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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
In E. M. Delafield's novella "The Optimist," the author crafts a poignant exploration of human resilience and the complexities of optimism in an often disheartening world. Through a distinctive narrative voice and a style that deftly combines light irony with sincere emotional depth, Delafield invites readers into the life of her protagonist, whose unwavering positivity is both a source of hope and a subject of scrutiny. Set against the backdrop of early 20th-century societal norms, the novella evokes a rich literary context, reminiscent of contemporaneous works that address themes of gender, individuality, and societal expectations. E. M. Delafield, renowned for her insightful social commentaries, was influenced by her own experiences and the societal changes of her time. Raised in a milieu that valued subservience in women, Delafield's works often reflect her struggles and triumphs within these constraints. This personal backdrop, coupled with her keen observational skills, imbues "The Optimist" with authenticity and relevance, portraying the trials of maintaining an optimistic outlook amidst life's trials. This novella is recommended for any reader seeking a thoughtful examination of optimism's role in human experience. Delafield's skillful balance of wit and earnestness not only entertains but also prompts reflection, making "The Optimist" a timeless piece that resonates with those grappling with the dichotomy of hope and reality. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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The optimist
Table of Contents
Introduction
When buoyant confidence in the goodness of events meets the stubborn grain of ordinary life, comedy and disillusion intertwine, testing how far hope can carry a person through class expectations, domestic compromises, and the polite fictions by which communities keep themselves in order, and in that collision between cheerful creed and recalcitrant circumstance, the most revealing questions are not whether fortune smiles, but what one must overlook to keep smiling, and what, if anything, is gained when sincerity pushes back.
The Optimist, by E. M. Delafield, is a work of British fiction rooted in the early twentieth century, attentive to the textures of English social and domestic life. Delafield, an English novelist and essayist best known for Diary of a Provincial Lady, brought to her writing a distinctive blend of irony, clarity, and compassion. Within that broader milieu—marked by shifting social codes and a growing scrutiny of everyday manners—the book situates its characters in recognizably human dilemmas. Without relying on melodrama, it engages the reader through observation and implication, drawing on the period’s social rhythms while remaining accessible to contemporary sensibilities.
Without disclosing more than the premise suggests, the book follows a figure whose naturally hopeful temperament shapes choices, relationships, and interpretations of setbacks. The appeal lies less in plot mechanics than in the gradual revelation of how a confident outlook interacts with the small negotiations of daily life. The narrative voice is poised and alert, allowing humor to emerge from understatement rather than exaggeration. The mood balances lightness and unease, offering moments of wry amusement alongside quiet scrutiny. Readers can expect an intimate, character-centered experience that privileges sensibility over spectacle and leaves ample space for reflection.
Several themes anchor the work. It examines optimism as both strength and vulnerability: a source of resilience that can become a veil over discomforting truths. It considers how social performance—those courtesies and tactful silences that smooth interactions—can conceal, and sometimes enable, discontent. It reflects on gendered expectations and class-coded behaviors that define what seems desirable or permissible, asking what it costs to maintain a cheerful narrative in the face of constraint. By staging these questions in ordinary settings, the book invites readers to weigh the fine line between hopefulness and self-deception, and between kindness and complicity.
Delafield’s style is marked by economy and precision. Scenes are built from exact observation: a turn of phrase, a gesture at the tea table, a conversational pause that hints at more than it says. The humor is dry, never cruel, and serves as a diagnostic tool for examining social veneers. Rather than issuing verdicts, the prose encourages readers to notice patterns and draw their own conclusions. The pacing is steady and unshowy, rewarding attentiveness to nuance. The effect is a sustained clarity: a narrative that feels effortless while quietly organizing a complex moral and emotional landscape.
Within Delafield’s wider body of work, The Optimist aligns with her interest in domestic realism and the pressures of respectability. Readers who appreciate her balance of satire and sympathy will recognize the moral tact with which she approaches ordinary predicaments. The book contributes to a tradition of early twentieth-century British fiction that treats drawing rooms and workplaces as stages for larger ethical questions. It also demonstrates Delafield’s craft in portraying self-awareness as a gradual, sometimes resistant process. That measured approach keeps the narrative grounded, inviting engagement not through sensational turns but through the credibility of lived experience.
