Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  George sometimes sketched a kick in his direction, and Doris put him firmly out of windows, saying coldly, “Not in here, puss,” and Grandpapa ignored him completely.

  Apart from Fauntleroy, Doris was managing everything beautifully. Certain changes, of course, had had to be made.

  A great deal of the furniture was awful, and the dining-room and drawing-room had needed redecorating for years, and the servants had got into tiresome, old-fashioned ways. But Doris introduced her reformations tactfully, and by degrees, and Grandpapa accepted them all.

  He gave no trouble, and never interfered. He wanted George to be the master of the house, and Doris the mistress, and as this was also what George and Doris wanted themselves, the arrangement worked admirably.

  The only thing Doris ever felt a little aggrieved about was a want of perfect straightforwardness in Grandpapa. Sometimes, when he had accepted an improvement or an alteration with smiles and polite speeches, it would come out afterwards, through the children perhaps, or some unguarded observation of his own, that he really hadn’t liked it at all.

  This annoyed Doris very much.

  “It isn’t as though I didn’t want to make him happy and comfortable,” she complained to George. “He might just as well be honest with me. But he won’t be.”

  Doris was quite right. Grandpapa was not always honest with her, for very old people, equally with very young ones, are driven to deceit, since it is usually the only means by which they can ever hope to get their own way.

  Moreover, Doris and George were slightly unreal to Grandpapa, exactly as he was slightly unreal to them, although of this they had no conception.

  “Doesn’t it just show,” said Doris, when the novelty of being an angel to Grandpapa had completely gone, “that he really does humbug, rather, dear old man. You know how he used to grumble at the cat, and say he wouldn’t have it upstairs, and all that? Well, yesterday when he had his breakfast upstairs, I went in to him, and there was the wretched Fauntleroy, curled up on the bed, eating bread-and-butter all over the quilt!”

  “I hope you kicked the brute out of the window,” said George, not meaning it.

  “Of course I didn’t interfere. Grandpapa must do as he likes. But after all the fuss there was, it does make one feel that perhaps Grandmama may have had something to put up with too. I mean, it must have been just contrariness, his saying that he hated cats so. However, I’m sure it’s all to the good that he should spend the morning upstairs. The day is so long for him, at his age.”

  Grandpapa perhaps thought so too. At all events he spent his mornings in bed, and Fauntleroy the cat always came in with the breakfast, and sprang ponderously on to the bed, and coiled his bulk round on the quilt.

  Grandpapa never spoke to him, or caressed him.

  But his eye rested on Fauntleroy’s glistening black form thoughtfully, and from time to time he gave him bread-and-butter.

  He, at least — so closely connected with the past — was quite real.

  QUESTION WITHOUT ANSWER

  All-out endeavour on my part, and absolute imperturbability on his. That had been the history of the past three weeks. It had, very nearly, assumed the character of a game of skill. Well — it would have done so, if I hadn’t had the misfortune to be very nearly seriously attracted. It was years since that had happened to me — naturally, living as I do, one can’t afford emotional luxuries, and it’s good enough if the man isn’t fat, or a bore.

  I don’t suppose I shall ever know what it was, about Morgan. Perhaps the fact that he was clever, and wrote books, or just that he didn’t talk much, and had a way of listening, with blue, intent eyes and a very serious expression. Anyway — it just got me.

  It seemed easy, at first. Just the usual beginning: I sat at my table, in the corner, and looked across at him once or twice having dinner all by himself. I wasn’t surprised when he came across to me afterwards, and began to talk. It was just the usual conversation, too, except that he didn’t rush things at all.

  I liked him for that.

  I pulled all the usual stuff — about having had to divorce my husband, and being all by myself, and life was very hard for a woman, like that. It took me exactly twenty-four hours to realize that he was clever — the sort of cleverness that knows all about people. Not that he ever said anything, but I just sensed it.

  So then I told him the truth. Well — as much of the truth as a woman ever does tell to a man who’s beginning to attract her.

  And he listened, just the same way as he’d listened before — very quiet, and attentive, and looking at me all the time with those eyes that looked as if they’d seen such a lot, and yet hadn’t lost interest.

  (I believe it was his eyes — and yet it’s difficult to think that I could have been such a fool.)

  He took me to the south of France.

  He said he just wanted to have three weeks there, before going back to London. He wanted to be quiet, and not have to go out and find amusing places all the time.

  Well — I wanted that, too. Wanted it a whole lot more than he realized.

  Before we got to Cannes, I knew what was happening to me, and I’d got to the stage when I didn’t much mind, if only I could make him care a little bit too.

  Looking back, I know I must have got it badly. Incredibly so, for a woman of my experience. I even stopped drinking, because I didn’t want to be artificially stimulated any more. That just shows you — I might have been a girl of twenty, thinking about love lasting for ever, and being the greatest thing in the world, and all that.

