country for a holiday. For the first three years of Laura’s London life
they went as a matter of course to Lady Place. There once more arose the
problem of how two children of one sex can play nicely with a much
younger child of the other. Fancy and Marion played at tea-parties under
the weeping ash, and Titus was the butler with a tin tray. Titus would
presently run off and play by himself at soldiers, beating martial
tattoos upon the tray. But now there was no danger of the youngest
member of the party falling into the pond, for Aunt Lolly was always on
guard.
Laura enjoyed the visits to Lady Place, but her enjoyment did not go
very deep. The knowledge that she was now a visitor where she had
formerly been at home seemed to place a clear sheet of glass between her
and her surroundings. She felt none of the grudge of the dispossessed;
she scarcely gave a thought to the old days. It was as if in the agony
of leaving Lady Place after her father’s death she had said good-bye so
irremediably that she could never really come there again.
But the visits to Lady Place came to a sad end, for in 1905 James died
suddenly of heartfailure. Sibyl decided that she could not go on living
alone in the country. A manager was found for the brewery, Lady Place
was let unfurnished upon a long lease, and Sibyl and the four-years-old
heir of the Willowes name and traditions moved to a small house in
Hampstead. Sibyl had proposed to sell some of the furniture, for there
was a great deal more of it than she needed, and most of it was too
large to fit into her new dwelling. This project was opposed by Henry,
and with considerable heat. The family establishment must, he admitted,
be broken up, but he would allow no part of it to be alienated. All the
furniture that could not be found room for at Hampstead or at Apsley
Terrace must be stored till Titus should be of an age to resume the
tenure of Lady Place.
To Laura it seemed as though some familiar murmuring brook had suddenly
gone underground. There it flowed, silenced and obscured, until the
moment when it should reappear and murmur again between green banks. She
thought of Titus as a grown man and herself as an old woman meeting
among the familiar belongings. She believed that when she was old the
ghost-like feeling that distressed her would matter less. She hoped that
she might not die before that day, if it were only that she would
remember so well, as Titus could not, how the furniture stood in the
rooms and the pictures hung on the walls.
But by then, she said to herself, Titus would have a wife with tastes of
her own. Sibyl would have liked to alter several things, but tradition
had been too strong for her. It would be a very different matter in
twenty years’ time. The chairs and tables and cabinets would come out
blinking and forgetful from their long storage in darkness. They would
have lost the individuality by which they had made certain corners so
surely their own. The Lady Place she had known was over. She could
remember it if she pleased; but she must not think of it.
Meanwhile Emma’s harp trailed its strings in her bedroom. Ratafee was
removed to Hampstead. Titus had insisted upon this.
She wondered if Henry felt as she did. He had shown a great deal of
Willowes spirit over the furniture, but otherwise he had not expressed
himself. In person Henry, so it was said, resembled his grandfather who
had made the move from Dorset to Somerset--the sacrilegious move which
the home-loving of the Willoweses had so soon sanctified that in the
third generation she was feeling like this about Lady Place. Henry
seemed to resemble his grandfather in spirit also. He could house all
the family traditions in his practical mind, and for the rest talk about
bricks and mortar. He concerned himself with the terms of Sibyl’s lease,
the agreement with the manager of the brewery, and the question of
finding a satisfactory place to carry his family to for the holidays.
After some experiments they settled down to a routine that with a few
modifications for the sake of variety or convenience served them for the
next fifteen years. In spring they went to some moderately popular
health resort and stayed in a hotel, for it was found that the
uncertainty of an English spring, let alone the uncertainty of a
Christian Easter, made lodgings unsatisfactory at that time of year. In
summer they went into lodgings, or took a furnished house in some
seaside village without any attractions. They did this, not to be
economical--there was no need for economy--but because they found rather
plain dull holidays the most refreshing. Henry was content with a little
unsophisticated golf and float-fishing. The children bathed and played
on the beach and went on bicycling expeditions; and Caroline and Laura
watched the children bathe and play, and replenished their stock of
underclothes, and rested from the strain of London housekeeping.
Sometimes Caroline did a little reading. Sometimes Sibyl and Titus
stayed with them, or Titus stayed with them alone while his mother paid
visits.
