Lily knew that all these things were naughty, because she had always been told so, but the spirit of frenzy that possessed her always drove her on, the consciousness of naughtiness notwithstanding. Therefore at a very early age there was implanted in her the conviction that she had been sent into the world with a natural proclivity towards wrong-doing.
Both children knew that Lily was their parents’ favourite. It would have been impossible not to know it. She might be sorrowfully reproached for her “disloyalty” — a favourite accusation — to the cardinal article of belief that Father and Mother always knew best, but she was never punished. Her prettiness and her precocious cleverness were exploited and praised to her face. She was sent for to the drawing-room whenever there were visitors, and taken out in the carriage to pay calls, and very often given small, unexpected presents and surprises by her mother, in which Vonnie’s only share was to be told that “next time” it would be her turn.
It never was her turn, and Lily and Vonnie both knew that the “next time” of the promises would never come.
Paradoxically, it was far harder upon Lily than upon Vonnie. She had the greater capacity for suffering of the two, and a strong abstract sense of justice besides, that rendered her absolutely incapable of accepting uncritically an unfair situation. In addition, the ardour of her love for Vonnie was proportionate to the intensity of all her emotions.
Theoretically, one loved Father and Mother best of everybody in the world. In fact, it would have been a “disloyalty” of the very naughtiest kind to contemplate any other possibility. It was proper to love one’s sister third in order, and Lily and Vonnie were both persuaded that to these regulations they must and did conform.
Lily, at seven years old, naturally did not seek logically to reconcile this doctrine with the strange accesses of rage and rebellion against Father and Mother that seized her so frequently upon Vonnie’s behalf.
Vonnie resented nothing, for herself. She was philosophical, humble-minded, and above all desirous of peace. The nursery storms raised by Lily in her defence were her chief source of grievance. She did not mind being left out of treats, very much. She minded the noise of Lily’s angry screams, and Mother’s argumentative reproaches, and the final grieved intervention of Father, very much more.
Fortunately, perhaps, for her peace, Vonnie very often failed to realize that it was her own inoffensive self that was the cause of these terrible domestic cataclysms.
She was absent-minded, and never much interested in what people were saying, so that very often the beginning of disturbance went quite unheard by her. Sometimes she only woke up to what was happening when Lily had begun to scream, as she always did sooner or later when her furious gusts of temper outran her powers of verbal expression.
Then Vonnie would think wearily: “Another scene!” which was what she always called a disturbance of any kind, and put her hands to her head, through which each one of Lily’s shrieks sent a dull pain jarring. It made her feel rather sick in a curious sort of way, to see Lily shaking all over, the tears streaming down her scarlet cheeks, and Mother, as pale as Lily was crimson, with miserable eyes and a face that almost implored her to be good.
“My pet, how can you be so naughty? Can’t you trust Mother to know what’s best for both her babies?”
“It’s not fair, it’s not fair!” shrieked Lily as she had been shrieking for the last five minutes.
“Stop saying that, Lily. It’s not true, it’s very naughty. Don’t you know that Mother would never do anything that wasn’t fair?”
“Let — Vonnie — come — too,” Lily sobbed more quietly. “My little darling, leave Vonnie to me. You must learn not to interfere with Vonnie. It will be her turn next time. Besides, Vonnie doesn’t want to go, do you, Vonnie my pet?”
“No, Mother,” said Vonnie, watching her mother’s face and only desirous of saying what would most quickly conduce to peace.
“You see, Lily! As though Mother didn’t know what was best for her little Vonnie.”
“She always says she doesn’t want to go! It’s not fair!...”
Lily had begun again, more frantically than ever. Father had to be sent for.
Father took up a high line at once. “My little Lily!” said he gravely. He firmly placed his little Lily upon his knee, a post of honour reserved exclusively for moments of serious appeal and which, even at the height of her frenzy, Lily would never have thought it possible to decline.
