by Rebecca West
We had till then thought of starving people as slum-dwellers, or peasants in a blighted land, who would claw at food when it was offered them. A starving man so thoroughly geared to a complicated society that he dared not relieve his hunger till he had consulted a doctor struck on my understanding as strangely as atonal music strikes on an untrained ear. We were to be more disconcerted after he had gone, when we asked the Todds how much unemployment benefit the man would be getting, and we learned that he would get none. Mrs Todd told us of neighbourhood projects to help the unemployed, and again what we heard struck us as strange, though not with the strangeness of novelty, but of the obsolete. This was Victorian charity of the soup-kitchen sort, which in England had long been rejected, because it offended against the idea of equality, which one had thought was specially dear to the Americans. The poor should not be put in the position of dependants on the rich; the state could not exist without their work, and therefore the state should keep them if by some accident it had for a time no work for them to do. Mary and I rarely thought about such things, but we suddenly realised that that was what we had been thinking about then. It was all right when we got to the piano, for after we played the sonatas Arthur Todd eased his cuffs round his beautiful hands, as he had done before he lifted the starving man, and lifted a new meaning out of the sonatas for us. But when we were alone again there came to us a frightened sense of America as an artificial society with insufficient artifice; and that had always to be succeeded by the admission that up till then America had certainly had all the artifice it needed. This was not a thoughtless, not a cruel country. It had been visited by an unpredictable event which had afflicted on it wounds of a sort it had not known before, and it had not yet improvised the bandage and the tourniquet.
Yes, it was like that, and the innocence was even more elemental. And it was hard during our tour to keep our mind on our music, when we were faced with this situation, which was extreme. It could even be stated thus: two people had known each other for a long time and had a friendship based on what seemed a common culture. They could have gone to Venice together and never been surprised by what the other one wanted to see, and between them would have seen everything. But suddenly one received by an accident a deep cut in his body, and cried out, not in amazement because he had been wounded, but because blood was issuing from his body. Until then it appeared he had had no idea that blood flowed under his skin, it was still true that he had known all about the churches of Venice, that he had been the most agreeable of companions; and it even turned out that he knew all about X-rays.
On our last night in New York, we went to a party of the kind that Americans give better than any other people in the world, a small party for people who are ordinarily asked to big parties. There were three pianists in the room, but, as was right, at the piano there was someone who could hardly play at all, who just bent over the keyboard as if it were a syrup-tin and spooned out the sweetness then faintly spiced with jazz of musical-comedy tunes. There was an actress who wore a white dress with a circle cut in it just above her navel so that her skin could be seen, which looked very pink. Against the white, it was as if she had dropped a slice of ham on her lap; but it showed good feeling and willingness to think out new ways of pleasing. There were playwrights of the sort common in New York at that time, melancholy men, usually Jewish, who built intricate plays which were more profoundly funny than they had any right to be, considering that they were written without resort to the creation of character, solely by piling up situations; it was as if a Chinese puzzle should turn out to be satirical.
There were some millionaires and their wives who were felt to have thrown off their guilt by consenting to know people like us. Americans had a strange sense of guilt about possessing things, although possession was imposed on them by their climate. None of them were politicians, that was what made American cities different from London, where one meets at parties what seems far more than the six hundred and twenty-six Members of Parliament than actually exist. But these people spoke always of general ruin, which had not touched them yet but must, of this paralysis, spread further. They spoke too of prescriptions to end it, and showed themselves naked and newborn in their innocence, as unaware that blood ran in their bodies as they were of bandages and tourniquets.
‘They are like us when Papa went away,’ said Mary, as we drove home. ‘Do you remember how we talked about going into factories, we did not know which, and making enough to keep the house going?’
‘They are like us in other ways,’ I said. ‘They speak of the stock market as something that has an independent existence and sometimes gave them lots of money. It was their father, they are like us, they are gambled children.’
The car stopped. We were staying at a hotel by Washington Square, and had to go right up Fifth Avenue, and the traffic lights worked all night, though in the early hours of the morning there are hardly any cars on the street at all. The red light burns; and you sit still in your car, the canyon of the avenue rising black before you, the white lights at its base announcing distance that is just distance. One stops every few blocks for a long time. The halts come to seem discipline imposed by the time, like the night itself, and one sits and waits for the sign, the order, which will come at some point in the rite.
