Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  “But I,” said Christine privately to her sister, “am going to pay all the expenses. I’ve got quite a lot of money saved — truly I have — and I’m simply going to blue it on this.”

  “Christine, are you — I daresay you will think me very absurd and conventional — but are you happy?”

  “Frightfully,” said Christine placidly.

  “I’m glad,” said Laura, almost tearfully.

  Christine shook her fair head disapprovingly, kissed Laura, and changed the subject. Laura never knew whether Christine placed to her discredit this brief dialogue as a merely sentimental impulse, or whether she suspected any of the stifled longing that possessed her sister for opportunities that it seemed to her she had never had. For Laura, confronted by Christine’s security, Christine’s contentment, and Christine’s absolute conviction of present and future happiness, was obsessed by a positively frenzied sense of contrast.

  She did not wish — except spasmodically and without real fervour — that Alfred had been rich, but she wished with a ceaseless, half-suppressed passion, that now coloured the whole of her days, that she could become possessed of Christine’s freedom, Christine’s detachment, and Christine’s powers of conducting her affairs with judgment and intelligence. Laura, in fact, shared with several hundred thousands of other people a vain desire to combine the opportunities of youth with the experience of maturity.

  She was also in the grip of a variety of other desires, mostly incompatible with one another, such as a longing to be made love to by Duke again, and an exhausted feeling that it would certainly simplify matters never to see him any more, a conviction that she could never let Alfred know that she had fallen in love with another man, and a weak desire to tell him all about it in the hope that he would remain sufficiently unmoved to take away from her any sense of guilt.

  “I suppose Freud would say that I had better set about murdering an infant in its cradle,” reflected Laura, with stark and joyless humour, “in preference to nursing an unacted desire. What would Freud say to my present state of mind?”

  Laura’s question was purely rhetorical. If she had dwelt upon the subject, which she had no wish to do, she would have known too well that Freud, had he been in a position to pronounce a verdict, would have declined to look upon her case as being in any way peculiar, unique or interesting. For she could not deny that there is nothing either peculiar, unique or interesting, in wishing for more love, more admiration and more attention than one is ever likely to receive.

  Edward and Johnnie received with varying degrees of enthusiasm the information that they were to be pages at their aunt’s wedding. It had evidently been easy for nurse to inoculate Edward with some of her own excitement, but the un-suggestible Johnnie was inclined to parade his own originality by adopting an opposite point of view. The unfortunate Edward was torn between his natural tendency to enjoy whatever he was told was enjoyable, his unvarying instinct for imitating Johnnie, and his desire to propitiate nurse. It was left to Laura to make up his mind for him, and as usual she did so with a mild contempt for his vacillations, and a contrasting admiration for his characterful junior. In Edward she saw all the acquired characteristics that she least admired in herself, in Johnnie’s those that she had not had the strength to develop, but that might once have been hers.

  She wondered from time to time, remembering Mrs. Bakewell, whether it might not be possible to live in her children, as the phrase runs. It did not seem so.

  Edward, physically independent and spiritually and mentally undeveloped, did not really interest his mother as an individual. She knew that more and more, as time went on, he would live in a world of games and machines and little, unrelated facts about things and animals — never about people — and that in that world he would, rightly, have very little place for her. The bond between them, such as it was, was unlikely to survive the needs of his childhood.

  For Johnnie, her love was vivid, and even passionate. He possessed the power to hurt her. She was the secondary luminary in his ego-centric world. But his need of her, also, would diminish, as he came to realise more and more the importance — the, to him, supreme importance — of his own effect upon other people. Johnnie’s very likeness to herself would defeat any attempt on Laura’s part to monopolise him.

  Nor did she seriously wish to do so — for she had read several very alarming works about the strange, and indeed scandalous, effects of what the authors rightly termed Vampire-Mothers, upon the subsequent careers of their children.

