THE COLLECTED NOVELS OF E. M. DELAFIELD (6 Titles in One Edition). E. M. Delafield
beastly egotistical of me really, I expect, to go on jawing about my own concerns like this. Do forgive me. It's the worst of being born a reserved sort of chap, that sooner or later there's bound to be a reaction. Breaking-point, I suppose."
Zella lifted sympathetic grey eyes to Stephen's cold steel-blue ones, which could only express two emotions— complacency or discontent. For the moment the latter was in the ascendant.
"Why don't you tell me about it?" she inquired with a pleasing sense of daring. "I—I think, somehow, that I should understand."
"You'd always understand," uttered Stephen emotionally.
"Try." She smiled up at him.
Stephen began to pull up small tufts of grass all round him, and throw them aimlessly about.
"Oh, it's a stupid enough story, and not at all original." He gave a sufficiently realistic rendering of a mirthless laugh. "The only difference, I imagine, between my case and that of most of us was that I took things hard— damnably hard. I beg your pardon! You see, I cared about a woman. I was only a boy, as far as years went, and she was older than I was—ten years older. As a matter of fact, she was a married woman." He hesitated. "Am I shocking you?"
"No," said Zella steadily.
She was very much shocked indeed, and maintained her serious, pitying gaze only by an effort.
Stephen for a second looked all but imperceptibly disconcerted.
"You'd probably know who she was, if I told you her name—everybody knows her. She's a most beautiful woman. Good heavens, yes! she is beautiful."
He paused a minute, gazing over the terrace with most unseeing eyes. Possibly something less sympathetic than before in the quality of his listener's silence recalled him; for he added with a suspicion of haste:
"Not everybody's type, you know—not mine, for the matter of that—but undeniably wonderful in her own way. She had brains, too, and understanding. (Even then I could never have loved a face without a soul behind it.) Everybody knew, more or less, that she wasn't happy. Her husband didn't understand her; he was a little Jewish bounder, colossally rich, which is why she married him, I suppose. Of course she had a lot of friends—she's one of the most popular women in London—and I was very much in her sort of set, I suppose. Anyhow, we saw a lot of one another during the whole of one summer, and in the autumn I went to stay at their place in Scotland for a week. I was madly in love with her, and I thought she knew it. I suppose I was a fool."
He stopped.
Zella wondered what to say, and decided that he needed a courageous champion against his own self-humiliation in the retrospect.
- " She must have behaved very badly," she exclaimed hotly. "You were younger than she was, and she had no business to take advantage of you."
He looked up, genuinely astonished, and Zella saw that she had struck the wrong note.
"Taken advantage of me? She did more for me than anyone, and I'm eternally grateful to her," he said curtly. Then, with a relapse into his former tone: "Of course I gave her all I had to give, and she—well, she just didn't want it. It was natural enough, I dare say. But I've sometimes wondered whether she knew
"However," resumed Stephen more briskly, after a pause which effectually implied the words that had not concluded his sentence—" whether she knew all that she was throwing away "—" that's neither here nor there. You understand—I needn't tell you—what a boy's adoration is."
Zella tried to keep out of her face the gratification which she felt, and to look deeply pensive and deeply understanding.
"I would have laid down my life for her a hundred times over. It was a—a chivalrous sort of feeling, I suppose. Well, one evening on the moors I lost my head a bit. It was a glorious sunset, I remember, that night. The sky was all red and gold over the purple moors— I can see it still. . . . Somehow, I never can see a sunset now without thinking of that one. I—I'm a remembering sort of chap, you know."
He laughed rather agitatedly.
Zella felt a thrill of sympathy and of a curious sort of envy. She would have liked a memory in her own life that should be roused at the sight of a sunset.
This time Stephen remained so long silent that she ventured gently:
"Tell me—at least if you care to."
"Care to! You're the only person in this world to whom I've ever spoken of it—the only one who would understand," exclaimed Stephen vehemently. "Only tell me I'm not asking too much in asking you to listen; you're not shocked, as other girls might be."
Zella's vanity was powerless against the subtle implication.
"I'm not like other girls," she answered softly.
"I know," said Stephen, looking at her.
Before the silence had time to become more fraught with weighty meanings than would have been convenient, he began to speak again:
"Of course it all came to an end. She stood amongst all that heather with the sunset light on her hair, and listened to me for a few minutes. I was on my knees, somehow, in front of her—and then—well, then"
He broke off abruptly, with a quick gesture of sudden finality.
After an instant he resumed in a flat, even voice:
"I thought I'd hitched my waggon to a star; I used to put it to myself that way sometimes, I remember. And then—well, the whole world was suddenly dark, and I'd foundered pretty badly on to the rocks."
Both were too much absorbed to notice that the waggon simile was being slightly over-strained.
"I went to pieces for a bit, I fancy. I don't know that I'd ever?been fool enough to believe that she actually cared for me, you know, but the whole thing hit me pretty hard. It was disillusion, too. She hadn't really ever understood. She just thought of it all as a boy's fancy, and wanted to laugh at me a little and play at being my friend. One couldn't stand that, of course. The only thing to do was to go away and fight it out alone. And I went.
"If there'd been anybody to give me a hand it would have been different; but I was intensely reserved even then, and somehow I just saw it through alone. And yet in a way it wasn't exactly alone, either. I don't know if you'll understand, or think me mad; but somehow the stars, and the dark sky, and the wind that blew up there on the moor, helped me in some extraordinary way. I can't explain, and it sounds insane enough."
His laugh simulated an awkwardness which he was far from feeling.
"Oh, I know," breathed Zella. "It's sometimes the only thing in the world that does help one; people don't understand, but the earth and the sky"
She broke off.
"That's about it," said Stephen. "I don't suppose one person in a million would have known what I meant, but somehow you understand."
"I'm glad—oh, I'm glad!"
Their eyes met for a moment; then Zella's were veiled, and she bent her head.
"Tell me what happened," she added rather hurriedly. "Have you—have you got over it?—I mean, as far as one ever does get over anything like that," she added hastily, for fear that he should think her unsympathetic.
"I came through somehow," said Stephen with rather a grim intonation. "I lost something on the moors up there, though, that I shall never find again—perhaps it was my youth. Something snapped in me, you know, and life has been—well, different ever since.
"But I've learned a good deal since those days, I fancy. There's the sun, and the wind, and the open road, you know—and other things as well. It's been a sort of key to music and poetry and things like that, in a way; there's a meaning in things now that was missing before. I suppose' it's just that one has to go down into the very depths before one can really see things in the daylight. It either makes one or mars one—I understand that now."
"And you—just didn't let go," said