For contemporary readers, the book’s inquiries feel timely. In an age that often prizes positivity and self-optimization, The Optimist poses a gentle challenge: what do we mean by a good life, and at what point does a constructive outlook shade into denial? Its value lies in how it clarifies rather than simplifies, offering companionship to anyone who has tried to be hopeful without losing sight of the world as it is. The result is an urbane, intelligent, and quietly moving exploration that lingers, not with final answers, but with a sharpened sense of what integrity might require.
Synopsis
Set in interwar England, The Optimist follows a quietly observant protagonist whose unshakable cheerfulness shapes every encounter. Domestic routines, small social obligations, and the steady hum of provincial life form the opening landscape. The narrative establishes how optimism functions as habit and conviction, not simply a mood. Friends, relations, and neighbors lean toward this warm certainty, sometimes for support and sometimes for confirmation of their own views. E. M. Delafield sketches the world with precise social detail, allowing character and environment to emerge together. Early chapters are largely episodic, introducing the circles in which expectations, propriety, and good intentions continually intersect.
As responsibilities accumulate, the protagonist’s optimism becomes a kind of organizing principle. Invitations, errands, and causes are accepted with brisk enthusiasm, while conversational tact smooths awkward moments. The story charts the ebb and flow of small triumphs—a successful visit, an efficient committee meeting, a reconciled misunderstanding—alongside the watchful judgments of a community that prizes restraint. Delafield traces how social confidence can be mistaken for certainty and how kindness can blur into habit. Through these sequences, the novel situates the central character within a network of obligations that seems, at first, agreeable, manageable, and sustaining, even as faint pressures begin to register at the margins.
A subtle challenge arises when circumstances shift at home and beyond, making routine generosity harder to sustain. Financial considerations and practical choices gently press against prior assumptions. The protagonist pursues an opportunity that promises broader scope but also new scrutiny, moving from familiar rooms to settings where experience matters more than intent. Delafield’s narrative remains understated, observing how tone and timing carry as much weight as words. Early optimism adapts into a strategy: anticipating difficulties without conceding to them. The plot advances through small, telling incidents—meetings, letters, introductions—in which social nuance alters outcomes, and where hope must learn to cooperate with prudence.
Key relationships gather definition as the circle widens. A friend with a wry, skeptical temperament becomes a foil, testing easy assurances and prompting sharper reflection. A relative, quietly burdened, relies on steadiness more than sympathy, while a potential romantic understanding develops in signals, not declarations. These threads are introduced without haste, each changing the balance of the others. Delafield allows silence, postponement, and courteous deflection to reveal more than explicit argument. Optimism, in this phase, is not contagious so much as resilient; its presence encourages others to speak, yet it also risks simplifying what cannot be simplified. The novel lets these tensions accumulate gradually.
A first turning point arrives when the protagonist’s willingness to assume responsibility outstrips available time and influence. Promises overlap. Practicalities refuse to align with ideal outcomes. Publicly, everything remains composed; privately, effort multiplies. The community’s unobtrusive hierarchies become clearer, as do the limits of persuasion. Delafield foregrounds the gap between sentiment and structure: goodwill can initiate, but not conclude, certain tasks. The protagonist improvises, accepts partial victories, and absorbs surface criticism to keep fragile arrangements intact. This section emphasizes consequences without catastrophe, showing how a series of modest compromises can amount to a meaningful shift in direction and self-understanding.
Complications deepen when a misunderstanding spreads through informal channels, revealing how information travels in overlapping fragments. A charitable project or workplace initiative becomes the stage on which people enact longstanding preferences, allegiances, and doubts. The protagonist attempts to mediate, trusting that clarity will suffice, but finds that motives are read as performances. Delafield uses concise dialogue and carefully observed scenes to show how tone, status, and timing override intent. Optimism is recalibrated from confident projection to attentive listening. The plot quickens, yet remains closely scaled to everyday life, illustrating how reputations are made and unmade in settings that appear, on the surface, politely uneventful.
A second turning point arrives with a personal or communal crisis that cannot be eased by reassurance alone. Practical help is required, decisions must be taken, and the cost of delay is measurable. The protagonist’s resolve holds, but its expression changes: fewer promises, more action; fewer speeches, more presence. Lessons learned earlier—about pace, limits, and the need to ask—are applied without fanfare. Delafield avoids melodrama, allowing consequences to speak for themselves. In this phase, optimism proves less a feeling than a discipline, oriented toward what can be done next. The narrative keeps future outcomes indistinct, emphasizing process rather than finale.
