Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  “Poor little clear! You shall go to bed at once,” said the kind old Sister in charge. “Where’s your dressing-gown, dear?”

  “In the dormitory.”

  “Then I’ll fetch it for you. Get ready for bed as fast as you can.”

  Lily, interpreting this literally, made every speed in divesting herself of her clothes, forgetful that her nightgown was not lying waiting on the newly made Infirmary bed.

  But the Sister would bring it, she decided, and sat close to the comfortable blaze of the Infirmary fire. Only a diminutive vest inadequately concealed her from the appalled gaze of the returning nun. Lily found herself enshrouded in both night-gown and dressing-gown on the instant, and directed to get into bed.

  The nun was very forbearing, and only said, when the first shock had passed:

  “A modest little girl would never have done that. What can your poor guardian angel have thought?”

  The Protestant Lily, however, was less concerned with the hypothetical embarrassment of her guardian angel, than with this new view of herself as a little girl lacking in modesty.

  She was homesick while she was at the convent, and a good deal bullied by her contemporaries, nevertheless the discipline was of a more wholesome kind than any she had yet known, and the total absence of any real clement of education in the teaching that she received was partially compensated by the nuns’ conscientious observance of Philip’s prohibitions, and the amount of dogmatical religious instruction that she thereby escaped.

  She might even have profited by the three months she spent at school, if it had been the conventual habit to pay any slightest regard to the more modem laws of hygiene.

  Lily was not naturally a practical child, although she possessed a certain fundamental common-sense, and a precocious ability to profit by experience once acquired. Certain simple hygienic practices of which the regular observance had been enjoined upon her at home, without any explanation as to the necessity for them, she had acquiesced in blindly as a matter of course, without the slightest realization of the fact that they were connected with the preservation of her bodily welfare.

  As the extreme modesty enjoined by the nuns did not permit of any supervision in such matters, even as regarded the youngest of the children in their charge, a state of affairs naturally followed that resulted in the very rapid deterioration of Lily’s health.

  Moreover, there prevailed at the convent, as at the very large majority of European educational establishments, the monstrous custom of curtailing the amount of sleep required for the proper development of growing youth.

  Lily, although, like the other junior pupils, she was seldom in bed before nine o’clock, suffered less than they did — and very much less than the seniors, young girls all more or less at a stage of physical and mental development that made the utmost demand upon each one’s constitution. Lily, at all events, need not obey the clamorous bell that summoned the school at a quarter to six every morning, in order that all might be assembled in the chapel by half-past six. She remained in bed until it became imperative to get up, dress herself — a task that she had not been allowed to perform unaided hitherto, and to which she was consequently highly inadequate — wash herself with an equal absence of thoroughness, partly because she was unaccustomed to ice-cold water, and partly because it was immodest to unfasten one’s night-gown before various garments had been shuffled on underneath it — and then join the other children, who had now been fasting for more than an hour, for breakfast.

  The food they were given was abundant, although inferior in quality, and completely lacking in variety. Each day of the week had its appointed menu, which was never departed from.

  Sweets and chocolates were permitted only on Sundays, when, to equalize distribution and encourage generosity, the assembled gastronomical wealth of the establishment was placed upon the long tables of the refectory at dinner-time. No favouritism was permitted, so that each box or dish must be sent the length of the table by its owner, each of whose fellow-pupils would accept one specimen of the contents.

  Naturally, the abstention of the week enhanced the necessity for profiting to the full by the plethora of Sunday, and Lily was not the only child who, when the day of rest and plenty was over, wished miserably, and for more than one reason, that Sunday privileges were allowed to extend over the cheerlessness of the week.

  Philip came once to see his daughter, and was dismayed, without altogether knowing why, at her appearance when she was sent to him in the parlour.

  The many inches of additional skirt by which the convent authorities had striven to obliterate the recollection of Lily’s original display of brown stocking, made her look absurdly tall and thin, and her hands and little, slim wrists seemed to have grown bony.

