by Rebecca West
‘No,’ we answered.
‘No,’ he agreed blandly and finished the bland soup. ‘He is much perturbed by the situation,’ he told Oliver’s back, as Oliver carved the young turkey.
‘And you are not,’ said Oliver.
‘Yes, I am,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘All through the ages my uncle would have been doing a very sensible thing to choose me rather than my cousin as head of his firm, but at the moment neither he nor myself understands what we are to do if the world is not to go bankrupt.’
‘Look, we have brought some wild rice to go with the turkey,’ said Mary.
‘Good girls, good girls,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘It is the one luxury I envy the Americans. Their terrapin they can keep, it is like some object removed surgically from nature, it is no exchange for grouse. If the world is not to go bankrupt, I was saying.’
‘Why should it go bankrupt?’ said Oliver. He was the only one free to go on with the serious talk; I was taking the claret from the chimneypiece, Mary was making the salad dressing.
‘Because there are too many people in it,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘Too many people. The banking rot set in in Vienna, with the Boden Credit-Anstalt. That is a stupid situation. The Austro-Hungarian Empire fell, because there were too many people. It went very well when the population was small. The Austrians were able to rule Hungarians and Czechs and Croats and Slovaks when there were only the three hieratic cities, Vienna and Budapest and Prague, and outside only squires and peasants and the kind of little people that live in small towns. But then there were many more people, and there were many big towns, and they asked questions, as people do in big towns, and they all asked why they should be governed by the Austrians, and there was no answer, so the Empire dissolved. But Vienna remained, the huge institutions of Vienna remained, with no power behind them. The Viennese banks remained. But banking is power, banks without a nation behind them are a dream, they end, they play politics, they gamble, they crash.’
‘Have you everything?’ said Oliver, sitting down at the table.
‘Yes, I have everything, and everything is perfect,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘Here I eat much better than at home. My daughter Zoe keeps house for me since her divorce, she engages chefs that give me palace food, things that lie in state in aspic, and taste of nothing.’
‘But why should America have a crash because Vienna did?’ said Mary.
‘Because the American structure was ready to fall before a breath of wind,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘That too is a matter of there being too many people. A stock exchange is only a valid institution if the community which buys stocks and shares is compact enough to know the value of the commercial and industrial institutions behind those stocks and shares, and the professionals who sell stocks and shares know that their customers have this knowledge. Otherwise the buyers will pay prices which are simply fairy tales told in an abbreviated form. But, my children, there is only one thing wrong with this evening.’
‘Oh, you do not like the wine,’ I said. ‘Mary thought you might think it a little past its best, but Oliver and I think it is at its perfection.’
‘No, the wine is delicious, though it is on the edge, Mary is wrong today but she will be right tomorrow. It is not anything of what I am eating or drinking that worries me. It is what you are wearing.’
Mary and I cried out in distress. ‘Oh, we thought the dresses were so pretty.’
‘Yes, they are pretty, but there is something wrong. Oliver, can you not see that there is something wrong?’
Oliver stared but shook his head.
‘What, you married Rose, and you cannot see what is wrong? That I find extraordinary. Call Kate, and see if she had noticed anything.’
When Kate came and heard what was wanted of her, she clicked with her tongue and smiled rebuke at Mr Morpurgo. ‘I would have brought it home to them in time,’ she said, ‘but this first time I did think they might be allowed to have it their way. You might at least have let them have their dinner out!’
‘But what is it?’ we cried. ‘Tell us, you must tell us.’
‘Why, you each are wearing the dress that would suit the other better,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘Oliver, do you really not see that? Kate, you saw it at once.’
‘Yes, indeed,’ said Kate, ‘but their Mamma noticed that, they often favoured what suited the other, it was as if they were so close together that they mistook each other.’
‘But what is wrong?’ asked all three of us.
‘Why, Mary should be wearing the emerald dress, it would look well with her black hair and her white skin, the lime green looks vague on her,’ said Mr Morpurgo.
‘And the lime green would look beautiful on Miss Rose,’ said Kate. ‘It would go so well with the brown in her hair.’
‘Why, that is true!’ Oliver exclaimed.
‘We are mortified, for like all women we think we have perfect taste,’ said Mary.
‘But what asses we were!’ I cried. ‘Shall we go up now and change?’
‘You were always the one to rush at things, Miss Rose,’ said Kate. ‘Look how Miss Mary is going on quietly with her dinner.’
‘The question is, what is there to follow?’ said Mr Morpurgo.
‘A ginger ice,’ Kate told him.
‘That can wait,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘They can change at the end of this course. I would like to see them as they should be, it will be worthwhile.’
Oliver’s brow clouded and I said, with some coldness, ‘It will not take a minute.’ Celia must have moved very slowly, for Oliver was always expecting me to take twice as long as I needed for the simplest actions. He never went on to the next stage and said to me, ‘Rose, how quick you are.’
‘But wouldn’t you,’ he asked Mr Morpurgo, still not on the level of intelligence where I would have wished him, ‘rather get on with dinner?’
