Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  “Oh, let me fetch Nurse,” sobbed Lily, shaking from head to foot.

  Vonnie shook her head very slightly in obstinate negative, and the movement forced a gasping sound of pain from her.

  It was always the same thing.

  Vonnie would not tell about her earache when it began because she was afraid of a fuss, and she would not tell about it afterwards for fear of being scolded because she had not “said” sooner. If Lily told instead of her, then it was naughty and interfering, and very likely disbelieved besides, in the face of Vonnie’s stoical denials. There was no hope anywhere, and the awful night would never, never end.

  Lily sat up too, because it was impossible to lie down while Vonnie crouched there, racked with pain; and tense, angry appeals that she thought of as prayers, raced through her mind.

  “Make her go to sleep — it’s nothing to You to send her off to sleep — You can’t let her go on like this all night.... It’s cruel to punish Vonnie too, as well as me.... Why can’t You send the earache to me, when it’s me You want to punish?”

  But God, who knew everything, would never be taken in by an argument of that sort, however plausible it might have been to the ears of human justice. Lily knew very well that God perfectly understood how, in some strange, naughty way that invariably made the authorities angry, Vonnie’s sufferings hurt Lily far more acutely than her own could ever have done. And, of course, He took advantage of His knowledge whenever she had to be punished. Lily had even, sometimes, reflected with a forlorn kind of abstract justice, that this was fair enough. If He didn’t so ingeniously choose the very way that hurt most, it wouldn’t be a real punishment.

  But, within sight and sound of Vonnie’s torture tonight, she had no consideration for abstract justice.

  She did what she had very seldom done before, and went to fetch the nurse.

  Nurse was in bed and, to Lily’s astonishment, had not yet gone to sleep.

  “Did Miss Vonnie ask you to come for me?” she demanded suspiciously.

  Lily had anticipated the question, which was always the preliminary, in the nursery, to an emphatic recommendation to mind her own business and leave Miss Vonnie to mind hers.

  “Yes, she did,” said Lily, feeling herself choke. God could hardly do much more than He had done already, even to a liar, and everything but present relief had become worthless of consideration.

  “Now mind, if you’ve got me out of bed for nothing” said Nurse threateningly. But she spoke in quite a kind voice, and put on her dressing-gown, and lit a candle. “Good gracious, child, why are you so white?” she asked Lily and took her hand protectingly and held it all the way to the night nursery.

  Vonnie’s moans were much louder now, and Lily, looking up anxiously at Nurse, felt that she must, for once, accept Vonnie’s illness at its own valuation, and not at the slighting one that Vonnie herself would fain give to it.

  “Now then, Miss Vonnie dear, what’s all this?”

  Nurse took Vonnie’s hands down from her head. The odd look round Vonnie’s eyes that had been so nearly imperceptible early in the evening had deepened in a very strange way, and after one glance at her small, leaden- coloured face, Nurse’s manner changed altogether.

  She went to the little medicine-cupboard high up on the wall, and lit the spirit-lamp, and heated water and put into it some sweet-smelling oil out of a green bottle. She put Vonnie’s dressing-gown round her and a large shawl over that, and sat down in a low chair and took Vonnie on to her lap. Then she dipped some cotton-wool into the warm oil and put it into each car, and all the time she was coaxing and pitying Vonnie with kind, soothing words.

  Lily never forgot the exquisite ecstasy of relief with which she watched and heard it all from her own bed in the corner. The violent reaction from her state of nervous anguish was so great that she began to cry and sob quite quietly, scarcely knowing that she was doing so.

  Vonnie’s moaning ceased almost at once, and her whole attitude relaxed, and presently Nurse got up and put her gently down in the low chair, with a pillow behind her.

  “I shall be back directly,” she whispered reassuringly to Lily, opening the door very softly.

  She came back with their mother.

  “She’s dropped off now. I expect she’ll sleep, poor little thing — she’s worn out with the pain,” said Nurse as they looked down at unconscious Vonnie.