  Laura, with a vague idea of sublimating her desires, thought of Alfred, of her own writing, and even — it must be admitted, as a last resource — of The Poor. But Alfred had already got everything that she had to give him, her writing was obliged to be subordinated to the claims of housekeeping, and The Poor, Laura honestly felt, were better catered for by existing organisations than by the manufactured activities of her own superfluous energy.

  She arranged to go to London a week before Christine’s wedding, and to let nurse, the boys, and Alfred follow at the last moment.

  “I shall see Duke,” she thought, her heart beating faster.

  And, she added, tempering her own momentary exultation :

  “This must be settled one way or the other. I can’t go on like this — and it isn’t fair on him, either.”

  A general sense of unfairness, in fact, possessed her. Things, she felt, were not fair on Duke, on Alfred, on the children, on herself.

  Things must be redressed.

  In this way did Laura, like a timid horse approaching an obstacle with sidelong steps, bring herself to the point of acknowledging that her love-affair was within sight of a crisis.

  CHAPTER XVI

  “I Should like to hear about it. I am interested,” said Lady Kingsley-Browne, with what Laura could not help feeling to be a creditable effort of generosity.

  “I don’t say that I was not surprised, but I was interested. I know you so well — I’ve met and liked your sister — the — the young man has stayed here. How did it all happen?” said Lady Kingsley-Browne, putting Laura into a difficulty.

  For it was impossible to reply: “The engagement of my sister to the richest commoner in England was brought about by his astonishment and disgust at the atrocious conduct of your daughter, the original object of his affections.” She decided upon a tempered truthfulness.

  “Jeremy was very unhappy when he found that Bébée — that she cared for somebody else — and he happened to meet Christine just then. Of course, she knew the whole story and was dreadfully sorry for him, and he seems to have taken her into his confidence from the very start. And they made great friends.”

  “Ah, yes. So often — on the rebound.”

  “Oh yes,” agreed Laura, perfectly understanding, and anxious to concede everything possible to anyone so profoundly humiliated as she felt her unfortunate hostess to have been.

  “I think we shall find tea in the library,” said Lady Kingsley-Browne, with her old, vague air of having no personal concern with the activities of her well-trained servants. “Come along, my dear. It’s so nice to see you, and I have something to tell you.”

  Remembering the last announcement made by the same informant, Laura indulged in a brief variety of hair-raising conjectures as to the direction taken by latest activities of that informant’s daughter, but she judged it prudent only to emit a wordless sound of interrogation.

  “Come along,” repeated her neighbour. “We can have an undisturbed chat over the fire. I hope your good man won’t be in too great a hurry to pick you up on his way home.”

  “He is at a meeting. They always take a little while.”

  “It was nice of you to come,” said Lady Kingsley-Browne rather wistfully. “And I always meant to thank you, dear, for writing to me yourself as you did, before the engagement was announced.”

  Laura felt touched.

  “Christine and I didn’t want you just to see it in The Times.” she murmured.

  “So
very kind and thoughtful. But I must tell you that Bébée, poor darling child, has taken up quite a new line.”

  “Oh, what?” exclaimed Laura, her tone of dismay betraying her conviction that any new line followed by Bébée must necessarily be a disastrous one.

  “She is leaving him — in fact, she already has left him. She has — it seems a most extraordinary thing, I know — but she has taken up religion. At least, I suppose you might call it a religion. Do come nearer the fire, Laura. I wonder if there are any scones, or anything hot? Oh yes — I see something in the fender. I do hope you like muffins?”

  “Thank you. But do please go on — —”

  “It seems as though Bébée has so much personality, poor darling, that she has to express herself in ways that might, in anybody else, seem almost odd.”

  “Yes.”

  “It seems that she has met a man — I’m sure things would have been just the same had it been another woman — —”

  Lady Kingsley-Browne paused, but as Laura felt equally sure that whatever “it” might be, things would not have been the same had it been another woman, she made no reply.