With pressure reduced, relationships regroup. Some misunderstandings are clarified; others are left to soften with time. The protagonist reviews commitments and quietly reshapes them, favoring steadiness over display. Opportunities remain, but they are approached with a tempered readiness that balances confidence and caution. Delafield marks these adjustments in small, exact gestures—how a visit is scheduled, how advice is offered, how silence is maintained. Optimism has matured: still bright, but less absolute, more alert to circumstance. The story’s late sequences draw threads together without tying them tight, preserving room for change while acknowledging what experience has taught.
The novel closes by affirming an overall message that is neither naive nor cynical. Optimism, Delafield suggests, is sustainable when grounded in attention, work, and a modest acceptance of human limitation. The protagonist’s outlook remains a source of energy and cohesion, yet its value lies in adaptability rather than insistence. Outcomes are left discreetly unstated, but the direction is clear: hopeful purpose aligned with practical sense can endure ordinary disruptions and quiet trials. Within its measured scope, The Optimist offers a portrait of character shaped by community and choice, tracing how a generous temperament finds its truest register in the tested rhythms of daily life.
Historical Context
E. M. Delafield’s The Optimist is situated in provincial England in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, roughly the late 1910s to early 1920s. The milieu is that of county towns, parishes, and commuter-linked suburbs where rectories, boarding houses, and modest middle-class villas structure social life. Rationing was winding down between 1919 and 1920, yet inflation and shortages persisted, and memorial services and war shrines began to punctuate village calendars. This time-and-place foregrounds clergy, minor officials, and clubwomen negotiating changed expectations after wartime disruption. Delafield, long resident in the West Country, uses such settings to examine the daily negotiations of status, propriety, and money that defined postwar English provincial society.
The Great War (1914–1918) reconfigured British life. About 886,000 British military personnel died; millions more returned wounded, and the Armistice of 11 November 1918 was followed by demobilization through 1919–1920. Public remembrance took shape with the unveiling of the Cenotaph in Whitehall on 11 November 1920 and the interment of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey the same day; the British Legion formed in 1921 fostered commemoration and welfare. War pensions, employment dislocation, and grief shaped households and work. In The Optimist, the novel’s measured cheerfulness sits against this background of loss and bureaucratic reconstruction: social calls, committees, and genteel routines function as a local response to national bereavement, while the persistence of optimism becomes a commentary on resilience and denial in small-town England.
The 1918–1919 influenza pandemic overlapped with demobilization, killing an estimated 228,000 people in the United Kingdom and perhaps 50 million worldwide. Successive waves (June–July 1918, October–November 1918, early 1919) strained public health, shuttered schools and churches, and normalized mourning clothes and abbreviated rituals. Municipal authorities—from London County Council to small boroughs—issued advisories on ventilation, spitting bans, and crowd control, while undertakers and hospitals faced acute shortages. The Optimist draws on this climate of subdued anxiety and abrupt bereavement: its emphasis on polite perseverance and a heightened consciousness of health, hygiene, and propriety mirrors the pandemic’s imprint on everyday conduct, reinforcing the book’s exploration of cheerfulness as both survival strategy and social expectation.
Postwar citizenship changed decisively. The Representation of the People Act 1918 enfranchised all men over 21 and about 8.4 million women over 30 meeting property or marital qualifications, tripling the electorate from roughly 7.7 to 21.4 million. The Parliament (Qualification of Women) Act 1918 allowed women over 21 to sit in the Commons; Nancy Astor took her seat in 1919. The Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919 opened juries and professions; Carrie Morrison became England’s first woman solicitor in 1922. The Equal Franchise Act 1928 finally equalized the voting age at 21. The Optimist reflects these shifts through women’s committee work, nascent political agency, and tensions between conventional deference and new rights, framing optimism as a mode of female self-assertion within cautious provincial reform.
Economic turbulence marked 1920–1921, when deflation and falling export markets drove unemployment above two million. Prices that had roughly doubled during the war fell erratically; middle-class fixed incomes were squeezed, and clerical workers faced insecurity. Housing policy attempted redress: the 1919 Housing and Town Planning (Addison) Act aimed for 500,000 “homes fit for heroes,” but Treasury cuts curtailed building to about 213,000 by 1923, while suburban growth still altered settlement patterns. In The Optimist, money worries, careful household economies, and aspirations for modest improvement are integral to character choices, situating personal cheerfulness within a brittle financial landscape where optimism often compensates for precarious credit, rent pressures, and the slow material recovery of the early 1920s.
