Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  It is better to be safe than sorry.

  *

  The New Movement

  All Movements are new at the beginning, although later on they become older. This particular New Movement was not invented in Great Britain, but it easily might have been. It is essentially law-abiding, constitutional, and conservative, but in objective it is communistic, revolutionary, and anarchistic. It is entirely static, and at the same time absolutely progressive.

  The author has no apology to offer on the score of inconsistency.

  *

  Systematic System

  Debates, Committees, Tea-fights, Elections, Governments, Old Women and Old Gangs, are one and all likely to prove fatal to the New Movement. They must go.

  Perhaps it would be better if the House of Lords, which comes under some if not all of the above headings, were to go also.

  The Citizens of this State and the Author of this Book

  In the opinion of the latter, it is absolutely essential that the former should all take to living athletic lives. In this way only can Great Britain deal with the Indian muddle, the Colonial confusion, the agricultural depression, the falling birth-rate, and the rising tide of taxation.

  A general adoption of the athletic ideals of Ancient Greece would mean a return to Ye Merrie England of Good Queen Bess, with ye fine olde British sports of bear-baiting, cock-fighting, drinking one another under ye olde mahogany, witch-burning, and so on. The men — ye mariners of England — who carried the egg of Columbus across the Atlantic, were like that.

  Waterloo was won upon the playing-fields of Eton.

  *

  Women

  It has been suggested that hitherto, in the New Movement, too little attention has been paid to the position of women. But every member of our organization has, at one time or another, and some times at both, had a woman for a mother. Therefore the part played by women in the Movement is important, although different from that of the men.

  To many the idea may seem fantastic, but men will always be men, and women still more always be women. In the New Movement, women will be mothers as well, continually and all the time. In this way, the problem will be solved.

  Woman’s place is the cradle.

  *

  Conclusion

  Whether the New Movement is really new, or really a Movement, no one can yet tell. It may be one and not the other, or the other and not the one, or either, or neither, or both.

  But whatever happens — or not — the author will still offer no apology on the score of inconsistency.

  WHEN I’M ALLOWED TO BE...

  MOTHER THERESA MAKES HER MEDITATION

  It’s thirty years since I found I’d the holy vocation, and me struggling against it for all I was worth, and saying I couldn’t ever leave Tipperary, and the dogs, and the horses, and Jamesie and all. And just to look at the way He works! I can see Jamesie now, like it was yesterday, coming up and hugging the head off me, the way he did, and saying: “Sis, if it’s me that’s keeping you back from your vocation, you’re in danger of mortal sin. And as like as not I’ll be getting a vo. meself one of these days.”

  “Never, Jamesie!” says I, for he was so wild, you’d never have thought he’d a pious thought in his whole body, but that he went to early Church the way I didn’t always meself, on cold mornings.

  “There’s no knowing,” says Jamesie.

  Well, I was bound to mention, at the end of my next confession, that I thought the Lord wanted me for His very own, and I remember I howled out loud with sobbing at the end of it.

  The Abbot was as kind as could be, and it was he who spoke to my Da in the end, and got permission for me to enter the convent.

  And after all these years I can remember that last night at home, and all of us sitting at the round table, the way we always did, and the lamp turned too low and smelling awful, and not one of us able to eat any supper.

  Father pretended to read, and Kitty sewed for her life at marking my new postulant’s handkerchiefs with the little Cross and the big M, and I thinking I’d most likely soak the lot of them through, with crying, in my first twenty-four hours in the noviciate. (So I did, too.) I’d the dogs at my feet, and Jamesie was curled up almost on top of them, with his head in my lap. (His hair was as red as fire, and he’d often been fit to be tied, the way we laughed at him for it.)

  But I didn’t laugh that night, or the next day when he and father saw me off from Dublin.

  For the noviciate was over in England, if you please, although the Reverend Mother was true Irish, glory be to God.

