“Now come on, Barbara,” Alex commanded her; “I’ll hold you.”
Between hoisting and pulling and Barbara’s own dread of disobeying her, Alex got her sister into a kneeling position on the broad flat top of the newel post.
“Now stand up, and then I’ll hold out the rope. You’ll be the famous tight-rope dancer crossing the Falls of Niagara.”
“Alex, I’m frightened.”
“What of, silly? If you did fall it’s only a little way on to the stairs, and I’ll catch you. Besides, you’ll feel much safer when you’re standing up.”
Barbara, facing the stairs, and with her back to the alarming void between her perch and the hall-floor, rose trembling to her feet.
“You look splendid,” said Alex. “Now then!” She jerked at the rope, and at the same instant Barbara screamed and tried to clutch at her.
Alex caught hold of her sister’s ankles, felt Barbara’s weight slip suddenly, and screamed aloud as a shriek and crash that seemed simultaneous proclaimed Barbara’s fall backwards into the hall.
Cedric and Barbara in a confused struggling heap on the floor — doors opening upstairs and in the basement — the flying feet of the servants — all was an agonized nightmare to Alex until Barbara, limp and inert on Nurse’s lap, suddenly began to scream and cry, calling out, “My back! my back!”
They hushed her at last, and Nurse carried her into the boudoir, which was the nearest room, and laid her down on the broad sofa. Then Alex became aware of a monotonous sound that had struck on her ear without penetrating to her senses ever since the accident happened.
“My spectacles are broken. You’ve broken my spectacles,” reiterated a lamentable voice.
“You horrid, heartless little boy, Cedric! When poor Barbara—” Sobs choked her.
“I like that!” said Cedric. “When it was all you that made her fall at all — and break my spectacles.”
“What’s that?” said Nurse, miraculously reappearing. “All you, was it? I might have known it, you mischievous wicked child. Tell me what happened, this minute.”
But Alex was screaming and writhing on the floor, feeling as though she must die of such misery, and it was Cedric who gave the assembled household a judicial version of the accident.
The doctor came and telegrams were sent to Scotland, which brought back Lady Isabel, white-faced and tearful, and Sir Francis, very stern and monosyllabic.
“Father, my spectacles are broken,” cried Cedric earnestly, running to meet them, but they did not seem to hear him.
“Where is she, Nurse?” said Lady Isabel.
“In the boudoir, my lady, and better, thank Heaven. The doctor says her back’ll get right again in time.”
Alex, hanging shaking over the balustrade, saw that Nurse was making faces as though she were crying. But when she came upstairs, after a long time spent with Lady Isabel in the boudoir, and saw Alex, her face was quite hard again, and she gave her a push and said, “It’s no use crying those crocodile tears now. You should have thought of that before trying to kill Barbara the way you did.”
“I didn’t, I didn’t,” sobbed Alex.
But nobody paid any attention to her.
Good-natured Emily was sent away, because Nurse said she wasn’t fit to be trusted, and Cook, who was Emily’s aunt, and very angry about it all, told Alex that it was all her fault if poor Emily never got another place at all. Everything was Alex’ fault.
There was no going to the seaside, even after Barbara was pronounced better. But Lady Isabel, who, Nurse said, had been given a dreadful shock by Alex’ wickedness, was going into the country, and would take Archie and the baby with her, if they could get a new nursery-maid at once.
“And me and Cedric?” asked Alex, trembling.
“Cedric doesn’t give me no trouble, as you very well know, and he’ll stay here and help me amuse poor little Barbara, as has always got on with him so nicely.”
“Shall I stay and play with Barbara too?”
“She’s a long way from playing yet,” Nurse returned grimly. “And I should think the sight of you would throw her into a fit, after what’s passed.”
“But what will happen to me, Nurse?” sobbed Alex.
“Your Papa will talk to you,” said Nurse.
