She had every intention of cultivating her friendship with Alex Clare in London.
“Then you’d like to come, Queenie?” breathed Alex ecstaticly.
“Of course, I would,” Queenie told her affectionately. “My dear, you know I have hated all the fuss here, and our never being allowed to speak a word to one another. But what could I do?” She shrugged her shoulders.
Then Queenie had really cared all the time!
Alex in that moment was compensated for all the tears and storms and disgraces of the year. That afternoon spent under the thick, leafy boughs of the old apple-trees with Queenie, enabled Alex to face with some degree of courage the prospect of their approaching separation. She knew that any sign of unhappiness for such a reason would be imputed to her as wrong-doing by the authorities, and as unnatural and heartless indifference to home on the part of her companions.
So Alex, who had no trust in any standards of her own, was ashamed of the tears which she nightly stifled in her hard pillow, and felt them to be one more of those degrading weaknesses with which her Creator had malignantly endowed her in order that she might be as a pariah among her fellows.
She felt no resentment, only blind wonder and fatalistic apathy. Nevertheless, all through Alex’ childhood and early girlhood, unhappy though she was, there dwelt within her a curious certainty that, somewhere, happiness awaited her, which she, and she alone, would have full capacity to appreciate.
Side by side with that, was her intense capacity for suffering, but that she was learning to think of as only a cruel, tearing affliction despised alike by God and man.
Of the immense force latent in the power of intense feeling Alex knew nothing, nor did any of the teaching which she received vouchsafe to her any illumination.
She and Queenie and the three Munroe girls made the journey to England with Madame Hippolyte, who showed Alex a marked kindness not usual with her.
At fifteen, wakeful nights and storms of crying leave their traces, and Alex, pale-faced and with encircled eyes, was pitiful in her propitiatory attempts to join in the eager anticipations of holiday enjoyment exchanged between her companions.
Perhaps, thought the French nun, the little black sheep had not a very happy home. A bad report would follow Alex to England she well knew, and it might be that the poor child was dreading its results.
Her manner to Alex grew gentle and compassionate, and Alex noticed it with a relieved, uncomprehending gratitude that held something abject in its surprised, almost incredulous acceptance of any kindness.
Madame Hippolyte, though she sternly rebuked herself for the uncharitable impulse, felt a certain contempt of the way in which her advances were received.
She knew nothing of the self-assertive, arrogant manner that would presently revive, in the childish sense of security in home surroundings, and would yet be merely another manifestation of the unbalanced complexity that was Alex Clare.
But as the crossing came to an end and they found themselves in the train speeding towards London, Alex was silent, her small face white and her eyes tragical.
The American girls made delighted use of the strip of looking-glass in the carriage, and exchanged predictions as to the pleased amazement that would be caused by Sadie’s growth, the length of Marie’s plait of red hair, and Diana’s added inches of skirt.
Queenie Torrance only glanced at her reflection once or twice, though an acute observer might have seen that she was not indifferent to the advantage of facing a looking-glass, after the many weeks in which none had been available. But she was merely completely serene in the immutability of her own attractiveness. Queenie did not need to depend upon her looks, which seldom or never varied from soft, colourless opacity and opulence of contour. The pale, heavy rings of her fair hair always fell back in the same way from her open, rounded forehead, her well-modelled hands, with fingers broad at the base, and pointed, gleaming nails were always cool and white.
The Americans were all three pretty girls, and something of race that showed in Alex’ bearing and gestures made her remarkable amongst any assembly of children, but it was at Queenie that every man who passed the little group in the railway carriage glanced a second time.
Good Madame Hippolyte, as serenely unaware of this as only a woman whose life had been passed in a religious Order could be, regarded Queenie as by far the least of the responsibilities on her hands, and did not conceal her satisfaction when Marie and Sadie and Diana were immediately claimed at the terminus by a group of excited, noisy cousins, and hurried away to an enormous waiting carriage-and-pair.