  I got the grace given me somehow to go through with it, but there were whiles I thought I’d go mad, with the stiff, prim English all round me, and the postulant’s veil, that nearly drove me silly the way it got twisted, and the Novice Mistress refusing to let me cut off so much as one hair of my head till I took my first vows at the end of a twelvemonth.

  They all came over from Ireland for my Profession Day — Father, and Kitty, and Jamesie, dressed up in the grandest clothes they could lay hands on, so as nearly to scare the life out of me. We sat in the parlour and talked, I feeling like a fool with the wreath of white flowers pinned on all askew over my novice’s veil — God forgive me — and they told me everything that had happened at home since I’d left, but I couldn’t tell them much about the religious life in return, for fear I’d be saying what I oughtn’t, or bursting out crying for home-sickness, or something. Reverend Mother saw them, and said she hoped I’d the makings of a good nun in me, and my Da gave her his thanksgiving offering, and then they went away.

  The very next week I was sent to the Orphanage in South America and stayed there, teaching, for fifteen years. And Kitty married a black Protestant, God help her, and died of it in a year — and Jamesie went for a priest, the way he’d said he should, and my old Da was left all alone at home.

  When I went back to England — to London, this time — there was talk of his coming over to see me, but he never did, and it was only Jamesie could get to him when he lay dying. Jamesie wrote and said what an edifying deathbed he’d had, thanking God and Our Dear Lady for the blessing of two religious vocations in the family, and the Abbot administering the Last Sacraments and all. So there was comfort in it.

  I saw Jamesie once more, before he went out to the Foreign Missions, and I wouldn’t have known him, but for the red head of him, he’d grown so tall and thin and grave-looking. He gave me a rosary that the Holy Father had blessed.

  The religious life teaches one detachment, thanks be to God. But it doesn’t take away the human heart of one, and I thought mine’d break when Reverend Mother told me about Jamesie having been killed out in Manchuria.

  “You must be proud of your brother, sister dear,” she said to me. “Father James gave his life for the Holy Catholic Faith. God rest his soul for a holy martyr.”

  The queer thing is that it’s not any Father James that I find meself praying for — though it’s rather I should be asking him to pray for me, in Heaven where he is now — but Jamesie — the way I used to see him with his red hair all on end, fit to be tied because we laughed at him....

  RETROSPECT

  When we were children, and lived at home at the farm, Francie and I were always together. We slept in the night-nursery, where the window overlooked the yard, and every morning we used to hear the long-drawn “cluck-cluck-cluck-a-clu-u-u-ck” of the hens, and then the crow of the cock, much farther away, where the dung-heap was.

  We played together, and sometimes quarrelled, but always made it up before going to sleep, because something dreadful would happen if the sun went down upon one’s wrath.

  We pretended things, that nobody else knew about, and had secret catchwords and allusions.

  And we knew one another with the unparalleled intimacy of shared nursery days. After all these years I can still say what Francie’s favourite colour was, and why she never liked primroses any more after Dinah, the sheep-dog, died, and how it was that she taught herse
lf at last to remember what seven times twelve makes.... And all that kind of thing.

  We remained children a long while, I think — longer than most people. We were, still, always together, even after we’d left the farm, and hadn’t a real home any longer, but lived in London in a boarding-house. We even shared our friends, because we always liked the same people, and the same people made us laugh.

  We were very happy, and made plans, such as I suppose all young people make, for a very successful and exciting future, that we were to share.

  Francie met Hugo whilst I was away on a visit. She wrote and told me that he was a new friend, and that I should like him.

  When I came back, after only a week, I found that he and she knew one another well.

  I liked him, too, at once.

  Hugo was very tall, and he had brown eyes that looked at one with a curious, slanting kind of glance, and when he smiled he showed very white teeth in a sunburnt face.

  For a little while I think he could not make up his mind.

  Then he fell in love with me. Already, I was more than half in love with him.