“My little Lily! Is this the way you show your gratitude, when an outing is planned for you? Don’t you know that you are grieving us very much, when we are only thinking of your welfare and pleasure, and wanting to make you happy? God will be very angry with you, if you can’t show a happy, grateful spirit.”
Father and Mother were never angry — they were only grieved. It was God that was always indignant and resentful on their behalf.
Lily was afraid of God, and secretly thought that He, who knew everything and could do everything, always punished her naughtiness by sending the thing that she dreaded most in all the world — one of Vonnie’s fearful earaches.
The assurance that God was angry again made her choke down some of her defiant sobs and mutterings.
“We might all be so happy, if you were a good little girl, and it ought to be so easy with parents who love you dearly. Many poor little children have no father and mother or nice, cheerful, happy home. Now, my pet, are you sorry?”
“Yes,” said Lily tremulously, thinking of God with the earache bolt still, as it were, suspended.
“Then I think you had better ask God to forgive you. Go and kiss your dear mother, and then run and get dressed. Don’t keep the carriage waiting.”
God, and Philip Stellenthorpe’s magnanimity, had defeated Lily.
She crept away, dragging her feet.
Her head ached and her eyes smarted and, dressed up in her white silk frock and best hat, precociously sensitive to the contrast, she had to leave Vonnie in everyday clothes and nursery pinafore, a forlorn figure at the window, and take her scat between her parents in the open carriage.
As they drove, she heard them exchange comments over her head, as they very often did, in slightly lowered tones.
“Her poor little eyes are quite swollen.”
“Poor little thing !”
They always forgave her quickly, like that, however frightful her offence.
Would that God had been equally unresentful! All through the unappreciated afternoon, Lily was secretly addressing earnest, spasmodic appeals to that unappeasable Avenger.
“Don’t make Vonnie have earache — not this time!... I did stop screaming at the end — I am sorry — I never, never mean to be naughty again. Oh, don’t make Vonnie have earache — give me any other punishment — (but of course He won’t, because He knows that nothing else makes me half so miserable — ) If only Vonnie doesn’t have earache this time, I promise I’ll never be naughty again as long as I live—”
“Have you enjoyed yourself, my pet?”
“Yes, Mother.”
It would have been naughty not to enjoy oneself when Father and Mother had given one a treat, and quite unthinkable actually to say that one hadn’t. As well part at once with the last feeble shred of hope that God would withhold the earache punishment.
Those earaches to which Vonnie was periodically a victim were like the shadow of some monstrous nightmare, for ever hanging over Lily’s head. The perpetual foreboding of them, which was never altogether absent from her, darkened her childish days, but when the nightmare was actually upon her, the foreboding realized, Lily knew the meaning of anguish.
Her tiny impotence would hurl itself against the cruel facts of Vonnie’s pain, Vonnie’s speechless and stoical acceptance of it, worst of all, the philosophic unconcern of the surrounding grown-up people. Because Vonnie never cried, never complained, would say “Nothing is the matter” to all their enquiries, they would not see.
They were not really sufficiently intere
sted to see.
When Lily had toothache — really a very little toothache — and tentatively said so, her mother petted her additionally, asking her continually if the tooth was hurting less, and giving her a story-book in the drawing-room at lesson time. She came into the night nursery with a carefully shaded light in her hand, in the middle of the night, and woke Lily up by putting a little plate with some grapes on it at her bedside. All of which was very pleasant, and Lily was quite sorry when next day it proved impossible, with any vestige of truth, to assert that the tooth was still aching.
But if anything hurt Vonnie, she would never say so. Lily knew this, but nobody else seemed to realize it. In the same way, Lily, by some mysterious instinct that she could not have analyzed, always knew by some quite indescribable look around Vonnie’s eyes, when anything was the matter with her. She even knew, and the knowledge made her so miserable that she felt as though she could not bear it, that Vonnie sometimes tried to shut her away, too, and would rather that she had not known so much and so unerringly.
