Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  How could one stop one’s husband from talking about county families? The habit was growing on him. As for her, she knew that she was the only woman left, even in the provinces, who wore elastic-sided shoes, with black lisle-thread stockings. Her hat, even, was a three-and-elevenpenny one bought at a sale just before her marriage, fifteen years ago. She gave it a kick before carefully putting it away in the wardrobe....

  Yet she was really a lady, even if not county. Somewhere inside her there was blue blood. She wondered exactly where, and thought of trying to find out with one of her old-fashioned hat-pins. But she was too tired, and it didn’t seem worth while. Better go to the cinema.

  PART II

  She — (not the same she — another one, shingled, but still provincial) — had relations who hunted. At least, they had been relations once, but that was before she married a man of a different class. Now, probably, they wouldn’t even have returned the calls that she was never able to pay, because she could not afford engraved visiting-cards, and yet knew that one couldn’t use printed ones. Seeing a young man in a pink muddy coat and muddy breeches, without a horse, limping along the road, she realized instantly that he had been thrown, out hunting. Once she had known people like that almost quite well. She offered him a lift. She offered him a boiled egg for tea, knowing from the past that nothing else would really do.

  PART III

  He and she and it were visible a long way off, all three walking with imperious self-confidence. Everyone in the public gardens turned round to look at them, their drab, middle-aged eyes nearly dropping out of their old-fashioned heads as they saw the young man’s plum-coloured georgette shirt and broad yellow handkerchief, carefully knotted round his head in place of a hat, the young woman’s pure gold lip-stick case that she was using as she walked along, and the spaniel’s ribbon bow, embroidered with a small cipher.

  They had come.

  Presently they would be gone.

  Just now they were still here.

  PART IV

  They — the he, she, and it ones — took the others, those queer, middle-aged, middle-class ones — out for the day. To a country-house. With the democratic tact of true aristocrats, they took special pains not to introduce one to the relations who owned the house — not even to the illegitimate son. Quite right. They knew, in their careless, confident, brilliant way, that one wasn’t up to the mark. After lunch and tennis and tea the host appeared, crawling across the lawn. He looked away from them, shuddering and retching.

  One guessed that he was not, really, pleased to see one there.

  PART V

  It was over.

  They had looked in and been given tea for the last time. This time to-morrow it would be cocktails.

  Where?

  One saw them on the Lido, or in the Land of the Midnight Sun, or on the top of the Woolworth Building in New York, while one remained at home, thinking about county families, and eating chocolate shape for supper, while one’s husband sang in the bath as he always did. Habit.

  One must tell him.

  “Please listen ...”

  He listened.

  Immediately one began to think. Seeing oneself at forty, at four-and-twenty, at fourteen, at four ... one could feel the feel of one’s first pair of stockings against one’s four-old legs ... where were they now? (The stockings, not the legs.)

  One remembered the whole of one’s life clearly and in detail.

  But he did not wait to hear about it.

  While one was still remembering the exact sound of the squeak made by one’s first slate-pencil on the slate given one by one’s grandmother, he had tired of waiting, and gone away.

  They — he, she, and it — had vanished — gone back to London, to the ‘Varsity, and to a society where people hunted and had boiled eggs for tea afterwards, and were presented with gold cigarette-cases from the tenants.

  PART VI

  Over. No. Yes. Quite.

  He was singing in the bath again.

  He was gone. (Not the same he, but the other he. One’s pronouns ... how was one to disentangle them, even?)

  Giving it up, one slept.

  Over, as they said in county cricket.

  PLATFORM SWEEPERS

  By Albert Hall

  CHAPTER I

  All the Sweepers have genius: it is their characteristic. No Sweeper has ever been known to fail in any undertaking, just as no Sweeper has ever acted any part in Shakespeare less than perfectly.

  The first Soot the Sweeper was born just after that very successful piece of play-acting by one Jacob — acting that played his brother Esau clean off the stage, over the footlights, and into the very back of the pit — and indeed it is possible that it was the story of that histrionic achievement which first inspired young Soot to adopt that career that was to send all post-Flood civilization clean, stark, staring mad about him.

