Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  “I’ll take you there,” said Lydia curtly.

  The concession had been made on the evening in September, when Jennie, coming in from an afternoon spent with her lover, had found Lydia huddled in a chair by the window of the drawing-room, with fixed, vacant gaze and chilly hands.

  But although Lydia had in no sense nor smallest degree revoked that half-spoken sanction of Jennie’s engagement, that had been inwardly forced upon her in the midst of the hour of truest misery that her life had ever known, she could derive no comfort from Jennie’s sudden, unregulated outbursts of jubilant gratitude.

  “Oh, mama! You’ll take me to London!”

  “I told you I would, when he got his leave. He wants the wedding immediately, of course?” Jennie nodded.

  “If he has ten days you can be married quietly in town by special licence, and — and see him off when he has to go back.”

  “I want to be married from here,” said Jennie quickly. “Just go up with you to meet him, and do, perhaps, one day’s shopping or two — while he gets the licence, and the ring and things, and we go and see the old lawyers and people — and then come back here for my wedding, and go somewhere in the country for a tiny honeymoon, till the last possible minute.”

  Lydia was surprised.

  “It’ll be much more tiring for you — a lot of rushing about like that.”

  Her instinct was always to shield Jennie from Jennie’s self.

  “Roland wants it to be like that, too.” The defiant gleam of one who expects opposition had come into Jennie’s eyes again.

  “Don’t, Jennie, take that tone. I’m not saying you shan’t have it your own way. Why do you want to be married here, and not in London, which would be so much simpler?”

  “It’s my home,” cried Jennie, “and, besides, I want to have all the people I can; even if I have got to be married in a travelling dress, and without proper bridesmaids or anything, I may as well have some fun. We don’t know any people in London.”

  She spoke like a child, Lydia reflected.

  And yet, when they met Roland Valentine in London twenty-four hours later, Jennie no longer spoke like a child. She was quite different — infinitely more reposeful, gentler, more womanly.

  Was this the real Jennie? Lydia’s perceptions were far too acute for her not to know that it was with Roland, not with herself, that Jennie was at ease, and therefore was absolutely natural.

  Roland Valentine himself pleased Lydia better than on any former occasion. He, too, was graver and more quiet, and he thanked her very earnestly for giving her consent to an immediate wedding.

  They went to lawyers, to banks, to jewellers and innumerable other shops, and Roland procured the special licence, and Jennie’s strong, sunburnt finger was measured for the wedding-ring. The ring was to follow them to Devonshire by post — something was to be engraved inside the gold circlet, but Lydia was not told what it was to be.

  Jennie had never been secretive or even reserved, but it never seemed to occur to her to give her mother her confidence now, any more than she had ever given it to her in the course of the last seven or eight years.

  Lydia, although she had been aware of this before, had never suffered from it as she suffered now. Formerly, she might have told herself that Jennie had no confidence to bestow — that nothing lay beneath the surface. Now, she was slowly, and with infinite pain in the recognition, forced to concede to Jennie the existence of a definite and individual personality — Jennie, the potential woman, as distinct from Jennie, Lydia Damerel’s child.

  On the day before that of their proposed return to Devonshire, Jennie unexpectedly demanded whether they could not “look up Aunt Evelyn and Aunt Beryl.”

  “I’ve seen Roland’s relations, the only ones in England, at least, and I think he ought to see mine.”

  “So he has. He’s been at Quintmere, and he knows your grandmother and Billy.”

  Lydia had not the slightest desire to “look up” the Senthovens, and, once more, there was the instinctive conviction that what Jennie suggested for herself could not be the best thing for her.

  “That’s just it,” said Jennie. “He says they all make him feel like an adventurer down there — it’s so old and — and sort of traditional. I know just what he means. So I want him to see what awfully ordinary sorts of relations I have, as well as people like Grannie and Aunt Joyce.”

  The recollection flashed across Lydia’s mind incontinently of the care with which she, engaged to be married to Jennie’s father, had avoided any such display of relatives and their “ordinariness.”

  However, Roland Valentine, the Canadian mechanic, would scarcely prove critical.

  Lydia sent a prepaid telegram to Regency Terrace, and received Aunt Beryl’s laconic reply: “Delighted.”

