Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  He looked at her fixedly for a moment, and then went on speaking very slowly, as though giving her time to form to herself some mental image from each of his halting phrases.

  “Think of that meeting between Mary of Bethlehem and her Son. To her He must have been still the little Child of Nazareth, for whom she had no doubt done everything that other mothers do for their little children — whom she had loved and guarded and cherished, whom she had lain in the tiny, poor little manger at Bethlehem, whom she had carried before her on the back of the ass during the flight into Egypt, safe in her arms. During the three years of His ministry no doubt they were much separated,” said the Rector in the same simple, narrative manner, “but there must have been many times when He came back to her — for instance, they were together for the festival at the marriage of Cana. She knew about His work, and I feel sure that they talked about it all together.

  “Think, my dear, what it must have been to a mother to meet her son like that. On His way to be tortured and put to death like a malefactor, the blood and the sweat all streaming down His face, and carrying on His shoulders that heavy Cross. She must have felt then that it would be a million times easier to suffer it all herself, don’t you think? It would have hurt her far less, surely.

  “And she went up the hill, too, my dear, and stood by the Cross and saw it all. And I have always thought to myself — I trust there is nothing irreverent in the idea — that her suffering- must have surpassed Christ’s.

  One knows very well,” said the old Rector, “that it is less painful to endure bodily anguish than to watch it endured by one’s beloved.”

  Lydia uttered a stifled, startled cry.

  “But that is love, to find it easier to endure oneself than to let one’s beloved endure!”

  “It is a stage of love,” the Rector acquiesced gently.

  “And beyond that?” asked Lydia fearfully.

  “Beyond that there is a greater immolation. That of relinquishing the privilege of suffering to another, and accepting the pain of watching that suffering.”

  There is a certain strong sense of inner conviction that strikes, with a pang as that of birth, through the very soul, and which is experienced but once or twice in a lifetime.

  Such a pang struck through Lydia now.

  It was’ this, then, that they had all been trying, in their varying degrees, to tell her.

  Jennie, with her inarticulate, struggling rebelliousness, that held all the blundering ungraciousness of a young, blind thing still unaware of its own objective — Roland Valentine, with his strong, personal resentment on behalf of his love, and his hard, new-world standards of independence; Joyce Damerel, with her narrow, inflexible judgments and personality antagonistic to Lydia’s; old Lady Lucy, with the conventional shibboleths of her creed and her generation, that yet stood for selflessness and high courage; Aunt Beryl, with her simple, matter-of-fact statement of a truth evidently accepted by her without question: “Jennie has to live her own life... it’s more sacrificing yourself that I meant — sacrificing your own feelings, like.”

  They had all meant the same thing — even silly, ill-advised Aunt Evelyn, grumbling at the tardy independence of her middle-aged daughter, and yet acquiescing in it with the rueful finality: “We must just make the best of our shelf now we’re on it.” Even, incredibly enough, poor, forgotten, unaltered Maria Nettleship, with her uneloquently expressed realization of having been spared the strange, paradoxical, immeasurable suffering of love, that in the ultimate analysis meant the relinquishment of suffering to the beloved.

  “That is all, my dear,” said the Rector gently.

  Lydia had heard nothing of what he had been saying, although she had been aware of the kindly, monotonous old voice, talking on and on in careful, halting sentences.

  Her every faculty had been absorbed in the tardy revelation that was at length hers.

  As her mental equilibrium slowly swung back to its habitual poise once more, the fundamentally practical outlook that would always be Lydia’s, asserted itself.

  “But it’s too late now. Jennie is going away from me to-morrow.”

  “To-morrow,” repeated the Rector almost maunderingly.

  Voices became audible in the hall outside, and Lydia knew that the Kennedys had returned.

  She could even conjecture, from the murmur of the maid Alice’s voice that the Rector’s message had been given to them.

  The sounds dispersed and ceased altogether.

  “I must go,” said Lydia. “You’ve been so good to me — I was nearly mad when I came, I think. I can be braver now — I can be brave to-morrow.”

  “To-morrow,” said the Rector again. “Let to-morrow be Jennie’s day.”

  Some glimmering of his meaning brought a flash of irrepressible resentment into the inquiry of Lydia’s gaze.

  “My dear child — my dear Lydia,” said the old man apologetically, “let little Jennie have the foreground to-morrow. Let hers be the bravery, and the sacrifice, and the sorrow, and the gladness. It need matter to no one what anybody else feels, or has to undergo — it need distract no attention from the child. Let it,” said the Rector pleadingly, “let it all form a background.”

  Lydia understood.

  There was a conscious relinquishment, a displayed self-abnegation, that would infallibly attract the sympathy and the compassion of all but the ultra-critical, that might not be hers.

  Very tentatively, perhaps guided more by instinct than by full awareness, the Rector was pointing out to her the infinitely subtle atonement that might yet be hers.

  To-morrow — her wedding-day — to be solely Jennie’s.

