“Aleck?”
“Telegraphed for. We don’t even know where he is.”
“He seems so young,” sighed Lydia. “Well, anyhow, your little Charlie is all right. He’ll be out of it all at his age.”
“He’s only thirteen,” said the Colonel gruffly.
“They’ll rush ’em through like anything, though. I’m glad now that they neither of them had a fancy for soldiering, and chose the Navy instead. They can be made use of right away, young as they are, if they’re wanted.”
Lydia looked at him with involuntary admiration.
“How’s Nathalie?”
“Come along and see her,” said Colonel Kennedy.
Lydia accepted with a certain relief. She wanted to postpone her return home, hardly able to bear the thought of speaking to Jennie, and reflecting also that delay would give her daughter time for thought. She felt, too, with a sudden and most unwonted sense of dependence, that Nathalie was her earliest friend, one of her own time and generation, who would assuredly understand and comfort her.
For the first time she consciously felt need of that quiet, stable affection and friendship of Nathalie’s that had always been there, waiting, in the background of Lydia’s whole existence.
She raised her tired eyes.
“I’ll come with you now,” she said to the Colonel.
“Poor Nathalie! She must be frightfully anxious, and though one can’t do anything, it may be a comfort to her to have someone to talk to.”
Involuntarily she put forward Nathalie’s possible need of her — not hers of Nathalie.
“Thank you, yes,” said the Colonel.
And when he took Lydia into his wife’s drawingroom, Nathalie exclaimed gratefully: “Oh, Lydia, how dear and good of you to come! I knew I should see you soon.”
Nathalie showed Lydia the telegram that had recalled their elder boy, the sailor, and speculated vainly as to when they might hope to know where he was, and she recapitulated, with a mixture of wistfulness and pride, the chances that little Charlie, too, would be sent to sea before the war was over; her husband, she said, would try to rejoin his old regiment.
“Because of course it’s war, Lydia. Jack says the Germans have been working for this all along — that they’re mad enough to want to fight us. Oh, doesn’t it all seem like a nightmare? — and a week ago we were all so peaceful and happy! What is Billy Damerel going to do, Lydia?”
“He’s in London. He told Joyce that he should enlist the minute war is declared — of course they’ll give him a commission.”
“Of course. His poor mother!” Lydia let Nathalie go on talking, and listened almost as though she were in a dream.
It seemed to her extraordinary that now, when she was suffering as she had never in her life suffered before, this supreme preoccupation should have come over the whole world, absorbing all attention, all speculation.
It even struck her as remarkable that she should presently be having tea with Nathalie in the small porch overlooking the garden, and that Nathalie should still have made no reference to the topic that absorbed her own thoughts.
But, of course, Nathalie knew nothing about it. If she were to know, Lydia must tell her. It had never been Lydia’s way to make confidences about her own affairs — Grandpapa’s lesson had been too well learned for that — and she had preferred other people to guess or infer it when trouble overtook her. She had often noticed, even whilst showing herself sympathetic and interested, how very ready others were to talk about themselves, and make their confidences — in curious contrast to herself.
But Nathalie evidently had guessed nothing.
She talked on and on about the war, about her own two boys, and the sons of the neighbouring families in the county. One or two young soldiers she knew had already received peremptory orders to rejoin their regiments.
“That young Scotsman the Bishop’s daughter is engaged to has had to go, Lydia. They may even have to put off the wedding. I do think it’s hard on the girl.
If I were her, I should get married as quickly as possible, I think.”
“Why?” said Lydia sharply.
“They’ll have had something, anyhow, that way. If they were married, she could be with him up to the last minute, and perhaps go and look after him if he’s wounded later on. I’ve heard lots of people say that.
Oh, Lydia, it’s going to be dreadful for all these young people! Look at your own Jennie — she’s not begun life yet, and there she is in the midst of tragedy and horror — all the boys of her own age going off to fight and be killed perhaps. She’s had none of the innocent enjoyment that we had yet, and Heaven knows if they’ll any of them enjoy anything any more now.”
“This nightmare won’t last — it can’t last,” said Lydia. “They’re young — they’ll recover from all this, and have their lives before them. It’s we, who know what it all means, that are the worst sufferers, I think.
Look at you, Nathalie, having to let Aleck go, and perhaps little Charlie!” Nathalie shook her head. Her eyes were full of tears, and she did not speak.
Presently her father came and joined them.
Mr. Palmer was a very old man, but he did not seem to Lydia to have changed a great deal since the early days of her own married life, when he had lived his gentle, unobtrusive life beside her and Clement at the Rectory, and treated her now as though she were his daughter.
It was he who gazed at her with his mild, good blue eyes, that needed no glasses yet, even though they had lost their brightness, and said gently: “You’ve come to share this anxiety with us, Lydia, my dear. That’s very good of you. But you look tired and troubled. There is no fresh news, is there?”
“Nothing that I know of.”
Lydia, overwrought and resentful of Nathalie’s blindness, could not withstand the kind anxiety with which Mr. Palmer still looked at her.
“I am worried — though I hardly know if I ought to say anything about it to anyone yet. But I’m afraid little Jennie has been reckless and silly — I’ve not been taking proper care of her.”