  “For why should I sweep chimneys?” demanded Soot the Sweeper, who was to become the father of Master Soot the Sweeper’s son, the grandfather of Tom, Dick, and Harry Sweeper, the great-great-great-grandfather of countless other Sweepers, the remote ancestor of a long line of faultless Hamlets and inspired Othellos.

  CHAPTER XX

  Sweepers always get what they want. Dick Sweeper wanted at fifteen to play Lear — wanted to badly. Play it in London, to a house that should scream, sob, stamp, roll all over the stage itself in a very frenzy of appreciation. No Sweeper ever put up with anything less than that from any audience. That had been the reception accorded to Carpet Sweeper, whose acting in tragedy — she could never touch comedy — had driven every other actress of her day to instant suicide.

  So Lear, at fifteen, Dick needs must play.

  And— “It’s not a part for a fifteen-year-old. Fifteen should still be playing utility in a fit-up on No. 3 tours.”

  Thus Dick’s mother, born and bred in the prompt corner, able to speak her lines as Volumnia before she was well out of swaddling-clothes, nurtured on a stick of grease-paint.

  But Dick was right. He played Lear as Lear had never been played before, and Europe went mad.

  “Capture, Rapture.” (The old saw of the Sweepers, come true for the thousandth time, as Dick took his five hundred and eighty-first call on the successful first night of his Lear, that was to be spoken of throughout the world for the next fifty-four years.)

  Merry, Very.

  CHAPTER L

  It is a fact that in 1891 there was not a woman in England or in America capable of playing Juliet to Tom Sweeper’s Romeo.

  He went to the most recently acquired of the Sweeper wives — a duchess in her own right. No aristocracy has ever been anything but gratified at alliance with the Sweepers.

  “Frankly, I’m at my wits’ end. I’ve tried out three-and-a-half-dozen women. Not one of them has charm. I’ve never met any woman, except a Sweeper, who has.”

  “A Sweeper by marriage acquires Sweeper characteristics,” said a brilliantly evasive Femina, deliberately letting the suggestion come from him. For she knew her Sweepers, did Femina.

  And Tom leaped at the hint like a hungry shark at a bather’s foot.

  “I can get away with it,” declared a confident Tom (forgetting for a moment that the expression was not in use at that date).

  Clever, Ever....

  He flung Femina into Juliet, lock, stock, and barrel, as a cook flings rice into stew. Day and night he rehearsed her, worked at her with the brilliant efficacy of the Sweepers, brought her to the point at which he wanted her.

  The result justified him hand-over-fist, head-over-heels, one-over-the-eight.

  Femina was the rage of five continents — would have been the rage of ten had there been ten continents.

  CHAPTER CXIV

  Later in his career, young Chim Sweeper — a brilliant, dare-devil Chimney had demanded, and obtained, the abbreviation — was to declare that he had always known that every star on the post-war London stage was the mistress of either his father, or his uncles, or one
of his brothers.

  Mocking, Shocking....

  He himself married old Femina Sweeper’s third boy’s niece-by-marriage, and swept her instantly into the talkies. The success that she achieved there is still the talk of the five-and-ten-cent stores of Ohio.

  But he had reckoned without the previous generation of Sweepers. An outraged generation that had never heard of talkies, never intended to hear of them.

  It was the talkies that killed Harry Sweeper, in the reign of King George V., just as it was the movies that had killed Dick in the nineteen-hundreds, and the musical-comedy craze that had killed Tom in the late ‘nineties.

  Fashion, Passion....

  CHAPTER CCCLXV

  Clean Sweeper, the epitome of all the Sweepers, leapt into stardom at two years old, as an active mouse leaps away from a pursuing cat.

  Hurry, Skurry....

  (Are there many more Chapters to come? — Editor.

  As many as there are Sweepers. And the Sweepers run to children. There is still the illegitimate branch, started by the original Soot the Sweeper and now sweeping the revue stage, yet with an occasional brilliant throw-back to Timon, or one of the Henrys. — Author.

