Collected Works of E M Delafield
Page 5
“But, James, there are degrees. The blackness of a lie does depend on what it is about,” said Zella confusedly.
“I call self-deception worse than telling lies — a great deal.”
Mrs. Lloyd-Evans entered the room, and the conversation between the boy and girl ceased abruptly. But there was more animation and interest in Zella’s little colourless face than there had been since her arrival at Boscombe.
She found life there very dull, and the atmosphere, in spite of Aunt Marianne’s kindness and Muriel’s companionship, strangely uncongenial. She was often oppressed with a sense of her own ingratitude and discontent.
But, after that odd little conversation with James, Zella felt as though she had found something which she had subconsciously been missing. She would have liked to resume the same sort of discussion again, and appealed to her cousin at luncheon one day with the quick look of interest that was the expression most natural to her pretty face.
“James, you know what we said about self-deception the other day. Isn’t it a form of cowardice?”
James looked annoyed, “glanced at his mother, and said in the most expressionless of voices, “Oh, I don’t know.” And Mrs. Lloyd-Evans remarked gently: “Deceit is always wrong, dear, but no one should be afraid to tell the truth. Don’t you remember the piece of poetry Aunt Marianne is so fond of? —
“‘Dare to be true, nothing can need a lie; The fault that needs it most grows two thereby.’”
“Have some more salad, Zella?” said her Uncle Henry, looking slightly uncomfortable.
The lesson sank into Zella’s receptive mind, and she never repeated her mistake.
That same afternoon Mrs. Lloyd-Evans, finding Zella alone in the schoolroom, said to her:
“Come down and help me with the drawing-room flowers, dear. It’s Muriel’s little job as a rule, but she has had to go for her violin lesson now, as that tiresome man altered his time. It was really rather artful of him, for he took care to let us know at the last minute possible, knowing very well that I shouldn’t like it. It’s much too late and too dark for Muriel to be out, and I’ve had to send James with her.”
Zella, reluctantly closing her book, rather unwillingly followed her aunt to the drawing-room. She had already learnt that it was of no use to decline any proffered kindness, however unwelcome, of Aunt Marianne’s. They carried the silver vases from the drawing-room to the pantry, filled them with water, and bore them solemnly on a little tray to the hall table, where lay a selection of late autumn flowers.
“Put all those red sweet-peas together, dear, in that bowl. No, not any pink ones. I don’t like two colours together unless they match. It is not artistic.”
Zella thought she knew better, but lacked the courage to say so. As a compromise, she thrust one or two white sprays among the red. Mrs. Lloyd-Evans gently removed them.
“I keep all the white ones apart,” she said in a voice that hinted at solemnity. “Put them in these two little silver vases, dear, and bring them into the drawing-groom.”
Zella, feeling inexplicably depressed, obeyed.
“You see,” explained her aunt, “I only put white flowers on this little velvet table in the corner — my little shrine.”
The little shrine was loaded with silver-framed photographs of those friends and relations of Mrs. Lloyd-Evans who had departed this life.
She placed her white sweet-peas before the central photograph, an enlarged one of Archie, the baby son who had died.
“I call this my In Memorial table,” said Mrs. Lloyd-Evans in hushed accents.
“In Memoriam?”
“In Memorial, dear,” corrected Mrs. Lloyd-Evans firmly. “When you are a little older, you will know what that means. A very beautiful poem has been written about it.”
Zella was outraged at having it supposed that she did not know her Tennyson.
“I have read ‘In Memoriam,’” she said coldly, “and all Tennyson’s poems.”
“I don’t suppose you’ve read them all, dear. He wrote a great many, and even Aunt Marianne has never had time to read all through the book,” said Mrs. Lloyd-Evans, unperturbed. “Put those white roses there, Zella, in front of poor grandpapa.”
Mrs. Lloyd-Evans patted the sweet-peas delicately once or twice with her thumb and finger.
