“My father read aloud the whole of the Waverly novels to us, when we were children,” Lucilla explained to the curate.
“Nowadays, I am given to understand that children read an illustrated supplement entitled Comic Cuts,” said the Canon bitterly.
“Pretty Wedgwood plate,” came in an aside from Mr. Clover.
“There is a reaction even against Tennyson, that king of song,” thundered the Canon.
“Most of all against Tennyson, according to Owen Quentillian,” said Adrian rather maliciously.
“Owen is tainted by the folly of the day, undoubtedly — but I cannot but believe that a young man of intellectual calibre such as his will learn to distinguish the true from the false in time. Owen is ‘the child of many prayers’ “ said the Canon with a sudden softening of his voice.
A moment later he sighed heavily.
The direction of his thoughts was only too evidently concerned with the recent disastrous turn taken by Quentillian’s affaire de cœur.
“What is the programme of your friends’ entertainment?” the curate timorously inquired of Adrian.
“Well, they’ve not really worked out the details yet, but I’ve been asked to go over there this afternoon and help them settle. Of course, Miss Duffle will sing, and she’s promised to do a step-dance, and she and I thought of getting up a play of some kind.”
“You are not in a position to bind yourself to anything of that sort, Adrian,” said the Canon hastily. “I would have you realize that this supineness cannot go on. You appear to forget that you have to find some work for yourself.”
It was so seldom that Canon Morchard vented his feelings upon his younger son that an appalled silence followed his words, rendering them the more noticeable.
Then Mr. Clover said:
“Half-past eight,” in time to the chiming of the clock on the mantelpiece, and there was another silence.
Adrian looked sulky, and Flora nervous. The curate gazed across the table at Lucilla and inquired:
“What news from India?”
It was the head of the house who replied.
“David is strangely lax as a correspondent, Clover, strangely lax. Flora there is favoured with a letter more often than most of us — or should I rather say, less seldom? And yet it costs so little to send a few lines regularly to the loving ones at home! You young folk little think what you are laying up for yourselves in the years to come by neglecting, tokens that may appear trivial at the time. The unspoken kind word, the unwritten affectionate letter — how they come back to haunt us later on!”
It almost appeared that these non-existent symbols were haunting St. Gwenllian at once, so heavily did the shadow of David’s remissness hang over the dinner table.
The Canon alternated between fits of profound and cataclysmic silence, during which he ate nothing and his eyes became grave and fixed in their unhappiness, and outbursts of vehement discoursiveness, that not infrequently took the form of rhetorical remonstrances addressed to an audience only too willing to agree with him.
The consciousness of his grief pervaded the atmosphere. No one could be unaware of it. His children, indeed, knew of old the successive stages of anger, morose irritability, and heart-broken remorse, to which mental suffering reduced their father.
Mr. Clover’s ineptitudes fell upon tense pauses, and remained unanswered.
Gradually the little man’s kind, anxious face showed a faint reflection of the misery that was so plainly to be read upon the Canon’s.
Flora’s face looked set in its gravity, Adrian was frankly sulky and resentful, and Lucilla’s impassivity was tinged with regretfulness.
Outside sounds struck almost with violence upon the silence within, and Mr. Clover murmured distressfully:
“A motor going along the road, towards the town.”
“The craze for rapid transport is ruining our English countryside,” said the Canon. “Frankly, I cannot away with it. What profit or pleasure can there be in whirling past unseen scenery, leaving clouds of dust and an evil odour behind?”
No one attempted to defend the satisfaction to be derived from the pastime so epitomized, and the Canon after a moment pushed back his chair.
“Don’t move — do not move on any account. Clover, you will pardon me, I know. I have a great deal of writing to get through. I shall require no coffee, Lucilla.”
He went out of the room, unsmiling, and with a slow, dejected step, his grey head a little bowed forward.
“How long is this going to last?” inquired Adrian, after a moment.
No one attempted to misunderstand his meaning.
“The worst of it is that he’ll be still more unhappy a little later on, when he realizes that his depression has reacted on all of us,” said Flora.
“In the meantime, Adrian, I strongly advise you to find a job and begin to work at it,” Lucilla added.
“Your father is very, very much depressed,” said Mr. Clover.
Adrian appeared to ponder these encouraging statements, and then he observed:
“Well, I don’t seem to be doing any good by staying here, so I think the best thing I can do is to accept the Admastons’ invitation and go over there and stay until after this show. It’ll be much handier for rehearsals, after all.”
It may be supposed that this reason, however adequate in fact, was not put forward, unsupported, by Lucilla, upon whom Adrian as a matter of course devolved the task of announcing his immediate intentions to the Canon.
“Let it be understood that he makes no further engagement of the kind,” said the Canon curtly. “I cannot interfere with his promise to these people, but this state of affairs must end. I will speak to him before he goes. Adrian is only a boy still, for all his war experience.”
There was the indulgent note in his voice that always crept there sooner or later when speaking of his youngest son.
Adrian went to the Admastons, and St. Gwenllian became used to the silence. Gradually the Canon resumed his habits of reading aloud after dinner, and of exchanging small items of general and parish news with his family during meals.
