But she always listened attentively to what Nicholas said, and glanced at him from time to time out of the comers of her small, blue-green eyes.
One evening when Nicholas was alone with Lily he told her that Doris had been telling him something about her life, during their tête-à-tête dinner.
“She’s had a very hard time, Lily, mind you. I think it’s wonderful it hasn’t made her in the least bitter, poor child.”
Lily saw that Nicholas’s rather facile sympathies had been roused. She felt vaguely surprised.
“Did she tell you about her engagement, and why it was broken off?”
“She did. I suppose she’s confided it all to you, long ago?”
“No. She’s mentioned several times that she was once engaged, but she’s never told me why she didn’t get married.”
“I daresay she’s very reserved,” said Nicholas. His tone betrayed a slight sense of flattery at having received a unique confidence. “I don’t know quite why she told me about it, but I suppose she saw that I was interested. I suppose that was it.”
Lily smiled a very little.
Nicholas never made it difficult for any woman to see when he was interested.
“The man must have been a bit of a brute, I should fancy. He got engaged to her while she was at this hospital place and they were to be married almost directly, so of course she resigned from the hospital. I fancy, though she must have worked hard there, that the surroundings were never particularly congenial. In fact, she as good as told me that she only went to work so as to give her younger sisters a better time at home. Rather plucky, eh? But of course she left when she thought she was going to be married. And then what does this wretched fellow do but get insanely jealous over some pal or other of hers, lose his head completely, and say things that no girl could possibly overlook. She couldn’t forgive him, of course, and I don’t blame her. Life with a jealous husband — and for a girl like that — Good Lord!”
“It’s odd she should be so attractive,” said Lily. “She isn’t pretty.”
“No — no, I suppose not. But she’s taking, don’t you think? Something very arresting about her, altogether. I must say, I can’t help admiring her spirit. She’s told you how they worked them at that place, I suppose?”
“The hospital? Yes.”
“For a girl brought up, I suppose, very much as you were yourself,” said Nicholas, “it must have taken some spirit to stick it out. She was telling me that there wasn’t a soul there of her own class, practically, for her to speak to, and she used to cry from sheer loneliness, sometimes. I can’t imagine her crying, somehow.”
“Neither can I,” said Lily drily.
Something in the quality of the silence that followed did not please her, and she went on speaking hastily:
“But she seems to have made a few friends all the same, Nicholas. At least she’s always telling me of the young men who ran after her.”
“I daresay,” said Nicholas curtly.
The lengthening of his face indicated that his enthusiasm had been somewhat dashed, and Lily, characteristically, at once sought to efface the unsympathetic colouring that she had purposely given to her words. “I rather wonder she hasn’t married. She could have done so easily, I should think.”
“Oh, of course she could.”
The tone in which he spoke was once more confident and enthusiastic.
“Old Dickenson told me something about that. He said she was the sort of girl men used to look at while she was still in the nursery — although both her sisters are prettier — in fact, as you say this one isn’t exactly good-looking, I suppose. I don’t know what it is about her — magnetism, I suppose. Certainly she’s attractive. Don’t you think so?”
“She’s more so to men than to women, I should imagine.”
“Perhaps. You women have odd ideas about one another’s merits, eh?” He laughed heartily and was still laughing when Doris came into the room.
Nicholas rose and placed a chair for her.
“We were just talking about you. I was telling my wife something about the stiff upper lip you’ve shown all along. I can tell you.” said Nicholas significantly, “she admires pluck as much as I do. Eh, Lily?”
“Oh. I don’t know,” said Doris.
She was taciturn in the presence of Nicholas and his warm, friendly admiration.
“We both want you to feel that you’ve got real pals in us — people that you can always turn to, you know. I don’t want to think of your going through any more of those lonely times that you were telling me about—”
“It’s awfully sweet of you both,” said Doris slowly. She looked at Nicholas as she spoke.
His small, tawny eyes expressed all the candid, un- subtle simplicity of his spirit. A hundred times he had looked at Lily herself with just such open, uncritical admiration.