‘No, not at all,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘Even such a minute adjustment takes us a stage nearer the ideal universe.’ Between mouthfuls, sometimes pausing to inhale the bouquet of the claret, he told us that the distress of America might be considered relevant to the question of whether we three ought to be aware of what was happening to us or not, for that distress did not proceed from the material conditions in America, but from the failure of Americans to form an accurate estimate of these material conditions. ‘America,’ he said, ‘has just as many acres of wheat, just as many cattle and hogs and just as many mines and quarries and sources of hydro-electric power as she had before the crash. The present American misery was of the same sort that in the past has usually been caused by an actual failure of crops or plague among beasts or men; it is caused by the tendency of Americans to over-estimate the dividend that can be yielded by this capital. Alas,’ he breathed, and laid down his knife and fork. ‘Alas, that the dream is over, that slice of turkey, that wild rice, that cranberry sauce, cannot be eaten all over again. Now go and change your dresses.’
‘Then you are not really worried over the situation?’ Oliver asked him, rising to open the door for us.
‘I wonder why you should think that?’ said Mr Morpurgo.
I did not let Mary go out of the room, I was anxious for her to hear what I had to say. ‘Oliver thinks,’ I told Mr Morpurgo, ‘that because you liked the turkey and the claret and are making a fuss about our dresses that you cannot be worried. Stupid,’ I told Oliver, ‘it is when he feels things are all wrong that he likes to get what he can right. He is like you in that. He grows all these flowers in his gardens because so much of the rest of the world is a slag-heap.’
Oliver looked down at me with a faint smile, hoping I was right, but not sure. He was always making mistakes about other men because he believed that they were male in some forthright and uncompromising way that he was not, in a way, that was, indeed, not discernible in any man we knew. He expected that a banker who had made a great fortune in the City would respond to a financial crisis by becoming inflexible and thinking and talking of nothing but figures, and presently arriving by logical s
teps at a conclusion which averted that threat. Yet he knew that such concentration is by instinct practised only on technical problems, that the act of composition flows through the whole day, in and out of consciousness, which it often permits to occupy itself with other matters; and surely he must know that our practical brothers, when they were as great as Mr Morpurgo, knew such a merging of the essential and inessential, only to be ended when the tug of the moon brought the sea back to its bed. But in the straightness of Mary’s back, as she went out of the room and up the stairs before me, I could see that she was ascribing Oliver’s misapprehensions to superficiality, that she was wondering, as I knew she had wondered many times before, why I should have married him. I would have liked to cry out to her that she was being unjust to Oliver because she disapproved of marriage so deeply that she must pick a hole in any husband that spoiled whom she loved, but we were in the middle term of life, it no longer seemed necessary to discuss fundamentals, we might perhaps get on with as much of them as we had worked out already. But in the bedroom when we stepped from our coloured dresses her body in her white slip was so stern in its slimness that it seemed to be declaring a law, and I wanted to dispute her judicial power, and to tell her that Oliver knew all we both knew, that he was not literal, that he was aware that the intellect has not anatomised the universe, that the soul and the body recognise connections not yet systematised. But the instance of his awareness which came to my mind, a dent in the pillow on our bed recalled it to me, was not for telling; when he received a letter from Jasperl, or worse still one of those letters that were sometimes written to him about Jasperl, and the nature of evil was made clear to him by some gross example of destruction, he found great pleasure in making love to me, he came to me for refuge but he ended by giving me reassurance, and of that great pleasure the core was his joy in a blue vein that crossed my left breast. I was separate from my sister indeed. I was gentle to her and slipped her dress, that had been mine, over her head with a caress, because I had deserted her, and she was as gentle to me, with kindness that brought tears to my eyes because it came from her delusion that Oliver was a fool, she had deserted me. Who should I think of but Rosamund, who, when she had been with us, had welded everyone? Yet I could not think of her for long. Since I had known love the profanation of love that she must know forbade my mind to rest on her in happiness, even in longing.
‘It is strange that we wear the same size of dress,’ I said, as we smoothed ourselves and combed our hair, ‘you look so much slimmer.’
‘You are round, and I am flat,’ said Mary.
‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘You could never pass yourself off as anything but a mammal.’
‘Yes, but I seem to have thought of it just at the last moment, you give indication of it long before you get to the point.’
‘You’re getting near the sort of thing Cordelia might say!’
‘Oh, no! Oh, no!’ She really minded me saying that. She had always been more afraid of Cordelia than I was.
‘Silly, I didn’t mean it, if I had meant it I wouldn’t have said it. Come on. I told him we would only be a minute.’
‘Yes, yes.’ I hurried so that my husband should see I moved more swiftly than Celia, she hurried to save me from losing face before a stranger.
