Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  He waited, angrily and with clenched teeth, for Buckland to go away again, as he had always gone before.

  But Buckland went inside the room and the door closed behind him.

  He did not come out again.

  (5)

  Olwen Morgan, suddenly waking up at some hour preceding the dawn, felt extraordinarily frightened. She did not know why.

  She sat up in bed, reaching wildly for the switch that should turn on the light, and was unable to find it. She was conscious that her mouth was dry, and her hair clinging wetly to her forehead, and still the horrible nightmare fear persisted. With an effort that seemed inconceivably great, she forced herself to lean half out of bed, and at last felt her hand against the light-switch, pressing it down.

  The hotel bedroom, narrow and colourless, at once resumed its familiar aspect — but still the sense of horror clung round her.

  She sank back against the little hard pillow, pushing the sheet away from her sweating body, and lay listening intently. She could hear nothing, except the loud thudding of her own heart.

  An overwhelming feeling of unhappiness seemed to be closing in on her. She could do nothing at all except lie there, trembling, whilst wave after wave of sick misery washed over her, to her terror and desolation.

  “Oh, what is it?” moaned Olwen.

  But no answer came to reassure her.

  This agony of fear and suffering was something about which she could do nothing — something outside herself, and yet it was part of herself. She could not escape from it, nor control it.

  Olwen, sobbing and sweating, began to pray under her breath.

  CHAPTER XIV

  (1)

  It was on the day following that of the expedition to Monte Carlo that Mr. Bolham, with an injustice of which he was entirely, and very angrily, aware, said to his secretary with suave unpleasantness:

  “Mightn’t it be an agreeable change, Waller, if you endeavoured to pay a little attention to your work to-day?”

  Waller became first red, and then rather green.

  “I’m extremely sorry, sir, if you feel that I’ve not been paying full attention to it. I must say, I wasn’t conscious of having given you any reason for thinking so.”

  “I dare say you’ve been attentive enough when you’ve been here at all. But I’ve not been privileged to see very much of you in the last forty-eight hours, you must remember.”

  “Sir!” cried Denis, with more spirit than usual. “I distinctly understood that you would not require my services yesterday, and had no objection whatever to my taking the day off.”

  As Mr. Bolham had, indeed, given Denis to understand just exactly that, he became angrier than ever. He wished to find some adequate grounds for his increasing tendency to bully the wretched Denis, and none would present themselves.

  It was intolerable.

  “Take down these letters,” said Mr. Bolham, low and viciously, and beginning to dictate with extreme rapidity before Denis had got either pencil or note-book ready.

  In this agreeable atmosphere, the morning passed.

  The afternoon was spent by Denis at the typewriter, his instinct for self-dramatisation feeding greedily on the sweltering heat, and the fact that he had not been near the sea all day, nor exchanged a word with anybody other than his employer.

  His sense of martyrdom was complete when, at four o’clock, he refused himself the customary break in which to drink a cup of tea and went on working.

  By six he had finished.

  He wondered bitterly whether Chrissie had been down to the plage to bathe, and had missed him. At all events she had not troubled to send him a message, or ring him up on the telephone.

  Denis took a long draught of rather tepid water from the tap marked eau potable in the bathroom. He would have liked iced orangeade, but he never treated himself to small luxuries unless by doing so he could impress somebody else. Then he changed into a bathing-suit, put on his silk dressing-gown, of which he was extremely proud because it looked so expensive, and went downstairs.

  Nobody was there except Dulcie Courteney. Her face lighted up at the sight of Denis, and she sprang towards him, squeaking.

  “Oh, I’m so glad to see you, Mr. Waller — Denis, I mean. I’ve been wondering all day where you were, and I couldn’t see you at lunch-time because I had it upstairs with Marcelle Duval. She wasn’t feeling well. It’s been awfully quiet all day. The Morgans are packing, and Mrs. Romayne hasn’t been downstairs at all, and Patrick went off by himself somewhere. He looked as if he had a headache — like Marcelle.”