“I think you’ve a great deal to be proud of, you know,” said Nicholas. “There must have been times when you felt pretty nearly down and out, eh?” And Doris again replied:
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“But I do,” said Nicholas, nodding triumphantly.
Lily wondered, with a certain impatience, why Doris did not indulge in one of those lengthy expositions of her own grievances against life, and the hospital, and her father, with which she had so often wearied her patient.
Was she really sufficiently intelligent to realize how very much more effective was this uneloquent refusal to dwell upon the hardships that Nicholas was so evidently ready to accept at her own valuation?
Next morning, however, when the two were again alone together, Doris was quite as voluble as ever and Lily quite as profoundly fatigued by her.
“I shall soon be strong enough to get up,” said Lily. “I don’t want to lie here longer than I need.”
“You’re like me,” Miss Dickenson retorted. She possessed a wonderful power of extracting a personal application from apparently anything in the world. “That’s just like me. I never can bear to give in. You know, sometimes I’ve really been on my last legs, as the saying is, and the Sister or someone has noticed it, and told me to slack off a bit. But I simply can’t take things easily. I have to go on till I drop. That’s absolutely me all over.”
She leant back comfortably in an armchair as she spoke and began to polish her finger-nails with the palm of her hand — a favourite exercise.
“I was so awfully surprised at your not manicuring, Mrs. Aubray. It was one of the first things I noticed about you. You know, I’m afraid I always notice people’s hands. It’s the first thing I look at, almost. I suppose I sort of judge people by that. I sort of can’t help it. I always look first of all at their hands.”
Lily wondered, with the acrimony born of weariness, why this well-worn boast should almost invariably emanate from those least capable of any intelligent observation whatsoever.
She ignored Miss Dickenson’s claim to perspicacity altogether, and replied to her earlier remark.
“I hope you don’t feel that you have to go on till you drop, here. It’s the last thing I should wish, and besides there’s nothing but weakness the matter with me. I shall be getting up very soon — I hope before my aunt comes.”
“Oh, yes, your aunt is coming. Now, when I’m ill, I never have any of my relations near me — not my sisters or anyone. It isn’t that I don’t think they’d come, you know, but I simply couldn’t ask them. A weird sort of pride, I suppose. I really am a weird sort of person altogether, you know.”
Lily closed her eyes.
“What makes you put that face on — it makes you look so weird. What were you asking about — oh, yes — me when I’m ill. It’s too funny, you know. I go on and on long after other people would have let themselves collapse, and then, when I do have to give in, of course I’m most frightfully bad. I’m a fearfully bad patient, too, because I’m always down on the nurse. I suppose it’s because I know so well how nursing ought to be done.”
“Oh,” said Lily.
<
br /> She remained speechless, even after Miss Dickenson had three times asked what made her say it like that.
“It sounded so weird,” remarked Doris distrustfully, in conclusion.
But the sense of irony that occasionally sustained Lily was not always at her command. She regained her strength very slowly, and had no great desire to be well again.
Her relations with Nicholas were in a curiously fluid state. His presence, after enduring that of Doris Dickenson all day, always brought to her a rush of relief and pleasure, and often his companionship appeared to her as almost a perfect thing. The revulsion of feeling was proportionately painful when words of his, casually and kindly spoken, from time to time forced upon her an unwelcome realization of the gulf that mentally separated them.
They would never agree about people.
Lily, shamefacedly admitting the immense importance to herself of the personal equation in life, yet tried to blame herself for regarding the difference between them as being an important one. Sometimes, even, in her weakness and youthfulness, she tried to deny its existence.
Her husband’s cult for Doris Dickenson, however, Lily unaffectedly welcomed. Incomprehensible though it seemed to her that Miss Dickenson’s company should afford aught but weariness to anybody, she was glad that Nicholas should not have a solitary breakfast and dinner.
He always disliked being alone, unless when he was busy, and Lily felt vaguely that her prolonged stay upstairs would be partly compensated for if she could provide other companionship for him.
