Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  The Charlie Hardinge loved and mourned by his wife and by their children would have been saddened and frightened by such a cleavage of himself from them. One could imagine him, clinging still to old formula, asking piteously for explanations, calling upon old, familiar trivialities.

  But radiant in the presence of his God, every value he had known upon earth transmuted, without pause or preparation?

  Lily knew that she could accept no such assurance. She remembered, as a little child, asking whether she might pray for her dead mother, and Philip’s gentle teaching that those at rest with God needed no intercession. They were at peace. The child had been comforted, receiving the words with full confidence, because spoken by her father. Now, Lily found that her whole being rejected them, although she desired to believe, and was frightened of her independent judgment as of a sin. The thought of Charlie Hardinge’s soul, as she imagined it to be, deprived of the familiar body and of all the homely accessories to existence, obsessed her. With a sense of furtive guilt. Lily prayed. She prayed that he might not be afraid, or lonely, that someone might be there to help him, and that he might, in some mysterious way, keep in touch with the people that he loved and that loved him, without feeling the added pang of their tears and their sorrow.

  Surely the twenty-five years with Ethel counted for something, even in eternity?

  She fell again into a maze of speculation, that lasted until all was over.

  As the groups of people moved away from the newly- filled grave, Lily saw Janet Hardinge beckoning to her. She went to her, and Janet said wistfully and miserably, as Sylvia had said the day before: “I think it makes it easier if there are people there, Lily. Please come up to the house with us, won’t you?”

  The Hardinges’ house was filled with strange uncles and aunts, most of them entirely unknown to Lily. Tea was laid in the dining-room, and the house, with blinds up- drawn again, and the hall door open, had to Lily’s eyes an odd look as of having been newly relieved from strain.

  She sat between a Hardinge aunt and an uncle whose name she did not know.

  He was a kindly, red-faced man, who shook his head, saying, “Well, well, well,” very much as Charlie Hardinge himself might have said it, and then appeared to dismiss the more serious aspect of the gathering from his conversation, if not altogether from his thoughts.

  “This is a very good room,” he said approvingly, looking round him. “Nice aspect, nice sunny room. They ought to use this room a great deal.”

  On Lily’s other side the Hannigan aunt murmured lugubriously:

  “They must just try and begin life again, and make the best kind of a home they can. That’s what I tell them. They’ve got to begin again, now.”

  And at the other end of the table Lily could hear yet another aunt telling Sylvia that she must be brave and eat some sponge-cake and drink up her tea.

  Mrs. Hardinge did not appear at all.

  Tea was prolonged as though nobody knew what was to be done, once it was over.

  “They ought to go away, and make a thorough break,” said Miss Hannigan to Lily. “Then they could come back here again, you know, and start fresh.”

  “Let me cut you a piece of cake, now,” said her other neighbour.

  She was relieved when a diversion was caused by the maid’s announcement that her husband had come to fetch her.

  Janet had gone upstairs to her mother, but Sylvia embraced Lily convulsively in the hall, and said:

  “Oh, Lily! It’s all so awful, and it goes on and on. I keep feeling that I shall wake up and find it’s all a dream.” A few tears of exhaustion rolled down her little white face as she spoke, but Lily saw that she had literally cried until she could cry no more.

  “Are you all going away for a little while?” she said hesitatingly. “Your aunt said something about it.”

  “They want us to go back to Ireland with them, but Mother thinks they couldn’t really afford three visitors, and such a long journey wouldn’t be worth while for less than a month.”

  “Cousin Ethel wouldn’t go alone, or perhaps with just Janet, and let you come to me — or somewhere else, of course, if you’d rather?”

  “Oh!” cried Sylvia, “we must all keep together now that there are only the three of us left.”

  Lily, as she left the house, violently disputed this sentiment within herself. The longer the three desolate women remained together, just so much the longer would they react upon one another emotionally. Lily wondered whether she was herself heartless in so thinking. It made her seriously uneasy to know that Philip Stellenthorpe would most certainly consider her to be so.

