Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  “Miss Easter didn’t do that, exactly. I think she thought I should be only too ready to explain away the story as it stood, and throw some light which would show that I hadn’t just thrown over a man who cared for me on the grounds of his being condemned to the life of a paralytic invalid.”

  “I should find it very difficult to believe that you did that,” said Sir Julian gently.

  There was a pause.

  “The facts of the story, in the main, are perfectly correct. I told Miss Easter so.”

  They had reached the end of the sea-wall, and as they turned mechanically back upon their footsteps, Sir Julian for a moment found himself facing her.

  The look in her eyes was doubtful, defiant, beseeching, all at once. Something in it evoked from him a very sincere and simple desire to reassure her.

  “Won’t you tell me about it, if you care to? I’m quite sure that, whatever the facts may be, there is another aspect to them than the obvious one.”

  He heard a little gasp that unmistakably denoted relief.

  “Thank you very much. It’s so much easier now you’ve said that and I want to tell you about it. You’ll understand, perhaps.”

  “Don’t hurry,” said Julian, more with reference to a certain breathlessness in her speech than to the increased speed at which she was walking beside him.

  However, she slackened her pace and presently began to speak quietly.

  “I don’t suppose you know exactly what it’s like for a girl with no home of her own the difficulty of having any friends, or seeing anyone except just the people one’s working with not that there was ever anyone I wanted to see particularly, the men I associated with were all of Mr. Cooper’s type, as nice and as polite as could be, always but I had nothing in common with them except the day’s work. There were a few friends of my father’s he was an architect but after his death they rather dropped away from us. They were the sort of people who turned up their noses at the dressmaking business. My mother took it up, after he died, because it was the only thing she could do to make money, and she hoped it would mean that I need never go out and work for myself when I grew up. I’m glad,” said Miss Marchrose vehemently, “I’m glad and thankful that she never lived to see the muddle I made of everything.”

  Sir Julian remained silent, aware that she was talking to herself as much as to him.

  “After she died I got a job in Southampton Row. I lived in a hostel for women workers. It was all right in a way, but deadly lonely. And I wasn’t used to the sort of girls who live at those places, and I thought myself too good for them and of course they saw it. They used to play cards in the evening, or some of them played the piano, and sometimes they made up parties to go to the pit at the theatre but after I’d been disagreeable once or twice, naturally they didn’t ask me any more. And I never sat in the public sitting-room downstairs, but always went up to my own bedroom. And I read a book at meals. You don’t know how people who do that are hated. So they ought to be, I suppose, but in those days I thought it was quite worth while to make them all indignant, and find myself left in peace. But all the time I was more and more lonely, and I used to sit and think in the evenings, wondering how I could bear it if all my life was going to be like that just working on and on and then becoming like one of the older women at that hostel there were dozens of them pinched and discontented, always worrying over expense, and why there weren’t two helpings of pudding at dinner, with nothing to do, nothing to remember, nothing to look forward to knowing themselves utterly and absolutely unnecessary in the world. And they’d got used to it that was the ghastly part of it and yet they couldn’t always have been like that. Once they must have passed through awful phases of rebellion and despair, like me, and hoping against hope that something glorious and brilliant would turn up the sort of things that only happen in books and then gradually they’d got resigned and hopeless, and indifferent the worst of all. And I felt that all that, year after year, would be coming nearer and nearer to me.”

  “It couldn’t,” muttered Julian. “Marriage, for instance “Of course, everyone said that. My mother said it she kept on talking about ‘When you marry, Pauline’ as though it was something almost inevitable. My aunt said it, when I spent my holidays at her house. At first I used to say it myself thinking, like fools of girls always do, that love meant happiness and that it was bound to come.”

  The bitterness in her tone shocked him, but he said nothing.

  “As I’m telling you these things that I’ve never told anyone, I’d better tell you the whole truth,” said Miss Marchrose, her voice coldly dispassionate all at once. “I am not in the least attractive. No one, except Clarence Isbister, has ever wanted to marry me. Some girls sometimes quite pretty ones are like that. They don’t know what it means to be wanted by anyone.”

  “Stop that,” said Julian. “I can’t stand it. No man has any right to hear this sort of thing. Besides, it’s nonsense. You were never in a position to know any men of your own sort.”

  “I used to tell myself that. But it wasn’t altogether true. There were always plenty of people at my aunt’s house she lived in Hampstead and both my cousins went to a school of art, and had any number of friends, and they were always nice to me, and took me to all their parties when I was with them. That’s how I met Clarence Isbister at the Chelsea Arts Ball. He’d come with a party of people, and one of them knew my cousin Dolly, and she introduced him to me, and he brought Mr. Isbister and said he wanted to know me. He was only a boy twenty-one, I think.”

  “Quite old enough to know his own mind.”

  “Was he? To my dying day,” said Miss Marchrose very simply, “I shall never understand why he fell in love with me. I danced very badly, but he didn’t seem to mind, and asked me to sit out with him instead. We talked, but I don’t think we had anything much in common. I told him I was a teacher of shorthand, having my holiday. He kept beside me the whole evening and asked to be introduced to Dolly and if he might come and see us in Hampstead. Of course she said yes. I always remember Dolly when we got back, after the ball, and how she said, ‘Pauline, that man’s fallen in love with you. And, mark my words, he’s the sort who’d ask one to marry him.’

