by Rebecca West
She smiled over my head at Oliver and said, ‘I am pretending that I have come to save Rose having a shock when she reads this thing in the morning papers, but I have come because I cannot sit alone and think about it in my tower. It is Lady Tredinnick.’
‘Oh, she is dead?’ I whispered.
‘Late this afternoon she climbed up to the roof of her house and threw herself out of the window. Her body caught in a tree. They could not get to it. They had to call the Fire Brigade. But she was dead. She had broken her neck.’
‘How did you hear?’ I asked, then turned and explained to Oliver, ‘She took us to our first dance. It was horrible but she was nice. She was so nice.’
‘I have a pupil who lives next door to the Tredinnicks, she rang up and told me that she could not come for her lesson, she was upset by the dreadful thing that had happened.’
‘At this first dance she told me about a wonderful white orchid that her husband had seen growing on a tree,’ I told him. ‘They could not get to it.’
‘Does anybody know why she did it?’ asked Oliver.
‘She had been getting more and more strange,’ I said.
‘No,’ said Mary. ‘We had missed the point. We had simply not seen what was the matter with her. She had not been getting more and more strange. Her world had been doing that, not she. Which of her sons was Austell?’
The one in the Treasury,’ I said.
‘He was brought up in the West London police court this morning,’ said Mary. ‘Did you not buy an evening paper? It is in all of them. He had been found with a soldier in a square somewhere near Knightsbridge.’
‘Oh, God! oh, God!’ I said. ‘So that was what she was afraid of.’
‘Yes. It seems so obvious now. I cannot think how we did not see it.’
‘But why should he do that?’ I marvelled. ‘Austell did not live with her. He had a little house in Westminster, she took me there once, a very pretty house with very good panelling and a vine in the garden. Why did he not take anybody he liked to his own house?’
‘You do not understand,’ said Oliver. ‘My God, it makes one sweat to think that it is mere chance one is not born like that. There are different kinds, of course, Lionel de Raisse would not do this. But this kind must have a stranger, and must run the risk of being caught. Caught, what a hideous word! And what a hideous thing! Think of being compelled by desire as intense as anything we know, to go with some snotty boy into the streets at night; and mating like an alley cat, like a stray dog, with the hope, the fear, that you find yourself under the beam of a policeman’s torch, and everything else in the world stripped from one, the light casting complete and eternal bankruptcy.’
‘Is that what some people want?’ said Mary. I had an uneasy feeling she thought it hardly stranger than what Oliver and I wanted.
‘It is in a way quite rich,’ said Oliver. ‘There’s the perverse joy of rejecting all the delicacy of life, the little house in Westminster, the panelled walls, the vine, the Guardi and the Gainsborough drawing, the soft-voiced friends, for a coarse boy and the open street. There’s the joy of forcing the world to punish one when it meant one no harm, there’s the joy, of course, of getting one’s poor little bastard of a partner into trouble too, of taking something so much lower than oneself that it would seem impossible to protect it, and railroading it into the police court and the cells. I have often wondered how it is that Jasperl has never tried this form of pleasure.’
‘My love, my love,’ I said, ‘you need not follow that damned soul into sins he has not yet committed.’
‘I am hungry,’ said Mary. ‘I have had no dinner. There is a very good cold supper waiting for you, I am going to share it. I asked Kate to put out some of that Pontet-Canet Oliver likes.’
On the dining-room table there was a bowl of cyclamens, great white ones like poised butterflies.
‘It is foolish, but one thinks that people who love flowers and are clever at growing them should be rewarded by happiness,’ said Mary.
‘Or even having flowers in the house. So odd to turn one’s back on all the things on this table, the flowers, the silver, the glass, the wine, the food,’ said Oliver. ‘But people do it, both men and women, they choose damnation.’
‘I see it now,’ said Mary. ‘Lady Tredinnick thought we were pretty, she was puzzled by her son’s indifference to women, she asked us to her house because she hoped her sons would like us. But of course they did not like us at all. Looking back, I see all of them were like that.’
‘I wonder when she began to guess,’ I said.
‘Some time ago. You remember how oddly she behaved at that party when she was rude to that young man who said he was a friend of one of her sons.’
‘She had lived a long time in a state of bewilderment and then for a long time in a state of horror and fear,’ said Oliver, ‘and at the end the blow fell. What did he get?’
