Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  “Yes,” said Joyce, “you do. You want unquestioning gratitude from her the whole time, and unquestioning acceptance of everything that you do for her.

  And it’s absolutely against nature that you should get it, Lydia. Jennie is sturdy and independent by nature.

  If she hadn’t been, by this time you would have made her into a helpless, selfish, boneless weakling. As it is, of course, she’s in a state of constant rebellion. She wants to be generous and to give, and to take care in her turn — and so she ought. But you want to arrogate all those rights to yourself.”

  “What you are accusing me of,” said Lydia bitterly, “is of having loved Jennie too well, and sacrificed myself too much for her sake.”

  “I?” said Joyce slowly. “If you want to know, Lydia, I think you the most monstrous egotist that I have ever known in my life.”

  Not only the shock of hearing herself so described, but also the amazement of hearing so trenchant a personality from Joyce Damerel, who was never personal, and seldom vehement, kept Lydia absolutely silent. She looked at her sister-in-law without a word.

  Joyce faced her unflinchingly, and without any compassion or hesitation in her gaze.

  “Perhaps I’ve no right to say these things to you, but for once I’m going to. While Clement was alive I shouldn’t have said a word — it was for him to say it, if anyone did, only he never would have. Oh, I know he was your husband, but I knew Clement and his brother in their nursery days — we were all more or less brought up together — and he never would have spoken, for fear of hurting you. He’d only have kept Jennie more and more with him. Do you remember when Clement died, how you kept on telling me that Jennie was too young to understand — that she wouldn’t really feel it? You didn’t want her to feel it, because you wanted to have the sole prerogative of grief. Clement’s mother is old, and a saint — even you couldn’t grudge her her sorrow; but you knew very well that she wouldn’t claim any pity or sympathy — and the very old are too near eternity to get the compassion of the multitude. You wanted it all for yourself — you grudged Jennie her share, and you wouldn’t admit that she had any right to suffer at all.

  “And it’s been like that all along. Jennie may have the nice, little, happy, easy, trivial things — especially if she owes them all to you, and everyone knows it — but the real experiences, the things that hurt and teach one, and are the privilege of the people that are to be worth anything — those she must leave to you. And you try to believe, and to make everyone else believe, that because you make Jennie’s clothes, and live economically and are a wonderful manager, and save money for her, and do the tiresome things in the house yourself, so that she can enjoy herself in the garden — because of all that, you love Jennie as no daughter has ever been loved before, and it puzzles and pains everyone that she doesn’t seem grateful and loving in return. Well, it isn’t Jennie you love at all — it’s yourself. I don’t believe you’ve ever loved anyone, Lydia.”

  A very far-away echo of the past came dimly to Lydia’s stunned perceptions. A little pale-faced.

  Cockney girl, Rosie Graham, the cashier at Elena’s, had once said something to her like that.

  “I know very little about your life before you married Clement,” said Joyce ruthlessly. “Perhaps there was someone then. But you didn’t want any friends or relations to come and stay with you, as most girls do when they marry and have a house. Nathalie told us you had cousins, and an aunt and uncle who brought you up, and friends in London — but we never saw any of them. Your aunt came when we were all away — and after you’d been married for years and years.

  Clement wanted her to come while he was alive — it was you who didn’t want anyone.”

  “It was our home — why should I want other people?” Lydia attempted to justify herself mechanically and without conviction.

  Joyce laughed contemptuously.

  “That cock won’t fight, my dear. The old Rector came to you, at your own suggestion, before you’d been married a year. Clement’s mother loved you for that, and thought it was a sacrifice you were making, so that Nathalie could get married and go to India, and so that Clement could come down here and live near her. It wasn’t a sacrifice, Lydia. Nothing matters to you so much as having the beau role. You can’t bear anyone else to be in the foreground, and no sacrifice costs anything if it’ll get you there. You sacrificed even Clement, over and over again.”

