Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  “You feel that?”

  I was, somehow, surprised without knowing why. I’d taken for granted that the Allisons wouldn’t be able to say anything bad enough about Copper.

  “Of course. He’s the man for Rose. I see that, just as much as she does. Once they’d met, it was inevitable that they should care for one another. It’s like something one’s read about — a perfect affinity.”

  I thought her as romantic as her daughter, and nearly as unreasonable.

  “If you feel that,” said I, rather brutally, “surely the only thing to do is to persuade Mrs. Gifford to give Copper a divorce, and then let him marry Rose.”

  “But she won’t,” said Mrs. Allison simply. “I mean, Copper’s wife won’t. She’s a horrid woman, really, though I know that technically he’s no right to ask it of her.”

  “Do you mean,” I demanded, still incredulous, “that if she were willing to divorce him, you and Tim would allow that girl — that lovely child — to marry Copper?”

  “I don’t see that we should be entitled to prevent it. You haven’t moved with the times, my dear friend. Why should you, when you’ve never chosen to marry and have children of your own? But I do assure you, parents don’t possess their children nowadays. One advises, perhaps, but one doesn’t coerce. I can’t tell you that I shouldn’t be bitterly disappointed to see my Rose married to a man who’d given up his career, and left his wife and children, because of her. I’m even conventional enough, I’m afraid, to mind what other people would say about it — the scandal. But Rose has got to live her own life. Tim sees that too. It would be for her to decide.”

  “Supposing she decides to go off with this fellow?”

  Mrs. Allison whitened, although her face was white enough already.

  “I’ve said all I can. She knows that we think it would be wrong and in her heart she thinks so too. Besides, I don’t believe he’d ever ask her to do that. He cares for her too much.”

  “Then what do you think will happen?”

  “I think they’ll say good-bye. Rose will come Home with us, and he’ll stay at his post. I’m so sorry for him — for them both.”

  Tears were running down her face.

  I was sorry, too, but I felt that she was taking it all too seriously. Girls fell in love with men whom they couldn’t marry, but they got over it — especially girls as young and as beautiful as Rose Allison. It was, to my mind, harder on Copper Gifford than on the girl. He was older, and unless I was much mistaken, Mrs. Gifford would never let him forget that she’d a handle against him for the rest of their life together. But there again — women liked Copper, and were sorry for him. There was no reason to think that he wouldn’t console himself in time.

  Up to the very last moment before the Allisons sailed gossip was rife. People suggested that Rose would stay behind, or that Copper would follow by the next boat. The girl had hardly been seen about at all within the last fortnight, but it was known that Copper spent every available moment in Johore. The Allisons were blamed for permitting it.

  Actually they did more than permit it.

  They came and dined at my bungalow, that last evening, leaving Rose alone to say good-bye to her lover.

  The two had decided that it was to be goodbye.

  “She’ll get over it,” I repeated to Mrs. Allison, in the futile way that one does reiterate a phrase intended to be consoling.

  “Do you remember,” she rejoined, “my telling you — oh, ages ago — that Rose was utterly dependent on personal relationships? She is, you know, just as when she was a little child. Some women are like that. Nothing else matters to them.”

  “She’ll find someone else. It sounds heartless to say so now, perhaps, but I’m certain it’s true.”

  “That’s what I say,” Tim Allison put in. He looked sadly distressed, and I could see that my common-sense pronouncement was heartening him up. The fact that he was evidently on my side, so to speak, encouraged me to add:

  “Mark my words, when I come Home, two and a half years from now, and look you up in London, the very first piece of news you’ll give me, is that Rose is engaged to be married to some splendid young fellow of her own age. And what’ll you give me, Mrs. Allison, not to say I told you so?”

  She smiled, and didn’t say anything when her husband exclaimed that I was right.

  I went down to the docks next day and saw them off. Copper wasn’t there. Rose looked pale, with great, dark circles under her eyes, and spoke very little. Her mother was crying.