Laura looked forward with pleasure to the summer holidays (the Easter
holidays she never cared about, as she had a particular dislike for
palms); but after the first shock of arrival and smelling the sea, the
days seemed to dribble out very much like the days in London. When the
end came, and she looked back from the wagonette over the past weeks,
she found that after all she had done few of the things she intended to
do. She would have liked to go by herself for long walks inland and find
strange herbs, but she was too useful to be allowed to stray. She had
once formed an indistinct project of observing limpets. But for all her
observations she discovered little save that if you sit very still for a
long time the limpet will begin to move sideways, and that it is almost
impossible to sit very still for a long time and keep your attention
fixed upon such a small object as a limpet without feeling slightly
hypnotised and slightly sick. On the lowest count she seldom contrived
to read all the books or to finish all the needlework which she had
taken with her. And the freckles on her nose mocked her with the
receptivity of her skin compared to the dullness of her senses.
They were submerged in the usual quiet summer holidays when the war
broke out. The parish magazine said: ‘The vicar had scarcely left East
Bingham when war was declared.’ The vicar was made of stouter stuff than
they. He continued his holiday, but the Willoweses went back to London.
Laura had never seen London in August before. It had an arrested look,
as though the war were a kind of premature autumn. She was
extraordinarily moved; as they drove across the river from Waterloo she
wanted to cry. That same evening Fancy went upstairs and scrubbed the
boxroom floor for the sake of practice. She upset the bucket, and large
damp patches appeared on the ceiling of Laura’s room.
For a month Fancy behaved like a cat whose kittens have been drowned. If
her family had not been so taken up with the war they would have been
alarmed at this change in her demeanour. As it was, they scarcely
noticed it. When she came in very late for lunch and said: ‘I am going
to marry Kit Bendigo on Saturday,’ Henry said, ‘Very well, my dear. It’s
your day, not mine,’ and ordered champagne to be brought up. For a
moment Laura thought she heard her father speaking. She knew that Henry
disapproved of Kit Bendigo as a husband for Fancy: Willoweses did not
mate with Bendigos. But now he was more than resigned--he was ready. And
he swallowed the gnat as unswervingly as the camel, which, if Laura had
wanted to be ill-natured just then, would have surprised her as being
the greater feat. Willoweses do not marry at five days’ notice. But
Fancy was married on Saturday, and her parents discovered that a hasty
wedding can cost quite as much as a formal one. In the mood that they
were in this afforded them some slight satisfaction.
Kit Bendigo was killed in December 1916. Fancy received the news calmly;
two years’ war-work and a daughter thrown in had steadied her nerves.
Kit was a dear, of course, poor old Kit. But there was a war on, and
people get killed in wars. If it came to that, she was working in a
high-explosive shed herself. Caroline could not understand her eldest
daughter. She was baffled and annoyed by the turn her own good sense
inherited had taken. The married nun looked at the widowed amazon and
refused battle. At least Fancy might stay in her very expensive flat and
be a mother to her baby. But Fancy drew on a pair of heavy gauntlet
gloves and went to France to drive motor lorries. Caroline dared not say
a word.
The war had no such excitements for Laura. Four times a week she went to
a depot and did up parcels. She did them up so well that no one thought
of offering her a change of work. The parcel-room was cold and
encumbered, early in the war some one had decorated the walls with
recruiting posters. By degrees these faded. The ruddy young man and his
Spartan mother grew pale, as if with fear, and Britannia’s scarlet cloak
trailing on the waters bleached to a cocoa-ish pink. Laura watched them
discolour with a muffled heart. She would not allow herself the cheap
symbolism they provoked. Time will bleach the scarlet from young men’s
cheeks, and from Britannia’s mantle. But blood was scarlet as ever, and
she believed that, however despairing her disapproval, that blood was
being shed for her.
She continued to do up parcels until the eleventh day of November 1918.
