The resulting condition of resentful obedience induced in Lily, who was at once too sensitive and too fond of her father to risk reducing him to one of those states of despairing depression that were his only form of displaying vexation, Philip described as “a nice, happy, friendly, little home party, with no unpleasant discussions.
Since the death of his wife, he had known no more definite happiness than his own pitifully negative contentment whenever such a state of affairs appeared to him to prevail in his house. He would have thought it a disloyalty to Eleanor’s memory to suppose that he could ever be happy again.
The children might be so — in fact he wished them to be so, and was bewildered and hurt when his own lack of proportion created an atmosphere to which Lily, at least, reacted at a cost infinitely greater to herself than either of them realized.
Kenneth, ten years younger, was different.
The “difference” of Kenneth, in fact, was becoming positively appalling, to his entirely humourless father.
Kenneth disregarded the code with blatant impunity, and that not from a spirit of defiance, but apparently from sheer constitutional inability to regard it seriously.
He obviously did not believe that grown-up people were infallible.
Remonstrance never made him cry, nor imputations of heartlessness and disloyalty.
He never willingly sat upon anybody’s knee after he was three years old, but would say cheerfully: “I’d rather not, thank you,” as he walked away.
He held opinions of his own, and expressed them freely.
He did not instantly relinquish them when Philip gravely and gently told him that he was an ignorant little boy and that Father always knew best.
He was addicted to making personal remarks.
He spoke crudely and candidly about subjects that Philip had always tacitly impressed upon his children as being sad or unpleasant, and therefore unfit to be mentioned freely.
He asked indiscreet questions.
“How old are you, Father?”
“Hush, hush, little boy. That’s a very rude question. You know you must never ask grown-up people their age.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s very bad manners.”
“Cousin Charlie asked Lily how old she was, the other day, and Lily didn’t mind.”
“That’s different.” Philip was at last beginning to learn that one could not put an end to Kenneth’s enquiries merely by saying: “Come, come, you know Father doesn’t like arguments.”
“Cousin Charlie is a great deal older than Lily, and can say what he likes to her.”
“Then it’s only old people who mind being asked their age. Is that why you won’t tell me yours, Father, because you’re so old?”
Philip was exceedingly sensitive about his age, and quite incapable of assessing the utter meaninglessness of his son’s estimate.
“That’s a naughty, heartless way of speaking,” he said, deeply hurt. “I don’t want to talk any more to little people who can speak like that.”
“Oh well, it doesn’t matter,” said Kenneth with supreme indifference. “I s’pose you’re alxnit seventy or eighty. I didn’t know you’d mind being asked.”
In the last assertion lay the painful core of the matter. Kenneth really didn’t know, as Lily, and even Vonnie, had known, as much by intuition as by training, what Philip would “mind.”
He transgressed constantly, and was gaily impervious to the devastating effect of his transgressions upon his father and, by reflection, upon Lily. But Lily secretly admired Kenneth, and envied him that pachydermatous courage of his own convictions that she herself had never acquired.
Kenneth was never afraid of being himself, although that self in no slightest degree corresponded to Philip’s ideal of a motherless little boy of nine years old.
He went to school and was not in the least homesick, and he seemed to be neither grieved nor ashamed when Philip expressed great disappointment at his first report.
“I hoped you would have been proud to bring back some nice prize or other to show me,” said Philip wistfully.
“Prizes are fearful rot,” said Kenneth.
He afterwards remarked in a detached way to Lily that, after all, what he did at school was his own business, more or less.
“Father pays for you to go there,” said Lily, instinctively aware that only such practical considerations would carry any weight to her youthful hearer.
“Yes, of course. But he needn’t want to know whether I’ve made any nice friends, and rot of that sort.”
“I know it’s rather aggravating to be asked about that sort of thing,” half whispered Lily, feeling herself to be guilty of treason. “But after all, it’s because he’s fond of us, that he wants to know everything about us.”
“Being fond is such rot,” said Kenneth, in his graceless and limited vocabulary.
Lily was quite glad to see him return to school before her own departure for Italy.
“I’m afraid you won’t see your sister at home next holidays, my boy, so you and I will have to cheer one another up,” said Philip nervously. “But it’ll be a great treat for Lily to go abroad.”
“Mind you send me some stamps for my collection, Lily,” Kenneth said earnestly.
“Come, come, Kenneth. Try and not think quite so much about your own little concerns. Now say good-bye, my boy.”
But the most determined sentimentalist upon earth could extract no conventional emotion out of Kenneth.
“Good-bye,” he said casually, and turned an inattentive cheek to Lily’s salute.
She would willingly have omitted the ceremony of kissing him altogether, knowing that he disliked it, but for her certainty that Philip, shocked and pained, would have insisted upon its due performance.
“I hope little Kenneth is not a heartless boy,” said his father, turning away dejectedly from the scene of farewell that had impressed him so unsatisfactorily.
But hope was not the predominant note in his voice.
Lily was so sorry for her father — all the sorrier because she was conscious that her own inmost sympathies lay with Kenneth’s point of view — that she felt it incumbent upon her to show no elation at all at her own projected departure, although she was in reality fast becoming both excited and pleased at the prospect of going into entirely new surroundings.
