Nothing could be less tired-looking than Jennie Damerel, when she walked into her mother’s drawingroom less than ten minutes after Lydia’s own return.
“Nurse Hopkins has come,” she said volubly, “and Jackie’s asleep, and it’s only a green-stick fracture, and so—”
“Yes, I’ve seen Dr. West, and he told us just what I suppose you heard him say at the surgery.”
Lydia was not going to allow Jennie to impart all this information as though it were her own discovery.
“Are you tired? Grandmama wants us to dine at Quintmere to-night, to meet Billy’s friend, but the carriage won’t be here till half-past seven. Go and lie down, Jennie, and I’ll bring you some tea.”
There was a tone of urgency in Lydia’s solicitude.
If only Jennie would have been a meek and delicate child, allowing her mother to wait upon her, how gladly Lydia would have displayed her unselfish devotion! “I’m not a bit tired,” Jennie declared gaily. “Mama, do you know Dr. West said I was a born nurse and Jackie was far quieter with me than with Nurse Hopkins — really he was.”
“Before you can talk about being a born nurse, darling,” said Lydia tranquilly, “you would have to learn not to drop everything you touch, and break it.
I’m afraid I should feel sorry for your patients — especially if you went near them with hands like those.”
Jennie burst into an angry laugh, and coloured all over her fresh face, looking down at her dirty hands.
“Surely the doctor knows best,” she said defiantly.
“It’s not very likely he was in earnest — a little hoyden like you. I was quite ashamed of you this afternoon, pushing roughly past older people, and tearing across the grass like that, to interfere with what you knew nothing about. Everybody was laughing about it afterwards — a little schoolgirl thrusting herself forward, when there were women there who knew all about children before you were born. If it hadn’t been that Mrs. Madge is a helpless fool, I should have made you give up Jackie to his mother at once. Now try and keep quiet and rest a little before we go out this evening.”
Lydia picked up a book, and Jennie flounced out of the room, muttering below her breath.
When she had gone Lydia put down the book, of which she had not read a line. She knew that she had been unsympathetic, and yet Jennie’s arrogance seemed to her intolerable, and produced in her a greater sense of irritation than anything she had ever known. It was nothing less than necessary to snub her, surely? Lydia’s eyes suddenly filled with tears. She would have liked so much to pet Jennie, and make a baby of her, and know her to be dependent on her mother for everything! She had made many sacrifices for Jennie when Jennie really was a baby, and everybody had acknowledged her devotion to her only child. But Jennie had, from an obstinate, rather inarticulate, and backward child, slowly developed into a self-sufficient, self-assertive girl, asking only to go her own way, and perfectly satisfied with her own crude efficiency.
She did not want beautiful sacrifices to be made by her mother on her behalf. She would have resented them violently.
Lydia was far too clear-sighted not to realize that Jennie had inherited her own strong instinct for impressing her personality upon her surroundings. But, looking back upon her own youth, Lydia felt that nothing was subtle, nothing restrained, about Jennie.
She was blatant where Lydia had been astute, boastful where Lydia had dealt in half-implications. Thinking over the perpetual fret of their relations, Lydia felt suddenly tired and hopeless.
She went up to Jennie’s room, and inspected her black net evening-frock, the only one that she possessed, since she was not yet considered to be grown up.
“You really can only wear it this once more, Jennie.
Your things never last. I can remodel the whole of the top, though, with some fresh tulle. I’ll do it for you to-morrow.”
It was always a satisfaction to Lydia to feel herself working for her undutiful daughter.
“Oh, please don’t, mama,” said Jennie, wriggling.
“I do hate people to know that you make my things.”
“That is a very ungracious thing to say. Don’t you think I can work well enough for you?”
“Mama, you know it isn’t that! It’s a shame to pretend you think I meant that. It’s only because it sounds as though you were always working yourself to death for me, and I let you do it — and it isn’t true.”
XXIII
“HE’S come!” Billy excitedly told the guests, as he met them in the hall at Quintmere. “Came all the way without a break.”