‘Everything is changing,’ I said, as the car sped on. ‘Do you suppose that all the disasters and wars that he foresaw are going to happen?’
‘It might be so,’ said Mary. ‘I never was sure that the last war showed he was a prophet, but that is only because I always thought that if his prophecies came true everybody involved in them would be dressed like the actors in a Shakespearian play, and move and speak like that.’
‘I thought that too,’ I said. ‘How happy those days were. Wars and disasters, we knew no parallel to them. In our days they belonged to the past, like Shakespeare.’
‘So I feel that if the war had been one of the wars that Papa foretold Richard Quin would have worn doublet and hose when he went out to be killed.’
‘And been followed by a circle of limelight,’ I said, ‘and spoken his farewells in blank verse.’
The memory of him suddenly grew strong. He stood tall between the houses, he was the distance at the end of the avenue.
We halted at another traffic light. ‘Do you think they are really finished, that it is all going to break up?’
‘I don’t really,’ said Mary. ‘We have only Shakespeare to go by, and according to him they have a long way to go, their end is not in this play. What they say never sounds like the things his people say when their story has gone wrong for good. You know, like Desdemona when Othello has gone out after he has been cursing her as a strumpet, and Emilia asks her how she does, and she answers, “Faith, half asleep,” and you know it is all over with her, there is no hope.’
‘Or like Richard the Second when he says to his queen, “I am sworn brother, sweet, to grim Necessity,”’ I said.
‘Still, had we not better see if we have any money?’
‘I never thought of that,’ I said. ‘Would you mind being poor again?’
‘Well, we could sit and eat boiled eggs among our loot comfortably enough, provided we could pay the rates,’ said Mary. ‘But sometimes I remember how frightened Cordelia was of poverty, and I get frightened too.’
‘We must ask Mr Morpurgo how much money we have,’ I said.
‘Wouldn’t Oliver know?’
‘Not a bit,’ I said.
On that Mary made no audible comment, and I was annoyed. Her silence was asking, ‘Was there no sense at all, then, in her getting married?’
I sent a cable the next morning and asked Oliver to get Mr Morpurgo to dine with us the second night after Mary and I got home. Then later in the day we sailed on the Olympic, and slept and read, and lunched on deck, rolled up in rugs with hot-water bottles, while the boat straddled the black-green walls of water, and dined in bed and read each other passages we liked out of our books. It perturbed me a little
that our tastes were dividing. I could still read anything. Mary was rejecting more and more, she went back all the time to Wordsworth’s Excursion and Paul Valéry’s La Jeune Paraue. I did not like it that we ceased to be nearly identical. I was even a little sad when Oliver met us at Southampton and first kissed Mary and let her go on, and then took me in his arms, and told me, by the private centre of his public kiss, how much he had missed making love to me. As my mouth gave him my secret answer my eyes were on Mary as she moved forwards under the ugly lights of the Customs-sheds, in a black coat straight as a pillar with a round white fur collar, and a round white fur hat on her shining black hair. She was still like a girl; though we were passing into middle-age, she walked lightly and was alone. I longed to be with her, though I rejoiced at being in Oliver’s arms. But then he drew back and looked at me a little sadly, and I knew that something horrid had happened while we were away.
He told us in the train. Miss Beevor had died in her sleep a week ago. She had had no suffering at all, and Cordelia had had tea with her the day before. ‘It was all right,’ he said, with surprised eyes, and Kate told us too without surprise, ‘It was all right.’ She took us into Miss Beevor’s bedroom, which smelt of lavender and was very cold, and opened the chest of drawers and showed us parcels wrapped in tissue paper. ‘Nothing was untimely about it,’ she said, ‘she left all her Christmas presents ready. And though that is a new cemetery up in North London, there are some fine trees. I would not take the first plot they offered us, oh, no, I winked at Mr Oliver and we went off without the man, and I found her a good place, better than I could have hoped for, close by a yew.’
‘Is that good, near a yew?’ I asked.