Then, when she heard the noise of cheering and the sounding of hooters,
she left her work and went home. The house was empty. Every one had gone
out to rejoice. She went up to her room and sat down on the bed. She
felt cold and sick, she trembled from head to foot as once she had done
after witnessing a dog fight. All the hooters were sounding, they seemed
to domineer over the noises of rejoicing with sarcastic emphasis. She
got up and walked about the room. On the mantelpiece was a photograph of
Titus. ‘Well,’ she said to it, ‘you’ve escaped killing, anyhow.’ Her
voice sounded harsh and unreal, she thought the walls of her room were
shaking at the concussion, like stage walls. She lay down upon her bed,
and presently fainted.
When she came to herself again she had been discovered by Caroline and
put to bed with influenza. She was grateful for this, and for the
darkened room and the cool clinking tumblers. She was even grateful for
the bad dreams which visited her every night and sent up her
temperature. By their aid she was enabled to stay in bed for a
fortnight, a thing she had not done since she came to London.
When she went downstairs again she found Henry and Caroline talking of
better days to come. The house was unaltered, yet it had a general air
of refurbishment. She also, after her fortnight in bed, felt somehow
refurbished, and was soon drawn into the talk of better days. There was
nothing immoderate in the family display of satisfaction. Henry still
found frowning matter in the _Times_, and Caroline did not relinquish a
single economy. But the satisfaction was there, a demure Willowes-like
satisfaction in the family tree that had endured the gale with an
unflinching green heart. Laura saw nothing in this to quarrel with. She
was rather proud of the Willowes war record; she admired the stolid
decorum which had mastered four years of disintegration, and was stolid
and decorous still. A lady had inquired of Henry: ‘What do you do in
air-raids? Do you go down to the cellar or up to the roof?’ ‘We do
neither,’ Henry had replied. ‘We stay where we are.’ A thrill had passed
through Laura when she heard this statement of the Willowes mind. But
afterwards she questioned the validity of the thrill. Was it nothing
more than the response of her emotions to other old and honourable
symbols such as the trooping of the colours and the fifteenth chapter of
Corinthians, symbols too old and too honourable to have called out her
thoughts? She saw how admirable it was for Henry and Caroline to have
stayed where they were. But she was conscious, more conscious than they
were, that the younger members of the family had somehow moved into new
positions. And she herself, had she not slightly strained against her
moorings, fast and far sunk as they were? But now the buffeting waves
withdrew, and she began to settle back into her place, and to see all
around her once more the familiar undisturbed shadows of familiar
things. Outwardly there was no difference between her and Henry and
Caroline in their resumption of peace. But they, she thought, had done
with the war, whereas she had only shelved it, and that by an accident
of consciousness.
When the better days to come came, they proved to be modelled as closely
as possible upon the days that were past. It was astonishing what little
difference differences had made. When they went back to East
Bingham--for owing to its military importance, East Bingham had been
unsuited for holidays--there were at first a good many traces of war
lying about, such as sandbags and barbed-wire entanglements. But on the
following summer the sandbags had rotted and burst and the barbed-wire
had been absorbed into the farmer’s fences. So, Laura thought, such
warlike phenomena as Mr. Wolf-Saunders, Fancy’s second husband, and
Jemima and Rosalind, Fancy’s two daughters, might well disappear off the
family landscape. Mr. Wolf-Saunders recumbent on the beach was indeed
much like a sandbag, and no more arresting to the eye. Jemima and
Rosalind were more obtrusive. Here was a new generation to call her Aunt
Lolly and find her as indispensable as did the last.
‘It is quite like old times,’ said Caroline, who sat working beside her.
‘Isn’t it, Lolly?’
‘Except for these anachronisms,’ said Laura.
Caroline removed the seaweed which Jemima had stuffed into her work-bag.
‘Bless them!’ she said absently. ‘We shall soon be back in town again.’
_Part 2_
The Willoweses came back to London about the second week in September.
For many years the children’s schooling had governed the date of their
return; and when the children had grown too old for school, the habit
had grown too old to be broken. There was also a further reason. The
fallen leaves, so Henry and Caroline thought, made the country unhealthy
after the second week in September. When Laura was younger she had
sometimes tried to argue that, even allowing the unhealthiness of fallen
leaves, leaves at that time of year were still green upon the trees.
