Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  “Your home is in Paris, then?”

  She looked rather puzzled. “I don’t know Paris well,” she observed apologetically. “We were only there once before, when mama was with us. It was a nice hotel, I thought, but noisy. This one — the Grand — is better. Have you been much in Paris?”

  “Not since I was at school there. My French was acquired in Paris,” I added, automatically.

  One says that kind of thing so often, to please the parents. ,

  “Mademoiselle aime parler francais, hein?” she enquired, with a little smile.

  Her French was as perfect as her Italian, or her English; and it was evidently natural to her to speak either language.

  “Are you English?” I could not refrain from asking her.

  “My papa is Italian — mama was half English, and half French.”

  Was? Then her mother must be dead. That would account for the empty limousine, and the strange independence of the child.

  “Mama is in New York, now, we think,” she remarked. “I am to join her when I am ten; that was arranged for, in the deed of separation.”

  “Separation?” said I.

  “There is no divorce in Italy,” said the little creature, shrugging her shoulders. “Papais a Catholic, though not, of coursepratiquant. They have been separated since I was seven.”

  “Then who — who “I wanted to ask who looked after her, but such a form of words seemed singularly inappropriate. “Who looks after your papa’s house?” I found at last.

  “We are in hotels, most of the time, papa and I, and my maid, Carlotta, but in the holidays — les grandes vacances — we go to the country somewhere — villegiatura — and there is a lady then, always.”

  Her grave eyes looked at me. “A different one,” she explained, “each time.”

  Her very complete understanding of the status held by the “ladies “was implicit in her manner, but that struck me less poignantly than did her philosophical acceptance of all that they stood for.

  The grey limousine came into sight, and she made an amiable little sign to the chauffeur.

  “I must go now. It doesn’t do to keep the auto waiting.”

  In her grave little voice, was all the circumspection of the child that has learnt to fend for itself, that knows by experience that it will only be tolerated so long as it gives no trouble, runs counter to no prejudices, is guilty of no indiscretions.

  “It has been so pleasant to talk to someone English. Good-bye Miss?”

  Her little pause was exactly that of a grown-up person, before an unknown or unremembered name. And what precocity of discernment had told her that “Miss” was the suitable prefix?

  “Miss Arbell,” said I. “Tell me your name before you go.”

  “Laura di san Marzano.”

  She pronounced Laura in the Italian way — Lah-o-ra.

  When I held out my hand, she kissed it, as Italian children do, and after she had climbed to the driving-seat, she waved to me, before turning the grey car down the hill.

  I looked for her every morning after that, but she never came to the Borghese Gardens again.

  II

  The second time that I saw Laura di san Marzano was nearly four years afterwards, in the hall of the Majestic Hotel, at Lucerne.

  I had thought of her, at intervals, and had no difficulty in recognising her, in spite of the difference between eight years old and twelve.

  She was tall and very slim, and the set of her dark head on her straight shoulders was just the same. Her black hair now fell in a long plait to her waist, but she still wore the straight, short fringe that suited her du Maurier profile.

  It was late afternoon — tea-time, and the hall was full of people, and noisy.

  Laura sat motionless, but somehow, one felt, very attentive, beside a beautifully-gowned and jewelled and painted woman, who was talking to half a dozen men.

  Mama?

  She looked very young to have a child of Laura’s age.

  Then I saw that Laura’s green silk frock was absurdly short, and made in a babyish style, that matched the huge bow of green satin ribbon unnecessarily fastened over one ear.

  My pupil, a nearly grown-up one, was late, and as I waited for her, I watched Laura.

  Presently our eyes met. At once recognition leapt into hers, and she smiled at me, and bowed.

  I returned the salutation — with infinitely less grace, as I knew in my middle-class British self-consciousness — and wondered whether she would come and speak to me.

  Later on she did so, when the group round mama was at its noisiest.

