Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  “Who is the lady in charge?”

  “A splendid woman — splendid woman. Miss Melody — Monica Melody. You’ve heard of her, of course — took a university degree, and has written some very sound stuff about education. Mind you, I sounded her very carefully before I sent the kiddies. Ethel and I had really had no idea of sending them to school at all — but they were keen to go. It was their own idea — Dorothy started it.”

  Philip almost groaned.

  “I can hardly understand the idea of young children who actually want to leave home,” he said, considerably understating his case.

  “Your kiddie-widdie wants to go to school too, eh?” said Charlie acutely. “I thought so. I thought so now, I thought so. You take it all too seriously, my dear fellow, far too seriously. It’s very natural, you know. My little girliekins had one another, after all, but Lily hasn’t a soul — not a soul of her own age.”

  “This is a lonely place, as you know,” said Philip stiffly. “There are no girls of her own age within a reasonable distance.”

  “Well, are there any boys then, any boys?”

  “Boys?”

  “Boys — boys of her own age. Boys, boys, boys. If there are no girls for the poor kiddie to play with, I suppose she must play with boys.”

  Philip rose from his chair and made elaborate examination of a slightly smoking lamp.

  By the time that he had meticulously adjusted it, he was able to turn round and speak with calm.

  “I shouldn’t like my little Lily to become a tomboy. She is quite happy in her own little nursery.”

  “Now, what’s the good of talking as though she were still a baby? She’s not a baby — you really must make up your mind to it, my dear chap, that the kiddie isn’t a baby any longer.”

  Philip was quite incapable of making up his mind to anything of the sort, but by sheer force of iteration Charlie Hardinge succeeded in accustoming his mind to the possibility of sending Lily to Bridgecrap.

  To Lily’s dismay, almost as much as to Philip’s own, Charlie asked her in her father’s presence:

  “Wouldn’t you like to go to school, little woman, where my kiddie-widdies are? You’ve often heard of my Dorothy, now, haven’t you? and she’s always asking about you. They’re all three of them at school at Bridgecrap now, as happy as the day is long. You’d like to go to school, wouldn’t you?”

  Lily cast a hasty glance at her father. His eyes did not meet hers, but she knew the profoundedly dejected droop of his head, and was acutely sensitive to the meaning of his silence.

  The atmosphere in which she and her father lived — of perpetually wounded susceptibilities, of suppressed verities, of only half-sincere demonstrations, continued long after they had ceased to be spontaneous — had made of Lily a super-sensitive, unbalanced creature, distrustful of her own instincts, and almost incapable of clear thinking. She had become the victim of muddle, the commonest and the most disastrous foundation upon which to build up a life.

  It now seemed to her that it would be impossible to speak the truth in the face of the obvious pain that it would give her father, while at the same time she was aware of the utter uselessness of telling a lie. To tell a lie, incidentally, was a sin, but then so was it a sin to be heartless and undutiful, and the latter was fraught with the more painful consequences of the two.

  Good-natured Charlie Hardinge saw, without understanding it, the conflict reflected on her small, pale face.

  “Come, come, come, come! You look as though school would do you all the good in the world. My kiddies have got cheeks like roses, and Dorothy holds herself like a grenadier — head up, shoulders back! They think Bridge- crap the jolliest place in the world.”

  “Is it a large school?” asked Lily, evading the point at issue with absolute relief.

  “Thirty girls. Miss Melody has some very nice kiddies there indeed — girls you’re likely to see something of, later on. Very nice girls — girls that Ethel and I thoroughly liked the look of. Walk well, hold themselves well, keen on all sorts of games—”

  It might be said that Philip eventually sent Lily to Bridgecrap in spite of Charlie Hardinge’s recommendations, rather than because of them.

  The thing that really moved him most, although he was quite unaware that it was the determining factor in his decision, was Charlie’s positive assurance that Lily was losing her prettiness.

  “The kiddie’s pale,” said Charlie accusingly. “She used to have a pretty colour when she was a little thing, and now she looks anemic — and there are lines under her eyes. She’s moping, Philip, that’s what it is. Moping. No wonder she holds herself so badly!”

  Philip did not like hearing strictures, that he could not feel to be altogether without foundation, upon the appearance of his daughter.

  It cost him real and severe pain to let her go, although her presence at home gave him no happiness, and he did not attempt to conceal the extent of his sacrifice from Lily.

  “Good-bye, my poor little girl. You shall have your own way, and go right away from home for a time. I hope it may answer, my poor child, and send you back some day to those who love you best in the world. God bless you.”

  This was Philip’s valediction, sending Lily to her new surroundings with a leaden weight of guilt at her heart, and a reproachful picture of a sorrowful and deserted father returning to an empty house.

  Having more or less lost hold upon her own convictions, she felt that, had it been possible, she would gladly have renounced Bridgecrap for ever, and returned to her father.

  In this frame of mind, and with spirit encompassed by the accumulation of false values that had steadily been put before her in one form or another by the two small worlds that she had known — her home and the convent — it may readily be assumed that Lily began her career at Bridgecrap school under a severe handicap.