  “And she was quite right. Dolly was always right about men, though the sort of men she knew weren’t the same sort as Clarence.

  “Well, you know, I was engaged to him. I was twenty-five, and I’d been dreading the future, and it seemed, in a way, the most unexpected chance of escaping everything I was most afraid of. But I don’t know if you’ll ever believe it if I tell you how much I hesitated.”

  “I shall believe anything you tell me. Why did you hesitate?”

  “Because he was twenty-one, and an ass,” replied Miss Marchrose, with the most unexpected candour. “And I didn’t even like him much; he irritated me nearly unbearably sometimes. It was very ungrateful of me, but it seemed to me that he loved me without rhyme or reason he knew nothing whatever about me. And I told him that I didn’t care for him. But I think, partly, the fuss his people made helped to make him want it all the more, just to show them that he would take his own way. They’d always made a baby of him at home, I gathered, and he had suddenly begun to resent it”

  “Yes,” said Julian thoughtfully, “that tallies with the little I remember of the Isbisters, when I met them several years ago. Did you ever stay there?”

  “No. His father and mother were much too angry about it, but he had money of his own and they couldn’t stop it. We were more or less engaged when he had his accident. He’d been at home, and he’d been hoping that his mother was coming round a little, and that perhaps he could take me to see her in London. He was very fond of his mother; but poor Clarence! he was like a little boy talking of the ‘lark ‘it would be to steal a march on them all, and get married at a Registrar’s Office one morning.”

  “Would you have done that?”

  “I thought I would I was back at work by then, and in the hostel again. He used to come and ta
ke me for walks and drives and out to dinner and often and often I was miserable and felt that I was taking everything from him, and giving him nothing at all. And besides “What?”

  “I suppose no one gives up romantic ideals, if they’ve had them, without a struggle,” said Miss Marchrose, speaking very fast.

  “Believe me,” said Julian gently, “it is worth while to remain faithful to one’s romantic ideals. People will tell you that to relinquish them means progress but don’t believe them. One is the poorer all the rest of one’s life for having let them go.”

  “No one else has ever said that to me. I said it to myself sometimes but most of the time I honestly thought that I should be a fool to chuck away what Clarence offered me. And when he had his accident, in the country, I knew nothing about it for a week after it had happened naturally, no one thought of letting me know. I imagined all sorts of things that he’d chucked me, you know. And I was angry and furious and disappointed in spite of everything. But my aunt read about the accident in some paper or other, and wrote to me. And afterwards Clarence’s mother wrote.”

  “She didn’t ask you, then, to give him up?”

  “She didn’t say anything about my being engaged to him at all. But when he was better, still in the nursing-home, he wrote himself, and told me that most likely he would be half-paralysed for the rest of his life. They really thought he would be, then, you know. And he asked me if I thought I could bear it. That was when I first began to realise my own inadequacy. You see, all the time I’d been thinking of him, and how young he was how unlike what I’d sometimes fancied. But when he wrote like that, I knew that I couldn’t even write the only sort of letter that would have been any good. I was worse than useless. I wrote the sort of answer that really meant nothing at all though I put all the sort of affectionate expressions that he liked, and anything and everything I could think of but I didn’t answer one word about our engagement. I couldn’t. I wrote to him every day, and all the while I was trying to gain time, to think it all out.

  “You’ve no idea how difficult it is sometimes just to get time and a place for thinking. There was my work all day, and then I used to fancy I’d have the evening but it was so cold in my room, and I found that I was only thinking about that all the time, and how I could keep my hands warm. And in bed one always imagines one can do all one’s thinking in bed. But one can’t! Things look quite different in the night, somehow much more important I can’t explain; and then all the shorthand outlines one had been making all day on the blackboard seemed to come into the darkness. I’m making it all sound muddled, I know but that’s what it was. Just a muddle, and all the relative values of things seeming to turn upside down.” She paused.

  “I understand,” said Julian.

  “In the end, Clarence wrote again, and said he must release me from the engagement; he couldn’t ask me to marry a man who would most likely never be able to walk again. And I thought, and thought till I was nearly frantic. You see, in a way, it would be the impulse of every woman to feel that she was all the more bound in honour to stick to a man because of that of course, I’m not speaking about those people who love one another, that’s different. But it kept coming over me like a wave how unthinkable it would be to refuse to marry a man after all, after one had promised, just when he’d had that appalling knock from Fate and everything that made his life worth living had been taken away. As though one could never do enough to make up for it all.... But in the end it was that which decided me. You see, I knew that I could never make up and not only that, but that I might make it far, far worse for him. It seemed to me that only a very great love could have been adequate. And I not only didn’t love him, but I knew myself I’m not patient, I’m not an unselfish woman. Heaven only knows what I should be, married to an invalid, to an unfortunate boy who cared for me, and who would be utterly dependent on me for all the things that matter most. And I could have given him nothing I should have been worse than useless to him. There was nothing real between us only just his infatuation and I knew that couldn’t last. I believed then, when I thought of him as a cripple, that if I’d married Clarence, he would have come to hate me. Before he was hurt, I’d meant to risk it and to try and be a good wife to him, though even then I knew I was cheating taking all he could give me, and bringing so little. But afterwards, it seemed to me that it would be a worse cheating to try and meet a tremendous demand like that with just nothing at all. So I wrote and tried to explain it to him, and tell him why I wouldn’t say I’d marry him in spite of it all.”