“Et vous?” she demanded, turning to the other two.
“Dad’ll come for me,” said Queenie confidently, inadvertently uttering a nickname that would not have been permitted to the Clare children, and was, in fact, never in those days heard in the class of society to which they belonged.
Queenie shot an imperceptible glance of confusion at Alex, who was clinging speechlessly to her hand.
Next moment she had recovered herself.
“There’s my father!” she cried.
Colonel Torrance was making his way rapidly towards them, a tall, soldierly-looking man, a trifle too conspicuously well groomed, a trifle too upright in his bearing, a trifle too remarkable altogether, with very black moustache and eyebrows and very white hair.
He raised his tall white hat with its black band, at the sight of his daughter, expanded his white waistcoat and grey frock-coat with the malmaison buttonhole yet further, and whipped off his pale grey glove to take the limp hand extended to him by Alex, as Queenie self-possessedly introduced her.
Alex hardly heard Colonel Torrance’s elaborately courteous allusion to Sir Francis Clare, whom he had had the pleasure of seeing several times at the Club, but she wondered eagerly if that introduction would be considered sufficient to allow of her inviting Queenie to Clevedon Square.
She felt as though her spirit were being torn from her body when Queenie said, “Good-bye, Alex, dear. Mind you write. Au revoir, ma mère.”
Compliments were exchanged between Madame Hippolyte and Queenie’s father, the gentleman flourished his top hat again, and then said to his daughter:
“My dear, I have a hansom waiting; the impudent fellow says his horse won’t stand. I trust you have no large amount of luggage.”
Queenie shook her head, smiling slightly, and in a moment, the brevity of which seemed incredible to Alex and left her with an instant’s absolute suspension of physical faculties, they disappeared among the crowd.
Madame Hippolyte grasped the arm of her distraught-looking pupil.
“But rouse yourself, Alex!” she said vigorously. “Who is to come for you?”
“The carriage,” muttered Alex automatically, well aware that neither would Lady Isabel sacrifice an hour of her afternoon to waiting at a crowded London station in July, nor old Nurse permit the other children to do so, had they wished it.
“And where is it, this carriage?” sceptically demanded Madame Hippolyte, harassed and exhausted, and aware that she had yet to find a four-wheeled cab of sufficiently cleanly and sober appearance to satisfy her, in which she might proceed herself to the convent branch-house in the east of London. But presently Alex came partially out of her dream and pointed out the brougham and bay horse and the footman in buff livery at the door.
“But you will not drive alone — in this quartier?” cried the nun, in horrified protest at this exhibition of English want of propriety.
Her fears proved groundless.
The neat, black-bonneted head of a maid appeared at the brougham window, and with a sigh of infinite relief Madame Hippolyte bade farewell to the last and most anxiously regarded of her charges.
“How you’ve grown, Miss Alex!” cried the maid, but her tone was scarcely one of admiration, as she gazed at the stooping shoulders and pale, travel-stained face under the ugly sailor hat of dark blue straw. “We shall have to make you look like yourself, with some of your own clothes, befo
re your mamma sees you,” she added kindly.
Alex scarcely answered, and sat squeezing her hands together.
She knew she must come out of this dream of misery that seemed to envelop her, and which was so naughty and undutiful. Of course it was unnatural not to be glad to come home again, and it wasn’t as though she had been so very happy at Liège.
It was only Queenie.
No one must know, or she would certainly be blamed and ridiculed for her foolish and headlong fancy.
Alex wondered dimly why she was so constituted as to differ from every one else.
The cab turned into Clevedon Square. Alex looked out of the window.
The big square bore already the look of desertion most associated in her mind with summer in London. Shutters and blinds obscured the windows of the first and second floors of many houses, and against one of the corner houses a ladder was propped and an unwontedly dazzling cream-colour proclaimed fresh paint.
Some of the houses showed striped sun-blinds, and window-boxes of scarlet geraniums. Alex saw that there were flowers in their own balcony as well as an awning.