  The standards there were altogether different from any that she had known yet.

  “Honour” seemed to be the watchword of the place. The girls who excelled in games, or in examinations, did so “for the honour of the school.” Their own personal honour was appealed to, freely and frequently. The convent system of surveillance would have been unthinkable, at Bridgecrap.

  “I want you girls to have just the Public School code of honour that your brothers have” Miss Melody herself often rousingly remarked.

  But although the Bridgecrap girls were to play games like boys, to hold the traditional boys’ views about honour, and, theoretically, to receive an education that should as nearly as possible conform to the pattern of that bestowed upon their brothers, they were never for a moment allowed to view the masculine sex as the superior sex. On the contrary, there was nothing, they were told, that a man could do which a woman could not do better. The old idea that women were not fitted for the professions that had hitherto been closed to them was being disproved every day. Miss Melody hoped to see many of her girls take their degrees, strike out careers for themselves....

  Many of the girls responded enthusiastically, although the majority of them belonged to a class of society in which careers, other than that of matrimony, are scarcely yet tolerated for its daughters; and seldom contemplated by them, schooldays once over. They were enthusiastic, although they did not realize it, largely because of the excellent physical conditions under which they lived.

  Games were played all the year round, at Bridgecrap. There was an elaborate gymnasium, and once a week the girls went to the swimming-baths. Lily was good-naturedly despised by them all for her absolute lack of athletic training or proficiency and total absence of muscle.

  Just as at ten years old she had heard the opinion of her contemporaries at the convent, and been humiliated by it, so at Bridgecrap she met with an equal candour, clothed in the slang that was tolerated, if not actually permitted, from the pupils.

  “Look here, Lily Thingamy, or whatever your name is, you’ll have to stir your stumps a bit. Can’t hold a whole hockey practice up for you, you know.”

>   “Just look at this kid! Why, she hasn’t any more muscle than a kitten. If she weren’t so thin, she’d be disgustingly flabby!”

  “You want backbone, that’s what you want. It makes one sick to see anybody of your age who’s never been taught what ragging means.”

  “My dear kid, it’s no use saying you don’t know the rules of the game. You’ve bally well got to know them. What on earth do you know, if you don’t know anything about cricket?”

  There were things that Lily did know, although she speedily became aware that the knowledge of them would not bring her to honour or triumph amongst the girls, and scarcely even amongst the mistresses. It was not accounted as particularly creditable to her, for instance, that she took a high place in the school, and retained it easily. More might have been made of it, but for the fact that all Miss Cleeve’s conscientious teaching had never embraced the form of cramming known as taking examinations, and at Bridecrap the taking of examinations was made the test of knowledge.

  Consequently, however excellent her half year’s work. Lily seldom succeeded in passing a test, to the form of which she was unaccustomed, and the lists were regularly headed by the captain of the hockey team, who had been at Bridgecrap nearly six years, possessed a capacity for hard work, a well-trained, mechanical memory, and no intellect whatever.

  The mistresses were almost all primarily selected for their proficiency in games, except the French teacher, a Swiss lady who gave all her lessons in broken English.

  The Scripture classes were taken by Miss Melody herself, in each of the three divisions of the school. History was imparted in the usual patchwork of dates, anecdotes, and names famous in Great Britain between the reign of King Alfred the Great and that of Queen Anne, geography was not taught beyond the Upper Third, botany was an extra, natural history ignored, and plain needlework not taught. Mathematics, except in the cases of one or two peculiarly constituted beings, presented itself to the girls, as to the majority of feminine minds, as a compound of meaningless “sums” that, if juggled with by a series of unrelated processes, might “come out right” at the end. Those of the pupils, Lily Stellenthorpe amongst them, who had least liking or aptitude for figures, received, by way of inculcating these, an hour’s private and extra tuition in arithmetic once a week. Almost each one of them still surreptitiously counted upon her fingers, as little children do, believing it to be a form of cheating, but entirely unfamiliar with any more legitimate method of achieving the same result.

  Literature, kept within the realms of English achievement, generally embraced one Shakespearean play thoroughly prepared, out of a school edition, for a coming examination. Shakespearean plays not judged suitable for this purpose, many of the girls did not even know by name. A few had “read Scott, because my young brother had to swot up ‘Woodstock’ last hols.” Scarcely one could connect the name of any classic with that of its author, and all, without exception, would have felt heartily ashamed of being found, under no form of compulsion, to be reading poetry.

  Few, it may be added, ran any such risk.

  The religious principles of the school were Church of England, but religion, to Lily’s relief, did not imply the insistent advertisement of outward and minor pieties that had prevailed at the convent.

  A short daily service was held in the school chapel, and there were prayers morning and evening. Miss Melody held “Sunday talks” for the elder girls, of which the prevalent notes were brightness and broad-mindedness. Free discussions of Bible and Catechism readings were encouraged, with implicit avoidance of certain of the Commandments which apparently were not fit subjects for explanation.

  Indeed, the nuns themselves could have displayed no more silent and resolute modesty than prevailed at Bridgecrap upon subjects that, sooner or later, must become of vital moment to every one of the feminine creatures there being educated.