The result of which filial piety was that Philip told Ethel Hardinge, in a resigned way and with a smile of great melancholy, that little people realized very few of the sacrifices made for them, and one must not expect to see them display gratitude.
VIII
“Aha!” cried Aunt Clo in a loud, ringing contralto.
She stood on the small, empty platform and waved her hand above her head with a spacious, graceful gesture, as Lily got out of the train.
Miss Stellenthorpe’s short, iron-grey curls were uncovered and parted in a masculine style on one side of her head, and she wore a dark-blue, fisherman’s jersey and a pair of dark-blue knickerbockers. Her large, well-shaped legs and feet were bare.
“Aha! Good! Good!”
She kissed Lily upon both checks in an emphatic, foreign sort of way, and gazed at her with a fondly humorous smile.
“Ecco!” said Aunt Go.
She hurried Lily across the little platform, affectionately grasping her arm, and talking so cordially all the while that her niece felt quite unable to interrupt her.
At last she said:
“My luggage, Aunt Clo. I’m afraid there’s a trunk.”
“A trunk! Dio mio! Let us not forget the trunk!”
Aunt Go sped back again, appearing not at all disconcerted, and disposed of the trunk question with much animation.
“The trunk,” she exclaimed to Lily in mock-bombastic style, “the trunk is provided for. All is well with the trunk. It appears at the gate of Il Monasterio au plaisir de ce brave Lorenzo.”
There were many French phrases and a few Italian ones scattered through Aunt Clo’s c
onversation, and she frequently gave a strangely foreign construction to the sentences that she spoke in English.
Lily was impressed by her fluency, by the perfection of her French, and by a certain humorous candour that Aunt Clo displayed in voicing her opinions.
Nevertheless, she could not quite kill her remembrance of having, as a child, disliked Aunt Go.
Outside the station was a very small waggonette with a striped red and yellow awning. A sleepy, good-natured- looking peasant, his shirt open at the neck, sat on the box.
“Ecco, Umbertino!”
Miss Stellenthorpe waved her niece into the waggonette and sprang in after her. The vigor of her ascent seemed out of all proportion to the dilatory progress that they made along a baked and arid-looking road, the fields on either side unrelieved by any shade.
“But the vineyards round Genazzanol” said Aunt Go expressively. “Patienza!”
Gcnazzano proved to be a small village consisting of one cobble-stoned street, winding up the side of a steep hill, and an ancient grey pile that stood raised from the roadside at the top of half a dozen irregular steps.
“The Cathedrale,” Aunt Go introduced it.
A mattress, imperfectly concealed behind a heavy red curtain, hung before the entrance to the cathedral after the Italian fashion.
A small, brown-skinned child was squeezing its way inside, and a sturdy peasant woman, carrying a baby and a basket, was pushing her way out.
“Buon’ giorno, Teresa mia!” cried Aunt Clo, waving her hand.
The woman smiled in reply.
“This is the country of the Miraculous Virgin,” Miss Stellenthorpe told Lily. “The Madonna of Genazzano. The statue is in the cathedral and we have a wonderful procession once a year. Ah! ce cher Genazzano!”
Tenderness radiated from her face and voice.
The waggonette drew up before a small iron fence that enclosed a tiny stone house, built along the four sides of a square. A little cloister ran all round the house, and the space in the middle formed a courtyard where shrubs flowered in painted green pots.
There was no garden, other than the small and apparently untended courtyard, but within the house, Aunt Go waved through the window at a thick trellis covered with vine tendrils and fig-leaves, and framing a sturdy arbour beneath which stood a rustic bench and table, and said:
“La Tonnelle.”
Beyond lay a sloping track of ground on which the vines grew round poles that stood in long, converging lines, reminding Lily of a miniature edition of a Kentish hop-field.
“Truly have not my lines fallen to me in pleasant places?” Aunt Go enquired musingly. It was perhaps a slight relief to Lily that her tone required no reply. A bald negative or affirmative seemed so inadequate a rejoinder to Aunt Go’s rounded, elaborate periods.
When they were sitting in the tonnelle that evening, however, just before the falling of the brief Italian dusk, Miss Stellenthorpe made enquiries to which more detailed answers were necessary.
“And what of Philip — what of your father, Lily?”
Lily answered as fully as was compatible with that old obsession that it was disloyal to present one’s near relations to the gaze of another in any aspect save that particular one in which they might choose to regard themselves. She knew that Philip often described himself as a broken man, and conscientiously did her best to put a picture of a broken man before Aunt Clo.
“Aha!” said Aunt Clo, and “Ecco!” and nodded with deliberation, as though merely acquiescing in the recital of a state of affairs that had long been known to her.
“Nous nous aimons de loin,” she said with resignation. “It doesn’t do to remove the crutches before a lame man is ready to walk. I myself have stood without a prop all my life, and I wanted to see your father and mother strong and straight and unsupported, too. But perhaps I was hard and hasty. I was young. They clutched at the artificial supports that I tried to make them spurn — they resented the council of perfection... Well, well... I thank whatever gods there be, that I myself have learnt to stand upright and face the sunlight.”
