“Ursula!”
Ursula swung on her husband, her heart beating heavily. “William,” she replied. Their eyes met. William could not speak; his cheek twitched. He was remembering that Ursula was pregnant; he held back his own rage. After a moment, he said hoarsely: “How dare you strike that child, that baby! You know it is against my orders.”
“Your orders!” exclaimed Ursula. Feigning distress, she put her hand suddenly to her side. William saw the gesture. His rage was still high, but he was frightened. “Ursula, I command you to sit down at once. You are making a most disgraceful scene.” He caught her arm; his fingers might be rough, but she felt his fear in them. He forced her into a chair. He stood over her, his eyes gleaming but watchful. Over his shoulder, he called to the housekeeper: “Mrs. Templeton, a cup of tea for Mrs. Prescott at once.”
So, thought Ursula, there is a way to control things. But she rejected the idea at once. That way was the way of weak women, without principle or resolution. She accepted the cup of tea hastily brought her by Mrs. Templeton. She could not stop the trembling of her hands. To her amazement, William awkwardly stirred the tea for her. She looked at him, and her eyes filled with tears.
“William,” she whispered, “let us go away, into my room. Anywhere.”
“Drink your tea,” said William, sternly. But there was a kind of helplessness in the gesture with which he touched his temple. The firelight flared up a moment; Ursula, with a pang, saw again the patches of white in his thick black hair. “Drink your tea,” he repeated.
Ursula drank the tea, slowly. She was not really hysterical, nor had her sudden loss of self-control been more than a flare. All her stern calmness returned to her. She looked at young Thomas, still crouched at his father’s feet. He had retained the square promise of his babyhood; everything about him, from healthily flushed face to shoulders and body and legs, had a rude bluntness without refinement of line or hint of grace.
Ursula turned from Thomas to Matthew, for whom she had originally had a kind of sympathy. She had believed he would be her favorite. Now she knew she would never be able to understand him. He did not have the bold truculence of his brother. There was an elusive quality about him. As tall as Thomas, he appeared of a finer strain, and so gave an impression of slightness. He had a triangular face, a sensitive thin mouth, a good sharp nose. His blue eyes were set deeply, yet they were large and had a remote awareness. The light fluff of his babyhood had brightened to a definite gold molded caplike on his long and narrow head. There was nothing feminine about the child, but there was nothing that expressed great strength.
Ursula turned away from her sons, mournfully. As clearly as if Julia were now in the room, Ursula saw the little pert face, impudent and without shyness. A pretty face, yes; Julia had inherited Ursula’s own eyes, though her long fine hair was inclined to wave nicely about the temples and at the ends. Julia had something of Matthew’s delicacy of feature, but none of his reticence.
Ursula sighed. She was desperately sorry that she had struck the baby. It was not all Julia’s fault; her ruin and spoiling had been received from William. For all her pretty wiles, her warm plump little body, and her bent for humor, she was well on the way to becoming detestable.
Ursula tried to stiffen herself against her own despair and sadness. She had seen the malevolence of Julia’s little face when the child had looked at her father. It was a malevolence that could spring only from hatred and contempt.
Ursula’s awareness returned to the room. She looked at Oliver, passing, with a shiver, over her own two sons. He smiled at her reassuringly.
She stood up. She said to her husband quietly but with determination: “William, I am going to my room. I want to talk to you. It is very important.”
CHAPTER XXIV
When in her own apartments, Ursula excused herself and went into her dressing-room, where she removed the heavy gown and corsets which encased her, and threw a light silk robe of a lavender color over her aching body.
From her window she had a view of the mountains. They were not the strong and quiet mountains that stood behind her little house. Here they had retreated, become immense and distant and cold. She could see the dark purple of them now against the lighter purple of the darkened sky. Above them, the evening star glittered restlessly. All at once, Ursula was overcome with melancholy. The sky, streaked with a whitish scarf, had a dull and remote look, as if a sun had never burned there in warmth and brilliance. She could hear no sound; the house was so very still. Had William remained in her room, as she had requested? She listened intently. She heard the slow and ponderous pacing to and fro of his feet. It, too, sounded tired, as tired as she was tired. All at once, she wanted to cry. She sat down, leaned her elbow on her dressing-table, and rested her forehead in her palm. She must go out to him. But what could one ever say to William? In these past several years, she had attempted to approach him, to become part of him, to touch him warmly with her hand. It had all been impossible. They were not stupid people. What was it stood between them, invisible but implacable, striking them into silence?
She was more sure than ever that he loved her. Yet, she could not speak with William, and he, in turn, could not speak with her. Once or twice she had thought: He is afraid and I am afraid of his fear, whatever it is.
She stood up, applied firm palms to her wings of russet hair, made herself as calm as possible, then went into her bedroom. William was standing at the window, looking down at the parkland which surrounded his house. He had not heard her reenter. His broad shoulders sagged a little, his head was bent.