  “How do you do, Miss Arbell?” There was not the faintest hesitation over my name. “I used to see you often in the Borghese Gardens, in Rome, and once we talked together. I hope you remember?”

  “I remember very well,” said I, “but I am surprised at your doing so. You were so very young then, and you must have met so many people since.”

  “I never forget people,” said Laura simply.

  “You left Rome suddenly, didn’t you?” I continued. “ I was there for nearly a month after our meeting, but I never saw you in the gardens again.”

  Laura shook her head slightly.

  “I can’t remember,” she admitted. “Very likely we left suddenly. One does that so often. The management of the hotel becomes intolerable, or tiresome acquaintances appear — and then the simplest thing is to pack up and go elsewhere.”

  She spoke so evidently from experience that one could but accept her strange, rootless, attitude as part of her natural equipment.

  We talked for a little while, and she told me, or I deduced, that since the Roman days she had been a great deal in Paris — (“ I adore the Opera there, but the theatres not much “) — and then in New York, with mama. She was to spend the next few years with mama.

  Where?

  Laura’s shoulders indicated the faintest of shrugs. Anywhere. Mama liked New York as well as most places, but personally Laura thought that the rooms in the hotels there were always too hot. They went to London a good deal. Delightful — she smiled at me politely — but one missed the sunshine. Her point of view, inevitably, was one of great sophistication. It did not, to my mind, detract from her charm, which had never been of a direct, childlike kind, but rather of a description so subtle that amongst the many it might easily pass for mere oddity.

  “I hope we shall meet again,” she said to me, when a certain nervous movement in the group of mama’s admirers had culminated in the detachment of a tall, fair youth, who was coming now towards Laura herself.

  “I am afraid that I leave here to-morrow. My pupil and I are on our way to rejoin her parents in Italy.”

  “We may be gone ourselves to-morrow. I meant for later on — any time, anywhere.” She smiled charmingly, but her unchildlike eyes remained serious and rather weary.

  I heard the fair youth say something to her, with a burst of meaningless laughter. She did not laugh in return, but her clear, well-bred little voice was raised to a sympathetic tone of interest.

  “Mama likes an olive in hers, always, but for me I prefer a sweet Martini — with two cherries, if you please.”

  I saw Laura twice again before leaving Lucerne, but we did not speak to one another.

  The first time, at seven o’clock the evening of that same day, was in one of the gigantic hotel corridors, on the first floor, where I was waiting for the lift that was to take me to the fifth.

  The hotel hairdresser, in a white coat, with an immense head of curled and discoloured yellow hair, stood before a shut bedroom door. It flew open suddenly, and then closed sharply behind Laura di san Marzano.

  “Vous voila donc! Eh bien, il est trop tard.”

  Her voice was ice, her face scornful and unbelieving as she listened to the man’s torrent of excuses for his tardiness.

  “Assez,” said Laura. “Madame est fort mé contente. Elle ne veut plus de vous.”

  “Mademoiselle”

  “C’est inutile. M
adame se passera de vous.”

  And as the hairdresser turned away, grumbling and disconcerted, she added superbly:

  “J’arrangerai la chose. Soyez exacte demain. Mais pour ce soir, c’est moi qui coifferai madame.”

  Much later in the evening, when I had long ago despatched my pupil to the bedroom opening out of mine, I returned for a moment to the hot and strident lounge in order to make certain enquiries at the office.

  Mama was in a white wicker armchair, with crimson and orange cushions overflowing upon either side of it, and showing up the elaborate waves of her hair, as black as Laura’s own. The paint that I had seen on her face earlier in the day was now concentrated into one scarlet curve upon her mouth, her white lace dress was held up by narrow black velvet straps cutting across the opulent creaminess of her shoulders, and the electric light above her head had fastened upon the diamond butterfly bows of her satin shoes, so that they winked and flashed right across the hall.

