by Rebecca West
As time went on she became more troublesome. The family left South Africa and went back to London and, while Gerda kept healthy and rosy, Ellida responded to the change in climate by ailing perpetually; and it was impossible to help blaming her for this, because she so obviously liked being ill. She liked having her mother’s full attention, and pestered her to spend whole days by her bedside, and as Mrs Heming was beginning to feel the full force of her husband’s roguery, and was distracted by her efforts to keep a middle-class house on an income that had by now dwindled to a working-class level, she found this an intolerable tax on her time and strength. When Gerda, her cheeks glowing with a long walk, ran into the sickroom where Ellida was obstinately keeping her bed on the plea of a mysterious pain, Mrs Heming could not restrain herself from crying, ‘Oh, Ellida, if only you were more like Gerda!’
There was also constant trouble with the second child at school. She had actually a better brain than Gerda, but she could not profit by it because of the antagonism she aroused. Her teachers and her schoolfellows were prepared to find her odd, for as Gerda came into the schoolhouse every morning with her sister, her eyes were set gravely before her and her very short upper lip was raised right off her teeth, as if she were carrying a load so heavy that she did not know if she could get it to its destination; and everyone who heard her cry out to her sister, ‘Ellida! you’ll be late for prayers!’ ‘Ellida! what have you lost now? Your pencil? Oh, I told you –’ knew very well that that load had consisted of crushing responsibilities. And Ellida amply justified the expectations of both the teachers and the girls. She did not seem to have any instinct of self-preservation, for she made no attempt to cover up her unlikeable qualities. When another little girl was born to the Hemings she showed open and malignant jealousy. She proclaimed glumly that after this she would get no attention at home at all. But Gerda bubbled over with pleasure, and went about telling everybody, ‘I’ve got the loveliest little baby sister!’
She was as sweet and good-tempered with the baby as could be wished, though just at the time she had a severe shock. One day she went out to tea with a little girl, about her own age, who was a doctor’s daughter. The family was well-to-do, but the child was neglected. There was nobody in the house when Gerda got there except the servants, so the little girl was able to take her visitor into the surgery. She said to Gerda as they stood in the room, which was full of the cloying smell of ether, ‘There’s a new baby in your house. Do you know how it came?’ Gerda answered, ‘Of course I do. Mother told me. Our doctor brought it in his bag.’ The little girl laughed and said, ‘Oh, you silly! That isn’t how babies come! They just tell you that. I’ll show you how babies really come,’ and she took down from her father’s shelves books on anatomy and obstetrics, with drawings in them, which she explained with a grin. Gerda refused to look after she understood what it was all about, and ran down the steps of the house into the street with her fair hair flying out behind her. That afternoon worried Gerda dreadfully. She could not dismiss what the girl had said as nonsense, because her shrewd little brain told her that the story hung too well together to be anything but true. The undesired knowledge made her suffer terribly, for she was instinctively very pure, so pure that she could not bear to tell even her mother what had happened. It was then, at the age of about nine, that she first turned to religion and found in it the help that life itself denied her. She had always liked saying her prayers, learning hymns, and going to church. Now she found that praying and reading the little devotional books her mother had given her, and looking at the pictures in them of angels in shining raiment, made her feel clean again; and by cleansing her made her feel she was an active participant in holy things.
