A reversion to type

by E. M. Delafield

VII

Of the forces arrayed against Rose—and she found them many—the most potent was the strong desire for school that they had implanted in little Cecil himself.

He was always begging to go to Hurst.

“Don’t you want me to be friends with Lord Charlesbury’s little boy, Mummie?”

“Yes. Of course I do.”

“Well, he’s at Hurst. He’s in the Eleven there.”

“I know.”

“Shouldn’t I be in the Eleven, too?”

“No. You don’t play nearly well enough yet, darling.”

Cecil flushed and then said defiantly: “Diana thinks I would be, and she knows more about cricket than you do, Mummie—you said yourself that she does. She said—she said——”

“What did she say?”

Diana Grierson-Amberly was surely not prone to the paying of unmerited compliments, and Rose felt curious.

“She said I ought to be at Hurst and that I bowled better than that other little boy, Hugh. She did, Mummie.”

“Ces!” said Rose warningly.

“Yes, she did. That was because I bowled her out first ball, just as easy as anything. And the bails stayed on, Mummie, and only the middle stump went down, really and truly.”

She knew, necessarily, that he must be boasting, and the circumstantial details with which he amplified his story made her, from previous experience, forlornly certain that he knew himself to be inventing.

“When did this happen?”

“Last night, when we played on the lawn after tea.”

“Well, I know you did play on the lawn with Uncle Ford and Diana and Miss Wade. But she didn’t really say you bowled better than Hugh Charlesbury, now did she, Ces? You only said that for fun, didn’t you?”

Her coaxing voice pleaded with him for the admission.

“I can’t help it if you won’t believe me, Mummie,” said Cecil with dignity, “but it’s perfectly true all the same.”

Miss Wade descended upon them with her usual air of timorous determination.

“Come along, Cecil dear, it’s time to go out. You’d like me to bowl to you, wouldn’t you? Remember what Miss Grierson-Amberly said to us last night!”

“What?” Rose asked almost involuntarily.

“She said Cecil would never get into the Hurst Cricket Eleven unless he practised really hard. And she told us about Lord Charlesbury’s little boy—didn’t she, Cecil?—who bowled some other boy out first ball, and the middle stump actually went flying, although the bails stopped on.”

“I see,” said Rose dully.

Not for the world would she have exposed Cecil in Miss Wade’s presence. She would not even look at him.

“Come along,” said Miss Wade, in her voice of manufactured brightness.

Cecil had rapidly turned from white to scarlet, but when he saw that his mother had no intention of humiliating him by any spoken comment, his face cleared. He ran up to her and kissed her, and said “Good-bye, Mummie,” quite cheerfully before he went away with Miss Wade.

She felt that he would easily succeed in putting the whole incident quite out of his thoughts.

“But why—why does he do it?” reflected Rose miserably.

She was incapable of searching out the basic foundations for Cecil’s perversion of the truth. The crux of the matter, to her, lay in the bald fact that he told lies; not at all in the existence of a fundamental self-distrust and craving for the reassurance of praise and approval that provided a motive for the lies.

“I can’t make him good,” said Rose to herself desperately.

She was too unsure of the orthodoxy of her own beliefs to have made out of religion an instrument for the chastisement of Cecil’s spirit, and when he had informed her that Miss Wade said all story-tellers went to hell, she had heatedly replied: “Bosh! don’t think about hell. Think about heaven instead.”

Lady Aviolet, she knew, had suggested once or twice to Cecil, with characteristic reticence of expression, that his besetting sin should be made the subject of nightly intercession in his prayers. But Rose herself, and, she felt certain, Cecil with her, had looked upon the mechanical petitions, “Help me always to speak the truth, for Christ’s sake, Amen,” as the merest shelving of responsibility. Religious susceptibilities were no more apparent in Cecil than in herself, and Rose instinctively mistrusted resolutions rooted rather in a supine faith in Divine omnipotence than in a personal will to achieve.

A sense of utter frustration assailed her after the expenditure of nervous energy that she had flung into her “scene” on the previous evening. It had been of no use. The old people had not understood; their stupidity was as impenetrable as their good breeding. Ford, who might have interpreted her ill-chosen words to them, had chosen, malignantly, to play a little comedy of obtuseness that was never meant to deceive Rose, but only to make her angrier and more incoherent.

Thinking it all over, the tears burned in her eyes and she clenched her teeth. It seemed incredible to her that so much vehemence should have proved so completely impotent.

The conviction of defeat was ready to invade her, but her indomitable sense of the issue at stake refused to let her be overwhelmed.

“He shan’t go—he shan’t go——” she repeated to herself, half sobbing. “I know he isn’t fit for school.”