She was glad to remember that Nicholas had always liked Aunt Clo.
When Miss Stellenthorpe’s visit became due, Lily said to her husband:
“Am I to say anything to Miss Dickenson about going away?”
“Why?” said Nicholas, looking astounded.
“I thought she was only staying till Aunt Clo arrived; and Aunt Go will be here to-morrow.”
“Oh well — it isn’t a sort of Box and Cox arrangement, is it? There’s plenty of room for them both. Just as you like, my dear, of course — but your aunt might feel freer if you still had your regular nurse at your beck and call. Besides, she’s a nice girl — a nice girl, and a plucky one. You’d be sorry to lose her.”
To the daughter of Philip and Eleanor Stellenthorpe it was almost an impossibility to cut across that kind, well- pleased statement with a wounding contradiction.
Lily’s spirit sought the familiar refuge of the weak, a feeble and unconvinced optimism. “Perhaps Doris will go of herself, when Aunt Clo is here.”
To a certain extent, the half-hearted prediction was verified, although the eventual departure of Doris Dickenson was not, perhaps, entirely a matter of free will.
“Bambina!” said Miss Stellenthorpe, less than a week after her arrival, with even more than her habitual emphasis of diction. “Bambina mia! How can this be?”
“What?”
“This canaglia!” said Miss Stellenthorpe, snapping her finger and thumb and becoming several degrees more cosmopolitan than usual.
“But who — what — je vous le demande — who is this Dickenson... que vient-elle-faire dans cette galtre? Ecco! My Lily! Mais c’est rigolo, voyons!”
It was always a little difficult to be adequate when replying to Aunt Clo.
“She is looking after me professionally — she’s been properly trained.”
“Ahimè!” Aunt Clo sighed gustily, her eyes upturned to Heaven.
“I don’t like her,” Lily confessed. “She tires me very much; she talks such a lot, and really what she says is never worth hearing.”
There was actual relief in putting into words the thoughts that she had so often suppressed in her own mind.
“Basta! I understand, my child. Enough. You lie there, like a trampled flower, with this thing — this inferior, third-rate machine — rattling above you! But of what is Nicholas, ce bon Nicholas — of what is he thinking?”
“He arranged it on purpose for me — he was thinking of me,” said Lily eagerly. “He thought she would be more of a companion than just an ordinary nurse. We know her- family, and she was to be here more or less as a friend.”
“Et patati et patata,” said Miss Stellenthorpe scornfully. “Leave this to me, little one. I understand the Dickenson type very well.”
It appeared indeed that she did.
Sitting in Lily’s room, her large and shapely legs crossed beneath the astonishingly brief serge skirt that had temporarily replaced the blue knickerbockers of Genazzano, Miss Stellenthorpe elegantly smoked a number of cigarettes, and eyed the while, with critical penetration, Miss Doris Dickenson.
“You’re like me, Miss Stellenthorpe. I’m afraid I smoke like a chimney — you know, my nerves sort of want it, somehow. I always inhale, too. Everyone always says I smoke too much.”
“And who is ‘everyone’?” negligently enquired Miss Stellenthorpe.
Doris stared at her.
“Everyone is everyone, I suppose,” she said shortly.
Aunt Go smiled with irrepressible superiority, turning to her niece.
“But how typical, is it not, of young England? The art of definition: everyone is everyone, she supposes! Ha, ha!”
“One talks carelessly, sometimes,” Lily said, strongly inclined to laugh.
“But not at all,” graciously exclaimed her aunt; “if by ‘one’ you allude to yourself, carina, I can assure you that it is not so. Your vocabulary, your originality, the extent of your reading, all combine to render your conversation stimulating. How I revel in the clash of wits! My niece and I between us must teach you the use of words, my little Dickenson.”
Aunt Clo’s little Dickenson appeared to be far from delighted at the proposition.
“How d’you mean, the use of words?” she asked curtly.
