into her parlor, and it shook in her hand. She set the lamp on a table, stirred up the fire, then sat down before it, her fingers tautly laced together. She began to cry as she had not cried even when her father had died. But her tears could not wash away this huge hunger, this sadness, this loneliness, this passion, now acknowledged, to see William Prescott again.