She slowly prepared to put in action a plan that she had evolved in the course of a sleepless hour of the night.

She wrote a letter.

This was to Rose a laborious undertaking at all times, since she disliked letter-writing and had had very little occasion to practise it. Her handwriting, that had an inappropriate appearance on the stamped blue notepaper of Squires, was large and painstaking, and very legible.

My dear Uncle Alfred,

It seems a long time since I wrote to you after poor Jim’s death, and I daresay you will be interested to hear that Cecil and myself are now with Jim’s people at the above address. Well, Uncle, this is to say that things are not going as I should wish with regards to Cecil, and they want very much to send him to a Preparatory School and then to a Public School. This I do not want, because it would be bad for Cecil, and I know what I am talking about. Well, Uncle, I cannot make them see this here, and so I write to you. Will you have Ces and me up at your place for a bit if this is not too inconvenient? I could help in the business like Mother used to, and have a talk with you about Cecil. He’s a lovely little boy, really, and I do want to do the best possible for him.

I must stop now, Uncle, hoping to hear from you before long.

Your affectionate niece,
Rose.

She sealed her letter very carefully before putting it herself into the oaken box on the hall-table. The late Mrs. Smith had imparted pessimistic views to Rose on the subject of private correspondence if left unprotected.

“It isn’t in nature not to read what isn’t meant for you, if it’s lying about,” had said Mrs. Smith, in simple explanation of her own well-informedness upon various affairs that might strictly have been regarded as the concern of her neighbours rather than her own.

Rose, not sufficiently endowed with curiosity herself to indulge in the reading of other people’s correspondence, was quite tolerantly prepared to believe that this was nevertheless the general practice.

When she had finished her letter, she felt happier. No one had said anything to her about her outburst of the preceding evening. She had come down to breakfast heavy-eyed and apprehensive, although no whit less resolved to maintain her own cause, but there had been no sign that any one remembered the existence either of a cause or of a champion.

The conversation had circled placidly round the customary subject of “plans for the day” and the necessity of sending the young man Toby to the station for the 10.39 train.

Rose had been partly relieved, partly disappointed, and wholly perplexed.

She found the Aviolets, their standards, their aims and avoidances, alike incomprehensible. She felt as though it would be an untold relief to return to Uncle Alfred and his shop, where all the pitfalls were of an obvious kind and where approval and disapproval were alike manifested on equally established and well-defined lines.

“Would you care for a walk?” said Diana Grierson-Amberly, coming upon her in the hall.

“Always walks!” thought Rose with uncomprehending resignation, but Diana’s voice had sounded friendly, and she was grateful, although she could never understand the satisfaction to be derived from walking for half an hour along a country lane, with no shop windows to look into and no given objective, and then turning round and walking along the same road for another half hour back again.

“It isn’t even as though we had anything to say to one another,” she reflected.

But it appeared that Miss Grierson-Amberly had something to say on this occasion.

She sang the praises of the Aviolet family.

“I’ve always been so awfully fond of them all, here. Cousin Catherine is such a dear.”

“Oh, yes,” said Rose, with more of uncertain interrogation than of assent in her tone.

“I used to play with the boys a lot when I was younger, and they were always so nice to me, though they were so much older. Ford and I have always been great pals.”

There was a silence.

“He did so splendidly in South Africa. You know he was wounded at Spion Kop?”

“Yes, I know.”

“They say that he went on encouraging his men and calling out to them long after he was hit.”

“Did he?”

“Yes. We never could quite understand why he didn’t get recommended for promotion, or something like that.”

Another silence.

“Of course, very likely his Colonel did recommend him for decoration, and nothing came of it. I’m afraid there’s a certain amount of wire-pulling that one doesn’t know about,” said Diana solemnly.

Once more Rose made no answer, and once more Diana persevered.

“This world is such a queer place, isn’t it? I mean, there’s so much jealousy and pettiness to be found.”

“I suppose so.”

“Perhaps,” Diana laboriously amended, “I ought to say it’s not so much the world that’s queer, as the people in it.”

On this last subtle commentary of Miss Grierson-Amberly’s upon mankind, the silence that ensued was of so abysmal a character that it remained unbroken for nearly ten minutes. Rose, although her vocabulary hardly comprised the word platitude, was ruthlessly recognizing and condemning the quality of her companion’s conversation as “utter bunkum,” and Diana Grierson-Amberly, not without good cause, was discouraged.

Presently she tried again.

“Cousin Catherine is so fond of children, I expect she loves having Cecil here. I always think it’s such an ideal place for a child, too.”

“Do you? Why?” said Rose, interested for the first time.

