She was so hot, so flushed, so furious, that Ursula was puzzled.
The two sisters went on, up the road. They were passing between the
trees just below Shortlands. They looked up at the long, low house, dim
and glamorous in the wet morning, its cedar trees slanting before the
windows. Gudrun seemed to be studying it closely.
'Don't you think it's attractive, Ursula?' asked Gudrun.
'Very,' said Ursula. 'Very peaceful and charming.'
'It has form, too--it has a period.'
'What period?'
'Oh, eighteenth century, for certain; Dorothy Wordsworth and Jane
Austen, don't you think?'
Ursula laughed.
'Don't you think so?' repeated Gudrun.
'Perhaps. But I don't think the Criches fit the period. I know Gerald
is putting in a private electric plant, for lighting the house, and is
making all kinds of latest improvements.'
Gudrun shrugged her shoulders swiftly.
'Of course,' she said, 'that's quite inevitable.'
'Quite,' laughed Ursula. 'He is several generations of youngness at one
go. They hate him for it. He takes them all by the scruff of the neck,
and fairly flings them along. He'll have to die soon, when he's made
every possible improvement, and there will be nothing more to improve.
He's got GO, anyhow.'
'Certainly, he's got go,' said Gudrun. 'In fact I've never seen a man
that showed signs of so much. The unfortunate thing is, where does his
GO go to, what becomes of it?'
'Oh I know,' said Ursula. 'It goes in applying the latest appliances!'
'Exactly,' said Gudrun.
'You know he shot his brother?' said Ursula.
'Shot his brother?' cried Gudrun, frowning as if in disapprobation.
'Didn't you know? Oh yes!--I thought you knew. He and his brother were
playing together with a gun. He told his brother to look down the gun,
and it was loaded, and blew the top of his head off. Isn't it a
horrible story?'
'How fearful!' cried Gudrun. 'But it is long ago?'
'Oh yes, they were quite boys,' said Ursula. 'I think it is one of the
most horrible stories I know.'
'And he of course did not know that the gun was loaded?'
'Yes. You see it was an old thing that had been lying in the stable for
years. Nobody dreamed it would ever go off, and of course, no one
imagined it was loaded. But isn't it dreadful, that it should happen?'
'Frightful!' cried Gudrun. 'And isn't it horrible too to think of such
a thing happening to one, when one was a child, and having to carry the
responsibility of it all through one's life. Imagine it, two boys
playing together--then this comes upon them, for no reason
whatever--out of the air. Ursula, it's very frightening! Oh, it's one
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