The Only Poet (38 page)

‘Don't you think, dear,' she asked her, ‘that you would do better to choose some occupation in which your appearance would not be so important?'

This seemed to irritate Ursula, yet Gerda felt that she should have understood. When Gerda had gone to see Ursula act she had wanted to cover her eyes every time her sister had come on the stage, there had seemed something so odd and disturbing about her. Surely she must know how terribly different from other people she was? If she did not, it must be because she was so far from the normal that she had no standards. There was certainly something unpleasant about the doggedness with which she went on hunting for an engagement after she should have seen that a dramatic career was hopeless. She did eventually get one, but it was in a painfully second-rate company, and Gerda very sensibly pointed this out to her. Ursula seemed to lose pride in it, after that, and resigned during rehearsals, greatly to Gerda's relief. She then tried to make Ursula do what she had always wanted her to do, which was to become a clerk in the Post Office. It was not much of a career, but then Ursula had lost the chance of going to a University by her naughtiness at school, and she must take the consequences. It happened, however, that just at this time Ursula was given the opportunity to write an article for an evening paper, and she wrote it so brilliantly that she was given a post on the paper. Everybody was pleased except Gerda. She was enormously proud of her sister's work, but she also knew that too early and too easily won success would be the worst thing in the world for Ursula's undisciplined temperament. As it turned out afterwards, she had good ground for her fears.

The evidence for that accumulated very quickly. Ursula began to make her work an excuse for being tiresome at home. She began to pretend that she could not do her work unless her mother exercised some self-control and ceased to give way to hysteria and melancholy. That was obviously not the right thing for a daughter to say, and Gerda stopped that briskly enough. But her work itself was a worry. She expressed her views in such a downright way, and they were of a revolutionary sort that made Gerda wince. She had hated with the most passionate loathing her poverty-stricken home, with her disreputable father, her melancholic mother, poor, moping Ellida, and queer, rebellious Ursula. She would have given anything to be born again into a respectable family, such as the other girls at school had had, with a stout father who went to the City every day, a mother who was handsome and well-dressed, and brothers and sisters who were tidy and popular. But Ursula seemed at odds with the world of people who were like that, to be destroying all chance of the family getting into that world through social contacts. Gerda did her best for her sister's literary work. She read all her articles, telling her at once when they dropped below standard, and trying to prevent her from getting conceited. But she could not help feeling that it would all end badly.

But she was even more worried about Ursula's social life. The two sisters were asked out a great deal. Ellida was not; she was too strained and nervous to be readily liked. But the other two were always being invited to parties, and at these Ursula always behaved so unsatisfactorily that Gerda suffered agonies on her account. To begin with, it always seemed to Gerda that Ursula looked all wrong. One could not quite say what it was, but she was odd, she was not like other people. Gerda used to hover round her before they started, trying to make her look right, and she used to be tiresomely ungrateful. Once somebody lent her a Vionnet model to copy, and she had it made up in white crepe. Gerda almost cried when she saw it. It had loose wings on each side that parted and showed the arms up to the shoulder. It is true that women in evening dress usually have bare arms, but somehow she could not endure Ursula to do it, so she went straight away and got a needle and thread, and began sewing the wings together. At this Ursula gave way to an attack of temper that Gerda, for all her love for her sister, felt a little bit disgusting. Ursula would not let the sewing be finished, and just as if she were a naughty little girl again, she slapped her. Poor Gerda had hardly been able to get through the evening. Ursula had started out flushed and over-excited, and her arms had looked dreadful. They must have done so, for people kept on staring at her; and they would keep on making her talk, and she had not the sense to see they only wanted to make her show off and then laugh at her. She hated the way they made a laughing stock of Ursula at parties, and of course she could not do anything about it in other people's houses. When Ursula brought guests home, Gerda could more or less keep control of things. She always sat close by Ursula and when it was needed said something quiet and sensible that put matters on a proper footing. But when they were the guests of others she could do nothing, until they got into a taxi to go home, when she would try to make the girl realize what a fool she had made of herself. But that was uphill work. However kindly and tactfully she tried to do the disagreeable business, Ursula showed a childish resentment that made one feel it was useless.

