Had the vagrant fancy of Alex lighted upon any one of the elder nuns charged with the direction of the school, the attraction would have been discreetly permitted, if not admittedly sanctioned, by the authorities. It would almost inevitably have led Alex to an awakening of religious sensibilities and the desirability of this result would have outweighed, even if it did not absolutely obscure in the eyes of the nuns, the excessive danger of obtaining such a result by such means.
But the stars in their courses had designed that Alex should regard the Mesdames Marie Baptiste and Marie Evangeliste of her convent days with indifference, and devote her ardent temperament and precocious sensibilities to the worship of Queenie Torrance.
The enthusiasm was smiled upon by no one, and thereby became the more inflamed.
“Je n’aime pas ces amitiés particulières,” said the class-mistress of Queenie Torrance severely, to which Miss Torrance replied with polite distress that she was powerless in the matter. It made her ridiculous, she disliked the constant infringement of rules to which Alex’ pursuit exposed her, but — one could not be unkind. She did not know why Alex Clare showed her especial affection — she herself had done nothing to encourage these indiscreet displays. Of course, it was pleasant to be liked, but one wished only to do right about it. Queenie mingled candour with perplexity, and succeeded in convincing every one with perfect completeness of her entire innocence of anything but a too potent attraction.
“Ce n’est donc même pas une amitié? C’est Alex qui vous recherche malgré vous!” exclaimed the class-mistress.
Under this aspect the question soon presented itself alike to the pensionnat and its authorities, rendering Alex ridiculous. In a system of surveillance which admitted of no loophole for open defiance or outspoken rebuke, Alex’ evasions of that law of detachment which is the primary one in convent legislation, became the mark of every blue-ribboned enfant de Marie who wished to obtain a reputation for zeal by reporting the defection of a companion to her class-mistress.
It was always Alex who was reported. Queenie never sought opportunities to snatch a hurried colloquy during recreation, or manoeuvred to obtain Alex as companion at la ronde, or when they played games in the garden. She never infringed one of the strictest rules of the establishment, by giving presents unpermitted, or purchasing forbidden sweets and chocolate to be given away at the afternoon goûter.
Queenie accepted the presents, wrote tiny notes to Alex and skilfully gave them to her unperceived, and cut Alex to the heart by telling her sometimes that she made it very hard for one to try and be good and keep all the rules and perhaps get one’s blue ribbon next term.
These speeches were to Queenie’s credit, and made Alex cry and worship her more admiringly than ever, but they did not tend to lower the transparent, doglike devotion with which Alex would gaze at Queenie’s bent profile in the chapel, utterly unconscious of the scandal which her manifest idolatry was creating for the severe nun in the carved stall opposite. She was scolded, placed under strict observation, and every obstacle placed in the way of her exchanging any word with Queenie, until she grew to see herself as a martyr to an affection which every fresh prohibition increased almost to frenzy.
One day she was made the victim of a form of rebuke much dreaded by the pensionnaires. A monthly convocation of the school and mistresses, officially known as la réclame du mois, and nicknamed by the children “the Last Judgment,” was held in the Grande Salle downstairs, with the Superior making her state entry after the children had been decorously seated in rows at the end of the long room, and all the other nuns who had anything to do with the school had placed themselves gravely and with folded hands against the walls.
They all stood when the Superior came in, followed by the First Mistress, carrying a sheaf of notes and a great book, which each pupil firmly believed to be devoted principally to the record of her own progress through the school.
Then the Superior, with inclined head and low, distinct voice, spoke a few words of prayer, and settled herself in the large chair behind which the nuns clustered in orderly rows.
The children sat down at the signal given, and listened, at first with smiles as the record of the baby class were read aloud and each mite stood up in her place for all the universe to gaze at her, while the analysis of her month’s work, mental and moral, sounded with appalling distinctness through the silence.
“Bébée de Lalonde! première en catéchisme, première en géographie ... calcul, beaucoup mieux ... elle y met beaucoup de bonne volonté!”
“A la bonne heure!”
The Superior is smiling, every one is smiling, Bébée de Lalonde, her brown curls bobbing over her face, is pink with gratification. Her young class-mistress leans forward, the white veil of novice falling over her black habit.
“Ma Mère Supérieure, pour le mois de S. Joseph, elle se corrige de cette vilaine habitude de mordre ses ongles. Elle a fait de vrais efforts....”
“C’est bien. Faites voir.... Venez, ma petite.”
Up the long room marches Bébée, two freshly washed tiny pink hands thrust out proudly for the Superior’s inspection.
“Très bien, très bien. Vous ferez bien attention au pouce droit, n’est pas?”
The Superior is quite grave, however, every one laughs, and then the serious part of the proceedings begins.
The very little ones are not nervous. Most of them are good, even the naughty ones only get a very gentle homily from the Superior. Then their class-mistress claps her hands smartly and they get up and file out of the room, it not being considered politic to let les petites hear the record of that pen of black sheep, les moyennes.
The indictments become more serious. Marie Thérèse, twice impertinent to a mistress, taking no trouble over her lessons, worst of all, taking no trouble to cure that trick of which we have complained so often — sitting with her knees crossed.
