Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  “Hours of Silence, of course, you can also offer up. Do you understand what that means?”

  “Not quite. We have so many hours of silence, it seems to me,” replied Zella.

  “Pauvre chou! You are not used to it yet.”

  “But does it mean that I have to do extra ones?” faltered Zella.

  The old nun burst out laughing.

  “No, no, my child! I do not ask you to spend your recreation in silence, for instance, nor to wake up in the middle of the night in order to remain silent for an hour. But use those opportunities, of which, as you say, you have so many. Spend your study hour in perfect silence, for instance, and offer it up for our dear Mother.”

  “I don’t quite see how it will do her good.”

  “If you offer the merit of your good action for her, it will be so much spiritual gain for her. Do you understand, petite?”

  “Yes,” said Zella, who, never having heard the word “merit” used in this connection, was, if possible, more utterly at a loss than before.

  “That is well. Then we come to Acts of Mortification, which I need not explain, need I?”

  “Oh no!” replied Zella readily, and with distinct recollection of saints who lashed themselves with thongs, slept on hard boards, existed for days without food, and the like.

  “There, then, my dear child, you can quite feel that you are contributing with the others towards our Mother’s Feast, and you may be sure that she will be glad to hear how much you wished it. There is the bell for Office, and I must go quickly. I shall not forget to say a special little prayer for you.”

  She patted Zella kindly on the head and hurried away, her lips moving even as she went, in earnest supplications for the conversion of the little Protestant who already showed such good dispositions.

  Zella felt strangely disturbed as she reviewed the conversation, and wondered if she should ever come to feel anything with the absolute fervour of conviction which Mere Jeanne brought to bear upon the smallest as well as the greatest detail of her far-reaching and incredibly intricate creed.

  She thought the old nun childish and superstitious, but she also felt a passionate and oddly unchildlike envy of her powers of belief, even while holding herself enormously superior to the whole tangle of pious catchwords and superstitious practices of which she supposed the Catholic religion to consist.

  It was this sense of her superiority to her surroundings that led Zella into one of the many errors of her convent days. She determined to prove to the beholders in general that she could, if she chose, and in spite of what they all appeared to consider as the disadvantage of being a Protestant, beat them on their own ground.

  Shortly before Reverend Mother’s Feast she appeared one evening at Mother Veronica’s recreation with a contracted brow and limping perceptibly.

  So fierce a discussion was raging on the relative merits of St. Peter and St. Mary Magdalene, always rival favourites, that Zella, to her annoyance, remained unnoticed for some little while. At last, however, after she had drawn in her breath with a sharp hiss of apprehension as a younger child brushed against her in running past, she heard the expected inquiry:

  “What have you done to your foot, Zella?”

  “Oh, nothing,” she said hurriedly; “I mean, it doesn’t really matter.”

  “Have you hurt yourself, dear?” inquired Mother Veronica unemotionally.

  “Not — not exactly,” said Zella, with artistic hesitation. “Please don’t ask me about it now, Mother.”

  “But is anyone looking after it? Have you been to the infirmary?”

  “Oh, no. I’d rather not have a fuss, please,” earnestly begged Zella, doing her best to create one by the emphasis and confusion of her manner.

  “Nonsense,” briskly returned Mother Veronica, “of course it must be attended to. I see you are limping. Now tell me at once, Zella, what is the matter.”

  “Could I tell you privately?”

  By this time the girls were all listening eagerly, and Zella was enjoying herself.

  “You had better overcome human respect, and tell me quite simply and naturally what you have done to yourself, I think.”

  “It was for Reverend Mother’s Feast,” faltered the ingenuous Zella, looking down. “What?”

  Zella raised her grey eyes with an innocently rapt expression.

  It was my first Act of Mortification.”

  She took off her shoe and extracted a small glass marble.

  She had almost expected that an emotionally shaken Mother Veronica would embrace her then and there, and that the girls would at least keep a touched and reverent silence, and she was utterly unprepared for the gale of merriment that broke out all round her on the instant of this revelation.

  She stood scarlet, rooted to the spot, and overwhelmed with an appalling sense of disaster.

  Even the humourless face of Mother Veronica was smiling. She was English, and had a great deal of common-sense, with little imagination.

  In the space of a second or two, however, she had checked her amusement, and silenced that of the children by smartly clapping her hands together. The accustomed signal hushed them at once, and she spoke briefly.

  “That will do now. Zella will know better another time, and there is nothing to make such a noise about. Go and ring the bell for prayers, Mary.”

  Mary departed, still giggling violently, and the girls, conscious of approaching bedtime, broke out into volubility again.

  Zella was fighting tears of rage and mortification. Mother Veronica spoke to her in a low voice, and not unkindly:

  “You mustn’t take this little humiliation to heart so much, child. Offer it up, instead of the marble in your shoe.”

  She rather obviously repressed an inclination to smile again.

  “You’ll learn better in time, dear, but that is not the sort of thing that our Lord wants of you just at present.”

  Zella would have liked to say, “How do you know?” but was literally unable to speak.

  “Try and keep silence in the ranks, and eat up your meat at dinner instead of leaving it on your plate,” said Mother Veronica in tones of unsympathetic common-sense, “and do not play foolish pranks that might injure your health.”