  Just at first one had news, more or less regularly, of the Allisons. People asked one another, “Have you heard from the Allisons this mail?” and someone had almost always had a letter.

  Imperceptibly it became: “Does anyone ever hear anything of the Allisons nowadays?” and then, as usual, interest shifted to new arrivals or to those who had been new arrivals when the Allisons left. Just before I took my year’s leave, I heard of Allison’s rather sudden death from influenza. I wrote, of course, and subsequently saw Mrs. Allison in London. Naturally, it wasn’t a festive reunion.

  Rose wasn’t with her.

  When Allison retired, they had bought a house near Oxford, and Mrs. Allison told me that she and Rose intended to stay on there. Rose was neither married nor engaged.

  “She hasn’t forgotten, I’m afraid.”

  “Does she ever hear from that fellow?”

  “No. The Regiment went to Hong Kong afterwards. They’re out there still, I believe.” That was all that was said about Copper Gifford.

  We talked about Rose, of course, a good deal. I gathered that she and her mother were devoted to one another and did everything together. I remember thinking that it would be doubly lonely for Mrs. Allison when Rose did marry, for I felt certain that, in time, she would marry.

  Five more years went by. I was within sight of retiring myself. The Allisons had become remote, as people do whom one has once known well and then lost touch with by degrees.

  They were very vividly and unexpectedly recalled to me.

  Two globe-trotting ladies — sisters called Verschoyle — suddenly descended upon me with letters from my people. There were complications about their boat — I offered them the hospitality of my bachelor bungalow and they, with noisy exuberance, accepted. They remained, effusive and talkative guests, for a week and in the course of that week — I must confess I found it a lengthy one — they told me all about Rose Allison.

  It appeared that they lived quite near to the Allisons in Oxfordshire. Their nephew, whom they spoke of, in every other sentence, as Humphrey, was going to marry Rose Allison. News of the engagement had only reached them last mail: they were determined to cut short their tour and be at home in time for the wedding.

  “So inconsiderate of them! They might just as well have settled it before we left England, so that we should have known what to be at!” Miss Verschoyle said, with one of her loudest laughs.

  “It wasn’t,” said Miss Adelaide, “as though the thing hadn’t been going on quite long enough — why, Humphrey’s wanted to marry Rose ever since they first met, and that’s quite six years ago. I confess, at one time, I thought it really was hopeless, and that he’d far better give up the idea of her altogether, but, of course, I didn’t say a word. But we always knew when poor Humphrey had proposed to Rose again and been refused, he was so dreadfully depressed next day, and used to make an excuse for going away for a few days. Of course, in the usual course of things, he never goes away. He’s so devoted to his little place, you know.”

  I didn’t know at all and was bewildered.

  “He farms his own land?”

  “Yes. Just three hundred acres, you know, and a nice, old-fashioned Oxfordshire farm-house. Humphrey’s lived there ever since he came into the place and is quite devoted to it. We call him — ha-ha-ha — a regular old country squire.

  Wild horses won’t drag him out of Oxfordshire.”

  “But how old is he, if I may ask?”

  “Well,
he’s a good deal older than she is, certainly. Humphrey — I suppose Humphrey must be getting on for forty-one. She’s twenty-six. It seems rather a lot — fifteen years between them — but Humphrey’s such a steady old thing. We’ve always felt he’d make a splendid husband.” It seemed to me that what the Misses Verschoyle had felt mattered very little indeed. Their eulogies of their nephew had only succeeded in conveying to me an impression of a worthy clodhopper with about as much intelligence as one of his own turnips, and already settled irretrievably into the ways of middle age. What a mate for Rose Allison as I remembered her — that golden girl, who had been so wildly in love with another woman’s soldier husband!

  “What does Mrs. Allison say about it?” I enquired, not too felicitously, I admit.

  The two ladies looked offended. They were both inclined to be touchy.

