Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  “What are you staring at, Zella?”

  Zella started slightly.

  “Was I staring?” A rapid movement of the head backwards and a hasty blink or two indicated a rudely severed reverie. “I suppose I was just thinking.”

  “What about?” asked Kathleen, as punctually as could be wished.

  “As a matter of fact,” laughed Zella, with the merest hint of embarrassment—” as a matter of fact, I was thinking about you.”

  The next step was of course inevitable.

  “What about me?” Kathleen inquired with much interest.

  And Zella, delighted, implied that her natural shyness did not allow her to answer the question in detail, even while her charmingly expressive glance and smile assured Kathleen that she could, if she wished, have furnished a flattering explanation of her absorption.

  Subtlety was not needed, and would, in fact, have been lost upon the Irish girl, and Zella was sufficiently aware of it to indulge in broad effects only.

  The eagerness with which she watched for some sign that the attraction was mutual was the first thing that added interest to her life as a convent school girl.

  When Kathleen, one evening at recreation, thrust her arm through Zella’s, and said, “You’re looking tired to-night, aren’t you?” Zella’s heart beat violently with disproportionate triumph and excitement.

  Her happiness was not even dashed when Mother Veronica instantly pounced upon them, and said:

  “Kathleen and Zella, please find a third at once, and you know very well that linked arms are not allowed.”

  That night Zella prayed ardently:

  “Do let me have Kathleen for a friend!... Oh, do let it be all right, and let her get fond of me; I will be so good if only I may have Kathleen for a friend! Oh, do let it be all right,” she impatiently apostrophized the Almighty.

  She wondered if it would be of any use to follow Dorothy Brady’s example, and press the inhabitants of Purgatory, hypothetical or not, into the service. She decided that it was worth trying, since it couldn’t do any harm and might do good. Besides, God might be rather touched at this slightly pathetic evidence of faith from one who did not really belong to the Church.

  (Zella, quite unconsciously, had already come to look upon the Catholic Church as The Church.)

  “If you’ll make Kathleen really get fond of me, and be my friend,” she hurriedly instructed the souls of the departed, “I’ll say — I’ll say a whole rosary for you every day for a month. In fact,” she added with an outburst of generosity, “I shall begin it now, at once,” and felt that, if that didn’t move the Powers that be, nothing could be expected to do so. There was also a slight sense of daring to enliven the proposal, for Zella had never said the rosary before.

  The next day, by a characteristic inspiration, she said rather timidly to Kathleen Mallet:

  “Would you mind lending me your rosary? I haven’t got one, you know; but I’ve promised to say one every day for the souls in Purgatory until I get a — a very special intention that I want.”

  The phraseology of the convent by this time came to her glibly.

  “Of course, I shouldn’t ask any of the other girls, but I thought perhaps you would let me have yours....” She hesitated.

  “Of course I would,” said Kathleen heartily; “but as a matter of fact, you know, one can’t lend a rosary.”

  “Why not?” asked Zella, bewildered, wondering if she should ever come to the end of these incomprehensible Catholic conventions.

  “Is it against the rules?”

  “No, of course not. But, you see, if someone else used my rosary I should lose the indulgence,” said Kathleen mysteriously.

  “But why?”

  “Oh, because the indulgence is only for the person who uses that particular rosary. If you used it, the indulgence would belong to you, and not to me. That’s why they are blessed, you know.” Zella was confounded.

  “I never heard that before. It seems so — so selfish, in a way.”

  “Oh, it isn’t a bit, really, you know,” Kathleen assured her with the vague, unreasoned confidence that Zella was beginning to think characterized these daughters of the Faith.

  “But of course you must have a rosary. It’s frightfully nice that you should want to say it.”

  I’ll tell you what the intention is some day,” said Zella shyly—” that is, if I get it.”

  “Oh, you’re sure to get it. The Holy Souls are perfectly ripping. Look here, don’t do anything about the rosary yet, and I’ll see about it somehow before Benediction this evening.”

  Zella felt rather excited.

  That evening Kathleen rushed up to her, slightly out of breath, and thrust a string of blue beads into her hand.

  “I got leave to give you one,” she explained rather confusedly, “and it’s been blessed and everything.”

  Zella’s thanks were out of all proportion to the gift bestowed, but so also was her joy at this unexpected token of affection.

  She went into the chapel with a sense of brilliant, exhilarating happiness that was perhaps destined to compensate for the inevitable disillusionment that ended her first friendship.

  It added to the bitterness of Zella’s misery, which was as intense as were all her emotions, that she brought calamity upon herself, and destroyed with her own hand the slender fabric of her friendship with Kathleen, soon after it had become a recognized fact.

  It was Zella’s birthday, and she took her place in the refectory for breakfast rather nervously. It would, she considered, appear rather young and amateurish to have a quantity of birthday presents from home, and the other girls would most probably look upon her with contemptuous eyes as a “spoilt child.”