Unfortunately, Miss Grierson-Amberly’s observation had been rhetorically, rather than literally, intended.

“Well, the garden, you know, and—and the house—and then Ford can teach him to shoot, later on, and he can have a jolly time in the holidays. Miss Wade is nice, too, isn’t she? I think it must be much more fun to have a young governess.”

“She’s all right, but rather an ass, don’t you think?”

“I thought she seemed a nice little thing. You know, Mrs. Aviolet, I do really think there’s heaps of good in everyone if you only look for it,” said the girl, quite earnestly.

“Well, I don’t. I don’t see one single atom of good in that precious Ford of yours, for instance,” Rose declared with sudden recklessness.

Diana’s face grew very grave and very pink. She turned and looked at Rose, with the corners of her mouth rather turned down, and when she spoke her voice was full of distress.

“Of course, to me, it sounds so dreadful to hear you say a thing like that. I simply can’t understand it. Why, Ford is really a perfect dear, when you know him.”

“What about last night?”

“Well, you know, he can’t help what he thinks, now can he, Mrs. Aviolet?” said the girl pleadingly. “You see, what I always feel, is that there are two sides to every question. I think you ought to remember that, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

The effect of reasonableness with which Diana uttered what Rose regarded as futilities was remarkable.

It even impelled Rose to reply to them as though she felt them to be worth a reply.

“I’m not angry with Ford for thinking that Ces should go to school. It’s quite natural he should think so, I suppose. He’s only mixed with two kinds of people all his life—those who go to public schools and those who go to the national schools. He evidently doesn’t know anything about the in-between people. That’s not his fault. But what puts my monkey up, is him pretending to think that I’m a fool; that I want to keep Cecil a molly-coddle, just for the sake of having him tied to my apron-strings. He’s playing up to old Sir Thomas and Lady Aviolet, that’s all, because they’re so stupid. They really do think it’s only that. Why Ford hates me is more than I can tell you—but he does. He’s made things difficult for me ever since I came here.”

“May I say what I think?”

“Of course.”

Rose could not imagine why any one should ever want to do anything else.

“Well, then—I do hope you won’t think it rude of me to say this, but you’ve given me leave to—it seems to me that you take a simply terribly exaggerated view of things. Not only about Ford. (Of course, what you say about his hating you is perfectly absurd. Why, he’s your relation!) But it isn’t only about him. It struck me that you did last night, when you were talking about your little boy. You say that he—well, that he doesn’t always tell the truth. Of course I know it’s a great pity, and the thing of all others that one minds most—it seems so awfully un-English, doesn’t it?—but, after all, Mrs. Aviolet, he’s only a baby, isn’t he? He’ll begin to understand, in a very little while, that he mustn’t tell stories, surely.”

“He knows that now,” said Rose wearily. “You don’t understand. Sometimes I don’t think it’s his own fault, poor darling! He can’t help it.”

“Well, that’s just what I say,” the girl argued perseveringly. “He’ll know better later on. And really and truly, it’s perfectly wonderful what school does for them. My young brother Tony was very delicate as a baby, and I’m afraid we spoilt him dreadfully, but he improved in the most marvellous way after his first term at a preparatory school. It seems to make them so much more manly and sensible, you know.”

“Ces is manly already,” cried Rose, going off at a tangent. “I don’t know what you’d say if you could see what ordinary children are like, after being born and brought up in the tropics. They haven’t got a kick left in them by the time they get home, as a rule, nor for months afterwards.”

“I didn’t mean——”

“That’s all right. I know you didn’t. I suppose the whole thing’s got on my nerves, rather. It’s always Cecil this, and Cecil that, it seems to me.”

“Only because they’re so—so interested in him.”

“I daresay, but it’s a funny way of showing it. You’d think they’d have the sense to see, old people like them, that of course I know more about him than they do.”

“But you know, he wants to go to school himself—really he does. He says so.”

“I know,” said Rose briefly and bitterly.

“Well, then——?”

“Oh, of course, they’ve made him keen, telling him about the games and all the rest of it. He didn’t want to go to school till it was put into his head. You can make a child think it wants anything, even castor oil, if you bluff it enough.”

“But school isn’t a nasty thing, like castor oil,” said Diana, with a sort of ingenious stupidity.

“Chuck it,” Rose advised briefly. “You and me aren’t talking the same language. We shouldn’t understand one another if we went on jawring till we turned black in the face.”

No such disastrous consummation was achieved, but Miss Grierson-Amberly seemed quite unable to abandon the discussion.

