Sleep in Peace (68 page)

“Laura,” he began. “I've come to tell you. I want you to be the first to know. I've made up my mind. Of course it won't be settled for months yet whether they will accept me.”

Does he intend marriage? thought Laura, startled; and she felt excited, pleased, dismayed and puzzled—for what of Eva Byram? —all at once.

“What do you mean, Ludo?” she said, laughing nervously.

“I shall go and stay there for a few weeks first, and if they approve of me then I shall become an Aspirant,” said Ludo. “Then if they still approve of me I shall become a Novice.”

“A Novice? What are you talking about, Ludo?” cried the horrified Laura.

Ludo in his gentle, stumbling tones explained. He wished to become a member of a celibate Anglican community, a monastery, in southern England—he had visited it on his recent holiday, it seemed, and undergone a preliminary inspection by the Superior. “Of course I've been in correspondence with him a long time,” said Ludo. “I've been a Lay Companion of the Order for several years.”

“You've been planning to become—a
monk
—for several years?” whispered Laura. (Yet in her heart she was not surprised.)

“Yes. But I knew I ought not to leave you while the mill was in such difficulties,” said Ludo soberly.

“But you're going to leave us now—you're going to leave
me
now,” cried Laura, weeping. “Oh, Ludo! I can't bear it!”

“But you're all right now, Laura,” argued Ludo mildly. “You don't need me any more now you're such a celebrity. And the mill is doing nicely. And Geoffrey's all right. I waited to see him take hold properly. He's quite fit to be secretary of the company now. It's more his business than mine now, you know, with him holding a quarter of Mr. Hinchliffe's shares. They can get in a\.works manager, who'll do my work better and cheaper than me. And some other responsibilities of mine are off my shoulders now.” (Eva Byram's child has grown up, I suppose, thought Laura.)
“I've wanted to go for a long time now,” said Ludo in a wistful tone: “But I knew I mustn't go until I had a definite call. I know I'm right to go now,” concluded Ludo simply. “I only hope I shall be found fit for acceptance.”

“Oh, Ludo, you're too good, you're too good,” wept Laura. She pushed away her typewriter, buried her face in her hands and sobbed despairingly. “You're too good. And to go in for all that
rubbish!
To leave us! To cut yourself off from the world! Really I can't bear it!”

“Oh, I shan't be cut off from the world. On the contrary. I was hoping you'd help me to break it to the rest of the family,” said Ludo in a wistful tone. “I'm afraid they may be a bit upset.”

“Upset” was, as usual with Ludo's vocabulary, a word inadequate to the occasion; the family reaction to the news demanded a much stronger expression. To the Armisteads, strongly tinged as they were with northern puritanism, their good, harmless Ludo suddenly appeared as a kind of Romish monstrosity, and they shrank in real horror from the apparition. Gwen for once in her life was daunted, and had absolutely nothing to say; her eyes widened and her cheeks paled, she gazed at her brother with a superstitious terror. As for poor Mr. Armistead, he was dumfounded. He had grumbled at Ludo for forty years, but the thought of doing without his son frightened him. Ludo was part of the landscape, part of life; how could he live without Ludo? Amid all the unfamiliar terms with which his old ears were suddenly bombarded—chastity, poverty, aspirant, novice, lay brother—he wandered with a mind distraught; he really shuddered to hear the words, and could never bring himself to use them, using instead homely circumlocutions. All the family hoped, and indeed believed, that Ludo would be rejected, and not become even an Aspirant; but even should he return to them thus after a few weeks in the monastery, they felt he would never be the same old Ludo. He would be a stranger, changed by this eerie experience; something like Lazarus or Proserpine. His mere intention to undergo
the experience set him apart; so far apart that it seemed useless to remonstrate with him, for he would not hear their arguments—even if they felt it right to argue, which Laura emphatically did not. They sorrowed, therefore, in a perplexed silence, from afar. The greatest sympathy for Ludo's action in Blackshaw House came, oddly enough, from Geoffrey, who asked his uncle a good many questions about the Community and listened with more interest than he usually accorded his elders to the replies. Ludo seemed not to mind, even positively to welcome, Geoffrey's enquiries, though Laura shuddered at her nephew's tactless candour. Mr. Armistead looked up uneasily, as if some intimate physical concern had been discussed at the dinner-table, and Gwen tried to turn the conversation. Madeline sat through these Community dialogues with an odd expression on her strong round face, an expression which Laura presently discovered to be disgust. For one evening Madeline presented herself unexpectedly at the door of Laura's studio, and remarked in a firm abrupt tone:

“Do you want Uncle Ludo to go into a monastery?”