  She saw with relief that only one parcel awaited her. No striking disgrace, surely, could be attached to the reception of one solitary parcel, even though flanked by a small pile of letters. The parcel, of course, was from Aunt Marianne, by whom the ritual of birthdays was always held sacred and inviolable. There was a letter from her, full of birthday wishes tinged by a sort of hopeful melancholy, a dutiful expression of “Many happy returns of the day” from Muriel, and three pages of gracefully expressed auguries and congratulations from Tante Stephanie. The Baronne, good-humouredly contemptuous of modern customs and implacably Catholic, declined to consider any birthday as worthy of note, and reserved her annual felicitations for the feast day dedicated to St. Gisele.

  Last of all, Zella opened a letter from her father. As she unfolded it, a postal order for a pound fluttered on to the table before her. It was a Sunday, and talking was therefore allowed at meal-times.

  “I say, Zella, is it your birthday?” asked Dorothy Brady, round-eyed.

  “Yes. That’s my birthday present from my father,” said Zella hastily, in obedience to her frequent and quite unreasoning sense that an explanation was required of her.

  “A pound! You are lucky.”

  “I wish my father sent me a pound on my birthday,” said someone else.

  “So do I. You are in luck, Zella,” light-heartedly remarked Kathleen, without a trace of consciousness in her manner.

  But Zella suddenly remembered, with a sharp pang, Mary McNeill’s description of the Mallets’ poverty. “Sometimes not enough in the house to eat... Kathleen minds never having a single penny.”

  Without an instant’s reflection, acting on one of the sudden, violent impulses that occasionally overtake the most perceptive people, Zella pushed her pound across the narrow table.

  “Kathleen, do take it. I should love to give it to you.”

  The next moment she was overwhelmed by a sense of appalling disaster.

  She saw that she had made an irretrievable mistake.

  Kathleen Mallet flushed scarlet, and then turned white with anger. They looked at each other for the space of perhaps one instant in dead silence. A sort of frozen speechlessness seemed to have fallen upon the girls round them.

  Then Kathleen, with a furious gesture, pushed
back the flimsy bit of paper.

  “I don’t want your money. You must be mad, I think.”

  Her voice, choked with one of the most elementary of the emotions, sheer anger, was almost unrecognizable. There was an appalling silence, and Zella, feeling physically sick, saw in one lightning flash that she had lost her friend, and had made a mistake that would never be forgotten or forgiven by those who had witnessed it.

  By a curious effect of breeding, it was Zella who, with her cosmos in fragments round her, found voice to break the spell of horror by speaking some commonplace aloud.

  The girls followed her lead thankfully. Only Kathleen, still white, and shaking a little, remained perfectly silent.

  Zella attempted no explanation with her. She knew instinctively that it would be of no use. Kathleen would never understand, and her friendship was gone for ever. Zella herself could not understand, afterwards, what madness had prompted her to an act that surely every reasonable being with a spark of pride must consider nothing less than insulting. She wept tears of shame and agonized regret over the error, and knew that the other girls never altogether forgot it. Only in curious fugitive flashes, of which she would have strenuously denied the existence even to herself, did it occur to Zella that her impulse had been one of the most genuine ones of her life, and that, weighed by standards other than conventional ones, there may be that which is worth more than even honest pride.

  XVI

  The Convent, MON BIEN-CHER. PAPA, This is the last letter I shall be able to write until next week, as the whole school is going into Retreat this evening. I asked Reverend Mother myself to let me make it too, as all the other girls are making it; and last year I hated being the only one who did not make it, and they all said I had missed a great deal. Reverend Mother asked if you would mind my making the Retreat, but I said I was sure you wouldn’t. I think it will be very interesting. It is being given by a priest called Father Harding, and Reverend Mother told me he was the greatest thinker of modern times and very well known, so I expect you will have heard of him already. I hope I shall be at Villetswood for my birthday, as the holidays generally begin on July 18 or 19, so that will make up for my not being able to come away for Easter. We only have a week, and most of the girls stay at the convent, so I shan’t be alone; and of course I understand about your having to go to Brittany on business for Grand’mere.

  I will write again as soon as we are out of Retreat. Of course I shall pray for all your special intentions.

  Always your own loving Zella.

  Villetswood,

  My Darling Zella, April 13

  Thank you for your beautifully written letter. I am very glad you should make a Retreat with the other girls, if you think you would like it. Write and tell me your impressions when it is over, and do not forget that there is more than one side to every question. I have not hitherto heard of Father Harding, but, then, I have not been very much in the way of great thinkers for the last few years, as you know.

  Do not overdo things, mignonne, and write as soon as you can.

  Your loving father, I shall be here till the end of this month.

  The Convent, Darling Papa, April 26

  It is a long while since I last wrote, but I wanted to think very seriously before writing to you, and to be quite sure that I knew my own mind. I do hope you will remember that I am now practically seventeen, and old enough to judge calmly and reasonably for myself, though, of course, I would never do anything that you seriously disapproved of, unless I was quite sure that God Himself wanted it of me.