  “Naturally, I should imagine she’s delighted to think of having her daughter settled so near. Humphrey’s place is only a few miles away from their tiny house.”

  (I noted, as I was meant to do, the distinction between the “place” and the tiny house.)

  “But they weren’t engaged when we saw the Allisons before we left Oxfordshire,” Miss Adelaide explained. “So naturally we didn’t discuss it with Mrs. Allison — in fact, there wasn’t anything to discuss. Of course, it was an open secret that Humphrey wanted Rose to marry him — these things always get about — but beyond a word or two years ago to Mrs. Allison there really wasn’t anything to be said.”

  “Is Rose as pretty as ever?” I asked.

  “She is very pretty,” they agreed, but without enthusiasm.

  “A little pale and quiet,” Miss Verschoyle added. “Not a great deal of animation, perhaps.”

  “It’s natural in the only child of a widowed mother — leading such a quiet life too. And there was some girlish love-affair that had rather cast a shadow. However, that’s all over now — ha-ha-ha!”

  Certainly, neither of the Miss Verschoyles were to be accused of lack of animation.

  They chattered on, and I drew some very definite conclusions from their chatter. First of all, that the Allisons were poor, and that Humphrey Verschoyle — by comparison — was well off.

  That Rose wasn’t in love with him and had only yielded to the pressure of dogged pertinacity.

  That the two devoted, exuberant aunts had their home within a mile of Humphrey’s lodge-gates, and looked forward confidently to being, as they phrased it, in and out of his house after his marriage even more frequently than before it.

  I found myself wondering what Mrs. Allison, who had told me that one didn’t coerce one’s children, felt about Rose’s marriage.

  I thought of writing to her, but somehow I didn’t. It was so long since we’d met, and Rose herself, I hadn’t seen since the affair with Copper Gifford.

  The aunts, in due course, removed themselves from my bungalow, and indeed from Malaya. One of them — rather to my surprise — eventually wrote me a long letter from Oxfordshire and enclosed a newspaper cutting giving an account of Rose Allison’s marriage to Humphrey Verschoyle.

  After that, I gave none of them more than a passing thought for years.

  Then, at a comparatively short interval of time, the two echoes reached me that were to complete my knowledge — imperfect as such indirect knowledge must necessarily be — of Rose Allison’s story.

  It was after I had left the Malay States for good and was shivering through the horrors of an English winter on the South Devon coast — erroneously recommended to me as a refuge from east winds.

  Staying in the same hotel as myself was the elder Miss Verschoyle.

  Except that she was in deep mourning she looked exactly the same as when I had, with much inward relief, said good-bye to her on the docks at Singapore. She recognized me and there was little escape for me from her society after that.

  Her gay exuberance had changed to a grave exuberance. That was the only difference to be seen in her. She belonged to the type of elderly lady that is faithful to the coiffure, the hats, and the dress that were in the very height of fashion fifteen years earlier.

  She told me directly that she was in mourning for her sister. Miss Adelaide Verschoyle, it appeared, had had a weak heart and, three months ago, had succumbed. Her sister’s manner indicated that there was something to be explained about it all — and later on, I heard the rest.

  “My dear sister,” said Miss Verschoyle, “ought to have been spared every kind of worry. It always affected her health. But unfortunately we had a good deal of family trouble. One doesn’t care to talk about it.” She paused and I knew that she was going to give me the whole thing. “You knew my nephew Humphrey’s wife before she married him?”

  “Only as a mere child.”

  Miss Verschoyle waved that aside.

  “I remember talking to you about it all just when they became engaged, that delightful time in Johore, and Adelaide and I hurried home to England and cut short our whole trip just so as to be back in time for the wedding. Dear me, one little thought how it was all going to turn out!”

  “The marriage hasn’t been a success?”

  She shook her head, pursing up her lips.

  “Very, very far from it. Poor Humphrey!” Already the spirit of contradiction and something else inclined me to retaliate with “Poor Rose!” but naturally, I did not do so.

