Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  “Cest le ton qui fait la musique.”

  It was the teacher, not the teaching, that mattered. “Some day, I shall love,” thought Lily.

  And she reflected coldly: “It is at least possible, if not probable. Am I to pretend to myself that such a thing is out of the question, because I am married? Why, I don’t even know what I should do — whether I might not leave Nicholas altogether. And break his heart — oh, Nicholas!”

  She was fond of him, she knew that she would always be fond of him. It would be impossible to her to be ruthless where Nicholas was concerned, she thought, and next moment she told herself fiercely that her opportunity had come, that she would divorce him, and find herself free to begin life again, alone.

  It was just. Nicholas had given her just cause.

  For a little while Lily thought that the conflict lay, as so often, between sincerity and sentiment.

  Then illumination came to her, scaring and vivid.

  Was the freedom for which she looked to be based upon yet another artificial value? Was she to exact from Nicholas a supreme penalty for that which had been powerless to hurt her?

  Philip Stellenthorpe might say that there was one reason for which the tie of marriage might be set aside. Nicholas himself, piteously bewildered, might admit technical justification for such penalization, the world might condemn Nicholas and be right in so doing by the letter of the law, but the wife of Nicholas knew that in the spirit he had not sinned against her, and that she had no right to turn against himself his sin of the body for her own ends.

  “If I loved him I should forgive him. Not loving him, there is no real question of forgiveness at all. It’s the old test — the applying of a general law to a particular case — taking one’s values ready-made — the old, old humbug.”

  The last, comforting falsity fell from her, and she saw the ultimate presentment of all the truth that she would ever know, in stark finality.

  She could build for herself no freedom upon a foundation of pretence.

  XXII

  The unendurable circumstance remains unaltered. The alteration is in the soul that suffers.

  Lily’s relation with Nicholas was largely founded, as she had told herself, upon pretence, and the rapture of complete sincerity could never be hers. But she told him, again and again, in reply to his impassioned protestations of gratitude, that she felt herself entitled to assume no attitude of forgiveness.

  “It wasn’t for the — the sin,” she said painfully, “that I thought of divorce. It would only have been a pretext—”

  Nicholas gazed at her as tenderly as uncomprehendingly.

  “Poor darling, you’ve been more generous than words can say. And you do understand a little, Lily? It would never, never have happened if my little wife hadn’t been away from me for such a long while.”

  “You do need me, Nicholas?”

  “Need you? By Jove. I should think I do,” cried Nicholas, in the old buoyant, explosive way. She knew it to be true.

  Nicholas had given her his love, and it would be hers always. He depended upon her, he trusted her. She had given him herself, cheated of her right to know the possibilities in herself, the possibilities in life; cheated into accepting her values ready-made. But the gift had been made.

  Lily knew that never, to gratify her aching longing for the freedom that only Truth can give, could she see herself justified in seeking to force upon Nicholas a vision of the facts as she saw them.

  By degrees that to herself were imperceptible, she put behind her the old, childish visions that had typified themselves to her under the names of Flames and Carnations. Only her faith in that to which she personally relinquished all claim, remained unimpaired, and destined to endure.

  For a long while bitterness tinged her thoughts of Philip.

  It was he to whom the utter faith of her impressionable childhood had been given, he who, thinking it love, had again and again deceived her.

  It was out of the hard, smiling revolt behind which Kenneth entrenched himself more and more securely and triumphantly against their father, that Lily’s softening came at last.

  He had failed his children, but had they not failed him? Vonnie, who had died, was the child that had hurt and perplexed Philip Stellenthorpe least; the child that he had loved least. When Lily knew that she might herself be about to have a child, the last resentment against her father was slowly eliminated from her heart.

  A strange certainty possessed her that this time the blossom would come to maturity.

  Of later years, she had hoped never to have a child, asking herself:

  “Why should I want to bring a child into the world, for it to suffer as I suffer?”

  Slowly Time had transmuted that cry into a dawning hope that because she had suffered, her child might suffer less.

  The little, normal, everyday things of life slipped past, and bore away with them the sense of crisis from Lily and Nicholas.

  It was all but incredible that there had ever been a crisis.

  The figures that for a little while had seemed to be only shades, peopling a dream world, became real once more.

  Aunt Clo, after her fashion, reappeared abruptly from some labyrinthine tangle of lives unknown, from which her hand, and seemingly hers only, could evolve a clue.

  “Ecco! my little one,” said she. “I hardly thought that we should meet again thus. Eheu fugaces!”

  Her tone was not free from reproach.

  “I am very glad that you have come,” said Lily.

  Her aunt’s head was graciously bent in acknowledgment towards her.

  “I also. There was a time, my Lily, when I thought that you might wish to claim my help — such help as my knowledge of Life enables me to give. You know, perhaps better than most, whether I grudge the spending of myself upon others.”

  Aunt Clo gave a melancholy smile at the mere supposition of anything so far removed from fact.