  She felt strangely rebellious, and at the same time ashamed of it.

  “Well,” said Nicholas, “I’m extremely thankful it’s over. I was very much afraid there was going to be an accident, weren’t you?”

  “What — when?”

  “Didn’t you notice? I suppose your little head was somewhere in the clouds again. One of the bearers wasn’t fit for the job — quite unmistakably intoxicated. That’s the worst of having country labourers — one can’t ever be quite sure. I was on thorns, I can tell you.”

  He laughed a little, quite gently, but the sound jarred vaguely upon Lily.

  “Has the whole thing upset you, poor child? It’s the first time, I suppose, you’ve been to a funeral, isn’t it? Well, I must say I hope nothing of that sort will ever be done over me. I should like to be buried at sea.

  He flung back his shoulders, tapping his broad chest with the tips of his fingers.

  “When this ‘poor clay’ is laid by, I must say that I should like to think that its only grave was to be rolling waters, eh, Lily?”

  She was conscious of feeling more utterly out of tune with his mood than ever before.

  “What can it matter, if it isn’t oneself at all? Lots of people say that, about being buried at sea, but it’s no more and no less than being buried anywhere else. What’s the difference?”

  He looked surprised.

  “What’s happened to my holy little saint? I should have thought that the prayers and the consecrated ground and all the rest of it meant a great deal to you, Lily.”

  His kind, good-humoured air of interested curiosity made her regret her own exasperation, of which, however, she knew herself to be far more conscious than he was.

  “Nicholas, tell me really. What do you think has happened to Cousin Charlie’s soul, now?”

  “My dear little girl! We know that he was very kind and good, and — and Almighty God’s mercy...” He stopped, looking disconcerted.

  “What’s come over you, Lily?”

  “I don’t know. Only it all seemed so unreal, somehow, to think of Cousin Charlie perfectly happy in heaven and either not knowing anything at all about the people he loved best, or else, in some miraculous way, able to understand why God should let them suffer, and what good is going to come out of it all, so that he doesn’t mind. It all seems so — so unlike the ordinary sort of person that he was.”

  “Yes,” said Nicholas. “Yes.”

  “How could he suddenly turn into a pure spirit who would find eternal joy in the presence of God?” cried Lily recklessly. “They sang that hymn about heaven, but how can one imagine an ordinary, average, good person suddenly in heaven for ever and ever more, unless they’ve become absolutely different? Surely it’s the same essential spirit that was on earth, that goes on into the next world?”

  “Heaven, eh? Harps and crowns and white robes and wings and all the rest of it, eh, Lily? No, my dear, I can’t say that any of that appeals to me very much.”

  “Do you believe in it, Nicholas?”

  “The old idea of heaven or hell, world without end, Amen? No — yes. I don’t know. No, I can’t say I do.”

  “What do you think happens after death, then?”

  “One goes on, somewhere or other, of course.”

  “Yes.”

  “But I know no more than you do, my dear,” said Nicholas. “I don�
��t suppose we were ever meant to know.”

  Lily was intensely aware that such a conclusion shirked the question entirely, but she said nothing more.

  It was from that time that she began to acknowledge to herself her own inner conflict between loyalty, that she had been taught was the supreme virtue, and the insistent demand of something within herself that claimed a right to independent judgment.

  Reacting to the sense of having been deluded, Lily gradually forsook the habit of going to church, and was relieved when Nicholas made no comment.

  They did not talk about religion. The subject was one which quite evidently held not the slightest interest for Nicholas.

  Lily went once or twice by herself to the Brompton Oratory, but always with a sense of doing something wrong. She also purchased, almost furtively, from a green baize board erected at the bottom of the church, a penny pamphlet purporting to explain the chief difficulties that might be supposed to confront a potential “convert” to the Catholic religion.

