Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  “You ought to have a prize, you know,” she heard Ralph McAllister tell Barbara. “If you’d had a better partner you’d have won easily. You play much better than Lady Essie, really!”

  It was not in the least true that Barbara played better than Lady Essie, or nearly so well, but she put on a little, gratified, complacent smile, that apparently satisfied Ralph McAllister quite as well as modest disclaimers.

  Alex kept out of her partner’s way, and avoided his eye. Not much probability that he would address flattering speeches to her!

  All the time a subconscious emotion was surging through her at the thought of Mother Gertrude’s letter and what it contained.

  “The life you are leading does not satisfy you. You will never find that what the world can offer will satisfy you.”

  It was true enough, Heaven knew, Alex thought drearily, as she addressed perfunctory and obviously absent-minded civilities to her mother’s guests.

  In the sense of depression engendered by the afternoon’s failure, no less than by the sight of McAllister’s evident delight in Barbara’s demure, patently-artificial, alternate coyness and gaiety, Alex realized both her own eternal dissatisfaction with her surroundings and the subtle allurement of a renunciation that should yet promise her all that she most longed for.

  XVIII

  Crisis

  When Alex went back to London in the beginning of October, it was with a sensation as though an enormous gulf of time had been traversed between her visits to the convent in the hot, arid summer days and her return there. For one thing the cold weather had set in early and with unusual severity, and the sight of fires and winter furs seemed to succeed with startling rapidity to the roses and lawn-tennis at Windsor.

  In her first greeting with Mother Gertrude, too, Alex was strongly conscious of that indefinable sensation of having made some strange, almost unguessed-at progress in a direction of which she was only now becoming aware. It frightened her when the Superior, gazing at her with those light, steady eyes that now held a depth of undisguised tenderness, spoke firmly, with an implication that could no longer be denied or ignored.

  “So the great decision is taken, little Alex. And if peace has not yet come to you, do not feel dismayed. It will come, as surely as I stand here and tell you of it. But there may be — there must be — conflict first.”

  Whether she spoke of the conflict which Alex foresaw, half with dread and half with exultation, as inevitable between herself and her surroundings, or of some deeper, inward dissension in Alex’ own soul, she could not tell.

  But there was both joy and a certain excitement in having her destiny so much taken for granted, and the mystical and devotional works to which the Superior gave her free access worked upon her imagination, and dispelled many of her lingering doubts. Those which lay deepest in her soul, she never examined. She was almost, though not quite, unaware of their existence, and to probe deeper into that faint, underlying questioning would have seemed a disloyalty equally to that intangible possession which she had begun to think of as her vocation, and to Mother Gertrude. The sense of closer companionship — of a more intimate spiritual union expressed, though never explicitly so in words, in her relation with the Superior, was unutterably precious to Alex. In the joy that it brought her she read merely another manifestation and the consolation to be found in the way of the Spirit.

  A feeling of impending crisis, however, hung over the hurrying days of that brief November, when the convent parlour in the afternoons was illuminated by a single gas-jet that cast strange, clean-cut shadows on the white-washed walls.

  Just before Christmas Sir Francis spoke:

  “What is this violent attraction that takes you out with your maid in the opposite direction to your mother’s expeditions with Barbara?” he suddenly inquired of Alex one evening, very stiffly.

  She started and coloured, having retained all the childish, uneasy belief that her father lived in an atmosphere far above that into which the sound and sight of his children’s daily doings could penetrate to his knowledge without the special intervention of some accredited emissary such as their mother.

  As he spoke Lady Isabel looked up, and Barbara left the piano and came slowly down the room.

  “It has come” flashed through Alex’ mind. She only said very lamely:

  “I — I don’t know what you mean, father.” There was all the shifting uneasiness in her manner that Sir Francis most disliked.

  “Oh, darling, don’t prevaricate,” hastily broke in Lady Isabel, with an obvious uneasiness that gave the impression of being rooted in something deeper and of longer standing than the atmosphere of disturbance momentarily created.