  Philip, scrutinizing her face anxiously, decided that she had lost some of her colour and that there certainly were black rings round her eyes. Her hair seemed to be in need of brushing.

  To his enquiries, Lily replied, after the fashion of almost all children, that nothing was the matter. Yes, she liked the convent.

  Had anyone been talking to her about religion? No, she didn’t think so.

  This relieved Philip’s chief personal anxiety on Lily’s behalf, and after cautioning her gently upon the use of slang and the care of her hands, he bade her say her little prayers every day, and be a very good child, and said that he hoped she would be home by Christmas.

  He went away inexplicably depressed.

  Eleanor instantly felt the weight of that depression, but as Philip had seriously resolved that his wife must, for her own good, be subjected to no further anxiety whilst the little boy continued ill, he gave her a hollow and unsmiling account, which he made as brief as possible, of Lily’s welfare and happiness. It would have been quite impossible to Eleanor to receive a statement of her husband’s at any but its face value.

  She pretended, even to herself, that she believed Philip’s account, and only cried in the middle of the night, telling herself that it was because she was over-tired.

  Whether or not this last was the cause of her weeping, it was certainly a fact.

  With quite irrational self-immolation, she had refused to entrust the care of Kenneth to a trained nurse, and devoted herself to him day and night in a veritable orgy of maternal sacrifice.

  Kenneth recovered, although probably less rapidly than he would have done under professional care, and Eleanor fell ill.

  She had the fever very slightly, but after a time, she tentatively asked that Lily should be sent for from the convent.

  “I must see her once more, Philip.”

  It was entirely characteristic of Eleanor Stellenthorpe that with all her impassioned idolatry of her favourite child, it never occurred to her that she might spare Lily’s sensitive youth an emotional scene such as the one of farewell that she contemplated.

  But Philip, although heavy with the sense of impending calamity, and the spoken weight of an unfavourable medical verdict, was incapable of abandoning his life-long endeavour to alter the nature of painful facts by dint of refusing to acknowledge them.

  “Don’t talk like that, Eleanor dearest,” he begged her. “It sounds just a little morbid, and of course you’ll be well again by Christmas.”

  Accordingly, nothing distressing was put into words, and Philip and Eleanor, neither of them inwardly deceived by their spoken denial of despondency, suffered separately and in silence.

  For two days before she died, Eleanor was unconscious, but it was not until after her death that Philip said, with heartbroken sincerity:

  “I gave up hope from the moment she fell ill. From the first, I really knew that she would never get well again.”

  IV

  Philip did not want to send Lily to school. He and his wife had been at one upon this point. He regretted even the three months that she had spent at the convent, although he remarked at intervals for long afterwards that a girls’ school and a convent were not at all the same thing.

 
; “Besides, my little pet, you were only there for a month or two, and you were not at all well when you came away. It wasn’t at all a success.”

  “But that was years ago,” Lily protested. “I should like it very much, now, or best of all if only you would send me to a proper school, Father.”

  For nearly four years, ever since her mother’s death, she had asked at intervals to be sent to school.

  At first, Philip had answered her with a sort of mournful playfulness.

  “What! Doesn’t my little girl get enough lessons at home? We must talk to Miss Cleeve, and see if she can’t manage an extra hour or two on Saturday afternoons — shall we. Lily?”

  The Lily of ten and eleven years old had dutifully pretended amusement, and thought herself naughty for the inward pang that she experienced at being treated like a baby.

  A year later, she was far more openly rebellious.

  “It’s so very dull doing lessons all alone, Father.”

  “If God had spared us our poor little Yvonne, you would not have to do them alone,” said Philip, the allusion, in some mysterious way, having exactly the effect of a merited rebuke.

  Lily immediately, and quite irrationally, felt that she had been heartless.