‘He was remanded for three weeks,’ said Mary.
We ate and drank. I got up and filled Oliver’s glass and he stroked my head and said to Mary, ‘Odd that two sisters should both have such lovely hair, of quite different kinds. Rose’s so soft and curly, yours so smooth.’
‘But Cordelia has the prettiest hair of all of us,’ said Mary.
I wondered why she needed to think of that stranger, when we were all together, in such a private grief, and finding such private consolation; for while my heart ached for Lady Tredinnick, caught for ever, in my mind, up in her tree like a great black bird, it comforted me to note that Oliver’s glass was empty and to fill it with the wine he liked, to feel his hand caress my head, to see him treat Mary as if she were his sister too, and it was a legitimate comfort; Lady Tredinnick in her tree would have approved the way we were spending the night of her death. But what Cordelia did was neither here nor there.
‘Rose played so well this afternoon,’ Oliver told Mary, setting down his glass.
‘What, were you there?’ I asked.
‘Yes, I started out to obey you and go for a walk on the cliffs, but I turned back and stood at the back of the hall. And it was superb.’
‘You were possibly the only person in the hall who deserved to hear her,’ said Mary.
‘Why have you such a down on audiences?’ I asked. She gave a dark look into the distance as if she saw something that she feared, and I gave her a tender shake, filled her glass and then put the decanter down and went back to her and said, as I had said to her a million times, ‘Don’t be such an ass.’
Oliver said suddenly, ‘I wonder what the poor chap is doing. She should not have done it, you know. It is too hard on him. He loses his job and many of his friends and becomes a sort of lewd joke, and he has this as well. She had hardly the right to do it.’
‘That is what is so unbearably horrible,’ said Mary. ‘This is utter defeat. Everything she did was right, she never can have needed to think out the moral aspect of any act, her taste settled everything before it reached that level. Now at the end she has done this thing which is cruelly wrong.’
‘No, you do not understand,’ I said. ‘She thought her son might try to kill himself, and she went first to show the way. Can’t you see her, going up flight after flight of stairs, and going out on the roof, and stepping into space, as she would have gone into battle if she had been a soldier? There was only a limited number of actions one could expect from her. This is the only way she could have committed suicide. She could not have run up those stairs and thrown herself out of the window in an effort to reach forgetfulness, it was not in her character, she could not have done it any more than she could have played my programme at Bournemouth this afternoon. So she did not see herself as torturing her son, she saw herself simply as leading her son out of disgrace.’
‘Yes,’ said Mary. ‘You are right. That is what she must have wanted.’
‘But do you think her son will do it?’ asked Oliver.
‘No,’ said Mary. ‘It does not go with that little house in Westminster.’
Then what she did is still wrong,’ said Oliver.
‘Yes,’ said I, ‘but it is better to think of her as being wrong in her way of being wrong; and it is a nobler way of wrongness than the one we first thought of.’
‘Where she went wrong is in not understanding that what her son did seemed entirely natural to him’, said Oliver. ‘It will seem to him no more reasonable for his mother to require him to jump off a roof because he had been charged with sodomy at a police court than it would seem reasonable to any of us if somebody came into this room and told us we must jump off a roof because we are musicians and have composed and performed. It seems natural for him that he should mate with his own sex. It seems natural for him that he should mate in such a way that he lands in the police court. Why should he kill himself? He may be weeping at this moment but he will be feeling that something has been accomplished, he has obeyed a summons to doom.’
‘She was more wrong than that,’ said Mary. ‘For where did the confusion arise? In her. Every day she grew less like a woman. It was no wonder if her sons were part men and part women. She had no right to blame them.’
‘Again, it was like music,’ I said. ‘Like Mamma being a pianist and Mary and I having inherited part of her gifts.’
It hurt me that I saw from a twist of Oliver’s eyebrow that he suspected me of exaggerating my mother’s greatness as a pianist out of my love for her, that he thought it improbable that she had played better than we did. Yet her superiority was what had made us. That is the great handicap of sexual love, that lovers can share everything except what explains the past, of which their enjoyment is a part.
‘We should have seen all this before,’ said Mary, ‘and we could have saved the poor old dear.’
‘But how?’ asked Oliver. ‘How could you two save a woman who has sodomite sons and is shocked by them?’