  After all, Lydia reflected, with that strange clarity of mind that sometimes follows upon extreme physical exhaustion induced by violent and unaccustomed emotion, those to-morrows when her daily life would be linked with Jennie’s might be few indeed now. If the future was to hold crisis again for Jennie — as who could doubt — it might well be that she would choose to encounter her experiences alone.

  Let to-morrow be Jennie’s, as nothing in her young life had yet been hers.

  And again, another echo of words long since uttered by a more cynical, less kindly voice than that of the Rector, brought a shadowy smile that held no mirth to Lydia’s lips as she walked home through the darkness.

  Grandpapa, who knew, had called her “a situation-snatcher.”

  Again and again, the strange expression, grotesque to the verge of anti-climax, haunted Lydia.

  She thought of it as she entered her own house, and heard the exclamations of the servant Susan.

  “Oh, ma’am, we’ve been wondering where you was) Miss Jennie’s been in quite a way — it’s past dinner-time, and knowing you were walking.”

  “I was detained at Mrs. Kennedy’s,” said Lydia briefly.

  Jennie ran out of the drawing-room.

  “Oh, mama! I’m glad you’ve come — I was getting so worried, thinking of you out in the cold....”

  Jennie stopped nervously, and Lydia knew intuitively that she was remembering her mother’s old, implied claim to the sole prerogative for all such expressions of concern.

  “I stayed longer than I meant to with the Rector.

  He sent you his love.”

  “Did he? Shall we have dinner now, mama, or are you going to change?”

  “I’ll change,” said Lydia, and went slowly upstairs.

  She carefully removed the traces of weeping from her face before she came down again.

  The short evening was a very quiet one. In the drawing-room Jennie sat with her cheek resting upon her hand, gazing into the fire. Once she said rather timidly: “The packing is all finished. Susan and I put the things into my new dressing-bag when I came in this afternoon.”

  “It’s a beautiful bag,” said Lydia absently.

  The dressing-bag had been Roland Valentine’s gift.

  She remembered that she herself had been secretly disappointed, at the time of her marriage, beca
use no one had given her such a thing, and she possessed only the plain, wooden hair brushes and clothes brush, and the celluloid comb, that had figured upon her makeshift dressing-table at Miss Nettleship’s boarding-house.

  And then Uncle George had given her a cheque, privately and almost shamefacedly, explaining that it had nothing whatever to do with the three-tiered silver cakestand that was to figure at the wedding as the joint offering of himself and Aunt Beryl. It was merely a trifle, that he could well afford, with which to supplement her trousseau.

  And Lydia remembered that, in her estimation, the word “trousseau” had immediately become stretched so as to include the smallest and neatest of silver-fitted dressing-bags. The very next day she had successfully found and purchased the treasure.

  She generally had succeeded, Lydia reflected dispassionately. “There’s no such thing as can’t” had been another of Grandpapa’s aphorisms, and his descendant, for many years of her life, had triumphantly proved the axiom in her own person. She had made people like and admire her, she had profited to the full of educational advantages, she had found work and successfully achieved it, had extricated herself unscarred and unblemished from various minor encounters, had made a marriage such as might well have seemed unattainable to Lydia Raymond, working in Madame Elena’s shop, and, even greater achievement, had adequately filled the place open to her by that marriage. The record was to end there, it seemed.

  Lydia felt as utterly incapable of envisaging the rest of her life, the complete aloneness that seemed suddenly to have revealed itself to her, as of speaking aloud her thoughts to Jennie, motionless beside her.

  They talked very little, and, it seemed to Lydia, only of trivialities, although it was evident that Jennie attached some importance to her speculations as to the morrow’s weather, the seating capacity of the little church, the extent to which choir and organist would do credit to the parish.

  “I do want it all to be perfect,” was Jennie’s candid aspiration.

  “I hope it will be,” said Lydia tonelessly. “Are you very happy, Jennie?”

  “Yes,” said Jennie simply, her grey eyes ecstatic.

  Then she looked at her mother, and added wistfully: “I should be perfectly happy if — if only you were, too.”

  Lydia smiled faintly.

  She thought that she could appraise at its true value Jennie’s obvious afterthought.

  Her fatigue was almost overwhelming, and, to her own surprise, she slept heavily all through the night.

  Then it was Jennie’s wedding-day — a clear, grey day, without sunshine and without wind.

  Surprisingly enough, Lydia felt, one went through it with very little feeling of any kind. The emotion that struck most sharply at her consciousness was one of surprise that so long a waiting, so many preparations, should have culminated only in so brief an apotheosis.

  The wedding was over before she had adjusted herself to the expected pang of it, and actually very little impression of it all remained with her.

  The odd epithet that had rung in her ears since the day before rang there still, meaningless, and yet strangely expressive.

  “Situation-snatcher.”

  It even mingled senselessly in the farewells that rang all round her, when Jennie — Jennie Valentine — took her leave of them all with her husband.

  “Good-bye — good luck!”

  “Good-bye, dear Aunt Joyce — Grandmama — everybody — I’ll see you all again in a little while.”

  “Good-bye, Roland. Take care of her.”

  “I will, ma’am — you may be sure of that.”