  The short, familiar journey was thronged for Lydia, in her new mood of painful introspection, with such memories as it seemed never to have held before.

  Jennie and Roland Valentine sat opposite to her in the train. They talked to one another in low tones, and every now and then looked into one another’s eyes.

  It seemed to Lydia that, even in the gaze of the young man who had already been at the front for more than three months, there was no apprehension of parting — only the ecstatic recognition of an immense bliss.

  She felt herself overwhelmingly lonely.

  Regency Terrace, as usual, looked astonishingly unchanged. One almost expected to see Grandpapa’s head at the bow window of the dining-room behind the lace curtains, to hear Shamrock’s shrill, eager barking on the steps.

  Aunt Beryl wore a dark-blue skirt and a flannel blouse with a high collar, just as she had worn every winter ever since Lydia could remember her.

  “Come in, dear — I’m ever so pleased to see you.

  How do you do, Mr. Valentine? I’m quite well, thank you. Well, Jennie, I declare!” Aunt Beryl looked at Jennie with an open adoration that she had not conceded even to Lydia in Lydia’s younger days.

  “Aunt Evelyn is in the drawing-room, and Olive.

  It’s a great piece of luck having Olive here. She’s doing V.A.D. work at our Belgian Hospital in King’s Road, and she’s got the afternoon off. Tell Aunt Evelyn that you think Olive’s looking better, Lydia, if you get the chance. She’s awfully down on the poor girl for wanting to do this work — says she isn’t strong enough, and will knock herself up. It’s only because we know the matron that Evelyn let her go there at all.”

  Aunt Beryl shook her head, and conducted them into the drawing-room.

  If Jennie wanted Roland Valentine to appreciate the fact that she possessed relations who might be described as “ordinary,” Lydia reflected that she must surely be satisfied now.

  Never had the Regency Terrace household exhibited such a perfect apotheosis of the commonplace.

  Olive, in a dark-blue uniform that made her look extraordinarily flat-chested, sat on a stool crouched over the fire, her face unbecomingly heated. Aunt Evelyn was in the arm-chair that had been Grandpapa’s, but it, too, had been drawn close to the narrow grate, behind which burned a piled-up mound of coal, constantly replenished by Olive from the scuttle.

  Mrs. Senthoven had visibly aged, although her sister had not.

  Her increasing deafness compelled her to carry an ear-trumpet, that gave her an air of infirmity, and she wore a cap over her thin, parted, white hair, and a little knitted shawl across her shoulders.

  With a sort of shock, Lydia realized that Aunt Evelyn must be past sixty.

  They had to shout at her, for she would not always make use of her ear-trumpet.

  “Mother does hate that old trumpet of hers,” said Olive in explanation. “I tell her she ought to see some of the things our men in hospital have to put up with — artificial legs, and glass eyes, and goodness knows what-all.”

  Olive could talk of nothing but the hospital.

  She had only been working there a month.

  “This Sister, I can tell you — Sister McGregor, as
she calls herself — she’s a terror. A great, big woman, she is, and wears the scarlet and grey uniform — you know. Well, what d’you think the men call her? She’s a thumping great piece, I must tell you — as broad as she’s long, and that’s saying something. Well, the men call her The Thin Red Line!’ Isn’t that great, now?” Roland Valentine shouted with laughter, and Jennie laughed too. Even Aunt Beryl, to whom Lydia felt sure that the story could not be new, displayed a sympathetic mirth, and Olive’s mother inquired querulously what the joke was? “It’s an old one, mother,” screamed Olive. “You’ve heard it already.”

  “But what was it?” persisted Aunt Evelyn suspiciously.

  It was Roland Valentine who picked up the trumpet and loudly repeated into it Olive’s successful anecdote.

  Soon it became evident that the introduction of Roland to Jennie’s family was to be crowned with success.

  The young man talked about Canada to Bob’s mother, and was shown the photograph of Bob, and Bob’s wife, and a fat boy in a kilt, who was explained as “my daughter-in-law’s only child by her first. She was a widow when Bob met her, but the boy is a nice little fellow, I believe. No second family, I’m sorry to say.”