  And Francie cried. We knew one another so well that we could never hide anything from one another. But she said:

  “Nothing could ever come between us.”

  In a way, that was true.

  But life takes one away, somehow.

  Hugo and I went to India, and Francie married somebody also, and after a time they went to Canada, where she died.

  Hugo, my husband, came through the war, and we went back to India, and I took up the curious, divided life of the woman whose man is abroad, and her children at Home.

  It was just packing, and unpacking, and one set of clothes, then another, and Army talk, and rushing from school to school in England, and all the time the thought of sailing again just ahead of one.

  Just a rush, for all the years of my middle life, and the old sense of always waiting for some kind of finality.

  I suppose, in the end, Cheltenham stood for finality. At all events, the rush is all over now. There is no more packing, there are no more schools, the children are quite grown-up and have gone their several ways.

  Hugo died very soon after we came to the Cheltenham villa.

  Sitting alone, in the evenings, with The Times all folded up neatly on the little brass table under the lamp, and no noise anywhere, one’s thoughts go back.

  Although I think of Hugo, and that time in India, and of the children, and the new Library novels, and the housekeeping, it’s those far-away farm days that I remember most often, and the cluck-clucking of the hens under the night-nursery window, and the strong scent of the mint growing in the sun, under the red-brick wall of the kitchen-garden.

  It’s strange, sometimes, to feel that, after all, it’s not Hugo that I miss most now that all the turmoil is over. It’s Francie.

  THE GENERATIONS

  If it hadn’t been for the rain, I don’t suppose I’d have gone inside the Cathedral at all. I’ve never been much of a one for churches. But it was wet, and I’d more than an hour to wait for my train.

  It felt chilly in there, and empty — just one or two people, kneeling or sitting. I’d been there myself, sitting in the corner of the pew, quite a little while before I remembered.

  It must have been all of forty years ago. But it was in that Cathedral, all that long while back, that I’d been a baby bridesmaid at the Fanshawe wedding.

  I was five years old, perhaps, or six. I wore a pink frock, with flowers all over it, coming right down to my feet, and puffed sleeves, and a fancy bonnet — pink velvet, with a little tiny frill inside it. I hadn’t thought of it for years and years — and there, all of a sudden, I was remembering it quite plainly. It was just as though I could see myself, as I’d been then, coming down the empty aisle.

  And the thing I remembered best of all was the feeling that my mother was there, in one of the front pews, looking at me and smiling, and that in another minute she’d hold out her hand to me and take hold of mine.

  It was queer, how the feeling came back to me then. I loved her so much that it hurt. I thought she was the most wonderful person in the world, and the most beautiful, and the kindest. I couldn’t imagine ever loving anybody else as I did her.

  What happens to it, all that love and confident trust? That’s what I want to know.

  Looking back, one doesn’t know when the change came. One can’t say, Here is where things altered, or That was the moment when it all went wrong.

  There isn’t any turning-point.

  It just changes.

  I suppose it’s part of what life does to one. Children grow up and their parents don’t mean the same any more. It’s like that for all of us.

  Mostly, one doesn’t remember how one felt then, only just sometimes it comes back, like it did as I sat in the Cathedral and somehow saw myself as a little girl, and my mother as she used to look to me in those days.

  And I thought of Evadne, as was natural, I suppose, and the way she always comes running to meet me when I get home. She’ll throw her arms round me, and be happier than she’s been all day, because I’ve come back, and she’ll tell me she loves me, the way children do.

  But Evadne’ll grow up. It’ll be the same for me as it’s been for my mother.

  One loses them.

  Only it seems queer that one can’t ever say when it happens, or how.

  I don’t think about the past much, as a rule, or the future either for that matter. There’s never any time. I suppose it was sitting like that, in the Cathedral, quiet and with nothing to do, that brought it all back.

  WHERE HAVE WE GOT TO NOW?