  One hardly saw — certainly did not distinguish — the figures that composed her numerous entourage, but the prevailing black and whiteness, the glitter of continually raised small glasses, gave a general impression of unrelieved masculinity.

  Laura sat beside her mother, on an upright chair. She was dressed in rose colour, a frock even shorter than the green one that I had seen before. Her straight hair had been somehow persuaded into a semblance of long curls; the green silk bow over her left ear had been replaced by a pink one with fringed ends.

  She did not see me. Her eyes, indeed, were glazed with fatigue, and every now and then her head fell forwards and was jerked upwards again.

  The hall was unendurably hot with a breathless, artificial heat, and the orchestra was playing an American rag-time that every now and then succeeded in out-sounding the medley of raised voices and high-pitched laughter and clinking glasses.

  It was long after eleven o’clock.

  As I looked at Laura, I saw that her slim, silk-clad legs were swinging gently to and fro between the bars of the high-backed chair. Her feet, in bronze-coloured dancing slippers, could not quite reach the floor.

  For the first time, I saw her as the child she really was — the efficient, helpless, cosmopolitan, traditionless, hotel child.

  III

  It is a far cry from the family of a British Ambassador — collectively distinguished, if individually dull — and the blue wonders of Italy, to an English Girls’ School and the grey horrors of an east coast town.

  The post that I filled temporarily at Lundeen School was not one that I should have considered, but for personal and family reasons of convenience. They are long since past, and matter nothing to the story.

  But it was at Lundeen School that I saw Laura di san Marzano for the third and last time.

  It was the most inappropriate setting imaginable.

  She was left there by mama, in mid-term, because a continental doctor had declared that she needed bracing air and companionship of her own age, and also — this I learnt later, quite incidentally, from Laura herself — because mama and acher ami had suddenly planned a visit to Monte Carlo for the express purpose of visiting the Casino, to which Laura, being under twenty-one, could not have been admitted.

  Laura, as the hotel child, had been pathetic, but her dignity had been safeguarded, if not actually enhanced, by the kaleidescopic background of her surroundings.

  At school, she was pitiful — and out of place. The girls, without ill nature, despised her from the first.

  She arrived amongst them in the short, fanciful, ultra- picturesque silk frocks and infantile bows of hair ribbon that I had seen her wear abroad. Those unimaginative, untravelled English schoolgirls had seen no one like her before, and what they did not know, by experience or by tradition, they distrusted and disliked.

  Lundeen School made demands upon the pupils’ physiques, upon their powers of conformity, and upon each one’s capacity for assimilating wholesale a universally applied system.

  Laura di san Marzano had no chance at all.

  The child who “never forgot people “ could not remember her multiplication table, and although she spoke perfectly at least three languages besides English, she had never learnt syntax, nor read a line of any history. She had seen the Guitrys play in Paris — (and from her crisp appreciations and criticisms I deduced that no finest nuance of their art had been lost upon her) — but she had memorized no standard selections from the poets. And she did not know how to learn.

  No one, not even the head mistress, was very much disturbed by Laura’s educational deficiencies, because it was so evident from the first that her stay amongst us would only be a very temporary affair.

  Mama would certainly swoop down again, probably without warning, and resume Laura as suddenly as she had discarded her.

  That was how mama always did things, one felt sure.

  Laura herself, although evidently aware of her shortcomings, accepted them with a grave, but unexaggerated, regret. She seemed, quite without arrogance, to know that, even educationally, there were other standards than those of Lundeen, and that her connection with these latter was after all merely transitory.

  What really distressed her, and shocked her too, I think, was the attitude of the other girls.

  Compared with the hotel child, there was only one word that adequately described these daughters of so many excellent English homes — and that word was uncivilised.

  They played unbeautiful games violently, they spoke in hideous slang, they were rudest when they intended to be most friendly.’

  Towards Laura di san Marzano, indeed, they did not wish nor attempt to display friendliness. They were simply contemptuous.