When the carriage drew up at the front door, she jumped out and replied hastily to the man-servant’s respectful greeting, a slight feeling of excitement possessing her for the first time at the prospect of seeing Barbara, and impressing her with her added inches of height.
She ran quickly up the stairs, hoping that Lady Isabel would not chance to come out of the drawing-room as she went past. On the second landing, safely past the double door of the drawing-room, she paused a moment to take breath, and heard a subdued call from overhead.
Barbara was hanging over the banisters with Archie.
“Hallo, Alex!”
Alex went up to the schoolroom landing, and she and Barbara looked curiously at one another, before exchanging a perfunctory kiss.
Alex suddenly felt grubby and rather shabby in her old last year’s serge frock, which had been considered good enough for the journey, when she saw Barbara in her clean white muslin, with a very pale blue sash, and her hair tied up with a big pale blue bow.
Barbara’s hair had grown, which annoyed Alex. It fell into one long, pale curl down her back, and no longer provoked a contrast with Alex’ superior length of shining wave. Deprived of the supervision of Nurse, with her iron insistence on “fifty strokes of the brush every night, and Rowland’s Macassor on Saturdays,” Alex’ hair had somehow lost its shine, and hung limply in a tangled, uneven pigtail.
Alex thought that Barbara eyed her in a rather superior way.
She felt much more enthusiastic in greeting little Archie. He was prettier and pinker and more engaging than ever, and Alex felt glad that he had not yet been sent to school, to have his fair curls cropped, and his little velvet suit exchanged for cricketing flannels.
He pulled Alex into the schoolroom, with the enthusiasm for a new face characteristic of a child to whom shyness is unknown, and Alex received the curt, all-observant greeting which she had learnt to know would always await her from old Nurse.
“So you are back from your foreign parts, are you, Miss Alex?”
Nurse always said “Miss Alex” when addressing her returned charge at first, and as invariably relapsed into her old peremptory form of address before the end of the evening.
“My sakes, child, what have they been doing to you? You look like a scarecrow.”
“Has she grown?” asked Barbara jealously. She knew that grown-up people were always, for some mysterious reason, pleased when one had “grown.”
“Grown! Yes, and got her back bent like a bow,” said Nurse vigorously. “An hour on the backboard’s what you’ll do every day, and bed at seven o’clock tonight. Have they been giving you enough to eat?”
“Of course,” said Alex, tossing her head.
She did not like the convent when she was there, but a contradictory instinct always made her when at home uphold it violently, as a privileged spot to which she alone had access.
“You look half-starved, to me,” Nurse said unbelievingly.
Nothing would ever have persuaded her of what was, in fact, the truth, that Alex received more abundant, more wholesome, and infinitely better cooked food in Belgium than in London.
Barbara sat on the end of the sofa, swinging her legs and fidgetting with the tassel of the blind-cord.
“Have you brought back any prizes, Alex?” she enquired negligently.
And Alex replied with an equal air of indifference:
“One for composition, and I’ve got a certificate of proficiency for music.”
This was not at all the way in which she had planned to make her announcements. She had thought that her prizes would impress Barbara very much, and she had foreseen a sort of small ceremony of display when she would bring out the big red-and-gilt book. But Barbara only nodded, and presently said:
“Cedric has got quantities of prizes: the headmaster wrote and told father that he was a ‘boy of marked abilities and remarkable power of concentration,’ and father is going to give him a whole sovereign, but that’s because he made his century.”
“When will he be here?”
“Next week. His holidays begin on Tuesday and he’s got a whole fortnight longer than we have.”
“We?” asked Alex coldly. “How can you have holidays? You’re not at school.”
“I have lessons,” cried Barbara angrily. “You know I have, and Ma’moiselle is going to give me a prize for writing, and a prize for history, and a prize for application. So there!”
“Prizes!” said Alex scornfully. “When you’re all by yourself! I never heard such nonsense.”