“Where’s the flying-machine?” said Jennie, as excitedly.
“In the Four Acres field — I told him most carefully exactly where to land, and he made a glorious descent.”
“Oh, why didn’t I see it! Can’t we go and look at it after dinner?”
“All covered up with tarpaulin and stuff for the night. Two of the men are going to watch it, in turns, all night. Fancy, Jennie, the pilot’s here, too — he’s having supper in the housekeeper’s room!” The two young things looked at one another with glowing eyes, and Lydia involuntarily smiled in sympathy, incomprehensible to her though their enthusiasm was.
Her smile died away when, to Jennie’s agitated whisper at the drawing-room door, “Oh, I feel as if I was being introduced to Royalty!” Billy replied reassuringly, “You needn’t be nervous. Grandmama’s been telling him about you pulling the hurdles off that kid this afternoon, and he was fearfully interested.”
Really, Lady Lucy spoilt both her grandchildren, Lydia reflected. Here was Mr. Roland Valentine treated as an honoured guest, staying in the old house to which so few visitors were ever invited, just because Billy had known him at Oxford, and had gone mad about his experiments in aviation. He struck Lydia as rather a common young man, good-looking in a bold, well-set-up fashion, and with a faint, unfamiliar twang in his speech.
And grandmama was just as indulgent of Jennie as she was of Billy.
She inquired with solicitude if the girl were tired, or had felt any strain from her exertions, and she recapitulated, with the iteration of old age, the story of Jennie’s prowess in the afternoon.
“I wish I’d seen you — it sounds as though you’d been a regular heroine,” said Mr. Roland Valentine, rather too familiarly, Lydia thought.
“It wasn’t anything. I’ve heaps of muscle.”
Jennie thrust out a white, solid forearm, pushing the black net sleeve away from her elbow.
“By Jove!” said Mr. Valentine admiringly.
All through dinner they talked about aeroplanes, and Jennie asked questions that elicited long, technical sounding replies from Valentine, who kept his eyes fixed upon hers across the table.
“I say, you’ve been reading all this up,” he challenged her at last.
“No, I haven’t,” cried Jennie, unresentful of the assumption, but eager to display her credentials. “I’ve been keen on machinery, and especially on flying, for ages — haven’t I, Billy?”
“Rather,” said Billy heartily.
“Can’t we go out and look at the machine to-night?”
“It’s all covered up — you won’t see much.”
“I don’t care — just the shape would be something.
Mayn’t we, grandmama?”
“If Mr. Valentine will take you,” said Lady Lucy placidly. “But why not wait till to-morrow morning?”
“I’m afraid I have to be off good and early,” said the young airman. “But I hope you’ll all come and see the start.”
The naive egotism of the invitation almost made Lydia laugh.
But she was vaguely glad that Mr. Valentine was to leave next day.
She altered the trend of the conversation by asking him whether he had always lived in America. Something in his intonation, though scarcely to be called an accent, prompted the suggestion.
“I’ve spent my life in Vancouver, but I don’t know the States.”
“Vancouver!” cried Jenni
e. “Oh, mama, perhaps he knows Cousin Bob!” Jennie did not herself know any of the Senthovens excepting Aunt Evelyn and Olive, and her sense of clan-ship was a continual source of vexation to Lydia, by whom it was not shared in any degree.
“Canada is a large place,” she said, laughing a little.
“Your Cousin Bob is on Vancouver Island, not on the mainland at all.”
“What’s Cousin Bob’s name, anyway?” said Mr.
Valentine encouragingly.
“It’s Senthoven, not a bit a common name,” said Jennie eagerly. “Oh, do say you know him.”
“Well, I’m afraid I just don’t — but I tell you what, Miss Damerel, I’ll make a point of looking him up as soon as I get back, and telling him he’s got a very charming relative in England who’s anxious for news of him.”
“Nonsense,” said Lydia, laughing. “My daughter doesn’t even know this cousin. I don’t know what this sudden interest in poor Cousin Bob is about, Jennie.”
Jennie coloured. For all her schoolgirl forwardness, it was always easy to make her blush, and Lydia was not sorry for it.