“Oh, Lydia! Jennie’s not ill, is she, poor child?” said Nathalie, her voice all genuine concern at once.
“No, no. She’s embarked on a — a — I don’t know what to call it, except a sort of flirtation — with that Canadian friend of Billy’s, the young man who came down here in a flying machine the other day.”
“I remember,” said Nathalie. “Isn’t he nice, Lydia?”
“Rather third-rate — and, besides, they don’t know each other. They just met that once at Quintmerc, when I’m sorry to say that I let Jennie stay there without me, just for one night — and then they seem to have arranged that he should call on us here on his way from Plymouth.”
“I remember, you told me,” said Nathalie. “Did he come?”
“He came to-day.”
Lydia paused, and her mouth tightened.
She could never bring herself to speak to anyone of the things, the unpardonable things, that young Valentine had said to her. She did not wish to recall them to her own mind, when they stabbed her afresh with every involuntary recollection.
“Well,” said Nathalie placidly, “you’ll have heaps of things of that sort to reckon with, Lydia, now that Jennie’s grown up. I’ve always thought that girls must be more trouble than boys, especially if they’re attractive. Jennie will marry young, I’m sure.”
“She won’t marry this young man,” said Lydia.
Nathalie said something about Canada being a long way off, and then her face changed again.
“But poor little girls of this generation, there may not be anyone for them to marry! Who knows what is going to happen?” The Rector’s eyes had never left Lydia’s face.
“Is this young Canadian undesirable in any way, my dear?”
“His manners are not good,” Lydia declared.
“Really, I know very little about him.”
Her tone was quite purposely light, as though by treating the subject c
asually she were relegating Mr.
Roland Valentine and his proposal to the negligible value of a mere episode.
“And little Jennie is in love with him?”
“He is conceited enough to think so,” said Lydia.
She even laughed, with a curious sense of relief at being able thus trivially to present the Canadian’s declared certainty that his love was returned. It was as though, while convincing the Rector and Nathalie, she was also convincing herself. “Jennie and I haven’t had our talk about it yet. He stole a march on her when I drove him to the station this afternoon.”
“I should let them be engaged if I were you, Lydia,” Nathalie said wearily. “If we’re all going to war, Heaven knows what will happen to any of us, and she’ll, anyway, have a man to take care of her. I suppose he’ll go back to Canada?”
“I suppose so. I don’t know,” said Lydia stiffly.
She did not want to proclaim the Canadian’s intention of taking his aeroplane into the zone of war, aware that the knowledge would only strengthen Nathalie in her unconsidered advice to let the young generation snatch at its desires of the moment. “I must go, Nathalie.
The child will be wondering what has happened to me.
If you get any news, you’ll let me know?”
“At once. Oh, Lydia, what shall we see in the papers to-morrow?” Lydia went away with the speculation still ringing in her ears. She felt unreasonably resentful that Nathalie had taken no serious interest in the individual problem centring round Jennie and the decision of her future that lay in Jennie’s mother’s hands. But she realized that the resentment was unjust, and that she herself had purposely spoken as though the affair were of no account.
How could she do otherwise, when the real hurt lay in those phrases that Lydia so passionately denied and repudiated, in which young Valentine had arrogantly taken upon himself to epitomize her mental and moral attitude towards her child?
XXVI
THE country had been at war for over a month, and the epidemic of war-marriages had already set in.
Engaged girls bought special licences, bought their own wedding-rings, held everything in readiness for an immediate marriage “whenever he should get leave.”
And every day fresh engagements were announced.
“What are they all thinking about?” said Lydia half impatiently, when they heard at Ashlew that the Bishop had taken his daughter to London himself, at twentyfour hours’ notice, to marry her Highlander.
She said it only because it seemed to her that everything was conspiring to the ultimate achievement of an immediate marriage between Jennie and Roland Valentine.
It would come to that.
Lydia knew it quite well — had known it with absolute certainty ever since old Lady Lucy — the conservative, the tradition-bound Lady Lucy — had said to her very gently: “I’m very sorry for you, my dear, but poor little Jennie! Let her be happy while she can. We hear nothing against this young man — quite the contrary — and this is a new world we’re going to live in. The old traditions mustn’t be made binding on these young folk, who are giving up everything. And I think he is a good young man,” said Lady Lucy emphatically.
Valentine was at Ashlew again, with three days’ leave before departing with his aeroplane to the front.
“He’s not a gentleman,” said Lydia, her mouth hardening.
She remembered how, once upon a time, Lady Lucy had begged her son Clement to wait, before asking in marriage a girl who was indubitably not of his own social standing.
“Colonial manners are never the same as ours,” declared Lady Lucy. “My dear, I think that in all the essentials, Mr. Valentine is a gentleman. And somehow the little rule-of-thumb by which one had always measured things up to now doesn’t seem to hold good any longer. We must go back to essentials in these terrible times — the old, primitive things.”
“Supposing I let Jennie marry him, and he is killed in a week — what has she gained?”
“Supposing you don’t let her marry him, and he is killed — what then?” asked the old lady gently. “Would Jennie ever forgive you, Lydia?”