“But I do understand you, really and truly I do. Only it seems to me, if you’ll forgive me for saying such a thing, that it would be more unselfish of you to let Cecil do what he wants, and what everybody else thinks best for him, than just to try and make him do what you like. I’m afraid I’m expressing it stupidly, but I daresay you’ll understand. After all, if one loves any one, one wants the best thing for them, doesn’t one? And you know, boys learn heaps of things at school that one simply can’t give them at home—playing the game generally, and esprit de corps, and all that sort of thing.”

“I’ve heard every bit of this before, and I daresay it’s all quite true. But as long as Ces remains what he is, he’ll go to no school. I’d as soon send an epileptic child to school as him.”

“Oh, how can you!” The distress in Diana’s voice was most unmistakably genuine. “Indeed, indeed, I’m certain you’re exaggerating the whole thing most dreadfully. And even if he is as naughty as you think, surely school would be the very——”

“Naughty!” Rose, like an explosion, repeated. “Who said he was naughty? I’ll thank you to keep your advice about my boy till you’ve got one of your own. You’ll know a bit more about it by that time, perhaps.”

For the second time, Diana coloured deeply; but after a moment she said unresentfully:

“I’m afraid I’ve vexed you, and I’m so awfully sorry. I really only said it because I’ve known the Aviolets all my life, and Cecil is such a dear little boy.”

The last words mollified Rose instantly.

“It’s all right. I’m sorry, too, if I was rude. Don’t let’s talk about it any more.”

They made spasmodic conversation upon indifferent subjects until Squires was reached. Rose, tired and out of spirits, trailing slowly upstairs, heard Diana’s voice incautiously raised in Lady Aviolet’s morning-room.

“I hope I’ve done some good, Cousin Catherine. I’ve been reading the Riot Act, but of course——”

The door was closed, and Rose proceeded on her way, muttering sub-audibly, “Damn her impudence!”

Her perceptions, acute, if inarticulate, sensed in Diana Grierson-Amberly all the blind, limitless cruelty of the obtuse. She felt strangely weak and frightened at the thought of it, as though knowing that from that cruelty of the unimaginative there is no appeal.

In the nursery, she found Cecil strutting about, reciting a sort of saga, with the intensely disapproving eyes of Miss Wade fixed upon him in a horrified stare.

“An’ there was elephants there, and a tiger, and—and horses as big as lions; and they all lay down in front of me until I said, ‘Up!’ Like that I said it, very loud and grand—‘UP!’ I said. That was in Colombo, once.”

“Hallo, Ces,” Rose said rather wearily. She guessed, from the expression of the governess, what was coming.

“I’m glad you’ve just happened to come in, Mrs. Aviolet. There’s a little boy here who hardly seems to know the difference between pretence and reality, I’m afraid.”

“What’s the matter?” Rose demanded ungraciously. She would not even look at Miss Wade, and she kept one hand on Cecil’s forehead, stroking back his thick, soft hair.

“Oh, I hope nothing’s the matter,” Miss Wade declared with sudden, spurious brightness. “I’m sure Cecil will tell you himself that he’s only been talking nonsense.”

“I’m not talking nonsense——”

“If you mean that rubbish I heard as I came in, about elephants and tigers, it was nonsense, Ces, and you know it. You weren’t trying to make Miss Wade believe it was true, were you? You wouldn’t be so silly, a big boy like you.”

The appeal to Cecil’s vanity seemed to make him hesitate. At last he gave an uncertain little laugh, and said: “No, Mummie. I only said it for fun. It was just something I was inventing.”

Rose kissed him in sudden, passionate thankfulness.

“My precious! That’s a good boy!”

“It’s a pity, isn’t it, that Cecil should think it amusing to invent things that never happened,” said Miss Wade mildly, “especially as we know that he isn’t always quite as brave as he ought to be about telling the exact truth. But I’m glad he’s been straightforward this time.”

Rose did not think that she looked glad.

“If Cecil may go into the garden for a while, Mrs. Aviolet, I should be glad to speak to you.”

“All right.”

Rose made no attempt at all at displaying an amiability which she was far from feeling.

“As we’re on the subject,” said the little governess nervously, “I thought I’d really better speak to you. Cecil is a dear little boy and I’m very fond of him, but I really don’t know what to do about his want of truth. I’m sorry to have to say it, Mrs. Aviolet, but he’s untruthful—downright untruthful.”

“Have you just found it out or did his grandmother tell you so?” Rose asked truculently.

“Lady Aviolet never mentioned such a thing to me, nor did any one else. I am in the habit of forming my own opinions as to the character of my pupils. I am a student of child-psychology,” said Miss Wade with dignity. “It is a most serious fault, and one that cannot be corrected too young.”