  “How dare you speak like that?” Lydia was choking.

  “I’ve watched it for nearly twenty years,” Joyce declared recklessly, “and I’ve not spoken. Once you told us — do you remember? — that your grandfather had given you a rule, and that you’d kept it all your life — always to let the other people talk about themselves. And you did. You let the people that did love you — Clement, and good, simple Nathalie Kennedy, and little Jennie, at first — you let them all talk about themselves, and you listened, thinking all the time how superior you were to be able to keep your own counsel, and never give yourself away in return. And when you were sympathetic, and said kind things about what they’d told you, they were grateful, and that pleased you, because it put you in the position of giving, while they only took. But that sort of thing won’t go down for ever with sensitive and loving people. Do you suppose that Clement didn’t come to know that there was nothing real behind all your patience, and your sympathy and your listening? You liked to feel that he was dependent on you for something, that was all. You didn’t really care for his little, fiddling jobs about the garden, that Jennie loved instinctively; you didn’t really care about the parish, and the people, although you liked being the parson’s wife, and having them come to you for things. Clement found out what your sympathy was worth, and that his, in return, that he would have given you so lavishly, wasn’t what you wanted, or ever would want. He fell in love with your pretty face and your quick wits, and with what he thought was your courage in going to work, as a young girl, in London. And he helped you, when I suppose even you, for once in your life, were frightened and in want of comfort — when you found yourself, an ignorant and helpless child, on the verge of being mixed up in the divorce scandals of your employer. You’d got down to bedrock that time, I imagine, and needed someone human and warm-hearted, like Clement, to come to your help.”

  “Don’t mention his name to me again,” cried out Lydia suddenly.

  “No, I won’t. I’ve said my say, and if it’s hurt you, Lydia, I’m glad. Not because I hate you — I don’t now, though I came very near it once when I saw Clement, first bewildered, and not understanding what it was that you lacked, and then gradually realizing what I’d realized long ago — that you care for nothing and nobody on earth, except as it affects yourself.”

  Joyce, as she had told Lydia, had said her say.

  The two women faced one another in dead silence for another moment.

  Then Joyce Damerel turned and left the room.

  Lydia, sitting huddled in a chair beside the window, with eyes that conveyed hardly any message to her stunned mind, saw her sister-in-law’s tall figure walking away swiftly across the garden.

  She was left alone.

  Jennie and young Valentine were out together.

  The house was curiously silent.

  So that was what Joyce thought of her. Did it matter? Joyce and she had never liked one another, and Joyce’s opinion did not really count for very much....

  Only gradually was Lydia’s inner vision able to focus the real point at issue.

  Were these accusations true? Falteringly, and very, very slowly in its deepening anguish, her mind took a long journey back through the years.

  Through a dim, childish era, when she had proudly resented her mother’s widowhood, to which her own orphanship must be subordinated. She had hardly regretted her mother’s death at all, partly because it had freed her from the capricious tyranny of weakness, principally because it had left her, undisputed, the first right to consideration and compassion.

  Throug
h the inauguration of her life in the little Regency Terrace household.

  She had known all the time, even as a little girl, that Aunt Evelyn was silly and snobbish, Aunt Beryl limited and provincial, Uncle George pedantic with his perpetual Mr. Barlow monologues on uninteresting subjects, their old friend, Mr. Monteagle Almond, a pompous and narrow-minded little bank clerk, who had never made any success of his life.

  They had been very kind to her, had admired and praised her cleverness, without stint as without discrimination, and had trustfully displayed their real characteristics to the little Daniel come to judgment, who had always listened and responded so intelligently and gently.

  She had taken what they offered, keeping her own counsel all the time, and inwardly criticizing and despising them.

  Grandpapa — but Grandpapa had known all the while. One could not doubt for an instant that Grandpapa’s shrewdness had penetrated through all the good behaviour and proper deference of the little girl Lydia, to the acute self-interest that had actuated the good behaviour and the deference.