  Well, I’m afraid if there are as many of them as all that, we can’t afford the space. — Editor.

  But I wanted to go on till I could put January 1, 1900 — December 31, 2000, on the last page. — Author.

  You can do that now, straightaway. In fact you’d better.

  Stop it, Hop it. — Editor.)

  WOMEN AND CHILDREN LAST

  (But journalistic young gentlemen don’t, for very long)

  FOREWORD

  If I reopen the stale old question as to whether women have souls, I shall be accused of writing journalese, and that accusation becomes a trifle monotonous when it is repeated in every one of the eighteen hundred letters, five thousand post-cards, and two hundred and fifty telegrams that I receive for every paragraph of mine that appears in the Press. But at least it proves that women, everywhere, are gnashing their teeth and tearing their hair — two things, I may shrewdly observe, that no man ever does — at the thought that I, who am, after all, known all over Oxford and the part of London that counts, have seen through them as a sex. I may observe that I am, I believe, the first man, and very possibly the only one, to have done so.

  I suppose that if I were really to give my opinion about women to the world, pandemonium would be let loose. All kinds of women would commit suicide. A few would emigrate. Others would go mad. Hundreds would write to me, and have appalling nervous breakdowns when I sent no reply, and still worse ones when I did. It would be hell let loose.

  Yet why should a simple statement of fact cause all this despair? It is more than time that women realized exactly what I think of them. I have been thinking it ever since I was six years old — when I may observe that my mentality, outlook, and vocabulary were almost precisely what they are now. (Men are often like that. Women never.)

  Let us therefore take my statement in its broadest sense. Women cannot possibly have souls. This fact, to me, is so obvious, that only the unceasing popularity of this woman-theme in our daily Press could have induced me to write about it. These pages will therefore contain the epitome of all the eternal verities that I have hitherto given to the world in mere columns and half-columns of newspaper.

  (1) What I shall do to make my wife happy

  (a) I shall insist upon having an exact account of every penny of mine that she spends. A wife cannot expect to be treated with either the confidence or the open-handed generosity that a man shows to his mistress. And yet some of them do!

  (b) Three times a week I shall catch her by the shoulders, shake her, bite her in the calf, and then kick her down the cellar stairs. All women are masochists, and any psychologist will tell you that this sort of treatment keeps them bright and contented.

  (c) I shall make her face the truth, long ago discovered by myself, that every year a woman lives she becomes a year older than she was the year before. I don’t want the woman I love to find that out abruptly. I shall remind her of it every day. Perhaps twice, on some days.

  (2) Mothers with a capital M

  Thousands of mothers write to me. I suppose it must be because my mind is quite fairly superior to that of anybody of my generation, or their generation, or any other generation. Perhaps they know that whenever I see a mother — silver-haired, tremulous, in the dear, old-fashioned bonnet and shawl of a bygone fashion — I instinctively realize that here is tragedy. Here is a woman who has nothing left in life. She has had children, and those children have grown up. A tragedy! If my own mother were asked whether she did not view her son in the light of a tragedy, I sometimes wonder what she would reply. But I have never asked her.

  (3) Where women go wrong

  The supreme error of all women is that they do not know how to give a man everything he wants, always, at the exact moment that he wants it. That is why I have never allowed even the greatest courtesans in Europe to make love to me. They cannot do it well enough. Probably they know this, and are afraid of me, for so far they have not attempted to conquer me.

  (4) Where I myself go wrong

  Sometimes I have asked a woman out to dinner, and found that she expected me, simply because I happened to be the host, to pay for her dinner as well as my own. This makes me very angry. Yet it is surely pure, incontrovertible logic that if a woman smokes like a man, she ought to be prepared to pay for her own dinner, and his, too. If you let a woman look at the menu card in a Lyons restaurant, she will almost certainly choose to have her tea brought in a tea-pot, which costs fourpence more than if it was in a cup. I have seen this colossal ramp perpetrated time and time again by women who would absolutely disagree with you if you told them that they were dishonest, fraudulent, immoral, and deserving of at least fifteen years’ penal servitude.