  And I saw that the hotel child minded that, both from pride and from ultra-developed social instinct.

  My work was entirely amongst the elder girls, and I saw very little of Laura during her brief stay, but towards the end of it, something happened. The rumour arose and spread like wild-fire, even to reaching the Common Room of the teaching staff, that Laura di san Marzano was in disgrace with her fellows for cheating over an examination paper.

  The tradition of Lundeen was that of the public-school code. Cribbing was permissible: ‘copying’ or peeping at the questions set for an examination, was impossible.

  They were already prejudiced against her; the accusation was accepted on the instant by her contemporaries.

  The Prefectorial system was in full force at Lundeen, and in any case, I could not have made the affair my business. But it so happened that I was present when Laura uttered what I believe to have been her one and only specific denial of the charge against her. I came unexpectedly into the room, and saw the semi-circle of self-righteous inexpressive, young faces that confronted Laura, who stood, rather pale and with her head held proudly high, and spoke very softly and clearly.

  “I didn’t cheat. Those who thought they saw me, made a mistake. You are being very unjust and cruel, all of you.”

  She was looking the head of her class straight in the eyes as she spoke, and the girl, giving her back look for look, made a sound that unmistakably expressed contemptuous incredulity.

  “What is all this?” said I sharply.

  They were taken aback, all of them. There was an instant of confused silence, and it was, after all, only the hotel child who possessed enough of savoir faire to reply to me.

  “Miss Arbell,” she said courteously, “it was a — a necessary conversation. It is over now.”

  She crossed the length of the room, very composedly, and went out quietly.

  Her ostracism, after that, was complete. It lasted for a week, and then, just as one had always surmised would happen, mama, in sables and violets, drove up in a blue Lanchester car, and said that she and Laura (who looked so much stronger and better for the change) would at once go straight to Paris, give themselves enough time to find some clothes, and sail for New York the following week.

  The hotel child, her face radiant, came to find me and say good-
bye to me. She was incapable, for all mama’s imperious haste, of forgetting or omitting the courtesy.

  “Do you actually leave this evening?” I asked her.

  Mama had been even more impetuous than I had anticipated.

  “Yes. I need never see any of them again.”

  “It has been an experience, at least,” I reminded her.

  “Yes — but “ she shrugged her shoulders.

  “Expensively bought?” I suggested. And, since she was leaving, I thought that I might add: “At least, my dear, you have kept your colours flying. These last days have been very trying, I am afraid, but you come out of them better than our friends of the Fourth Form, to my thinking.”

  “Thank you,” said Laura. She looked at me with her grave, straightforward eyes.

  “It would have been much easier, though, if only I really hadn’t cheated.”

  * * * * *

  There is a postscript to the story of the hotel child. A very few years later I heard of her marriage to the Prince d’Armaillh’ac-Ambry, the representative of the noblest, and one of the wealthiest, of French families. I believe that they live almost entirely on his estates in Brittany, and that the Princess interests herself personally in the numerous peasantry around them.

  Her two children, a boy and a girl, are brought up in great simplicity, and to the strictest and most orthodox Catholicism.

  IMPASSE

  (To S.M.A.)

  Two, three, five Dedicated Virgins. They stood before their Reverend Mother, ponderous black folds of serge sweeping the boards round each flat-soled pair of black list slippers.

  “The orphans must go to the dentist,” said Reverend Mother, mournfully, yet with determination. “Here we are in a Protestant country. We must adapt ourselves to the conditions of our exile. The orphans will have to be taken to the dentist’s house.”

  The nuns looked at one another, and at Reverend Mother, and solemnly nodded.

  It was an innovation, but if Reverend Mother said so, it must be right.

  “Sister Clara and Sister Dominic, you will take three orphans to the dentist to-morrow.”

  Sister Clara drew herself up a little. Her throat swelled beneath the white swathings that bound her head and neck, and her double chin momentarily became three.