Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

“You’ll let me take you away from that, won’t you, Lucilla? It’s an impossible life for you.”

  “Why do you confuse the issue like that? It’s just what I said before — you want to follow a generous impulse without counting the cost. My life has really nothing to do with the question.”

  He was frankly confounded.

  “I thought it might be an argument in my favour,” he said resentfully.

  “There’s only one thing that could really count in that way — well, two things, to be accurate. Your need of me, Owen.”

  “It’s quite real,” he returned levelly. “I’m lonely, and yet the company of most of the people I know rather annoys me. And there’s another thing. I’m frightened, very often. It’s since the war, and — and you know I’d been shell-shocked, as they call it? I’ve thought lately that if you were there — the realest person I know — I shouldn’t be frightened, at Stear. I’m giving you facts, Lucilla — not romance. We’ve both missed that”

  “Val didn’t stand to you for romance, did she?”

  “No.”

  Quentillian could think of nothing at all to add to his bald negative.

  “Well, we’ve faced your risks,” said Lucilla. “What about mine?”

  “The worst one is that you should find me an intolerable egotist,” he said rather unsteadily.

  “We can discount that.”

  She spoke curtly, and he made no rejoinder, uncertain of her meaning.

  “What was the other argument that might count in my favour, Lucilla? One was my need of you. I think I’ve shown you that. But you said ‘two things, to be accurate.’ Tell me what the other was.”

  “Is,” she corrected, with a sound that was very nearly a laugh, and that caused him to look at her.

  She faced his gaze with all her own steadiness, but for the first time he saw Lucilla’s mild imperviousness, her implacable matter-of-factness, as a shield for something infinitely fragile and sensitive.

  Her voice, always quiet, was quieter than ever when, she spoke.

  “It’s fair to tell you, I think. I’ve loved you for a long time now. So you see my risks would be greater than yours, Owen. That’s why I was afraid of impulse. But you see I’ve told you this — which was rather difficult to say — because it seems to me that our one chance lies in absolute honesty. We’ve faced the fact together that you’re — just lonely, and that’s why you want me — but — we’ve got to face the other fact too — both of us — I mean that, for me — you do stand for romance, Owen.”

  Her voice had not altered, but the effort with which she had spoken had brought tears, that Owen had never seen there before, to Lucilla’s eyes.

  Nevertheless she smiled at him valiantly.

  For the first time, perhaps, since his childhood, Quentillian found himself unable to analyse his feelings or to translate them into tersely sententious periods.

  In the long silence that fell between them, there began a process by which he slowly reversed certain judgments, and eliminated certain axioms, which hitherto had stood to him for wisdom.

  But it was with scarcely any knowledge of this, that Owen Quentillian, reduced at last to making an appeal, asked Lucilla Morchard once more:

  “Will you marry me? The risks are all yours — will you take them?”

  With her most characteristic gesture, she bent her head in assent, neither impulsive nor emotional, but fully accepting responsibility, and said seriously and gently:

  “Yes, Owen, I will.”

  THE END

  MRS. HARTER

  CONTENTS

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  TO PHYLLIDA

  I

  MOST of us, at Cross Loman, have begun to forget about Mrs. Harter and Captain Patch, and those of us who still remember — and after all, it was only last summer — hardly ever speak their names.

  I know that Mary Ambrey remembers, just as I do. Sometimes we talk about it to one another, and exchange impressions and conjectures. Conjectures more than anything, because neither of us has the inside knowledge that alone could help one to a real understanding of what happened. Mary goes by intuition a good deal, and after all, she did see something of Mrs. Harter.

  Personally, I know less than anybody. Bill Patch was my junior by many years, and though I saw him very often, we were never anything more than acquaintances. And Diamond Harter, oddly enough, I hardly spoke to at all. And yet I have so vivid an impression of her strange personality, that I feel as though I understood her better than anyone now living can ever do.

  It is partly to rid myself of the obsession that she is to me, that I have set myself to reconstruct the affair of last summer. It is said that antiquarians can reconstruct an entire monster from a single bone. Perhaps, as an amateur psychologist, I can reconstruct a singularly enigmatic personality from — well, more than a single fact, perhaps, but not much more. Impressions, especially other people’s impressions, are not facts. Besides, the most curious thing of all, to my mind, is that they all saw her quite differently. The aspect that she wore to Mary Ambrey, for instance, was not that in which Claire, my wife, saw her.

  And yet Claire — about whom I intend to write with perfect frankness — is not devoid of insight, although she exaggerates everything.

  Claire lives upon the edge of a volcano.

  This is her own metaphor, and certainly represents quite accurately the state of emotional jeopardy in which her days are passed — indeed, it would be truer still to say that she lives upon the edge of a hundred volcanoes, so that there can never be a complete absence of eruptions.

  She has really undergone a certain amount of suffering in her life, and is, I think, all but entirely unaware that most of it was avoidable.

  Her powers of imagination, although in the old days they helped to constitute her charm, are, and always were, in excess of her self-control, her reason, and her education. There are few combinations less calculated to promote contentment in the possessors of them.