William, too, was thinking. He did not see the land below him, the distant gaslights which now ran, flickering, along Schiller Road, the outlines of other big houses which had chosen to be his neighbors. He was saying to himself, with angry gloom and somberness: There is no way to talk to Ursula. It is impossible ever to speak, to tell her what I think. But there never was anyone but Dr. Cowlesbury. Why have I told her so little about him? I promised to take her to his house, yet I never did. Why?
There is one thing I do know, his exhausted thoughts continued. I know she hates the people I hate. It is an easy hatred, a smiling kind of hatred, as if she despised them. I cannot hate them like that; I can only hate them with fury and rage. Why? Is it because Ursula feels equal to them that she can despise them pleasantly and serenely, while I do not despise them in that fashion because I cannot convince myself, even now, that I am equal to them—those sanctimonious fools, those bigoted wretches, those pious swine without honor or decency or mercy?
“William,” said Ursula behind him, quietly.
He turned about, and immediately his expression became sullen and wary, in the soft light of the lamps. He stood there in the center of the big and lovely room, which she had subtly altered during her occupancy. She had “faded” the room, he had once thought accusingly. It had been muted enough to begin with; now, all color had been gently drained from it, leaving only a ghost of color behind, the merest suggestion.
“Please sit down, William,” she said, almost impersonally. Already he was freshly angered against her; it was his defense against the sick and powerful yearning he had for her, his unremitting desire to speak to her and tell her of the dark and chronic rage which lived in him. But it was not possible to talk to Ursula of this; she was too cool, too balanced, too composed.
He did not accept her invitation immediately. They stood and looked at each other in silence, and the thing that always sprang up between them sprang up again, armed and watchful, dividing them. He sat down heavily in a finely carved chair covered with a faint rose damask, and she sat opposite him, crossing her ankles neatly, folding her hands in her lap.
Her voice was restrained but clear: “William, I think we should have a little talk about a number of things. I think we should speak honestly to each other.”
Honestly! he thought.
“You never tell me anything. But I suspect there is something wrong.” She paused. “In your a
ffairs,” she continued resolutely. “I think I have the right to know.”
He had been prepared for a quarrel about the children, another of the many quarrels between them. She had not spoken about the children. Yet he had an intuition that she was approaching the subject obliquely. This exasperated him.
“What do you mean?” he demanded.
She lifted her hands slowly in a gesture of hopelessness, then let them fall again upon her silken knee. “William. You know what I mean.”
“My ‘affairs’!” he exclaimed, with an insulting intonation. “What can you know of my ‘affairs’?” He waited for her to speak. She did not; she only gazed at him, waiting. He stood up, towered over her. “What is it that you want? Is there something you need, which I have denied you? Have I ordered the dismissal of servants?” Then he was really enraged. “What do you mean?” he asked again, and his voice became hoarse with his fury.
Still not looking away from him, Ursula was silent a moment. She said: “Perhaps I have no reason for my uneasiness. But our way of living is becoming even more opulent than before. People gossip; hints come to me that even the wealthy summer visitors from Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and New York and Boston discuss you.”
“What are these wonderful ‘hints’?” he asked, with what he considered savage humor.
Slowly, she said: “Perhaps I have spoken of this because thrift is a habit with me. I had been brought up to despise waste and extravagance. I do not know whether all this,” and she gestured briefly, “is ‘waste’ or ‘extravagance.’ I never knew anyone who lived as we do but, then, perhaps Andersburg is a very conservative city. I often wonder whether we need so many servants. Why a nursemaid, when we have Lucy? She is capable of taking care of Julie, and Tom and Matthew, without assistance.”
During all this, William had not spoken; his face had darkened. He waited until she had finished, then he said: “This is miserliness. You wish to count every penny. I have told you, over and over, that I can afford what we have. Why do you persist in wishing us to live like beggars?”
Ursula could not help smiling sardonically. It was these smiles of hers, cool and superior and half-suppressed, which he could not endure. “Even with the staff cut down, we’d hardly be living like beggars,” she said indulgently.
“You must let me be judge of that,” he said, trying to control his temper. The old sick panic returned to him, and he almost hated his wife. His voice rose: “You don’t know what you do to me when you talk like this! I won’t have it!”
She studied him earnestly. “Do to you, William? What is it I do to you when I suggest a little sensible economy?”
As if he could not endure looking at her, he moved to the window.
Ursula said, very gently: “It would not disturb me to have less than we have, to have fewer servants. Sometimes I find it all more than a little oppressive. I do not think ostentation more important than my husband’s peace of mind.”
“No,” he said, “you would be quite content to crowd all of us into your miserable little house! I know that. You have no real appreciation for good living. The piling up of a useless and untouched fortune would be much more to your liking. You would prefer that to living as we ought to live.” His irascible temper flared. “A man must have evidence about him that he is a success. But that is something you’d never understand.”
I see, thought Ursula, with aching pity. She tried to speak serenely, in order to calm the fear she felt in him: “I have told you before that my father and I lived very modestly. I respect money; I had to learn to respect it. So that, while I know you can afford all this, and perhaps even more, I still do not believe in wasting money when it is not necessary to waste it.”
He said, violently: “You try to undermine me at every step! You try to make me lose faith in myself!”
