I
Good women know by instinct that the younger generation, more
especially when nearly related to themselves, should be equipped to
encounter life by the careful and systematic misrepresentation of the
more vital aspects of life.
The mother of Lily and Yvonne Stellenthorpe was a good woman, and had
all a good woman's capacity for the falsification of moral values. Her
husband was so constituted that it would not be unjust to describe him
in identical terms.
Lily was so pretty that she did not begin to disappoint her parents
seriously until she was seven years old, but Yvonne, who was not pretty
and who displayed many less negative disadvantages as well, was a
source of dismay to them from her very infancy, when she nearly died of
water on the brain.
"Is little Vonnie quite like other children, I sometimes wonder?"
fearfully whispered Eleanor Stellenthorpe to her husband, when Yvonne
was five years old. And Philip Stellenthorpe, with that entire refusal
to acknowledge even the possibility of any painful contingency so
wholly characteristic of the sentimental, replied, also in a whisper:
"Hush, my dearest! I can't bear to hear you say a thing like that."
Accordingly nothing of the sort was ever said again, although it became
perfectly obvious, in the course of another year or two, that Vonnie
was "not quite like other children"--was, in fact, very, very slightly
deficient mentally.
She was a quiet little girl, who could be intensely obstinate, with
a hesitation in her always unready speech that hardly amounted to an
impediment. She was tall and healthy looking, so that one scarcely
realized her head to be too large, as it certainly was, for her body.
Little Lily loved Yvonne, her senior by two years, with the fierce,
protective passion of a mother for a helpless child. It was a love
that caused her the most acute suffering of which a sensitive and
highly-strung child is capable, and the manifestations of which were
sorrowfully described by her parents, in all good faith, as Lily's
naughtiness, and tendency to impertinent interference.
It was naughty to rage and cry when Vonnie was punished for being
obstinate or slow, it was impertinent to stamp and shout: "It's not
fair! It's not fair!" when Vonnie was left at home, and Father and
Mother were kind enough to take Lily out for a treat, such as a
neighbouring garden-party, or a wedding, and it was naughtiest of
all, when Vonnie was laughed at or admonished for not understanding
things quickly, to interfere and cry out: "She can't help it--she _is_
trying--it isn't _fair_ to scold her!"
Lily knew that all these things were naughty, because she had always
been told so, but the spirit of frenzy that possessed her always drove
her on, the consciousness of naughtiness notwithstanding. Therefore at
a very early age there was implanted in her the conviction that she had
been sent into the world with a natural proclivity towards wrong-doing.
Both children knew that Lily was their parents' favourite. It would
have been impossible not to know it. She might be sorrowfully
reproached for her "disloyalty"--a favourite accusation--to the
cardinal article of belief that Father and Mother always knew best,
but she was never punished. Her prettiness and her precocious
cleverness were exploited and praised to her face. She was sent for to
the drawing-room whenever there were visitors, and taken out in the
carriage to pay calls, and very often given small, unexpected presents
and surprises by her mother, in which Vonnie's only share was to be
told that "next time" it would be her turn.
It never was her turn, and Lily and Vonnie both knew that the "next
time" of the promises would never come.
Paradoxically, it was far harder upon Lily than upon Vonnie. She had
the greater capacity for suffering of the two, and a strong abstract
sense of justice besides, that rendered her absolutely incapable of
accepting uncritically an unfair situation. In addition, the ardour
of her love for Vonnie was proportionate to the intensity of all her
emotions.
Theoretically, one loved Father and Mother best of everybody in
the world. In fact, it would have been a "disloyalty" of the very
naughtiest kind to contemplate any other possibility. It was proper
to love one's sister third in order, and Lily and Vonnie were both
persuaded that to these regulations they must and did conform. Lily, at
seven years old, naturally did not seek logically to reconcile this
doctrine with the strange accesses of rage and rebellion against Father
and Mother that seized her so frequently upon Vonnie's behalf.