  “Why, you ask me, did I not come forward, did I not speak freely and frankly, as is ever my wont? Ahimé! la verité, pour moi, c’est tout! Why did I not cast the bulwark of my strength before so frail a fortress, one so near capitulation? I reply, Because I am proud. Yes! c’est moi qui vous le dit, child. I am deeply, intimately, passionately proud.”

  Aunt Clo’s head sank upon her breast at the admission, but very soon she raised it again and once more faced the world.

  Her handsome face expressed a sort of joyous determination.

  “Can I regret it, you ask me? No, little one! J’ai l’attic fière, it is all too true, but mine is not an ignoble pride. Rather is it a pride of race, a pride of character, that has upborne me through seas far rougher than you, I trust, will ever know. It is true, I cannot deny, that it has made me suffer, but it is through suffering that I have learnt to be strong.”

  Aunt Clo paused again, and looked very strong indeed.

  “Many have turned to me in their need, as you know. I do not think that I have failed any. Indeed, no. But where confidence is not given. I cannot seek it. For I am proud, Lily. Proud and intensely reserved.”

  It was, as ever, a little difficult to rise to Aunt Clo’s level.

  “I am happier than I was last time you came. Aunt Clo. And I think Nicholas is very happy; especially now.”

  “Especially?”

  “I am going to have a child,” said Lily.

  Aunt Clo gazed at her niece for a full moment before raising her eyebrows and emphasizing her appreciation of the facts by a slow series of words that had a curious air of well-weighed significance.

  “Aha! The domesticities have claimed you.”

  “I wanted you to know. I knew you would be glad, really, for my sake.”

  Miss Stellenthorpe rose, erect and very tall, placed a hand upon either of Lily’s shoulders, and kissed her brow with solemnity.

  She made no further reference to Lily’s confidence until the moment of her departure.

  “Child,” she then said, turning upon the threshold in
farewell. “Child! Let me know, in the midst of the sad task to which I go — a tangled skein to be unravelled, my Lily — let me hear that you have given a man-child to the world.”

  There were others also who, possibly for less altruistic motives than Miss Stellenthorpe’s, hoped that Lily’s child would be a son.

  Ethel Hardinge delivered herself of many prudent and matronly exhortations.

  “And I do hope you’ll have a boy, dear. I was dreadfully disappointed when all my three were girls, and so was poor dear Charlie, though he was much too kind to say so. And then Dorothy’s first two, dear little darling things, though I wouldn’t change them for the world — still, you know how delighted she was when little Charles appeared. There is something about having a son, you know, Lily.”

  Lily, thoroughly understanding this cryptic statement, agreed to it, but she said also:

  “Nicholas doesn’t mind which it is, if only we really have a child, and I don’t think I could be disappointed, so long as it lived.”

  “Ah, poor little thing. But you’ll see, Lily dear, everything is going to be all right this time. Only you must take great care of yourself. You’ve no mother, and you won’t mind a little advice from me, will you? Tell me dear, do you...”

  Cousin Ethel was very kind, and intensely interested, full of counsels that related to the physiological aspect of the situation.

  Philip Stellenthorpe desired a grandson. He told Lily sadly that his own son was causing him great anxiety.

  “He sometimes almost seems to be growing up a heartless little boy.”

  “You know. Father, Kenneth isn’t really a little boy at all, now.”

  “He will always be a little boy to me,” returned her father with simplicity. “When, please God, you have your own child, Lily, you’ll know that’s one of the sad and beautiful things about the parents of a child. To them, he never really grows up. They always see him as the dear little baby they took care of, and petted, and loved.”

  “Kenneth wouldn’t like that, you know, Father. He doesn’t really want to be taken care of, now. I think, in fact, that he resents being treated as though he were still a child.”

  “It’s very ungrateful,” said Philip, shaking his head. “Ungrateful and heartless. You were not like that, my little Lily.”

  “I was a girl, not a boy.”

  She hesitated, and then the thought of Kenneth made her speak.

  “But, Father, sometimes I’ve wished that I was rather more like Kenneth. He’s honest, anyway. He wants to develop into an individual with characteristics and opinions and beliefs of his own. I know Kenneth is often conceited and — and tiresome, but I don’t really think he’s heartless.”

  “Then what is he, pray? What is his persistent refusal to confide in me, to follow the advice that I’m only too ready to give him, to trust me?”

  “I suppose he wants to feel that he belongs to himself.”

  “What nonsense!” Philip was roused to the extent of making use of a colloquialism. “A child, in one sense, must always belong to the parents who brought him into the world. Why, he owes them everything — life itself. The opinions and beliefs that you talk about, can only come to him through the things they teach him or cause him to be taught.”

  “That,” said Lily, “is why it seems to me that so many of us, of his generation, are handicapped. I mean that we were taught along certain grooves, and never told to look beyond. Never told that Truth is not to be handed on, ready-made, but must be won at individual cost. And never told, cither, that free-will is the right of every human soul, and that all teaching is only preliminary to the exercise of that free will.” She stopped, deeply in earnest, and gazed at her father.