  For the last time, they reached the end of the seawall and turned, once more facing the blustering wind. In the rapidly gathering twilight Julian could only see that her face was very pale.

  “Well,” she said, with a very small, rather tired laugh, “he didn’t become a cripple for life, and he married somebody else, who was suitable. And I sometimes wonder whether I was a fool.”

  “I don’t think you wonder really,” said Sir Julian steadily. “You know as well as I do that you had been led into a false position, and that you had the courage to act up to your own inmost convictions, instead of making bad worse by yielding to the impulse of a generous self-sacrifice that is bound to spell disaster unless there is the capability of sustained effort to back it. Lacking that capability, as you were aware of lacking it, you were brave enough to set obvious sentiment at defiance.”

  “Oh!” cried Miss Marchrose, in an odd voice between laughter and sadness, “I have never before heard the case for the defence stated like that! Thank you, Sir Julian.”

  They climbed the sandy declivity, tufted with hillocks and boulders almost invisible in the increasing dusk, and reached the narrow and stony road at the top.

  “We are not far from the farm,” said Julian. “You must be tired.”

  “No, I like going down to the sea. I’m glad I met you. I was so angry at the beginning of the afternoon after I’d seen poor little Miss Easter.”

  “I’m not at all surprised.”

  “Do you think,” said Miss Marchrose, somewhat more than doubtfully, “that she is a discreet person?”

  Sir Julian so emphatically thought the contrary that for the moment words almost failed him.

  “Let us hope,” he said at last, rather grimly, “that decency may induce her to hold her tongue on a subject of which she knows nothing whatsoever.”

  It struck him as he spoke that the foundation of the hope was but a frail one, and he wondered whether Miss Marchrose was thinking of Mark Easter as the recipient of his sister’s newly-acquired piece of information.

  If so, she gave no further sign of it, and he took her to the door of the farmhouse almost in silence.

  Julian’s thoughts that evening were occupied almost exclusively with Miss Marchrose. The complete frankness with which she had spoken that afternoon had put before him an extraordinarily new aspect of the self-contained, competent Lady Superintendent of the College. It appeared to him that he very well could imagine for himself all that she had hinted at, rather than described.

  The architect father, the excellent, probably middleclass mother, who had set up a dressmaking business so that her child might live at home, and the youthful spirit of pride and intolerance that had resented the very existence of any such endeavour to shield her. Even the semi-Bohemian, semi-suburban home of the aunt and cousins at Hampstead came very clearly before his mind’s eye. He felt convinced that the aunt was an elder sister of the paternal Marchrose, and that she and “Dolly “had brought much common-sense to bear upon the Clarence equation and that they must have talked the matter over and over, with a great effect of giving frank and disinterested advice.

  And the girl who was tired of her work, who thought herself too good for the inhabitants of her hostel dwelling, whom “no one had ever wanted to marry “it was not altogether wonderful, Julian thought, that she should have stifled her foolish, schoolgirl dreams of romance and accepted all that the infatuated boy of “the sort who asks one to marry
him “had been ready to offer her.

  Her acceptance of him was much less remarkable than her subsequent rejection.

  It never occurred to Julian for an instant to question that she had taken her decisive step from any reason but the one she had given: that of knowing herself unequal to meet the supreme demand suddenly made upon her. Julian remembered the words that he had twice heard applied to that refusal of hers.

  “Of course she didn’t really care for him.”

  The literal truth, Julian reflected. And it was her resolute facing of that truth, in defiance of sentiment as of condemnation from others, that, to Julian’s way of thinking, had redeemed the wrong that she had done to Clarence Isbister no less than to her own inner vision.

  “For when all’s said and done,” said Julian to himself, “what is she but an incurable romanticist, unable to put up with the second best in that which, rightly or wrongly, she rates highest in life? But what one sees ahead for her that’s another matter.”

  Sir Julian, pessimist and idealist both at once, shrugged his shoulders and dismissed the speculation. But it had brought him to the thought of Mark Easter.

  He thought that Mark, ten years ago, would have loved her, and that he would have made her happy. Julian, who had very completely missed happiness himself, still held that in the knowledge of it lay the secret of fulfilment. Mark had known it, knew it still. It lived, fundamental, in himself. But Miss Marchrose should have known it as a gift from without, a sudden revelation, even if enduring in its entirety for a little while only. Julian wondered whether she were destined still to know it, through the man whom he believed should teach her, through Mark Easter, and if so, at what cost?

  He summed it up with his usual, “It’s no business of mine. But I believe she’d think it worth while, at any price and by Heaven, she’s right!”

  Perhaps incurable romanticism was not attributable to Miss Marchrose only.