Vonnie resented nothing, for herself. She was philosophical,
humble-minded, and above all desirous of peace. The nursery storms
raised by Lily in her defence were her chief source of grievance. She
did not mind being left out of treats, very much. She minded the noise
of Lily's angry screams, and Mother's argumentative reproaches, and the
final grieved intervention of Father, very much more.
Fortunately, perhaps, for her peace, Vonnie very often failed to
realize that it was her own inoffensive self that was the cause of
these terrible domestic cataclysms.
She was absent-minded, and never much interested in what people were
saying, so that very often the beginning of disturbance went quite
unheard by her. Sometimes she only woke up to what was happening when
Lily had begun to scream, as she always did sooner or later when her
furious gusts of temper outran her powers of verbal expression.
Then Vonnie would think wearily: "Another scene!" which was what she
always called a disturbance of any kind, and put her hands to her head,
through which each one of Lily's shrieks sent a dull pain jarring. It
made her feel rather sick in a curious sort of way, to see Lily shaking
all over, the tears streaming down her scarlet cheeks, and Mother, as
pale as Lily was crimson, with miserable eyes and a face that almost
implored her to be good.
"My pet, how can you be so naughty? Can't you trust Mother to know
what's best for _both_ her babies?"
"It's not fair, it's not fair!" shrieked Lily as she had been shrieking
for the last five minutes.
"_Stop_ saying that, Lily. It's not true, it's very naughty. Don't you
know that Mother would never do anything that wasn't fair?"
"Let--Vonnie--come--too," Lily sobbed more quietly.
"My little darling, leave Vonnie to me. You _must_ learn not to
interfere with Vonnie. It will be her turn next time. Besides, Vonnie
doesn't want to go, do you, Vonnie my pet?"
"No, Mother," said Vonnie, watching her mother's face and only desirous
of saying what would most quickly conduce to peace.
"You see, Lily! As though Mother didn't know what was best for her
little Vonnie."
"She always says she doesn't want to go! It's not _fair_!..."
Lily had begun again, more frantically than ever. Father had to be sent
for.
Father took up a high line at once. "My little Lily!" said he gravely.
He firmly placed his little Lily upon his knee, a post of honour
reserved exclusively for moments of serious appeal and which, even at
the height of her frenzy, Lily would never have thought it possible to
decline.
"My little Lily! Is this the way you show your gratitude, when an
outing is planned for you? Don't you know that you are grieving us
very much, when we are only thinking of your welfare and pleasure, and
wanting to make you happy? God will be very angry with you, if you
can't show a happy, grateful spirit."
Father and Mother were never angry--they were only grieved. It was God
that was always indignant and resentful on their behalf.
Lily was afraid of God, and secretly thought that He, who knew
everything and could do everything, always punished her naughtiness
by sending the thing that she dreaded most in all the world--one of
Vonnie's fearful earaches.
The assurance that God was angry again made her choke down some of her
defiant sobs and mutterings.
"We might all be so happy, if you were a good little girl, and it
ought to be so easy with parents who love you dearly. Many poor little
children have no father and mother or nice, cheerful, happy home. Now,
my pet, are you sorry?"
"Yes," said Lily tremulously, thinking of God with the earache bolt
still, as it were, suspended.
"Then I think you had better ask God to forgive you. Go and kiss your
dear mother, and then run and get dressed. Don't keep the carriage
waiting."
God, and Philip Stellenthorpe's magnanimity, had defeated Lily.
She crept away, dragging her feet.
Her head ached and her eyes smarted and, dressed up in her white silk
frock and best hat, precociously sensitive to the contrast, she had
to leave Vonnie in everyday clothes and nursery pinafore, a forlorn
figure at the window, and take her seat between her parents in the open
carriage.
As they drove, she heard them exchange comments over her head, as they
very often did, in slightly lowered tones.
"Her poor little eyes are quite swollen----"
"Poor little thing!"