Domestic service—long the largest female occupation—experienced a structural shock. In 1911, about 1.3 million women in England and Wales worked in service; wartime factory wages and postwar expectations reduced supply and elevated turnover. By the 1920s, employers reported the “servant problem,” while new appliances remained too costly to fully replace labor. Social boundaries between “upstairs” and “downstairs” blurred as charwomen, daily helps, and part-time cooks supplanted live-in staff. The Optimist mirrors these realities in its attention to household management, social calls timed around staff, and the delicate etiquette of employment, revealing how class deference persisted even as labor markets empowered working women and unsettled the rituals on which genteel optimism depended.
Voluntary associations proliferated as civic anchors. The first British Women’s Institute formed in 1915 at Llanfairpwll, Anglesey; the National Federation (1917) spread rapidly, reaching hundreds of thousands of members by the mid-1920s. Local charities, parish councils, and hospital boards coordinated fetes, bazaars, and relief funds, while remembrance committees organized war memorials in villages and market towns after 1919. Such bodies trained women in finance and governance and gave men and women structured avenues for sociability and soft power. The Optimist engages this associational culture through portrayals of meetings, minutes, and mild bureaucratic absurdities, mapping how civic voluntarism mediated class contact and offered socially sanctioned optimism in the face of bureaucratic inertia and lingering postwar dislocation.
As social and political critique, the book exposes the tensions beneath polite stability: grief privatized as good manners, women’s expanded responsibilities without commensurate authority, and a middle class balancing moral leadership against financial strain. It scrutinizes paternalistic local elites, the gendered double standard in respectability and marriage, and the subtle coercions of committee culture that enforce consensus while stifling dissent. By dramatizing how buoyant rhetoric masks widows’ insecurity, servants’ bargaining power, and veterans’ quiet marginalization, The Optimist interrogates the interwar compact of cheerfulness and compliance, revealing optimism as both ethical aspiration and an instrument that can perpetuate inequities in class, gender, and civic life.
The optimist
IVALERIA AND OWEN QUENTILLIAN
(i)
The ship swung slowly away from the side of the wharf. Several people on board then said, “Well, we’re off at last!” to several other people who had only been thinking of saying it.
Owen Quentillian remembered another, longer, sea-voyage taken by himself at an early age. Far more clearly he remembered his arrival at St. Gwenllian[2].
It was that which he wanted to recall, aware as he was of the necessity for resuming a connection that had almost insensibly lapsed for several years.
He deliberately let his mind travel backwards, visualizing himself, a disconsolate, shivering morsel, being taken away from Papa and Mamma at the very station itself, and put into an open pony-cart beside Miss Lucilla Morchard.
The conversation between them, as far as he could recollect it, had run upon strangely categorical lines.
“Who are you?”
“I’m Canon Morchard[1]’s daughter. You can call me Lucilla.”
“How old are you?”
“I’m fifteen, but you shouldn’t ask grown-up persons their age.”
“Oh, are you a grown-up person?”
“Of course I am. My mother is dead, and I look after the house and the children, and now I’m going to look after you as well.”
Lucilla had smiled very nicely as she said this.
“How many children are there?”
“Three, at home. My eldest brother is at school.”
“What are the names of the other ones?”
“Valeria and Flora and Adrian. Valeria and Flora are sometimes called Val and Flossie.”
He had discovered afterwards that they were seldom called anything else, except by their father.
“Why don’t Papa and Mamma come in this little carriage too?”
“Because there wouldn’t have been room. They will come in the brougham[3], later on.”
“They won’t go back to India without saying good-bye first, will they?” he asked wistfully.
He had known for a long time that Papa and Mamma were going back to India and leaving him at St. Gwenllian.
“No, I promise you they won’t do that,” had said Lucilla seriously.
Owen had felt entirely that her word was one to be relied upon. Very few grown-up persons gave him that feeling.
He remembered extraordinarily little about the house at St. Gwenllian. It was large, and cold, and there were a good many pictures on the walls, but the only two rooms of which he retained a mental photograph were the schoolroom, and the Canon’s library.