  She is really incapable now of concentrating upon any but a personal issue. Yet she expresses her opinion, with passionate emphasis, upon a number of points.

  “An atheist,” says Claire frequently, “is a fool. Now an agnostic is not a fool. An agnostic says, humbly, ‘I don’t know.’ But an atheist, who denies the existence of a God, is a fool.”

  It is perhaps needless to add that Claire considers herself to be an agnostic.

  She generally speaks in capital letters.

  When she dislikes the course of action, as reported in The Times, taken by any politician — and she has a virulent, and mutually inconsistent, set of dislikes — Claire is apt to remark vivaciously:

  “All I can say is, that So-and-So ought to be taken out and HUNG. Then he wouldn’t talk so much nonsense.”

  Claire is, of course, an anti-Prohibitionist— “because just look at America — it’s a perfect farce” — and an anti-feminist because “women can exercise all the influence they want to at home. I should like to see the woman who can’t make her husband vote as she wants him to vote!”

  Socialism, in which Claire includes the whole of the Labour Party, the Bolsheviks in Russia, and a large number of entirely non-political organisations, she condemns upon the grounds that “it is nonsense to pretend that things could ever be equal. Place everyone upon the same footing in every respect, and in a week some people would have everything and others nothing.”

  Upon the question of birth-control, so fully discussed by our younger relatives, her views might be epitomised — (though not by herself, since Claire never epitomises anything, least of all views of her own):

  “The whole subject is disgusting. — All those who write or speak of it are actuated by motives of i
ndecency, and all those who read their writings or listen to their speeches, do so from unhealthy curiosity. God Himself has definitely pronounced against any and every form of birth-control.”

  Of this last Claire seems to be especially positive, but I have never been able to find out exactly where this revelation of the Almighty’s attitude of mind is to be found.

  It need scarcely be added that, to Claire, all pacifists are unpatriotic and cowardly, all vegetarians cranks, and all spiritualists either humbugs or hysterical women.

  Sometimes, but not often, she and I discuss these things. But when I object to sweeping generalities, Claire, unfortunately, feels that I am being something which she labels as “always against” her, and she then not infrequently bursts into tears.

  Few of our discussions ever survive this stage.

  It is very curious now, to think that fifteen years ago, I was madly in love with Claire Ambrey. She refused to marry me, until I was smashed up in a flying experiment in America.

  Then she wrote and said that she loved me, and had always loved me, and would marry me at once. I suppose I believed this because at the moment I so wanted to believe it, and because also, at the moment, she so intensely believed it herself.

  The generosity, and the self-deception, were both so like Claire! Her emotional impulses are so violent, and her capacity for sustained effort so small.

  It would be ungracious, to say the least of it, to dwell upon the failure that we both know our married life to be. It is sufficient to say that, in tying herself to a semi-cripple, with a too highly-developed critical faculty, and a preference for facing facts stark and undecorated, Claire, in a word — and a vulgar word at that — bit off more than she could chew.

  We have lived at Cross Loman Manor House ever since my father’s death. The Ambreys, Claire’s cousins, are our nearest neighbours, but they have only been at the Mill House for the last seven years, and Cross Loman looks upon them as newcomers. The Kendals have been eighteen years at “Dheera Dhoon,” which is the name unerringly bestowed by General Kendal on their big stucco villa at the outskirts of the town. Nancy Fazackerly was born at Loman Cottage, lived there until she married, and came back there a few years afterwards, widowed — and so on. It is just the same with the tradespeople and the farmers. Applebee was always the baker, and when he died, Emma Applebee, his daughter, remained on in the business. A boy, whom Emma Applebee has always strenuously impressed upon us all as “my little nephew,” will succeed Emma.

  Half-way up Cross Loman Hill is the church, with the Rectory just below it. Bending has been there for twenty years. Lady Annabel Bending, who was the widow of a colonial governor when the Rector married her, has only been amongst us for the last two years.

  We all meet one another pretty frequently, but I seldom care to take my wheel-chair and my unsightly crutch outside the Park gates, and so my intercourse is mostly with the people who come to the house.

  Mary Ambrey and her children come oftenest. Claire’s feelings, on the whole, are less often hurt by Mary than by most other people. Claire neither likes, admires, nor approves of Sallie and Martyn Ambrey, but she is at the same time genuinely and pathetically fond of them — a contradiction as painful to herself as it is probably irksome to Martyn and Sallie.

  Martyn has always been her favourite, because he is a boy. Throughout his babyhood she invariably spoke of him as “little-Martyn, God-bless-his-dear-chubby-little-face,” and she unconsciously resents it, now that little Martyn has grown up, and has ceased to be chubby — which he did long before she ceased to call him so. As for the formula of benediction, I think Claire feels that God, in all probability, experiences exactly the same difficulty as herself in viewing Sallie and Martyn as real people at all.

  On the whole, Martyn and Sallie do not behave well towards Claire. They are cold and contemptuous, both of them conscious of being logical, impersonal, and supremely rational, while their cousin is none of these things, but rather the exact contrary of them all.

  Martyn is twenty-one and at Oxford.

  Sallie is a year younger, a medical student at London University.