This was considered mere casuistry. When they walked in Kensington
Gardens upon the first Sunday morning after their return, Caroline would
point along the tarnishing vistas and say: ‘You see, Lolly, the leaves
are beginning to fall. It was quite time to come home.’
It was useless to protest that autumn begins earlier in London than it
does in the country. That it did so, Laura knew well. That was why she
disliked having to come back; autumn boded her no good, and it was hard
that by a day’s train-journey she should lose almost a month’s reprieve.
Obediently looking along the tarnishing vistas, she knew that once again
she was in for it.
What It was exactly, she would have found hard to say. She sometimes
told herself that it must be the yearly reverberation of those miserable
first months in London when her sorrow for her father’s death was still
fresh. No other winter had been so cold or so long, not even the long
cold winters of the war. Yet now her thoughts of Everard were mellowed
and painless, and she had long ago forgiven her sorrow. Had the coming
of autumn quickened in her only an experienced grief she would not have
dreaded it thus, nor felt so restless and tormented.
Her disquiet had no relevance to her life. It arose out of the ground
with the smell of the dead leaves: it followed her through the darkening
streets; it confronted her in the look of the risen moon. ‘Now! Now!’ it
said to her: and no more. The moon seemed to have torn the leaves from
the trees that it might stare at her more imperiously. Sometimes she
tried to account for her uneasiness by saying that she was growing old,
and that the year’s death reminded her of her own. She compared herself
to the ripening acorn that feels through windless autumnal days and
nights the increasing pull of the earth below. That explanation was very
poetical and suitable. But it did not explain what she felt. She was not
wildly anxious either to die or to live; why, then, should she be rent
by this anxiety?
At these times she was subject to a peculiar kind of day-dreaming, so
vivid as to be almost a hallucination: that she was in the country, at
dusk, and alone, and strangely at peace. She did not recall the places
which she had visited in holiday-time, these reproached her like
opportunities neglected. But while her body sat before the first fires
and was cosy with Henry and Caroline, her mind walked by lonely
sea-bords, in marshes and fens, or came at nightfall to the edge of a
wood. She never imagined herself in these places by daylight. She never
thought of them as being in any way beautiful. It was not beauty at all
that she wanted, or, depressed though she was, she would have bought a
ticket to somewhere or other upon the Metropolitan railway and gone out
to see the recumbent autumnal graces of the country-side. Her mind was
groping after something that eluded her experience, a something that
was shadowy and menacing, and yet in some way congenial; a something
that lurked in waste places, that was hinted at by the sound of water
gurgling through deep channels and by the voices of birds of ill-omen.
Loneliness, dreariness, aptness for arousing a sense of fear, a kind of
ungodly hallowedness--these were the things that called her thoughts
away from the comfortable fireside.
In this mood she would sometimes go off to explore among the City
churches, or to lose herself in the riverside quarters east of the Pool.
She liked to think of the London of Defoe’s _Journal_, and to fancy
herself back in the seventeenth century, when, so it seemed to her,
there were still darknesses in men’s minds. Once, hemmed in by the
jostling tombstones at Bunhill Fields, she almost pounced on the clue to
her disquiet; and once again in the goods-yard of the G.W.R., where she
had gone to find, not her own secret, but a case of apples for Caroline.
As time went on Laura grew accustomed to this recurrent autumnal fever.
It was as much a sign of the season as the falling leaves or the first
frost. Before the end of November it was all over and done with. The
next moon had no message for her. Her rambles in the strange places of
the mind were at an end. And if she still went on expeditions to
Rotherhithe or the Jews’ Burying-Ground, she went in search for no more
than a little diversion. Nothing was left but cold and sleet and the
knowledge that all this fuss had been about nothing. She fortified
herself against the dismalness of this reaction by various small
self-indulgences. Out of these she had contrived for herself a sort of
mental fur coat. Roasted chestnuts could be bought and taken home for
bedroom eating. Second-hand book-shops were never so enticing; and the
combination of east winds and London water made it allowable to
experiment in the most expensive soaps. Coming back from her
expeditions, westward from the city with the sunset in her eyes, or
eastward from a waning Kew, she would pause for a sumptuous and furtive
tea, eating _marrons glacés_ with a silver fork in the reflecting warm
glitter of a smart pastry-cook’s. These things were exciting enough to
be pleasurable, for she kept them secret. Henry and Caroline would
scarcely have minded if they had known. They were quite indifferent as
to where and how she spent her afternoons; they felt no need to question
her, since they could be sure that she would do nothing unsuitable or
extravagant. Laura’s expeditions were secret because no one asked her
where she had been. Had they asked, she must have answered. But she did
not examine too closely into this; she liked to think of them as secret.
