Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  There was silence, and then Valeria, without looking at her sister, suddenly said:

  “Sometimes I wish we’d been brought up more like other people, Flossie. I know Father’s care for us has been beautiful — dear Father! — but somehow the girls I was with in France seemed more alive, in a way. They knew about things....”

  “Isn’t that rather like Eve wanting the knowledge of good and evil? Father always says that one should only seek the beautiful side— ‘whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are holy,’ like St. Paul says.”

  “Owen wouldn’t agree to that. He believes that one ought to know everything, good and bad alike.”

  “Perhaps it’s different for a man.”

  “Perhaps. We don’t know much about men, after all, do we, Flossie?”

  Flossie raised her eyebrows with an indescribable effect of fastidious distaste, and closed her lips.

  “I don’t think I want to, particularly. Father is the most wonderful man that anyone could ever want to know, I should imagine.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Valeria.

  She was perfectly conscious of speaking anything but whole-heartedly.

  She did indeed think her father wonderful, but she could not, like Flora, feel herself to be forever satisfied by the contemplation of parental wonderfulness.

  “You’re different since you came back from France, Val. I think you’d better marry Owen,” said Flora calmly.

  “He hasn’t asked me, yet.”

  There was a sound from the floor below.

  “That was Father! He hates us to sit up late. I’d better go before he comes up again. Good-night, Flossie.”

  “Good-night.”

  Flora looked at her sister, and once more murmured: “Father would like it, you know,” half pleadingly and half as though in rebuke.

  “Father doesn’t know everything about Owen. He has been very much affected by the tone of the day, as Father calls it. His faith...”

  “Oh, Val! Isn’t that one reason the more? You might do so much to help him.”

  Flora spoke with humourless and absolute earnestness.

  “Valeria!”

  The Canon’s voice, subdued but distinct, came to them from without.

  “My dear, go to your room. This is not right. You are acting in defiance of my known wishes, although, no doubt, thoughtlessly. Bid your sister good-night and go.”

  Val did not even wait to carry out the first half of the Canon’s injunction. She caught up her brush and comb and left the room.

  “Are my wishes so little to you, Valeria?” said her father, standing on the stairs. “It costs so small an act of self-sacrifice to be faithful in that which is least!”

  “I’m sorry, Father. We both forgot the time.”

  “Thoughtless Valeria! Are you always to be my madcap daughter?”

  His tone was very fond, and he kissed her and blessed her once more.

  Valeria went to her own room.

  She sat upon the side of her bed and cried a little.

  Everything seemed to be vaguely disappointing and unsatisfactory. What if Owen Quentillian was in love with her? He was very clever, and Val was tired of cleverness. Father was clever — even Flora, in her austere, musical way, was clever. Val supposed grimly that she herself must be clever, if imposed intellectual interests, a wide range of reading, a habit of abstract discussion, could make her so. Nevertheless she was guiltily conscious of desires within herself other than purely academic ones.

  Flora was right. Those six months in France had made her different.

  She had worked in a canteen, where the preoccupation of everyone had been the procuring and dispensing of primitive things — food, and drink, and warmth. Women had worked with their hands for men who had been fighting, and were going to fight again.

  Valeria had been the quickest worker there, one of the most efficient. The manual work, the close contact with material things, had satisfied some craving within herself of which she had not before been actively conscious.

  She had learnt to cook and had become proficient with astonishing ease. Scrambled eggs interested her more than herbaceous borders, more than choir practises, more, to her own surprise and shame, than evening readings-aloud at home.

  The canteen jokes, elementary, beer-and-tobacco-flavoured, had amused her whole-heartedly. She had laughed, foolishly and mirthfully, for sheer enjoyment, knowing all the time that, judged by the criterion of St. Gwenllian, the jests were pointless, the wit undeserving of the name.

  Very soon she had ceased to dwell upon any remembrance of the criterion of St. Gwenllian. She had let herself go.

