Lily understood that the interview was at an end.
Acutely sensitive as she was to Miss Melody’s kind and serious interest in her welfare, it was almost inevitable that she should come to the sorrowful conclusion that Miss Melody, in her vast and tolerant experience, must be correct in her estimate of Lily’s self. The thought depressed her.
She lacked backbone, and she was a shirker, squandering all her energies upon fancies that meant nothing.
In a vague and general way, Lily resolved to abjure those fancies and to readjust her scale of relative values so that it should include all that Miss Melody had meant by such words as “keenness”— “a thoroughly English spirit” and “doing everything to the greater honour and glory of God.”
VI
The least highly spirited amongst us, however easily cowed by outside influence, seldom finds it easy or desirable to practise meekness when dealing with a near relative at home.
This law, which is a practically invariable one, deserves a candid recognition which it seldom receives.
Certainly it was never openly admitted to exist by Philip Stellenthorpe, whose house furnished a striking example of its workings after Lily had finally returned from Bridgecrap.
At school, she had been the victim of a diffidence engendered in the consciousness of failure.
At home, the consciousness of failure merely roused her to covert and irritable defiance of criticism.
She was no longer the sensitive and over-intuitive child steadily denying her own instincts wherever she foresaw that they must run counter to her father’s unalterably sentimental ideals. But neither had she the moral courage nor the training in honesty of thought that would have enabled her boldly to analyze the causes of her own discontent.
She was resentful of Philip’s arbitrary conventions, for which he never gave any other reason than that “Father says it will be best that way,” and at the same time she believed her resentment to be wrong and undutiful.
She thought, and was shocked and unhappy to think, that there were times when she hated her father, whereas her hatred was in reality wholly for certain manifestations of his solicitude and affection for herself.
“A child that is impatient of its parent’s love,” Philip once called her, in bewildered pain and disappointment.
Lily felt herself to be unutterably heartless, cried herself sick with remorse and despair, and then had to bite her tongue to prevent herself from protesting aloud in exasperation the very next time that Philip called her his little pet.
A perpetually tête-à-tête existence might well have brought the state of tension between them to an unforgettable climax, but that the situation was saved by the Hardinges.
The Hardinges came to live within a mile of Philip Stellenthorpe.
The shock to him was less severe than if they had been people of whom he knew nothing, and the sacred tradition of Eleanor’s day, that “the children were happiest in their own little nursery,” was allowed to lapse when Lily between eighteen and nineteen years old, and Kenneth in his first term at school. Subtle and intangible conflict and the presence of the cheerful, commonplace Hardinges were unthinkable together in the same atmosphere.
Dorothy Hardinge, no longer able to play hockey with any regularity, philosophically turned her attention to other forms of amusement, and was quite ready to make a companion of Lily Stellenthorpe. Having reluctantly put up her hair and lengthened her skirts, she made the best of privileges that she had never coveted, took her clothes quite seriously, and discovered frankly, for the first time, that Lily had at least one undeniable advantage over other girls that had never been recognized at school, in that she was extremely and unusually pretty.
Janet was less simple-minded, or less generous than Dorothy, and always made Lily conscious of her faint contempt.
Sylvia was still called Lily’s friend, although they had much less in common than had Lily and Dorothy, now that Lily was accounted grown up, while Sylvia had three more years of school before her.
Charlie and Ethel Hardinge gave tennis parties and small dances, and picnic parties, and talked as proudly and volubly of “the girls” as they had once talked of “the kiddies-widdies.”
They included Lily and Kenneth in everything.
“We’ve got two boys coming to stay with us next week. It ought to be rather fun,” Dorothy Hardinge proclaimed. “There are never enough men to go round, here.”
“There are so few families with sons, and anyway the boys always seem to be years younger than the girls — like Kenneth,” said Janet discontentedly.
It had been the fashion at Bridgecrap to deride as early Victorian any assumption of the desirability of masculine society under any conditions, but Dorothy Hardinge at least had candidly readjusted her point of view amongst her new surroundings.
“We shall try and give a dance, while they’re here. One of them is father’s ward, Colin Eastwood — he’s eighteen and awfully nice. Sort of quiet, you know, but nice. And he’s bringing a friend, someone we don’t know. Father said he might. He’s at some University or other, and he’s about twenty-two, or something like that. He’ll probably think himself as old as anything, compared to us,” said Dorothy with a little laugh that betrayed excitement.
Lily felt excited, too. She had met very few boys indeed that were beyond the age of sailor suits, but she had indulged in as many romantic fancies of possible future conquests for herself, as were allowed her by the ineradicable memory of the convent theory that masculinity was ipso facto something to be, as far as possible, ignored by the modest feminine.
Much reading and an uncontrollable imagination had merely eradicated the recollection of conventual shibboleths, but Lily was still sufficiently bound by them to feel very much ashamed when she found herself wondering whether Colin Eastwood and his friend would think that she was pretty. Dorothy said that she was.