‘Tchk, tchk!’ she said, pained at the thought of all she had been unable to teach us. ‘Yes, indeed, a yew is best.’ She looked round the room and said, as if repeating a promise, ‘I will leave it as it is, of course, for the full month.’ We waved our hands at the emptiness about us and smiled and tiptoed out, and Kate shut the door softly, to suit a phantom’s senses. As she went along the passage before us her skirts flapped desolately round her long legs, as if virtue had gone out of her starched petticoats. I asked her if she would like us to find another old person for her to look after, and she halted and gave me a queer glance as if I had failed to notice something under my nose. She thanked us for being so thoughtful, but no, that was not needed. The light in the passage shone strongly down on her tallness. If she had had a pigtail caught at the back of her neck with a black bow she might have been one of Nelson’s sailors: her eyes looked past us at a far horizon, and her great hands were clenched, ready for the next chore. For her we were already at sea, on a new voyage. It was most likely that she was right.
‘Any news from Miss Rosamund?’ I asked. But there was none.
The next night Mr Morpurgo arrived with a briefcase full of files that would tell us how much money we had. Mary and I were waiting for him, one on each side of the fireplace, wearing dresses we had bought at Benoit Teller’s, of pleated georgette, a material hardly ever seen now, like chiffon but warmer. It was the same dress in two different colours: hers was lime green, mine was in emerald. Mr Morpurgo liked them and put his arms round our waists and stretched his neck in an attempt to get rid of his rich Oriental chins and pouted at himself in the looking-glass over the chimneypiece, and complained, ‘Now, me, I look older.’ We laughed and kissed him but I had noted that the time had come when people told Mary and me that we were not looking any older. We had reached the middle term. The pattern of our lives was determined, we had only to work out the other half and make it symmetrical. To confirm this thought, which was not sad but solemn, I looked at our reflections, and it struck me that Mary looked much younger than I did, younger by far more years than she was my elder. I felt no envy but concern, as if I had recognised in her the first signs of a sickness.
‘It is so pleasant that you are here,’ Mr Morpurgo said to her. ‘It is like old times.’
‘Before I broke up the happy home,’ said Oliver, from behind us, busy with the sherry.
‘It is better than before,’ said Mary, smiling, ‘we are both guests, you will drive me home, and we shall say what was wrong with the dinner.’
‘What was wrong with the room,’ said Mr Morpurgo, looking round him tenderly.
‘What was wrong with the host and hostess!’
‘Alas,’ sighed Mr Morpurgo, with his luxurious Jewish sadness, ‘all is so right here, in the midst of -’ His voice died away.
‘What exactly is happening?’ asked Oliver, giving him his sherry.
‘Ah, what do you think is happening?’ sighed Mr Morpurgo.
‘I don’t know,’ said Oliver. ‘I’m still on the last movement of this symphony.’
‘Well, what do you two girls think is happening?’
‘People in America fall down and faint because they are starving and there is no unemployment benefit,’ I said.
Mr Morpurgo wondered, ‘Surely people are meant to know what is happening to them. Surely their consciousness should cover that area. Yet I do not know why it should. The clerks in my firm understand very little of our transactions. I class you with the clerks, they like you are specialists. It is only those of us who cannot specialise who get to the top in my business.’ The parlourmaid told us that dinner was served and he grumbled along the passage behind us. ‘It is terrible to think what would have happened if I had been a good book-keeper, but I was good for nothing at any process of banking. I served as apprentice in several offices and each of them reported that I was useless. I could not keep my mind on the ledgers, I covered them with blots while I reflected on what I had heard at the opera, seen at the museums, the bookshops, the botanical gardens. However, by large vague thoughts about man and the universe, I came to understand the large vague business that is banking.’ I had ordered his favourite soup, cream of chicken à la Célestine, a curious soup with almonds in it, which in our house was faintly dusted with nutmeg. The chicken was put through a hair sieve with some boiled rice, it was a little less gritty than the ordinary bisque. He enjoyed the texture, he pressed his spoon down on the plate to make sure it was so, before he started eating it. ‘My uncle detested this when I returned to England, he saw to it that in the course of time I became partner on terms which had consequences which did not appear at a first reading and gave me considerably more power than his own son, whose ledgers never showed a blot. You never heard of my cousin, did you?’
