He did so, and Mrs. Lambe added two or three fat cushions, and a decorated lampshade and waste-paper basket, such as she liked in her own drawing-room.
When Aunt Tessie was told that she was going away from Melrose for a time, she was delighted.
“Then I can relish my food again,” she said rather coarsely. “ There’s never any knowing what they’re all up to here.” That remained her attitude up to the very last. She dumped them all together as objects of her aggrieved resentment. Edgar, Maude, the two little girls, the impassive, well-behaved servants.
But when she said good-bye to Emma the night before she was to go away, Aunt Tessie squeezed her hand hard, and gave her some money and several ornaments and little trinkets from her own possessions.
Soft-hearted Emma cried, and hurried away to the sitting-room to find Nurse Alberta. “ I just can’t bear to listen to her, poor old lady, saying I’m the only one as never tried to do her a mischief,” she sobbed.
“You’re a silly girl to take on so,” said the nurse good- naturedly. “Why, she’ll be ever so well looked after where she’s going, and there’s good money being spent on her comforts, I can tell you, and Mr. Lambe won’t let that be wasted. It isn’t like some poor looneys, that get put away and not a soul of their own people ever goes near them to see how they’re getting on. She’ll be kept an eye on, you may be very sure, and it’ll be best for all parties to have her under another roof, really it will.”
“Oh yes, I know!” said Emma.
“It isn’t even as if she wanted to stay, you know, Emma. She’s turned dead against them, like cases of her sort often do. Look at the way she spoke to you about your being the only one that didn’t want to poison her, or some such rubbish.”
There was a pause.
“Nurse,” said Emma suddenly, “do mad people know as they’re mad?”
“They say not,” indifferently returned Nurse Alberta, biting a thread off her piece of needlework. “Why, Emma?”
“Because — well, me and Cook got to talking last night about poor Miss Lambe, and — I can’t say it how I mean,” Emma rambled on confusedly, “but Cook would have it that people as go off their heads — well, they are off their heads. They don’t look at anything like we do any more — it’s sort of all upside down to them. But I didn’t think it was like that — well, at any rate not with Miss Lambe.”
“Why not?” said Nurse Alberta.
She looked interested and Emma was encouraged.
“I thought, perhaps,” she said timidly, “that the inside of her poor mind is still like everybody’s else’s, in a way, only she can’t get the thoughts to come out right. And I thought, perhaps, that when she said all that about them wanting to poison her, it was only her — her mad sort of way of saying that she’d felt, all along, they really wanted her to go away. And that would be why she said I was the only person that she was safe with. Because I never did want her to go away. The master and mistress and the young ladies may have felt like that. Of course, it’s been ever so trying for them, I know, having her here like that — and the girls downstairs, they wanted her to go. But I never did, and I wondered if perhaps that was what she sort of felt, only she couldn’t explain it right, and so it came out that way — in all her talk about being poisoned, and that.”
Emma stopped and looked rather wistfully at the nurse. “ You’ll think I’m balmy myself, talking like that. And I can’t explain what I mean a bit well. It’s not as if I’d been educated like you—”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Nurse Alberta, smiling. “I think I understand what you mean, Emma. According to your notion, the poor old lady feels and thinks pretty much the same as we do, but she’s lost the trick of communicating her feelings and her thoughts. They — they get lost in transmission, so to say.”
“You do put it well, Nurse!” said Emma admiringly. Nurse Alberta looked gratified. “ I don’t know,” she said modestly. But she was herself rather pleased by the sound of the phrase that she had used, and could not resist repeating it.
“It’s a bit far-fetched, perhaps, but there’s certainly something in what you say, Emma,” she observed, biting off another thread. “Lost in transmission — that’s the idea — lost in transmission!”
TIME WORKS WONDERS!
I
“You funny little thing!” he said patronisingly.
Adela resented the term violently, but because he was the only man who had ever attempted to talk personalities with her, she accepted it smilingly.
“I must read some of those books of yours. Tell me what the names are.”
“Oh, it doesn’t matter! Never mind about my books,” she said hurriedly.
Adela could not imagine Willoughby reading anybody’s books, unless definitely of that class which deals with a fictitious Secret Service or the intrigues of an imaginary kingdom.
Her own books were small masterpieces of psychology, subtly ironical. A shudder, half-humorous, half-despairing, came over her at the idea of Hal Willoughby, bored and mystified, ploughing his way through one of her books.
“Never mind about my books,” she repeated. “ I’d rather you thought of me as a girl than as a writer.”
She felt wildly daring in so speaking, partly because she had called herself a girl, although she was thirty, and partly because it was the first time that she had ever attempted what she supposed to be a flirtation.
Her reputation for cleverness had always been so great and so terrible that young men had never dared to approach her.
She supposed that must be the reason for their aloofness, since she had always been passably pretty; and even now, by artificial light, she. looked five years younger than she was.