  “I have a headache myself,” said Denis, passing his hand across his forehead. “I’ve been working at very high pressure all day. I thought I’d go down and see whether a swim would do me any good.”

  “Oh, are you going to the plage? I’d love to come with you. I was at the rocks this morning, with Pops and Mr. and Mrs. Moon. Oh, and” — she hesitated— “I nearly forgot to tell you, that Miss Challoner was there, and she asked me to tell you that she was going to St. Raphael this afternoon, but she hoped she’d see you to-morrow.”

  “That’s very kind of her,” said Denis, with the most satirical inflection that he could contrive.

  “Why do you say it like that?”

  “I don’t know that I meant to say it in any very special way, Dulcie. It just amuses me a little bit, that’s all, to see how very easily success seems to spoil people.”

  “Is Miss Challoner spoilt?”

  “I think so. Just a little bit,” Denis answered in a quiet, indulgent tone. It gave him a peculiar satisfaction to speak disparagingly of Chrissie, yet without animosity, as though he was judging her quite impartially.

  “She’s very clever indeed, of course — quite brilliant in her own line — and it’s natural, I suppose, that she should be rather capricious and — inconsiderate — to people who’ve been less fortunate than herself.”

  “I’m sure she’s been beastly to you!” cried Dulcie.

  Denis had been far too much absorbed in his own histrionics to expect her to voice any such conclusion, and was considerably startled.

  But sympathy was pleasant, and Dulcie’s eager and unquestioning acceptance of him at his own valuation soothing to his writhing vanity.

  “No, I don’t think so,” he said, in a tone which meant the contrary. “As I say, I can quite understand it. She thought she liked me very much, I believe, for a few days, and then she discovered that I was a very ordinary person, and just dropped me again. I never took any of it very seriously, you know.”

  He smiled calmly and reassuringly.

  But Dulcie made a clutch at his arm, and uttered a sympathetic moan.

  “How horrible of her! Oh, I simply hate her!”

  “It’s very sweet of you to care so much about my troubles,” said Denis, really touched. Obeying an instinct that still survived in him from his timid, unloved childhood, he laid his hand on her shoulder with a friendly pressure.

  Dulcie caught and pressed it fervently in her own.

  “Come along down to the shore, and let’s have a bathe,” said Denis kindly.

  He was moved by her evident adoration of him, and in some obscure way it pleased him to feel that here was somebody for whom he could be sorry.

  All the way down to the shore she talked to him, telling him a great deal about herself, although always with her curious unchildlike caution in speaking of other people. It was only in regard to Chrissie Challoner — not a visitor at the Hôtel d’Azur — that she had been outspoken and unguarded. She did not, however, mention Chrissie again until they had swum — slowly and with many pauses — out to the raft, and were sitting on it, paying little attention to the two French youths who alone shared it with them.

  “Denis, if you don’t mind me asking, did you like her frightfully — Miss Challoner, I mean?”

  “I liked her very much, and I still like her very much,” replied Denis in measured tones. “I don’t change at all easily, I’m afraid.
People may disappoint me, sometimes — they do, quite often — but it doesn’t make any difference to my feelings for them. I don’t change, whatever they may do.”

  He was genuinely incapable, at the moment, of realising that no statement could have been much further from the truth. Denis was, and always had been, completely at the mercy of his own susceptibility, but he had hypnotised himself into believing that he was possessed of great constancy.

  Dulcie was quite prepared to believe this too.

  “I knew you were like that,” she said fervently. “I do think it’s a shame, her treating you like that.”

  “Promise me you won’t say anything about it to anyone,” said Denis earnestly. “In fact, there isn’t anything to say.”

  “Oh, of course I won’t. I think it’s marvellous of you to confide in me, truly I do. I’d love to feel I was a little teeny bit of a comfort to you, Denis.”

  “Of course you are. I haven’t many friends, you know,” said Denis sentimentally.