  There had been brief, giggling intimacies with girls and young women whom Valeria could certainly not visualize as intimates in her own home, allusions and catchwords shared with the men or the orderlies, childish, undignified escapades which she was aware that the Canon would have regarded and apostrophised as vulgar. Those days now seemed like a dream.

  Even the girl with whom she had shared a room for six months no longer wrote to her.

  She, the bobbed-haired, twenty-two-year-old Pollie Gordon, had had love-affairs. Valeria remembered certain confidences made by Pollie, and still blushed. Pollie had been strangely outspoken, to Miss Morchard’s way of thinking, but she had been interesting — revealing even.

  Valeria ruefully realized perfectly that Pollie Gordon, whether one’s taste approved of her or not, had lived every moment of her short life to the full. She was acutely aware of contrast.

  “And I’m twenty-seven!” thought Val. “I’d better go and be a cook somewhere. If only I could! Or marry Owen — supposing he asks me. Anyway, one might have children.”

  A humourous wonder crossed her mind as to her ability to cope with the intelligent, eclectically-minded children that Owen Quentillian might be expected to father.

  “It’s a pity he isn’t poor. I believe I should be better as a poor man’s wife, having to do everything for him, and for the babies, if there were babies.... The Colonies, for instance....”

  Although she was alone, Val coloured again and tears stood in her eyes.

  “What a fool I am!”

  It was this painfully sincere conviction that sent her to seek the oblivion of sleep, rather than any recollection of the fidelity in that which is least, enjoined upon her by her father.

  For the next few days Valeria was zealous in gardening and tennis playing. She also, on two occasions, fetched volumes of Lamartine and asked her father to read aloud after dinner.

  Her physical exertions sent her to bed tired out, and made her sleep soundly.

  It surprised her very much when Lucilla, who never made personal remarks, said to her:

  “Why don’t you go away for a time, Val? You don’t look well.”

  “I’m perfectly all right. I only wish I had rather more to do, sometimes.”

  Valeria looked at her elder sister. She was less intimate with her than with Flora. No one, in fact, was intimate with Lucilla. She spoke seldom, and almost always impersonally. At least, one knew that she was discreet....

  Val, on impulse, spoke.

  “Do you suppose — don’t be horrified, Lucilla — do you suppose Father would ever think of letting me go away and work?”

  Lucilla gave no sign of being horrified.

  She appeared to weigh her answer before she replied. “I don’t think it would occur to him, of his own accord.”

  “Oh, no. But if one asked him? Would it make him dreadfully unhappy?”

  “Yes,” said Lucilla matter-of-factly.

  Valeria, disappointed and rather angry, shrugged her shoulders.

  “Then, of course, that puts an end to the whole thing.”

  Lucilla finished stamping a small pile of the Canon’s letters, laid them on the table, and placed a paperweight upon the heap before turning round to face her sister.

  “But why, Val?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why need it put an end to the wh
ole thing? You know as well as I do that it would make Father unhappy for any one of us to suggest leaving home. But if you really mean to do it, you must make up your mind to his being unhappy about it.”

  “Lucilla!”

  Lucilla did not elaborate her astounding theses, but her gaze, sustained and level, met Valeria’s astonished eyes calmly.

  “You don’t suppose I’m as hideously selfish as that, do you?”

  “I don’t know what you are. But you’ve a right to your own life.”

  “Not at anyone else’s expense.”

  Lucilla began to stamp postcards.

  “Lucilla, you didn’t mean that, did you?”

  “Of course I did, Val.”

  “That I should hurt Father, and go away just to satisfy my own restlessness, knowing that he disapproved and was unhappy? I should never know a moment’s peace again.”

  “Well, if you feel like, that, I suppose you won’t do it.”

  “Wouldn’t you feel like that, in my place?”

  “No, I shouldn’t; but that’s neither here nor there. It’s for you to decide whether a practical consideration or a sentimental one weighs most in your own particular case.”

