Consequences. E. M. Delafield
is always cool and unmoved as she stands up, and Alex always looks at her. At this particular séance, the April one, she took her glances more or less surreptitiously, miserably aware that she had not enough self-control to refrain from them and so avoid risking a rebuke later on.
Queenie held no première. She was always last in her form, undistinguished at music, drawing, needlework, anything requiring application or talent alike. But her perfectly serene complacency was more or less justified by the exaggerated applause of her companions at her faultless "conduct" marks and the assurance of her class-mistress, always given readily, that she was "très docile, très appliquée."
Queenie's popularity was independent of anything extraneous to herself.
The Superior leant forward and asked a question in a low voice.
"Non, ma Mère Supérieure, non."
The denial of a possible accusation, of which Alex guessed the purport, was emphatic. She felt glad and relieved, but had no suspicions as to the indictment following on her own name.
"Alexandra Clare," said Mère Alphonsine sonorously, and Alex stood up.
She no longer felt self-conscious over the ordeal, and was indifferent to the habitual litany of complaints as to her unlearnt lessons, disregard of the rule of silence, and frequent bad marks for disorder and unpunctuality. But to the accusations which she knew by heart, and shared with the majority of the moyenne classe, came a quite unexpected addition, hissed out with a sort of dramatic horror by Mère Alphonsine:
"Alex recherche Kevinnie sans cesse, ma Mère Supérieure."
Only those familiar with the code of pensionnaire discipline in Belgium during the years when Alex Clare and her contemporaries were at school, can gauge the full heinousness of the offence, gravest in the conventual decalogue.
Even Alex, although she had been scolded and punished and made the subject of innumerable homilies, some of them pityingly reproachful, and others explanatorily so, on the same question, felt as though she had never before realized the extent of her own perversion.
She stood up, her hands in the regulation position, pushed under the hideous black-stuff pèlerine that fell from her stiff, hard, white collar to the shapeless waistband of her skirt, the whole uniform carefully designed to conceal and obscure the lines of the figure beneath it.
Overwhelmed with uncomprehending misery and acute shame, she heard two or three of the mistresses add each her quota, for the most part regretfully and with an evident sense of duty overcoming reluctance, to the evidence against her.
"She seeks opportunity to place herself next to Queenie at almost every recreation, ma Mère Supérieure."
"I am afraid that even in the chapel she lets this folly get the better of her – one can see how she lets herself go to distractions all the time…"
So the charges went on.
The summing up of Ma Mère Supérieure was icily condemnatory. She had tried every means with Alex, had spoken to her with kindness and tenderness; in private, had reasoned with her and finally threatened her, and now a public denouncement must be tried, since all these means had proved to be without effect.
Alex was principally conscious of the single, lightning-swift flash of reproach that had shot from the eyes of Queenie Torrance into hers.
How silently and viciously Queenie would resent this public coupling of her immaculate reputation with Alex' idiotic infatuation, only Alex knew.
With the frantic finality of youth, she wondered whether she could go on living. Oh, if only she might die at once, without hearing further blame or reproach, without encountering the ridicule of her companions or the cold withdrawal of Queenie's precariously-held friendship. Alex cried herself sick with terror and shame and utterly ineffectual remorse.
The despair that invades an undeveloped being is the blackest in the world, because of its utter want of perspective.
Alex could see nothing beyond the present. She felt all the weight of an inexpressible guilt upon her, and all the utter isolation of spirit which surrounds the sinner who stands exposed and condemned.
She knew that nobody would take her part. She was young enough to reflect forlornly that an accusation mattered nothing if unjust, since the consciousness of innocence would sustain one, serene and unfaltering, through any ordeal.
But she had no consciousness of innocence. She saw herself eternally different from her companions, eternally destined to lose her way, wickedly and shamefully she supposed, without volition of her own she knew, amongst those standards to which the right thinking conformed, and which she, only, failed to recognize. With sick wistfulness Alex sought Queenie's glance as they came one by one into the refectory, after the réclame was over.
Queenie's fair, opaque face was as colourless as ever, her eyes were cast down.
Frantically, Alex willed her to cast one look of pity or forgiveness in her direction, but Queenie passed on to the refectory where the children's mid-day meal was waiting for them without a sign.
Amidst all the blur of emotions, passionate remorse and hopeless loneliness, which made up Alex' schooldays, that Saturday mid-day meal stood out in its black despair.
The choking attempts to swallow a mass of vegetable cooking, made salt and sodden with her own streaming tears, the sobs that strangled her and broke in spite of all her efforts into the decorous silence of the refectory, even the awed and scandalized glances that the younger children cast at her distorted face, remained saliently before her memory for years.
At last the nun in charge rose from her place at the end of the room and came down and told Alex that she might leave the table. The long progress down the endless length of the refectory destroyed the last remnants of Alex' self-control.
The tide of emotional agony that swept over her was to ebb and flow again, and many times again.
But only once or twice was that high-water mark to be reached, that bitter wave to engulf her, and each time add to the undermining of that small stability of spirit with which Alex had been endowed.
She left the misery of that black Saturday behind her, and was left with her childish nerves a little shattered, her childish confidence of outlook rather more overshadowed, her childish strength less steady, and, above all, set fast in her childish mind the ineradicable, unexplained conviction that because she had loved Queenie Torrance and had been punished and rebuked for it, therefore to love was wrong.
III
Queenie Torrance
School days in Belgium went on, through the steamy, rain-sodden days of spring to the end of term and the grandes vacances looked forward to with such frantic eagerness even by the children who liked the convent best. Alex was again bitterly conscious of an utter want of conformity setting her apart from her fellow-creatures.
The misery of parting for eight weeks from Queenie Torrance overwhelmed her. Casually, Queenie said:
"I may not come back, next term. I shall be seventeen by then, and I don't see why I should be at school any longer if I can get round father."
"What would you do?"
"Why, come out, of course," said Queenie. "I am quite old enough, and every one says I look older than I am."
She moved her head about slightly so as to get sidelong views of her own reflection in the big window-pane. There were no looking-glasses at the convent.
It was true that, in spite of a skin smooth and unlined as a baby's and the childish, semicircular comb that gathered back the short flaxen ringlets from her rounded, innocent brow, Queenie's slender, but very well-developed figure and the unvarying opaque pallor of her complexion, made her look infinitely nearer maturity than the slim, long-legged American girls, or over-plump, giggling French and Belgian ones. Alex gazed at her with mute, exaggerated despair on her face.
"Your parents will permit that you make your début at once, yes?" queried Marthe Poupard, as one resigned to the incredible folly and weakness of British and American parents.
"I