Aunt Clo drew up her tall person as she spoke, and threw back her head in a gesture expressive of freedom and gallantry.
Later on, when Lily and she had dinner together, Miss Stellenthorpe became less metaphorical and more colloquial.
Her appearance was a surprise to her niece. She had discarded the blue jersey and the knickerbockers for an admirably fitting drapery of flame-coloured brocade, closely following the lines of her fine figure, and a Greek fillet encircled her head. Her arms were bare to the shoulder and Lily, glancing surreptitiously downwards, saw that she wore flame-coloured stockings and shoes that were laced sandal-wise.
“Certainly, I descend to the conventions in the evening,” cried Aunt Clo, not altogether truthfully, as her gaze followed Lily’s. “Would you believe it, Lily, that I shocked Genazzano profoundly when I first lived here!”
Lily felt that she could believe it easily.
“‘But,’ they cried, ‘the signorina shows her legs! She wears clothes like a man! It is immodest!’ Imagine it — such a point of view here in Genazzano, which is like an earthly Paradise. I was confounded.”
“‘But is this Suburbia?’ I asked. One expects Suburbia to be shocked — or even the provinces. Lily!” cried Aunt Clo in a tone of playful accusation. “I believe your father would be shocked. My legs — the legs that God gave me — would shock your father, if he saw them uncovered.”
Once more the very fervour of Lily’s inward acquiescence kept her silent.
“Oh these people who are shocked!” said Aunt Clo with a musical groan. “But Genazzano is now used to my knickerbockers — who knows but that one day your father may be reconciled to the thought of uncovered legs? Or would he say — ha, ha! — would he say that they were immodest? an indecent spectacle?... I believe that’s what he would say!”
Aunt Clo speaking with mournful roguishness, seemed disposed, in a breezy, open-minded sort of way, to attribute the most prurient-minded views and expressions to the rest of humanity.
She told Lily that there was a girl in the village who was suspected of being about to have an illegitimate child. She was only fifteen.
“I have sent for her to come up here to-morrow. Naturally, her relations can get nothing out of her. They have frightened her, and made her believe that she has done something to be ashamed of.”
She leant forward and scrutinized Lily’s face by the indifferent light of the two oil-lamps in the room.
“Biglia Mia! But I’ve made you blush! It suits you, and is charming — but why — why?”
Lily was indeed blushing, deeply annoyed with herself for so doing, and yet irresistibly compelled to it by Aunt Go’s open mention of subjects that were never referred to at home, and had only been furtively whispered about by the least endurable of the girls at school.
“I — I suppose I’m not used to hearing those things talked about,” she stammered. “I’ve never been told anything — I’m not even sure that I know what ‘illegitimate’ means, exactly.”
“Philip’s child — Philip’s child!” almost moaned Aunt Go. “I might have guessed it! He would never face life himself, and he brings up his child to suppose that ignorance means innocence. Oh, horrible!”
She shuddered and almost sprang from her seat. “Come out under the starlight, my child — you want no fruit? That’s right — you and I must have some talk.”
Lily felt ashamed of the irrepressible feeling of disappointment with which she followed Miss Stellenthorpe, whirled away from her beautiful untasted plateful of ripe figs.
But, of course, illegitimacy was not a subject to be discussed over dessert.
Aunt Clo, however, said nothing more about illegitimacy. She began instead to tell Lily how, long ago, she had solemnly warned Philip and Eleanor that they were refusing to face Truth; to look at facts as they were.
“It was about the poor little Yvonne. She would have been saved,
if they had brought themselves to acknowledge her weakness, instead of trying to persuade themselves and the world that she was like other children. Let me sec — you were two years younger — but you can remember?”
“Yes,” said Lily rather curtly.
Vonnie had been so seldom mentioned, since her death, and then always in such consecrated phrases that Lily felt Aunt Clo’s outspokenness almost as an indecency.
“Aha! nous avons changé tout cela — but when you were mites together, I remember very well how superior you thought yourself to poor little Vonnie. Hardly your fault, child — you were the favourite. They never disguised it, although, of course, they never would acknowledge it, in so many words. Ah, quel système!”
Aunt Go shook her head.
“Dear little one, how much you’ve improved since then!”
There was delicate approbation in her tone, and in the large, genial, scrutinizing eye that Lily could just perceive, gleamingly turned upon her in the moonlight.
Although, theoretically, Lily supposed herself to be striving after perfection, it caused her a distinct feeling of resentment to hear that she had “improved,” but she dishonestly attributed her annoyance to her growing conviction that it would be in better taste if Aunt Go were rather less candid in criticism of her niece’s nearest relations.
With her disconcerting penetration, Miss Stellenthorpe seemed to be aware of some such unsympathetic atmosphere surrounding her.
“You mustn’t resent my plain speaking. Pour moi, il n’y a que la verit. When we have known one another a little longer, my Lily, you will realize that truth is an obsession with me. Nothing but the truth. Deceit in any shape or form is the one unforgivable sin!”
Lily gave a fleeting glimpse to certain aspects of herself with a feeling of veritable horror, and a most sincere resolution that these must be for ever concealed from her hostess.
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 195