  The little book was ungrammatical, written in slipshod English, and was far from even being explicit. But Lily understood that in the Catholic Church was to be found even less liberty of thought than in her own. The Church told her children what to believe, and beyond that they might not look.

  Lily wondered whether such restriction of outlook might not be conducive to great inward peace.

  She thought of it wistfully and sentimentally, but knew very well that she could never now, of her own free will, seek to suppress, unsatisfied, the new spirit of doubt that encompassed her.

  With her faith in the arbitrary presentment of the religion that had been imposed upon her, Lily also lost much of her childish faith in the essential infallibility of her father.

  His religious beliefs were his own, and she did not seek to question them, but she resented more and more having been brought up to suppose that such beliefs could be transmitted wholesale, to be received without question and without analysis. No such acceptance, she thought, could be of enduring value. Discontent possessed her.

  She continued to take pleasure in the many enjoyments that awaited her, but she knew that she was missing happiness.

  Alternately, Lily blamed and pitied herself.

  XVII

  Nicholas Aubray had no idea that he made certain remarks at certain hours of every day, with almost clockwork regularity.

  It was left to his wife to make this discovery and others; her critical faculty developing with every year, the years themselves still too few to prevent her from putting her discoveries into words.

  “You mustn’t be too sharp in your judgment of other people, my dear,” Nicholas said to her from time to time, without any more direct reference to an increasing uneasiness in the atmosphere, that he would not, indeed, admit even to himself.

  Lily, too, had her reticences.

  The shibboleth declared any criticism of another to be uncharitable at best, disloyal at worst. Unthinkable, to criticize one’s husband.

  Lily sought valiantly to ignore that which certain perceptions in her registered almost automatically.

  She loved Nicholas, therefore she must see Nicholas as perfect.

  The effort, in the course of time, became considerable, and very wearying.

  She lived in a constant searching of spirit, fond of Nicholas and grateful to him when he petted her, touched by his many thoughtfulnesses and frequent gifts, intensely desirous of believing that she loved him, and irritated almost — although never quite — to the point of protesting aloud when he sang out of tune.

  Nicholas sang very often, from exuberance of spirits, and it was almost always out of tune.

  He had a singular faculty for remembering the words of popular musical-comedy songs, and no ability at all to retain the simplest of airs correctly.

  “I say, Lily, that was a catchy sort of thing we heard last night.”

  “Oh yes, I know.”

  Lily spoke hurriedly, trying to escape from the conviction that she was in dread lest Nicholas should attempt to reproduce the tune that he had liked.

  “The one that girl sang in the second act — very fine girl, tool.”

  His tone was jocosely significant, and although such humorous allusions did not really amuse her in the least, Lily eagerly caught at this one.

  “I saw you look at her, Nicholas! She’s rather your type, isn’t she?”

  “What do you mean by my type, madam, I should like to know? How do you know I’ve got a type, eh?”

  He began to laugh spasmodically, and Lily’s lips mechanically took on the curves of the amusement that she did not share.

  “My type, indeed! Ha, ha!”

  Lily’s meaningless laughter echoed his genuine mirth. Then he began to hum:

  “In Lou-is-ville — I’ve left my little home, The folk I used to know In Lou-is-ville — where — something — something — roam.

  Tra-la-la-la-la In Lou-is-ville.”

  “Catchy sort of tune, that.”

  “Oh yes. Would you like me to get the score?”

  “Not unless you want it yourself. I thought that was pretty nearly the only good thing in it, didn’t you? Besides, what do you want with a score when you’ve got a husband who can reproduce it note for note to you next morning? Ah — hum!”

  Nicholas cleared his throat and expanded his chest in facetious burlesquing of an operatic performance.

  “In Louisville! I’ve left my little home.”

  He sang it through again, with mock dramatic emphasis and gesticulation, and Lily dug her nails into the palms of her hands and stretched her mouth into a fixed smile.

  She was unspeakably disgusted at herself.