Mary and I looked at each other across the table. ‘Oh, we do not know how,’ I said, ‘that is the point. We have not the least idea.’
‘But Rosamund would have known,’ said Mary.
‘Your Rosamund might have known, but what could she have said to the desperate old lady?’
‘What she would have said neither Rose nor I know,’ said Mary, ‘but it was her talent to put an end to desperation.’
‘Oh, Oliver, it is true,’ I said.
‘All you have told me up till now is true,’ he said.
‘And mother played better than we do,’ I said.
‘She played in a sense better than anyone I have ever heard,’ said Mary.
‘Was it really so?’ asked Oliver, and shook his head, not in denial but in wonder.
His glass was empty, his plate was bare. I filled his glass again, I gave him another slice of cold lamb. Presently he put down his knife and fork and asked diffidently, ‘Could your Rosamund have helped me with Jasperl, do you suppose?’
Mary looked away, seeing that we spoke of a secret. I answered, ‘You do not need much help. You have done marvels. But, yes, Rosamund could have helped you.’
When he had eaten the lamb he passed his napkin over his lips, looked down on the circle of white flowers on the table, and sighed. ‘Your Rosamund did what we three could not. She had, I imagine, moral genius. We forget that there is such a thing, but of course that is what the saints had. And it is absurd for us to doubt that the saints really existed, as it would be for the tone deaf to doubt that there are great composers. None of us three can compete in that field. We are musicians. But we care about people, that means we care about morality, which I suppose is the art by which people are kept from harm. We could use the services of a moral genius now. But we want them only to work on the other kind of genius. The kind that go too near the crater’s edge because they have the Plutonic fire in them and they want to leap into the volcano and be united with the source of their being. Lady Tredinnick was pushed out to the frontiers of the desert, into the confusion of the jungle, on to the extremes of courage. Jasperl dashes himself against the frontiers of music. We would like to be able to stop them from this self-arson, and with Lady Tredinnick you have failed, and with Jasperl I am failing. But such people are exceptional. We do not come across them often. That means we rarely have need of a miracle-worker. For our own plain business we can get on by ourselves. Mary, let me peel you a peach.’
Thank you,’ she said.
But soon he laid down the silver knife. ‘I can see the tears shining on the cheeks of both of you. How sensible of you not to wipe them away. And how beautiful you both look. It must have been bitter for Lady Tredinnick to want wives for her sons, who were lovely like you, and could love like you, where she had no daughters-in-law except unknown Guardsmen grappling in the night.’
IX
SINCE THE CRASH in America Mary and I were not offered nearly such good tours, and our agents told us we need not go; but we could not keep away, and we felt a longing to see the autumn foliage again, and to be with our friends again. They were so friendly and they were so violently engaged in life; being with them was like getting on a toboggan behind somebody one liked, putting one’s arms round them, and dashing off downhill over the spurting snow. I was not sorry that I had gone, though it had meant leaving Oliver for nearly three months, and Mary liked it, because she liked to know things. The aim of her playing was always intellectual certainty. We had not been able to understand what had happened in America in 1929 before we went there. We knew it to be rich, by knowledge planted in our mind in our childhood by the little facts that can never be rooted up. Papa had spent a year in a mining camp on the Sierras when he was young; the American heiresses whom King Edward liked so much brought dowries large enough to restore the best estates that ruined peers could bring them; a poor Scottish boy called Andrew Carnegie went to America and worked in a mill and made so many millions that he had given Lovegrove the library where we got out books and had set up a trust which enabled any Scottish boy or girl to go to a university, we would have had to apply to it if we were no good at music. There were Americans who were poor and oppressed, we knew that from Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. But this was because greed made the manufacturers conspire on helpless immigrants and trap them into working for low wages. America was rich, naturally and unalterably as green is green and the sea is salt; and we proved that this was true when we crossed the Atlantic and found that the towers of New York were an Aladdin’s cave growing upwards, that there and in the continent beyond Mary and I could get all we wanted, of money and enjoyment and praise. There was nothing criminal in this wealth, for those Americans who were poor would soon be rich. Providence was emptying a vial of prosperity over the United States and presently the generous flow would cover all its surface. We believed the Americans when they told us this. The United States is the child of Great Britain, and no parents wish to think that their children are not to be eternally happy. Also it seemed a shame, if people took the trouble to sail six thousand miles over the ocean and face the hardships of emigration, in order to found a society better than the one they had left, that they should not get what they wanted. It would have been as if, after all our practising, we had not been able to play any better than other people.