  Grandpapa had known.

  Perhaps at first it had amused him. His teaching had not been of tolerance or humility, but of bracing self-repression and self-advancement: “There’s no such thing as can’t.”

  “Don’t give everything a personal application — it bores other people.” But, later on, he had been less amused and more contemptuous. Was it of Lydia’s methods? Slowly her thoughts took her through the long-ago school days at Miss Glover’s.

  Ambition had made her work, and the stimulus of admiration. But there had been human relations there too, surely. Across Lydia’s memory flittered a long, half-obliterated procession of Mollies and Doras who had walked up and down the garden with her, arm-in-arm, pouring out the stories of school quarrels, school adventures, school tragedies, that filled the horizon for them.

  “You won’t repeat this to a soul, Lydia, ever, will you? I can trust you?...”

  Oh, yes, Lydia could be trusted never to repeat the long, involved histories. Repeating only meant trouble for the tale-bearer. Natural shrewdness and fastidiousness combined had prevented her from making any return confidences. “Always let the other people talk about themselves.” Then they were in the weaker position at once and for ever.

  Lydia had tacitly accepted the obligations of these implied friendships, but she had felt herself all the time to be vastly superior to them.

  Through the school years still — to the arrival of Nathalie Palmer, the girl from Devonshire. Manners — dress — accent — all slightly different from those of the town girls at the school. Making friends with Nathalie had been eminently worth while, and her whole-hearted admiration pleasant. And Nathalie was so generous in her recognition of Lydia’s infinite superiority of brain and personality that it was possible to indulge from time to time in the occasional luxury of self-expression with her. The friendship with Nathalie had survived their shared school days, given fresh impetus, on Lydia’s side, by the consciousness that the grey-headed, distinguished-looking Rector, the devoted father of Nathalie, had approved of her clever schoolmate, and suggested that later on she should come and stay at the Devonshire Rectory.

  The end of school — and a catastrophe that still loomed large on the sky-line of Lydia’s memory. Illness on the very verge of the examination that was to crown so many minor honours.

  Even the pitying attention so lavishly bestowed upon her had not atoned for that calamity, especially when so much of it, unprecedentedly, had diverged from herself to Aunt Beryl, a sudden rival claimant to illness.

  On and on through those old, past times — the visit to Wimbledon, and the intolerable, bouncing, boisterous Senthovens. Even Lydia had only been able to endure, garnering what profit to herself was possible from their slangy, elliptical instruction — more than mere endurance would have been impossible. And, after all no need to assume sympathy or admiration in the case of the loud and self-satisfied Senthovens. They took tribute to their prowess for granted — wanted no demonstrations. “No nonsense about us!” cried they.

  Nevertheless, the Senthovens had been ready enough with shouted congratulations and boastings, and had made ungrudging jubilee over Lydia’s success, to them so incomprehensible and unattainable, in the great school examination.

  Lydia remembered quite well how the news had come, and rescued her from her humiliating standing as the spoil-sport of the party, who had clumsily contrived to hurt Olive Senthoven in a game of cricket. It had also distracted all the attention from Olive and her bruised face, and focussed it upon Lydia, rescuing her once and for all from the ignominy of her position amongst the Senthovens.

  After school days and the Senthovens, her bid for independence and London.

  Backwards still, through the days of that early, bewildering experiment. From Elena herself, that peroxide blonde of such astute experience, to the pallid young ladies in Millinery — Lydia’s personality had made conquests of them all. How freely they had giggled and gossiped before her, and eventually poured out their confidences just as recklessly as the little schoolgirls at Miss Glover’s! In those days, Lydia had really admired her own diplomacy, that had so quickly established her as general favourite in a community with which she really had so little in common. Shrewd, pale-faced Rosie Graham didn’t matter. One had thought she did at first, because she had brains and acumen, and something in her very scornfulness itself was oddly alluring.