Vonnie’s reticence was appalling. She would have suffered tortures, rather than risk a possible scene by complaining. She could only just bear Lily’s piercing watchfulness so long as it found no vent in words.
On the earache days, and, worst of all, nights, both were at a pitch of strain that amounted to acute nervous tension and each reacted upon the other.
An east wind gave Vonnie earache. So did sitting in a draught, or staying out of doors late when it was damp, or sometimes just catching an ordinary cold in the head. Lily knew all this. A familiar sensation to her was that of a sudden sinking, a physical sickness that only lasted for a few seconds, when some grown-up authority observed carelessly in her hearing:
“Why, the wind has gone right round to the east to-day.”
Once Lily had put her apprehension into words and said, breathless from misery:
“Then Vonnie will get earache!”
“What!
‘When the wind is in the east It’s neither good for man nor beast!’” her father made playful quotation.
But when Lily, frightened and resentful that she was not being taken seriously, repeated angrily: “But she will get earache — she always does, if there’s an east wind,” her father spoke gravely.
“Come, come, my pet. I don’t like to hear you say things like that. That’s not being a very good little girl, you know. It’s only gloomy, ungrateful little people who run to meet trouble halfway. Little Vonnie doesn’t mean to get earache. Do you, Vonnie?”
“Yes, Father — I mean no,” said Vonnie vaguely.
She went out and she did get earache. Lily had always known that she would.
Yet Lily, from that day added to her store of small, perverted convictions, the unescapable conclusion that it was very naughty to foresee calamity, and still naughtier to voice that foresight.
She still sometimes said to the nurse, or to the daily governess: “Vonnie’s got a cold already. She’ll have earache if she goes out to-day.” The words seemed forced from her in a frail hope that would not be denied, that the catastrophe might be averted.
But the nurse simply said: “Will you learn to mind your own business. Miss Lily? I should hope I know what was good for Miss Vonnie by this time, without any interference from you.”
And the governess said bracingly: “Oh, I don’t think Vonnie’s got much of a cold, have you, dear?”
To which Vonnie, of course, said No, just as she would have said there was nothing the matter, if earache had actually been upon her.
“There, you see, Lily! You really must give up always trying to speak for Vonnie instead of letting her speak for herself. It’s not good for her, and it’s not good for you. What will you do when you’re both grown up?” said Miss Cleeve humorously, “if you’re at a ball, let us say, and some gentleman asks Vonnie to dance, and then you, Lily, answer instead of her and say ‘Oh no, thank you very much, she’s tired.’ Wouldn’t that make you both look very silly, don’t you think?”
Lily was no match for Miss Cleeve’s ridicule. She could think of no confutation of this reductio ad absurdum of the situation, even in her own mind. She merely hated Miss Cleeve vehemently, and put her for ever into the large class of people who “didn’t understand.”
These were indeed legion, where was concerned the most vital preoccupation of Lily’s whole being — Vonnie’s welfare.
When an earache pain had actually begun, which it did almost always in the evening, not the day-time — and Lily knew by the look on Vonnie’s face that it was still quite endurable, there was a faint hope that if she went to bed quickly and pulled the blankets over her head, she might go to sleep before it became really bad.
But Vonnie would not, and Lily dared not, utter a word of this to the authorities, and consequently the half- hour spent in the drawing-room with Father and Mother before bedtime underwent no curtailment, on such occasions.
They played Happy Families, or Beggar-my-Neighbour, or listened to Father reading aloud, just as usual.
And all the time Lily, in an agony, was inwardly adjuring the Being to whom she believed all her misery to be directly attributable.
“Let them send us to bed soon — don’t let her be bad to-night — oh, do make them send us to bed to-night — now at once. Let her go to sleep before it gets bad — I’ll be so good if only You’ll make them send us to bed at once before it gets bad.”
On one such evening, when Philip Stellenthorpe saw Lily’s eyes fixed upon him, and her lips moving, as he thought, in earnest attention to his reading, he paused as he was about to close the book.