They always forgave her quickly, like that, however frightful her
offence.
Would that God had been equally unresentful! All through the
unappreciated afternoon, Lily was secretly addressing earnest,
spasmodic appeals to that unappeasable Avenger.
"Don't make Vonnie have earache--not this time!... I did stop screaming
at the end--I _am_ sorry--I never, never mean to be naughty again. Oh,
don't make Vonnie have earache--give me any other punishment--(_but of
course He won't, because He knows that nothing else makes me half so
miserable--_) If only Vonnie doesn't have earache this time, I promise
I'll never be naughty again as long as I live--"
"Have you enjoyed yourself, my pet?"
"Yes, Mother."
It would have been naughty not to enjoy oneself when Father and Mother
had given one a treat, and quite unthinkable actually to say that one
hadn't. As well part at once with the last feeble shred of hope that
God would withhold the earache punishment.
Those earaches to which Vonnie was periodically a victim were like
the shadow of some monstrous nightmare, for ever hanging over Lily's
head. The perpetual foreboding of them, which was never altogether
absent from her, darkened her childish days, but when the nightmare was
actually upon her, the foreboding realized, Lily knew the meaning of
anguish.
Her tiny impotence would hurl itself against the cruel facts of
Vonnie's pain, Vonnie's speechless and stoical acceptance of it, worst
of all, the philosophic unconcern of the surrounding grown-up people.
Because Vonnie never cried, never complained, _would_ say "Nothing is
the matter" to all their enquiries, they would not see.
They were not really sufficiently interested to see.
When Lily had toothache--really a very little toothache--and
tentatively said so, her mother petted her additionally, asking her
continually if the tooth was hurting less, and giving her a story-book
in the drawing-room at lesson time. She came into the night nursery
with a carefully shaded light in her hand, in the middle of the night,
and woke Lily up by putting a little plate with some grapes on it at
her bedside. All of which was very pleasant, and Lily was quite sorry
when next day it proved impossible, with any vestige of truth, to
assert that the tooth was still aching.
But if anything hurt Vonnie, she would never say so. Lily knew this,
but nobody else seemed to realize it. In the same way, Lily, by some
mysterious instinct that she could not have analyzed, always knew by
some quite indescribable look around Vonnie's eyes, when anything was
the matter with her. She even knew, and the knowledge made her so
miserable that she felt as though she could not bear it, that Vonnie
sometimes tried to shut her away, too, and would rather that she had
not known so much and so unerringly.
Vonnie's reticence was appalling. She would have suffered tortures,
rather than risk a possible scene by complaining. She could only just
bear Lily's piercing watchfulness so long as it found no vent in words.
On the earache days, and, worst of all, nights, both were at a pitch of
strain that amounted to acute nervous tension and each reacted upon the
other.
An east wind gave Vonnie earache. So did sitting in a draught, or
staying out of doors late when it was damp, or sometimes just catching
an ordinary cold in the head. Lily knew all this. A familiar sensation
to her was that of a sudden sinking, a physical sickness that only
lasted for a few seconds, when some grown-up authority observed
carelessly in her hearing:
"Why, the wind has gone right round to the east to-day."
Once Lily had put her apprehension into words and said, breathless from
misery:
"Then Vonnie will get earache!"
"What!
'When the wind is in the east
It's neither good for man nor beast!'"
her father made playful quotation.
But when Lily, frightened and resentful that she was not being taken
seriously, repeated angrily: "But she _will_ get earache--she always
does, if there's an east wind," her father spoke gravely.
"Come, come, my pet. I don't like to hear you say things like that.
That's not being a very good little girl, you know. It's only gloomy,
ungrateful little people who run to meet trouble halfway. Little Vonnie
doesn't mean to get earache. Do you, Vonnie?"
"Yes, Father--I mean no," said Vonnie vaguely.
She went out and she did get earache. Lily had always known that she
would.
