Zella thought of Aunt Marianne’s reproachful farewell, and of Alison’s semi-contemptuous one:
“Good-bye, little Zella. Do not play with the big things of life; they are not for you.”
Her self-confidence depended absolutely upon the good opinion of the people round her. The brilliant sense of security of two days before had fled, and Alison’s tolerant patronage had given her a stab out of all proportion in its intensity.
At the remembrance of it, tears rose again to her eyes; but her head ached, and it seemed hardly worthwhile to begin crying again when there was no one to be sorry for her.
“Pauvre cherie!”
Tante Stephanie was sorry, after all.
Zella felt a sudden definite wish to talk about herself, and to put into words that point of view which must reinstate her in her own consciousness as the heroine of the hour.
“You know about it, don’t you, Tante Stephanie?”
“Only that you have refused the offer of marriage of Mr. Pontisbury,” said Stephanie mildly.
“And that he was very angry — and — hurt — and thought that he had every reason to expect a different answer. And Aunt Marianne and everyone blames me, and thinks that I have behaved very badly to him.”
Stephanie stroked her hair in silence.
“Even papa has hardly said one word to me.”
“He does not blame you, Zella.”
“What did he say?”
“Hardly anything, my dear. He only told me that you were unhappy, and that he feared Mrs. Lloyd-Evans might have distressed you. He would prefer anything to seeing you rush into a marriage where you would not be happy.”
“I have not behaved dishonourably,” said Zella angrily, refuting an accusation which had not been made. “It’s not even as though we had been engaged, and I had broken it off. He asked me to marry him, and I said that I did not care for him.”
She waited for Stephanie to endorse the view she had held out, but Mdlle de Kervoyou remained silent.
Zella’s unwisdom urged her to press for the assent that she yet knew she would not receive.
“Did I behave so very wrongly, after all? Could I have done otherwise?”
“You could not have done otherwise than tell him that you did not care for him.”
“But before that?”
“Before? It was perhaps a pity; that seems to me the most that one can say, Zella. I do not say you gave Mr. Pontisbury cause to expect such a reply from you; but I do not think, either, that the shock will have broken his heart.”
Stephanie was even smiling a little over the tragedy.
Zella felt a transient pang of mortification, and yet a distinct and deeply rooted sense of relief, as though she were seeing the strange chaos of emotions that had constituted the episode of Stephen relegated to its true place in the scale of relative values.
“Tante Stephanie, you are very understanding,” she said, with more surprise in her voice than she knew “Talk to me. I am so tired, and I am still muddled about it all.”
“Poor child! But you are glad that you had courage, even a little late in the day, are you not? An engagement of marriage is a more serious thing to break than you realize; as maman said always, Ca ne se fait pas. She was very scrupulous in matters of honour, as you know. And, then, in her day things were so different. These situations did not arise.”
“Things were simple then. Everything was settled for one. After all, it would be very restful,” said Zella, now sufficiently restored to indulge in a moment of attitudinizing.
Stephanie de Kervoyou disconcerted her by replying gently:
“But no, Zella! do not deceive yourself. It would not suit you at all. You must have the situations, the dramatic crises, in your life. If they were not there, you would be almost tempted to manufacture them. I think les emotions are a necessity to you: is it not so?”
“Perhaps it is,” Zella admitted, with a sense of candour, and inevitably absorbed in any discussion of her own character.
“These things, one outgrows them,” said her aunt placidly, “but the process is sometimes painful. Monsieur Stephen is not the only desillusione, perhaps. For you also a glamour has disappeared, and it grieves you, although it was only of your own creation. But, Zella, though it does not seem so to you at present, it is but a little thing in reality. Had you married this man, indeed, things would have been different. But you have escaped, thank God.”
Zella, struck suddenly by her tone, looked up.
“Why do you thank God? Do you think, too, that I should have been unhappy with Stephen?”
Stephanie gazed at her with an almost fanatical horror in her pale eyes.
“That you can ask the question, even, poor child! I knew well that you realized in no way the peril encompassing you, but for that very reason it was the greater. Zella, three years ago you were admitted into the Church. Did it then mean nothing to you?”
Zella was confounded. It shot through her mind with an unescapable conviction that in those three years her Catholicism had become an element which counted for nothing in her life.
“But — mixed marriages are allowed,” she faltered.
“Allowed! Yes; but would it have mattered to you had they been forbidden, child? I do not judge you — how can I? — but how can I not have seen, during these months I have lived with you, that your faith is nothing to you? And yet, Zella, it is the only thing in this world that is real — the only thing that will matter to you when you come to die. God snowed His love for your soul when He called you into His Church: have you forgotten it already?”
“No — no,” stammered Zella, hardly knowing what she said. “I know I am not very pious; but indeed — indeed “Her voice died away, in the utter lack of conviction that overwhelmed her.
Stephanie gazed at her with sorrowful eyes that grew tender.