He seldom mentioned Valeria, but they knew that he had written to her.
He spoke of her again when an invitation came from the Admastons to witness their entertainment — an invitation which Adrian, it was evident to his sisters, cheerfully took it for granted that his father would refuse.
“It is very soon — very soon, indeed — to meet our neighbours after this unhappy affair of Valeria’s, that I fear has been only too much talked about. But it may be right to accept — it may be right. I cannot wish to disappoint the dear Adrian, either, though I am out of tune with gaieties at present. I will think over it, Lucilla, my dear, and let you know what answer to return.”
Lucilla, according to her wont, uttered no opinion, until Flora said to her:
“Wouldn’t it be better if ‘we didn’t go to these theatricals? Won’t Father dislike them very much?”
“Very much indeed, I should imagine.”
“And do you suppose Adrian wants us to be there?”
“Probably not.”
They looked at one another, Lucilla with a certain rueful humourousness, Flora with none at all.
“But, Lucilla, can’t you stop him?”
“I shouldn’t think so.”
Miss Morchard was always philosophical, rather than enterprising.
The Canon’s decision was communicated to his daughters a few days later.
“I have pondered this matter, my daughters, trivial though it be in itself. And it seems to me that we should do well to accept Mrs. Adamston’s invitation. Lucilla, you are my secretary.... And one thing more, my daughters.”
The Canon’s glance rested upon Flora, upon whose face a shade of dismay had fallen.
“One thing more. God loveth a cheerful giver! Even though it costs us something, let us go with a good grace. We owe it to Valeria, to our dear erring one, to show that she is whole-heartedly forgiven.
Yes, I can say it now, children. I have written my full and free forgiveness to your sister. The cloud has lifted.” If so, it appeared to have done so only with a view to descending upon other members of the Morchard menage.
Neither Lucilla nor Flora prepared for the Admastons’ party with any feelings save those of profound apprehension, and Adrian, meeting them in the hall, drew Lucilla aside in order to ask indignantly:
“Couldn’t you have stopped Father from coming tonight? I don’t want to be a beast, but really, it’s quite out of his line, and he won’t enjoy himself. In fact, he’ll probably be sick.”
The aspirant to the ministry was garbed as a Pierrot, with a curiously-shaped black patch upon his cheek, revealed as a miniature couple of dancers intertwined.
“Olga made it — isn’t it ripping?” said Adrian of this masterpiece. “I can’t wait — I ought to be behind the scenes at this minute. I came to look for some salts or something — Olga’s most awfully nervous. She’s simply shaking. What’s the proper thing to do for her, Lucilla? She’s really most awfully upset.”
“What about?”
“Stage fright, I tell you. Really good actors and actresses always get it. I wish I could get hold of some champagne for her.”
“Try standing over her with the water-jug,” Lucilla suggested crisply, and thereby deprived herself of her brother’s presence.
The Canon was always apt, at any gathering, to require a daughter upon either side, although he knew almost everyone in the county, and met old friends with a great and urbane pleasure. On this occasion, his eye roved in vain for Flora
She had murmured to Lucilla: “I don’t think I can bear it. Even Maud Admaston says they’re all going to be very silly, and I know Father will loathe it. I’ll change places later if you want me to.”
She had then disappeared to the very back of the large billiard-room at one end of which a stage and curtains had been erected.
Their hostess, with what Lucilla inwardly qualified as misguided kindness, conducted the Canon to a seat near the top of the room.
Lucilla resignedly took her place beside him.
“Capital, capital!” said the Canon genially. “But where is my little Flora?”
“I think she found someone who wanted to talk to her.”
“Flora is still timid — very timid. I fear that Flora has let slip her chance of joining our little family group. I should have enjoyed having a daughter on either side of me, to exchange impressions.”
The first item on the heterogeneous programme, however, was provocative of no very eloquent exchange of impressions between Canon Morchard and anyone else.
He listened with a faint air of surprise to an opening chorus from a row of Pierrots and Pierrettes, interspersed with various noises from a whistle, a comb, a pair of castanets, and a small and solid poker banged loudly and intermittently against a tin tray.
At the close of it he only said:
“I hardly recognized our dear lad, at first. That was he, was it not, at the end of the row, next to the little lady with black hair?”
“Yes. The girl was Olga Duffle. I believe she sings a great deal.”
The literal truth of her own description was borne in upon Lucilla as the evening went on. Miss Duffle did sing a great deal.
She sang a solo about the Moon, and another one about a Coal-black Baby Rose, and a third one, very short and modern and rather indeterminate, asking where was now the Flow’r, that had died within an Hour, and ending on the still more poignant enquiry, addressed to le Bon Dieu Above, Where was one who said “I love”?
The Canon, to this item, only asked in a puzzled way if the end was not rather abrupt?
“What in my day, we should have termed an unresolved discord,” he observed with some slight severity.
The sudden introduction of a quantity of toy balloons amongst the audience did not amuse him in the least, although he smiled, coldly and politely, as the guests, with little screams, buffeted them lightly from one to another.
Only the people on the stage, all very young, seemed thoroughly to realize the function of the toy balloons.