“I always think it’s the last little touch that makes all the difference in arranging flowers,” she observed.
The last little touch did not seem to Zella to have made much appreciable difference to the sweet-peas, but they looked very nice against the massive silver of Archie’s frame.
“Is that little cousin Archie?” she asked in reverent tones, knowing perfectly well that it was, but feeling instinctively that decorum forbade taking even the most obvious facts for granted when dealing with an In Memorial table.
“Yes, darling. You know poor dear little Cousin Archie was only five when he was taken away from us. Aunt Marianne can hardly bear to speak of it. Ah, Zella, life is very sad! but only a mother who has lost her child can really know what suffering means.”
Zella felt rather resentful.
“Not that Aunt Marianne has not had many, many other sorrows too,” said Mrs. Lloyd-Evans, with some determination. “And that reminds me of something I wanted to do, and that you can help me over. Fetch the photograph of your dear, dear mother from the back drawing-room writing-table, Zella dear, and bring it here.”
Zella fetched it, the tears rising to her eyes as she looked at the pretty, laughing pictured face.
She also rose to the eyes of Mrs. Lloyd-Evans as she gazed upon the photograph.
“It must go here,” she said finally, clearing a space between poor grandpapa and little Archie. “But not in this red leather frame. Let me see....”
She gazed reflectively round the room.
“Let me have that photograph of Muriel as a baby. The frame is silver, and looks as though it would fit.”
The photographs changed frames, and the one of Muriel, now surrounded by red leather, was sent to the back drawing-room writing-table; while Esmee de Kervoyou, silver-framed, took a place on the now crowded In Memorial table.
By this time the tears were streaming down Zella’s face. Aunt Marianne said “My poor child” two or three times, kissed her very kindly, and sent her upstairs to He down and rest for a little before the others came in.
That evening, in her room, Zella, in floods of tears, withdrew her own copy of her mother’s photograph from the flat leather travelling frame in which she had kept it ever since she could remember, and placed it in the middle of the mantelpiece, from whence she had carefully removed the clock and a few small china ornaments.
Then she took the little vase of flowers with which her dressing-table was kept supplied, and placed it in front of the photograph. There was a certain mournful pleasure in the aspect of the shrine when completed, and Zella’s tears only broke out again next day upon discovering that an officious housemaid had replaced the clock and china ornaments upon her mantelpiece, and restored the vase of flowers to its original position on the dressing-table.
V
I Hate Sundays,” growled James.
Muriel looked sincerely shocked, but was too much in awe of her brother to make any remonstrance.
Zella, conscious that the stronger part of her audience was with her, remarked airily: “Sunday is the most amusing day of the week in Paris.”
She felt superior and cosmopolitan as she spoke.
“You won’t find it that here,” said James grimly, as they entered the dining-room for breakfast.
On the two preceding Sundays, Zella had not been taken to church with her cousins, because it was feared that it might “upset” her, and the day had been unmarked save by the absence of the Lloyd-Evans family during a couple of hours, which had enabled her to read a story-book alone in the schoolroom. Consequently Zella, who scarcely ever went to church at Villetswood, felt no desire whatever to fulfil her duties as a member of the Church of England.
“Good-morning, Zella dear. This will be a nice fine Sunday for you to come to church, won’t it?”
This subtle implication that the weather alone had been responsible for Zella’s absence from church hitherto gave a lighter aspect to the case, and almost seemed, in some oblique manner, to glide over and ignore the existence of any possible cause for being “upset.”
“Yes, Aunt Marianne,” Zella answered readily.
“I hope that Crawford won’t be so long-winded to-day,” said Mr. Lloyd-Evans. “He was nearly twenty minutes in the pulpit last Sunday, saying the same thing over and over again, as far as I could make out.”
Mrs. Lloyd-Evans, by glancing swiftly from her husband’s face to James on one side of the table, and Muriel on the other, conveyed to Henry that he was not being quite careful in what he said before the children.