He saw the latter room first.
Lucilla had taken him there at once.
He remembered the books against the wall—numbers and numbers of books—and the big black writing table, with a small bowl of violets next to a pile of papers, and above the writing-table a finely-carved ivory figure, crucified upon a wooden cross, set in a long plaque of pale-green velvet.
Lucilla had seemed to be disappointed because her father was out.
“He said he did so want to be here to welcome you himself, but he is always very busy. Some one sent for him, I think.”
The youthful Owen Quentillian had cared less than nothing for the non-appearance of his future host and tutor. The prospect of the schoolroom tea had touched him more nearly.
But the schoolroom tea had turned out to be a sort of nightmare.
Even now, he could hardly smile at the recollection of that dreadful meal.
Eventually Val and Flossie had resolved themselves into good-natured, cheerful little girls, and Adrian into a slightly spoilt and rather precocious little boy, addicted to remarks of the type hailed as “wonderful” in the drawing-room and “affected humbug[4]” in the schoolroom.
But on that first evening, Val and Flossie had been two monsters with enormous eyes that stared disapprovingly, all the time, straight at Owen Quentillian and nobody else. Adrian had been an utterly incomprehensible, rather malignant little creature, who had asked questions.
“Can you see colours for each day of the week?”
Quentillian wondered whether he had looked as much alarmed as he had felt, in his utter bewilderment.
“I think Monday is blue, and Tuesday light green, and Wednesday dark green,” Adrian had then proclaimed, triumphantly, and casting his big brown eyes about as though to make sure that his three sisters had heard the enunciation of his strange creed.
“Adrian is not a bit like other little boys,” one of them had then said, with calm pride.
Owen Quentillian, unconscious of irony, had ardently hoped that she spoke truly.
Adrian had pinched him surreptitiously during tea, and had laughed in a way that made Owen flush when they had asked him what India was like and he had answered “I don’t know.”
He had thought the thick bread-and-butter nasty, and wondered if there was never any cake. A vista of past teas, with sugared cakes from the drawing-room, especially selected by himself, and brought to his own little table on the back veranda by the Ayah, made him choke.
There had been a dreadful moment when he had snatched at the horrid mug they had given him and held it before his face for a long, long time, desperately pretending to drink, and not daring to show his face.
Lucilla, seated at the head of the table, had offered the others more tea, but she had said nothing to the little strange boy, and he still felt grateful to her.
The miserable, chaotic jumble that was all that his mind retained, of interminable slices of bread-and-butter that tasted like sawdust, of thick, ugly white china, of hostile or mocking gazes, of jokes and allusions in which he had no share, all came to a sudden end when he had given up any hope of ever being happy again so long as he lived.
Canon Morchard had come into the room.
And, magically, Val and Flossie had turned into quiet, insignificant little girls, looking gently and trustfully at their father, and no longer staring curiously at Owen Quentillian, and Adrian had become a wide-eyed, guileless baby, and the thick bread-and-butter and the ugly china no longer existed at all.
Only Lucilla had undergone no transformation.
She said “This is Owen Quentillian, Father,” in a matter-of-fact tone of voice.
“I know, my child, I know.”
His hand, large and protecting, had grasped the boy’s hand, and after a moment he stooped and put his lips gently to Owen’s forehead.
Quentillian remembered a presence of general benignity, a strangely sweet smile that came, however, very rarely, a deep voice, and an effect of commanding height and size.
Memory could not recapture any set form of words, but Quentillian endeavoured, whimsically, to recast certain speeches which he felt to be permeated with the spirit of the Canon.
“My dear little boy, I hope you may come to feel this as home. We shall all of us endeavour to make it so. Lucilla here is my little housekeeper—ask her for anything that you want. Valeria—my tomboy. She and you will have some grand romps together. Flora is younger; nearer your own age, perhaps. Flora plays the piano, and we hope that she may show great feeling for Art, by and bye. Little Adrian, I am sure, has already made friends with you. I call him the Little Friend of all the World. There are some very quaint fancies under this brown mop, but we shall make something out of them one of these days—one of these days.”
Some such introduction there had certainly been. The Canon had been nothing if not categorical, and Quentillian could fancifully surmise in him a bewilderment not untinged with resentment had his Valeria one day tired of being a tomboy, and elected to patronize the piano, or Flora suddenly become imbued with a romping spirit, to the detriment of her artistic propensities.