  “It just happens to have been a man — Ernest Blog is his name, but Americans so often have names that we think odd — well, he has discovered, or invented, a tremendous new creed, and he has quite converted Bébée to it. And the really bright spot is, that they are on their way to England, to — to try and spread it.”

  “They?”

  “She has joined him,” explained Laura’s neighbour, with determined matter-of-factness, “as his secretary.”

  “Like she did with A. B.,” said Laura reflectively.

  “Mr. Blog is not married. You may say that simplifies things, in a way — but, of course, in another way, it makes them more complicated.”

  “Yes, I see it does.”

  “Bébée, I always feel, is a law unto herself,” said Bébée’s mother pleadingly.

  “Indeed, yes.”

  “One really can hardly judge her by our middle-aged, matter-of-course standards. So much more idealistic and enthusiastic. I can’t tell you how ardently she has taken up this new creed.”

  “What, exactly, is it?”

  “Well, from the letter she wrote me — her handwriting is always a little difficult, but one could make out a good deal, here and there — Mr. Blog lays down just one or two broad principles. Nothing sectarian, you know — it rather reminded me of the Women’s Institute movement, that I know you’re so keen about, in that way. But sort of guiding lines, that make life simpler for all of us.”

  “One would be glad to hear of anything that would make life simpler,” said Mrs. Temple, with some feeling.

  “Yes, wouldn’t one?”

  “I should like to hear some of the — the Blog principles, if you can remember them. I am not laughing, really and truly. It’s only the name that — just for the moment — —”

  “I know,” said Lady Kingsley-Browne forbearingly. “It has a quaint sound, I am bound to admit. But the principles seem very simple and beautiful. She enclosed a sheet, with some Rules of Life written on it, put together by Mr. Blog. Nothing dogmatic, you know. Just: It is Better to Speak the Truth than to tell Lies, and Kindness is Right, but Cruelty is Wrong. Things of that sort. I liked all that part of it.”

  “Was there another part, as well?”

  “Two other parts. One was about diet, which always seems to enter so tremendously into any new kind of religion. I always rather wonder why. His — Ernest Blog’s — idea is nothing cooked. Only things that have ripened in the sun — and, of course, in this country, that would limit one a good deal. But anything in the way of drink, and as much of it as one likes. Prohibition, you see.”

  “Not in England.”

  “I know. Perhaps he’ll modify that part of it over here.”

  “And what else?” said Laura.

  “Free Love,” said Lady Kingsley-Browne, as one accepting the inevitable. “Oh yes, my dear, there’s always a catch in these things, and though it’s wrapped up in Universal Brotherhood and Spiritual Planes, I know exactly what it all amounts to. But I’m past caring. All the morals that you and I were taught in the nursery have been turned upside down, and if people don’t do all the things they want to do, then they get complexes and repressions, and end by doing other, much worse things.”

  Laura remained dumbfounded, staring at the exponent of her own theories, that somehow seemed so strangely perverted when preached in conjunction with the evangel of Mr. Ernest Blog.

  “It’s all going to be terribly difficult to explain to people, I know, but Bébée has a wonderful way of carrying things off, and so few people see anything odd about anything nowadays. I thought I could go to her in London, but she is determined to come down here, and to bring him too, of course. One will just have to make the best of it, and after all, it isn’t so bad as her infatuation for A. B., who is so terribly well known. I hear he’s had a nervous breakdown, by the way, poor man, and his wife has taken him to the south of France.”

  “Is he recovering?” asked Laura in a strangled voice.

  “Quite, I believe.”

  The library door opened, and Laura and her hostess stared at one another in a common dismay as “Major and Mrs. Bakewell” were announced.

  “Oh dear, I never thought — —” said Lady Kingsley-Browne as she rose to her feet. “Well, this is nice of you! How are you, Major Bakewell? I haven’t seen you for months.”

  A short contest in unselfishness followed, won, as usual, by Mrs. Bakewell, and Laura sat down again in a chair so placed that on one side she was scorched by the fire, and on the other hampered by the tea-table.

