Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  “Yes, Mother dear,” she said proudly.

  Her Irish voice was rich and deep, compared with the thin, nasal tones of the Frenchwomen.

  “Shall I order a cab for them, Mother?”

  That was Sister Caroline, the sœur économe.

  “No, no. They must walk ... holy poverty... You will put on the heavy travelling veils, Sisters, and the big cloaks, just the same as for a journey.”

  The heat of that would be stifling, in this weather and on foot! An unmortified thought... Sister Clara stuck a pin in her sleeve. She would remember to confess a slight yielding to sensuality of thought.

  There had been similar yieldings, once or twice, within the last year.

  “Yes, Mother dear. Sister Dominie’ll sit in the waiting- room with two of the dear orphans, and I’ll be looking after the one that’s in with the dentist. I’ll not take an eye off of her, on any pretext whatever. I quite understand, Mother dear, that’s the way it’ll be. Make your mind easy.”

  One had to be knowing, and careful, going out into the world.

  There was a sense of adventure in setting out, the additional veil hanging swart, and straight, and heavy, pulling a little so that one’s head jerked slightly backwards every now and then.

  Sister Dominic held a stout umbrella in one black-cotton- gloved hand, whilst the other one grasped the wrist of the youngest orphan. The other two orphans, obscured in blue serge and hard, dark, straw hat-brims, each held on to a fold of Sister Clara’s habit.

  One thing, Reverend Mother had promised that the community should recite the Litany of Loretto after office just as they did to ensure anyone from the convent a safe journey.

  So they’d be protected, even scurrying, a row of five, holding on to one another, across the streets, in front of those frightful honking motor-cars, that looked like they’d take the heads off of you, give them a chance.

  “This’ll be it, Dominic dear. No. 3.3”

  A maid in a cap and apron to open the door — and the smartness of her! All grey-and-white, and showing her shape the way a modest convent-bred girl would never have done.

  And the waiting-room, with a carpet, and padded chairs, and a fine pot-plant — putting worldly ideas into the orphans’ heads, as likely as not. As for the pictures and books on the table ...

  “Don’t be casting your eyes about that way, children dear. Sit quiet now. Dominic, the hats’ll have to come off of them, we may be sure of that. We’ll pile them this way, on the chair, and you’ll keep an eye on them, for fear someone else’ll be coming in and perhaps making off with them. It’s not as though we were in a good Catholic country.”

  The hats of the orphans were stacked upon a chair, and Sister Dominic sat upon the edge of another chair, facing them. She held her umbrella.

  “If he does well by the children, the sisters’ll go to him. The Infirmarian says there’s some of them with teeth in a terrible state.”

  Sister Clara’s tongue sought familiar cavities, and her hand went to the particular fold of serge sleeve in which were imbedded two large pins, one of which was taken out at the end of meals, and replaced after use in the exact same place, so as to save making a fresh hole.

  “If you’ll step this way, Sister—”

  Mother of Mercy! What a start she’d got! It was the man himself, and smiling, too, standing holding the door open. Awfully young-looking, with dark eyes that might have been Irish, and a queer white coat on him.

  And the gentleness of him, when he’d got the orphan into that chair of his! She’d only to stir, and him stopping the machine, and saying, with that smile, that he was afraid it was hurting her.

  As if one didn’t go to the dentist to be hurt, and the pain to be offered up for all Reverend Mother’s intentions!

  Look at the hands of him!

  She watched them, moving softly and skilfully. Presently he talked to her, at first friendly, joking, little questions, then at more length, telling about himself. He was a stranger in the town, too..

  “It’ll be the grand thing for you, if Reverend Mother sends the orphans regularly. I’ll put in a good word for you,” she ventured, and he looked at her, screwing up his eyes, and laughing.

  She’d not spoken to any man, not counting the good holy priests which was a different thing altogether, for many years.

  But if they were all like this, where would be the harm in them at all? She’d make the orphans start a novena for his conversion to the Faith, that very night.

  “Now the next child, please.’’

  He spent half an hour on each orphan, and the last one, he said, would have to come again.

  “I’ll be bringing her along.’’

  He entered the appointment in a little book.

  “I’ve no secretary, you see, Sister — can’t afford one yet!” and then he shook hands with her. “Good-bye.” The feel of his hand was just what she’d imagined it’d be, gentle, and yet strong. There were funny little dark hairs all down the back of it and along the wrist. And although it was such a hot day, the palm of him was cool and dry. Sister Dominic spoke to her, humbly, on the way home. “Well, you’re a wonderful woman of the world, Sister Clara dear, getting us all safe there and back and talking to the man just as though it was the gardener at dear old Noisy-le-Grand. It won’t be so hard, next time, if Reverend Mother sends us again.”

  Reverend Mother did send them again, with relays of orphans, and then Sister Clara alone, with old Mother Seraphina who spoke no English and whose cheap râtelier appeared to need endless adjustments.

  And he was always kind, and he always smiled, with that screwing-up of his eyes, and talked to Sister Clara.

