Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  “Well,” said Mr. Lloyd-Jump, “if you want the truth, I never have. That kind of thing doesn’t amuse me, and never has, and I must say, I should have thought you’d have known it. I won’t say that I’ve never noticed a neat pair of ankles, or a smartly turned-out woman — human nature is human nature, and I suppose I’m a man like another — but when a fellow that calls himself a gentleman has taken a vow to cleave to one woman only, I consider that to break that vow, even in a small degree, is a sin. I daresay I’m peculiar — I know a great many men who consider themselves good husbands, and yet think nothing of deceiving their wives, but all I can say is, that in my opinion they’re curs. Neither more, nor less Curs. And for God’s sake, Louise, stop this talk out of books. You and I are past the time of life for that sort of nonsense.”

  This was far and away the most eloquent speech that Mrs. Lloyd-Jump had had from her husband for years — and very nearly the longest.

  Theoretically, she agreed with it all, although she much disliked the concluding sentence.

  “I still feel quite young, very often. Especially since we’ve been here,” she murmured.

  Harold made no reply.

  “I don’t really look middle-aged, yet. Or do I?”

  “Don’t fish, my dear.”

  “You are my husband, after all,” said Louise rebelliously. “If you can’t tell me that I — that I’m still attractive — who can?”

  “No one, I should think. People don’t go about the world making personal remarks. I’m going in to get some matches. In fact, I’m not sure that I’m not going in altogether.”

  “Why?” nearly wailed Louise.

  “I think, perhaps, that this place is getting on my nerves a bit. It’s a very good thing for all of us that we’re off so soon.”

  Mr. Lloyd-Jump got up.

  Mrs. Lloyd-Jump got up, too, rather frenziedly, and stood exactly in the narrow entrance of the arbour. She miraculously contrived to produce the illusion of looking up at her husband, although she was in reality taller than he was.

  Her eyes pleaded, her mouth allured, her whole aspect mutely invited him to kiss her.

  But Mr. Lloyd-Jump had been her husband for years. He saw little of all this, and what he did see, annoyed him. “Out of the way, old girl,” he said kindly and firmly, and took her lightly by the elbows — neither deriving nor imparting any slightest thrill from the contact — and removed her from his path.

  Louise stood and watched him disappear into the dimly lit square of the house, and for a moment or two she did not stir. But there was in reality only one thing that could be done, and sooner or later she would have to do it.

  She went indoors herself.

  The next day was hotter than ever.

  Mrs. Lloyd-Jump, with semicircles under her eyes, and the glow on her face lessened, did not go for her walk until after five o’clock.

  She felt more dejected than ever in her life before, for never in her life had she had so much cause to doubt herself.

  What, she wondered, had come over her?

  It was bad enough to have to ask this question, but it was worse still to know how deeply she inwardly shrank from learning the all-too-probable answer.

  Unconsciously, Louise walked faster and faster. From a straight road she diverged into what would in England have been a lane — paying no slightest attention to her surroundings.

  When she came to what she vaguely felt was a small wood, composed mainly of ilex-trees, she sank upon the hot, hard earth, pulled off her hat, and hiding her face in her hands, began wholeheartedly to cry.

  It was a thing that she had not done for years, and there was actually a certain luxury about it.

  Suddenly she felt, rather than saw, a shadow between herself and the evening light.

  She looked up, mopping away her tears with her soaked pocket-handkerchief.

  A man — an Italian — stood looking at her with grave concern.

  Not a gentleman, was the first thing that Mrs. Lloyd-Jump told herself, but almost simultaneously she admitted that he was the best-looking man that she had ever seen. In fact, she likened him to Rudolph Valentino.

  His white shirt was open at the neck, his sleeves rolled up above the elbow, and his black hair was all pushed away from his sunburned forehead. He might have been twenty-five years old, or rather more. His good looks might be of an obvious, rather animal type, but he had the muscles of an athlete, and the dazzling smile of a child.