One manifestation of the fur-coat policy, however, could not be kept
from their knowledge, and that manifestation slightly qualified their
trust that Laura would do nothing unsuitable or extravagant.
Except for a gradual increment of Christmas and birthday presents,
Laura’s room had altered little since the day it ceased to be the small
spare-room and became hers. But every winter it blossomed with an
unseasonable luxury of flowers, profusely, shameless as a greenhouse.
‘Why, Lolly! Lilies at this time of year!’ Caroline would say, not
reproachfully, but still with a consciousness that in the drawing-room
there were dahlias, and in the dining-room a fern, and in her own
sitting-room, where she did the accounts, neither ferns nor flowers.
Then Laura would thrust the lilies into her hands; and she would take
them to show that she had not spoken with ill-will. Besides, Lolly would
really see more of them if they were in the drawing-room. And the next
day she would meet Laura on the stairs carrying azaleas. On one occasion
even Henry had noticed the splendour of the lilies: red lilies, angular,
authoritative in form and colour like cardinal’s hats.
‘Where do these come from?’ Caroline had asked, knowing well that
nothing so costly in appearance could come from her florist.
‘From Africa,’ Laura had answered, pressing the firm, wet stalks into
her hand.
‘Oh well, I daresay they are quite common flowers there,’ said Caroline
to herself, trying to gloss over the slight awkwardness of accepting a
trifle so needlessly splendid.
Henry had also asked where they came from.
‘From Anthos, I believe,’ said Caroline.
‘Ah!’ said Henry, and roused the coins in his trousers pocket.
‘It’s rather naughty of Lolly. Would you like me just to hint to her
that she mustn’t be quite so reckless?’
‘No. Better not. No need for her to worry about such things.’
Husband and wife exchanged a glance of compassionate understanding. It
was better not. Much better that Lolly should not be worried about money
matters. She was safe in their hands. They could look after Lolly.
Henry was like a wall, and Caroline’s breasts were like towers.
They condoned this extravagance, yet they mistrusted it. Time justified
them in their mistrust. Like many stupid people, they possessed acute
instincts. ‘He that is unfaithful in little things ...’ Caroline would
say when the children forgot to wind up their watches. Their instinct
told them that the same truth applies to extravagance in little things.
They were wiser than they knew. When Laura’s extravagance in great
things came it staggered them so completely that they forgot how
judiciously they had suspected it beforehand.
It befell in the winter of 1921. The war was safely over, so was their
silver wedding, so was Marion’s first confinement. Titus was in his
third year at Oxford, Sibyl was at last going grey, Henry might be made
a judge at any moment. The Trade Returns and the Stock Exchange were not
all that they should be, and there was always the influenza. But Henry
was doing well enough to be lenient to his investments, and Aunt Lucilla
and her fortune had been mercifully released. In the coming spring
Caroline proposed to have the house thoroughly done up. The lesser
renovations she was getting over beforehand, and that was why Laura had
gone out before the shops shut to show Mr. Bunting a pair of massy
candlesticks and to inquire how much he would charge for re-plating
them. His estimate was high, too high to be accepted upon her own
responsibility. She decided to carry the candlesticks back and consult
Caroline.
Mr. Bunting lived in the Earls Court Road, rather a long way off for
such a family friend. But she had plenty of time for walking back, and
for diversion she thought she would take a circuitous route, including
the two foxes who guard the forsaken approach in Holland Park and the
lane beside the Bayswater Synagogue. It was in Moscow Road that she
began to be extravagant. But when she walked into the little shop she
had no particular intention of extravagance, for Caroline’s parcel hung
remindingly upon her arm, and the shop itself, half florist and half
greengrocer, had a simple appearance.