  “I shall always, always be your friend.”

  Denis felt touched, but also slightly embarrassed. He knew that he did not really feel very much drawn towards Dulcie, and never would. His taste in feminine looks, and manners, and conversation, was fastidious, and Dulcie did not by any means conform to it.

  He smiled at her, as nicely as he could, and then slipped off the raft into the sea.

  She followed meekly.

  At the corner of the road, just below the entrance to the grounds of the Hôtel d’Azur, the omnibus from St. Raphael was discharging its passengers. Denis’s heart missed a beat at the sudden thought that Chrissie might be amongst them.

  But only Buckland got out.

  “I didn’t know you’d gone to St. Raphael, Mr. Buckland,” said Dulcie. “Did you see Miss Challoner there?”

  “No. I was only in there an hour,” said Buckland. “Hallo, Waller! Been doing any more stunts in the water? How’s the poor old heart?”

  Denis made no reply, and they walked up the hill in a silence that was, so far at least as Buckland was concerned, unusual.

  Dinner had already begun when they arrived. Buckland disappeared from view, Dulcie went straight into the dining-room, and Denis, to whom the formalities were of the utmost importance always, hurried upstairs and changed into a flannel suit.

  When he at last entered the dining-room he saw that he would be dining alone. Mr. Bolham was sitting at Mr. Muller’s table, with the Morgan family. Denis remembered that it was their last night at the Hotel.

  Giving them his self-conscious little bow as he passed, he walked to his place.

  Courteney came up to him.

  “All by yourself, Waller? Come and dine at our table, won’t you?”

  “Thank you. That’s very kind of you. But don’t let me be in the way.”

  “Nonsense. Dulcie will be delighted. Come along.”

  Denis, not knowing how to refuse, went. He was always ill at ease with Courteney, although the latter had never again made the slightest reference to their having met before. Denis, in fact, had almost succeeded in persuading himself that Courteney had decided that he must have been mistaken, and forgotten all about the incident.

  Almost, but not quite.

  Dulcie, rendered more silent than usual by the presence of her father, made a slight grimace, expressive of her pleasure and understanding, every time that she caught Denis’s eye, but said very little. Denis was not sorry.

  The secretive instinct was strong in him, and he was also afraid lest Dulcie’s devotion should make him appear slightly ridiculous. He was beginning to be aware of its ardent and excessive character, and it was making him vaguely uneasy. He would have detached himself from the society of the Courteneys after dinner, but they seemed to expect him to sit with them on the terrace, over coffee, and he had not the courage, or the savoir-faire, to break away.

  The terrace was unusually empty.

  Mr. Muller had taken his entire party by car down to the sea for a moonlight bathe, the French family from Marseilles were out, the Duvals dining upstairs.

  Angie and Hilary Moon, in unbroken silence, sat at opposite ends of the hall, yawning over illustrated papers.

  Mrs. Romayne and Patrick had dined alone, and left the dining-room before Buckland’s appearance there. Then Mrs. Romayne had gone back there and sat beside him whilst he ate. Patrick had walked away, taking the path that led up the hillside, behind the Hotel.

  “Isn’t it quiet, to-night!” Dulcie exclaimed suddenly. “There’s nothing going on at all, is there? And to-morrow night the Morgans will all have gone. I wonder who will have their rooms.”

  “A party of South Americans,” said her father promptly. “They’re arriving to-morrow morning. And Muller’s wife, and his son and daughter, at the end of the week.”

  “How much longer is Mr. Bolham staying?”

  Courteney frowned.

  “Mind your own business, my dear,” he curtly told his daughter.

  Denis answered mildly, “I don’t think he’s quite made up his mind, Dulcie,” and felt sorry for her, as he always did for anybody who received a direct snub. His understanding of the effects of a snub was profound, and exaggeratedly bitter.

  A car dashed up, shattering the quiet of the breathless night, and the party of commerçants from Marseilles sprang out of it, screaming and chattering at the tops of their voices.