Her hair and her colouring were charming in a subdued and unvivid way, her features straight and very clean-cut. She hardly realised how much too thin were the lips of her tiny mouth, how intense and over-prominent her large hazel eyes.
“I never can imagine how anybody can write a book,” said Willoughby.
Adela moved uneasily. She could tell what was coming.
“Do you think of a plot first, or do you just make it up as you go along?”
“It all depends.”
She made the meaningless reply that had so often served her before.
“I should never know what to make the people say next. Aren’t conversations awfully difficult?”
“Sometimes.”
“I suppose you are always on the look-out for people to put into your books — under invented names, of course.”
“I don’t think I am.”
“Oh, but I expect you are! I expect really you sit there, taking it all in, you know.”
Why did people always think it necessary to talk to her like this?
“You ought to write a play. They say it pays like fun.”
“But, you see, I’m not a dramatist.”
“Oh, rubbish! If you’re clever enough to write books, of course you could write a play. I should, if I were you — really I should.” His voice was charged with encouragement.
“No, I couldn’t. Don’t let’s talk about that.”
“Why not? I want to hear about these books of yours. I’ve never met a literary lady before.”
It was of no use. He would not talk to her as she was almost sure that he would have talked to any other woman in the room, given those distant sounds of music from the ballroom, that hazy moonlight above the bench beneath the syringa-bushes.
Adela grimly sacrificed her art, perjuring her soul away.
“I expect you think it’s very funny of me to write books,” she said, desperately adapting her vocabulary to his own.
“I really do it mostly — a good deal — because it brings in money.” She tried to laugh, and hated herself for the artificiality of the sound.
“I suppose girls are always glad of extra pocket-money,” he assented indifferently.
A girl — that was how he thought of her.
She was pleased at that,
but she struggled for a more serious recognition of her capabilities, too. “It’s not only pocket-money. I can really get a living from my writing, though I’m always at home with my mother. But I could be independent to-morrow if I liked.”
“Oh, come now!” The words might have expressed remonstrance, incredulity, astonishment.
“The advance royalty — that’s the money the publishers give me in advance — on my last book was two hundred pounds,” she said calmly.
She had never gone away to work, never had to pay for her food or for a roof over her head, never tried her strength or the strength of her resources in the struggle for livelihood amongst unsupported women.
Two hundred pounds for her year’s work was a large sum, with no calls upon it.
Willoughby repeated after her: “Two hundred pounds! I say! You don’t expect me to believe you get that just for writing a story?”
“Yes.” She was uncertain of the reason for his disbelief, and even whether he really did disbelieve her.
“But was it a serious book, or just a novel?” He really sounded perplexed.
“Oh, ‘just a novel’!” she said bitterly.
“Good Lord! How many do you write in a year?” “ That last one took me over a year. My first one I worked at, on and off, for five years.”
“I suppose it doesn’t matter to you, taking your time, but it would be quite worth scribbling them off one after the other, if you can get money like that without working for it, so to speak,” said Hal Willoughby.
He fingered his thick, fair moustache, and Adela looked up at him furtively in the moonlight.
He was very big and good-looking; and when she danced with him, and met his full, bold gaze, Adela could almost forget about such conversations between them as the present one.
Besides, he had not always talked like this. Once he had pretended not to know what colour her eyes were, and once he had told her about his life in India. She wished intensely that the conversation now would shift to some such topic.
The moonlight and the heavy scent of the syringa seemed to mock her.
“And what are your books about?” said Willoughby laboriously. “Love, I suppose?” He broke into a roar of laughter. “Does the heroine fall fainting into the hero’s arms in the last chapter, eh? That’s the style, isn’t it?”
Adela stood up, trembling. “I think I want to go in now, please. The — the dance must be finished now.”
He stood up also. “But I say! What’s the matter? You’re not ratty, are you?” He pulled unceremoniously at the prim velvet ribbons that hung from her waist. “Sit down again. Don’t you know I’m going away to-morrow? You might be a little bit nice to me, I do think.”
“I didn’t know you wanted me to be,” she said swiftly.
He laughed, and pulled her on to the bench again.
Adela’s mother, with whom she always lived, had told her very often that men never really respected a woman who let them “take liberties.” Adela, never before put to the test, recklessly determined to disregard the parental axiom.
When Willoughby caught hold of her chilly little ringless hand, she made no movement of withdrawal.
He looked down at her and laughed again. “What an odd little thing you are! I don’t believe you’ve ever been kissed, have you?”
She was silent.
“Has anybody ever made love to you, now?”
“Yes,” she said defiantly and untruly.
He laughed quite openly, and declared, “I don’t believe it!” ...
Still laughing, he put his hand under her chin, tilting up her face, and kissed her.
II
Hal Willoughby’s careless parting kiss remained the only one that Adela was destined to receive.
For ten years more she lived with her mother, and heard her say proudly to other mothers, coming with the news of Mollie’s engagement, or Dolly’s beautiful new baby:
“Ah, I still keep my Adela, I’m glad to say. She’s almost too fastidious, I sometimes think. She’s never made herself cheap with anyone. And then there’s her writing, too.”