  Neither of them has ever been heard to utter the words “I’m sorry” after hurting anyone’s feelings. Claire noted this long ago — but she has never realised that it is simply because they are not sorry that they omit the use of the time-honoured formula.

  They are both of them clever, and both of them good-looking. But I often find it strange that they should be Mary Ambrey’s children.

  She, too, is clever, and good-looking, but in thinking of her, one substitutes other adjectives. Mary is gifted, sensitive, intelligent, gracious and beautiful, and pre-eminently well-bred.

  The description reminds me of the game we called “Sallie’s game” that she invented last summer. It was that afternoon, incidentally, on which I first heard Mrs. Harter’s name.

  The Ambreys had come up to the Manor House on the first day of the Long Vacation. There was the slight constraint that is always perceptible when Claire is present, unless she is being made the centre of the conversation. One felt the involuntary chafing of her spirit.

  After tea, she suddenly suggested that we should play paper-games.

  “I’ve invented a new paper-game,” Sallie said joyously, her eyes dancing. “It’s called Portraits, and there are two ways of playing it. Either we each write down five adjectives applicable to some person we all know, and then guess who it’s meant for — or else we all agree on the same person, and then write the portraits and compare them.”

  (“This,” thought I, “is the sort of game that ends in at least one member of the party getting up and leaving the room, permanently offended.”)

  “Let’s try it,” said Claire eagerly.

  Personalities always appeal to her, until they are directed against herself. But it is a part of her curious pathos, that she never really expects them to be directed against herself. I looked at Mary Ambrey, and she looked back at me, with the faintest hint of resigned amusement in her hazel eyes.

  Just as Martyn had finished distributing pencils and strips of paper, the Misses Kendal were announced.

  It was the twins, Dolly and Aileen.

  They wear their hats on the back of their heads, and their skirts a little longer behind than in front, as do all the Kendals, but they are nice-looking girls in a bovine way. It is hard on them to compare them with Sallie, who is ten years their junior, as slim and as straight as a wand, and whose clothes invariably produce a peculiarly dashing effect.

  No Kendals are ever dashing.

  “You’re just in time to learn a new game,” said Martyn, proceeding to explain.

  “We’re no good at this sort of thing,” said the Kendals, with cheerful contempt for those who were.

  “We shall be thoroughly out of it all, but we’ll try and struggle along somehow.”

  The Kendal reaction to life is a mixture of self-depreciation, self-assertion, and a thoroughgoing, entirely unvenomous pessimism in regard to past, present, and future. There are four sisters, and one brother, who is always spoken of by his family as “poor old Ahlfred.”

  Inquiries after Alfred, who is in business and only comes home for week-ends, always elicit the assurance that he is “struggling along somehow.”

  General Kendal, known as Puppa, and Mrs. Kendal — Mumma — also “struggle along somehow.”

  When they were told about Sallie’s new game, Dolly and Aileen Kendal looked horribly distrustful.

  “How can one ever guess who it’s meant for, I should like to know? It would be impossible,” said Aileen.

  “Would it?” Sallie remarked drily.

  She caught her mother’s eye, and relented.

  “Of course, you can take a public character, for your portrait, if you like.”

  “That would be much easier,” declared the Kendals in a breath.

  We all wrote on our pieces of paper, and bit the ends of our pencils, and finally folded up the papers and thre
w them into a bowl.

  “Here goes,” said Dolly Kendal, recklessly.

  “It’ll be all the same a hundred years hence,” Aileen added, with her air of philosophical resignation.

  The first slip read aloud by Martyn was my own.

  “Kind-hearted, Indomitable, Pathetic, Unscrupulous, Cheerful.”

  “Mrs. Fazackerly,” said Mary instantly.

  (“But why indomitable?” I heard Dolly ask, in a puzzled way.)

  “Excellent. Now here’s someone you’ll all guess,” said Martyn, with a glance at his sister.

  “Rational, Sympathetic, Intelligent, Reserved, Elusive.”

  “Elusive is very good,” said Sallie.

  “You’ve got it?” her brother asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Claire. “Read it again.”

  Martyn read it again, refraining from glancing at his mother.

  “Queen Mary,” Aileen Kendal suddenly suggested brightly.

  Martyn considered her gravely.

  “What makes you think it might be?” he inquired at last, evidently honestly curious.

  “Oh, I don’t know. You said we might take public characters, and she was the first one I thought of.”

  “It might be me, I suppose,” Claire said thoughtfully, “only it leaves out a good deal. I mean, I don’t think those characteristics are the most salient ones.”

  “Besides, some of them wouldn’t apply, Cousin Claire,” said Sallie, ruthlessly. “For one thing, I should never call you in the least—”

  “Tell us who it is, Sallie,” her mother interrupted her.

  “You, of course. I guessed it directly and so did Cousin Miles.”

  “It’s good, I think,” said Martyn. “Elusive is the very word I’ve been looking for to describe Mother’s sort of remoteness.”

  I saw the Kendals exchange glances with one another.

  Certainly, it is quite inconceivable that in the family circle at Dheera Dhoon Mumma should ever be thus described, in her own presence, by her progeny.

  “Read the next one,” said Claire coldly.