“No!” exclaimed Laura.

“Then why don't you try to stop him? You have a great deal of influence with him,” said Madeline.

“I don't think it right to thwart people, to try to force them into a certain path agreeable to myself, against their wishes,” said Laura sternly. “Life has at least taught me that.”

“And what about your own wishes? Aren't you allowed to fight for them?” demanded Madeline.

Laura hesitated, rather at a loss.

“Ha!” said Madeline in a tone of disdain; she swung round and clattered away down the stairs.

A week later Ludo left for his preliminary sojourn with the Community. Laura spent the preceding night in anguish, pacing up and down her room. To lose Ludo was a blow she really had not bargained for; she had been prepared, she thought, for everything
else, but not for that. Presently she could not bear her trouble any longer; she went down to the main landing and paused outside Ludo's door. To wake a sleeping person for her own convenience was quite abhorrent to Laura, and she stood outside her brother's door, the soft wool of the doormat brushing her ankles, for several minutes before at last, telling herself that it was perhaps the last night Ludo would ever spend under the same roof, the last time she would ever have the chance to speak to him thus intimately, she tapped softly and went in. Ludo was kneeling by his bed in prayer. He sprang up at her entrance; Laura, shocked by her own lack of consideration, stammered apologies and was about to withdraw when suddenly all her lifelong love for her brother, all she owed to his tender care, all the memories of their childhood together, flooded her heart with an unbearable anguish; she burst into tears, sprang forward and took him in her arms.

“I can't bear to lose you,” she wept.

“But you'll be all right now, Laura,” repeated Ludo. “You have so many friends now, artists and writers and people in London.”

“They aren't you,” said Laura. “Don't leave me, Ludo. Don't go.” She looked up hopefully into his face, and saw the dark, unhappy, thwarted look cloud his face at her words. “Of course you must go if you want to go, Ludo,” she added hastily. She was rewarded by seeing his eyes clear. Driven, partly by a genuine scruple, partly by a desire to play her last card before it was too late, Laura buried her face in his shoulder and whispered:

“What about Eva Byram?”

There was a pause. “The Father Superior knows all my life, Laura,” said Ludo soberly. “Since he is willing to test me to see if I'm suitable to be an Aspirant, you must see that he can't disapprove.”

“Well,” began Laura. But what's the use, she thought; he wants to go, and I should be a selfish tyrant if I tried to stop him. She gave him a last fond hug and kiss, and said: “Good-bye, Ludo.”

“How do you mean, good-bye?” said Ludo cheerfully. “I shall often see you, Laura.”

“Often?”

“Well, sometimes,” substituted Ludo.

Laura groaned and went away.

Next day Ludo left Hudley for the Community. After a month's probation he was accepted as an Aspirant.

He had transferred his hundred shares in Messrs. Armistead and Hinchliffe to Laura before he went, and successfully urged his father to make her a Director in his place; but his departure brought Laura not more, but much less, in contact with Blackshaw Mills and Blackshaw House.