Such a thing had never happened to any of the children before, but Alex, trembling and sick from crying, found herself confronting Sir Francis in the dining-room.
“I am going to send you to school, Alex,” he told her. “How old are you?”
“Twelve.”
“Then I hope,” said Sir Francis gravely, “that you are old enough to understand what a terrible thing it is to be sent from home in disgrace for such a reason. I am told that you have the deplorable reputation of originating quarrels with your brothers and sister, who, but for you, would lead the normal existence of happily-circumstanced children.”
Alex was terrified. She could not answer these terrible imputations, and began to cry convulsively.
“I see,” said Sir Francis, “that you are sensible of the appalling lengths to which this tendency has led you. Even now, I can scarcely believe it — a harmless, gentle child like your little sister, who, I am assured, has never done you wilful injury in her life — that you should deliberately endanger her life and her reason in such a fashion.”
He paused, as though he were waiting for Alex to speak, but she could not say anything.
“If your repentance is sincere, as I willingly assume it to be, your future behaviour must be such as to lead us all, particularly your poor little sister, to forget this terrible beginning.”
“Will Barbara get well?”
“By the great mercy of Heaven, and owing to her extreme youth, we are assured by the doctor that a year or two will entirely correct the injury to the spine. Had it been otherwise, Alex—” Sir Francis looked at his daughter in silence.
“When thanking Heaven for the mercy which has preserved your sister’s life,” he said gently, “I hope you will reflect seriously upon redeeming this action by your future conduct.”
“Oh, I’m sorry — oh, shall you ever forgive me?” gasped Alex, amongst her sobs.
“I do forgive you, my child, as does your mother, and as I am convinced that little Barbara will do. But I cannot, nor would I if I could, avert from you the consequence of your own act,” said her father.
Barbara did forgive Alex, in a little, plaintive, superior voice, as she lay very white and straight in bed. She was to stay quite flat on her back for at least a year, the doctor said, and she need do no lessons, and later she would be taken out in a long flat carriage that could be pushed from behind, then she would be able to walk again, and her back would be quite straight.
“If she’d been a hunchback, we might have played circus again, and I could have been the learned pig,” said Cedric reflectively.
Alex went to school at the end of September.
And that was her first practical experience of the game of Consequences, as played by the freakish hand of fate.
II
School
Alex’ schooldays were marked by a series of emotional episodes.
In her scale of values, only the personal element counted for anything. She was intelligent and industrious at her classes when she wished to gain the approbation of an attractive class-mistress, and idle and inattentive when she wanted to please the pretty girl with yellow hair, who sat next her and read a story-book under cover of a French grammar.
Alex did not read; she wanted to make the yellow-haired girl look at her and smile at her. She thought Queenie Torrance beautiful, though her beauty did not strike Alex until after she had fallen a helpless victim to one of those violent, irrational attractions for one of her own sex, that are apt to assail feminine adolescence.
“I hope that you will find some nice little companions at Liège,” Sir Francis had gravely told his daughter in valediction, “but remember that exclusive friendships are not to be desired. Friendly w
ith all, familiar with none,” said Sir Francis, voicing the ideal of his class and of his period.
As well tell a stream not to flow downhill. Nothing but the most exclusive and inordinate of attachments lay within the scope of Alex’ emotional capacities. She was incapable alike of asking or of bestowing in moderation.
Theoretically she would tell herself that she would give all, trust, confidence, love, friendship, and ask for nothing in return. Practically she suffered tortures of jealousy if the loved one addressed a word or smile to any but herself, and cried herself to sleep night after night in the certainty of loving infinitely more than she was loved.
The material side of her life as a pensionnaire at the Liège convent made very little impression upon her, excepting in relation to the emotional aspect, of which she was never unaware.
To the end of her days, the clean, pungent smell of a certain polish used upon the immense spaces of bare parquet ciré all over the building, would serve to recall the vivid presentment of the tall Belgian postulante whose duty it was to apply it with a huge mop, and whom, from a distance only to be appreciated by those who know the immensity of the gulf that in the convent world separates the novice from the pupils, Alex had worshipped blindly.