That helped her, perhaps, to be so good to her baby sister Ursula. It is true that she started with a most passionate fondness for her. When she was away from her she continually talked, with an absent look in her eyes, of her wonderful little sister, of her beauty and her cleverness and her warm sweetness; and when she was with her she watched over her, without cease, correcting all her baby faults. But this feeling might soon have worn off, for Ursula was an unusually trying child. She was darker than Ellida, and far more troublesome. She was not puny or malingering; but she was insanely rebellious. She was a creature of immense vitality, which she expended in insane destructiveness and rebellion. Toys that Gerda and Ellida had kept all through their childhood survived her strong little fingers not a morning. She was disobedient to an extent that made her scandalously untidy both as regards her person and her possessions. The mere fact that she was told to button up her dress made her look on any such proceeding as a silly waste of time; and she did not seem to see any reason why she should clear up her toys from the nursery floor. Praise evidently meant nothing to her. The schoolteachers were sorrier than ever for poor little Gerda, who had a more worried look than ever when she drove before her two recalcitrant charges instead of one. They had the greater sympathy with her because the family fortunes were plainly going downhill. Mr Heming had departed in search of a very mysterious job in America, and there was nearly no money at all. The children had no new clothes, their boots and shoes were a disgrace. Gerda felt the situation very bitterly, and suffered deeply from her loneliness. For of course Ellida was far too deeply sunk in morbid fancies about her unpopularity to notice what was going on, and Ursula was obviously far too young. Poor little Gerda used sometimes to come to school red-eyed with the tears she shed over her responsibility. Her teachers noted it and talked among themselves, admiring her.
Then she was deprived of one of her few consolations: that Ursula, though troublesome, was robust and not bad-tempered. Gerda was never able to cheer herself with that after a curious scene which happened during the holidays when Ursula was about six. The Hemings were staying in a Somerset village in a cottage that stood in the High Street. One day, just after Ursula had been given her week’s pocket money, she had looked through the window and seen an old man playing a hand-organ on the opposite side of the road. She cried out, ‘Oh, I’ll give him a penny!’ and before Gerda could stop her she had run to the front door, and ran across the street, right under the hoofs of a horse that was being ridden home from the hunt. The rider checked his horse in time, she was unhurt; and she smiled up at him for forgiveness. Then an arm fell on her shoulder and she looked up into Gerda’s face. Gerda had followed her sister to the front door and had got there just in time to see her run under the horse’s hoofs. A red mist had covered her eyes, something had seemed to cleave her body down to the heart. Then the mist had cleared and she had seen that Ursula was safe. At once she had run forward to take her back and punish her, because of course she must be punished severely for doing anything so silly and wicked. She was shaking all over at seeing her darling little sister so near to danger.
But it oddly happened that Ursula, who had not been frightened of the horse, seemed very frightened indeed of what she saw in her big sister’s face. She stared for a minute at Gerda, and then began to scream. Afterwards Gerda used to say that of all the troublesome moments she had had with Ursula, that was the worst. The child seemed driven mad by terror, and fought like a wild cat when her sister tried to get her back into the house. It was such a pandemonium as the High Street had never seen, and when they got her back into the house she continued for half an hour to give out these high, piercing screams that could be heard half across the village. Moreover, this was not the end of it. Thereafter she was given to attacks of hysteria that were to Ellida’s crying fits as a thunderstorm. They made her a hopeless nuisance at school, which the teachers greatly resented. They were always having to send for poor little Gerda to take her home. What added to Ursula’s unpopularity just about this time was that she developed a disfiguring facial twitch. She had always had a tendency to exaggerate all her expressions, to raise her eyebrows and pout her lips more than other people when she smiled. Of this Gerda had vainly tried to cure her, saying, ‘Don’t make those horrible faces!’ Now she had only
to utter this admonition for Ursula’s face to be convulsed. Gerda kept at it, but the condition did not seem to improve. Her task of caring for her little sister became more and more thankless. Ursula seemed incapable of gratitude, and was ready to form the most passionate resentment against her for trifles.