That was a trial to Gerda's nerves; but not so much as the evenings when Ursula went out alone. No one was happier than Gerda that her little sister should have a gay time, but these occasions filled her with sick apprehension. She used to sit up reading by the fire, wondering whether the hosts were people that it was really wise for Ursula to know, and, as the hours went by and it drew near eleven o'clock, whether she was not staying monstrously late. Before her there appeared a humiliating picture of a drawing-room with everybody gone home except Ursula, who sat there talking and laughing in her over-excited way, while the host and hostess looked stonily at the clock. When Ursula came in she used to tax her with these things. ‘Did everybody else go first? Are they really nice people?' she would ask. At first Ursula used to answer sunnily and reassuringly, but then she began to be impatient, and soon she was taking it worse and worse. With horror Gerda slowly realized that there must be something very wrong in Ursula's life, for she began to behave in the strangest way. As soon as Gerda started to ask harmless and necessary questions she used to throw herself down in her chair, covering her face and sobbing as if she were utterly tired out and utterly desperate.

Very soon Gerda knew that her suspicions were fully justified. One day Ursula ran away with a married man, Gordon Ayliss, the artist. It was an act of madness. There she was with a brilliant career opening in front of her, and a perfectly happy home life, and she had made this suicidal dive into an illicit love affair, which had even less promise of happiness than most, since Ayliss had run away with other young women and made them very unhappy. Mrs Heming went almost mad with grief, and Ellida, who had a peculiar horror of sex, turned from her sister in a pallid stupor of disgust. But suddenly Gerda knew that though they were feeling what was right and natural she could not feel it with them. She discovered that she loved Ursula far more, even, than she supposed. She remembered – and at the memory the blood seemed to leave her heart for a minute and rush down into her hands and her feet and back again – how warm and sweet her little sister used to be when she was tiny. She could not have what survived of that darling companion, however much it had let itself be soiled by the world, cast out into the darkness. Moreover, she felt that Ursula's going had left a hole in the air of the house, that stood before her in her sister's shape, forever calling her to mind, but empty of her sister's beloved substance. In spite of all her mother's shrieks and Ellida's peevish shudders, she went to see Ursula, who ran to her arms with a lack of shame that she found maddeningly characteristic in its oddity, its inability to appreciate the normal and proper view of things. And a month or two afterwards, Ursula, just as characteristically, tarnished Gerda's sacrifice by starting to have a child.

At this Gerda suffered the last bitterness of agony. The birth of this child fixed on her family for ever the stigma of undesirability that she had struggled from her infancy to remove. It took from her all hope of ever breaking into that world of conventional homes for which she longed far more than she had yet longed for Heaven. In her bed at night she sometimes envisaged the sort of home which she had seen when her schoolfellows asked her to tea, when they had thick red wallpaper in the dining-room and a massive sideboard glittering with silver-boxes and decanters, and in the drawing-room a grand piano; and she wept like an exiled angel. She remembered how she had always felt humiliated because her mother had no ‘At Home' day, and though she laughed at herself for that she knew that it still humiliated her. Nevertheless she still wanted to cherish her little sister, to be a shield between that dark and merry thing and the destruction the others wished for it. She felt, too, as if some higher power compelled her to stand by Ursula's side just then, as if an essential part of her destiny would escape her did she not take her place there. The approaching birth of the child could not, she thought, have meant more to her had it been she who was to be the mother. It was not only that she felt full of the tenderest love for the little creature; she was also in a state of rapt anticipation regarding the actual hour of its birth. Of course she shrank from thinking of it, because she could not bear to think of her little sister undergoing such terrible pain. Yet she was sure that at that moment something wonderful was going to happen. The universe would be struck by a blow, and shattered, and then remade in a new and beautiful and purified form. Thinking of it, her heart used to beat quicker and quicker till she had to let her head droop back and draw in her breath through her parted lips.

She could no more have kept away from Ursula during this time than she could have done without food or water or air. In spite of Mrs Heming's protests, which were by this time almost maniacal, she went to see Ursula before the baby was born, at the watering-place where she was hiding. It was something of an anticlimax when she got there because Ursula had not yet abandoned her repellently odd point of view regarding her situation. With amazing egotism she seemed to consider that the welfare of herself and her child ought to count exclusively at this time. When Gerda told her how Mrs Heming was going about the streets of the suburb where they lived with tears running down her cheeks, Ursula said grimly, ‘That's going to do a lot to keep down scandal,' and began complaining about her mother's lack of self-control. She did not seem to see that she was the person who was the proper object of blame in the family, and that of course everybody else was in the right. Gerda spent the weekend trying quietly to make her see things in the normal way, and she seemed more subdued by Sunday night. But then they walked down to the station and the sea air gave her better spirits. The train was late in starting, and they had some moments to pass with Gerda leaning out of the window and Ursula standing on the platform below. ‘Look at the evening star,' said Ursula, and turned away to regard it. As she stood there the serene absorption of her profile and the straightness of her back filled Gerda with despair. She must do something to make her understand. Leaning further out of the window, she began gravely, ‘I don't think you realize what you've done, dear,' when Ursula, not hearing, and still looking at the star, said, ‘I wonder if I will die.'