  Roland was bending over old Lady Lucy’s hand.

  “Look here, dear, I don’t want to hurry you, but you’ve only just time” Colonel Kennedy, of course — always a victim to “train-fever.”

  “Oh!” The bride flung her arms round her mother’s neck.

  “It’s only for a week, mama,” she whispered, consolingly. “Thank you for giving me such a lovely wedding” The chauffeur started the engine of the waiting motor-car, and its throbbing broke on the air and caused Jennie to detach her clasp from her mother.

  But she still faced Lydia with a pleading, puzzled look, her eyes tearful, but, lurking in their grey depths, an unconquerable joyousness.

  “I must say something,” Lydia reflected desperately, dully astonished at her sudden inability to find any words at all.

  A situation-snatcher. No — no — the foolish term was an obsession; she had not been that — not now She bent forward and kissed Jennie once more.

  “Good-bye, my child. You’ll write....”

  The chauffeur held the door of the car open, and Jennie’s foot was on the step.

  She was within it, and her husband was beside her.

  Leaning across him, her fresh face at the lowered window, her bare hand, with the new wedding-ring gleaming upon it, grasped the door.

  A sense of wrenching open, as of vistas of finality, suddenly dispersed Lydia’s apathy, and, at the agonizing glimpse of her own bereft and isolated future, she found, as the car began to move slowly from the door, the habitual, instinctive self-expression that alone could drug her misery.

  “Good-bye, Jennie! I’ll see to everything — don’t worry about letters or packing — I’ll do it all for you whilst you’re away.”

  “Jennie is still waving!” cried Joyce Damerel, and waved back again vigorously.

  But at the same instant Lady Lucy laid her tremulous old hand upon Lydia’s, gazing at her compassionately, and Nathalie Kennedy exclaimed aloud, turning towards her: “Oh, poor Lydia!” The scattered groups of relatives and friends coalesced, surrounding her.

  THE END

  HUMBUG

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  PROLOGUE

  Few novelists, if any, can have escaped the sprightly idiocy of a reproach couched in somewhat the following terms:

  “Aha! I recognized the people in your last book. You can’t deceive ME! The minute I came to that part about the old lady feeding the cat, I saw at once that you meant it for poor Aunt Jane.”

  And also, spoken several semi-tones lower:

  “All the same, it seems rather a shame to have put poor old Grandpapa into a book, now that he’s dead.”

  In an endeavour to forestall these intelligent criticisms, I wish to point out that Philip and Eleanor Stellenthorpe, Miss Melody, Aunt Clotilde, the Hardinges, etc., merely represent types — that I fear to be far from extinct — of amateur educationalists.

  There are no individual indictments in Humbug, the book is not an autobiography, and Lily Stellenthorpe is not an attempt at foisting upon the reader a portrait of the writer as she would fain have herself considered, and as she is not.

  E. M. Delafield.

  I

  Good women know by instinct that the younger generation, more especially when nearly related to themselves, should be equipped to encounter life by the careful and systematic misrepresentation of the more vital aspects of life.

  The mother of Lily and Yvonne Stellenthorpe was a good woman, and had all a good woman’s capacity for the falsification of moral values. Her husband was so constituted that it would not be unjust to describe him in identical terms.

  Lily was so pretty that she did not begin to disappoint her parents seriously until she was seven years old, but Yvonne, who was not pretty and who displayed many less negative disadvantages as well, was a source of dismay to them from her very infancy, when she nearly died of water on the brain.

  “Is little Vonnie quite
like other children, I sometimes wonder?” fearfully whispered Eleanor Stellenthorpe to her husband, when Yvonne was five years old. And Philip Stellenthorpe, with that entire refusal to acknowledge even the possibility of any painful contingency so wholly characteristic of the sentimental, replied, also in a whisper:

  “Hush, my dearest! I can’t bear to hear you say a thing like that.”

  Accordingly nothing of the sort was ever said again, although it became perfectly obvious, in the course of another year or two, that Vonnie was “not quite like other children” — was, in fact, very, very slightly deficient mentally.

  She was a quiet little girl, who could be intensely obstinate, with a hesitation in her always unready speech that hardly amounted to an impediment. She was tall and healthy looking, so that one scarcely realized her head to be too large, as it certainly was, for her body.

  Little Lily loved Yvonne, her senior by two years, with the fierce, protective passion of a mother for a helpless child. It was a love that caused her the most acute suffering of which a sensitive and highly-strung child is capable, and the manifestations of which were sorrowfully described by her parents, in all good faith, as Lily’s naughtiness, and tendency to impertinent interference.

  It was naughty to rage and cry when Vonnie was punished for being obstinate or slow, it was impertinent to stamp and shout: “It’s not fair! It’s not fair!” when Vonnie was left at home, and Father and Mother were kind enough to take Lily out for a treat, such as a neighbouring garden-party, or a wedding, and it was naughtiest of all, when Vonnie was laughed at or admonished for not understanding things quickly, to interfere and cry out: “She can’t help it — she is trying — it isn’t fair to scold her!”