  Why should she mind these things? And why, minding them, should not love for Nicholas make her minding of no account?

  For she still maintained to herself that she loved Nicholas.

  That which perplexed her perhaps most was her own increasing tendency to dwell upon a recollection that for several years now had been almost altogether obsured — Vonnie.

  The memory of her childish championship of Vonnie, the sick despair of knowing herself to be better loved and cared for than was Vonnie, the pain that she had suffered through Vonnie’s pain — all recurred to her with an odd sense of contrast.

  How could one compare the two? The kindly derision of common sense sounded in her imagination, insensibly clothing itself in the accents of that embodiment of common sense, Monica Melody. “Childie, childie, think what you’re saying. Why, how can you compare the two, Lily? The affection of a little child for another little child, and the love of a woman for her husband! Oh Lily, Lily!”

  Miss Melody would certainly conclude with mellow, tolerant laughter.

  And yet the comparison existed, and remained insistent.

  She would never suffer for Nicholas as she had suffered for Vonnie.

  “Perhaps I am better balanced now.” Lily wistfully suggested to herself, but the suggestion carried no conviction.

  She found the phrase that elucidated the question for her almost by chance:

  To the limit of capacity.

  Quite involuntarily, the application leaped to her mind.

  She had loved Vonnie to the limit of capacity. Her feeling for Nicholas did not extend even to the first outposts of that limit.

  But she loved him, nevertheless. It was a question of degree.

  Lily stifled the illuminating thought, accused herself of the extreme of disloyalty, and watched eagerly for signs in herself that she did love Nicholas. That he loved her, she could not doubt, and the thought filled her with remorseful gratitude. It still surprised and touched her that her husband, unlike her father, should so seldom find fault with her either directly or by implication, and that he should share and enjoy her enjoyment of almost every form of entertainment.

  He listened, with obvious pleasure and interest, to everything she said, and no subject was too trivial for discussion. He seemed never to be blasé or indifferent. Occa
sionally, only, he was out of temper or depressed, when his already long face would become indescribably elongated, and his conversation monosyllabic.

  Lily found that if she asked him a direct question, on such occasions, he would gravely and curtly reply: “Why should anything be the matter?” after the manner of a sulky child that desires to draw attention to its sulks but is too proud to give a reason for them. If she said nothing, he either recovered himself quickly, or spoke, with a sort of remote, detached condemnation, of the circumstance that had annoyed him. He never admitted to a trivial disturbance of mind, but sometimes, with transparent self-satisfaction, he would lay claim to outbursts of stupendous fury.

  “I’m afraid I lost my temper pretty thoroughly to-day. The fellow won’t try that game on again. He got my monkey up, and I let him have it straight. Hit out straight from the shoulder. I told him exactly what I thought of him, and you should have seen his face, Lily — the poor little devil was green. I don’t remember, word for word, exactly what I said, but I fancy I let him have it pretty straight. I don’t mince matters when my blood’s up. Mind you, Lily, a temper like mine’s no joke. I’ve always been afraid of going too far, one of these days.” He looked at her as though for confirmation, and she said, knowing that it would please him:

  “It’s a fault on the right side, I suppose. A man who hasn’t got a temper doesn’t get very far, I imagine.”

  “You’re right there, my dear. I shouldn’t be where I am now if I hadn’t been able to put the fear of God into those who work for me, from time to time.”

  Nicholas laughed.

  “You’ve never seen me angry, my dear, and I hope you never will.”

  “Only over a collar-stud,” observed Lily, with defective tact.

  The mild joke was not at all a successful one.

  Nicholas’s hatchet face lengthened immediately and grew inordinately grave.

  “I’m talking about necessary anger, my dear girl, the sort of wrath that’s pretty nearly indispensable when you’re dealing with men and women, if you want to get the best out of them. Weaklings have got to be made to feel that they’re up against strength. If a man’s strong, he’s got to have a temper.”