She and Barbara shared a room at Fiveapples Farm.
Barbara whined the inevitable contradiction, “I’m not silly,” but added immediately, “you wouldn’t be so cross, if you knew what I know. I expect you’d laugh too.”
“Well, what is it?”
“I shan’t tell you.”
Alex was not particularly curious, but she had been the nursery autocrat too long to be able to endure resistance to her command.
“Tell me at once, Barbara.”
“No, I won’t.”
“Yes, you will. Well, what is it about?” said Alex, changing her tactics.
“It’s about Cedric.”
“Is he in a scrape?”
“No, it’s just something he did.”
“What? Did he tell you about it?”
“Oh, no. He doesn’t know I know. He’d be furious if he did, I expect.”
“Who told you? Does any one else know?”
“Nobody told me. One other person knows,” giggled Barbara, jumping up and down in her petticoat.
“Keep still, you’ll have the candle over. Who’s the other person who knows?”
“Guess.”
“Oh, I can’t; don’t be so silly. I am not going to ask you any more.”
“Well,” said Barbara in a great hurry, “it’s Marie Munroe, then; it’s about her.”
“What about her? She didn’t take any notice of any one except Cedric, and I think it was very rude and stupid of her.”
“It was Cedric’s doing much more than hers,” Barbara said shrewdly. “I think he thinks he is in love with her. I saw them in the shrubbery when we were playing hide-and-seek; and — what do you think, Alex?”
“Well, what?”
“Cedric kissed her — I saw him.”
“Then,” said Alex, “it was perfectly hateful of him and of Marie and of you.”
“Why of me?” shrieked Barbara in a high key of indignation. “What have I done, I should like to know?”
“You’d no business to say anything about it. Put out the candle, Barbara, I’m going to get into bed.”
In the darkness Alex lay with her mind in a tumult. It seemed to her incredible that her brother, whom she had always supposed to despise every form of sentimentality, as he did any display of feeling on the part of his family, should have wanted to kiss little, red-haired Marie, whom he had only known for one day, and who was by far the least pretty of any of the three Munroe sisters. “And to kiss her in the shrubbery like that!”
Alex felt disgusted and indignant. She thought about it for a long while before she went to sleep, although she would gladly have dismissed the incident from her mind. Most of all, perhaps, she was filled with astonishment. Why should any one want to kiss Marie Munroe?
In the depths of her heart was another wonder which she never formulated even to herself, and of which she would, for very shame, have strenuously denied the existence.
Why had she not the same mysterious attraction as un-beautiful little Marie? Alex knew instinctively that it would never have occurred, say, to Noel Cardew — to ask her if he might kiss her. She did not want him to — would have been shocked and indignant at the mere idea — but, unconsciously, she wished that he had wanted to.
VI
The End of an Era
No salient landmarks ever seemed to Alex to render eventful the two and a half years that elapsed between those summer holidays at Fiveapples Farm and her final departure from the Liège convent to begin her grown-up life at home.
The re-arrangement of the day’s routine consequent on the beginning of the winter half-year caused her to miss Queenie less acutely than she had done when she first came home for the holidays, and with Queenie’s absence there were fewer revolts against convent law, and less disfavour from the authorities.
She made no other great friends. Marie Munroe showed her a marked friendliness at first, but Alex could not forget that giggling revelation of Barbara’s, and shrank from her advances unmistakably. She had very little in common with her French contemporaries, and knew that they thought her English accent and absence of proficiency in needlework, marks of eccentricity and of bad form, so that she became self-conscious and aggressive before them.
She was hardly aware of her own intense loneliness — the poignant realization of it was to come later — but the want of any channel of self-expression for her over-developed emotional capabilities produced in her a species of permanent discontent that reacted on her health and on her spirits, so that she got the reputation, least enviable of any in schoolgirl circles, of being “a tragedy queen.”
Her morose pallor, partly the result of an under-vitalized system, and partly of her total lack of any interest in her surroundings, were considered fair game.
“Voyez, Alex! Elle a son air bête aujourd’hui.”
“A qui l’enterrement, Alex?”
They were quite good-humoured, and did not mean to hurt her. It was not their fault that such pin-pricks stabbed her and sent her away to cry over her own friendlessness until she felt sick and exhausted.
She did not expend on any one else the extravagant worship bestowed upon Queenie Torrance. For a year she wrote to Queenie throughout the holidays, and received meagre and unsatisfactory replies, and then gradually the correspondence ceased altogether, and Alex only looked forward with an occasional vague curiosity to the possibility of meeting Queenie again in London, on the terms of equality symbolized by their both being “grown-up.”
During her last year at school, lack of intimate intercourse with any one, and the languid sentimentality of adolescence, made her take for the first time some interest in religion as understood at the convent. She prolonged her weekly confession, which had hitherto been a matter of routine to be got through as rapidly as possible, in order to obtain the solace of talking about herself, and derived a certain tepid pleasure in minutely following and applying to herself the more anecdotal portions of the New Testament.
For a time, it seemed to her that she had found a refuge.