From time to time, when she had on a new hat or put on a summer frock for the first time, her father looked at her with an air of rather melancholy gratification, and then made some small, detached observation at the very end of the day, when it might be assumed to have no special significance to the immediate occasion:
“My little Lily is getting quite a grown-up girl, now. It’s quite a duty for little people to take care of their complexions, you know, we’re given these small advantages to be a pleasure to those who care about our looks.”
Lily had thereby deduced that Philip was afraid of her becoming vain, and that therefore he, also, thought her pretty.
She sometimes took long and furtive observations of herself in the glass. Her eyes, dark-lashed and rather deeply set, were not nearly as blue as Dorothy Hardinge’s, but her nose at least was straight where Dorothy’s turned up, and her soft skin had no freckles, and was sun-burned olive instead of red. She thought that her lips were too full, but at all events they were firmly closed, since she had always breathed through her nose, which not one of the three Hardinges could do for any length of time. And her hair was lovely.
Lily would never have applied to it, even in her own mind, such an adjective — redolent of vanity, according to the code — but nevertheless, that was what she really thought of it, when she brushed out the long, silky brown waves.
She counted vanity as being amongst her besetting sins, and strove to persuade herself that, against the evidence of her own senses, she really ought to believe herself plain and unattractive.
It was a mark of her own unregeneracy, that this should prove to be so extraordinarily difficult.
It became more difficult than ever, when Colin Eastwood and Lily began to meet one another every day at the parties and excursions arranged by the Hardinges in honour of their two guests.
Colin, as Dorothy had said, was nice, and very quiet. The indications of his admiration for Lily were so shyly offered that she only became aware of it by subtle and gradual degrees.
So restrained and delicate was that impalpable idyll of their extreme yout
h, that it never became the object of jarring and facetious comment, as was Dorothy’s loud flirtation with Colin’s cheerful and amusing friend, embarked upon within an hour of their first acquaintance.
Lily, at first, had indeed been inwardly mortified at the promptness of Dorothy’s conquest. The undergraduate was a Real Live Person — so was Dorothy. So were all the others. Lily, just as at school, felt herself to be but an indifferent masquerader, through the badly sustained pretensions of whom they could all see plainly.
She found herself paired with Colin, in all the expeditions, and thought that it was because he had such nice manners that he always stayed beside her. But in a very little while she knew that, actually, Colin manoeuvred for the place next her, and that his gaze always sought hers to share in the frequent jokes and allusions that had so soon come into being amongst them all.
He liked her better than Dorothy, or Janet or any of them.
It was just such a first romance as is only possible to certain diffident and highly sensitized temperaments, as yet unawakened to any thought of the cruder and more obvious manifestations of mutual attractions. Colin Eastwood was very nearly as ingenuous as Lily, and quite as shy.
He sat next her at picnics, and looked pitiful if the privilege was accidentally usurped by others. He once, daringly, and with shaking fingers, fastened her glove for her.
He asked her to call him Colin, and when she shyly acquiesced he was transported, but looked at her with a gaze that implored a yet further privilege.
Lily blushed at first, and then said timidly:
“And will you call me Lily?”
He said breathlessly: “Oh, I should love to.” The audacity of the words made both their hearts beat quicker, so that they could say no more.
When they played tennis at the Hardinges’ house, Lily was generally assigned to Colin for a partner, as it was necessary to equalize the sets by coupling the weakest player, as Lily indubitably was, with the strongest.
At first she thought that he must resent her inferiority, but it was soon evident that he did not even acknowledge it to exist. When she played well, he praised her rapturously, and when she played badly he put aside her apologies with assurances that the sun, or the wind, or some mistaken movement of his own had been against her.
Under the stimulus of his admiration, Lily suddenly blossomed into a self-confidence hitherto unknown to her, and actually learnt to like tennis, and to play passably well.
Occasionally Colin was her adversary, and then he served his balls to her as gently as possible, and she knew it, and was thrilled by his chivalry, although she never made acknowledgment of it to him in any spoken words.
Such tiny little things seemed to count. The way one looked, or didn’t look — the scat one chose in the garden at tea-time. The allusions that proved how carefully certain predilections or desires had been noted. And there were the photographs.
All of them had cameras, and groups were taken. Colin always placed himself next to Lily, or sitting at her feet, or standing just behind her, for these.
Colin took photographs of Lily, because that was such a very pretty hat, if she didn’t think it rude of him to make a personal remark. And might he take one of her without a hat on at all, for a change?
Lily would just take one snapshot of Colin, because he had put her camera to rights, and they must see if it had been a successful operation.
Colin manoeuvred the unsuspecting Sylvia into making use of his Kodak, which was much superior to her own Brownie, so that the photograph which she took of Colin and Lily, alone together on the tennis court, appeared to be a sudden inspiration of her own.
But Lily knew that the whole was a deeply thought-out plot of Colin’s, although he never said so. When the films were developed and printed, however, though Colin exhibited them freely, he let Lily know, casually, that only she and he were to have copies of that particular photograph.