“Of course,” he added hurriedly, “a sermon’s a very good thing, and it’s extraordinary where the poor chap does get all his ideas, considering all the sermons he must have to write in a year.”
James looked contemptuous.
“Don’t make faces, Jimmy,” said his mother, shaking her head at him. Mrs. Lloyd-Evans was the only person who ever called James Jimmy, and Zella felt certain that he resented the diminutive.
He now coloured angrily all over his dark face, and Mrs. Lloyd-Evans, carefully looking away from him, gently changed the conversation by asking for the marmalade.
“I like sermons,” volunteered Muriel, who also wanted to distract attention from her brother’s obvious ill-temper.
“If they are good,” Zella conceded, with the air of a critic.
She had only once or twice heard an English sermon at Villetswood, but her father had once taken her to hear a famous Dominican preacher in Paris.
“The best sermon I ever heard,” she added in a very grown-up voice, “was in Paris. Père La Vedee, you know.”
“But he is a monk, isn’t he?” said Muriel, round-eyed.
“That is one of the R.C. fellows, surely?” said Mr. Lloyd-Evans. Zella felt rather pleased at the small sensation she was creating, and replied airily:
“Oh yes. When we did go to church in Paris, it was always to a Catholic one. My aunt and grandmother are very devotes; in fact, Tante Stephanie goes to church every single day.”
“I thought French people had no religion,” exclaimed Muriel innocently.
“Idiot,” muttered James under his breath.
“French people have their religion just as we have ours, darling,” Mrs. Lloyd-Evans said. “There are, unfortunately, a great number of Roman Catholics on the Continent, and one must be broad-minded and believe that they are sincere in worshipping their Pope, as they practically do. No doubt a great many of them really do not know any better.”
“But they don’t, Aunt Marianne,” cried Zella—” I mean, worship the Pope. Catholics are really much more pious than Protestants — at least, all the French ones that I’ve known.”
“Roman Catholics, Zella,” said her aunt in the low voice of extreme forbearance. “It is because of the Pope of Rome that we, in the Catholic Church, are obliged to call them Roman Catholics. But that is quite enough. French people are known to be most irreligious, though I have no doubt you may find a well-meaning one here and there. But the Continental Sunday is well known, all over England, to be a disgrace.”
“But Aunt Marianne, in Paris”
“That will do, dear. You are not likely to be allowed to go to Paris again, still less into a Roman Catholic place of worship.”
The tone, and still more its dreadful suggestion of a new regime, never to be relaxed again, brought Zella’s ever ready tears to the surface, and she gulped them down in silence with her coffee.
Her only consolation was a sub-audible aside from James, who sat next her.
“If French people worship the Pope, English people worship the Church of England,” he muttered cryptically.
But James was not destined to be epigrammatic unobserved, and his mother’s low tones, with their peculiar quality of gentle relentlessness, were once more addressed to him:
“Jimmy, do not show off and try and say smart things. It sounds irreverent, dear, though I dare say you spoke without quite knowing the meaning of your own words. Now, if you have all finished, you can go, and mind you are ready at twenty minutes to eleven punctually.”
She rose as she spoke, and as her son, looking sulky and lowering, held open the door, she paused, and, laying her hand upon his shoulder, said, in tones just audible to Zella:
“Your last Sunday at home, Jimmy!”
The boy looked sulkier than before, and Mrs. Lloyd-Evans, with one long reproachful look, left the room.
James muttered, “Thank goodness it is my last Sunday at home!” as he crossed the hall with Zella and Muriel.
“Oh, James!” cried his sister piteously.
“I didn’t mean that exactly — only I’m sick of being called Jimmy, and having my better feeling appealed to, and all the rest of it.”
“I don’t know why you should mind being called Jimmy,” said Muriel resentfully, seizing on the only part of his speech which she had understood. “Not that anyone but mother ever does.”
“I should hope not. You know better than to try it on, I should think!”