Adela had slowly been making a name for herself, but her great success only came after her mother’s death. A long novel, at which she had been working for several years, made her reputation in the world of letters.
She had inherited money from her mother, and her books brought her in more.
Adela was able to indulge in artistic necessities.
It became imperative that she should retire, whenever she wanted to write, to a Yorkshire moor with an atmosphere of ruggedness and strength, and very few trees.
So many journalists, so many fellow-writers, such a number of the new-born coterie that “followed the Adela Alston method “ had inquired so earnestly in what peculiar setting Adela found it necessary to enshrine her inspiration, that the need of the Yorkshire moor had suddenly sprung, full-grown, into being.
She built a two-roomed cottage, engaged a caretaker, and wrote in a small summer-house, wearing knickerbockers and sandals, and smoking violently. This was in the summer. In the winter, inspiration was obliged to content itself with Hampstead, and Adela had to wear shoes and stockings and a skirt.
At forty she had gained greatly in assurance, and knew herself for the leading spirit in a small group of intensely modern women writers, by whom she was devoutly worshipped.
Adela became accustomed to being the person who was listened to, in the society of her fellows.
They were not only interested in her work, but deeply, intensely interested in herself.
“You know almost too much of human nature, Adela. It’s not decent.”
Adela enjoyed being told that.
“I’ve seen all sorts in my time,” she said musingly.
It would no longer have pleased her to be thought younger than she was. On the contrary, she was apt to emphasise in herself the aspect of a full maturity.
“That last study of yours is simply magnificent. Dear, I don’t wonder you’ve never chosen to marry. No man’s vanity could survive your insight.”
A newcomer to the group leant forward eagerly. Her characteristic was lack of self-restraint, which she acclaimed in herself as fearlessness.
“But you’ve known the great realities — you’ve known passion,” she urged foolishly. “You could never write as you do, otherwise.”
Adela gazed at her new disciple from under drooping eyelids. “I am not ashamed of it,” she said quietly. “I am proud of it.”
The girl nodded with grotesque, unconscious vehemence. The two other women-friends of Adela who were present, exchanged a meaning look with one another. Each had heard Adela’s story before, had shown loyal pride and understanding. There was no need of further demonstration from them. Adela was looking at the girl.
“There was one man in my life,” she said low and deeply. “There is never more than one — that counts. And a woman who has never loved, never been loved, never met her mate — has never lived.”
The room was tensely silent.
“It was more than ten years ago, and I have outlived the poignancy of it. I have never seen him since — I never shall. But I make no secret of having known fulfilment.”
Her voice was low and rich with intense enjoyment of her own effect.
“Even now, though, when all the storm and stress is long, long past — it’s odd, but the scent of a syringa in bloom can still hurt me. You see — I was swept right off my feet.”
She paused before concluding with the words that she had unconsciously learnt by heart, so significantly did they always round off her retrospect.
“I had waited for him all my life. He asked everything, and I gave — everything.”
“Ah!”
“You splendid woman!”
Adela leant back again, her large eyes gazing abstractedly into the past, full of a brooding satisfaction. Her lips exhaled a sound that was barely audible.
“Hal Willoughby!”
Time works wonder
s.
THE END
THE GALLANT LITTLE LADY:
I
“I hope you are using all your influence to prevent the marriage?” said Clyde, in the impersonal tone that he always adopted when speaking to his wife of her only daughter.
“Why, Charles? They’re madly in love.”
“That is why,” said Sir Charles.
“What do you mean?”
Lady Clyde had not the slightest desire to know what her husband meant, and had already made up her mind that she disagreed with it root and branch, so she said, “What do you mean?” in a tone of indignation, and not one of enquiry, and gave him no time to answer.
“Richard is a gentleman, he’s earning a very good salary, and he adores Rita. The only possible objection is their having to live in the East, but everyone says the Malay States are quite healthy, and she’s very strong, thank heaven. If she’s plucky enough to face it, I don’t see how we can object.”
“My objection has nothing to do with their living in the Malay States. It is simply concerned with the fact that they will have nothing whatever to depend upon except Richard Lambourne’s salary. He is a young man, he has saved nothing, and he has no expectations from anybody.”
“Rita has her own small income.”
“It might keep them from starvation, certainly, but it wouldn’t be enough for a family.” .
“No one expects it to be. Richard will save if he has a wife, naturally, and he hopes to become a part owner of the rubber estate, later on. After all, it’s very creditable for a man of his age to have been made general manager already.”
“Very.”
“Then what have you against him?”
“Nothing at all,” said Sir Charles mildly.
“A minute ago you were telling me how you hoped I should use my influence to prevent this marriage. If you have nothing against him, why shouldn’t they marry?”
“Perhaps I have ‘ something against’ Rita, as you express it.”
“Rita is only your step-daughter, Charles, and I know very well that your own children—”
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 275