But the Canon’s children had always refrained from any volte-face[5] calculated to disconcert their parent. Quentillian was almost sure that all of them, except Lucilla, had been afraid of him—even Adrian, on whom his father had lavished a peculiar cherishing tenderness.
Quentillian could remember certain sharp, stern rebukes, called forth by Valeria’s tendency to untimely giggles, or Flora’s infantile tears, or his own occasional sulks and obstinacy under the new régime. But he could only once remember Adrian in disgrace, and so abysmal had been the catastrophe, that imagination was unneeded for recalling it clearly.
Adrian had told a lie.
Quentillian re-lived the terrible episode.
“Which of you children took a message for me from Radly yesterday? Not you, Lucilla?”
“No, father.”
“Mrs. Radly died last night.” The Canon’s face was suffused. “She asked for me all yesterday, and Radly actually left her in order to find some way of sending me a message. I hear now that he met ‘one of the St. Gwenllian children’ and sent an urgent summons which was never delivered. Which was never delivered! Good Heavens, children, think of it! I was here, in our own home-circle, enjoying a pleasant evening reading aloud, when that woman was dying there in the farm, craving for the help and comfort that I, her shepherd and pastor, could and should have given her.”
He covered his face with his hand and groaned aloud.
“In all the years of my ministry,” he said slowly, “I have never had a more bitter blow. And dealt me by one of my own household! Children,” his voice boomed suddenly terrible, “which of you received Radly’s message yesterday?”
Quentillian, in the retrospect, felt no surprise at the absence of any competition in laying claim to the implied responsibility.
At last Lucilla said tentatively:
“Val? Flora?”
“I never saw Radly at all, yesterday, nor any other day,” said Val, her brown eyes wide open and fixed straight upon her father.
Flora’s little, pretty face was pale and scared.
“It wasn’t me. No one ever gave me any message.”
Her voice trembled as though she feared to be disbelieved.
“Owen?” said the Canon sternly.
“No, sir.”
“Adrian?” his voice softened.
“No, father.”
The Canon hardly appeared to listen to Adrian’s answer. His hand was on the little boy’s brown curls, in the fond, half-absent, gesture habitual to him.
He faced the children, and his eye rested upon Owen Quentillian.
“If any one of you,” he said sternly and slowly, “has been betrayed into telling me a lie, understand that it is not yet too late for full confession. Selfish heedlessness cannot be judged by its terrible consequences, and if I spoke too strongly just now, it was out of the depths of my own grief and shame. The forgetfulness was bad—very bad—but that I can forgive. A lie, I can not forgive. It is not too late.”
His face was white and terrible as he gazed with strained eyes at the children.
Little Flora began to cry, and Lucilla put her arm round her.
“Understand me, children, denial is perfectly useless[1q]. I know that message was given to one of you, and that it was not delivered, and it is simply a question of hours before I see Radly and obtain from him the name of the child to whom the message was given. I accuse no one of you, but I implore the culprit to speak out. Otherwise,” he hit the table with his clenched fist, and it seemed as though lightning shot from his blazing eyes, “otherwise I shall know that there dwells under my roof a liar and a coward.”
Quentillian could hear still the scorn that rang in that deep, vibrant voice, terrifying the children.
Not one of them spoke.
And the Canon had gone out of the room with anguish in his eyes.
The nursery court-martial that followed was held by Lucilla.
“Flossie, it couldn’t have been you, because you stayed in all yesterday with your cold. Owen and Val were out in the afternoon?”
“We went to see the woman with the new twins,” said Val, indignantly. “We never met anyone the whole way, did we, Owen?”
“No.”
Owen Quentillian had known all the time what was coming. He knew, with the terrible, intimate knowledge of the nursery, that Adrian was the only one of the Canon’s children who did not always speak the truth.
Apparently Lucilla, also, knew.
She said “Oh, Adrian,” in a troubled, imploring voice.
“I didn’t,” said Adrian, and burst into tears.
“I knew it was Adrian,” said little Flora. “I saw Radly coming up the lane very fast, I saw him out of the night-nursery window, and I saw Adrian, too. I knew it was Adrian, all the time.”
None of the children was surprised.
Adrian, confronted with their take-it-for-granted attitude, ceased his mechanical denials.
The preoccupation of them all, was Canon Morchard.