  “Sentimental?”

  Val’s indignant tone gave the word its least agreeable meaning.

  “It is a question of sentiment, isn’t it? Father likes to have you at home, but he’s not dependent upon you in any way.”

  “But wouldn’t he say that my place was at home — that it was only restlessness and love of independence ...?” Valeria stammered.

  She suddenly felt very young beneath the remote, passionless gaze of her sister. For the first time in her life she saw Lucilla as a human being and not as an elder sister, and she was struck with Lucilla’s strange effect of spiritual aloofness. It would be very easy to speak freely to anyone so impersonal as Lucilla.

  “It’s ever since I got back from France,” said Val suddenly. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me, exactly, but I’ve ... wanted things. I’ve wanted to work quite hard, at things like cooking, or sweeping — and I’ve been sick of books, and music, and botany. I don’t feel any of it is one scrap worth while. And, oh, Lucilla, it’s such nonsense, because no one wants me to cook or sweep, so I’m just ‘seeking vocations to which I am not called,’ as Father always says. Perhaps it’s just that I want change.”

  Lucilla was silent.

  “Do say what you think,” Val besought her with some impatience.

  “I will if you like, but it isn’t really what I think, or what Father thinks, that matters. It’s what you think yourself.”

  Valeria stamped her foot.

  “I don’t know what I think.”

  “Better go away,” Lucilla then said briefly. “Work?”‘

  “Yes, if that’s what you feel like. Of course, marriage would be better.”

  “Lucilla.”

  “You asked me to say what I thought,” her sister pointed out.

  “I suppose you mean Owen Quentillian,” Val said at last. “But even if I did that — and he hasn’t asked me to, so far — it would only mean just the same sort of thing, only in another house. There’d be servants to do the real work, and a gardener to do the garden, and a nurse for the babies, if there were babies. Owen talks about farming Stear, but he’d do it all out of books, I feel certain. We should be frightfully — frightfully civilized.”

  “Owen is frightfully civilized.”

  “Well, I don’t think I am,” said Val contentiously. “Lucilla, do you like Owen?”

  “Yes. I’m very sorry for him, too.”

  “Why?” Valeria could not believe that Owen would be in the least grateful for Lucilla’s sorrow. It might even be difficult to induce him to believe that anyone could be sufficiently officious to indulge in such an emotion on his behalf.

  “I think his shell-shock has affected him much more than he realizes,” Lucilla said. “I think his nerves are on edge, very often. He’d be a difficult person to live with, Val.”

  Valeria remained thoughtful.

  She knew that Lucilla’s judgments, if rarely put into words, were extraordinarily clear-cut and definite, and as such they carried conviction to her own intuitive, emotional impulses of like and dislike.

  “Father likes Owen so much. Wouldn’t he be pleased if one ever did?” Val said elliptically.

  “Very pleased, I should think.”

  “Of course, that isn’t really a reason for doing it.”

  Lucilla apparently found the wisdom of her sister’s observation too obvious for reply.

  “Not the only reason, anyway.”

  Lucilla’s silence was again an assent.

  “Gossiping in the morning, my daughters?”

  The Canon’s deep, pleasant voice preceded him as he paused outside the open window.

  “Is that as it should be? Lucilla, my dear love, at your desk again? You look pale — you should be in the open air. Is not the day a glorious one? When this world about us is so unutterably fair, does it not make one think of ‘eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive, what things He hath prepared for them that love him’?”

  The Canon’s uplifted gaze was as joyful as it was earnest.

  “Heaven seems very near, on such a day,” he said softly.

  Val, always outspoken, and struggling with the unease of her own discontent, joined him at the window and said wistfully:

  “I can’t feel it like you do, Father. I wish I could.”