Indeed her life withdrew itself increasingly from her native town. There was now nobody for whom Laura felt a deep affection in Hudley, and she found herself spending less and less time there. Her work was in considerable demand, and its payment, as payment for art of any kind went, very satisfactory. By a natural development she began to travel a good deal; to lecture in the provinces, on business or pleasure to London; to various towns of Yorkshire which she was engaged in drawing. Since Blackshaw Mills was now more or less on its feet again, the family no longer needed her assistance; she bought a car, and began to be extravagant about her clothes. Something in her heart had hardened, or perhaps atrophied, with the departure of Ludo; she no longer felt part of the Blackshaw household as before. This feeling was accentuated by the treatment she received there. After the first shock, and a few weeks of gloom, on his son's departure, Mr. Armistead gradually readjusted himself to life again; he engaged, as Ludo had advised, a works manager, and this man and Geoffrey began presently to run the whole business. Geoffrey and Geoffrey's affairs began to loom the largest in the old man's mind, to the exclusion of his own children; this was natural enough, since Geoffrey was always at hand, while Ludo and Laura were absent. So Laura began to feel almost a visitor when she returned
to Blackshaw House. She reflected sometimes with an ironic amusement, directed quite as much against herself as against her family, on the changes in her position there. She had been by turns the darling little pet, the difficult would-be artist, the useful wage-earner, the beloved success of whom they were all so proud; now she was the rather tiresome celebrity, whose wishes had to be scrupulously respected, though they upset the peaceful routine of the home. There was quite a conspiratorial air about Gwen, Mildred and Geoffrey nowadays if Laura, as sometimes happened, appeared at home unexpectedly and asked for a meal. They tended to raise their eyebrows and exchange glances; while Mr. Armistead now took her continued success for granted, and had rather lost interest in the details of her career. Madeline was the only person of the Blackshaw household, indeed, who could understand those details, and Madeline was almost never there.

Laura had returned home the night before from a week's arduous sketching at Ha worth—she was preparing an illustrated edition of the novels of the Brontes. The June weather had been unusually brilliant, and Laura had worked extremely hard; the emotional experience of prolonged contact with those three tormented souls had tired her greatly. She therefore took a morning in bed, and lay turning over in her mind the material she had secured, the various changes of plan it would necessitate, and the letter she must write about these to her publisher, which she had indeed returned to Blackshaw House to write.

After a while she roused herself and read the morning newspapers, which for the last few days she had missed. This morning the news seemed even worse than usual. The attack on freedom of opinion, the special feature of the decade, had sprung up with fresh virulence in yet another quarter. It seemed the British Fascists had held a meeting in Glympia the night before last; Communists
had gathered outside in a counter-demonstration; there had been disorder involving torn clothing, bruised limbs and razor blades. Inside the hall there had occurred what the
Yorkshire Post
reported mildly as
several disturbances;
it seemed that anyone who heckled Sir Oswald Mosley was ejected by the Fascist stewards with what a Conservative Member of Parliament did not hesitate to call
unmerciful brutality
. It was, said he:
a deeply shocking scene for an Englishman to see in London
…
the Blackshirts behaved like bullies and cads
.

Laura boiled with impotent fury as she read. What is one to do with such people, she thought; why have these people, most of them young lads at the idealistic age when one's mind is filled with noble dreams of a better world, turned into brutes? Why does everyone nowadays want to coerce? Why are they rejecting all that my generation has fought for? Why do they all seek dictatorships, whether of a person or a class? What can one do to stem the tide? She could not endure to lie there, supine and slothful, any longer; she sprang up, dressed rapidly, tidied her room, tried to compose her letter, tried to examine her drawings, but could not withdraw from external events sufficiently to concentrate on either, and went down gladly to lunch when summoned by the bell.

Since it was a Saturday, Madeline was there for once; she looked, thought Laura, rather pale, and her greeting was even less effusive than usual, if that were possible. Gwen, too, seemed ill at ease, and her eyelids appeared reddened. Mr. Armistead, however, was quite blithe, and began to talk to Laura about Haworth, where it seemed he had stayed as a child, with an affectionate interest which Laura found refreshing. She attributed his interest to the absence of Geoffrey, and remarked casually:

“Geoffrey not in to-day?”

Madeline started, and Gwen frowned; Laura saw that she had made a
gaffe
, and glided off to other subjects.

When they had finished the meal and left Mr. Armistead lying
down for his afternoon sleep, Gwen said with a conciliatory air, as the three women moved into the drawing-room:

“I've ordered a cup of tea. I thought you'd like one, Laura. Geoffrey's in bed.”

“In bed?” said Laura.

“Yes—he's not very well,” said Gwen.

Her tone was so odd that Laura was sure she was lying. She looked at her sister in perplexity, and then transferred her glance to Madeline.