And the acrid, yet not unpleasant taste of confiture thinly spread over thick slices of brown bread, would remind her with equal vividness of the daily three o’clock interval for goûter, with Queenie Torrance pacing beside her in the garden quadrangle, one hand of each rolled into her black-stuff apron to try and keep warm, and the other grasping the enormous double tartine that formed the afternoon’s refection.
Even the slight, steady sound of hissing escaping from a gas jet of which the flame is turned as high as it will go, stood to Alex for the noisy evening recreation, spent in the enforced and detested amusement of la ronde, when her only preoccupation was to place herself by the object of her adoration, for the grasp of her hand in its regulation cotton glove, as the circle of girls moved drearily round and round singing perfunctorily.
The tuneless tune of those rondes remained with Alex long after the words had lost the savour of irony with which novelty had once invested them.
“Quelle horrible attente
D’être postulante....
Quel supplice
D’être une novice
Ah! quel comble d’horreur
Devenir soeur de choeur....”
Alex’ symbols were not romantic ones, but there was no romance in the life of the Liège convent, save what she brought to it herself. Even the memory of the great square verger, in the middle of gravelled alleys, brought to her mind for sole token of summer, only her horror of the immense pale-red slugs that crawled slowly and interminably out and across the paths in the eternal rains of the Belgian climate. Nothing mattered but people.
And of all the people in the world, only those whom one loved.
Thus Alex’ sweeping, unformulated conviction, holding in it all the misapplication of an essential force, squandered for lack of a sense of proportion.
She despised herself secretly, both for her intense craving for affection and for her prodigality in bestowing it. She was like a child endeavouring to pour a great pailful of water into a very little cup.
Waste and disaster were the inevitable results.
The real love of Alex’ young enthusiasm, fair-haired Queenie Torrance, was preceded by her inarticulate, unreasoned adoration for the Belgian postulante. But the Belgian postulante was never visible, save at a distance, so that even Alex’ unreasonable affections found nothing to feed upon.
There was a French girl, much older than herself, for whom Alex then conceived an enthusiasm. Marie-Angèle smiled on her and encouraged the infatuation of the curiously un-English little English girl. But she gave her nothing in return. Alex knew it, and recklessly spent all her weekly pocket-money on flowers and sweets for Marie-Angèle, thinking that the gifts would touch her and awaken in her an affection that it was not her nature to bestow, least of all on an ardent and ungainly child, six years her junior. Alex shed many tears for Marie-Angèle, and years later read some words that suddenly and swiftly recalled the girl who passed in and out of her life in less than a year.
“I love you for your few caresses,
I love you for my many tears”
The lines, indeed, were curiously typical of the one-sided relations into which Alex entered so rashly and so inevitably throughout her schooldays.
She was fifteen, and had been nearly three years at Liège, when Queenie Torrance came. She was Alex’ senior by a year, and the only other English girl in the school at that time. Alex was told to look after her, and went to the task with a certain naïve eagerness, that she always brought to bear upon any personal equation. In an hour, she was secretly combating an enraptured certainty, of which she felt nevertheless ashamed, that she had found at last the ideal object on whom to expend the vehement powers of affection for which she was always seeking an outlet.
Queenie was slight, very fair, with a full, serious oval face, innocent grey eyes set very far apart, and the high, rounded forehead and small, full-lipped mouth, of a type much in vogue in England at the time of the Regency. This was the more marked by the thick flaxen hair which fell back from her face, and over her shoulders into natural heavy ringlets. She was not very pretty, although she was often thought so, but she was charged with a certain animal magnetism, almost inseparable from her type. Half the girls in the school adored her. Queenie, already attractive to men, and sent to the convent in Belgium in reality on that account, nominally for a year’s finishing before her début in London society, was for the most part scornful of these girlish admirers, but Alex she admitted to her friendship.