  One day she said that she had toothache, and received Reverend Mother’s leave to make an appointment for herself after Mother Seraphina’s session. She had, for days, been devoured by an intense curiosity to know what it would feel like to have those hands hovering about one’s face. Once, he had had to put his arm right round the back of Mother Seraphina’s old head...

  “No, it’s not hurting me at all, at all.” She smiled up at him; a smile that she felt to be beatific, half-hypnotised. “Would you like to see what I’ve been doing?”

  “I would.”

  “There — on the left — that big molar—”

  He put a little mirror into her hands. And she that hadn’t looked in a glass, hardly, since the day of her final vows, twelve years ago!

  Gracious, what a colour she had! Plum-colour, that was her face. And the smile that had felt beatific, looking foolish and uncertain, as though she were ashamed of something. The glass turned dim as her heavy breathing struck it.

  Would she perhaps have been breathing into his face that way all the time, and she never thinking of such a thing?

  The face in the glass looked redder than ever. Mother of Mercy, this weather! The heat of it! And the holy habit no less than five smelly thicknesses of serge, and not wearing thin yet, though on the back of her year in and year out.

  “That’s the last stopping, Sister. I shan’t have to trouble you again.”

  “Ain’t I to come to you any more then?”

  “It won’t be necessary. What I’ve done should last you for a long while. But if you have pain, come to me at once. Any time.”

  What’d it be like, at all, not seeing him any more? Could it be that she’d become inordinately attached, the way the Imitation said was so wrong? And to a man, too.

  She was a wicked creature, not worthy of the holy vocation.

  “Is there nothing more needs doing?”

  “Nothing at all. You have excellent teeth, Sister. There’ll be no more trouble, now those fillings are in.” The smile he gave her! So that one hardly heard what he was saying...

  “If the Reverend Mother wants anyone else seen to, I shall be very pleased to do what lean. Good-bye, Sister. I should like to have persuaded you that there’s plenty of good work to be done outside, too. Take a capable woman like yourself, now. It seems a shame yo
u should be shutting yourself up inside four walls. Why, you — you might have been my secretary, if I could only afford to have one!” That was a grand laugh of his, it made one want to laugh too, only that one might start crying somehow.

  It seemed there’d be nothing left to look forward to in the whole world after the shake of the hand meaning good-bye. There was still that...

  It was the queer way to feel entirely, and her forty years old.’

  Touching the hand of him for the last time, and it strong and yet gentle at one and the same time, quite different to the hand of any woman...

  It was over now, and one hurried away, scared that old Seraphina’d see something strange in the face of one.

  “Will any more of the sisters be going to him, Mother Seraphina?”

  “No.”

  “Nor any of the dear children?”

  “No.”

  Mother of Mercy, there was no sleeping in this heat! But it wasn’t the heat. It was the way one was fretting and crying after what couldn’t be. Though what for couldn’t it be, when he’d said himself that it was a sin and a shame for the like of her to be shut up inside four walls, and himself wanting a secretary and not able to pay one? There’d be some glad enough to work for him without any pay.

  Day after day it went on, and night after night, till the pain in one’s head was past bearing, and still there was no getting to sleep.

  The things one thought of!

  There was the door, giving right on to the street, and then only a bit of a walk, and oneself knowing every step of the way, and then the sight of him, and the feel of those hands of his — it was that would put everything right, and take the spell off of one.

  On the hottest night of all, Sister Clara made up her mind. She’d break her holy vows, that were already broken in the heart of her, and go back into the world.

  In the morning she dressed and went downstairs.

  She’d not be taking anything with her. After Mass the nuns’d be going to the refectory, and they’d not be missing her for awhile, and they keeping the custody of the eyes the way the Holy Rule enjoined.

  Oh, it was the fine nun she was, to talk about the Holy Rule.

  The door was unlocked. Once outside on the pavement, there was nothing to do but pull it to again. The slam of it!

  There’d be no getting in again now, without a great ringing of the bell, and the portress coming to answer it, and the giving of scandal to the whole of them.

  If it hadn’t been for that slam of the door ...

  The weather had broken. It wasn’t hot any more, but raw and chilly.

  The way he’d laugh, and look at you, so interested in any little thing you said! It was wonderful.

  What time did people in the world get up and start their day? Later than this, no doubt. But there’d be the waiting-room, where she’d sat with Sister Dominic and the orphans that first time of all. (Maybe she’d never set eyes on Dominic again.)

  What for did that maid of his take so long to come to the door?

  But it wasn’t the maid who opened the door at last.

  It was a person in a blue apron, with a man’s cap pulled down over her eyes, and her sleeves rolled up, and a bucket with a mop in it at her down-at-heel feet.

  “‘E ain’t come yet. Won’t be ‘ere, not for a hower, but if it’s the toothache, you can come in and wait.”

  “Does he not live here, then?”

  “Ho no, ‘e don’t live ‘ere. But ‘e comes reg’lar, and ‘e’ll be along by-and-by. You go in and sit down. You won’t mind me going on with the cleaning-up? Turned cold all of a sudden, ain’t it?”

  The rolled-back carpet in the waiting-room, the chairs piled, seat against seat, round the walls, the broom that presently chased into all the corners, made it seem colder.

  It grew colder and colder as the hour went by.

  That was the sound of a key in the lock outside.