  She talked to Major Bakewell, about rope-making — a subject that had presented itself she knew not how — and heard with dismay fragments of the dialogue taking place upon the other side of the tea-table.

  “America…home almost directly…Blog, but then American names are rather like that…It is a Happier Thing to have Friends than to make Enemies…But nothing cooked.”

  Mrs. Bakewell’s voice perhaps from being employed in a better cause, was more resonant a great deal than that of Lady Kingsley-Browne.

  “I always feel it so wrong to judge anybody,” she said, “even those who, to our poor finite perceptions, appear to have outraged every law of God and man.”

  Major Bakewell stirred uneasily, but still flogged gallantly at the now nearly moribund topic of rope-making.

  “Universal Brotherhood…” came more faintly from Lady Kingsley-Browne. “So very glad to have her home again…unconventional, and even imprudent, perhaps, but then with magnetism like hers…”

  “And to think that I knew Bébée when she was in the nursery!” exclaimed Mrs. Bakewell, suddenly and strongly, as who should say: “To think that Messaline was once an innocent child!”

  At this Laura and Major Bakewell simultaneously abandoned all pretence, and gave themselves up to an attentive silence.

  “Even in the nursery,” said Lady Kingsley-Browne courageously, “Bébée was ridiculously attractive to men. I used to think it was her fairness. The man who came to wind the clocks, even, used to bring sweets for her.”

  “Cynthia has a bright smile for everyone who comes to the house. But I have never allowed my children to eat sweets. The first time I took Theodore to the dentist, he said to me, ‘Mrs. Bakewell! This child has Perfect Teeth. I have never seen anything like it.’ And Theodore — such a regular boy — spoke up before I could say a word: ‘That’s because we have never been allowed to suck sweets between meals,’ he said. Dear little fellow, it was so like him. Always rational.”

  “How very nice,” Laura murmured, already seeking for an anecdote about Johnnie wherewith to counter the precocity of the insufferable Theodore.

  She felt it unfortunate that, just as she was in the middle of it, Alfred should arrive, and that the politeness of her listeners should compel her to finish it in his presence.

  She was no
t surprised that, on the way home, he should inquire:

  “Don’t women ever talk about anything but cooks and children, when they get together?”

  “We hadn’t mentioned either until the Bakewells arrived. I had been hearing about Baybay.”

  Even Alfred displayed comparative animation in begging to be furnished with a report of so sensational a conversation.

  “But I’m glad I went,” said Laura in conclusion. “We couldn’t have let her see the announcement in The Times, just like everybody else. Though as a matter of fact, she didn’t mind nearly as much as I should have expected. We hardly talked about the wedding at all, and I never even told her that we’d been to stay at Castle Gate.”

  “Why should you?” said Alfred, who — as Laura reminded herself — never did see any reason why anybody should ever be told anything.

  She herself derived a certain amount of satisfaction from the interest aroused in the neighbourhood by the news of Christine’s engagement — struck though she was by a tendency on the part of nearly everybody to speak as though Christine were her eldest daughter rather than her younger sister.

  Christine, who had sold her flat to great advantage at exactly the moment when it best suited her to sell it, engaged rooms at the hotel from which she had decided to be married, and Laura joined her there a week before the wedding.

  It was not until Duke Ayland actually met her at the terminus, that Laura suddenly realised afresh what this relationship meant to her. At Applecourt, it had lost poignancy from the sheer weight and force of other preoccupations. Then, she saw him amongst the crowd making his way straight to her, his dark, eager face illuminated.

  “Thank heaven you’ve come! I’ve been here two mortal hours, though I knew perfectly well what time your train was due. Here — give me your case — —”

  He was masterful in the approved masculine way.

  “I could go by Underground,” suggested Laura, who did not, however, really intend to do such a thing.

  “You’re not going to,” returned Duke.