  She caught her breath as she looked at him. He said something to her in Italian, and she understood that he was asking her what was the matter. One of the few Italian words that she knew coinciding with the traditional answer to this inquiry, Mrs. Lloyd-Jump was able to reply with a short sob:

  “Niente.”

  “Maché!” said the Italian, and he sat down on the ground beside her and put his arm round her waist.

  He did it so naturally that it almost seemed natural to let him do it — and besides, it was extraordinarily comforting.

  The fact of having cried so much, after a nearly sleepless night, had made Mrs. Lloyd-Jump feel weak, and as if she were a child again, and this — she decided afterwards — must have helped to impair her moral control.

  For impaired it was — and badly.

  She never remembered, never even sought to remember the stages that led to her being kissed, at first gently, and then more and more passionately, by an Italian stranger who was not a gentleman — but they were few and short.

  Very few words passed between them.

  He murmured “Bella!” once or twice, and a few other ejaculations less intelligible to her, and she once said “Io sono” — and then stopped, unable to explain in a language of which she knew so little, that she was married, and really a lady.

  But she pointed to her wedding-ring, and he said, “Si, si,” and kissed her hand several times.

  The swift Italian twilight descended upon them, and it was with a frightful start that Louise, her head against the man’s hard, muscular shoulder, suddenly perceived that there were stars in the sky. She sprang to her feet.

  “Io — andare — casa — subito” she gasped.

  “Si,” said the Italian submissively.

  He stood up, too, and put his arm around her shoulders, and guided her gently out of the little ilex grove.

  Quite suddenly, passion seemed to have left them. They might have been two children, expressing an innocent affection by means of open and artless caresses.

  Leading her to the end of the lane, he showed her a bony, dejected-looking mule waiting between the shafts of a little covered waggon. She understood that the Italian was going to drive her home.

  “Dove?” said he simply.

  “Genazzano,” replied Mrs. Lloyd-Jump, and he helped her into the seat beside him, and gathered up the reins in one hand. His other arm was round her, and his free hand clasping hers.

  Louise, in a strange trance of something so utterly unfamiliar to all her forty-three years, that she hardly recognized it as happiness, leant against him.

  They drove in silence. Once or twice he kissed her hair, and she could just see the gleam of very white teeth under his dark moustache as he smiled at her.

  She smiled back at him each time — a smile of pure content. When the pale lights of the little square house at the foot of the village were quite close, she signed to him to stop the cart.

  “Domani?” said the Italian, but she did not understand.

  Standing on the step of the little waggon, leaning forward, for the last time she deliberately gave him her lips.

  Then she sprang down, and went swiftly up the cobbled road.

  “Well!” said Mr. Lloyd-Jump, standing at the opening of the vine arbour, and balancing himself backwards and forwards on the balls of his feet. “I suppose you lost your way?”

  “I got a lift home,” she said breathlessly. “A — a man in a mule cart.”

  “That was a bit of luck. But risky all the same. These Dagos!
I hope he was quite respectful?”

  Louise was hastening into the house and had her back to her husband.

  She replied, after a second’s pause:

  “Oh, quite respectable, I’m sure.”

  The following day, the Lloyd-Jumps went to Rome, and from thence they returned to England and home. As Mr. Lloyd-Jump had all along expected, this was by far the pleasantest part of the whole trip.

  Their friends came to see them, and were shown picture postcards — snapshots of Patricia on the steps of the Piazza di Spagna, of Mrs. Lloyd-Jump standing near the Fountains of Trevi, of the entire Lloyd-Jump family at Frascati, and heard accounts of Ronald’s typhoid fever and — from Mr. Lloyd-Jump — of the inadequate water supply at Genazzano.

  Everyone said that the picture postcards were wonderful but couldn’t give one the colour; that the snapshots were excellent and it must be a very good lens; that it was a mercy they’d been able to get hold of an English doctor for Ronald, and what was the good of Mussolini if he couldn’t do anything about the water supply?