“Poor little Zella! But it is never too late for le bon Dieu, and He understands you very well, even though no one else should do so. See all that He has done for you already, and now He has saved you from a marriage that might have risked the loss of your faith altogether! There can be no despair when He is there — always the same, always ready for you.”
Zella heard without understanding. The words were present to her mind, but awoke no response in her. She gazed dumbly at Stephanie.
“Forgive me for speaking to you so,” said Stephanie humbly. “There are others to advise or help you far better, should you wish it. What can I do but pray for you, dearest?”
The unwonted term of endearment suddenly touched Zella profoundly. She rose to her feet.
“Oh, pray for me, Tante Stephanie.”
“I do — I do, daily and nightly.”
Stephanie rose too, wiping a most unaccustomed moisture from her glasses.
“Maman would have reproached me for making you a scene when you are already tired and distressed,” she remarked in tones that strove to be matter-of-fact. “I do not wish too vividly to recall your good Aunt Marianne, Zella, but would it not, in truth, be as well if you were now to rest for a little while?”
“I think I am going out, perhaps,” said Zella, gazing wistfully into the garden, where the afternoon shadows were already lengthening across the grass.
“Au revoir, then,” said Stephanie, achieving the smile that proclaimed an end to all deeper significances between them.
But Zella still looked at her with young, despairing eyes.
“You are going on praying for me always?”
“But always,” said Stephanie, still smiling, but with gentle conviction in her tones. “See how I have always been answered. It was certainly my poor prayers,” she added simply, “that helped to save you from a Protestant marriage.”
Zella passed quietly through the open French window on to the terrace.
She went down the steps where she had sat with Stephen, and reached the shade of a great ilex-tree at the bottom of the lower terrace.
She leant against it, physically tired out,
and closed her eyes. Slowly the remembrance came to her of days that seemed infinitely remote. Her childhood, when she and James and Muriel had played together under the ilex tree, and she had often and often quarrelled with the others, and rushed away, angry and miserable, to cry by herself. She remembered vaguely that her mother had always taken her part and comforted her, and she reflected dreamily, “Mother always understood. Would everything have been different if she had not died?” and then told herself that the very question was part of a pose.
She remembered the days after her mother’s death, days when she had learnt and despised the standard of values that stood for reality in the Lloyd-Evans household, and had yet held fast to them in a passionate desire to conform. Then the longing for escape had become too strong for her, and she had sought a refuge with her father, only to find that the gaze he turned upon her was as unseeing as it was loving. She was not, never had been, his reality. A memory stood for that, and a philosophy of which she knew nothing.
She had measured time, then, by her precocious sense of the dramatic and by indulgence in the crude emotionalism of the beginner.
Then had come her convent days. Alien standards again, and a passionate attempt to contort her vision to the level of her surroundings. It was not religion that she had craved, not the faith that was the whole solution to the riddle of life for those who held it; but the personal sympathy, and the human comfort of affection from those with whom her path had lain for such a very little way.
Had it been worthwhile?
She remembered the eagerness with which she had acclaimed a new point of view of which Alison St. Craye had been the herald, and sought for a means of self-expression, playing with all those things which the world has agreed to call Art. But it was not Art that she had sought, after all, only the friendship of Alison St. Craye, which she had ceased to desire, and had derided herself for desiring, when Stephen Pontisbury had become a factor in her life.
But, even as she remembered, Zella knew that already Stephen had become unreal, and formed part of her living consciousness only as the vague gain of a new experience lying behind her.
“Will nothing ever be real to me?”
She thought with a bewilderment that at least was wholly sincere, “What is Truth?”
She thought of James Lloyd-Evans, to whom Truth had become a mere question of relative values, until much that makes life endurable had been eliminated from his rigid philosophy. Strangely dispassionate and impersonal, he would watch with understanding eyes that, though they might not condemn, were as yet not awakened to the compassion that alone can draw the weak into the way of strength.
She thought of the old Baronne, with her curt “Ca ne se fait pas” — the principle which had guided her through a life of seventy odd years, and which had been only the expression of the unfailing instinct left by the bravest and noblest blood of France in the generations behind her.
She thought of Stephanie, mild and colourless, yet awakened to a fanatical ardour at the touch of her childlike and incredibly narrow creed. God was Truth, and Truth was the Catholic Church, for Stephanie, and only the things of this world were unreal.
They had, one and all, Conviction at the back of them. Zella, afraid and alone, had none. The only equipment that could lend her courage for the encounter that was to come had been denied her.
For a moment she knew it, and a despairing tremor seized her.
What was it?
Again and again she had tampered with something real, and to her it had not been real.
Friendship, faith, work, love — the things that stood for Truth to others — seemed to have failed her.
Even as the thought formed, the first hint of a solution that should surely crystallize itself into a solidity came to her.
Nothing of these things was known to her. She had seen only the outside forms, from a long way off.
In Time alone, whose other name is Perspective, might lie an answer, in some greater or lesser degree, to the appeal with which Zella, still on the threshold, echoed the question of ages:
“What is Truth?”
