by Rebecca West
But we were wrong. We could not have been more wrong. When Cordelia and Alan came back from their honeymoon they settled down in a little white box of a house, in a turning off the Victoria Road, in Kensington, and Mary and I had grimly said to each other that whenever Cordelia saw in the papers that there was going to be a concert at the Albert Hall we were likely to go to, she would ask us to come in for a meal, and it would be dreadful, for she would do it only out of a sense of duty. These invitations came, but soon we found we were eagerly waiting for them, we would have been disappointed if they had not come. Cordelia had not cast off the character she had assumed on the day of her engagement. She still had no will of her own, only a desire to please and find out what gave most pleasure. It might have been said she had no character, had there not been some of her old blacksmith-forge quality in her limitation of herself to amiability. She never ran an eye over us when we went into the house, and convicted us of untidiness and lack of the sense of suitability. She simply asked us our opinion on what she had last done to the house, which was indeed a marvel, not only to our eyes, which had so long looked on only poverty, but to any person looking back on it from this age which is called affluent. Like all young people of moderated means at that time, Alan and Cordelia employed two servants, a cook-general and a house-parlourmaid, and the place shone bright and clean as few households do today. The dining-room faced south, and the sunshine fell full on the table at lunch-time striking prismatic rays from the silver and glass, each piece of which was polished as highly as polish can go. The whole house was full of light, the furniture was rosewood and elegant and in winter the curtains were of padded white chintz with huge flowers on it and in summer of ruffled muslin. There were flowers about, and always nice things to eat. But all that was as nothing to the prevalent good will, the way they welcomed us, the way they liked us to stay as long as we could without running the risk of being late for the concert. They would even come out with us to the garden gate, to be with us as long as possible.
One day, I remember, in the first winter of their marriage, we stayed with them till the last minute. The four of us lingered, looking round the little front garden, and they explained to us that it was still a mystery to them.
‘You see,’ said Cordelia, ‘we don’t know what half the trees are,’ and Alan said, ‘We do know that this is a laburnum, and that’s about all,’ and then Cordelia said, her intimation so like his in tone that she might have been his sister and not ours, ‘And this is a syringa, but this? We don’t know.’
‘And this we know to be a hawthorn,’ Alan went on, ‘but what colour? White, red, or pink? And you must allow it makes a great difference to a hawthorn. And to the house. Almost as much to the house as it means for a woman whether she has got fair hair or dark hair or carrots like Cordelia.’
‘The old lady next door speaks to me, but she doesn’t know what colour it is any more than we do, for she came here only a month before we did so doesn’t know any more than we do. The people opposite would know, of course, for the husband’s father lived there before them, he bought the house when it was first built, and Thackeray used to come to dinner with them. But how can I go and knock on their door and say, “Please, what colour is the hawthorn in my garden?”’
We did not want to part, they walked with us to the pillar-box. Our enemy had gone away, had not just left our house, but had vanished. Someone whom we did not know was wearing her clothes and her body, someone whom we did not hate, someone whom, it often seemed, we did not love enough. That December this sister-stranger and I were in her drawing-room, which was one of those anti-winter symphonies that can be composed by putting together a bright fire in a basket grate under a marble mantelpiece, bowls and trumpet-vases full of bronze and gold chrysanthemums, and cushions and curtains predominantly white. It was an Edwardian formula and it worked. Cordelia was moving round the room, collecting the tea-cups and little plates to make it easier for the parlour-maid when she came in to take out the tea tray; and she shifted into a corner a tiered cake-stand of the kind fashionable in those days, a wedding present from a French friend, an Art Nouveau construction with silver plates in the form of lily-pads. On the top plate there was left one small sugared biscuit. She looked at it, then looked away, and then looked at it again. I knew she wanted to eat that biscuit very much, as one sometimes wants to eat something for which one has no real hunger, simply because a childish and irrational appetite insists and seeks to prove that enough is not as good as a feast. She put out her delicate hand and raised the biscuit to within a millimetre of her lips, and suddenly drew it back and gazed at me with round eyes, saying, ‘Would you like it, Rose? Oh, do have it, Rose.’ There was a moment when the light of the room swam round me like slowly moving water. I knew Cordelia through and through as one knows a long-feared tyrant; and this complete knowledge told me now that, even had it been not a sugar biscuit in her hand but a great treasure, she would have given it to me. I did not feel abashed. I simply felt astonished at the quiet, prim force of her desire to surrender to me everything and anything which could give me pleasure. My memory was not wiped out. Indeed, as I smiled at her and shook my head, because I could not speak, there flashed before me a picture, as little mitigated as it had ever been, of the years and years during which she was a devouring nuisance, a resident plague in our midst. But all that was now over and done with. The cut end of an ugliness was lying in my mind, it lay loose, it was something to be thrown into the waste paper basket.