  Everyone also said that Mrs. Lloyd-Jump, at any rate, looked as though the change had done her all the good in the world.

  She replied that it had.

  To her more intimate friends, she gave the full history of her anxiety about Ronald’s typhoid fever, and she admitted that the dulness and the absence of civilization at Genazzano had been rather inclined to get upon Harold’s nerves.

  It was natural, said her friends, and men were like that.

  “All’s well that ends well,” said Louise, in a bright, impersonal, ladylike way.

  For she had become thoroughly ladylike again, the moment she left Italy.

  Her manner to her husband once more returned to the normal. The only difference was, if anything, a greater wish to please him, and an even more active desire to make his home comfortable and agreeable. Mr. Lloyd-Jump, who, upon his own plane, was not unobservant, noticed this, and attributed it to a wish on Louise’s part to obliterate all recollection of the misguided inspiration that had sent them abroad.

  He felt that she would never suggest such a thing again — and she never did.

  For, after all, she was now in a position to say: “The year we were in Rome,” which was exactly what she had wanted.

  She never said, even to herself: “The year we were in Genazzano,” for she had no wish whatever to recall that brief but disastrous sojourn.

  Surrounded once more by cultivation, bridge parties, the District Railway, and her weekly visit to the hairdresser, Louise, with almost incredible speed, did succeed in forgetting Genazzano — for she was a resolute woman, besides being a lady.

  Only a faint tinge of remorse sometimes coloured her thoughts, when she was obliged, as time went on, to say, ever more frequently and more firmly, to her daughter Patricia, that it was possible to be as modern as anybody else, to enjoy oneself and to go about, and yet to behave like a lady.

  In due course Patricia married and went to another suburb, and Ronald got a job with a firm of electrical engineers, and was eventually sent to the North of England, and Mr and Mrs. Lloyd-Jump remained on in the suburban villa.

  The reduction of the lower back ceased to be a matter of anxiety to Louise, in time, and as her husband became bald, she tactfully allowed herself to become grey. Even her anxiety to prove that, in spite of the suburban villa and certain inherent deficiencies in Mr. Lloyd-Jump, she could never be anything but wholly and perfectly ladylike, was gradually merged in the restful conviction that such was indeed the fact, accepted and recognized by all.

  On the last day of her life, when the nurse who was attending her decorous sick-bed firmly declared that the patient was to all intents and purposes unconscious, Louise Lloyd-Jump spoke her last word, which happened to be perfectly unintelligible to any of those present.

  “Domani,” she said, and smiled.

  THE SPRAT

  Miss DUQUENOIS had been rich for such a very little while that she had not yet forgotten what it felt like to be poor. In any case, she was not a person who forgot easily. She was sympathetic, without being imaginative, and impressionable rather than intelligent.

  Her money came to her, as a very great surprise, when she was forty-three years old. She realized, only too well, that forty-three is not a romantic age, but she was constitutionally incapable of realizing that it is, also, the age at which almost all women are apt to feel romantic.

  The godfather of Miss Duquenois left her a house in Wilton Crescent, filled with charming furniture, a collection of stamps, and an income of twelve thousand pounds a year.

  She had no one with whom to share these things. Her parents had long been dead, she had no brother or sister, and had for years been teaching music to the children — for the most part ungifted — of people in a much better social position than her own. Her closest personal contact in the course of those years had, actually, been achieved with the manageress of the private hotel in Bloomsbury where she lived. Her other friendships were pathetic, resuscitated affairs, that had originated in her schooldays.

  It took Miss Duquenois a little while to realize the extraordinary change in her fortunes — indeed, it almost seemed to her as if her acquaintances realized it more quickly than she did herself.

  “At last,” said her friend the manageress solemnly, “at last, Juliet, you will be able to attend all the best concerts in London whenever you want to.”