“It’ll be less bad if you tell him yourself than if Radly does,” Owen Quentillian pointed out.
“Of course, it makes it much worse having told him a lie,” Val said crudely, “but perhaps he didn’t much notice what you said. I’m sure he thought it was Owen, all the time.”
How much better if it had been Owen, if it had been any one of them, save the Canon’s best-loved child, his youngest son!
“You must come and tell him at once,” Lucilla decreed—but not hopefully.
“I can’t. You know what he said about a liar and a coward under his roof.”
Adrian cried and shivered.
“He wasn’t angry the time I broke the clock,” said Flora. “He took me on his knee and only just talked to me. I didn’t mind a bit.”
“But you hadn’t told a story,” said the inexorable Val.
They all knew that there lay the crux of the matter.
Quentillian could see the circle of scared, perplexed faces still—Lucilla, troubled, but unastonished, keeping a vigilant hold on Adrian all the time, Val, frankly horrified and full of outspoken predictions of the direst description, Flossie in tears, stroking and fondling Adrian’s hand with the tenderest compassion. He even visualized the pale, squarely built, little flaxen-haired boy that had been himself.
They could not persuade Adrian to confess.
At last Lucilla said: “If you don’t tell him, Adrian, then I shall.”
And so it had been, because Canon Morchard, re-entering the schoolroom, had, with a penetration to which his children were accustomed, instantly perceived the tears and the terror on Adrian’s face.
“What is it, little lad? Have you hurt yourself?”
The kind, unsuspicious concern in his voice, as he held out his hand!
Quentillian was certain that a pause had followed the enquiry—Adrian’s opportunity, conceded by Lucilla, even while she knew, as they all did, that he would take no advantage of it.
Then Lucilla had told.
Quentillian’s thoughts went off at a tangent, dwelling for the first time, with a certain surprised admiration, upon Lucilla’s resolute, almost matter-of-fact performance of her painful and alarming task.
Canon Morchard had been incredulous at first, and Lucilla had steadily repeated, and reiterated again and again, the dreadful truth.
A black time had followed.
It assumed the proportions of a twelve-month, in the retrospect. Could it have extended over a week? Strangely enough, Quentillian could not recall the exact fate of Adrian, but he knew that the Canon first fulminated words of wrath and scorn, and at last had actually broken down, tears streaming down his furrowed face, and that the sight of this unrestrained display of suffering had caused the boy Owen to creep from the room, with the strange, sick feeling of one who had witnessed an indecency.
All the children except Lucilla, who indeed scarcely counted as one of them, had avoided Canon Morchard in the ensuing days. They had crept about the house silently, and at meals no one spoke until the Canon had left the room. Owen Quentillian, playing with a ball in the passage and inadvertently bouncing it against the closed study door, had been suddenly confronted by the Canon, and the look of grief and horror fixed upon that handsome face had rendered any spoken rebuke for levity unnecessary.
After all, they had left an impression, those Morchards, all of them, Quentillian reflected.
Lucilla had been calm, matter-of-fact, competent—perhaps a little inhuman. Val, impetuous, noisy, inclined to defiance, yet frankly terrified of her father. Flossie—impossible to think of her as Flora, unless the name was uttered in the Canon’s full, deep tones—surely the prettiest of the three, gentler than Val, less self-assured than Lucilla, timid only with her father. Adrian, of course, did not speak the truth. His contemporaries had known it, although Canon Morchard had not realized the little boy’s habitual weakness. But then he had never realized that the children were afraid of him.
Why had they all been afraid of him?
Quentillian decided that it must have been because of his own phenomenal rectitude, his high standard of honour, and above all and especially, his deep, fundamental sense of religion.
Canon Morchard, undoubtedly, lived “in the presence of God.” Even the little boy Owen had known that, and, thinking backwards, Quentillian was convinced of it still.
He felt curious to see the Canon again. David Morchard had said to him in Mesopotamia: “Go and see him. They’ve none of them forgotten you, and they’ll be glad of first-hand news. I’ve only been home once in five years.”
The shrug of his shoulders had seemed to Quentillian expressive.
But evidently David had judged his family correctly. The Canon had written and invited his old pupil to stay with him.