How childish, how piteous, thought Ursula. She sighed. “Well, then, if I have offended you, I can only ask you to forgive me. After all, I cannot rid myself of the habits of a lifetime.”
Whenever she apologized like this, it only excited him the more. He exclaimed: “You resent our children having the best I can give them. You’d prefer them to suffer privation, no doubt for the good of their characters!”
Goaded, in spite of herself, Ursula replied: “Something ought to be done for their characters, God knows!”
“Oh, I understand! If it were left to you, they’d live on bread and water and live in a garret; to ‘strengthen’ them, I suppose, to teach them to love money, as you love it! It has never occurred to you that we owe our children everything. They did not ask to be born. We forced them into existence—”
Ursula interrupted quietly: “William, you are not talking sensibly. You and I did not ask to be born either; we, too, were ‘forced’ into existence. That is a silly argument. Our children should be grateful to us for having been born, just as we ought to be grateful to our own parents, because they caused us to be born. It is good to live. It is the highest, and, in fact, the only good.”
Ursula went on: “It has been my observation that those who hate life are potential murderers. Every tyrant must have hated life, his own and the lives of others.”
William asked furiously: “You say you are grateful to your parents that you were born? Born into such a world?”
Ursula said wearily: “I do not find it ‘such a world’,” as you imply. I find it interesting, fascinating, full of excitement, even when I suffer, and therefore I can endure my suffering. Yes, I am grateful to my parents for my life.”
“Sentimentalism!” he cried. “Only one who has never lived can speak of living with so much fatuousness. What do you know of living? Nothing! But I have noticed that those who do not know what it is to have lived are always the most enthusiastic about the very idea, and can even get lyrical about it.” She lifted her head in a quick movement of offense. He saw this, and his disgust and tiredness became too huge for expression. He could only look at her pale fine features and think how alien they were to him, as if she were of a different species.
He thought: What do they know of the violences, the passions, the terrible stresses and strains, anxieties and drives, that motivate men like me? These pallid, restrained little people, whose dull eyes have never seen lightning, who have never, because of incapacity or circumstance, been confronted with the necessity for desperate decisions and struggles! It is easy for them to smile, in their detestable superior manner, to call another man rampageous or brutal or frantic or extravagant or over-vivid, and despise him with one of their tight little smiles. Their meagre lives have never presented them with enormous problems or aroused them to gigantic rages.
He recalled what she had said earlier, and he exclaimed: “‘Never tell you anything’! Why, I couldn’t tell you ‘anything’! You wouldn’t understand. It would be unintelligible to you!”
He watched her while she bent her head silently and studied her clasped hands. Her composure charged him with fresh anger.
“Yes, life is ‘ill-bred’,” he said, bitterly. “It hasn’t any manners. It doesn’t know anything about ‘form’, the thing you are always talking about. It’s explosive; it’s terrible. And that is why I am trying to save my children from as much of its dangerousness as possible. You wouldn’t understand that, either. But I’ll save them in spite of you.”
“You mean,” she said, “that you want them to be secure? Secure from living?”
“Yes, you can put it that way,” he answered with contempt.
Ursula thought of what her father had once said: “Man constantly craves security, and I am afraid a time will come when a supine and truckling government might try to create security by fiat. That will be the end of American power and zest and inventiveness.” She said: “What you are really saying is that you want to keep the children from living, to shelter them so that they’ll never know what life is like. You are not very consistent.”
She looked at him for a long and thoughtful moment: “I’d much rather that they live, ev
en if it gives them pain. You don’t want them to have pain; but there is no living without pain.”
He laughed caustically. “When one hasn’t known pain, that is easy to say.”
She sighed, and rose. She went to a lamp and turned up the flame. She stood and looked down at it in the deepest depression. She ran her finger over the crystal shade, and said quietly, almost sternly: “We shall never, I understand now, agree about our children. But I want you to know, William, that my children are less important to me than you are.”
He was involuntarily touched, and then his natural combativeness sprang up against her as it always did when she spoke of the children.
“They aren’t important to you because you are cold to them, and they are cold to you because you don’t understand them. You resort to discipline because you have no imagination.”
“Oh, William. Look at our children. Julia is an arrogant little animal, vicious and mean, and it is your fault.” Ursula tried to keep her voice calm, but it shook. “You made her so. And you’ve made Tom into a quarrelsome little beast, too, without the slightest consideration for anyone but himself, and without any manners. And by indulging Matthew in everything, you have robbed him of interest in anything. You are ruining my children, William.”
William’s eyes glittered with an angry defensiveness. “You accuse the children of everything rotten because you don’t like them. You don’t know children at all.”
“I don’t ‘adore’ children in a silly, maudlin fashion—no,” said Ursula. In spite of her understanding and pity, her own temper was rising. She had to persist for her husband’s sake. “I am not blinded by sentimentality. Children are not a special species apart from the human race. They are only people, and if people refuse discipline, if they are not taught form and manners and civilized conduct, then chaos and nihilism inevitably result. My children’s lives are chaotic. And you are the cause of it all.”