Then came the affair of the examination. Alex, in her last term, and taking part in the final midsummer concours, could not bear the penalty of failure which it seemed to her would be displayed in the mediocrity which had all along been her portion. She had never been admitted to the virtuous society of the enfants de Marie, had never taken more than one of the less distinguished prizes at the end of any term, and had no warmly-worded report to display her popularity and the sense of loss that her departure would leave.
Her place in the half-yearly examination was not a good one. She had none of Cedric’s power of concentration, and her abilities were not such as to win her any regard in the continental and Catholic system of education of the middle nineties.
She cheated over the examination.
It was quite easy to copy from the girl next her, who happened to be one of the best vehicles for carefully-tabulated and quite unconnected facts, in the school. Alex could read the dates, and the proper names, and all the principal words on her history paper, and transferred them to her own, clothing the dry bones in the imaginative fabric of her own words, for the English girls were allowed to do most of the papers in their own language.
At the end of the morning she was oddly elated, at the sight of her well-filled paper, and felt no qualms at all. In the afternoon she was again next to Marie-Louise, and congratulated herself that the paper should be the literature one. Arithmetic, she knew, was not the strong point of Marie-Louise, and besides, it would be almost impossible to copy the working of problems figure for figure without ultimate detection.
That night, however, when Alex knelt down to say her prayers, she was suddenly overwhelmed by remorse and terror.
Her crime came between her and God.
The vaguely comforting belief that because she was lonely and miserable, He would vouchsafe to her an especial pity, was destroyed. Between God and a sinner, so Alex had been told, lay an impassable gulf that only repentance
, confession, atonement and punishment, could bridge — and even then, an indelible entry against one’s name testified to eventual exposure and shame at some dreadful, inevitable assizes, when sins hidden and forgotten, large and small, of commission and omission alike, would be made known to all the world, assembled together for the Last Judgment. Faced with this inevitable retribution, Alex felt that no present success was worth it, and wondered whether she could not repair her wickedness as far as possible on the morrow by confession.
But when the morrow had come, the Day of Judgment seemed far removed from the hot July morning, and the breaking-up, when the result of the examinations would be heard, a very present reality indeed.
It was a relief to the hot, tossing sensation of balancing values in her mind, to remember that it was the day of the Catechism examination, which would be viva voce.
She acquitted herself very badly, and the temptation to retrieve her failure in the afternoon was irresistible, when she again found herself placed next to the prodigy Marie-Louise.
The paper was headed “Histoire de l’Église,” and immense value was attached to proficiency in the subject, strenuously taught to the convent pupils out of enormous old-fashioned volumes containing much loyal fiction with a modicum of distorted historical fact.
Alex fell.
She could overlook her neighbour’s papers so easily, hardly even turning her head, that it only struck her as inconvenient, and did not awake in her any fear of detection, when presently Marie-Louise pulled a piece of blotting-paper towards her so that it covered the page on which she was working.
Alex finished the question to which Marie-Louise had unwittingly supplied her with material for the answer, and looked about her, subconsciously waiting for the removal of the blotting-paper. Her eyes met those of a younger child, seated exactly opposite to her, whose sharp, dark gaze was fixed upon her with a sort of eager, contemptuous horror. In that instant, when it seemed as though her heart had stopped beating, Alex knew herself detected.
The colour rushed from her face and she felt cold and giddy.
Lacking the instinctive guard against self-betrayal which is the hall-mark of the habitual deceiver, her terrified gaze turned straight to Marie-Louise.
The smooth, dark head was bent low, one hand still clutched at the covering blotting-paper, and the ear and piece of cheek which were all that Alex could see, were scarlet.
Marie-Louise knew.
The sharp-eyed child opposite had seen Alex cheat, and had no doubt conveyed a silent telegraphic warning.
It seemed to Alex that the world had stopped. Accusation, disgrace, expulsion, all whirled through her mind and left no permanent image there. Her imagination stopped utterly dead at the horror of it.
She sat perfectly motionless for the remaining hours of the morning, unconscious of the passage of time, only conscious of an increasing sense of physical sickness.
It was an absolute relief to her when the bell rang and she found herself obliged to get up and move across the long class-room with the others to give up her papers.
“Vous êtes malade, Alexandra?”
“J’ai mal-au-coeur,” said Alex faintly.
She was sent to the infirmary to lie down, and the old lay-sister in charge of it was so kind to her, and commiserated her wan, forlorn appearance so pityingly, that Alex burst into a flood of tears that relieved the tension of her body, and sent her, quivering, but uncomprehendingly sensible of relief, to rest exhaustedly upon the narrow infirmary bed with little white curtains drawn all round it.
No doubt every one would soon know of her disgrace, and she would be expelled, to the shame and anger of her father and mother, and the downfall of all her boastings to Barbara. No doubt God had abandoned one so unworthy of His forgiveness — but Soeur Clementine was kind, and it seemed, in the incredible comfort of a little human tenderness, that nothing else mattered.
And, after all, that hour’s anticipation proved to be the worst that happened to her. She went downstairs for the evening preparation, and Marie-Louise, a trusted enfant de Marie, obtained permission to speak to her alone, and solemnly conducted her to the lavatory, as the most private place in the school.