  Should you mind my becoming a Catholic? I know Aunt Marianne will think that the nuns have persuaded me, and worked on my feelings, etc.; but it is not that at all. I am thoroughly intellectually convinced, as well as by faith. It is rather difficult to explain, but I really am happier than I have ever been before, and it will be perfect if you will only allow me to be received into the Church. Of course I don’t want to do anything in a hurry, and Reverend Mother herself is always telling me that nothing can be settled yet, and I must wait and pray, and make quite sure of myself; but it is now some months since I first began to think very seriously about becoming a Catholic, and I really made the Retreat on purpose to have a quiet time for making up my mind as to what I ought to do.

  I am now quite sure that I ought to be a Catholic, and that it is the only true religion, and that the Catholic Church is the one true Church in the world. I talked to Father Harding several times during the Retreat, and asked him about one or two things that I didn’t quite understand; and he has made it all absolutely clear, and given me several books to read. So please do not think that this is nothing but a passing enthusiasm, for I am really in earnest and have thought out the whole question thoroughly.

  Of course I do not like not belonging to the same church as you do, darling papa, but Reverend Mother says that it is one of the sacrifices I must be prepared to make in return for having been given such a gift as faith. And I feel sure that you won’t mind anything that makes me so much, much happier, as I feel it will if I become a Catholic.

  Reverend Mother thinks that I might be received about the beginning of June, if you will give your consent. Please don’t think that I am being persuaded to disobey you or disregard your wishes, for Reverend Mother is always telling me that I can do nothing without your permission, and says that she can well understand that at first you may not like the idea at all; and she would quite understand if you even forbade it for the present, which I think is really extraordinarily broad-minded and generous, don’t you?

  This is a very long letter, I know, and yet I feel I haven’t properly said all that I wanted to say. But I do hope that you will understand, and especially that I really and truly want to be a Catholic more than I have ever wanted anything in the world, and I am quite sure that God wants it too.

  Reverend Mother is very kind to me, and often has me for a special talk all by myself, which helps me a great deal. I do so long to get your answer to this letter very quickly, and I hope that it will be a consent to my being received into the Church in June.

  Very, very much love, and please don’t let this letter make you unhappy. I shall always be just the same, Your own loving little Zella.

  VlLLETSWOOD, April 26.

  Dearest Little One, Your letter is one which requires much thought, but I cannot leave it unanswered even for a day, so write now to thank you for your confidence, and to assure you that I will refuse my consent to nothing which could in any way further your happiness. I am glad that you wrote to me so fully, and can quite understand that you should wish to join the Catholic Church in June, if you are so much convinced that it is the religion which would be of most help to you. But I entirely agree with your Reverend Mother in counselling prudence and patience. This is not merely the natural tendency of age to damp the ardour of youth, Zella dear, although you perhaps feel as if it were a mere habit to say “wait — wait — wait” to everything. But there is more to it than that, my dear.

  The question of religion, to my mind, should be an individual one always; and, as you know, you have not been brought up to any orthodox form of belief, for that very reason. It may very well be that you feel the need of a definite philosophy to help you on the way; and if the doctrines of the Catholic Church carry conviction to your mind, then I believe you could not do better than to become a Catholic. But it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between conviction and the extraordinarily strong influence diffused by an atmosphere. You have been for some time now in an atmosphere impregnated with Catholicism, and it may be that, once away from the convent world, you would view its ideals from a different point of view.

  I do not wish to make the decision for you, my dear, since the question is one which concerns you so directly. But I should wish — and advise — that you leave the convent altogether before taking the definite step of becoming a Catholic.

  If your conviction is a serious one, it will stand the test of a few months’ waiting; and then, if
later on you still wish it, you can be received as a member of the Catholic Church in Paris. It will be a great joy to Grand’mere and Tante Stephanie.

  I hope to come and see you before I leave England; write and tell me what day you would like me to come. We will then talk at length of your wishes and plans. Meanwhile, however, write to me often, and remember that you are always free to make your own decision, and my only wish is that it may be the best one for you, my little Zella.

  Your devoted Father.

  The Convent, Darling Papa, April 29’

  Thank you for your letter, but please, please do not take me away from the convent. I will not do anything in a hurry, but I do not at all want to go away from the convent now, and Reverend Mother was really and truly dismayed at the idea. She thinks — and I must say I quite agree with her — that it would be deliberately risking the loss of my faith if I went away now, just as I have really begun to appreciate the privileges we have at the convent. Besides, I can have instructions here regularly, besides the great advantage of the chapel always here.

  I am quite, quite sure that it isn’t only the influence of convent atmosphere, as you say in your letter, but real, absolute conviction; and Reverend Mother and Father Harding, who have had such quantities of experience in dealing with souls, both say that I am a case of true, sincere conversion. It would make me very unhappy to leave the consent, and I feel sure it wouldn’t be right, either, unless you really ordered me to. I hope that when you come down Reverend Mother will see you. She wants to talk it all over with you very much, and I am sure that after you have been here you won’t really want to take me away. Do come as soon as you can.

  Of course I haven’t told anybody that I want to be a Catholic, except Reverend Mother, who guessed it herself. But she thinks that these things had much better not be talked about until they are really settled, and so, of course, I have said nothing. But I can’t help hoping that after I have seen you it will be really settled, and that you won’t want me to come away from the convent. And I do want to be received in June.