  “But you did not want me to come with you and Barbara to the Stores this afternoon,” said Alex cravenly. The instinct of evading the direct issue was so strongly implanted in her, that she was prepared to have recourse to the feeblest and least convincing of subterfuges in order to gain time.

  “Of course, I don’t want you to come anywhere when it all so obviously bores you,” plaintively said Lady Isabel. “I have almost given up trying to take you anywhere, Alex, as you very well know. You evidently prefer to go and sit in a little stuffy back-room somewhere with Heaven knows whom, sooner than remain in the company of your mother and sister.”

  Alex felt too much dismayed and unwillingly convicted to make any reply, but after a momentary silence Sir Francis spoke ominously.

  “Indeed! is that so?”

  The suspicion that had laid dormant in Alex for a long time woke to life. Her father’s disappointment in her, none the less keenly felt because inarticulate, had become merged into a far greater bitterness: that of his resentment on behalf of his wife. A personal grievance he might overlook, though once perceived he would never forget it, but where Lady Isabel’s due was concerned, her husband was capable of implacability.

  “And may one inquire whose is the society which you find so preferable to that of your family?” he asked her, with the manifest sarcasm that in him denoted the extreme of anger.

  Alex was constitutionally so much terrified of disapproval that it produced in her a veritable physical inability to explain herself. She cast an agonized look around her. Her mother was leaning back, her face strained and tired, and would not meet her eye. Sir Francis, she knew without daring to look at him, was swinging his eye-glasses to and fro, with a measured regularity that indicated his determination to wait inexorably and for any length of time for a reply to his inquiry. Barbara’s big, alert eyes moved from one member of the group to another, acute and full of appraisement of them all.

  Alex flung a wordless appeal to her sister. Barbara did not fail to receive and understand it, and after a moment she spoke:

  “Alex goes to see the Superior of that convent near Bryanston Square. She made friends with her in the summer, didn’t you, Alex?”

  “Yes,” faltered Alex. Some instinct of trying to palliate what she felt would be looked upon as undesirable made her add in feeble extenuation, “It is a house of the same Order as the Liège one where I was at school, you know.”

  “Your devotion to it was not so marked in those days, if I remember right,” said her father in the same, rather elaborately sarcastic strain.

  Lady Isabel, no less uneasy under it than was Alex herself, broke in with nervous exasperation in her every intonation:

  “Oh, Francis, it is the same old story — one of those foolish infatuations. You know what she has always been like, and how worried I was about that dreadful Torrance girl. It’s this nun now, I suppose.”

  “Who is this woman?”

  “How should I know?” helplessly said Lady Isabel. “Alex?”

  “The Superior — the Head of the house.” Alex stopped. How could one say, “Mother Gertrude of the Holy Cross?” She did not even know what the Superior’s name in the world had been, or where she came from.

  “Go on,” said Sir Francis inexorably.

  They were all looking at he
r, and sheer desperation came to her help.

  “Why shouldn’t I have friends?... What is all this about?” Alex asked wildly. “It’s my own life. I don’t want to be undutiful, but why can’t I live my own life? Everything I ever do is wrong, and I know you and father are disappointed in me, but I don’t know how to be different — I wish I did.” She was crying bitterly now. “You wanted me to marry Noel, and I would have if I could, but I knew that it would all have been wrong, and we should have made each other miserable. Only when I did break it off, it all seemed wrong and heartless, and I don’t know what to do—” She felt herself becoming incoherent, and the tension of the atmosphere grew almost unbearable.

  Sir Francis Clare spoke, true to the traditions of his day, viewing with something very much like horror the breaking down of those defences of a conventional reserve that should lay bare the undisciplined emotions of the soul.

  “You have said enough, Alex. There are certain things that we do not put into words.... You are unhappy, my child, you have said so yourself, and it has been sufficiently obvious for some time.”