Kate had come into the dining-room and Oliver was asking her nervously whether the ice would not melt, and she was telling him that Mr Morpurgo liked his ice half melted, and would not be sorry if we were another ten minutes upstairs. She had known that there was less need to help Mary and me to change than to reassure Oliver, always hounded by fear when Mr Morpurgo was our guest. It was again this belief of his in the inflexibility of the successful man, who would keep to a timetable, who would accept standards, who would want to eat an ice as soon as it was brought into the dining-room, who would feel obliged to eat it hard because cooks always freeze ices till they are hard. Oliver, who would put his nose against the window to watch a bird while the soup was cooling, he who liked things never to be so hot nor so cold as when they were served, believed that he had these brothers born without caprice. It is something, I believe, that is instilled into boys at public schools, they are sent to boarding-schools so that they do not see in adolescence (which is the most critical time of life) how unstable and whimsical men are and grow discouraged by seeing what they must become; and so they never have any opportunity to see what men are like until they are men themselves, and therefore unwilling to admit their own defects. Absurd, absurd! I could not help laughing, and Mr Morpurgo rebuked me.
‘Rose, no mannequin should laugh. You never free yourself from your relationship except at the piano. Mary is right, she is there in her dress, apart as a star. And now, Oliver, you see that Kate and I are right.’
Oliver saw. His eyes rested on Mary with the total admiration he would have bestowed on an object in a museum, they passed to me with the readiness to find fault that he would have shown towards his own image in a mirror. But he found little fault. Smiling he said, ‘Of course, if one had never seen them but simply listened to their gramophone records, one would have known the emerald for Mary, the lime green for Rose.’
‘They have everything,’ said Mr Morpurgo, ‘except the preternatural brilliance of eye their mother had. But that would not have been appropriate in their faces.’
‘Every one in the family is different,’ said Kate. ‘No two alike. These two are not like their mother, nor their father neither, nor is Miss Cordelia.’
‘Nor was Richard Quin,’ said Mary.
‘They are archetypes,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘Now let us have the ice. Ices should not be such that polar bears should be able to live on them, huskies to draw sledges over them, but they should still recall the arctic. They are archetypes, all of the family into which you have married, being universal they have also to represent the universal quality of uniqueness. Each is different, because each child that is born is different. You are right, just right to serve Monbazillac with this ice.’ He lifted up his voice and cried sometimes through the spicy ice, sometimes through the perfumed wine,’ “The streams of the earth shall be turned into pitch, and the ground thereof into brimstone, and the land thereof shall become burning pitch. Night and day it shall not be quenched, the smoke shall go up for ever. From generation to generation it shall be waste. None shall pass through it for ever and ever. The cormorant and bittern shall possess it, and the ibis and the raven shall dwell in it; and a line shall be stretched out upon it to bring it to nothing, and a plummet into desolation.”’
For the savoury we had tiny little cheese soufflés, one for each of us. ‘What horrible noises I shall make in my stomach as I go home. When one is old one is Lear but the blasted heath is outside one. Words, words,’ he said, ‘one can do anything with words. “And thorns and nettles shall grow up in its houses, and the thistle in the fortresses thereof, and it shall be the habitation of dragons and the pastures of ostriches.” Isaiah could make one believe anything. “And demons and monsters shall meet, and the hairy ones shall cry out one to another. There hath the screech owl lain down and found rest for herself.” But it is nonsense. But we may take it. Isaiah takes it all back in the next chapter. I suspect him of being a disagreeable man. There is no zest in his destruction of salvation. This prodigality which your wife and her sister proclaim in their uniqueness would send in creatures that shall kill the thorns and nettles and by the excess of flowers that spring up under their tread, that shall pension off dragons, bridle the ostriches, teach demons and monsters to play various instruments, persuade the hairy ones to sing melodiously, and convert the screech owls to an audience and charge them a stiff price for admission. No brandy, thank you, but a Benedictine. I am an Edwardian and we were great drinkers of Benedictine. “A line shall be stretched out upon it to bring it to nothing, and a plummet into desolation.” Oh, it shall not be so.’
‘But the world will come to an end some day,’ I said.
‘Not like that,’ said Mr Morpurgo.
‘Mad grasses,’ said Mary, ‘how good that tough way of saying weeds is. But one can stay indoors, and against the hairy ones one must stop one’s ears.’
‘No, one must listen to what they are saying,’ said Oliver. ‘They conspire against us. They would about this Judgment Day to which my dear wife seems to be looking forward with such anticipation.’
‘Surely it must come whatever the dragons and the demons and the monsters do,’ said Mary. ‘Anyway I mean to shut my windows. And, Morpy, please have we any money?’
‘It is all in that brief-case I left in the hall,’ said Mr Morpurgo.
‘But can’t you tell us now?’ I asked.
‘Oh, darling, I don’t expect it is as simple as all that,’ said Oliver, again obsessed by his idea of this other maleness, which by being inflexible and insisting on timetables and acceptance of standards created a complicated universe about itself.
‘No, there is no reason why I should not tell them now,’ said Mr Morpurgo, he was always willing to betray his own sex to women, it was his pasha-like nature. Tutting the little I know about your affairs, Oliver, together with my complete knowledge of Rose’s affairs, I think this household is on a sound basis, and I am sure that Mary has no reason to be anxious. I invested the money their mother got from the family pictures very fortunately, and I have been as lucky in investing their savings. I wish Rose would save a little more.’