“It will not only be joy untold to receive news of our dear lad, David, but a real pleasure to us all to welcome you amongst us once more. I have not forgotten my pupil of long-ago days, nor my daughters their erstwhile playfellow. You will find all at home, including Adrian. Dear fellow, I had hoped it was to be the Church for him, but he has been so open, so anxious to decide the whole important question rightly, that one can only leave the decision to him in all confidence. I would not hurry him in any way, but his brief Army days are over, thank God, and we have the untold pleasure of having him with us now, so full of fun and high spirits, dear boy. You, with your pre-war experience of Oxford, will perhaps be able to talk things over with him and help him to a right and wise decision.
“You will remember my eldest daughter, Lucilla. She is still my right hand, mothering the younger ones, and yet finding time for all sorts of wider interests than those afforded by her secretarial work for me. I think that you will agree with me that Lucilla’s intellectual abilities, had she been less of a home-bird, must have made their mark in the world.
“Valeria is still something of the madcap that perhaps you remember. Her energy and enthusiasm keep us all in the best of spirits, even though we are sometimes a little startled at the new ideas sprung upon us. Both she and Flora worked valiantly during the terrible war years, though I could spare neither of my darlings to leave home for very long at a time. Valeria, however, was six months in France at a Canteen, and I believe rendered really valuable service. Little Flora, as I still call her, gives pleasure to us all with her music, and our men in hospital were sharers in her gift as far as we could manage it.”
Quentillian took up yet another sheet of notepaper covered with small, legible writing. It came back to him with a sense of familiarity, that the Canon had always been an expansive and prolific writer of letters.
“Make us a long visit, my dear boy. There are no near ones to claim you, alas, and I should like you to remember that it was to us that your dear father and mother first confided you when they left you for what we then hoped was to be only a short term of years. God saw otherwise, my dear lad, and called them unto Himself. How incomprehensible are His ways, and how, through it all, one must feel that mysterious certainty ‘all things work together for good, to those that love Him!’ Those words have been more present to me than I can well tell you, during the years of storm and stress. David’s long, weary time in Mesopotamia tried one high, but when Adrian, my Benjamin, buckled on his armour and went forth, my heart must have failed me, but for that wonderful strength that seems to bear one up in the day of tribulation. How often have I not said to myself: ‘He hath given His angels charge over thee ... in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest haply thou dash thy foot against a stone!’
“Perhaps you will smile at this rambling letter of an almost-old man, but I fancy that as one grows older, the need to bear testimony becomes ever a stronger and more personal thing. His ways are so wonderful! It seems to me, for instance, a direct gift from His hand that the Owen Quentillian to whom I gave his first Latin prose should be returning to us once more, a distinguished young writer. I wonder if we shall recognize you? I have so vivid a recollection of the white hair and eyelashes that made the village boys call out, ‘Go it, Snowball!’ as they watched your prowess on the football field!
“Well, dear fellow, I must close this. You have only to let us know the day and hour of your arrival, and the warmest of welcomes awaits you.
“I must sign myself, in memory of old happy times,
“Yours ever affectionately, “Fenwick Morchard.”
Quentillian, with great precision, folded the sheets together again.
“So Lucilla is a home-bird, Valeria is still something of a madcap, Flora is still ‘little Flora,’ and Adrian is a dear lad who is anxious to decide rightly about his future career.”
He wondered doubtfully whether he himself would come to endorse the Canon’s opinion of the Canon’s progeny.
And what was the Canon himself, if labels were to be thus distributed?
The sensation of doubt in Quentillian’s mind was accentuated, but he concluded his reflections by reminding himself, half tolerantly, and half with a certain grimness, that the Canon was at least, according to himself, Quentillian’s ever affectionate Fenwick Morchard.
(ii)
“This is like old times,” said Quentillian.
Lucilla Morchard smiled, shook hands with him, and made no answer, and Quentillian immediately, and with annoyance, became conscious that the occasion was not in the least like old times.
Apparently Miss Morchard did not accept clichés uncritically.
Her face, indeed, expressed a spirit both critical and perceptive. Quentillian could still trace the schoolgirl Lucilla in the clearly-cut, unbeautiful oval, with the jaw slightly underhung, grey, short-sighted eyes, and straight black brows. Her dark hair was folded plainly beneath her purple straw hat, but he could discern that there was all the old abundance of it. Her figure was tall and youthful, but her face made her look fully her age. He surmised that Lucilla must be thirty-five, now.
“This time, my father is here to welcome you.”