She no longer felt wretched and subdued, but full of irritation at Barbara’s conceit and absorption in herself.
“It’s not nonsense!”
“It is. If you’d been at school you’d know it was.”
“One word more of this and you’ll go to bed, the pair of you,” declared old Nurse, the autocrat whom Alex had for the moment forgotten. “It’s argle-bargle the minute you set foot in the place, Miss Alex. Now you just come along and be made fit to be seen before your poor mamma and papa set eyes on you looking like a charity-school child, as hasn’t seen a brush or a bit of soap for a month of Sundays.”
Useless to protest even at this trenchant description of herself. Useless to attempt resistance during the long process of undressing, dressing again, brushing and combing, inspection of finger-nails and general, dissatisfied scrutiny that ensued. Alex, in a stiff, clean frock, the counterpart, to her secret vexation, of Barbara’s, open-work stockings, and new shoes that hurt her feet, was enjoined “to hold back her shoulders and not poke” and dispatched to the drawing-room with Barbara and Archie as soon as the schoolroom tea was over.
She felt as though she had never been away.
No one had asked her anything about the convent, and all through tea Barbara and Archie had talked about the coming holidays, or had made allusions to events of which Alex knew nothing, but which had evidently been absorbing their attention for the last few weeks.
They seemed to Alex futile in the extreme.
Downstairs, Lady Isabel kissed her, and said, “Well, my darling, I’m very glad to have you at home again. Have you been a good girl this term, and brought back a report that will please papa?” and then had turned to speak to some one without waiting for an answer.
Alex sat beside her mother while she talked to the one remaining visitor, and felt discontented and awkward.
Barbara and Archie were looking at pictures together in the corner of the room, very quiet and well behaved. The caller stayed late, and just as she had gone Sir Francis came in from his Club, the faint, familiar smell of tobacco, and Russia leather, and expensive eau-de-Cologne that seemed to pervade him, striking Alex with a fresh sense of recognition as she rose to receive his kiss. He greeted her very kindly, but Alex was quite aware of a dissatisfaction as intense as, though less outspoken than, that of old Nurse as he put up hi
s double eye-glasses and gazed at his eldest daughter.
“We must see if the country or the seaside will bring back some roses to your cheeks,” he said in characteristic phraseology.
But when the children were dismissed from the drawing-room, Sir Francis straightened his own broad back, and tapped Alex’ rounded shoulder-blades.
“Hold yourself up, my child,” he said very decidedly. “I want to see a nice flat, and straight back.”
He made no other criticism, and none was needed.
Alex had gauged the extent of his dismay.
IV
Holidays
“Mother, may I ask Queenie Torrance to tea?”
Alex had rehearsed the words so often to herself that they had almost become meaningless.
Her heart beat thickly with the anticipation of a refusal, when at last she found courage and opportunity to utter the little stilted phrase, with a tongue that felt dry and in a voice that broke nervously in her throat.
“What do you say, darling?” absently inquired Lady Isabel; and Alex had to say it again.
“Queenie Torrance?” said Lady Isabel, still vaguely.
“Mother, you remember — I told you about her. She is the only other English girl besides me at the convent, and she knows all about father and you and everything, and her father belongs to the same Club—”
Snobbishness was not in Alex’ composition, but she adopted her mother’s standards eagerly and instinctively, in the hope of gaining her point.
“But, my darling, what are you talkin’ about? You know mother doesn’t let you have little girls here unless she knows somethin’ about them. Give me the little diamond brooch, Alex; the one in the silver box there.”
Lady Isabel, absorbed in the completion of her evening toilette, remained unconscious of the havoc she had wrought. Alex felt rather sick.
The intensity of feeling to which she was a victim, for the most part reacted on her physically, though she was as unconscious of this as was her mother.
But with the cunning borne of urgent desire, Alex knew that persistence, which with Sir Francis would invariably win a courteous rebuke and an immutable refusal, could sometimes bring forth rather querulous concession from Lady Isabel’s weakness.
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 95