  “Little Valeria! It will come, my dear; it will all come. These things become more real and vivid to us as life goes on. So many of those I love have gone to swell the ranks of the Church Triumphant, now — such a goodly company of friends! How can I feel it to be a strange or far-away country, when your mother awaits me there, and my own dear father and mother, and such a host of friends? What a meeting that will be, with no shadow of parting any more!”

  Valeria was conscious of foolish, utterly unexplained tears, rising to her throat at the tender, trustful voice in which her father spoke.

  How she loved him! Never could she do anything that would hurt or disappoint him. The resolution, impulsive and emotional, gave her a certain sense of stability, welcome after all her chaotic self-questionings and contradictory determinations.

  “Will you give Owen and myself the pleasure of your company this afternoon, Valeria? We meditate an expedition to Stear — an expedition to Stear.”

  She said that she would go with them.

  None of the Canon’s children had ever refused an invitation to go out with the Canon since the days when the Sunday afternoons of their childhood had been marked by the recurrent honour of a walk with Father. An honour and a pleasure, even if rather a breathless one, and one that moreover was occasionally liable to end in shattering disaster, as when Flora had been sent home in disgrace by herself for the misguided sense of humour that had led her, aged five, to put out her tongue at the curate. Or that other unforgettable episode when Val herself, teased by the boys, had vigorously boxed Adrian’s ears.

  She smiled as she recollected it, and wondered if Owen remembered too, and yet there was a sort of disloyalty in recalling the affair too closely.

  The Canon had been so very angry! His anger, as intense as it was memorable, had been succeeded by such a prolonged period of the blackest depression!

  Val realized thankfully that it was a long time since any of them had seen the Canon angry.

  She turned aimlessly down the garden.

  The Canon had already gone indoors. He was never other than occupied, and Valeria had never seen him impatient of an interruption.

  “The man who wants me is the man I want,” the Canon sometimes quoted, with his wonderfully attractive smile.

  “Father is wonderful. Never could I disappoint or grieve him,” thought Val vehemently.

  She suddenly wheeled round and returned to the open window, determined that Lucilla, the asto
nishing Lucilla, should know of her resolution.

  “You know what we were talking about just now?” she demanded abruptly.

  Lucilla looked up.

  “I’ve quite made up my mind that your advice was wrong,” said Val firmly. “I know you said what you thought was best, and it’s nice of you to want me to be independent, but, after all, one’s duty comes first.

  I don’t believe it’s my duty to dash away from home and make Father unhappy.”

  Lucilla looked down again.

  “Of course, if anything happened of itself to make me leave home, it would be quite different. If I married, or anything like that. But just to go away for a purely selfish whim”

  She paused expressively.

  “I couldn’t do it, you know.”

  “Well—” Lucilla’s tone conceded, apparently, that Val had every right to judge for herself. Further than that, it did not go.

  “Lucilla, if you really think like that, about living one’s own life, and I suppose from the aggravating way in which you won’t say anything, that you do — why don’t you do it yourself?”

  “But I haven’t any wish to,” said Lucilla, looking surprised.

  “Haven’t you ever had any wish to?”

  “Oh, yes, once. But not now.”

  “Then why didn’t you?” Val pursued desperately. She felt as though she was coming really to know her sister for the first time.

  “I suppose because I thought, like you, that it wouldn’t do to leave Father.”

  “But you don’t think that any more?”

  “No.”

  “Did anyone advise you?”

  “Oh, no. There wasn’t anything to advise about. One has to think things out for oneself, after all.”

  “Oh!” Val was conscious of her own perpetual craving for approval from everyone, for any course that she might adopt.

  “Did you ever ask anyone’s advice, Lucilla?”

  “I don’t think so. If I did, it would be because I meant to take it, and I can’t imagine wanting to let anyone else decide things for me. Just talking about one’s own affairs isn’t taking advice, though people like to call it so.”

  “I think it’s a very good thing you’re not married,” said Val crossly. “You’re too superior.”

  “Perhaps that’s why no one has ever asked me,” said Miss Morchard with calm.