  “But what is it that you want, Alex? What would make you happy?” her mother broke in, piteously enough.

  In the face of their perplexity, Alex lost the last feeble clue to her own complexity. She did not know what she wanted — to make them happy, to be happy herself, to be adored and admired and radiantly successful, never to know loneliness, or misunderstanding again — such thoughts surged chaotically through her mind as she stood there sobbing, and could find no words except the childish foolish formula, “I don’t know.”

  She saw Barbara’s eager, protesting gaze flash upon her, and heard her half-stifled exclamation of wondering contempt. Sir Francis turned to his younger daughter, almost as though seeking elucidation from her obvious certainties — her crude assurance with life.

  “Oh!” said little Barbara, her hands clenched, “they ask you what you want, what would make you happy — they are practically offering you anything you want in the world — you could choose anything, and you stand there and cry and say you don’t know! Oh, Alex — you — you idiot!”

  “Hush!” said Sir Francis, shocked, and Lady Isabel put out her white hand with its glittering weight of rings and laid it gently on Barbara’s shoulder, and she too said, “Hush, darling! why are you so vehement? You’re happy, aren’t you, Barbara?”

  “Of course,” said Barbara, wriggling. “Only if you and father asked me what I would like, and I had only to say what I wanted, I could think of such millions of things — for us to have a house in the country, and to give a real, proper big ball next year, and for you to let me go to restaurant dinners sometimes, and not only those dull parties and — heaps of things like that. It’s such an opportunity, and Alex is wasting it all! The only thing she wants is to sit and talk and talk and talk with some dull old nun at that convent!”

  Long afterwards Alex was to remember and ponder over again and again that denunciation of Barbara’s. It was all fact — was it all true? Was that what she was fighting for — that the goal of her vehement, inchoate rebellion? Had she sought in Mother Gertrude’s society the relief of self-expression only, or was her infatuation for the nun the channel through which she hoped to find those abstract possessions of the spirit which might constitute the happiness she craved?

  Nothing of all the questionings that were to come later invaded her mind, as she stood sobbing and self-convicted at the crises of her relations with her childhood’s home.

  “Don’t cry so, Alex darlin’.” Lady Isabel sank back into her armchair. “Don’t cry like that — it’s so bad for you and I can’t bear it. We only want to know how we can make you happier than you are. It’s so dreadful, Alex — you’ve got everything, I should have thought — a home, and parents who love you — it isn’t every girl that has a father like yours, some of them care nothing for their daughters — and you’re young and pretty and with good health — you might have such a perfect time, even if you have made a mistake, poor little thing, there’ll be other people, Alex — you’ll know better another time ... only I can’t bear it if you lose all your looks by frettin’ and refusin’ to go anywhere, and every one asks me where my eldest daughter is and why she doesn’t make more friends, and enjoy things—” Lady Isabel’s voice trailed away. She looked unutterably tired. They had none of them heard so emotional a ring in her voice ever before.

  Sir Francis looked down at his wife in silence, and his gaze was as tender as his voice was stern when he finally spoke.

  “This cannot go on. You have done everything to please Alex — to try and make her happy, and it has all been of no use. Let her take her own way! We have failed.”

  “No!” almost shrieked Alex.

  “What do you mean? We have your own word for it and your sister’s that you are not happy at home, and infinitely prefer the society of some woman of whom we know nothing, in surroundings which I should have thought would have proved highly uncongenial to one of my daughters, brought up among well-bred people. But apparently I am mistaken.

  “It is the modern way, I am told. A young girl uses her father’s house to shelter and feed her, and seeks her own friends and her own interests the while, with no reference to her parents’ wishes.

  “But not in this case, Alex. I have your mother and your sisters to consider. Your folly is embittering the home life that might be so happy and pleasant for all of us. Look at your mother!”

  Lady Isabel was in tears.