“Jennie is just like her father,” said Joyce Damerel.
“Clement always took an interest in anybody belonging to him, however distant, don’t you remember?”
“I’ve heard heaps about Cousin Bob from Aunt Beryl and Aunt Evelyn, and seen his photograph when he was a little boy,” said Jennie, casting an openly resentful glance at Lydia.
The young airman was looking from one to another with unabashed, almost openly amused interest and curiosity.
Joyce Damerel turned the conversation to Mr. Valentine’s exploits with his machine, and he dilated upon them with a sort of simplicity that just saved him from blatancy, until the end of dinner.
Then Jennie said, “Oh, may I?” And without waiting for any permission, rushed into the hall in search of the old carriage lantern.
As the expedition started Lydia heard her eager voice begin again: “But if the shaft of the propeller was at that angle.”
“Shall you go with them, my dear?” said Lady Lucy to Lydia. “Do, if you want to, though there is very little to see now. Joyce and I watched the machine come down: — a most wonderful sight.”
“No, thank you,” said Lydia. “Perhaps I shall see the start, and they don’t really want anyone with them.
They’re still talking machinery.”
“The young people of to-day are able to dispense with chaperonage,” said grandmama calmly. “They are all so impersonal.”
“Well,” said Joyce Damerel, with the curt, matter-of-factness that Lydia so much disliked, “I shouldn’t dispense with it too much in Jennie’s case, if I were Lydia, for, to my mind, she’s extraordinarily attractive.”
Lydia felt an odd mingling of annoyance and gratification.
They sat in the lamp-lit drawing-room, just as they always did at Quintmere after dinner, and the placid routine that Lydia knew so well took its accustomed course.
Coffee was brought in, and Lady Lucy lamented that the careless children had taken Mr. Valentine out before he could have had any.
“Are Solomon’s biscuits there, Joyce?” The old Aberdeen terrier’s biscuits were always there, in a little silver box with a chased lid.
“Solly — Solly — come along, then!” As the small and aged dog shuffled slowly up, an old recollection stirred in Lydia, and she gave a fleeting thought to the memory of Grandpapa’s Shamrock.
There had been a great deal of talk about getting rid of the obstreperous Shamrock after Grandpapa’s death, but after all Aunt Beryl had kept him, and for weeks he had faithfully shadowed Mr. Monteagle Almond, the solitary paying guest of the Regency Terrace house, and a notorious hater of dogs. Lydia could smile a little at the memory of prim Mr. Monteagle Almond, disgraced in the town where he was so well known, by the antics of his companion, by Shamrock’s raids upon perambulators, and butchers’ shops and nervous girls on bicycles.
Shamrock’s fate at the end had remained uncertain, for, after a severe and much-overdue thrashing at last bestowed by a righteously incensed Uncle George, the Sealyham had rushed out of the house with every appearance of being still entirely unsubdued, and had never come back again.
“I don’t believe that dog could ever die,” Aunt Beryl had remarked simply. “Honest to goodness, Lydia, I believe he was possessed.”
They had all of them left it at that.
“Poor Solomon is getting very blind, I’m afraid,” said Lady Lucy.
She said it every evening.
Joyce Damerel sat, very upright, by the open window, and knitted something silken. She was not a needlewoman, but Lydia knew that she would have thought it waste of time equally to sit unoccupied, or to read a book.
Lydia herself picked up an Illustrated London News, and Lady Lucy softly rustled the sheets of the Times.
“Have you heard how that poor woman is, at the hospital, Joyce, my dear?” There was always some poor woman or other to be inquired after.
“Oh, dear, these Suffragettes again!” That was Lady Lucy’s contribution to the agitating problem of the day.
The clock on the mantelpiece chiming ten startled them all in the drowsy silence.
“Where are those children? They must have come in, and gone to the billiard-room.”
Then the footman brought in a tray with glasses, and a decanter and syphon, and a large jug of cold water.
“Are the young gentlemen in the billiard-room, Charles?”
“No, my lady, talking with the pilot person.”