“At Jennie’s age, though it would be a brutal thing to say to her now, one’s first love is not one’s last. She would almost certainly come to care for someone else.”
Lydia’s mother-in-law did not point out to her that the argument applied as much to Jennie prematurely widowed as to Jennie unwedded.
Instead she put into words an insistent intuition of Lydia’s own, that she had tried strenuously to stifle.
“My dear, forgive me, but have you altogether taken into consideration Jennie’s temperament? She might, as you say, come to care for someone else — but will it ever be like this again?” Lady Lucy’s old face flushed delicately.
“It was love at first sight on both sides, Lydia — and they are madly in love. The change in little Jennie is one of the most extraordinary things I have ever seen.”
Lydia winced.
To her life-long instinct of repression, that ardour of Jennie’s, unrestrained as unconcealed, came as something almost shocking.
It was true that Jennie was changed.
Lydia had seen traces of tempestuous tears on her face, on the very evening of the day that Roland Valentine had gone up to London, driven to the station by Lydia.
And Jennie had said: “I’m crying because I’m so madly happy — I didn’t know anybody on earth could be so happy. I can’t help crying” She cried, but her eyes said, as her lips had said, that it was because she was so madly happy.
When war was declared, and Lydia, white-faced, had bidden Jennie try to realize what it might mean for all of them — for England — for Billy Damerel — for Nathalie’s boys — for thousands of other boys — Jennie had said recklessly: “I know it’s all true, and that I don’t realize it. I can’t even realize Roland is going out there. And whatever happens, nothing can ever — ever take away what I’ve had.”
What Jennie had had! In those early days she had had less than half-a-dozen meetings with Roland Valentine, one impassioned declaration of love, a brief, imperative farewell, and then only long daily letters, of which Lydia knew nothing but that they sent Jennie, radiant-eyed, to the inditing of blotted, scrawled replies, to be sealed and taken to the post-office in her own clasp.
Now, six weeks later, by degrees that seemed to Lydia in the retrospect sometimes almost imperceptible, and sometimes tempestuously sudden, Jennie had “had,” as she put it, a good deal more.
Roland Valentine’s claims as to his modest income, and the considerable salary that he would be in a position to obtain when he chose to apply for it, were triumphantly verified. Other inquiries, of which Jennie, so far as Lydia was aware, had been told little, but which were stringently made through Billy Damerel and Colonel Kennedy, met with unimpeachable reassurances.
And so the young man came down to Ashlew once more, wearing the magic uniform that still excited a display of enthusiasm all over England whenever it appeared.
Lady Lucy capitulated.
The Kennedys, Nathalie eagerly and her husband more cautiously, advocated the cause of the lovers.
Joyce Damerel had always, unwaveringly, if hitherto almost silently, supported Jennie’s claims against her mother.
“Of course they’re engaged,” said Joyce. “He’s asked her to be his wife, and she’s promised. The only question is whether you’ll let them marry at once, Lydia. And I don’t see how you can refuse in times like these.”
Lydia was making her last stand. She knew herself defeated, she knew that Jennie and Roland Valentine would marry in the course of his first leave from the front; she even knew, clearly and inexorably, that her opposition to the marriage was based upon no objection that could be made valid in the eyes of the Damerels, the Kennedys, her other friends.
She argued with them, not because she thought for a moment that argument would convince them, but in a desperate last effort to cheat herself into believing that her att
itude was what she represented it to be, and not the mere manifestation of an impassioned resentment that the man to take Jennie from her should be a man who saw her, and would encourage Jennie to see her, with the hard, defiant gaze of youth in judgment.
She had never liked Joyce Damerel, but in the new and overwhelming sense of loneliness that had come upon her, Lydia appealed to Joyce.
“Can’t you understand? When all the objections as to Canada, and his not being altogether — quite — and Jennie’s youth and all the rest of it — when they’ve all been disposed of, there’s still something else, Joyce.
Roland Valentine doesn’t like me.”
“How can you expect him to, when he knows that you’re against the marriage?”
“It was before that. A — a sort of antagonism Don’t you remember that very first evening of all, when we all dined at Quintmere?”
“I remember that he took Jennie’s part every time,” said Joyce bluntly. “Surely you wouldn’t want him to do anything else, Lydia? If he loves her and is going to marry her, how can you possibly want him to take anybody’s part but hers — ever?”
“Why must there be ‘parts’ to take?” Joyce shrugged her shoulders.
“Now you’re raising another issue altogether.”
“Yes, that’s quite true,” said Lydia, collecting herself. “My point is this, though. An older man — one of more experience and wider sympathies — would have understood my position — my whole attitude in regard to Jennie — and would have brought her, in time, to see it too. This boy, with his crude, Colonial ideas of independence, and his young, arrogant, heartless verdict— ‘gratitude is a beastly feeling’ — he actually said that to me, Joyce, quite naively! — everything that is defiant and ungrateful in Jennie, he will exaggerate.”
“I don’t think Jennie is ungrateful to you, exactly.”
“Do you think I want gratitude from my own child?” cried Lydia illogically.
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 179