“Well, after all, I always used to. It’s only lately you’ve made all this fuss,” said Muriel, suddenly plaintive. “Jimmy is the dear old nursery name that we always”
“Good heavens!” cried her brother. “Is that an argument, my good ass? For the matter of that, there’s the dear old nursery high chair that I used to sit in, but I suppose you don’t want me to use it now because I did then?”
Zella laughed, entirely on the side of James, who always got the best of an argument.
Muriel’s only retort was, “That is quite different,” uttered in a sentimental voice verging on tearfulness.
“It’s exactly the same principle,” said James instructively, seating himself on the edge of the schoolroom table. “Because a thing was all right once, it doesn’t mean it ought to go on for ever and ever. Things change, and it’s all humbug and sentimentality to pretend one must go on in the dear old way long after it’s become perfectly idiotic and unsuitable.”
Zella had never heard her cousin so eloquent, and she felt a keen desire to show him, by some profound comment or sudden brilliant contribution of her own, that he had an audience fully capable of appreciating the depths of his remarks.
But James went on in a dictatorial manner that gave her no opportunity for uttering a word, even if she could have thought of anything sufficiently striking to say:
“The value of things alters, and what may mean something one year ceases to mean the same thing next year, or ten years hence. It’s simply a form of rank insincerity to go on using old catchwords long after they’ve lost any appropriateness they may once have had.”
Zella suddenly thought of an effective aphorism:
“Intellectual insincerity “she began.
“It’s just the same,” pursued James, unheeding, “as that ghastly habit mother has of Sunday evening talks, when we have to be solemn and holy and jaw about our own insides.”
“James!” shrieked Muriel, acutely distressed,” how can you say such hateful things and be so disloyal to mother?”
“It’s not disloyal, as you call it,” cried the boy contemptuously. “It’s simple common-sense. Why, because it happens to be Sunday, should we have to go and sit in one particular corner of the drawing-room, and try and trump up something suitable to say, when we’d much rather not talk about our beastly feelings at all? It’s sheer rank humbug.”
“Intellectual insincerity”
“Nobody ought to want to talk about their own inside feelings after they’re old enough to have any; and if they do, the sooner they learn to come off it, the better
.”
Zella suddenly felt that she understood why James had always been called a prig. Who was he, to speak with such an assumption of infallibility of what people ought or ought not to talk about? She felt, without formulating the idea into words, that she did like to talk about her own feelings, and immediately said aloud, “Of course, everybody hates talking about themselves, and I can’t see why anyone should ever have to,” because she was afraid lest James might think that his sweeping assertion applied to her.
“I’m rather under the impression that people don’t hate talking about themselves at all,” said James aggressively; “but they jolly well oughtn’t to be allowed to, instead of being encouraged.”
Zella thought that James wanted to be asked why, and immediately felt that wild-horses should not drag the question from her, but Muriel at once said: “But why, James?”
“Because it’s an opportunity for posing and being sentimental, and every sort of insincere rot of that kind. People can’t speak the truth about themselves.”
“We don’t all tell lies, thank you!” said Muriel, scandalized.
“You haven’t understood a word I’ve said,” her brother told her scathingly, as he got off the table.
“It all sounds horrid and wrong, and I don’t want to, and neither does Zella.”
“I understood absolutely,” said Zella curtly.
“Oh, I knew that,” remarked James unexpectedly.
Zella went to get ready for church with a curious mixture of gratification at James’s remark, which appeared to point at appreciation of her understanding, and, on the other hand, a lurking dread lest it might merely have implied that he considered her a personally qualified judge of insincerity.
“James is always talking like that now,” Muriel confided sadly to her cousin as they went downstairs together.
“Mother thinks he simply does it because he thinks it sounds clever, but she doesn’t know half the things he says. James and mother don’t get on, you know, Zella; though she says that when he is a little older he will understand what a mother’s love really means — and of course he will. But it is a great pity, and does spoil things so.”