“You will be cutting yourself off completely, Lavinia,” Mamma said.
“From what?”
“From everybody. People don’t call on Nonconformists. If there were no higher grounds—”
“Oh—Caroline—” Aunt Lavvy breathed it on a long sigh.
“It’s all very well for you. But you might think of your sister Charlotte,” Mamma said.
Papa’s beard jerked. He drew in his breath with a savage guttural noise. “A‑ach! What’s the good of talking?”
He had gone on eating all the time. There was a great pile of chicken bones on his plate.
Aunt Lavvy turned. “Emilius—for thirty-three years”—her voice broke as she quivered under her loaded anguish—“for thirty-three years you’ve shouted me down. You haven’t let me call my soul my own. Yet it is my own—”
“There, please—please,” Mamma said, “don’t let us have any more of it,” just as Aunt Lavvy was beginning to get a word in edgeways.
“Mamma, that isn’t fair, you must let her speak.”
“Yes. You must let me speak.” Aunt Lavvy’s voice thickened in her throat.
“I won’t have any discussion of Unitarianism here,” said Papa.
“It’s you who have been discussing it, not I.”
“It is, really, Papa. First you began. Then Mamma.”
Mamma said, “If you’ve finished your supper, Mary, you can go.”
“But I haven’t. I’ve not had any trifle yet.”
She thought: “They don’t want me to hear them; but I’ve a right to sit here and eat trifle. They know they can’t turn me out. I haven’t done anything.”
Aunt Lavvy went on. “I’ve only one thing to say, Emilius. You’ve asked me to think of Victor and Charlotte, and you and Caroline and the boys and Mary. Have you once—in thirty-three years—for a single minute—thought of me?”
“Certainly I have. It’s partly for your own sake I object to your disgracing yourself. As if your sister Charlotte wasn’t disgrace enough.”
Aunt Lavvy drew herself up stiff and straight in her white shawl like a martyr in her flame. “You might keep Charlotte out of it, I think.”
“I might. Charlotte can’t help herself. You can.”
At this point Mamma burst into tears and left the room.
“Now,” he said, “I hope you’re satisfied.”
Mary answered him.
“I think you ought to be, Papa, if you’ve been bullying Aunt Lavvy for thirty-three years. Don’t you think it’s about time you stopped?”
Emilius stared at his daughter. His face flushed slowly. “I think,” he said, “it’s time you went to bed.”
“It isn’t my bedtime for another hour yet.”
(A low murmur from Aunt Lavvy: “Don’t, Mary, don’t.”)
She went on. “It was you who made Mamma cry, not Aunt Lavvy. It always frightens her when you shout at people. You know Aunt Lavvy’s a perfect saint, besides being lots cleverer than anybody in this house, except Mark. You get her by herself when she’s tired out with Aunt Charlotte. You insult her religion. You say the beastliest things you can think of—”
Her father pushed back his chair; they rose and looked at each other.
“You wouldn’t dare to do it if Mark was here!”
He strode to the door and opened it. His arm made a crescent gesture that cleared space of her.
“Go! Go upstairs. Go to bed!”
“I don’t care where I go now I’ve said it.”
Upstairs in her bed she still heard Aunt Lavvy’s breaking voice:
“For thirty-three years—for thirty-three years—”
The scene rose again and swam before her and fell to pieces. Ideas—echoes—images. Religion—the truth of God. Her father’s voice booming over the table. Aunt Lavvy’s voice, breaking—breaking. A pile of stripped chicken bones on her father’s plate.
V
Aunt Lavvy was getting ready to go away. She held up her night gown to her chin, smoothing and folding back the sleeves. You thought of her going to bed in the ugly, yellow, flannel night gown, not caring, lying in bed and thinking about God.
Mary was sorry that Aunt Lavvy was going. As long as she was there you felt that if only she would talk everything would at once become more interesting. She thrilled you with that look of having something—something that she wouldn’t talk about—up her sleeve. The Encyclopaedia man said that Unitarianism was a kind of Pantheism. Perhaps that was it. Perhaps she knew the truth about God. Aunt Lavvy would know whether she ought to tell her mother.
“Aunt Lavvy, if you loved somebody and you found out that their religion wasn’t true, would you tell them or wouldn’t you?”
“It would depend on whether they were happy in their religion or not.”
“Supposing you’d found out one that was more true and much more beautiful, and you thought it would make them happier?”
Aunt Lavvy raised her long, stubborn chin. In her face there was a cold exaltation and a sudden hardness.
“No religion was ever more true or more beautiful than Christianity,” she said.
“There’s Pantheism. Aren’t Unitarians a kind of Pantheists?”
Aunt Lavvy’s white face flushed. “Unitarians Pantheists? Who’s been talking to you about Pantheism?”
“Nobody. Nobody knows about it. I had to find out.”
“The less you find out about it the better.”
“Aunt Lavvy, you’re talking like Mr. Propart. Supposing I honestly think Pantheism’s true?”
“You’ve no right to think anything about it,” Aunt Lavvy said.
“Now you’re talking like Papa. And I did so hope you wouldn’t.”
“I only meant that it takes more time than you’ve lived to find out what honest thinking is. When you’re twenty years older you’ll know what this opinion of yours is worth.”
“I know what it’s worth to me, now, this minute.”
“Is it worth making your mother miserable?”
“That’s what Mark would say. How did you know I was thinking of Mamma?”
“Because that’s what my brother Victor said to me.”
VI
The queer thing was that none of them seemed to think the truth could possibly matter on its own account, or that anything mattered besides being happy or miserable. Yet everybody, except Aunt Lavvy, was determined that everybody else should be happy in their way by believing what they believed; and when it came to Pantheism even Aunt Lavvy couldn’t