“Your vocabulary,” Aunt Clo explained in a kind voice, “is that of a child, or a savage. It is. I believe, a statistical fact that certain savage tribes use a language of only two hundred words. It suffices for their need of self-expression. The vocabulary of the average English man or woman comprises little over fifteen hundred words, in daily use. People like myself, on the other hand, sooner or later have recourse to the most recondite expressions available, in the instinctive desire to avoid the banale. Words from other languages creep in — classical quotations — conversation becomes an art—”
Miss Stellenthorpe waved her cigarette gracefully round her head.
“How devastating!” said Doris Dickenson in the pause that followed.
Her voice was charged with the rather laboured sneer that in the English middle-classes is described as “sarcasm.”
“Unhappy one!” said Aunt Clo, and groaned aloud. “What is this ‘devastating’ that you employ à tort et à trovers? A senseless and meaningless cliché!”
She fixed a large and gleaming eye that held undisguised horror in it, upon Doris.
Lily was conscious of a fearful joy in listening, as the many scathing criticisms that had thronged into her own mind were thus eloquently and unrestrainedly put into words by her aunt.
The sulky face of Miss Dickenson was darkly flushed.
“I speak thus for your own good, my Dickenson,” said Aunt Clo, shaking a long forefinger. “You render yourself intolerable to the well-educated, and it is but a kindness to tell you so. Not only are you inexperienced, and therefore crude of outlook, but you are ignorant, self- assertive, stupidly bombastic, and talkative to a degree that—”
“Really, Miss Stellenthorpe, if you think I’m going to sit down under such rudeness—”
Doris’s voice had risen instantly to the true virago’s pitch of shrillness.
“Silence!” said Aunt Clo. “You disturb my niece. Perform the material duties, my Dickenson, for which I remark that you have been well trained, but cease to weary us with the trivialities of your conversation. En voila asses, n’est-ce-pas?”
“I don’t understand gibberish.”
It was evident that Doris, after t
he manner of her kind, was recklessly seeking after rudeness for the sake of rudeness, regardless of wit or point. Miss Stellenthorpe raised her handsome eyebrows in an expression of patient despair.
“You perceive, my Lily? This girl — mat’ educata indeed, as my beloved Italians say — knows neither her own language nor any other. What can you expect of such? Deplorable, oh deplorable!”
Aunt Clo looked at Miss Dickenson and shook her head repeatedly.
“Wretched one, have you never been taught that until you have learned the art of listening, you are unfit to talk? L’art d’ennuyer e’est de tout dire That art my unhappy Dickenson, you possess to the full. It is your only one. I come to this house — straight, I may tell you, from unravelling the many tangled threads of another’s destiny — I come, and what do I find? What, I ask you, do I find? I find my niece, broken in body and spirit, needing the utmost cherishing, the greatest delicacy of handling, the reticence of true sympathy — and compelled instead to submit to your ministrations. You ask me, perhaps, to tell you fully and freely of what those ministrations consist.”
“I don’t ask you,” cried Doris passionately. “I don’t want to know what you think.”
“Non far niente! I shall tell you just the same,” declared Miss Stellenthorpe with unabated spirit. “Pour moi il n’y a que la vérité. The day will yet come when you will remember my frankness with gratitude and admiration. But even should that day not come, my Dickenson, it matters little. The time has come for me to speak, and I shall speak. I have sat here in silence,” said Aunt Go, not altogether truthfully, “and I have been filled with amazement that my niece should not, long ago, have said what I am saying now. Instead, with a supineness for which, candidly, I blame her, she has allowed herself to be overwhelmed. Overwhelmed, you ask me, by what? By a ceaseless torrent of meaningless, ill-chosen, unmelodious words, my Dickenson, strung together without rhyme or reason. You have but one topic — the supremely uninteresting one of yourself. You are reminded of yourself à tout bout de champ — worse, you insist upon reminding us of yourself. But we do not want to know about you. You are not interesting. A-t-on jamais vu un toupet pared! You tell us of your views, your habits, your trivial little experiences, as though they were of cosmic importance.
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 208