She was precociously aware that intimacy with Lady Isabel Clare’s daughter was likely to accrue to her own advantage later on in London.
The genius for sympathy which led Alex to innumerable small sacrifices and tender smoothings of difficulties for her idol, Queenie at first received with a graceful gratitude which yet held in it something of suspicion, as though she wondered what return would presently be exacted of her.
But it became obvious that Alex expected nothing, and received with eager thankfulness the slightest recognition of her devotion.
Queenie despised her, but was lavish of gentle thanks and caressing exclamations. Hers was not a nature ever to make the mistake of killing the goose that laid the golden eggs.
Finding to her concealed astonishment that Alex only asked toleration, or at the most acceptance of her ardent devotion, and was transported at the slightest occasional token of affection in return, Queenie stinted her of neither. It would have seemed to her the most irrational folly to discourage a love, however one-sided, that found its expression in tireless sympathy, endless championship, and unlimited material gifts and help of any or every description. Alex did all that she could of Queenie’s lessons, made her bed and mended her clothes for her whenever she could do so undetected by the authorities, spent her pocket-money on gratifying Queenie’s shameless and inordinate passion for sweet things, and once or twice told lies badly and unsuccessfully, to shield Queenie from the effects of her own laziness and constant evasion of regulations.
Alex had been taught, in common with every other child of her upbringing and nationality, that to tell a lie was the worst crime to which a self-respecting human being can stoop. She also believed that a person who has told a lie is a liar, and that all liars go to Hell. Yet by some utterly illogical perversity of which she was hardly even aware, it did not shock or very much distress her, to find that Queenie Torrance told lies, and told them, moreover, with an air of quiet and convincing candour that placed them in a very different category to Alex’ own halting, improbable fibs, delivered with a scarlet face and a manifest air of hunting for further corroboration as she spoke.
In the extraordinary scale of moral values unconsciously held by Alex, there were apparently no abstract standards of right and wrong. Whe
re she loved, though she might, against her own will see defects, she was incapable of condemning.
Queenie took a curious, detached interest in coldly gratifying her vanity, by seeking to test the lengths of extravagance to which Alex’ admiration would go.
“Supposing I quarrelled with every one here, and they all sent me to Coventry — whose part would you take?”
“Yours, of course.”
“But if I were in the wrong?”
“That wouldn’t make any difference. In fact, you’d need it more if you were in the wrong.”
“I don’t see that!” Queenie exclaimed. “If I were in the wrong I should have deserved it.”
“But that would make it all the worse for you. It’s always the people who are in the wrong who need most to have their part taken,” Alex explained confusedly, yet voicing an intimate conviction.
“I don’t think you have much idea of justice, Alex,” said Queenie drily.
The conversation made Alex very miserable. It was characteristic of her want of logic that while she reproached herself secretly for her own impiety in setting the objects of her affection far above what she conceived to be the abstract standard of right and wrong, yet she never questioned but that any love bestowed upon herself would be measured out in direct proportion to her merits.
And despairingly did Alex sometimes review the smallness of her deserts.
She was disobedient, untruthful, quarrelsome, irreligious. It seemed to Alex that there was no fault to which she could not lay claim. Her lack of elementary religious teaching put her at a disadvantage in the convent atmosphere, and made its frequent religious services and instructions so tedious to her, that she was in constant disgrace for her weary, inattentive attitudes, not unjustly designated as irreverent, in the chapel.
She was not at all popular with the nuns. The “influence” which her class-mistress wielded over so many of the pupils, or the “interest” which the English Assistant Superior would so willingly have extended to her youthful compatriot were alike without effect upon Alex. She was not drawn to any of these holy, black-clad women, to one or other of whom almost all her French and Belgian and American contemporaries devoted a rather stereotyped enthusiasm.
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 93