“And where is Miss Jennie?” said Lydia quickly.
“I don’t think Miss Jennie ‘as come in from the Four Acres field, madam.”
“It’s too late for her without a cloak or anything, silly child! I shall go and see,” said Joyce Damerel.
She rose with her decisive movement, and left the room.
Lydia was left again to the drowsy silence of the drawing-room and old Lady Lucy.
She knew that Joyce had only gone out because she did not want Jennie to be scolded by her mother for the indiscretion of her escapade. Did they all think her such a tyrant, then? Lydia smiled rather bitterly, realizing vividly at the moment that she did not at all feel herself to be amongst the Olympians, the lawgivers, and lookers-on at the game of life.
Rather was she unable to feel her place to be anywhere but in the arena itself, in the very forefront.
But since the tragically early death of Clement, and the evanescence of the momentary lustre of pathos surrounding his widow, it seemed to her that she had been relegated into the background — a background, moreover, that was merely expected to throw into relief other and younger personalities.
Joyce Damerel might accept a place in that background — Lydia herself could not do so.
She felt herself to be far more alive, far more real, than was little Jennie, and it angered her that other people did not seem so to feel her.
The door opened, and Billy came in.
“Hallo, aren’t the other two in? I thought they were just behind me. I say, Aunt Lydia, we’ve a great plan. Can’t Jennie stay the night here, so as to see Valentine start to-morrow morning? He’s got to be off early.”
Lydia looked at Lady Lucy.
“Delighted to have dear little Jennie,” said the old lady placidly. “It really is an opportunity not to be missed, and she has always been so interested in these strange machines. I was struck by her knowledge to-night.”
“So was Valentine,” said Billy, in an awed voice.
“You should have heard them in the field, jawing away.
Why, she knew nearly as much about it as he did!”
“Wonderful!” said Lady Lucy. “Ring the bell, my dear boy, and tell them to get the little blue room ready at once.”
“And may I have the carriage, grandmama? It’s later than usual,” said Lydia.
“Certainly, my dear.”
“I’ll put the child’s things together, just for to-n
ight and to-morrow morning, and send them back in the carriage. I won’t keep it waiting.”
“You are always so thoughtful, my dear,” declared Lady Lucy affectionately.
She was very fond of Lydia nowadays.
“Good night, grandmama. If I don’t see Jennie, tell her that I shall expect her home in time for lunch to-morrow.”
But Lydia did see Jennie.
Joyce Damerel and the young airman, and Jennie herself, were coming into the hall just as she left the drawing-room, politely escorted by Billy.
“Grandmama has suggested that you should stay the night, Jennie, and then you’ll be able to see the start to-morrow morning,” said Lydia. “Oh — your shoes!” She looked down in dismay at the satin slippers, soaked with dew.
“They’re very old,” said Jennie perversely. “I don’t suppose it’ll hurt them.”
“I’m thinking of your catching cold,” began Lydia severely, and stooped to feel the damp edges of Jennie’s black evening frock.
In her usual ungracious fashion the girl twitched herself away, as she always did at such demonstrations of her mother’s solicitude.
Lydia almost involuntarily looked up to see the impression that might be produced by her daughter’s ungrateful reception of the maternal thought fulness.
Roland Valentine was gazing at Jennie, and there was more than a suspicion of laughter in his bold eyes — laughter that, as Lydia quickly felt, was wholly sympathetic of her youthful ingratitude.
“I fancy you’re a pretty strong girl, aren’t you? It’s rather waste of anxiety to fuss around you, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is, as I’m always telling mama. I’ve never been ill yet,” boasted Jennie.
“I’d rather be ill and have done with it, than have to be always thinking of taking care, the way some girls do — and fellows too, if they’re mollies,” affirmed the airman.
“Or having someone else taking care for one,” murmured Jennie under her breath, casting a half-deprecating, half-impudent glance at her mother.
“You ungrateful little cat!” cried Joyce Damerel.
But she laughed as she said it, and put her arm round the shoulders of her recalcitrant niece.
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 175