  “What shall I do?” said Alex wildly. “Let me go right away and not spoil things any more.”

  “You have said it,” replied Sir Francis gravely, and inclined his head.

  “Francis, what are you tellin’ her? How can she go away from us? It’s her home, until she marries.”

  Lady Isabel’s voice was full of distressed perplexity.

  “My dear love, don’t don’t agitate yourself. This is her home, as you say, and is always open to her. But until she has learnt to be happy there, let her seek these new friends, whom she so infinitely prefers. Let her go to this nun.”

  Alex, at his words, felt a rush of longing for the tenderness, the grave understanding of Mother Gertrude, the atmosphere of the quiet convent parlour where she had never heard reproach or accusation.

  “Oh, yes, let me go there,” she sobbed childishly. “I’ll try and be good there. I’ll come back good, indeed I will.”

  Barbara’s little, cool voice cut across her sobs:

  “How can you go there? Will they let you stay? What will every one think?”

  “So many girls take up slumming and good works now-a-days,” said Lady Isabel wearily. “Every one knows she’s been upset and unhappy for a long while. It may be the best plan. My poor darling, when you’re tired of it, you can come back, and we’ll try again.”

  There was no reproach at all in her voice now, only exhaustion, and a sort of relief at having reached a conclusion.

  “You hear what your mother says. If her angelic love and patience do not touch you, Alex, you must indeed be heartless. Make your arrangements, and remember, my poor child, that as long as her arms remain open to you, I will receive you home again with love and patience and without one word of reproach.”

  He opened the door for Lady Isabel and followed slowly from the room, his iron-grey head shaking a little.

  Alex flung herself down, and Barbara laid her hand half timidly on her sister’s, in one of her rare caresses.

  “Don’t cry, Alex. Are you really going? It’s much the best idea, of course, and by the time you come back they may have something else to think about.”

  She giggled a little, self-consciously, and waited, as though to be questioned.

  “I might be engaged to be married, or something like that, and then you’d come back to be my bridesmaid, and no one would think of anything unhappy.”

  Alex made no answer. Her tears had exhausted her and she felt weak and tired.

  “How are you
going to settle it all?” pursued Barbara tirelessly. “Hadn’t you better write to them and see if they’ll have you? Supposing Mother Gertrude said you couldn’t go there?”

  A pang of terror shot through Alex at the thought.

  “Oh, no, no! She won’t say she couldn’t have me.”

  She went blindly to the carved writing-table with its heavy gilt and cut-glass appointments, and drew a sheet of paper towards her.

  Barbara stood watching her curiously. Feeling as though the power of consecutive thought had almost left her, Alex scrawled a few words and addressed them to the Superior.

  “We can send it round by hand,” said Barbara coolly. “Then you’ll know tonight.”

  Alex looked utterly bewildered.

  “It’s quite early — Holland can go in a cab.”

  Barbara rang the bell importantly and gave her instructions in a small, hard voice.

  “It’s no use just waiting about for days and days,” she said to Alex. “It makes the whole house feel horrid, and father is so grave and sarcastic at meals, and it makes mother ill. You’d much rather be there than here, wouldn’t you, Alex?”

  Alex thought again of the Superior’s welcome, which had never failed her — the Superior who knew nothing of her wicked ingratitude and undutifulness at home, and repeated miserably:

  “Yes, yes, I’d much rather be there than here.”

  The answer to the note came much more quickly than they had expected it. Barbara heard the cab stop in the square outside, and ran down into the hall. She came back in a moment with a small, twisted note.

  “What does it say, Alex?”

  Alex read the tiny missive, and a great throb of purest relief and comfort went through her.

  “I may go at once. She is waiting for me now, this minute, if I like.”

  “What did I tell you?” cried Barbara triumphantly.

  She looked sharply at her sister, who was unconsciously clasping the little note as though she derived positive consolation from the contact. She went to the door.