  “Poor child! Well, Nurse, if you’ll move in here for to-night, I’ll take Miss Lily into my room.”

  “Going to sleep with Mother” was a treat. Lily knew very well that if she had been the one to be ill, she would have been moved into her mother’s room long since.

  But nothing mattered, now that Vonnie was sleeping peacefully, and being taken care of by a kind, omnipotent grown-up person.

  When Lily was lying snugly between the soft, scented sheets in her mother’s enormous bed, with the pale pink quilt spread across it, her mother came and knelt beside her and put her arms round her.

  “Go to sleep quickly, my pet. I shall be in bed directly. I’ve only got to take off my dressing-gown. Settle down comfily, now.”

  A delicious, drowsy feeling invaded Lily, and she turned over obediently on her side.

  “Why, my poor chicken, you’ve been crying! There’s nothing for you to cry about. Did you have a bad dream?”

  “Vonnie had earache,” murmured Lily, half asleep, and heard without surprise her mother’s amused, uncomprehending laugh and answer:

  “Why, you silly little goose, it was poor Vonnie who had earache, not you! There was nothing for you to cry about! You must have been dreaming.”

  II

  Lily never knew whether the night that she had fetched Nurse to come to Vonnie had witnessed the culminating episode in that series of giant nightmares, Vonnie’s earaches — or whether it only stood out in her memory from the acute sensation of exquisite relief that it had finally afforded her.

  At all events, it was after one of the earache nights that a dreadful thought first came to her.

  What a good thing it would be if Vonnie were to die! Lily was horrified at her own wickedness, but dwelt upon this solution with a sort of unwilling fascination.

  She knew instinctively that Vonnie would never grow up like other people — would never be able either to take care of herself, or to find people who would take care of her. She would never be very happy, she would always have earache, and be left out of treats, and chidden for being so slow.

  Whereas, if Vonnie died, there was an end of earache, of scoldings, of everything that was unkind or unfair. She would go to Heaven, where everybody was perfectly happy for ever, and Lily herself would never mind anything again, if once she knew for certain that Vonnie was happy and taken care of, even though out of sight. It seemed a very simple solution, although Cod, to say nothing of Father and Mother, would certainly be very angry with her for thinking of such a thing.

  Lily, affrighted, put the idea away from her, although it came back again when she once overheard Aunt Clo emphatically remarking that Vonnie would certainly never live to grow up.

  Lily did not know of the devastating effect produced by Aunt Clo’s unsolicited pronouncement.

  “That child won’t live to grow up.” said Miss Clotilde Stellenthorpe defiantly.

  “Good heavens, Clo, what a thing to say in front of her own mother!”

  Eleanor was half indignant and half tearful.

  “Mark my words,” said Aunt Clo inexorably.

  Her brother Philip looked at her in pained rebuke.

  “I don’t like to hear you say a thing like that, Clo. It’s — it’s heartless. Poor little Vonnie!”

  “But no! There is nothing heartless about it. You and Eleanor refuse to face facts, my poor Philip. Why, you have only to look at Vonnie to see that she isn’t.”

  Philip winced so painfully, holding up his hand as though in protest, that she broke off.

  “But just compare her with Lily, who is two years younger! Look at the
way Lily chatters, and the too, too precocious things she says, and the way she can read and play her little pieces on the piano! Not that I approve of the w-ay you exploit the child, my Eleanor. It’s very bad for her, alas! and I can see that she thinks herself tremendously superior to poor little Vonnie, always left out of everything.”

  “We have always been devoted to both our little children, Clo,” said Philip gravely. “It may be rather a temptation to take Lily about with us more than is quite good for her — she is a very pretty little mite, and one likes to hear her chatter, and to make her happy. But we love both our dear little girls equally, as they know very well.”

  It was perfectly true that the dear little girls had, at least, often been told that this was so, and neither Philip nor his wife ever admitted the possibility that their children might have come to draw other conclusions for themselves.