  “Besides,” continued her father, pressing the advantage that he perceived himself to have gained, although without quite knowing how, “you don’t want to break up our poor little home-party any further, my child, do you? You and I and poor little Kenneth are all that are left now, you know.”

  Lily was silenced, although, dimly, she knew that she had been unfairly defeated. What he said was true — she cried herself to sleep at the thought of it sometimes — but her powers of clear thinking had been too thoroughly obscured for her to analyze the illogical attitude taken up by her father, who from time to time said, with the most obvious sincerity:

  “Poor little children! How can I do anything for them? She made home, and now that she and little Yvonne are gone, there is nothing left but sadness and emptiness. I have no wish whatever to live, but it must be as God Almighty wills.”

  “It couldn’t make any difference to him if I went to school,” Lily reflected resentfully, after Philip had thus once more put in words the utter despondency that hung always over him.

  By the time that Lily was fourteen, there was scarcely anything left of the pride and the species of doting affection that her father had displayed during her early childhood. His ideal of a happy home had been rudely shattered by Eleanor’s death, and he attributed the signs of Lily’s inevitable development to a lack of veneration for her mother’s memory. He was honestly incapable of perceiving that, if Eleanor had lived, conflict of the most irreconcilable kind must have arisen between her and Lily.

  He dumbly and piteously resented Lily’s incoherent attempts at self-expression, her struggling efforts to evolve her own personality in the midst of a stultifying atmosphere, with much the same blind sentimentality that he regretted the lost, blue-eyed prettiness of her baby days and the unescapable certainty that she was grown too tall to sit upon his knee.

  Her continual requests to be sent to school distressed him profoundly. At one and the same time, he saw Lily convicted of disloyalty in wishing to alter the routine of life instituted for her by her mother, and as heartlessly desirous of abandoning her lonely father and little brother in their changed and saddened home.

  At last he said to her:

  “I can stand this no longer. Go, Lily, but remember that God Himself will condemn those who blaspheme against the sacred love of father and mother. You can go. I will keep no child at home against its will.”

  His face was drawn and grey with suffering, as he looked at the child who seemed to him to be growing up devoid of heart. Only the extremity of pain and disappointment would have made him speak so and Lily realized it.

  She broke into terrified sobs, and saw herself with his eyes.

  Both were shaken by the sense of an immense issue involved. The question had acquired a monstrous and devastating magnitude. Only the shamed and stifled, but still living, sense of proportion in Lily’s soul, that warned her how bitterly she would, later, regret the folly of yielding to a sentimental impulse, prevented her from exclaiming that she never, never wanted to leave home as long as she lived.

  An almost intolerable period of tension followed. The gloom of Philip Stellenthorpe became abysmal. Only little four-year-old Kenneth appeared to be cheerfully insensible to it.

  Undaunted by his father’s weighty tenderness, that was in itself an advertisement of melancholy, Kenneth continued to play with his toys, to shout for bread-and-jam with his tea, and to wriggle unconcernedly away when his father would have lifted him to Lily’s old post of honour on the parental knee.

  Kenneth was far from being the motherless baby boy of fiction. He evinced no special affection for anyone, and was quite unaffectedly impenitent when sins, that had once been the cause of heart-searching remorse to Lily and Yvonne, were pointed out to him with sorrowful gravity. Although only ten years separated them, Kenneth was in fact the modem child that Lily had never been allowed to become.

  She watched him with more awe than affection, sometimes. He seemed to be a hard little boy.

  The next phase of Lily Stellenthorpe’s education was inaugurated by the astonishing announcement of Miss Cleeve, that she was going to be married and must go away.

  “The old order changeth,” said Philip, in tones of bewildered pain.

  He gave Miss Cleeve a munificent wedding present, and reflected that yet another link with the past was breaking.

  To look for another governess for Lily seemed to him an appalling task. His conscience would not have allowed him to depute it to his sister Clothilde, for ever since the fulfilment of her pronouncement that Vonnie would not live to grow up, Philip had steadily assured himself that poor Go’s judgments were not to be trusted.