  We used to sit on the rocks, at a place called Agay that we motored to nearly every day, and talk. I don’t know that I’d ever done that before, with anyone. I told him more and more things — about myself, mostly — things that I hadn’t even remembered, in years. Sometimes he’d talk to me, and I liked it — God, how I liked it! It wasn’t the kind of talk that usually gets handed out to my kind of woman — it was the real stuff, about what he’d thought, and done, and written. That’s how I saw it then — I’ve sometimes wondered, since.

  Once or twice we dined at the big hotels at Cannes. I’ve known those places, and all the others like them, since I was sixteen — but they seemed kind of new — and when I caught myself thinking that, I knew exactly what kind of a fool I was. The trouble was that I couldn’t deceive myself into thinking he cared for me, though there were times when I tried hard enough. It used to make me wild, too, to think of being caught in that age-old trap. All the same, I did just what women always do, in spite of being harder, and more intelligent, than most.

  I went all out to try and make him care too. And got just exactly nowhere.

  It was funny, being with a man and making no demands on him at all. I don’t believe it had ever been like that before, with me.

  I gave him everything he wanted, when he wanted it, and I didn’t let him throw his money about, and I found out, the way one does, how he liked a woman to behave when he took her out, and I played up to that.

  It sounds insane when I look back on it, but not so insane as letting him see that I’d fallen in love with him. I did that too. I got the idea, somehow, that it would make him fall in love with me.

  It didn’t, of course.

  The end, when you come to think of it, was funny.

  We went out to dinner at a smart Cannes hotel, and it was the last night but one, and I’d have lain down and let him walk over me, by that time. Then we saw a whole party of people he knew — Americans, mostly. They came over to our table, and he introduced me, and I could see the three men of the party just looking at me, and wondering. They couldn’t be sure — because I was feeling like someone different to what I usually was, and I suppose I looked it too. I can’t explain any better than that.

  However, the women knew all right — or thought they did — except one, who was only about twenty-five. I don’t know whether she was married or not — I expect she was — and she had no looks at all, but any amount of style.
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br />   She didn’t care what she said, and said it all the time in a voice that was just about as common as mud — and she had more vitality than anyone I’d ever seen.

  She made a dead set at Morgan from the very beginning. I suppose I wasn’t the only woman, by a very long way, to find those eyes of his attractive.

  He asked me to dance, first, and I said No. God knows why. Perhaps it was because I’d got into the habit of knowing exactly what he wanted, and I knew well enough that he wanted to dance with the American girl.

  I’ll hand it to her that she danced divinely. I’d known all along that she would. She was the kind of woman that everybody in the room looks at, all the time, and women may know that she isn’t pretty — but men never find it out at all. There isn’t much more to tell about her. She talked and talked to Morgan, and most of what she said was rubbish, and all of it in that awful voice of hers — and he listened, and she made him laugh quite a lot, and they both went on drinking champagne.

  It was three o’clock before that party broke up. She’d given him an address in London by that time, and told him she was going there in a week’s time, and he’d asked her to have dinner with him and go to a theatre.

  You couldn’t be surprised. She knew all the rules of the game, and played it right. Where I’d gone wrong was in thinking that Morgan wanted anything different.

  Or perhaps I didn’t really think it. One believes what one wants to believe.

  Anyway, I didn’t believe it any more after that night. I just knew I’d been wasting my time. He gave that girl the look that I’d been waiting for all the time, just as he said Good-bye to her. Just that indescribable expression that nobody ever fakes, and that nobody ever makes a mistake about either.

  I let him talk about her, afterwards. He didn’t say much, only just the amount that men always do say when they’re attracted and think that nobody has found it out yet.

  Two days afterwards I said Good-bye to him, and we said we’d write, but of course we never did. I’ve often wondered why I thought he was different, and whether he really was.

  THE END

  PEOPLE YOU LOVE

  ON THE STATUS OF THE FAMILY UNDER NAZISM

  They would strike at you through the people you love.

  That is the most frightening thought of all, to women. We have read and heard what has been done in those countries in which the evil forces have imposed their wicked and pitiless will — and God knows we have felt sick with horror for their victims. But because human imagination is a limited thing, and because we instinctively shrink from facing what seems unbearable, there may sometimes have crept into our minds the underlying thought: it couldn’t happen here.

  Not to us, in England.

  Not to you and to me.

  Those other people, in the days when they were still safe, and free, and happy, thought like that too. If we are to avert the dreadful things — the cruelty, and the tyranny, and the tortures — as we must and will avert them, it can only be by facing the facts.

  Supposing we didn’t win the war? Supposing the Nazi forces were to win it? Don’t be content to reply: But that couldn’t happen. Face, instead, the thought of what life would be like, here in England, for you and for me, if it did happen.

  The things that I am going to write about here are all of them true: they have happened, and are happening now, to other people, in their homes. And they would happen to us, if the Nazis came to Britain. Make no mistake about that.

  Home.

  It is perhaps the most thoroughly English word in our language. There is no real translation of it in any other tongue, and it stands for something that is, in itself, essentially our own. “Home-life” exists in England still, as it has existed for hundreds of years, and whether we grumble at it, as we frequently do, or are privately rather sentimental about it — still, we accept it, as part of our British tradition.