  “But mother has plenty of grandchildren,” Olive announced, half proudly and half aggressively. “Have you seen this one of pore ole Bee’s young hopefuls, Lydia?” It was a large group. Six — seven, Swaines, ranging from the ages of fifteen to eight and a half. The girls had frizzed-out hair, and wore cheap lace collars over their stuff dresses, and the two youngest, both boys, were in velveteen suits, and one grasped a spade and the other a bucket. The photographer had indicated a sea-scape behind the group.

  “Regular Swaines, aren’t they?” said Olive discontentedly. “Not a Senthoven amongst the lot of them, at least, not in appearance.”

  “Why, hasn’t this fine little fellow here got a look of his auntie?” inquired Roland Valentine, indicating the least unattractive of Mrs. Swaine’s progeny.

  Olive looked gratified.

  “Funny you should say that. He’s my godson — Horace — and he is a good bit more like our side of the family than any of the others. Not that the others take after their father in anything but looks, I will say.”

  “Don’t you like him, then?” inquired Jennie innocently.

  Lydia had not thought fit to enter into any details before Jennie as to the little she knew of Beatrice Senthoven’s disastrous alliance with Mr. Stanley Swaine. She had indeed systematically evaded all Jennie’s inquiries about her contemporary cousins.

  “Like him?” said Olive explosively. “Hark at her, Lydia! Why, he’s a bad lot, Jennie — that’s what he is — a regular scallywag. He — you know.”

  An expressive pantomime of tilted-up arm and hand and a motion as of swallowing completed Olive’s terse description of her brother-in-law’s failing.

  “Ah, a lot of good fellows get their lives spoilt that way,” said Valentine sympathetically — but quite matter-of-factly, thought Lydia.

  “Him and Beatrice ought never to have been allowed to go about together the way they did,” said Aunt Evelyn suddenly. “I blame myself.”

  “Now, now, now — tell us all about this wedding of yours, Jennie,” said Aunt Beryl, violently tactful.

  “A regular war-wedding, isn’t it?” said Olive. “One of our nurses at the hospital the other day got a telegram just like that to say that her fiasco was coming on leave, and they were to get married straight away. So this girl I’m telling you about, this nurse — she went straight off with twenty-four hours’ leave — that was all they’d give her, if you please — and simply came back married.”

  “Only twenty-four hours!” exclaimed Jennie.

  “What did the husband do?”

  “Oh, came down with her, of course, and stayed at the hotel.”

  “Well, I think it was too bad,” Aunt Beryl remarked with finality. “Only giving her twenty-four hours like that, poor thing.”

  “One’s got to think of the work,” said Olive, shaking her head. “We’re fearfully full up just now. I wonder you don’t take up nursing, Jennie — but perhaps you mean to after you’re married?”’ “I don’t know,” said Jennie calmly.

  Then she had had some such idea, although Lydia had definitely stated that she was not fitted for such work, and had taken it for granted that Jennie would come home to her after Roland’s return to the front.

  Lydia had far too much self-command to risk a betrayal of her thought by looking at her daughter, but she knew by intuition that Jennie had shot a half frightened, half-mischievous glance at her in school-girl fashion.

  “I’d like to have Jennie doing work in London somewhere,” declared Roland Valentine. “It’ll be handy for my leave, or if I get sent into hospital.”

  “We might find a flat in town,” said Lydia quietly.

  “There are all sorts of hostels for women-workers being opened everywhere,” said Jennie.

  The implication was obvious enough.

  At four o’clock Olive rose importantly. She had been glancing surreptitiously at the clock for the last ten minutes.

  “Well, I suppose I must be toddling. What a bore!” she said with an affectation of reluctance. “It’s as much as my place is worth to be five minutes late in going on duty.”

  “I told the girl to put a cup of tea for you in the dining-room, dear. You’ve plenty of time. (The girl I’ve got now,” said Aunt Beryl in parenthesis to Lydia, “is the best I’ve had since Gertrude left. You remember Gertrude, who got married?) How are you going, Olive?”

  “By tram, I s’pose.”

  “Perhaps you and Jennie would like to walk her as far as the tramway centre?” suggested Aunt Beryl, with a kindly gleam of rather pallid mirth directed at the Canadian.

  “Sure! Will you, Jennie?”