  Courteney rose, extinguishing his cigarette as he did so.

  “Don’t move, Waller.”

  He went over to the group, and spoke to them agreeably in his faultless French, asking whether they had spent a pleasant day, and punctuating with polite, ejaculatory comments their voluble replies.

  One of the women, with her hand through his arm, dragged him into the lighted hall.

  “Allons, faites un peu de musique,” she urged him. “On va danser.”

  “They’re going to dance,” Dulcie unnecessarily observed to Denis.

  They heard Courteney’s strong, competent hands descend on the keyboard. He played with great spirit, and a degree of accuracy unusual in anybody playing by ear alone. Denis wondered whether he ought to ask Dulcie if she would like to dance.

  He did not want to, partly because he was tired, and comfortable where he was, and partly because he was a careful, rather than an inspired, dancer, and did not feel at all sure of appearing to advantage.

  “It’s lovely, sitting out here, isn’t it?” said Dulcie rather timidly.

  Relieved that she apparently did not expect to be asked to dance, Denis assented with some warmth.

  “I’m so glad you like it too, Denis. Oh, Denis, I’m so awfully glad I’ve got you for a friend. It’s so lovely just to sit and talk, isn’t it, with just the stars and things?” said Dulcie romantically.

  Scraping the legs of her chair hideously against the gravel, she drew it close beside his.

  Denis, after a momentary hesitation, put out his hand and took hold of hers.

  He felt that her speech demanded something of the kind, and his own tendency to vague pawings was in proportion to his deficiency in normal sex-desire.

  He even experienced an indulgent amusement, and a sense of being rather touched, when Dulcie, with small breathless gasps of ecstasy, hooked her skinny little fingers into his and allowed her head to droop against his shoulder.

  Denis had often sat in similar affectionate and meaningless proximity to other young women, his wife Phyllis included, and moreover it had not occurred to him to think of Dulcie as anything but a little girl, to whom nobody else was very kind. He permitted her semi-erotic advances, and even encouraged them mildly, with something of the complacency that a demonstrative child might feel at receiving notice and unaccustomed petting.

  They sat on, for some time.

  Dulcie talked and babbled, making various confidences of which Denis did not hear more than half.

  He was in a mood even more sentimental than usual, induced partly by the tunes that Courteney was playing
, and partly by the obviously romantic nature of their surroundings. The thought of Chrissie still hurt, but he was gradually weaving a web of unreality round his sufferings. Soon, Chrissie might become one of those memories on which he dwelt with luxurious melancholy, revelling in the thought of his own faithfulness and the heartless way in which he had been treated. Just below these surface emotions, something more genuine stirred. But he did not want to wake it.

  The only possible way of retaining Chrissie’s friendship was to be honest with her, and that was a necessity Denis could not face.

  (2)

  At ten o’clock Mr. Hilary Moon appeared on the threshold, wearing a light-grey flannel suit.

  Denis gently pushed Dulcie into a more erect position.

  Hilary went to the garage, and came back in his car. The Hotel chasseur appeared with a couple of suitcases and put them into the back of the car.

  At the same moment the music stopped, and the dancers began to stray out on to the steps and terrace.

  “Are you off?” asked Denis, in some surprise, of Moon.

  “Got to see a man in Marseilles to-morrow, if I can, before he sails for America,” Hilary replied negligently.

  “I hope you’ll have a good journey,” said Denis politely.

  “Cooler, travelling at night.”

  “When shall we see you back again?” Denis enquired, secretly hoping that it might not be for several days. He had always felt certain that if one could only see something of the lovely Mrs. Moon, away from her very unattractive husband, it would be easy to get to know her. There was much about her that Denis disapproved, but she was very young: probably she had never come under the right influence....

  “One’ll turn up again one of these days,” said Hilary coldly. He glanced back at the lighted hall.

  Angie was no longer to be seen in the wicker chair near the open window.