  A certain attraction about Miss Graham — until measured by the standard of importance applied to one’s first affair with a man.

  Margoliouth. His oily and uninspired pawings — there was no other word for them, in the retrospect — had certainly roused no ardour in Lydia. It had merely been agreeable to feel herself the centre of speculation amongst the matrons and spinsters of Miss Nettleship’s boarding-house. And, competent to take care of herself, in the accepted sense of the words, Lydia had discreetly permitted the Greek’s advances, conscious all the time of the prestige accruing to her from theatre expeditions, hansom-cab drives, gifts of violets and boxes of Cadbury’s chocolates.

  She had viewed as a safeguard her own perfectly distinct inward determination that Margoliouth should never be allowed, in return for these favours, to overstep the limits set by Lydia’s careful sense of discretion.

  Disaster and humiliation had threatened the termination of that episode, the first hint of which had been Miss Nettleship’s plaintive and nervously-spoken warning of the Greek gentleman’s inability to meet his bills.

  A worse revelation, then, and a more public one, had been that of Mrs. Margoliouth’s unexpected existence.

  Pain had really threatened then — had hung like a descending cloud above Lydia’s humiliated head.

  But her secret boast had been that, after all, she had turned that defeat into victory. The victory of a fine attitude, that had won her a great deal of admiration and a pity that was not condescending, from all the spectators of the little, sordid drama. It had also brought her an odd revelation, that she remembered still: the conviction that there was no calamity without its available compensation, in the shape of a not at all discreditable notoriety.

  Through the phases of her youth still. The writing of her story, and the introduction that it had brought her, through voluble Miss Forster, to the unforgettable Lady Honoret. Certainly, her wit and determination had made the very most of that introduction, aided by the curious success that her novel had achieved. A side-issue, Lydia envisaged also the fact that she had ceased to write when success in writing had ceased to have any value for enhancing her position amongst her surroundings. The writing, like everything else, had only been a means to an end.

  Backwards, through that far-away summer holiday that she had manoeuvred to obtain at Nathalie’s home in Devonshire, gratifying at once her love of gratitude and her desire to justify her own careful schemings by inducing Aunt Beryl to receive Miss Nettleship in her stead at Regency Terrace.

  Then the delight of
making a success in her new milieu — of knowing that admiring Nathalie and the simple-minded Rector were full of praise and thanks for the able help that she had so soon learnt to give them. Certainly they had had the assistance that her quick brain and nimble fingers could bestow, but the things that they had given her were things of the spirit — affection, and trust, and loyal admiration, and for these they had met with no return in kind.

  Was it that Lydia was incapable of them? Joyce said that Clement had come to recognize it.

  With the remembrance came, shudderingly and reluctantly, but with relentless inevitability, the linking up of the past with the present.

  Clement, who had puzzled and almost angered Lydia by his gradual transition during their married life, from eager confidences and ardent demonstrations to strange, apathetic reticences — Clement lived on in his daughter Jennie.

  That which she had never acknowledged to herself for the sake of Clement, for whom her love had been a tepid thing, undeserving of the name, Lydia was coming to recognize for the sake of Clement’s child.

  Jennie was the first person whom Lydia had loved, and as Rosie Graham had predicted long, long ago, she had “not known how to set about it.”

  Loving Jennie, she had yet, as Joyce Damerel said, taken all the greater things for herself, and left Jennie only the less. For herself, the beau role, for Jennie that of foil.

  Across her ravaged perceptions tore yet another recollection, one that this time seemed to summarize them all.

  She heard again Grandpapa’s thin old voice, with its cynical intonation: “You’re a situation-snatcher, Lydia — that’s what you are. A situation-snatcher.”

  Grandpapa had known.

  XXVII

  “MAMA, the telegram has come. Roland has ten days’ leave — he’ll be in London to-morrow.”

  Jennie’s voice held a kind of awe in it, as though the unbelievable had come to pass.