  “The saints did,” retorted Zella in a choked voice.

  “You are not a saint,” caustically replied Mother Veronica, “and I am afraid you are a very self-righteous little girl.”

  XV

  Sister Veronica, with singular ineptness, had selected perhaps, of all others, the adjective least applicable to Zella, in calling her self-righteous.

  A lamentable lack of self-confidence lay at the back of all the timid and generally ill-judged attempts at self-assertion which marked Zella’s convent days. She was in the midst of alien standards, and she knew it, nor did her most strenuous efforts ever succeed in conforming her to the type which she both aimed at and despised.

  Her first year at the convent seemed to Zella to be a succession of failures.

  Her education left her far behind the requirements of the convent teaching, limited and old-fashioned though it was; and however much her knowledge of French might delight Mere Jeanne, she knew instinctively that the girls looked upon it as a sort of affectation, not to be alluded to, and only excusable on the grounds that she had “heaps of foreign blood in her.”

  Her Protestantism in time came to be overlooked; her foreign name and her proficiency in English composition, never.

  Zella had all her life calmly taken it for granted that she was clever. At the convent, for the first time, she began to waver in this opinion. It was so obvious that no one else shared it. Her class mistress encouraged her gently by saying: “You have had great disadvantages, no doubt, dear, but I am sure you will make up for lost time now.”

  But Zella found it no easier to apply herself to tasks which seemed extremely and unvaryingly dull, than it had been in Muriel Lloyd-Evans’s schoolroom. The only information which appeared to be of the least use in her
class work was, in fact, that which she had reluctantly imbibed from the teaching of the strenuous Miss Vincent.

  She was almost always at the bottom of her class, and tried to find uneasy consolation in the remembrance that in all school stories the clever, but incurably idle, heroine invariably occupied the same position until some brilliant, wayward impulse would send her suddenly to the head of the school. In the depths of her heart, however, Zella was aware that no sudden effort, however brilliant, would ever enable her to acquire and retain the curiously tabulated and compressed amount of information which appeared to constitute education.

  Zella found herself much perplexed by this question of cleverness. It was an accepted convention that one or two of the girls were “clever.”

  “Dorothy Brady is awfully clever,” she once heard, to her surprise.

  “What sort of way?”

  “Oh, every way. She always knows the lesson, and yet her prep never takes long; and look how well she plays.”

  It was true that Dorothy could play “La Fileuse de Raff,” and many other compositions of similar calibre, faultlessly, and her copies of water-colours “from the flat” were almost indistinguishable from the originals. (Drawing from casts was not encouraged, as bearing a possible relationship to statues, and thus leading, by subtle degrees, to the human form.)

  Zella herself frequently struck wrong notes at the piano, almost always played faster than the metronome indicated, and never succeeded in toning her washes of colour to the palely graduated tints of the copy before her.

  “It is true that I can’t ‘do ‘ things,” she told herself fiercely, “and that Dorothy can. There’s nothing I’m any good at, except talking French; and that isn’t because I ever learnt it, but simply because it’s been talked all round me ever since I was born. Why do I think I am clever, and that she’s not? I’m a fool, really; I can’t do anything well.”

  Yet the certainty remained, obstinate, ineradicable, that she possessed some utterly indefinable quality which was lacking in her companions, and which set her mentally, infinitely above them.

  But not till long after her school days were past did Zella learn to associate this instinct of latent superiority with the idea of creative power.

  At the convent she continued to be, at least in her own estimation, a failure. Humility is a much-abused term, and can only be applied to Zella’s attitude of mind with reservation, since it was engendered by her passionate conviction that for her to be anything but first in the estimation of those around her, was for her to be a failure.

  Nor were minor humiliations spared her.

  She made no special friends.

  In spite of the stringent convent regulations as to preferences, it was acknowledged even by the authorities that certain friendships might be tolerated, or even encouraged, within bounds. If a Child of Mary was supposed to exert a good influence over some more unregenerate companion, the friendship was smiled upon. The two might spend the recreations together, of course in the company of the inevitable third, without being called to order by the sharp rebuke of Mere Pauline: “Vous deux la-has! il ne faut pas vous rechercher comme cela. C’est defendu.” Or Mother Veronica’s monotonous “Not two together, children. You must find a third at once, please.”

  Zella was often called upon to redeem the character of a tete-a-tete by converting it into a trio, because she was too sensitive to take any real part in a conversation where she knew herself unwanted, and at the same time too self-conscious and too much alive to the absurdity of her position not to make a pretence of being actively interested in her companions’ discussion.

  But she was seldom sought out for her own sake. The other girls and she had no common meeting-ground. Zella could neither discuss the relative merits of St. Aloysius and St. Ignatius with any enthusiasm, nor exchange raptures over the nuns. She would fain have set up a heroine-worship for any of her mistresses, but knew secretly that her taste revolted against the sentimental gushes of mingled schwarmerei and piety in which her companions indulged freely, and the knowledge pierced in spite of herself through all her pretences. Moreover, none of these kindly, commonplace women seemed to Zella to be endowed with the glamour through which the other girls obviously viewed them. They were merely kind and good and childish, and dressed in a becoming habit and veil.