  “Come on, then. Goo’-bye, auntie; goo’-bye, Lydia, ole gurl. Awfully glad to have seen you— ‘specially in these busy days. Ta-ta!” Olive clattered from the room, quite in the old, breezy Senthoven manner.

  “She won’t be back till ten o’clock to-night, as likely as not,” moaned her mother.

  “She’s looking very well on it,” declared Aunt Beryl stoutly. “Lydia, don’t you think Olive looks ever so much better for the interest?” Lydia agreed with complete sincerity.

  Aunt Beryl sat down by the fire, and there was a certain relaxation, as from a long strain, in her bearing.

  “Those are the lucky ones, those that have a job.

  There’s poor George eating his heart out because he’s past the age for even the volunteers. It does seem hard, too. All he can do is to stay overtime at the office, doing the work of young fellows who’ve gone to the war. Lydia, that’s a fine young chap that Jennie’s got there.”

  “I’m glad you like him, Aunt Beryl,” said Lydia gently.

  Her tone held no hint of disagreement. To disparage her accepted son-in-law would have offended her taste, besides mitigating her claim to self-sacrificed motherhood.

  “Dear little Jennie! She’s full young — but you weren’t much older when you were married yourself, Lydia.”

  “Nearly three years — and Jennie is such a baby for her age!” Lydia held tenaciously to the theory of Jennie’s tardy development because it seemed to exonerate her from some of the charges, that she could not forget, brought against her successively by Roland Valentine and by Joyce Damerel.

  “She’ll mend of that fast enough in these days, poor dear! Besides,” said Aunt Beryl thoughtfully, “I don’t know that she’s so much of a baby, Lydia. This engagement will have steadied her, too. I could see a great difference. Evelyn, didn’t you think Jennie much less of a child — more grown up, like?”

  “What, dear?”

  “Tell Lydia whether you don’t think Jennie much more of a woman since she’s been engaged,” screamed Aunt Beryl.

  “Oh! Yes, poor little Jennie! The world’s all being made over in this awful war — it’s only the young things who count
for anything now.”

  “She hasn’t heard,” said Aunt Beryl to Lydia, shaking her head.

  But the observation of the deaf woman had not been so irrelevant, at least to the thoughts that surged into Lydia’s sub-consciousness.

  Only the young people counted now. It was they who, in every sense, stood in the forefront of the battle now.

  “Oh,” said Lydia, in sudden, overwhelming need of a vent for the intolerable misery that was surging within her, “I can’t bear to think of my little, sheltered Jennie suddenly rushed into the realities of life like this. If only I could bear it all for her!”

  “Ah, yes — I expect you feel that,” said Aunt Beryl with strange matter-of-factness.

  “I would so gladly take it all for her.”

  Even as she spoke Lydia realized the full truth of the words. How much easier it would be, how far less costly to herself, to know Jennie ignorant and happy, while she herself, a recognized victim, faced a suffering that would be rendered entirely bearable by that very fact.

  “I’m sure it’s very hard to sit by and see others suffer,” said Aunt Beryl tritely, and added in the same rather monotonous voice, “I was very fond ‘of your mother, Lydia, and I remember quite well thinking how much easier it would have been when your poor father died if I could have had the pain of it all to myself, instead of having to feel for her, and Aunt Evelyn there, as well. There was a sort of selfishness in it, like, I daresay.”

  “Aunt Beryl,” said Lydia suddenly, “should you say that I was selfish with Jennie?”

  “How do you mean, dear, exactly?” There was nothing in Aunt Beryl’s voice that showed her protesting, as Lydia inwardly craved that she should protest, at the mere suggestion.

  “Then you do think so?”

  “No — oh, no, Lydia. I shouldn’t say that, dear.”

  They both glanced at Mrs. Senthoven.

  She had fallen into a doze, and was nodding over the red fire.

  Lydia’s misery drove her to a form of self-revelation utterly foreign to her.

  “I — I’ve been worried lately. Joyce — my sister-in-law — who has never liked me — began to talk about Jennie the other day. And she sounded as though — as if — she thought that my very love for Jennie was something selfish — had always been selfish. It upset me very much. And she wasn’t even logical, Aunt Beryl.