“Even in the chapel, Ma Mère Supérieure.”
This is very bad! It is unladylike, it is against all rules, it is extremely immodest.... And what an example!
Marie Thérèse, says the Superior decisively, can abandon all hope of obtaining the green ribbon of an aspirante enfant de Marie until she has reformed her ways. The mention of a première in literature gains no approving smile from any one and Marie Thérèse sits down in tears.
Gabrielle, Marthe, Sadie — all through the three classes of the moyenne division of the school, with very few stainless reports and two or three disastrous ones.
Then les grandes. The first of these, in the lowest section, is a name to which the reader, a French woman, always takes exception. She finally compresses her lips and renders it as: “Kevinnie!”
Queenie is always cool and unmoved as she stands up, and Alex always looks at her. At this particular séance, the April one, she took her glances more or less surreptitiously, miserably aware that she had not enough self-control to refrain from them and so avoid risking a rebuke later on.
Queenie held no première. She was always last in her form, undistinguished at music, drawing, needlework, anything requiring application or talent alike. But her perfectly serene complacency was more or less justified by the exaggerated applause of her companions at her faultless “conduct” marks and the assurance of her class-mistress, always given readily, that she was “très docile, très appliquée.”
Queenie’s popularity was independent of anything extraneous to herself.
The Superior leant forward and asked a question in a low voice.
“Non, ma Mère Supérieure, non.”
The denial of a possible accusation, of which Alex guessed the purport, was emphatic. She felt glad and relieved, but had no suspicions as to the indictment following on her own name.
“Alexandra Clare,” said Mère Alphonsine sonorously, and Alex stood up.
She no longer felt self-conscious over the ordeal, and was indifferent to the habitual litany of complaints as to her unlearnt lessons, disregard of the rule of silence, and fre
quent bad marks for disorder and unpunctuality. But to the accusations which she knew by heart, and shared with the majority of the moyenne classe, came a quite unexpected addition, hissed out with a sort of dramatic horror by Mère Alphonsine:
“Alex recherche Kevinnie sans cesse, ma Mère Supérieure.”
Only those familiar with the code of pensionnaire discipline in Belgium during the years when Alex Clare and her contemporaries were at school, can gauge the full heinousness of the offence, gravest in the conventual decalogue.
Even Alex, although she had been scolded and punished and made the subject of innumerable homilies, some of them pityingly reproachful, and others explanatorily so, on the same question, felt as though she had never before realized the extent of her own perversion.
She stood up, her hands in the regulation position, pushed under the hideous black-stuff pèlerine that fell from her stiff, hard, white collar to the shapeless waistband of her skirt, the whole uniform carefully designed to conceal and obscure the lines of the figure beneath it.
Overwhelmed with uncomprehending misery and acute shame, she heard two or three of the mistresses add each her quota, for the most part regretfully and with an evident sense of duty overcoming reluctance, to the evidence against her.
“She seeks opportunity to place herself next to Queenie at almost every recreation, ma Mère Supérieure.”
“I am afraid that even in the chapel she lets this folly get the better of her — one can see how she lets herself go to distractions all the time....”
So the charges went on.
The summing up of Ma Mère Supérieure was icily condemnatory. She had tried every means with Alex, had spoken to her with kindness and tenderness; in private, had reasoned with her and finally threatened her, and now a public denouncement must be tried, since all these means had proved to be without effect.
Alex was principally conscious of the single, lightning-swift flash of reproach that had shot from the eyes of Queenie Torrance into hers.
How silently and viciously Queenie would resent this public coupling of her immaculate reputation with Alex’ idiotic infatuation, only Alex knew.
With the frantic finality of youth, she wondered whether she could go on living. Oh, if only she might die at once, without hearing further blame or reproach, without encountering the ridicule of her companions or the cold withdrawal of Queenie’s precariously-held friendship. Alex cried herself sick with terror and shame and utterly ineffectual remorse.
The despair that invades an undeveloped being is the blackest in the world, because of its utter want of perspective.
Alex could see nothing beyond the present. She felt all the weight of an inexpressible guilt upon her, and all the utter isolation of spirit which surrounds the sinner who stands exposed and condemned.
She knew that nobody would take her part. She was young enough to reflect forlornly that an accusation mattered nothing if unjust, since the consciousness of innocence would sustain one, serene and unfaltering, through any ordeal.
But she had no consciousness of innocence. She saw herself eternally different from her companions, eternally destined to lose her way, wickedly and shamefully she supposed, without volition of her own she knew, amongst those standards to which the right thinking conformed, and which she, only, failed to recognize. With sick wistfulness Alex sought Queenie’s glance as they came one by one into the refectory, after the réclame was over.
Queenie’s fair, opaque face was as colourless as ever, her eyes were cast down.
Frantically, Alex willed her to cast one look of pity or forgiveness in her direction, but Queenie passed on to the refectory where the children’s mid-day meal was waiting for them without a sign.