Standing over the sink, with its stiff and solitary tap of cold water, Marie-Louise conducted her inquiry with business-like, passionless directness.
Alex made no attempt either to deny her sin or to palliate it. She was mentally and emotionally far too much exhausted for any effort, and it did not even occur to her that any excuse could avail her anything.
Marie-Louise was not at all unkind.
She knew all about la charité, and was agreeably conscious of exercising this reputable virtue to the full, when she informed Alex that no one should ever know of the lapse from her, provided that Alex, making her own explanation to the class-mistress, should withdraw her papers from the examination.
“But what can I say to her?” asked Alex.
“Quant à ça,” said Marie-Louise, in the detached tones of one who had accomplished her duty and felt no further interest on the point at issue, “quant à ça, débrouillez-vous avec vôtre conscience.”
To this task she left Alex.
And Alex ended by doing nothing at all. Partly from inertia, partly because she knew that Marie-Louise would never ask her what she had done, she shirked the shame and trouble of confession to her class-mistress, and let her papers go in with the others. She knew that she would not get a high place, for her work all through the term had been bad, and would have to be taken into consideration, and over all the remaining papers she muddled hopelessly. Besides, she was leaving for good, and no one would know.
She had lost her self-respect when she first realized that she was cheating, and it was then, as she neared the completion of her seventeenth year, that the belief was ineradicably planted in Alex’ soul that she had been born with a natural love of evil, and that goodness was an abstract attitude of mind to which she could never do more than aspire fruitlessly, with no slightest expectation of attainment. She was further conscious of an intense determination to hide the knowledge of her own innate badness from every one.
If she were ever seen in her true colours, no one would love her, and Alex already knew dimly, and with a further sense of having strange, low standards of her own, that she wanted to be loved more than anything in the world.
Far more than she wanted to be good.
The affair of the examination passed, and although Alex did not forget it, she mostly remembered it as merely the culminating scandal of a succession of petty evasions and cowardly deceptions.
She left Liège without regret.
She had hated the physical discomfort of the conventual system, the insufficient hours of sleep, the bitter cold of the Belgian winters and the streaming rain that defiled the summers; she had hated the endless restrictions and the minute system of surveillance that was never relaxed; above all, she had hated the sense of her own isolation in a crowd, her own utter absence of attraction for her kind.
It seemed to Alex that when she joined the mysterious ranks of grown-up-people everything would be different. She never doubted that with long dresses and piled-up hair, her whole personality would change, and the meaningless chaos of life reduce itself to some comprehensible solution.
Everything all her life had been tending towards the business of “growing up.” Everything that she was taught at home impressed the theory that her “coming out” would usher in the realities of life, and nothing impressed her more with a sense of the tremendous importance of the approaching change than Lady Isabel’s greeting, when she came back to Clevedon Square after her final term at Liège.
“We’ve put off Scotland for a week, darling — your father’s been so good about it — so that I may see about your clothes. I’ve made appointments with Marguerite and the other places for you, so there’ll be nothin’ to do but try on, but, of course, I shall have to see the things myself before they finish them, and tell them about
the colours; they’re sure to want to touch everything up with pink or blue, and white is so much prettier for a young girl. White with a tiny little diamanté edging, I thought, for one of your evenin’ dresses....
“The first thing, of course, is your hair. Louise must go with you to Hugo’s, and watch them very carefully while they do it in two or three different styles, then she’ll be able to do it for you every evening. I expect she’ll have to do it every day to begin with, but you must try and learn. I should like you to be able to be independent of a maid in that sort of way — one never knows quite that some time one mightn’t find oneself stranded for a day or two....
“I don’t think your hair will need waving, Alex, which is such a comfort. So many women have to wear their fringe in curlers every night — thank Heaven, I’ve never had to. As a matter of fact, they say fringes are goin’ out now, but I’m certainly not goin’ to let yours grow until we’re quite certain about it ... and a bald forehead is always so unbecomin’.”
Alex listened with a sense of importance and excitement, but she was also rather bewildered. The contrast between all this preoccupation with her clothes and her appearance, and the austere mental striving after spiritual or moral results which had permeated the convent atmosphere, was too violent.
“You’ll be interested in it all, my darling, won’t you?” asked Lady Isabel disappointedly. “I couldn’t bear to have a daughter who didn’t care about her things — some girls are like that — so disappointin’; after one’s had all the trouble of their upbringin’ and is lookin’ forward to a little reward.”
Alex could find no words in which to explain what she knew quite well, that she was as full of eager anticipations as Lady Isabel could wish, but was too much bewildered by the novelty of it all, as yet, to give any expression to them.
She became rather boisterous and unconvincing in her endeavours to express, by means which were not spontaneous, the pleasure and excitement expected of her.
“You’ll learn to move prettily and quietly, darling, and we must see about some dancin’ lessons before next year. Dancin’ fashions alter so quickly now-a-days,” said Lady Isabel, her low, gentle tones a shade lower and more gentle than usual.
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 98