  “It wasn’t so bad the first few years, whilst her mother was alive.”

  I exclaimed, for I had not heard of Mrs. Allison’s death, but Miss Verschoyle’s narration rushed on, unheeding of all that did not bear upon the main theme of her grievance.

  “Yes, Mrs. Allison died four years after the marriage, poor thing, and at first, I’m bound to say, Adelaide and I both thought that things would go better once Rose had got over her loss. She was really quite exaggeratedly upset by it, but, of course, she and her mother were very devoted, and in fact we all thought — all our family — that Mrs. Allison spent far too much of her time with them. I remember once, when I was speaking to poor Humphrey about it, and trying to persuade him that he ought to put his foot down, he said to me that it was a positive relief to him to have Mrs. Allison there, at any rate in the evenings, because then he could go to sleep in peace over the newspaper without having to answer Rose’s chatter. It seemed as though she could not be happy without talking. Even when they were alone together at meals, I believe she expected him to talk to her.”

  “But what about?” I asked stupidly, really not knowing what else to say.

  “Anything — everything!” Miss Verschoyle exclaimed impatiently. “Her mother used to say that Rose was so dependent on sympathy — but as I said to her it was largely Mrs. Allison’s own fault for ever allowing her to reach that stage. As though any man, especially one like Humphrey, either out in the fields all day or else hunting, wants anything except to be left in peace when he does come indoors.”

  “There are no children, then?”

  “Unfortunately not. Both Adelaide and I have said again and again that if only there had been half a dozen children to take her mind off herself, she’d have kept poor Humphrey happy, and been happy herself. As it is, after Mrs. Allison died, the whole thing practically came to smash.”

  “She left him?” I hazarded.

  Miss Verschoyle nodded portentously.

  “First of all, she had what the doctor was pleased to call a nervous breakdown. Personally, I should have thought a nervous breakdown is the result of over-work, and not of doing nothing all day long except read books and play the piano. Half the trouble was that Rose wasn’t fit to live in the country. She had no country pursuits, and although I believe she was supposed, at one time, to care about golf and tennis, Humphrey naturally hadn’t got time to play with her. Anyhow, she was supposed to be ill, and she lost a great deal of weight and all her looks — poor Humphrey!”

  She stopped.

  “It’s almost too dreadful to talk about.”

  Once more, I knew that sh
e was going to talk about it.

  “Rose went to the South of France. The doctor — some London man, who probably had an arrangement with hotels there, or something like that — said that it was absolutely necessary for her to have a complete change — and poor dear Humphrey sent her off with a hospital nurse. You can imagine the expense, with the estate needing every penny that can be put into it these days! And Rose, of course, has practically nothing at all. She and her mother were living, more or less, on Mrs. Allison’s widow’s pension before Rose married.

  “Well, she went off. Then, I believe, she wrote poor Humphrey a most impossible letter. He simply hates long letters to begin with, and he certainly never writes one if he can help it. I don’t know, actually, what it was she said exactly — but that letter was the beginning of the end. It made out that she couldn’t live without human companionship — Heaven only knows what she meant — and that she wanted to spend half the year in London, or abroad, where she could see people and hear music and get conversation. Imagine! when she knew as well as possible that Humphrey can’t bear London, and would never think of leaving home, unless he just wanted to go and shoot somewhere for a day or two. But, of course, what she wanted was to go by herself, just as though she had no responsibilities towards her husband and the running of her house.

  “Adelaide and I were a tiny bit hurt that he didn’t come to us about that letter. We could have talked it over, and I feel certain that one of us, at least, would probably have gone out to Rose and put the whole thing before her in the right light. But — well, I suppose, he’d come to the end of his tether, poor Humphrey. He simply wrote back half a dozen lines saying that he expected her to do her duty as a wife, and that he had no intention of altering their way of life, and hoped that when she came home, they would settle down again and forget she’d ever been away.