Yet Lily, from that day added to her store of small, perverted
convictions, the unescapable conclusion that it was very naughty to
foresee calamity, and still naughtier to voice that foresight.
She still sometimes said to the nurse, or to the daily governess:
"Vonnie's got a cold already. She'll have earache if she goes out
to-day." The words seemed forced from her in a frail hope that would
not be denied, that the catastrophe might be averted.
But the nurse simply said: "_Will_ you learn to mind your own business,
Miss Lily? I should hope I know what was good for Miss Vonnie by this
time, without any interference from you."
And the governess said bracingly: "Oh, I don't think Vonnie's got much
of a cold, have you, dear?"
To which Vonnie, of course, said No, just as she would have said there
was nothing the matter, if earache had actually been upon her.
"There, you see, Lily! You really must give up always trying to speak
for Vonnie instead of letting her speak for herself. It's not good
for _her_, and it's not good for _you_. What will you do when you're
both grown up?" said Miss Cleeve humorously, "if you're at a ball,
let us say, and some gentleman asks Vonnie to dance, and then you,
Lily, answer instead of her and say 'Oh no, thank you very much, she's
tired.' Wouldn't that make you both look very silly, don't you think?"
Lily was no match for Miss Cleeve's ridicule. She could think of no
confutation of this _reductio ad absurdum_ of the situation, even in
her own mind. She merely hated Miss Cleeve vehemently, and put her for
ever into the large class of people who "didn't understand."
These were indeed legion, where was concerned the most vital
preoccupation of Lily's whole being--Vonnie's welfare.
When an earache pain had actually begun, which it did almost always in
the evening, not the day-time--and Lily knew by the look on Vonnie's
face that it was still quite endurable, there was a faint hope that
if she went to bed quickly and pulled the blankets over her head, she
might go to sleep before it became really bad.
But Vonnie would not, and Lily dared not, utter a word of this to the
authorities, and consequently the half-hour spent in the drawing-room
with Father and Mother before bedtime underwent no curtailment, on such
occasions.
They played Happy Families, or Beggar-my-Neighbour, or listened to
Father reading aloud, just as usual.
And all the time Lily, in an agony, was inwardly adjuring the Being to
whom she believed all her misery to be directly attributable.
"Let them send us to bed _soon_--don't let her be bad to-night--oh, do
make them send us to bed to-night--now at once. Let her go to sleep
before it gets bad--I'll be so good if only You'll make them send us to
bed at once before it gets bad----"
On one such evening, when Philip Stellenthorpe saw Lily's eyes fixed
upon him, and her lips moving, as he thought, in earnest attention to
his reading, he paused as he was about to close the book.
"What about an extra quarter of an hour, just for once?" he enquired
benevolently. "It's almost too exciting to leave off here, don't you
think, little Lily?"
He never really quite believed that poor little Vonnie, who never
spoke, could follow the thread of any story, although he would have
been much shocked if anybody had ever put such a thought into words.
And Lily, unforgettably, appallingly conscious of her own departure
from sacred tradition, gratitude and everything else to be accounted
for righteousness, said in a voice that sounded loud and strained:
"Please, I'd rather we went to bed now."
There was a dreadful silence.
The kind smile abruptly vanished from Philip's face altogether, and he
shut up the book as though he could never bear to open it again, and
put it away from him almost with horror.
Eleanor Stellenthorpe looked stricken.
"Run along, my pets," she said in the accustomed formula, but in an
inward voice that suggested restrained suffering.
She received Vonnie's kiss automatically, as she always did, but
when Lily put her arms round her mother's neck, fearful of omitting
the customary hug that she knew was always expected of her, Eleanor
released herself gently. Slowly bowing her head, she at the same time
raised her eyes and fixed them sorrowfully upon Lily's face, producing
an extraordinarily poignant effect of silent reproach.
Philip kissed Lily once upon the forehead, instead of as usual, two or
three times all over her face and said deeply:
"My poor little child! Good-night."
Lily went upstairs in tears, indescribably guilty.