When it was said that the United States was poor, we thought at first that it might conceivably be poorer than it had been. But we were disconcerted because there were far fewer liners crossing the Atlantic. In earlier years we had never had to worry about catching any particular boat, there was always another one belonging to a different line leaving a day or two later. But now there were few sailings a week. On the boat the American passengers told us stories of ruin, but with an upward, hopeful inflection that made them hard to consider: it was as if we were trying to look into the eyes of someone who wore brightly polished spectacles. We were doubtful, until we had landed, and taken the night train to a town in New England, where there was a college for women; and we had the intention of playing on our tours some sonatas by a young American composer called Arthur Todd who was head
of the music faculty there. The professor and his wife, who was named Abigail, met us at the station and drove us to their house; he was long and sandy and spectacled, with such beautiful hands that one wished he would not drive a car, and she was nice but unwise, she kept on saying that she always had had faith in her husband, with an emphasis suggesting that this had often been a considerable feat. But she was, like so many American women, exquisitely domesticated. They lived in a small white frame house, in a street of such houses, that were old and graceful, with the sweet air of Georgian architecture copied by country craftsmen from pictures in books, their unhedged lawns set trim and swept in spite of the flaming leaves that were falling from the trees that shadowed the sidewalks. Inside it recalled the illustrations in children’s books that show the homes of the imaginary animals that wear clothes; there were the same clean colours, highly polished furniture, and censored contentment. There were windows on both sides of the sitting-room, so to take the glare out of the light Mrs Todd had put thin shelves across the windows that looked on to the street, and she had put on them a collection of coloured glass. It was an idea that we were to see everywhere we went that year, and for that matter most of the houses in that street would be furnished exactly in the same way; but it was a good idea, and there was no country we ever visited where so many houses were so pleasant to see. Mrs Todd made us some coffee, and gave us coffee-cake that she had baked before she went out, and then we rose to go upstairs and have baths and change before we played to her husband. As we left the room Mary turned to have a last look at the red and blue glass, and cried out. She had seen something through the clear panes between the shelves. She ran out of the room and out of the house, and when we followed her we found her standing where the lawn met the sidewalk. A neatly dressed man was lying on the ground, with his head on the grass and his feet on the sidewalk: this was better than the other way round, and he looked so much as if he were the sort of person who would be careful to make such sensible arrangements that it seemed odd that he should have done anything so irregular as to fall down in the street. If he had felt ill, one would have thought, he would have stayed at home. There was an earthy pattern about him such as we had never seen before. The professor sighed, eased his cuffs round his wrists, put out his beautiful hands, and lifted up the man and carried him into the house. As we followed him Mrs Todd told us that he had been a clerk, she called it ‘clurk’ and on her lips the word meant a shop assistant, in a small old-fashioned store which had closed down some months ago, and he had probably been on his way to sweep up leaves for a widow who lived down the street, and had been one of his customers. But everyone was out for jobs like that, there were not many to be had. She guessed the poor man was starving. They put him on a sofa and consciousness came back to him. He cried out in misery because he was not wearing spectacles. He said that he would never get another job if he had lost his spectacles. The Todds made to keep him on the sofa while we went and found the spectacles, which were not broken. Mrs Todd had not yet got him to drink a cup of coffee, and had thought that he was refusing it because he was worried about his spectacles, but even when we had brought them to him, he would not drink. Arthur Todd was from Iowa and he spoke with the tender reverberating Middle Western accent. Gently he urged the man to drink; and the clerk finally admitted, sulky with shame, that he had not eaten for twenty-four hours. His wife and children had gone to stay with his people in Maine, and they were poor enough: he had had to give his wife the greater part of their savings, hoping he would get along, but it hadn’t worked out. He had been going along to earn his dollar from Mrs Kirby and had thought he would last out and eat afterwards but, he repeated, it hadn’t worked out. Well, would they mind calling a doctor, because he had read once in an article in the Literary Digest that when people hadn’t eaten for a long time they had to be mighty careful what they took when they started eating again.