The experience was impossible to describe, it was so much more than itself. But when I told Mary that I found Cordelia much nicer and hardly anything of the old punitive terror, it seemed she herself had noticed a change, and found it disconcerting. She said she felt like a keeper at the Zoo who suddenly found that all the animals in the Lion House had been replaced with angels. ‘It would be difficult,’ she imagined, ‘not to approach them with a spiked pole from force of habit.’ And she added, ‘For goodness’ sake we must stop defending ourselves against her.’ Richard Quin simply said, ‘Of course, of course,’ when we talked about the change and hurried off to go skating at Queen’s with Olivia and Angela, which was natural enough, for it was Friday evening, and he made a point of spending an hour or two during the weekends in being useful to the Houghton-Bennett family. He listened to Sir George’s stories of the Far East; and he took Lady Houghton-Bennett to the wrong concerts, which she so constantly and invariably chose in preference to the right ones; and he took the girls to parties or theatres or skating-rinks, to any other gatherings where an adolescent still at school was acceptable as the male escort then obligatory. This was a real kindness, for there was an ugly paradox in the society of that day. Convention relegated unmarried women to an inferior position, and insisted that they must always be accompanied by men on all social occasions and at places of entertainment. But only rich young women found it easy to get the necessary husbands or escorts. This was very odd because though there were more women than men in Great Britain - something like a hundred and three women to a hundred men - the surplus had no bearing on this phenomenon, since it was due to the longevity of women. There was, in fact, a full force of husbands and dancing-partners available, had they only come forward; and I could not account then, and cannot account now, for their reluctance except by supposing that men do not like women and find pleasure in preventing them from doing what they want to do. What made Richard Quin unique was that he had not a drop of this masculine vinegar in his veins, perhaps because he was so male that he had no reason to be irked by the sexual division. He had a profile as fine as any girl’s, but he could not have been taken for a girl, and when he played a girl’s part in a school play there was no illusion, and I can remember that when I threw my arms round his shoulders it felt as if he had a delicate armour under his skin. With his maleness, this other element, the difference of every cell in his body from every cell in ours, he was protecting us. Though Cordelia had always bullied him worse than any of us, perpetu
ally complaining that he was spoiled and would come to no good, when I told him how she had changed there came only this: ‘Of course, of course,’ and it seemed clumsy and inelegant to remember even faintly her past faults. He bore no grudges. And he was working all he could for Cordelia by ingratiating himself with the Houghton-Bennetts, for they would not blame her so much for taking Alan from them since they had had him as their amusing page.
Mamma’s reaction was different when I told her that Mary and I had begun to like Cordelia, even to love her, because she had changed. She said, ‘Of course she is changing. You have all changed. Mary and you especially. Much of the original brutality has gone.’ But what wonder, for the whole world was changing.
VII
MARY AND I made real successes in the few years that followed Cordelia’s marriage. We were gold medallists, a great conductor gave us the chance to play with the best provincial orchestras, we were soon at the Proms, we never had to worry about filling the hall for our recitals. The only thing we had to worry about was the danger of getting tired and letting people come between us and our work for the very reason that they admired it. But the charm of our success lay in the fact that it was not unique, it was set in an age of success. Everybody and everything was developing according to some principle which commanded romantic perfection. I remember playing the Mozart Twenty-third Concerto at a Queen’s Hall concert one summer night when the intelligence of the audience made their listening a better performance than my playing; it was spiritualism, Mozart was there; and they applauded at the end as if the hall were burning about us and they must say what Mozart meant to them before they were buried in the rubble. Mary and I drove away to a party through a London which was moonlit and transfigured. In all the squares waltzes and one-steps and tangos were exhaled from porticoes wearing striped awnings like masks, and in the gardens dancers walked on the moon-frosted lawns, the moonlight shining with phantom coldness from the young women’s bare shoulders and bright gowns, and making breast-plates of the young men’s shirt-fronts. It would have been easy for assassins hired to kill these young men to hide behind the sooty trees and aim at those gleaming shirt-fronts, but no human being could be so pitiless towards their youth. At the great house to which we had been invited, we sat in a courtyard where the moonlight sobered an extravagance of flowers, and watched a black stage, and listened to music as different from the music I had played as a Mongolian face is different from a Western face, until yellow limelight shone on the stage and showed us a girl whose face was tragic though she wore the full tarlatan skirts which till then had been the livery of the least serious of the arts, who was light as a feather yet as grave as Hamlet. Then Nijinsky leaped from a window in the darkness behind the stage and halted an instant in mid-moonlight before he dropped into the yellow limelight, uttering with the speed of light a prophecy that he and we were to travel to strange places and often see nature transcending what we had been told were its limits. Every time we left our pianos the age gave us such assurances that there was to be a new and final establishment of pleasure upon earth. True that when we were at our pianos we knew that this was not true. There is something in the great music that we played which told us that that promise will not be kept, though another promise will give us more than that, but in its own time. That we did not believe this assurance which sustained most of our contemporaries added to our loneliness; but we could enjoy their achievements. And let there be no error, their achievements were enjoyable. This faith in the dispensation of pleasure was not a form of guilt, those who held it were not drunken or idle or cruel, and accepted kindness itself as a pleasurable act. Simply the world appeared to be whispering to its peoples that it was about to turn into a rose, into a jewel, into wine, and those who heard often responded by actions that were wholly delightful, though they are now seen to be appropriate.