  “Vonnie doesn’t really enjoy being taken about. I’ve made a few little experiments with her, quite often, and they’ve never been a great success,” observed Eleanor.

  Her idolatry of her younger child had given her occasional moments of insight and she did not possess to the full her husband’s monumental capacity for evading the acknowledgment of painful or unpleasant facts. A wistful desire for self-justification sometimes possessed her, and a complete absence of judgment led her to ask it from the quarter in which she was least likely to receive it.

  “Why do you say things like that, Clo dear? Vonnie is very happy and well taken care of in the nursery. You don’t think there’s any jealousy between them?”

  “I can hardly credit that Vonnie likes seeing her younger sister always preferred to herself,” said Aunt Clo, shrugging her shoulders. “It would scarcely be human nature.”

  She was merely making application of a rule that she supposed to be general, to a particular case of which she knew nothing.

  Vonnie had never in her life been jealous of Lily’s privileges — and Lily herself bitterly resented them.

  But Aunt Clo, who so scornfully accused her brother and sister-in-law of refusing to face facts, was quite determined that Vonnie was jealous because she was neglected, and that Lily was complacently ready to rob her sister of her rights as eldest.

  Even Aunt Clo, however, never in so many words said that Vonnie’s intellect was in any way feeble. She only continued to repeat that the child would most certainly never live to grow up, and since neither Eleanor nor Philip would conceivably have allowed, even in their inmost thoughts, that to die might prove very much easier for Vonnie than to live, Miss Stellenthorpe was not again asked to stay with them.

  There was no break, or open quarrel — an open quarrel with Philip Stellenthorpe would have been a sheer impossibility — and the nearest that Philip ever allowed himself to go to an analysis of the disagreeable situation was to say to his wife:

  “Poor Clo isn’t very sympathetic in her manner, especially on subjects she doesn’t quite understand, like the bringing-up of children. Perhaps, dear, we’ll wait a little while before having her here again.”

  Eleanor understood, and the little while became of quite indefinite duration, without anybody’s having to put a distressing resolution into painful words.

  As it would have been “disloyal” to admit that a near relation could be anything but loved and admired, Lily and Vonnie were only told, as was indeed the truth, that Aunt Clo lived a great deal abroad. Lily, observant and critical, could, however, perfectly well have told the date at which Father and Mother began always to speak of her absent relative as “your poor Aunt Clo” — and the adjective was to her perfectly indicative of some obscure condemnation.

  Lily had intuitions about the grown-up people about her, especially her father and mother, of which they appeared to be quite unaware.

  She knew that something, or someone, had made them at last realize that Vonnie’s slowness and her rather inarticulate way of speaking were not so many manifestations of naughtiness on her part. They would have preferred it, Lily concluded, if these things had been naughtiness. In some incomprehensible way, they resented having to be anxious about Vonnie.

  Sometimes, when Mother spoke to Vonnie sharply for the second or third time and Vonnie only looked at her dumbly with that scared, bewildered gaze which meant that she had not been “paying attention,” Father and Mother would exchange a look that Lily indefinably resented.

  Then Mother would compress her lips, as though exercising great control over herself, and turn away without speaking.

  And Father sometimes said, in that grave, gentle voice which both children perfectly well knew to mean profound vexation:

  “Run away and play, little Vonnie. You needn’t stay in the drawing-room any more. My Lily can come and look at pictures, if she likes. You can trot off and enjoy yourself in the nursery.”

  Lily never dared to ask whether she might go to the nursery too, although she knew that Vonnie, humiliated and dejected by these kind words which she was supposed to accept unquestioning!)’ at their spoken value, would only sit by herself on the nursery oil-cloth, quite still, slowly tracing patterns with her finger on the floor. If Lily had been with her, they would have played their own private games with the dolls or the marbles, and have been happy together.

  But Lily had, instead, to accept her own undesired privileges, and even before she was nine years old, it had grown to be a moral impossibility for her to brave her parents’ shocked grief and disappointment by displaying to them that ungracious candour which they would have felt to be ungrateful disloyalty.