  “I should like my child,” she said timidly, “to feel always that he belongs to himself. That we, Nicholas and I, can only tell him that we ourselves have learnt such and such things, and then leave him also to learn them by his own experience. I shouldn’t want him to take his beliefs on trust from us — or from anybody. We are not omniscient. How can we tell the aspect that the Truth is to wear for him? Only he can find that out, perhaps at the cost of many mistakes. But it seems to me that the knowledge we have won for ourselves must be a more real and lasting thing than the ready-made standards of other people.”

  Philip shook his grey head, and Lily saw that his worn face looked more deeply lined.

  “My poor little girl, you will see it all very differently when you have your child.”

  With all the intensity that was in her, Lily inwardly resolved that never, through weakness or faltering of hers, should that prophecy be realized. Never, so long as the clarity of vision won at long last still remained to her, would she let sentimentality, however disguised, blind her to the rights of her child’s individual soul.

  To Philip she said nothing more.

  He looked at her sorrowfully and pitifully, but after a little while he found, as he had always found, a fiction with which to drape the hard reality that he disliked.

  “You’re not yourself at present, you know, my little pet. It’s very natural. Your condition... You’ll look at it all very different by-and-by.”

  Thus Philip, deriving such comfort as he could from a fictitious optimism.

  Lily left it to him, and sought no further to speak of the many things that were in her mind. She had once come very near to hating her father in the bitterness of her youth, and now, with the faint dawn of a better wisdom, she was glad to let the past rest, to know that the future was not in his hands.

  Sometimes, but very seldom, Lily reflected upon the possibility of her own death in child-birth.

  Rather to her own surprise, she did not want to die. She wanted to see her child, and to remain with it.

  “Of course you won’t die, my darling,” said Nicholas tenderly. “You must stay and look after me, eh, Lily? And you couldn’t let the poor little thing be motherless, whichever it is.”

  “Which do you want, Nicholas?”

  “Of course, every man wants a son.” Nicholas threw back his shoulders in the old, characteristic way. “But I should love a little girl, Lily, with pretty hair like yours.”

  He touched her brown hair very softly. Often, now, his caresses were tinged with diffidence, and he was less prodigal of them.

  “If you have a girl, Lily, you’ll be able to have her always with you. A girl needn’t go to school. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes. Only, Nicholas—”

  She slipped her hand into his, doubtful whether he would agree with what she was about to say, and instinctively and half unconsciously seeking to propitiate him, as she would have to do for all the days of their married life, if she was to act upon the convictions that were hers, but were indifferent to him.

  “You wouldn’t always want to have her at home if she wanted to go away? They have the right to develop along their own lines — the children.”

  Nicholas gave her a shrewd glance.

  “You didn’t get much of a chance that way, did you? I shall leave it to you, my dear. It’s the mother’s job to bring up her daughters, isn’t it, and her son, too, for that matter, till he goes to school. Do you know what Ignatius Loyola used to say?”

  “I don’t think so. Tell me.”

  “‘Give me a child until he is seven years old. After that any one may have him who wills!” quoted Nicholas. “So you see that according to that, it’s the early years that count.”

  “I believe it’s true,” she exclaimed.

  “So do I. Those are the impressions that remain longest. I’ve lived a good many more years in this funny old world than you have, my dear, and I flatter myself that my memory is as good as that of most people” he paused.

  “Eh, Lily?”

  “Your memory is a very good one, Nicholas.”

  “Well, be that as it may, I’ve certainly come to the conclusion that it’s those early impressions that make one’s after-life. Somehow, they’re ineradicable.”

  Lil
y believed it utterly. Searching her own lesser experience, and greater perceptions, she knew that so it had been with herself.

  So would it be with her child.

  “It’s for me to make those early impressions true ones,” she thought. “Not just ideas of blind loyalty and unreasoning trust, that later years are bound to destroy, but of self-reliance, and honesty of mind, and courage in facing things as they are.”

  Nicholas had said that she should bring up the child herself, and she knew that he meant it.

  It was the best that she could hope for now. The perfect union of minds to whom an identical vision has been vouchsafed could never be hers and his. The marriage of body, soul and spirit, that she had once dreamed of dimly, and called by its true name of Love, she had forfeited through her marriage with Nicholas.

  She had long sought to comfort herself with illusions, but she had found no strength until she had put facts into words, and stripped the truth of sentimental accessories.

  In her final acceptance, she felt nearer to her husband than ever before.

  It was not the fault of Nicholas that their relations to one another had been founded upon a falsity. The one wrong for which he might reproach himself had been powerless to hurt her.

  They only spoke of it once again.

  Lily asked her husband whether he knew what had become of Doris Dickenson.

  “Must we mention her?” he said unwillingly.

  “Not if you’d rather not. I only wondered what she was doing?”

  “No good, from what I heard! Not that it amounts to much, but I did hear somebody commiserating poor old Dickenson the other day. She isn’t living at home. She can’t keep straight.”

  A vision of Miss Dickenson, to Lily’s eyes so singularly unattractive, rose to her mind in odd juxtaposition to the account now given of her.

  She could have laughed, but for knowing that it would shock Nicholas sincerely to hear her.

  “Don’t you bother your little head about her, my darling child. She’s a wrong ‘un, that’s what she is,” said Nicholas with great finality.