“If you’re thinking of his nonsense just now, Miss Wade——”

The governess interrupted her firmly. “No, that has nothing to do with it. I have been meaning to speak to you for some little while. I should have thought little or nothing of his wild inventions of imaginary adventures, if I had not, more than once, found him out in a direct untruth.”

Rose groaned almost involuntarily.

“You knew of this fault already?”

“Yes, of course I did.”

“He is so young, and such a dear little boy, and so good otherwise that I feel sure he can be corrected. But I must ask you, Mrs. Aviolet, to let me have a free hand in dealing with this.”

“No.”

“I beg your pardon, Mrs. Aviolet?”

“I said, ‘No.’”

Miss Wade looked quite confounded.

“Now do you suppose,” Rose impatiently inquired, “that I should give anybody a free hand, as you call it, in punishing my own child? What am I his mother for, if I’m to go giving free hands to other people all over the place? But you can tell me what your idea is—unless it’s school, which, I may tell you, I’ve heard enough about—and a bit over.”

“Cecil is hardly fit for school until he has learnt to speak the truth.”

“That’s the first word of sense I’ve heard spoken about it yet. Well, fire ahead.”

“Mrs. Aviolet, I do not wish you to take it upon my word alone, and therefore I will refer you to my authority. Monroe on the ‘Moral Education of Children.’”

“And what has Monroe got to say about it?”

“‘There are two faults, and two only, for which corporal punishment should be inflicted: deliberate cruelty, and deliberate untruth. We need not add that it should be made perfectly clear to the child that the punishment is not given in anger, still less in revenge.’” Miss Wade relinquished the head voice by which she had denoted that she was quoting, and resumed her natural rather nasal accents.

“I am deeply distressed at having to say it, but Cecil will never realize the full gravity of this dreadful fault unless he is punished in such a way that he will remember it. I have tried reasoning with him, and coaxing him, and scolding him, and he is always sorry, but it produces no real effect at all. Indeed, Mrs. Aviolet, I dislike the idea more than I can tell you, and I have never in my life had to punish a pupil in such a manner before, but I should be failing in my duty if—if——”

Miss Wade faltered and produced her handkerchief, choked by what Rose instantly recognized as a perfectly real emotion.

“Oh, don’t cry! Anyway, you know, it wouldn’t be you who’d have to do it. You’re not nearly strong enough. Besides, you’d never go through with it. I shouldn’t myself. I should sob and howl—roar, in fact. But it’s a man’s job.”

Miss Wade looked at her with an air of rather resentful astonishment.

“Then you have contemplated the idea of corporal punishment already?”

“Spare the rod and spoil the child. Of course I have, Miss Wade.”

“In general, I am thoroughly opposed to the system of corporal punishment,” said Miss Wade gloomily. “I follow Dr. Monroe’s teaching, and he is quite averse to it. But, as he says himself, persistent lying and persistent cruelty are in a class apart and must be dealt with accordingly.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“I hope that the occasion may not present itself, but if it does, Mrs. Aviolet, if Cecil tells a direct lie again, then I must ask you either to deal with him on the lines that I have indicated, or else to let his uncle do so.”

“Ask for something you’re a bit more likely to get, I should,” Rose advised the outraged little governess. “If Cecil tells a direct lie, as you call it, again, he shall be whipped. We’ve tried everything else, and it may as well be that. But it’ll be me who’ll settle when it’s done, and how, and who by. And another thing—I’m going to give Ces fair warning about it. Perhaps it’ll help him to be careful, poor lamb.”

She turned to go.

“One moment, Mrs. Aviolet, if you please. Has Cecil ever been—castigated—before?”

“He’s been hit by his father,” said Rose briefly. “He’s never had exactly what you might call a state whipping, so perhaps the disgrace might make an impression on him. But I hope to goodness we shan’t have to do it.”

She let the door slam on Miss Wade’s solemn reiteration of the hope, already feeling that exasperation had committed her to a course of action that her inner self disapproved.

Yet the thought of punishing little Cecil by beating him did not horrify her. Her own mother had administered hearty and impetuous slaps throughout Rose’s childhood, in moments of impatience, and afterwards, as heartily and as impetuously, had smothered her with kisses and given her slices of new bread thickly covered with jam. Rose had borne no malice for the slaps, although they had always caused her to roar lustily, for Mrs. Smith’s heavy-handed blows had never been half-hearted affairs, and she had enjoyed the kisses and the bread-and-jam.

“No bunkum from Dr. Monroe’s little books on Moral Education about Mother!” Rose reminded herself, and smiled in a loving retrospective appreciation of her parent’s thoroughness.