  Contrary to what is believed all over the world, I am not a woman-hater. It is because I want to give women a chance of earning my approval that I write the truth about them. Sometimes after I have written the truth, I have been called vulgar, and at other times I have been called vulgar without my having written anything at all. But I have never known why.

  The other day, I was sitting in a public lounge (I always use this word, although I know perfectly well that refined people do not, because it seems to me prettier than the alternative, vestibule), when I saw a sight that seems to me to sum up the entire question of the relationship between the sexes.

  I saw a man get up and open the door for his wife. The thing was horrible. It was the negation of all the most sacred principles of masculinity. I don’t say that the wife ought to have opened the door for the husband. These are questions that all individuals must thrash out for themselves. But I must say, once and for all, that in no circumstances whatever, when I am a husband, shall I open the door for my wife. And if you reply that I am not a husband, I can sum it all up by saying that the woman whom I shall marry has not yet been found.

  But I am always there — waiting.

  (NOT) FOR FRIGHTENED PEOPLE

  (As it will only make them feel worse)

  (Publisher’s Note about the Author. — The Author’s birthday is in June. She has a natural Permanent Wave and weighs exactly eight stone in her bathing-suit. She has twice been mistaken for a film star — a different one each time.

  The author is a very keen hiker; she crochets a good deal. Her previous novels — However, never mind about that. The Personal Note is what readers want. If they still insist upon knowing about the novels, they must look on what we in the trade call the Back Flap.)

  All day we went on hiking. Later, I was to wonder why we had ever thought it was a good thing to do. At the time, I only thought of keeping level with Arnold’s markedly long stride, and of recognizing Stewart’s quotations from Osbert Sitwell. Also, three of us were wondering what would be the best and quietest way of murdering the fourth.

  Mrs. Mardick never knew what we were talking
about. Later, I was to discover that when Stewart, hobbling his twenty miles an hour as best he could on two broken legs, talked about Simpson’s in the Strand, Mrs. Mardick thought he meant something by P. G. Wodehouse.

  It was this sort of thing that made us feel she ought not to be allowed to go on living. It has always seemed to Stewart and me that the easiest way of avoiding the society of the people who do not speak our own language, is to put an end to them. Later, I was to wonder if there were flaws in this system. I do not know if Stewart ever wondered. On the hike, we neither of us wondered at all. Arnold may have wondered, in the seventeen different languages and twenty-five dialects of which he was master, but in his detached, impersonal way — later, I learnt to love that detached, impersonal way of his — he said nothing.

  As it was, Mrs. Mardick could out-hike, out-sleep, out-eat all of us. She could not out-quote us, that was all.

  Detachedly, as I knotted the boot-lace that Arnold had broken, with that absent-minded gesture of his that occurred twenty times in each day’s march, and that I was, later, to find so endearing — I realized that if we went on hiking long enough, the men were bound to fall in love. Biologically, I knew that both would fall for the same woman. With scientific impartiality, I told myself definitely that this would lead to unpleasantness. Perhaps to rape. Stewart and I have always called things by their right names. Especially things like rape. It was an odd experience, this cold analysis of probabilities.

  I was not a woman who liked the idea of sharing her men. Usually, I didn’t have any to share. This endless hike of ours — later, Stewart and I were to agree that forty miles a day in shorts, and without hats, was too much — was going to mean that sooner or later the talk about modern poets would come to an end, and then there would be nothing left to talk about except sex. Stewart and I have always agreed, quite frankly, that sex exists.

  I told myself, quite impersonally, that I should prefer to be the only woman available when the moment came for the two men to fall in love.

  From that time onwards, Mrs. Mardick really had no chance at all.

  I am not sure when I took the final decision. It may have been when that boot-lace of Arnold’s finally gave way, after I had mended it for the fourteenth time in one morning, sitting by the roadside with the gnats buzzing round my head, and the nettles stinging my bare legs, and the bramble-bushes tearing at my left shoulder-blade. “My dear,” she said, “you’ve tied a granny-knot, and that’s not really the best kind of knot. Let me show you.”