They banged them hither and thither, shrieking with laughter when the inevitable destruction ensued, and making each miniature explosion an excuse for calling out the catchword of the evening — imported from a revue comedian whose methods, more or less successfully imitated by most of the young men on the stage, appeared to consist in the making of grotesque facial contortions:— “May — I — ask — you — politely — to — absquatulate?”
At each repetition of the phrase, the actors and actresses were overcome with mirth.
The members of the audience were more divided in their opinions. Their laughter was not immoderate, and that of Canon Morchard was non-existent.
Lucilla, gazing anxiously at his severe profile, was yet able to feel it some slight relief that at least Owen Quentillian was not present. One such expression of melancholy beside her was more than enough.
“I hope I am not what is vulgarly called ‘superior’,” said the Canon, “but I confess that all this noise appears to me to be little short of senseless. Surely our faculties were given us for some better purpose than pointless, discordant merriment? No one is more ready than myself to concede”
The upheaval of an enormous drum on to the stage debarred Lucilla from hearing what it was that no one was more ready than her father to concede, and she was left, amidst ever-increasing din, to judge from his exceedingly uncompromising expression, how much more of the performance would elapse without causing him to become what was vulgarly called superior.
II
Lucilla Morchard was not naturally of a sanguine disposition, and it must have been an optimist indeed who would have ventured to augur that the effect of the evening’s entertainment might be of benefit to the Canon’s spirits.
From placidity he passed to tolerance, and from tolerance to endurance. In the course of the short play that concluded the performance, Lucilla perceived with resigned dismay that endurance was turning rapidly to serious vexation.
“Extravagant, vulgar, decadent nonsense,” was the Canon’s verdict, and Lucilla’s critical faculty endorsed the trenchant adjectives that he had selected, although she was devoid of her parent’s apparently acute sense of disgust.
“Olga Duffle is a good actress,” she said.
“One dislikes the levity of it all so profoundly,” said the Canon. “I believe I am the last man in the world to hold back from any cheerful, innocent amusement at fit and proper times and seasons, but I cannot but regret that Adrian, naturally gifted as he is, should turn his talents to no better account than mere buffoonery.”
The part relegated to Adrian in the little play was indeed of no exalted order, and the most subtle display of humour conceded to him was concerned with the sudden removal of a chair behind him and his consequent fall on to the floor.
The audience laughed, with mild amusement.
Lucilla dared not look at her father.
A spirited speech from Olga Duffle, who had shown no signs whatever of the stage fright that had caused her fellow-actor so much solicitude, brought down the curtain. Lucilla’s applause was rendered vigorous by an impulse of extreme thankfulness.
She was also grateful to the Canon for the measured clapping of the palm of one hand against the back of the other, with which he rewarded a performance that he had certainly found to be neither instructive nor amusing.
Adrian sought no parental congratulations, when the performers, still in theatrical costume, came down amongst the audience, but Olga Duffle made her way towards the Canon.
She looked, as usual, more attractive than any of the prettier girls present, and spoke with her habitual childlike, almost imperceptible, suggestion of lisping.
“Didn’t you think us all very silly? I’m afraid we were, but so few people care for anything else, nowadays.”
Her glance and gesture eloquently numbered the Canon in the few, though sh
e did not extend the implication quite so far as to include Lucilla.
“You are a good actress, Miss Duffle. Have you had training?”
“Oh, no, nothing to speak of,” said Olga modestly. “They did offer to give me a year at the big Dramatic Training place, free, after I’d acted in a charity matinee a few years ago in London. They said I could easily play juvenile lead in any theatre in London at the end of a year, but of course that was all nonsense. Anyway my people naturally wouldn’t hear of it.”
“Indeed. Certainly it is a very moot point how far the possession of a definite talent justifies embracing a life such as that of a professional actress must needs be.”
“Yes, isn’t it?” said Olga.
Her big dark eyes were fixed on the Canon’s face, her lips parted with the expression of absorbed interest that lent her charm as a listener.
Lucilla was not surprised to see that the Canon’s face relaxed as he looked down at the small up-gazing figure.
She left them, in response to an imperious glance directed upon her from the other end of the room.
“I particularly want the old man to get to know Olga,” said Adrian with agitation. “It’d do him all the good in the world to have some of his ideas about the modern girl put straight, and if anyone can do it, she can. Wasn’t it priceless of her to make straight for him like that?”
“Perhaps she likes to talk to a distinguished man.”
“My dear old thing, don’t be absurd. Why, Olga has half London at her feet.”
Lucilla felt unable to make any display of enthusiasm at the announcement, although she saw no reason to doubt that a substratum of fact underlay Adrian’s hyperbole.
“I suppose Father thought the whole show utter tripe?”
“He didn’t say so,” Lucilla observed drily.
“Well, for goodness sake get him away as soon as Olga’s had her talk with him. The Admastons are determined to turn the whole thing into a glorious rag, and it’ll go on till all hours. Father would be wretched, and besides I should have him on my mind the whole time. I daresay I shan’t have many more opportunities of enjoying myself, so I may as well make the most of this,” said Adrian in a voice charged with meaning, that Lucilla understood to be an allusion to his recent ecclesiastical ambitions.
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 224