  What would home-life be like if the Nazis ruled this country? Try, English wives and mothers, to imagine it just as it would affect your every-day family life. War-time conditions would be a thousand times harder than they are in this country — but I want now to dwell only on ordinary non-war conditions.

  (Notice that “non-war conditions” is as near as I can get to using the word “peace-time,” because it is many years since the average German household has lived in anything that could honestly be described as peace. It is not living in peace, when everything that makes life reasonably easy and pleasant is sacrificed to the making of armaments and the training of combatants.)

  If you are a wife, you will see very little of your husband. Apart from his job, he will have to take part in compulsory physical training, compulsory recreations, compulsory military exercises. His half-day will be taken up with these activities; so will his Sundays.

  If he is no longer a young man, or not a strong one, you will see him go short of the rest and relaxation that he needs.

  Both you and he are helpless in the matter. The State needs him, and the State must come before the individual.

  Your children, of course, my poor mother, are in no sense part of your home-life, nor you of theirs, after the age of six. The State takes them.

  The employees of the State teach them, regardless of what the views of their parents may be, what it is good for them to learn. You may, or may not, agree with the ideas that are so tirelessly drilled into the young and impressionable minds of your children. That doesn’t enter into it.

  But if you don’t agree — beware of saying so! Your children have been well and thoroughly taught that Patriotism — in the Nazi meaning of the word — comes before everything else, and that those — even their own parents — who think otherwise are traitors to the State.

  Boys and girls alike are in the grip of the Hitler machine. Every one of them must be moulded into a blindly-obedient, unreasoning instrument of war — the boys as soldiers, the girls as the potential mothers of more soldiers.

  The physical-fitness campaign among the Nazi youth serves other purposes besides the obvious one of physical development. It teaches endurance — the compulsory outings and marches are often extremely strenuous — and it keeps the children away from home.

  When your children come back to you at night, sometimes exhausted and unnerved by exertions beyond their individual powers, you must be very careful to breathe no word of criticism or concern. The State has decided how their half holidays and their play-times, as well as their hours in school, are to be spent. And the State’s dictatorship is, of course, absolute.

  Are you foolish enough to think that your influence would still count for something, at least while your children are very young? If so, remind yourself that even their toys and their nursery-books are State-directed. In their games, they are forced to use the mimic figures of storm-troopers and S.S. men. The books from which they learn to read contain stories of violence and bloodshed. They are being made war-minded.

  Here is an extract from a history-lesson, designed by one Karl Ruger, for all small German children:

  SECTION I. THE GREAT WAR 1914 — 18

  Father’s experience during War.

  Let your father tell you what he

  remembers of the Great War.

  Bring from home to school anything

  connected with the War.

  Discuss day in trenches.

  Shell explosion and soldier’s funeral.

  And so on.

  If you, the parents, do not conform to this programme your children will report you to the school authorities — how can they do otherwise, when questioned?

  One more example: this time from the German National Reading - book which every German child is obliged to use.

  Our Leader, Adolf Hitler We love you We pray for you We like to hear you We work for you. Heil!

  In a Roman Catholic school in the Reich an Englishwoman (who told me the story) heard a priest, come to give a lesson, open it by saying all in one breath:

  “In the Name of the Father and of t
he Son and of the Holy Ghost Heil Hitler!” — the class echoing his words.

  If your political views should not be pro-Hitler, you must keep them carefully hidden from your children over whose minds Hitlerism will, by the means shown above, have established absolute domination.

  Remember that, in Mein Kampf, it is laid down that German children under the Nazis are to leave school with their military training already far advanced. They are to be taught, from babyhood, what the State, ruled by Hitler, wishes them to learn. Foremost amongst these lessons are the superiority of the German race, and the promise of future German world supremacy.

  What the children would be taught of a conquered Europe, in Germany’s power, we can guess. What they have been taught concerning the Jewish race and its treatment, we know only too well already. Let it be enough to say here that, at the time of the pogroms, obscene and revolting Jew-baiting inscriptions and posters were displayed on the street-corners of German and Austrian towns and villages, and that little children were encouraged by the authorities to look at them, and enjoy them, and find them amusing.

  Nazi methods, in a defeated Britain, would be just what they are in other defeated countries, and what they are in the Germany of to-day. And you would be powerless to keep your children from such influences.

  All normal women are vulnerable through their affections. A woman who loves is a woman who can be attacked, and hurt, where she is practically defenceless. Tyrants who have only one end in view, and who believe that the individual doesn’t matter — that only the State matters — possess in the knowledge of that fact a very powerful weapon indeed.

  Think in terms of yourself — English, young, in love with a man who is in love with you.

  The war has taken him away from you.

  Yes, that is a very bad thing.

  But it’s a clean, decent pain — something that, though it breaks your heart, need never turn every memory into intolerable anguish.