  An ex-officer was crawling up Albemarle Street. He was not, needless to say, literally crawling on hands and knees, but he was progressing at the pace of a snail on a wall, owing to the extreme horror that filled his mind at the thought of his errand. But there was nothing else to be done.

  He had already spent a frightful half-hour with the manager of his bank, and the last words of the manager had been:

  “Then we shall be hearing from you in the course of the next day or two, I may take it? Quite. Exactly. Thank you, Captain Loder. Good-morning. Wonderful weather we’re having, indeed....”

  Captain Loder, in spite of crawling, reached the house in which his stepsister lived, and compelled himself to ring the bell. Although he was thirty-six years old, it was with difficulty that he refrained from dashing down the steps again and out of sight before it was answered, after the fashion of little street-boys — although not from a similarly light-hearted impulse.

  Presently he was in his stepsister’s flat — walnut furniture, mostly of the period of Queen Anne, Dresden china, and quantities of silk cushions — and Joan had greeted him affectionately. She was forty-six and quite handsome. She was also very clever, and held some superlatively important Government post that was known to carry a pension as well as a considerable salary. Besides all this, she had a private income that ran into four figures, and she had had the sense not to marry, so that she was able to do exactly as she liked with her money.

  “This is very nice of you, Wilfred,” she said. “How are you?”

  “I’m all right, Joan, thanks. Still amongst the unemployed, unfortunately — —” He forced a laugh, that died away under Joan’s complete disregard of its existence.

  “And how’s Chrissie — and the baby?”

  “The baby’s splendid, thanks. Chrissie’s not too fit, poor girl. A bit worried just now.” He didn’t dare tell Joan, so modern and efficient and rational, that Chrissie was going to have another baby. By the way she raised her eyebrows, he was almost afraid that she’d guessed it, but she said nothing.

  “I really came, Joan, to — to — —” No, he couldn’t. “I say, how awfully nice your hyacinths are!”

  “Yes, they’re rather good, aren’t they? I do them in moss-fibre.”

  She went on talking about her bulbs, and he said Yes, and I see, without listening to a word.


  “You’ll have some tea, won’t you, Wilfred?”

  “Thanks awfully, but I really mustn’t stay. I think Chrissie’s expecting me.”

  Joan looked surprised. Well she might, reflected Captain Loder, since he had been living at home with Chrissie in the Maida Vale flat for the past two and a half years, and there could be no possible reason for him to hurry back to it.

  “Joan, I wonder if you’d do me a most frightful kindness?”

  His heart was thumping in a sickening manner.

  “If I can, of course.”

  Joan’s voice was, he could not help feeling, full of the amiability of the person who is in the superior position of granting favours.

  “Could you possibly — It’s just that — Look here, Joan, I know it’s a frightful thing to come to you like this — but Chris and I are in — in fearfully low water just now.”

  If anyone had told him, ten years earlier, that he would ever try to borrow money from a woman, even if she was his own stepsister — ! He clenched his hands, forcing himself to remember Chrissie crying at her typewriter, because her back ached so, and the ghastly pile of bills shoved away into the back of the writing-table drawer.

  “Could you possibly lend us a couple of hundred pounds, to try and straighten things out?”

  He’d said it now. The worst must be over. She couldn’t refuse, and already he projected his mind into the blessed moment when he would be out in the street again, her cheque in his pocket. He compelled himself to meet Joan’s eyes.

  Into her face had come that mysterious change that always, invariably, came into the faces of rich people when money was in question. It wasn’t a look of anger at all, but merely one that suggested the donning of some impenetrable spiritual armour — protecting the precious money from the insidious attacks of sentiment, or pity, or affection. No doubt, he reflected in a detached way, if it wasn’t for that armour, and their capacity for donning it at a moment’s notice, people like Joan wouldn’t be the rich, secure people that they were.

  “Wilfred — of course, I’m very glad you came to me. We’d better have a little talk, hadn’t we? I’m sorry you and Chrissie are finding things difficult.”