"There are some gypsies on the common, Father."
"Are there, my pet? You and Miss Cleeve had better keep to the road,
for the present, then. Very likely they have illness about. Those
people are not very careful."
"There was such a thin little boy. He looked as though he didn't get
much to eat," said Lily tentatively.
"Well, well, my darling, we'll hope he does. Did you find any
blackberries on your walk this morning?"
"Only a few. They're not yet ripe. But, Father----" Lily was ten
years old, and nowadays when she saw that her father and mother were
deliberately evading a subject upon which she desired information,
something that seemed stronger than herself drove her on to urge the
point, with an affectation of being unaware of their disapproval.
"Do you think that little boy was really starving, perhaps?"
"No, no, my child." Philip moved uneasily and glanced at his wife.
"People don't starve in England nowadays."
"We won't talk about sad things like that, Lily dear," said Eleanor
brightly. "People needn't be poor unless they want to, you know. They
can always find work."
"Why hasn't everyone got a house then? Why can't that little boy live
in a house like we do?" Lily demanded meditatively.
There was a silence weighty with disapproval.
Then Philip remarked simply and with finality:
"Don't ask foolish questions, my little pet."
Lily knew herself defeated and was guiltily conscious of having
deserved rebuke by her deliberate pursual of one of the many topics
that, for reasons never explained, should not be talked about.
During the year that had elapsed since Vonnie's death, the number of
these subjects seemed to have increased enormously. Not only was Vonnie
not to be talked about, but anything connected with death, funerals,
and mortality generally must be avoided, and it was a general axiom
that what Philip occasionally referred to as "sad, painful, distressing
things" were never really fit subjects for discussion.
Curiously enough, the nervous sufferings of Lily's whole early
childhood, culminating in the emotional crisis that she had undergone
when Yvonne died, at this period deserted her. She was now merely
sensitive in a petulant way, subconsciously antagonistic to all her
surroundings, and obsessed by a resentful certainty that her father and
mother did not understand her.
This ungracious conviction she once haltingly attempted to explain to
Eleanor, early faced with the endeavour that has defeated so many,
that of avoiding the only form of words obviously designed to express
what she wished to have understood, and finding instead some other
formula in which it might be conveyed with equal lucidity and yet less
outspokenness.
The results were a number of self-contradictory statements from Lily,
followed by tears.
"But what is it that I don't understand, my baby?" Eleanor urged her to
return to the attack.
"Me," quavered Lily, suddenly explicit.
Her mother winced very visibly indeed.
Lily felt unutterably naughty.
"My dearest," said Eleanor at last, "how can a grown-up person not
understand a little child? You're talking nonsense, you know. There
can be nothing in a little girl of ten years old that's beyond the
understanding of a grown-up, experienced person. And to say that a
_mother_ doesn't understand her own child, is to suggest something that
can't possibly be. Some day you'll know what I mean."
"When?" said Lily.
Eleanor's absolute belief in the creed that she had enunciated perforce
carried a certain conviction to Lily's bewildered and undeveloped mind.
"When?" she repeated.
"When you have a little child of your own," her mother replied simply.
There was nothing more to be said.
Until that far-away, unbelievable time when one would be sufficiently
old to have a little child of one's own, it must be taken on trust that
all grown-up people, especially one's father and mother, understood one
perfectly, although they made one feel all the time as though they did
not.
Lily's thoughts and her feelings became speedily more and more muddled
and confused.
Her discontent, which originated in sheer perplexity, took the form of
argumentative and tiresome contradiction of the rules imposed upon her.
"She used to be such a dear, little sunny thing," cried Eleanor
piteously. "Of course, I know there's an awkward age for all children
to go through but I never thought of Lily's beginning it so young."
She cried and looked pale over Lily's naughtiness very often, and Lily
was tortured by remorse and self-accusations that were without any
effect upon her behaviour.
One day her father, who was tacitly supposed to know of her
naughtiness, but to find it too grievous to be mentioned openly, spoke
to her.
"You will regret it bitterly later on, my child, if you grieve your
mother just now. There are reasons which you can't understand why she
should be spared in every possible way, at present."
Were these specific reasons, or only the usual mysterious ones held
over one's head by the authorities, and generally supposed to have
obscure reference to God?
Lily presently came to the conclusion that some definite event was
impending, and that she was supposed to know nothing whatever about
it. Things were said to her of which it was obvious that she was
intended to make general application only, and to which, with intuitive
certainty, she instantly attached a special meaning.
"You must always be a very good little girl to your mother, and pray to
God that He may take good care of her."
Why should Father suddenly say that, when it was an old-established
certainty that Lily knew she ought to be a good little girl, and had
prayed for her mother every night ever since she could remember, as a
matter of course?
Sometimes it almost seemed as though they wanted to see how far it was
possible for them to go, before Lily would make any sign of having
noticed that there was a mystery.
"Nurse, I want you to bring those things that I spoke to you about into
my room this morning."
"Yes, madam."
And then five minutes later:
"My little Lily must stay in the schoolroom and do her lessons very
nicely this morning, and not go running about the house too much. Trot
along to Miss Cleeve, my pet."
As though Miss Cleeve had ever dreamed of allowing Lily to run about
the house during lesson time! Such a thing was quite unheard of,
and Eleanor's casual tone did not for an instant deceive Lily into
supposing that the prohibition had been a casual one.
On another occasion, a still more careless enquiry:
"You know you must never come into upstairs rooms without knocking at
the door first, don't you, darling?"
A rule that Lily had known and had been made to observe, since she was
three years old.
It appeared, therefore, that there was some urgent necessity for
enforcing the rule now. Lily discovered that the door of the Blue Room
was locked, all of a sudden.
She felt a strange inability to question her father or mother, but she
tried to entrap Miss Cleeve into an admission, unconsciously imitating
the air of carelessness with which Eleanor had tried, as Lily dimly
felt, to entrap her into asking some question, to which a reply might
be given that would direct curiosity into an innocuous channel leading
nowhere.
"Oh, Miss Cleeve! Did you know the door of the Blue Room had been
locked?"