Exeter, Easter, 1916.
THE WAR WORKERS
First published in 1918, the final year of the First World War, this story centres on Lady Vivian, a 29-year-old woman, who runs a Midlands supply depot during the conflict, assisted by women volunteers. They meet hundreds of men off troop trains late at night supplying them with sandwiches, cake and steaming cups of tea. These women war-workers were indefatigable in their approach to their duty and would often put their own lives on hold, keeping going even when ill.
Lady Vivian, however, goes to great lengths to secure recognition of her war work managing the supply depot and other war service organisations in her region. Although projecting an image of herself as extremely efficient, her refusal to delegate and desire for control creates obstacles for others and a great deal of unnecessary work for herself and staff. Her staff of about three dozen women initially admire her greatly, but with the arrival of a well-bred young lady from Wales, the irritated complaints of the neighbourhood doctor, and a few heartless actions of her own, this view changes, except among her two most devoted allies. The other main character in the novel is Lady Vivian’s mother, concerned exclusively with her elderly husband, whose health is poor; the relationship between mother and daughter is tense and disappointing for both.
The first edition’s title page
CONTENTS
Author’s Foreword
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
To
J. A. S.
A very small token of innumerable bonds of union
Author’s Foreword
The “Midland Supply Depot” of The War-Workers has no counterpart in real life, and the scenes and characters described are also purely imaginary.
E.M. Delafield
I
At the Hostel for Voluntary Workers, in Questerham, Miss Vivian, Director of the Midland Supply Depôt, was under discussion that evening.
Half a dozen people, all of whom had been working for Miss Vivian ever since ten o’clock that morning, as they had worked the day before and would work again the next day, sat in the Hostel sitting-room and talked about their work and about Miss Vivian.
No one ever talked anything but “shop,” either in the office or at the Hostel.
“Didn’t you think Miss Vivian looked awfully tired today?”
“No wonder, after Monday night. You know the train wasn’t in till past ten o’clock. I think those troop-trains tire her more than anything.”
“She doesn’t have to cut cake and bread-and-butter and sandwiches for two hours before the train gets in, though. I’ve got the usual blister today,” said an anaemic-looking girl of twenty, examining her forefinger.
There was a low scoffing laugh from her neighbour.
“Miss Vivian cutting bread-and-butter! She does quite enough without that, Henderson. She had the D.G.V.O. in there yesterday afternoon for ages. I thought he was never going. I stood outside her door for half an hour, I should think, absolutely hung up over the whole of my work, and I knew she was fearfully busy herself.”
“It’s all very well for you, Miss Delmege-you’re her secretary and work in her room, but we can’t get at her unless we’re sent for. I simply didn’t know what to do about those surgical supplies for the Town Hospital this morning, and Miss Vivian never sent for me till past eleven o’clock. It simply wasted half my morning.”
“She didn’t have a minute; the telephone was going the whole time,” said Miss Delmege quickly. “But yesterday, you know, when the D.G.V.O. wouldn’t go, I
thought she was going to be late at the station for that troop-train, and things were fairly desperate, so what d’you suppose I did?”
“Dashed into her room and got your head snapped off?” some one suggested languidly. “I shall never forget one day last week when I didn’t know which way to turn, we were so busy, and I went in without being sent for, and Miss Vivian—”
“Oh yes, I remember,” said Miss Delmege rapidly. She was a tall girl with eyeglasses and a superior manner. She did not remember Miss Marsh’s irruption into her chief’s sanctum with any particular clearness, but she was anxious to finish her own anecdote. “But as I was telling you,” she hurried on, affecting to be unaware that Miss Marsh and her neighbour were exchanging glances, “when I saw that it was getting later every minute, and the D.G.V.O. seemed rooted to the spot, I simply went straight downstairs and rang up Miss Vivian on the telephone. Miss Cox was on telephone duty, and she was absolutely horrified. She said, ‘You don’t mean to say you’re going to ring up Miss Vivian,’ she said; and I said, ‘Yes, I am. Yes, I am,’ I said, and I did it. Miss Cox simply couldn’t get over it.”
Miss Delmege paused to laugh in solitary enjoyment of her story.
“‘Who’s there?’ Miss Vivian said-you know what she’s like when she’s in a hurry. ‘It’s Miss Delmege,’ I said. ‘I thought you might want to know that the train will be in at eight o’clock, Miss Vivian, and it’s half-past seven now.’ She just said ‘Thank you,’ and rang off; but she must have told the D.G.V.O., because he came downstairs two minutes later. And she simply flung on her hat and dashed down into the car and to the station.”
“And, after all, the train wasn’t in till past ten, so she might just as well have stayed to put her hat on straight,” said Miss Henderson boldly. She had a reputation for being “downright” of which she was aware, and which she strenuously sought to maintain by occasionally making small oblique sallies at Miss Vivian’s expense.
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 32