There was, for example, the affair of Miss Fenwick’s tea-party. Miss Fenwick was the only teacher for whom Ursula felt any liking; and to her she gave an outpouring of devotion that worried Gerda by its abandonment. She was a kind, absent-minded woman, who never listened to gossip, and she liked Ursula’s brains. She seemed to like her very much. One summer term she gave out invitations to a tea-party for all the children in her class; and Ursula was the only child who did not get one. She went home in tears and sobbed out what had happened on her mother’s breast. Her mother told her that the most likely explanation was that she had been naughty in Miss Fenwick’s class. At this she had the usual fit of hysterics. But Gerda said that she did not think Ursula had been in any particular trouble lately. Then her mother told her to wait, that the invitation might be coming nearer the day. But the days passed, and every day Ursula, who was an honest child, had to admit to her playfellows that she had not been invited; and her behaviour in Miss Fenwick’s class became so overwrought that she earned rebukes more than once. Every evening she cast herself into agonies of mourning at her rejection by her idol; and Gerda was as kind as could be. The day of the tea-party she tried to distract Ursula by taking her out to a tea-shop and giving her ices.
The next day Miss Fenwick said to Ursula, as she came into the cloakroom, ‘What was the matter with you, dear, that you didn’t come to my tea-party?’
Ursula choked and answered, ‘But, Miss Fenwick, you never asked me!’
Miss Fenwick said, ‘But of course I did, dear. I gave the invitation to your sister, Gerda, and she put it in her satchel to keep for you.’
Gerda was standing close to them, ready to intervene as she always did when she could save Ursula from the consequences of her oddness. When she heard these words she gasped, and slipped her hand into her satchel, and took out the letter, and cried, with tears standing in her clear blue eyes, ‘Oh, Miss Fenwick, I shall never forgive myself!’
At that Ursula leapt on Gerda in a biting and scratching mass. Miss Fenwick was extremely shocked, and never could bring herself to like the child again.
Shortly after Gerda left school and went to a distant University, and Ellida got a scholarship at a boarding school. Ursula was left alone with her mother, who was in an irrational state of melancholy on account of the death of Mr Heming in America, and had formed a delusion that she had angina pectoris. Ursula did not know it was a delusion. For two years, from that time till she was twelve, she lived alone with the sad woman, in daily expectation of her death, in the dreariest poverty, with her sisters’ company only in the holidays. Then Ellida came home, but that was not such a relief as it might have been. She had just completed her first year at a training college, where she had done brilliant work, when she was sent back in a state of profound neurasthenia. The only thing she wanted to do was to lie in bed and weep, lamenting that no one really cared for her, that there was no place for her in the world. She lived with her mother and Ursula for a year, by which time she was well enough to go out and take a job as an uncertified teacher. At the end of this time Ursula had a curious collapse of conduct and health. The first term she was free of Ellida, she got in with a rough crowd of girls and got into trouble by playing a practical joke on a teacher and by editing a magazine that satirized school life. There was a great fuss over that, and she proceeded to have a nervous breakdown, which was followed by a prolonged threat of weakness about the lungs.
Gerda almost broke down when she got the news. She was doing very well in her post-graduate post; and she had thought that surely her family would see that the least they could do was to relieve her of care for them. It was true that she did not actually have to go home, but the responsibility was there all the same. What broke her heart was her realization that her beloved little sister, Ursula, was evidently not going to grow out of her queerness after all. It was then for the first time that she realized that all her struggle had been in vain, that all her unremitting efforts to drag her sisters into line with normal people had been wasted, and that her family was going to be her cross. She prayed humbly for strength to bear it.
The actual material responsibility for Ursula was, as it happened, not so insoluble a problem as it might have been, because just about that time an aunt of Mrs Heming’s died and left them a moderate income. Ursula, who was now seventeen, wanted to go on the stage. As a famous actress had seen her in amateur theatricals, and had declared she had great talent, she was allowed to go to a dramatic school. There, however, she failed miserably. She had the kind of self-mistrust that leads people to make the worst of themselves once they are observed. Once she was being watched she turned from something interesting and vital to something clumsy and stolid. At the end of two terms the authorities could give no hope that it was worthwhile continuing her studies. Gerda had from the first warned Ursula that she must expect some such disappointment, and fortunately, as she had just taken a post near her home, she was there to comfort her when the blow fell.
‘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 c
onceited. 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.