  Such is the curious effect produced by a prophet whose word has been too well verified in his own country.

  Philip, like all sentimentalists, preferred asking advice to taking it. He decided to consult Eleanor’s cousin and nearest surviving relative, unconsciously reserving to himself the right of finding that, after all, poor Charlie Hardinge was not a very sympathetic fellow, and held very little sacred, and that his counsels could not be worthy of serious consideration.

  Besides the fact of his relationship — of potent weight with Philip — Charlie Hardinge was further qualified as adviser, in being the father of three little girls. The little girls, however, and Ethel their mother, had only been seen by the Stellenthorpes at rare intervals.

  Charlie himself was in the habit of staying with them for two nights on his way to and from the north of England, in the course of every year. He always brought the children presents, and Philip always said in advance, nervously: “You must thank Cousin Charlie very nicely if he is kind enough to bring you a little present of chocolates, but you’ll keep them downstairs in the drawing-room, like good children, won’t you?”

  He had never been able to forget altogether that Charlie Hardinge had once expressed injudicious surprise at the decorous restraint that prevailed over the distribution of sweets presented to the Stellenthorpe children.

  Unconsciously, he liked Charlie much better in esse than in posse, and found even his exuberant habit of repeating everything he said three or four times over merely an ebullition of warm-hearted earnestness.

  “Now, now, now, now,” said Charlie. “You want some suggestion about this kiddie of yours — your Lily. I understand perfectly. What are you to do with her — fourteen, isn’t she? Fourteen — yes — fourteen. Now, our Dorothy isn’t fourteen yet, and Janet and Sylvia, of course, are younger still. Sylvia is just ten, in fact. You know they’ve just gone to school at Bridgecrap?”

  “No,” said Philip, startled. “I had no idea of it. I always supposed that you and Ethel meant to educate them at home.”

  His terrible fear of any unpleasantness made him h
esitate, and feel unable to say, as he had meant to say, that he disapproved of girls’ schools altogether.

  “Well, it was a sacrifice,” Hardinge admitted with a sigh. “A sacrifice. But we felt that it was for the kiddies’ own good. No brother, you see. They wanted to be taught how to take chaff, and ragging, and teasing — that’s what they wanted — they wanted to get thoroughly well teased. Now your Lily, my dear fellow — very pretty kiddie-widdie, mind you, beautifully mannered, and I’m only saying this because I’m fond of her — your kiddie doesn’t know how to take a joke. I noticed it this evening, when I was chaffing her a little about holding herself so badly. That’s another thing she wants — drilling. Drilling, drilling!”

  Charlie hit himself a resounding blow on the chest.

  “She wants drilling!”

  “She is tall for her age,” said Philip, who considered personal remarks ill-bred, unless complimentary.

  “So’s my Dorothy,” Hardinge inexorably returned. “Now, how tall is your kiddie? How tall exactly?”

  “I really don’t know, but she is certainly taller than most children of fourteen. In fact the governess, before she left, told me that Lily was outgrowing her strength.”

  “Our Dorothy is thirteen and a half and stands five- foot five in her stockings. Five-foot five, and a back like a ramrod. Now, Lily isn’t five-foot five, I’m positive of that. We’ll measure her to-morrow, and you’ll find she’s not five-foot five. Nowhere near it.”

  Philip made a politely acquiescent sound.

  “Drilling is what she wants, drilling and games. It’s done everything in the world for my kiddie-widdies. Little Sylvia, now, didn’t hold herself as well as the other two — was rather inclined to poke. And after one term at Bridgecrap she’s holding her head up, and her shoulders back, and talks of nothing but hockey.”

  Philip suppressed a shudder at a consummation which appeared to him so utterly undesirable.

  “You must send Lily to Bridgecrap,” said Charlie Hardinge positively. “No place like it. Splendid air — right up above the sea, outdoor games all the year round — swimming and gym — everything you can think of.”