  V

  Lily formed and retained a very acute impression of the Bridgecrap atmosphere, during the three years that she spent there, but hardly a single personality in the place made any lasting effect upon her memory. Yet it was during those three years that a secret and shamed conviction slowly crystallized within her; they were all what she inwardly called Real Live People, and she herself was only a sham. However much she might try to be like everyone else, sooner or later they would find her out.

  She could not have explained wherein lay the difference, but connected it vaguely with a mysterious undercurrent of romance that ran through her daily life, and of which no one must ever, ever know.

  She thought that no one but herself ever invented long, dramatic stories, that went on from day to day, in which one traversed strange and eventful scenes, always a heroine, always becomingly dressed, and always in full view of a selected audience.

  Lily also supposed herself, with more reason, to be unique in another respect.

  At fifteen, even at sixteen years of age, she still liked playing with toys. Not even such respectable toys as jigsaw puzzles, or ingenious mechanical contrivances — although even such tastes as these must have roused the extreme of scorn in the players of hockey — but terribly, shamefully babyish things — wooden farmyards and tea sets and dolls.

  Above all, dolls.

  Officially, Lily had outgrown dolls at twelve years old. Miss Cleeve had expected it, had taken it for granted. She might, or might not, have known that there was a little wax baby-doll, in long clothes, hidden in Lily’s bedroom.

  But certainly neither she, nor anybody else, knew that the doll Sophy had accompanied Lily to school.

  Worse — Lily played with Sophy in secret and took her into bed with her every night. She had a small bedroom to herself, as had most of the elder girls, and as soon as the governess in charge had paid her brief nightly visit of inspection, and extinguished the light, Lily crept out of bed, felt her way to the chest of drawers, unlocked the bottom drawer and took out the baby-doll from underneath a pile of garments folded at the very back of the drawer.

  She pretended that Sophy had to be hidden away in a cave all day from danger of kidnapping, and that she might only visit her at night. She cuddled her, and talked to her in a whisper, and went to sleep with her in her arms.

  With part of herself, Lily really believed that Sophy could understand what she said to her, and appreciate the caresses lavished upon her. There was never any question of her forgetting to conceal the little doll again in the mornings. She was far too genuinely terrified of being found out.

  It appalled her, occasionally, to think of the effect that discovery might have upon all those Real Live People. Not only the girls, but everyone she had ever known — governesses and servants, and relations like Aunt Clo and Cousin Charlie, or her father. Lily did not really feel that even her mother would have understood, although, like most motherless children, she idealized the memory of the dead woman. The only person with whom she knew that her secret could quite well have been shared, would have been Vonnie.

  They had always played “pretence games” together, and Vonnie would have outgrown them no more than Lily.

  It was partly this consciousness of a guilty secret, of which Lily was unutterably ashamed, that kept her from any intimate friendships at school.

  Like many naturally reserved people, she held an ideal of friendship that included the most complete unreserve, and how could such a thing ever be possible to a person who would have to begin by saying:

  “I am not like other people. I am not a nearly grownup girl like you are — I still play pretence games with myself, although I am sixteen. All the pencils in my pencil-box have names, and ages and characters. I like quite baby toys, and I would much rather play by myself with a box of tin soldiers, than go for a school-picnic, or to see a Shakespearean play. I have got a baby-doll and I talk to her and take her to bed every night, and I always mean to go on, as long as I live.”

  Whenever Lily reached this climax, in her imaginary confession, she always saw the recipient of it, not necessarily as derisive or
scornful, but simply, blankly amazed and completely uncomprehending.

  There could be nobody who would understand in the whole world.

  The whole world, if bounded by the gates of Bridgecrap, certainly justified Lily’s instinct in that respect.

  She liked most of the girls, although she knew in her heart that there was no real link between herself and any one of them. This she put down to that indefinable eccentricity of hers which differentiated her from the rest of the world. She knew that the girls were conscious of it too, although it would not have occurred to them to put it into words.

  The discussion of an abstract question amongst themselves they would have considered to be an affectation, and bad form, although the youthful Briton’s trick of freely making crude personal remarks flourished unchallenged.

  “I say, what a scarlet nose you’ve got!”

  This was entirely permissible and called for neither comment nor reply, other than a casual “Have I — what’s it matter?”

  But Lily always remembered the outcry that followed upon a remark once made by one of the younger pupils:

  “I wonder why one gets that funny feeling sometimes of having done things before? Sort of like that Indian thing Mam’oiselle was reading about the other day — reincarnation or something.”

  “Here! Chuck it, please. That was in a lesson!”

  “Little girls shouldn’t use long words they don’t understand,” said a senior severely.

  “Snub for you, Elizabeth Fulham, showing off like that! Trying to be original, I s’pose! Did you ever hear of such affectation in a Fourth Form kid!”

  Apparently no one ever had and no one ever did again, Elizabeth Fulham subsiding, with a very red face, into silence and subsequent orthodoxy. Certainly no one else at Bridgecrap could fairly be accused of trying to be original. It would have been the unforgivable sin.

  Everyone seemed to copy everyone else.