‘People don’t know anything about what one thinks except here,
you know, Hugo, and if they don’t know they can’t do any harm.’
‘That’s what Mother says,’ he answered. ‘She says no one can
take one’s inside world away ever; and nothing can matter too
badly while one has that—but she says one must learn to live
outside as well, and school does that—and Guy does that, of course.’
‘Oh, Hugo, what shall I do when you are gone?’
‘I suppose dying is like this,’ Hugo said seriously. ‘One going
away—the other being left behind. It happens to every one and
yet it is just as bad.’
When we went indoors I found Cousin Delia in the drawing-room.
She was standing by the end window, looking out into the rose
garden, and her back was to me.
I called her and she looked round. She held out her hand to me
and I ran up to her.
‘Must Hugo go to school?’ I asked her, and she nodded her head.
I looked up and saw she had been crying.
‘Dear heart, he must—isn’t it cruel?’ she said, and I felt as
though I had said already all that I was going to say, and she
had answered all. I threw my arms round her and burst into tears.
‘Oh, Cousin Delia, I can’t bear it!’ I cried.
She called me her pet and kissed me, and said again to me what
she said to Hugo; it was kinder to him really to send him now,
she said.
‘Life will be hard for Hugo,’ she said. ‘I know that. I have
always known it; but it will be worse if we put it off. We can’t
run away,’ she said. ‘We can’t shut ourselves up for always.
He has to go out into the world and fight some time, you know,
Helen. Oh, my little Hugo—I would save him if I could!’ She turned
suddenly away and sobbed.
I had never seen her cry; she was so quiet and calm as a rule;
my mother called her cold—and it frightened me, I felt more than
ever that something momentous had happened.
That afternoon we sat in our Happy Tree and told stories and
talked very solemnly, about school and life and growing up. After
tea Cousin John took us riding on our ponies. He was kind and
cheerful as he always was, and did not seem to feel that anything
tragic was happening at all. He never understood things as Cousin
Delia did, but we enjoyed our ride and were happier after it;
and the next morning when we woke up, the grief was less.
This sounds, I expect, a great fuss about nothing. What is it,
you will say one little say—boy going to school? But even now,
when I think of that day, it seems just as heart-breaking, just
as momentous, as it did then. It is not, after all, the event
itself that makes the tragedy, or significance, but the effect
of that event on the people concerned. Guy’s going to school
was not tragic; Hugo’s was. It was like going to the war; like
being killed—at least in one way—something terrible to be faced
and gone through with; and he did face it and go through with
it; and it was not less painful because we were children.
V
We were happy again that summer, as the days and weeks passed
by, but the shadow of the coming autumn was over us. We would
remember suddenly in the middle of playing, and stop. One said
without thinking, ‘We will do that in the winter—or when the
nuts are ripe’—or something of that sort, and then remembered
that Hugo would not be there.
Guy was very kind to Hugo.
He said to me:
‘I am sorry for Hugo. You see, I like school. It is different
for me—but Hugo minds things more.’
Once, many years later, he said almost the same again. When he
was in hospital and very ill, he said:
‘I am worried about Hugo—it is different for a tough fellow like
me——but Hugo minds things more.’ And I remembered. It was like
Guy, dear old Guy; he minded things quite enough in his different
way.
The day came at last; the 22nd of September. The last week was
a misery, but it passed too; and Guy and Hugo went off together.
Soon after that I left Yearsly and went to London to my grandmother,
in Campden Hill Square. My mother was there too, mostly, but
she travelled about so much that she did not really live in any
place at all. She organized Women’s Trade Unions and societies
for Citizenship and things of that kind.
My mother had been at Newnham and got a First Class in Economics.
She was very clever and competent. She lectured in Economics
too.
I was a disappointment to her, I know, for I was not clever,
and not interested in those things at all. I don’t think she
would ever have bothered about me much. I don’t think she would
ever have cared about children or wanted to be with them. She
had not time. And I am glad of that, for if she had cared more,
she would not have let me go to Cousin Delia as she did, when
my father died, for she did not like Yearsly nor the Lauriers.
If she had kept me with her I don’t know what would have happened.
I don’t know how I could have grown up at all.
But now when I went back for a bit, it did not matter. It was
really my grandmother who counted, and I loved her. She used
to be at Yearsly sometimes before, when I was there, and I had
gone back to her always from time to time. She was my father’s
mother, Mary Geraldine’s granddaughter. She was not different
and hostile, as my mother was.
I think that my grandmother must have been a rather wonderful
person. My father had loved her very much. I have seen letters
he wrote to her from Afghanistan just before he died, and letters
when he was a boy, before he was married. She had grown up at
Yearsly in the strange time after Mary Geraldine’s death, when
our great-great-grandfather was still alive and kept everything
like a museum of his wife. His son and daughter-in-law lived
with him and their two children. Yet they had not been oppressed
by him. They had grown up unwarped and contented, loving their
home and their strange old grandfather, and when my grandmother
married the chain had not been broken. My father and Cousin John
had been more like brothers than cousins, although they must
have been very unlike in themselves.
I think now that my father’s marriage must have been a sorrow
to her. I don’t think she can have liked my mother really, but
in the time I remember she never showed it. She made it easy
for my mother to come and go as she wished, with no constraint
upon her. She never appeared to disapprove of her—not even of
her neglect of me. Of course I did not understand these things
at the time. It is only now, looking back, that I see what a
difficult situation it must have been, and how well she dealt
with it.
I don’t think it would be true to say that I disliked my mother.
I admired her in a way, and I think her poor opinion of me had
a very strong effect upon me. It was her own doing that I felt
her so definitely in opposition to Cousin Delia, and that inevitably
raised hostility in me. I think now that it was curious in so
clever a woman that she did not conceal her feelings more.
It was only years afterwards that Grandmother told me of my father’s
wish for me to go to Delia when he died. He had sent for Cousin
Delia and asked her to take care of me, to have me with her at
Yearsly as much as she could. My mother did not want me herself,
but she could not forget this.