  “‘Morning, Mrs. Hatch. A nasty change in the weather, isn’t it?”

  Mumble, mumble, mumble.

  “Oh Lord, already!”

  He came into the room where Sister Clara shuddered and cowered inside her folds of enveloping black serge.

  Look at the face of him! Different, somehow.

  You could see how he felt the sudden chilliness in the air, and he was rubbing his hands together, hard. They were different, too — all mottled with cold.

  “You in pain, Sister?”

  “I — I’ve come.”

  “M’m? I don’t attend to anyone till nine o’clock, you know, as a rule, but if it’s a question of pain ... Well, what can I do for you? By the look of you, it’s an abscess, isn’t it?”

  THE APPEAL

  This isn’t a story. It’s an attempt at reconstruction. Given my knowledge of the principals — Mary Jarvis, and her mother, Mrs. St. Luth — I think I can do it.

  Mary Jarvis was my mother, and Mrs. St. Luth, of course, my grandmother. Thank god, I’m a modern and can look at them impersonally — judge each on her own merits, as it were.

  My mother and my grandmother made scenes as other women make jumpers. It was their form of self-expression. I imagine — although I never knew for certain — that it was my father’s inability to maintain himself a la hauteur, in the perennial melodrama that was my mother’s idea of life, that led to my grandmother being invited to live with them.

  She came when I, their only child, had barely reached the stage of exchanging my baby frills for first knickerbockers. ( I am certain, although I don’t remember it, that my mother wept and said she felt that she had lost her baby for ever.)

  Already my parents were unhappy together. Mary — I call her so here for convenience, but she would never have tolerated it in reality — Mary, although really affectionate and impressionable, was fundamentally insincere, with herself and with everybody else. She lived entirely on the emotional plane, and when genuine emotions were not forthcoming she faked them by instinct. Her mother, who belonged to the same type, although with more strength of character, and far less capacity for affection, had always played up to her. They had their violent disputes and violent reconciliations — neither could have been happy without — but they did respect one another’s poses.

  But my father never played up.

  He couldn’t. Worse still, if he could have done so, he wouldn’t — on principle.

  Again I can’t remember, but I can imagine, almost to the point of certainty, short and searing passages between my parents.

  “Robert, I want you not to ask me to play the piano to-night.”

  (He so seldom gave her an opening, that she had to force them.)

  “Off colour?”

  “It isn’t that. I heard to-day that Mrs. Thorndyke’s child is dead. It — it upset me.”

  “But you didn’t know the child.”

  “I know Katherine Thorndyke.”

  “You’ve met her once or twice, I remember. And didn’t we hear that if the poor child had lived, it must have been an idiot?”

  Probably, at that stage, my mother burst into tears. She’d been heading for that, of course, although she didn’t know it consciously. But my father did, and had made her aware that he did, in a rather brutal fashion.

  That was the way they reacted on one another.

  It was better, after grandmother came. Curiously enough, my father liked her, although she and Mary had so many of the same characteristics. But I think he regarded her as a sort of lightning conductor.

  For Mary herself, however, it was different. Like so many people who manufacture continual unhappiness for themselves, she had a frantic craving for happiness, and an irrational conviction that happiness was her due.

  She told me herself, long afterwards, that she never had any thought of infidelity towards my father, nor did she ever meet any man who could or would have caused her to break her marriage vows. But — and this she didn’t tell me, it’s part of the reconstruction — she was constantly obsessed by a vague and romantic
expectation of some such encounter. I imagine that she could not believe the world to have been created without a special application to her yearnings.

  And then undoubtedly the nervous wear and tear that she imposed upon herself, and upon us all, told on her spirits. Her scenes with grandmother, although they may have served as a safety-valve, were too frequent. They may also have served to throw into painful contrast her husband’s stolid opposition to any form of emotional stimulus.

  However that may be, grandmother had formed part of our household for rather less than a year, when Mary suddenly ran away.

  It was, I suppose, the only dramatic thing that she could think of, in a wet and dreary February, and I have no doubt at all that she did it on impulse. That is to say, she gave herself time to write an immensely long letter to my father — in which perhaps she set forth that view of herself which he never gave her adequate opportunity for putting into words — but she gave herself no time to pack up her things. She simply took her dressing-case, and I am sure that that was mostly filled with photographs in folding frames, and packets of letters tied up with ribbon, and little manuals of devotion heavily underscored in several places.

  Then she walked out of the house, and to the station, and eventually got to Assisi. And they traced her there almost at once, partly because she took no pains to cover up her tracks, and partly because my grandmother — who understood the processes of her mind — found a copy of a Life of St. Francis on the drawing-room sofa, face downwards, with one page all blistered, as though tears had fallen upon it.

  My father, for his part, found the long letter that no doubt told him how little he had understood a sensitive nature, and possibly to what point their life together had become intolerable.

  And this had the strange effect of making him resolve, and declare aloud, that nothing would induce him to try and get her back again. There must have been a stormy scene between him and my grandmother, who had all the conventionally moral instincts of her day, and was genuinely shocked and disturbed at her daughter’s abrupt and violent casting off of her obvious responsibilities.