She had been naughty again, and oh! how like God it was, to have
arranged things like that. If Vonnie didn't get to bed and to sleep
before the earache gained its hold, then they must both suffer through
one of those black nights of misery that Lily so dreaded. But when
one was asked whether one preferred to go straight to bed, or to sit
up while Father was kind enough to read aloud, it was naughty and
ungrateful to choose bed. So that God, having thus trapped one into
naughtiness, was there all ready with His favourite punishment--the
thing that He knew she dreaded most of all the punishments in the
world--Vonnie's earache.
That night, the hand of God, as Lily saw it, was even heavier than
usual. Vonnie's earache was agonizing.
Lily knew this, in the darkness of the night nursery, from the tiny,
stifled moans that came from Vonnie's bed. Not a sound ever escaped her
until the pain was almost unbearable, and even then Lily knew that she
would never utter a spoken word, because the children were forbidden to
speak after the light was put out.
Lily herself lay stiff and rigid in her bed, her hands clenched, her
body quivering and sweating, with every faculty strained to its utmost
in the intensity of her tortured listening. Each time that Vonnie's
almost inaudible moan sounded, a pang went through Lily's whole frame.
Every now and then she would discover that she was holding her breath,
and find herself constrained to exhale it in a long, quivering,
noiseless sob.
From time to time when the little moaning sound had not at once
recurred after the brief interval of silence by which it was usually
succeeded, a sick hope invaded Lily that Vonnie might after all be
dropping off to sleep. But, redoubling the intensity of her own
listening, she could hear sobbing, irregular breathing from Vonnie that
shook her with a fresh despair.
"Vonnie!" she whispered.
No answer.
"Oh, Vonnie, is it very bad?"
"No," came the faintest of whispers in reply.
It was not true, Lily knew perfectly well, and she knew also that very
likely next day Vonnie would deliberately go and confess to their
mother that she had been disobedient and talked, after the light had
been put out in the night nursery.
She would say nothing about her earache, nothing to excuse herself,
nothing to incriminate Lily, and would accept rebuke or punishment
quite speechlessly. Lily knew that Vonnie always craved any form of
penalty that would ease her conscience of the imaginary burdens with
which she was eternally loading it. But no one else understood this.
Presently a shaft of moonlight crept through the curtained window, and
Lily sat up in bed. Then she saw, with a shock that made her feel sick,
that Vonnie was sitting bolt upright, not lying down at all. Her small
pillow was put up on end behind her and inadequately supported her
shoulders, and both hands clasped her temples.
As a rule, Vonnie lay down on the side that wasn't hurting her, and
kept both hands over her bad ear. Lily had never seen her sitting up
like this before and it seemed to deny any hope of her ever being able
to go to sleep at all.
"Oh, let me fetch Nurse," sobbed Lily, shaking from head to foot.
Vonnie shook her head very slightly in obstinate negative, and the
movement forced a gasping sound of pain from her.
It was always the same thing.
Vonnie would not tell about her earache when it began because she was
afraid of a fuss, and she would not tell about it afterwards for fear
of being scolded because she had not "said" sooner. If Lily told
instead of her, then it was naughty and interfering, and very likely
disbelieved besides, in the face of Vonnie's stoical denials. There was
no hope anywhere, and the awful night would never, never end.
Lily sat up too, because it was impossible to lie down while Vonnie
crouched there, racked with pain; and tense, angry appeals that she
thought of as prayers, raced through her mind.
"Make her go to sleep--it's nothing to You to send her off to
sleep--You _can't_ let her go on like this all night.... It's cruel to
punish Vonnie too, as well as me.... Why can't You send the earache to
me, when it's me You want to punish?"