Amidst all the blur of emotions, passionate remorse and hopeless loneliness, which made up Alex’ schooldays, that Saturday mid-day meal stood out in its black despair.
The choking attempts to swallow a mass of vegetable cooking, made salt and sodden with her own streaming tears, the sobs that strangled her and broke in spite of all her efforts into the decorous silence of the refectory, even the awed and scandalized glances that the younger children cast at her distorted face, remained saliently before her memory for years.
At last the nun in charge rose from her place at the end of the room and came down and told Alex that she might leave the table. The long progress down the endless length of the refectory destroyed the last remnants of Alex’ self-control.
The tide of emotional agony that swept over her was to ebb and flow again, and many times again.
But only once or twice was that high-water mark to be reached, that bitter wave to engulf her, and each time add to the undermining of that small stability of spirit with which Alex had been endowed.
She left the misery of that black Saturday behind her, and was left with her childish nerves a little shattered, her childish confidence of outlook rather more overshadowed, her childish strength less steady, and, above all, set fast in her childish mind the ineradicable, unexplained conviction that because she had loved Queenie Torrance and had been punished and rebuked for it, therefore to love was wrong.
III
Queenie Torrance
School days in Belgium went on, through the steamy, rain-sodden days of spring to the end of term and the grandes vacances looked forward to with such frantic eagerness even by the children who liked the convent best. Alex was again bitterly conscious of an utter want of conformity setting her apart from her fellow-creatures.
The misery of parting for eight weeks from Queenie Torrance overwhelmed her. Casually, Queenie said:
“I may not come back, next term. I shall be seventeen by then, and I don’t see why I should be at school any longer if I can get round father.”
“What would you do?”
“Why, come out, of course,” said Queenie. “I am quite old enough, and every one says I look older than I am.”
She moved her head about slightly so as to get sidelong views of her own reflection in the big window-pane. There were no looking-glasses at the convent.
It was true that, in spite of a skin smooth and unlined as a baby’s and the childish, semicircular comb that gathered back the short flaxen ringlets from her rounded, innocent brow, Queenie’s slender, but very well-developed figure and the unvarying opaque pallor of her complexion, made her look infinitely nearer maturity than the slim, long-legged American girls, or over-plump, giggling French and Belgian ones. Alex gazed at her with mute, exaggerated despair on her face.
“Your parents will permit that you make your début at once, yes?” queried Marthe Poupard, as one resigned to the incredible folly and weakness of British and American parents.
“I can manage my father,” said Queenie gently, and with the perfect conviction of experience in her voice.
As the day of the breaking-up drew nearer, discipline insensibly relaxed, and Queenie suddenly became less averse from responding in some degree to Alex’ wistful advances.
On the last day, one of broiling heat, the two spent the afternoon alone together unrebuked, in a corner of the great verger where the pupils were scattered in groups, feeling as though the holidays had already begun.
“I shall have the journey with you,” said Alex, piteously.
“Madame Hippolyte is taking us over, with one of the lay-sisters,” said Queenie, naming the most vigilant of the older French nuns. “So it will be much better if we don’t talk together on the boat. You know there will be the three Munroe girls as well, because they are going to spend their holidays in Devonshire or somewhere.”
“How do you know it will be Madame Hippolyte?” said Alex disconsolately.
The authority deputed to conduct pupils on the journey to and from Liège was one of the many items in the convent curriculum always shrouded in impenetrable mystery until the actual moment of departure.
“I overheard two of them talking about it, in the linen-room this morning,” placidly said Queenie. “I kept behind the door.”
Part of her curious attractiveness was, that she never attempted to disguise or deny certain practices which Alex had been taught to consider as dishonourable.
Alex counted this as but one more stone in the edifice erected for the worship of her idol. It was not until she saw Queenie Torrance long after, in other relations and other surroundings, that she dimly realized how much of that streak of extraordinary candour was the direct product of a magnificently justified self-confidence in the potency of her own attraction, needing no enhancement from moral or mental attributes.
“Do you always live in London, Alex?”
“Yes, in Clevedon Square. You know, I told you about it, Queenie.”
“Yes, I know, but I only wondered if perhaps you had a house in the country as well.”
“No. Father and mother go to Scotland in the summer, and generally they send us to the seaside with Nurse and a governess or some one.”
“I see,” said Queenie reflectively. She had wondered if perhaps the Clares had a country house to which she, as a favourite school friend, would be asked to stay.
“Father hates the country,” said Alex. “We are sure to be in London for a little while in September, before I come back here. Would you — would you—” She gulped and clasped her hands nervously. Certain of Lady Isabel’s rules and recommendations rushed to her mind, but she desperately tried to ignore them.
“I suppose you would not come to tea with me one day, if I were allowed to ask you? Oh, if only your mother knew my mother!”
Smoothly Queenie took her cue. “Of course, mother won’t let me go to tea with any one — unless she knows them herself — but I don’t know.... What Club does your father belong to?”
“Two or three, I think,” said Alex, surprised. “He often goes to Arthur’s or the Turf Club.”
“So does father. Perhaps we could manage it that way,” said Queenie reflectively.
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 94