Gerda dropped back into her seat. It had never occurred to her that Ursula might die. Thereafter the thought haunted her, making her more liable than ever to violent palpitations of the heart. When Mrs Heming railed at her because of her intention to be with Ursula when the child was born, she kept her eyes down on the floor and did not answer, nursing within her the reason why in this matter she must go against her mother as she had never done before. At last, very shortly before the date that had been foreseen for the birth, she felt that she must not hold it back any longer, and, with a curious feeling of pride as if she were lifting a curtain on some great drama, she said, ‘But Ursula may die!' When Mrs Heming replied, petulantly as a tragedy queen who sees the centre of the stage usurped by a rival, ‘Nonsense, Ursula won't die, she's so strong!' Gerda's heart turned over in her, and she felt herself pierced by two griefs. The one was horror that Ursula should be so uncherished by her mother. She did not know what the other was. It felt like disappointment. She supposed it was because she had raised the whole matter on to a certain plane and her mother had dragged it down to a lower one. The house became distasteful to her. She was not at ease until she found herself in the train on her way to Ursula. It was a long and uncomfortable journey; Ursula had always annoyed her by talking and writing as if her willingness to face it were the remarkable feature of her sacrifice, instead of her disregard of the conventional aspect of the situation. But she felt relaxed and content once she could sit face to face with her fear of Ursula's death, contemplating and arguing with her, not having to think of anything else.

When she got to Ursula's lodgings and had her supper with her and the nurse under the gaslight it all seemed like a dream. She looked at her sister's face, which had an expression of fatigue and power, as if she were performing a task that called for an immense expenditure of energy but she knew she had enough to last her till its completion, and she thought, ‘Mother was right, Ursula is very strong, there is no danger of her dying.' All at once she became very tired. She felt that the vast amount of emotion she had expended on Ursula during the last few months had been got from her on false pretences. As soon as supper was over she got up and said she could not keep awake any longer. Ursula looked up at her apprehensively, as if she were a little girl again and were frightened of a scolding from her elders. That made Gerda laugh and bend down and kiss her.

She fell asleep very quickly, turning sullenly away from the thoughts that had occupied her nightly for many weeks as if she had been deceived by them. But she was to stay awake in that bedroom till dawn, three nights later. For Ursula's strength after all did not settle everything when the child was born. She began to suffer late in the evening, just before supper, but not severely. The doctor came and looked at her, and said that all was going well, and he would come back in a few hours. But about ten o'clock she suddenly lost all self-control. She began to moan very loudly, and even to cry out. Gerda ran at once to shut the windows, which were very wide open, as it was a hot night. The house backed on to the garden of a very nice villa, and she did not want the people living there to hear. Ursula sat up in bed to watch her doing this, shaking with hysterical laughter which changed, as she dropped back on the pillows, to shrieks. Gerda had done everything she could to make her pull herself together. She felt sure that other women did not behave like this when they were having children. But soon the nurse told her that she must go and tell the doctor to come at once. She ran down the road to his house, her eyes set gravely before her and her very short upper lip raised right off her teeth. She did not like asking him to come, when he had said he would come later. Probably he was resting after a hard day's work. It was so like Ursula to have her baby in the night. She was so apologetic that indeed he did not hurry himself, but when he got to the house and saw Ursula he seemed greatly perturbed. He sent Gerda back to tell his wife to telephone another doctor in the town. She did it very quickly, and then ran back to the house. Nobody said how quick she had been. The doctor held the door of Ursula's room while he spoke to her. It was hard to hear what he was saying because of the dreadful noises Ursula was making, but she gathered that he was telling her to go to her room, but hold herself in readiness to be called at any moment. To try and make excuses for Ursula, she said, ‘She has been very brave till now, Doctor.' He looked at her strangely and said, ‘She isn't quite conscious now, you know.'