But God, who knew everything, would never be taken in by an argument of
that sort, however plausible it might have been to the ears of human
justice. Lily knew very well that God perfectly understood how, in
some strange, naughty way that invariably made the authorities angry,
Vonnie's sufferings hurt Lily far more acutely than her own could ever
have done. And, of course, He took advantage of His knowledge whenever
she had to be punished. Lily had even, sometimes, reflected with a
forlorn kind of abstract justice, that this was fair enough. If He
didn't so ingeniously choose the very way that hurt most, it wouldn't
be a real punishment.
But, within sight and sound of Vonnie's torture to-night, she had no
consideration for abstract justice.
She did what she had very seldom done before, and went to fetch the
nurse.
Nurse was in bed and, to Lily's astonishment, had not yet gone to
sleep.
"Did Miss Vonnie ask you to come for me?" she demanded suspiciously.
Lily had anticipated the question, which was always the preliminary, in
the nursery, to an emphatic recommendation to mind her own business and
leave Miss Vonnie to mind hers.
"Yes, she did," said Lily, feeling herself choke. God could hardly do
much more than He had done already, even to a liar, and everything but
present relief had become worthless of consideration.
"Now mind, if you've got me out of bed for nothing----" said Nurse
threateningly. But she spoke in quite a kind voice, and put on her
dressing-gown, and lit a candle. "Good gracious, child, why are you so
white?" she asked Lily and took her hand protectingly and held it all
the way to the night nursery.
Vonnie's moans were much louder now, and Lily, looking up anxiously at
Nurse, felt that she must, for once, accept Vonnie's illness at its own
valuation, and not at the slighting one that Vonnie herself would fain
give to it.
"Now then, Miss Vonnie dear, what's all this?"
Nurse took Vonnie's hands down from her head. The odd look round
Vonnie's eyes that had been so nearly imperceptible early in the
evening had deepened in a very strange way, and after one glance at her
small, leaden-coloured face, Nurse's manner changed altogether.
She went to the little medicine-cupboard high up on the wall, and lit
the spirit-lamp, and heated water and put into it some sweet-smelling
oil out of a green bottle. She put Vonnie's dressing-gown round her and
a large shawl over that, and sat down in a low chair and took Vonnie on
to her lap. Then she dipped some cotton-wool into the warm oil and put
it into each ear, and all the time she was coaxing and pitying Vonnie
with kind, soothing words.
Lily never forgot the exquisite ecstasy of relief with which she
watched and heard it all from her own bed in the corner. The violent
reaction from her state of nervous anguish was so great that she began
to cry and sob quite quietly, scarcely knowing that she was doing so.
Vonnie's moaning ceased almost at once, and her whole attitude relaxed,
and presently Nurse got up and put her gently down in the low chair,
with a pillow behind her.
"I shall be back directly," she whispered reassuringly to Lily, opening
the door very softly.
She came back with their mother.
"She's dropped off now. I expect she'll sleep, poor little thing--she's
worn out with the pain," said Nurse as they looked down at unconscious
Vonnie.
"Poor child! Well, Nurse, if you'll move in here for to-night, I'll
take Miss Lily into my room."
"Going to sleep with Mother" was a treat. Lily knew very well that if
she had been the one to be ill, she would have been moved into her
mother's room long since.
But nothing mattered, now that Vonnie was sleeping peacefully, and
being taken care of by a kind, omnipotent grown-up person.
When Lily was lying snugly between the soft, scented sheets in her
mother's enormous bed, with the pale pink quilt spread across it, her
mother came and knelt beside her and put her arms round her.
"Go to sleep quickly, my pet. I shall be in bed directly. I've only got
to take off my dressing-gown. Settle down comfily, now."
A delicious, drowsy feeling invaded Lily, and she turned over
obediently on her side.
"Why, my poor chicken, you've been crying! There's nothing for you to
cry about. Did you have a bad dream?"
"Vonnie had earache," murmured Lily, half asleep, and heard without
surprise her mother's amused, uncomprehending laugh and answer:
"Why, you silly little goose, it was poor Vonnie who had earache, not
you! There was nothing for _you_ to cry about! You must have been
dreaming."