  This moral cowardice Lily, inevitably, grew to look upon as righteousness.

  She was conforming to the standard set before her.

  It was not a very wide-embracing standard, but it was a very unyielding one. It gave one to understand, without adducing any reason or explanation for its arbitrary condemnations, that certain things constituted naughtiness. Chief amongst these, of course, was the crime of “disloyalty,” which equally comprised any implied distrust — a spoken one was out of the question — of any opinion, decision, act, word, or deed emanating from Father or Mother, and the ungraciousness of admitting to possible disappointment or fatigue when taken anywhere by Father or Mother. Sometimes, on such an occasion, one of them might enquire of Lily: “Are you tired, my pet?” and in some mysterious way it was not telling a story to reply joyfully: “Oh, no, not a bit!” instead of saying, as was probably the case, “Oh, yes, I am!” It was only doing what was expected of one, and anything else would have been “disloyal.”

  Telling stories, however, was most undoubtedly a form of naughtiness in any other connection. Lily knew, and was often told, that she was an untruthful child. The accusation was entirely deserved, and as no distinction was ever drawn between the casual untruthfulness of any sensitive and imaginative child, and the fundamental insincerity of a mentally dishonest one, Lily remained persuaded that she was of an incurably deceitful disposition.

  She was always profoundly ashamed when she had told a lie, which she often did when she wanted to draw attention to herself or to make people believe her of some great importance or merit.

  But she was not really exhilarated or proud of herself, although she tried to persuade herself that she was, when her mother or the governess praised her for confessing to some breakage, or piece of accidental mischief.

  “That’s a brave little girl, to be honest!” and “No one is ever punished who tells the truth at once.”

  Lily could not feel that she had really been very brave or very honest. That wasn’t the sort of thing about which it would ever have occurred to her to tell a lie. She knew perfectly well that she was never punished on account of even careless damage, and there was a sort of lurking self-importance that was far from unpleasant, in making elaborate confession of the misdeed, with an artistic display of all the shame and nervousness that she was supposed to be enduring.

  It was, in fact, rather like being praised for not crying at the dentist. Mere vanity was ent
irely responsible for Lily’s courage on such occasions, and a desire to be told how brave she was. It would have mortified her self-esteem acutely, had she shed tears. However, she was always greatly praised for being so courageous, whereas nothing much was ever said about Vonnie’s endurance, because Vonnie always remarked stolidly on receipt of the customary sixpence: “But it didn’t hurt me much, and I didn’t want to cry!”

  Lily would have been incapable of so belittling her own achievement, but she was capable of a genuine appreciation, and even generous envy, for Vonnie’s conscientiousness — which was more than Eleanor Stellenthorpe was. Such an ungracious reception of the parental praises and sixpences very nearly amounted to disloyalty, in her unexpressed opinion.

  Her disapprobation was only felt by her children — it was seldom put into words.

  Philip Stellenthorpe and anything in the nature of “scoldings” were unthinkable under the same roof, and Eleanor intensely disliked the system of punishment by which her own childhood had been made miserable.

  Neither realized in the slightest degree that the atmosphere of oppressive disapproval and hurt feeling which they contrived wordlessly to diffuse whenever their children fell short of the ideal formed for them, caused infinitely greater suffering to both than the severest punishment would have done.

  Occasionally, when Lily fell into one of the tempestuous crying fits sorrowfully alluded to as “temper,” and entirely unrecognized as the inevitable concomitant of a highly wrought nervous organization forced into an unnatural condition of life, Eleanor would talk to her long and seriously. She was afraid that her little Lily had a morbid disposition.

  “What is morbid?” Grievance-making. Did Lily realize what an extraordinarily happy little girl she ought to be? Yes — Lily, sobbing and crying in an access of uncontrollable misery, did know how very, very happy she ought to be — truly she did. Everything in the world to make her happy, her mother sadly repeated. Then she told Lily something about her own childish days.