The glamour of perfect summer weather lay over it all, and the scent and colour of the innumerable roses with which the Hardinges’ garden seemed to be eternally decked. It was the beginning of August, when the halcyon days drew to a close, and on the last evening, they all, under a red harvest moon, went out to the favourite scene of their many excursions — a stretch of common land whereon the heather had just burst into purple bloom.
The undergraduate challenged Dorothy to a race through the thick, impeding clumps, and they sped far ahead, the youth gaining upon her every moment, in spite of a long start and the silk skirt that she had daringly wound round her waist, exposing her frilled petticoats and a shapely length of leg.
Sylvia and two contemporaries, encountered upon the way, linked arms and could be heard singing fragmentarily as they went. Kenneth, excited by the unwonted lateness of the hour, ran with the Hardinges’ dog, and alternately teased and chattered to Janet, always left odd- man-out, and now relegated to the society of her father, who told her instructive things about the moon. Lily and Colin lingered far behind them all.
They were not articulate, even now, in spite of the soft allurement of the melancholy that possessed them both.
In Lily’s mind, there floated a fragment once read somewhere:
De cet adieu, si douce est la tristesse.
She said tremulously:
“I’m sorry you’re both going away to-morrow.”
She had not wanted to say both, but the word mysteriously forced itself from her.
“I’m sorry, too,” Colin answered fervently. “I shall never forget this time. It’s been the happiest of my whole life.”
“I think it’s been the happiest of mine, too.”
Shyness overwhelmed and silenced them both.
“You don’t want to catch up with the others, do you?” spoke Colin entreatingly.
“No — oh no. They’re too far ahead,” said Lily hurriedly.
The hillside became steeper, and the gorse-bushes that stood up amidst the tough springing heather became more numerous.
“I think I’d better go first and — and help you, if I may.”
He thrust the stiff, green spires aside, and held out his hand.
Lily tremulously placed hers within his grasp.
They climbed slowly, without speaking.
“Shall we sit down for a minute?” Colin suggested, when the end of the steep path was reached, and Lily had softly, but definitely, withdrawn her hand from his.
They leant against a boulder, and Colin detected a tiny tuft of white heather.
“Let’s each pick a piece of it, and not tell anyone where we found it.”
Then they exchanged their pieces, rather solemnly and without speaking much. Colin’s fingers lingered round Lily’s as she tendered her little spray towards him, and they looked long at one another in the moonlight.
“I shall always keep mine,” he murmured.
“As a remembrance,” whispered Lily.
“I shan’t need anything to make me remember,” said the boy reproachfully. “Will you keep yours?” he added beseechingly.
“Yes.”
Colin kissed his piece of heather and put it into a little pocketbook.
Lily tucked hers tenderly into the front of her gown. Then it was all over and the others joined them, and they went down the hill again all together, singing “For Auld Lang Syne,” and Lily and Kenneth were left at their own lodge-gates.
And for the next few days, Lily found the picnics dull, and the tennis parties no longer events to be looked forward to, and the taking of photographs not worth while.
Once Dorothy Hardinge said to her, quite calmly: “I believe Colin Eastwood was awfully in love with you, Lily.”
“Father says Colin is frightfully susceptible,” said Janet quickly. “I heard Father and Mother laughing about him.”
Lily did not mind the laughter of good-natured Cousin Charlie and his wife.
She wondered with shy, delicious tremors whether Colin really was in love with her, and whether some day he would come bac
k again and ask her to marry him, and take her away to some nebulous dream world in which all true lovers had their being.
Her dreams and fancies were nearly as unsubstantial as those that she had woven round imaginary adventures, and told herself from day to day, at school. She was still only pretending to be like other people. Really Lily knew that it was all pretence to say that she was now grown up.
Philip said it from time to time, even while himself still treating her as a child, with no slightest claim to either judgment or individuality of her own.
But when he one day found her, more or less surreptitiously, childishly devouring toffee in the garden, he reminded her seriously and with displeasure, of her years.
“You don’t want to eat unwholesome sweetstuff, between meals, like a little schoolboy. That’s all very well for the nursery,” said Philip, disregarding the fact, resentfully remembered by Lily, that no such practice had ever been allowed prevalence in the Stellenthorpe nursery.
“I don’t like to see you behaving so babyishly, Lily. It’s — it’s undignified, and unsuitable. I don’t like to see it.”
He saw it no more.
Lily, although regarding detection as shameful, was either not sufficiently convinced of the heinousness of eating toffee at nineteen years old, or else lacked sufficient self-control to refrain from surreptitiously indulging her desire for sweet things.
She made inconspicuous expeditions to the village sweet-shop, and returned with her purchases in her pocket, thoroughly despising herself the while.
Guilt, and a ludicrously disproportionate terror showed plainly in her face when she once met her father, on her return by the least frequented entrance to the house.
“What have you been doing, my little pet?” Philip enquired with a suspiciousness foreign to his nature, but which must have been engendered in the most trusting of parents by Lily’s confused and disconcerted expression.
“I just went up to the village,” she stammered, and felt herself flushing.
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 193