“What about an extra quarter of an hour, just for once?” he enquired benevolently. “It’s almost too exciting to leave off here, don’t you think, little Lily?”
He never really quite believed that poor little Vonnie, who never spoke, could follow the thread of any story, although he would have been much shocked if anybody had ever put such a thought into words.
And Lily, unforgettably, appallingly conscious of her own departure from sacred tradition, gratitude and everything else to be accounted for righteousness, said in a voice that sounded loud and strained: “Please, I’d rather we went to bed now.”
There was a dreadful silence.
The kind smile abruptly vanished from Philip’s face altogether, and he shut up the book as though he could never bear to open it again, and put it away from him almost with horror.
Eleanor Stellenthorpe looked stricken.
“Run along, my pets,” she said in the accustomed formula, but in an inward voice that suggested restrained suffering.
She received Vonnie’s kiss automatically, as she always did, but when Lily put her arms round her mother’s neck, fearful of omitting the customary hug that she knew was always expected of her, Eleanor released herself gently. Slowly bowing her head, she at the same time raised her eyes and fixed them sorrowfully upon Lily’s face, producing an extraordinarily poignant effect of silent reproach.
Philip kissed Lily once upon the forehead, instead of as usual, two or three times all over her face and said deeply:
“My poor little child! Good-night.”
Lily went upstairs in tears, indescribably guilty.
She had been naughty again, and oh! how like God it was, to have arranged things like that. If Vonnie didn’t get to bed and to sleep before the earache gained its hold, then they must both suffer through one of those black nights of misery that Lily so dreaded. But when one was asked whether one preferred to go straight to bed, or to sit up while Father was kind enough to read aloud, it was naughty and ungrateful to choose bed. So that God, having thus trapped one into naughtiness, was there all ready with His favourite punishment — the thing that He knew she dreaded most of all the punishments in the world — Vonnie’s earache.
That night, the hand of God, as Lily saw it, was even heavier than usual. Vonnie’s earache was agonizing.
Lily knew this, in the darkness of the night nu
rsery, from the tiny, stifled moans that came from Vonnie’s bed. Not a sound ever escaped her until the pain was almost unbearable, and even then Lily knew that she would never utter a spoken word, because the children were forbidden to speak after the light was put out.
Lily herself lay stiff and rigid in her bed, her hands clenched, her body quivering and sweating, with every faculty strained to its utmost in the intensity of her tortured listening. Each time that Vonnie’s almost inaudible moan sounded, a pang went through Lily’s whole frame. Every now and then she would discover that she was holding her breath, and find herself constrained to exhale it in a long, quivering, noiseless sob.
From time to time when the little moaning sound had not at once recurred after the brief interval of silence by which it was usually succeeded, a sick hope invaded Lily that Vonnie might after all be dropping off to sleep. But, redoubling the intensity of her own listening, she could hear sobbing, irregular breathing from Vonnie that shook her with a fresh despair.
“Vonnie!” she whispered.
No answer.
“Oh, Vonnie, is it very bad?”
“No,” came the faintest of whispers in reply.
It was not true, Lily knew perfectly well, and she knew also that very likely next day Vonnie would deliberately go and confess to their mother that she had been disobedient and talked, after the light had been put out in the night nursery.
She would say nothing about her earache, nothing to excuse herself, nothing to incriminate Lily, and would accept rebuke or punishment quite speechlessly. Lily knew that Vonnie always craved any form of penalty that would case her conscience of the imaginary burdens with which she was eternally loading it. But no one else understood this.
Presently a shaft of moonlight crept through the curtained window, and Lily sat up in bed. Then she saw, with a shock that made her feel sick, that Vonnie was sitting bolt upright, not lying down at all. Her small pillow was put up on end behind her and inadequately supported her shoulders, and both hands clasped her temples.
As a rule, Vonnie lay down on the side that wasn’t hurting her, and kept both hands over her bad ear. Lily had never seen her sitting up like this before and it seemed to deny any hope of her ever being able to go to sleep at all.
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 186