We should have been perfectly happy, had it not been that Cordelia, instead of valuing Richard Quin for his loyalty to her, was vexed by a perpetual dread lest he was turning out badly. She was nearly her old self when she was moved by this fear. She was looking at Mamma with her old white stare when I came in on her one afternoon, and found her trying to find out what Richard Quin’s last school report had been.
‘But he will be leaving school in six months, Mamma,’ I can remember her saying, ‘has he no idea of what he wants to do?’
‘Well, he is sitting next month for a scholarship at Oxford,’ said Mamma.
‘But the headmaster has told you he will never get it, he is not working hard enough,’ said Cordelia, savage as she used to be.
‘If he fails, then he can take a year and rub up his piano and violin, and he is sure to get into one musical school or another,’ said poor Mamma.
There was a silence. We looked at Cordelia, daring her to say he was not good enough, in view of her own violin-playing. But we did not like to defend the plan that he should become a musician, because there was in fact in all his playing the anti-artistic quality of improvisation. He played as a bird sings, which is not the recommendation that the unmusical believe.
‘Surely he realises,’ said Cordelia desperately, ‘that he must earn his living? - that he cannot live on you?’
Again Mary and I were awkwardly silent. Cordelia was doing what she had always done, she was blaming other members of her family for weaknesses which were particularly her own. She was always asking us in front of people whether we had lost things, when it was she and she only who constantly left things in trains. Now she was suggesting that Richard Quin was going to be a burden upon us in a way which would be specially unpleasant in a man; and it was not for her to do that. We had got scholarships for our musical education, and had cost Mamma very little during our training, and now we were making money. But Cordelia’s classes in foreign languages and the history of art had been quite expensive, and she had never earned a penny; and on her marriage Mamma had made a little settlement on her. But she went on, and we began to feel miserable, for indeed we were ourselves beginning to be puzzled by Richard’s indifference about his future. It seemed that nothing in him was striving to have its way with him, as music had had its way with us.
‘Are you worried about him, Mamma?’ asked Mary abruptly.
‘Not in the least,’ replied Mamma.
‘That is the worst of this family,’ grieved the old Cordelia. ‘You take nothing seriously, you don’t realise things.’
‘No, dear,’ said Mamma.
‘I wish you could get Richard Quin to come up to town and have a talk with Alan’s father,’ said Cordelia importantly. ‘By the way, where is Richard Quin? It is six o’clock, do you not expect him home for tea?’
‘I do not really expect him,’ said Mamma, growing more and more placid. ‘He has so many friends.’
‘But a boy of that age should not just roam about, with nobody knowing where he is,’ scolded Cordelia. ‘He should come home to tea at regular hours, he should settle down to his homework, this is all wrong. I do not know where it will lead. It is the greatest misfortune that he could not be sent to a public school. I would,’ she said, with a sincerity which would have touched us had anyone else been speaking, ‘far rather that poor Mr Morpurgo had done nothing for me and spent all the money on sending Richard Quin to Harrow or Rugby.’ This was a great deal for her to say for Mr Morpurgo had given her her house, which she passionately loved, more than most people love their houses, more as a child loves a doll’s house.
It was just then that Richard Quin came in, carrying a teapot. The sight made Cordelia click her tongue against her palate, for it meant that he had been down in the kitchen getting Kate to make him fresh tea, and it was another proof that he was living an unmanly life among a crowd of women. He put down the teapot and kissed Mamma and waved a hand at the rest of us, and said, ‘I talked to a man on the bus coming back from school, and asked him what he had in his basket, and it was a pigeon, and he asked me to go home with him and see his pigeons, he had thirty-six. And do you know
, there are lots of people in London who think of nothing but pigeons?’