  Zella, brought up in an atmosphere of latent cynicism and declared scepticism of the orthodox forms of belief, honestly supposed that the nuns in charge of her education were merely the more or less unconscious dupes of superstition.

  But she posed valiantly, gushed in chorus, and was astonished and mortified as she gradually perceived that even to these unperceiving companions her pretences somehow failed to carry any conviction. Reality was lacking, and they knew it instinctively.

  Yet it must be admitted that the convent atmosphere was not calculated to encourage Zella in any way towards naturalness.

  She counted her most glaring bevues by the number of times in which she had been the victim of a genuine impulse.

  She was too impressionable not to learn quickly, and the impulses were seldom yielded to as time went on, but it was one of these outbursts of spontaneity that cost her the only possible friendship of her school days.

  Zella had been distinctly attracted by Kathleen Mallet, who was pretty and refined-looking, with a ready Irish tongue and ease of manner. She was nearly eighteen, and Zella’s predilections were ever for those older than herself. Moreover, Kathleen was popular, and her notice of the new girl gratified Zella’s vanity.

  A certain mild air of convent romance surrounded Kathleen, too. She had an elder sister who had run away from home at nineteen in order to become a Benedictine nun, and it was well known that the Mallets were the poorest family in County Wicklow.

  “Sometimes there really and truly hasn’t been enough to eat in the house, I believe,” Marv McNeill assured Zella, with a look of horror.

  “But why?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” always the recognized preface to the bestowal of information. “You see, the father always was rather poor, and then he lost all the money there was, racing, and of course there are eight of them to bring up, all girls. It’s awful, isn’t it?”

  “What do they do!” said Zella, who had never heard of such poverty as lacked food except in the lowest classes of life.

  “Well, two of the younger ones got taken by the nuns in Dublin — for nothing, of course; and there’s another, the eldest, who’s a daily governess, and of course Eileen is a nun at St. Benedict’s.”

  “What a good thing!”

  “The father was perfectly furious, and wouldn’t give his consent. That’s why she had to run away.”

  “But why was he furious? It seems such a good thing, if they’re so poor, that one should be settled.”

  “Oh, well,” said Mary comfortably, “I suppose parents very often hate it, though, as Reverend Mother says, it’s all nonsense. They don’t mind if their daughters go away and marry, so why should they mind their becoming nuns?”

  Zella thought there was a fallacy in the argument, but was too much interested in the poverty of the Mallet family to pursue it.

  “I suppose they don’t have to pay anything for Kathleen here, do they?”

  Mary suddenly assumed a shocked expression and grew rather red.

  “What a funny thing to ask, Zella!” she said reprovingly.

  Zella coloured scarlet on the instant, scenting another mistake, but asked rather defiantly:

  “Why? You told me the younger ones got taken at the convent in Dublin for nothing, so why shouldn’t I ask if Kathleen is here for nothing?”

  “Well, it’s a funny thing to ask, isn’t it?” coldly returned Mary, still resentful, “considering that you know her and everything. It’s rather cheek, in a new girl, to ask that sort of thing, you know.”

  Zella felt indignant, but dared not imperil her equilibrium by speaking. Her tears, like those of most oversensitive people, were always perilo
usly near the surface, and she knew that Mary’s unimaginative, rather hostile gaze was fixed upon her.

  “You needn’t look so furious. I dare say you didn’t mean it, and, of course, I shan’t tell anyone you asked. Of course, Kathleen minds about it frightfully. She must. Not so much about being here without paying, because I believe Reverend Mother was a friend of her mother’s or something, but about the whole thing, and never having a single penny. She never talks about it; she’s frightfully reserved, you know, really. Mind you don’t go and ask her about it, Zella.”

  Unperceptive, suspicious Mary! Zella felt a thrill of fury and of contempt for the lack of judgment which could suppose her capable of such tactless ill-breeding. She endeavoured to reply haughtily, “Naturally, I shouldn’t dream of speaking to Kathleen about such a thing,” but, to her dismay, again felt her tears rising. She remained silent, but grew scarlet to the roots of her hair. Her hot, frequent blushes were a source of endless misery to her and of unfailing amusement to her companions. Mary stared at her now, and then began to laugh.

  “Well, you needn’t set the place on fire,” she said not ill-naturedly, and with a giggling appreciation of her own wit. But Zella felt as though she had suddenly and purposely been struck in the face.

  But her interest in Kathleen deepened after this conversation. The very restrictions imposed by the school regulations upon their intercourse greatly increased Kathleen’s attractions, and Zella presently began to wonder whether this was not the ideal friend for whom she had been waiting, so she firmly told herself, all her life.

  She wondered if eighteen would condescend to the friendship of fifteen, and began to indulge in various small antics designed to draw Kathleen’s attention to herself.

  Sitting next to Kathleen at the mid-day recreation, with an expression of portentous thoughtfulness so marked that it could hardly fail to draw forth comment, Zella gazed with a fixed, unseeing, and yet far-reaching look at her neighbour. It was not a look designed to escape attention, nor did it do so.