  Miss Duquenois was very fond of music, and had often lamented her inability to attend recitals that would have deeply interested her. Even cheap seats were usually beyond her means, and, in any case, she was not a strong woman. The daily fatigue of teaching, and of going to and from the houses of her pupils — almost always situated at an aristocratic distance from tube or bus route — was apt to leave her wearied out. She was an inelastic woman, heavy on her feet, and cheap shoes and ill-fitting corsets served her worse than she knew.

  Nothing, in reality, so brought home to her the fact that she was rich, as the bliss and glory of innumerable taxis, and — as she became bolder — the hire of a Daimler car. But, of course, she went to the concerts too. She would not have liked to feel that material comforts counted with her to anything like the same degree as did opportunities for increased culture.

  Sometimes her friend, Miss Kate Beamish, went with her, but Kate was not really musical, and, moreover, she was almost always busy. Juliet usually went alone.

  This rather saddened her.

  One day, a man sitting next to her in a fauteuil at the Queen’s Hall spoke to her. He asked her opinion, in regard to the conducting of a passage, in a manner that took for granted her musical understanding.

  Miss Duquenois, startled and flattered, replied.

  They continued to talk.

  “He looks like a gentleman,” Juliet Duquenois told herself, for she had never before entered into conversation with a stranger, and needed reassurance. The stranger was a fair, pale-faced man, with an agreeable smile, a curiously square head, and very alert, grey-green eyes, set rather close together.

  Miss Duquenois, who prided herself upon being a shrewd judge of character, particularly noticed that he looked her quite straight in the face whenever her spoke — and this, she felt, was a good sign.

  She thought that he might be about thirty-five years old.

  It was evident to her that he knew a great deal about music, and she hoped, and indeed felt, that he realized himself to be talking to one who was herself not ignorant. But when it became clear that he knew, personally, almost all the great virtuosi of the day, Miss Duquenois felt intimidated. Perhaps she was talking to one who was himself a well-known musician. She glanced covertly at his hands, feeling sure that she would be able to deduce from them his ability as a performer. Artistic hands — one had so often come across the phrase. But the hands of the stranger, folded over his programme, were singularly unrevealing. They were of medium size, clean, but not manicured — and with rather thick fingers.

&nb
sp; Could that hand span an octave? Miss Duquenois asked herself, trying to feel like an expert. Undoubtedly. But then so, after all, could most hands.

  She felt, somehow, that he was not a singer.

  Perhaps, however, she was wrong?

  He was talking about singers now, and amongst them, also, he seemed to be at home.

  At last she said timidly:

  “Are you — do you — do much yourself?”

  She felt that this was not gracefully, nor even very intelligibly, worded, and it was a relief to her that he appeared to understand her meaning without difficulty.

  “No — no. I’m very much in the musical world, but perhaps I am hardly entitled to say that I am of it. Actually, I’m musical agent to a great many of these people.”

  “Oh,” said Miss Duquenois uncertainly.

  She scarcely knew what a musical agent was, and could not imagine what his work could be.

  “May I?” said the stranger. And he took out a card and handed it to her.

  Engraved upon it — not printed — was a name.

  Mr. Arthur Lawrence.

  “Oh,” repeated Miss Duquenois, but with more of satisfaction, and less of uncertainty, in her tone this time.

  The card, somehow, by being engraved, had greatly reassured her. And “Arthur Lawrence” was a most straightforward and respectable name, thoroughly English. Miss Duquenois had a peculiar feeling, not quite amounting to actual distrust, about people whose names were foreign. Even a middle initial had a Transatlantic suggestion about it that slightly troubled her.

  All through the last item of the programme, Juliet Duquenois thought about the man at her side. It was the very first time she had ever made an acquaintance in such a manner. In her girlhood she had been taught that all men not definitely husbands and fathers were potentially dangerous to all young women, and in the course of her working years the singular construction of British social life in the middle classes had thrown her exclusively into the society of other women, most of them unmarried.