Sunflower

by Rebecca West

  ‘Go on,’ said Francis Pitt, ‘go on.’

  How could she have made such a mistake? In his soft gaze there was nothing but an immense kindliness and protectiveness, and a certain wistfulness. He had simply wanted to hear her story. Of course that would be all, for as a matter of fact she had not dropped any particularly intimate phrases. Probably the beauty of Alice Hester’s destiny was so great that it got through even her halting words, just as Shakespeare gets through bad acting. And he was probably in need of help. Though he was so strong he had not that varnished look that happy people have.

  ‘Go on,’ said Etta Pitt, too.

  ‘Well, when she went back to her cottage her husband was gone. And she was there, with all her children. And the ploughman fell in love with her, and brought her over to Packbury, because his uncle had found work for them. And then—’ it was awkward to have to take her eyes away from Pitt’s and probably silly to feel that she ought to, ‘they had a real baby. I mean a baby of their own. And they were awfully happy, and he went on always being good to her, and they got quite old. And then he got ill and the doctors said he’d have to go into a hospital and have an operation. And he told her that there was only one thing he wanted to do before he died, and that was to marry her.’

  She remembered the look in the old woman’s eyes as she had repeated the dead man’s words. She stopped her story and said querulously: ‘I want something to drink. Give me some water.’

  Francis Pitt filled her glass. When she had drunk he said again, ‘Go on … Go on.’

  Plainly he really needed to know. She turned to him as she went on with the story. ‘Alice Hester knew she oughtn’t to do it, for her sister over in Essex had told her that her first husband was in the workhouse there. But she saw that her man really wanted to marry her, so she made up her mind to do it. But there was a horrid boy living in the house, a kind of idiot, and he overheard them, and she knew it. All the same she didn’t stop things, because she knew the old man really wanted to marry her before he died. She just went on with all the plans, and finally the day came for their marriage. And all the way to the registrar’s office she heard the boy whistling just behind them. But still the old man wanted it so badly she went through with it. And then the man went to hospital and died. The funny thing was that she did not seem to mind that very much. I don’t mean that she didn’t feel it but it didn’t seem to break her up. I suppose nothing can really hurt one if you’ve got lots of children and know that everything will go on …’

  She drooped her head, looked down on the bright wood of the table, and was lost in a dream of an impregnable kingdom of satisfaction; till a movement from Essington recalled her.

  ‘Well, the boy talked, and the police heard about it, and she was arrested. They let her off. Mr Sandbury was ever so nice. But she had to stand in the dock. Though she looked lovely. And you could see nothing mattered to her really, because of the children, and because it had given him pleasure to be married to her before he died. That’s all.’

  For a moment there was silence. She sat turning the rings on her fingers and looking into the dark corner of the room, until, partly that by speaking she might keep back her tears and partly lest she should in her stupid way have left out the point of the story as she had done with Harrowby, she said hoarsely, ‘Wasn’t it wonderful that he wanted to marry her after all those years, and that she went to all that trouble to do for him what he wanted?’

  There was a stir and murmur from them all. Francis Pitt said deeply: ‘Yes, it’s a wonderful story. A wonderful story.’

  Essington asked in a shrill, complaining voice: ‘Did she tell you all this as a coherent story?’

  Her lips quivering, she nodded.

  ‘You sometimes get a witness that can tell a coherent story. The general run of them … My God …’

  Francis Pitt asked: ‘Did she show any embarrassment at getting up in court, in front of all these people, and owning to having lived with this man?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Ah, women are sensible,’ he said, ruminatively. ‘They don’t believe in these things.’

  She understood that he was telling her that he honoured her: that he thought that she had done right in living with Essington without being married. Without looking directly at him, because her eyes were wet, she smiled in his direction. But suddenly there came an acid spurt from Essington.

  ‘Don’t they?’

  She whirled about in astonishment, and he gave her a second helping of spite. ‘Some seem to!’ he flicked at her. She was puzzled, not only because she could not understand what his words meant, but because she had thought that he was bound to be in a good mood, since usually he was glad when she said anything that interested people. But it was evident that something had made him terribly angry. Perhaps he was jealous because she had been telling her story to Francis Pitt. Often he was silly like that. She smiled into his eyes but he glared through her. Still, she would get him round.

  He said, to the company in general: ‘Queer, the range of the scale of humanity. Think what that woman’s life must have been. With seven or eight children.’

  ‘Ten, it was,’ said Sunflower. ‘Eleven, counting the real one. The best one, I mean. The one she had with the man she liked.’

  He did not look at her. ‘Eleven. My God. This would all be about fifty years ago. She must have had to do it all on twelve or thirteen shillings a week. What a miserable life of hunger and squalor …’

  ‘Oh no! She was quite happy,’ said Sunflower.

  ‘The vast range in the scale of humanity. Only fifty years from now, only fifty miles from London. Only fifty years and fifty miles from Sunflower …’ His glance dwelt on her benevolently. She must have been right in her guess at the cause of his rage, for he was not angry with her any more now that she had stopped talking to Francis Pitt. ‘Pampered little Sunflower!’ he purred. ‘Think of the difference between you and that poor wretch …’

  ‘Oh, but you don’t understand!’ objected Sunflower. Since he seemed to be melting she wanted to keep the conversation on these lines till she was quite sure he was placated; for in spite of the sweetness of his tone she felt that there was still something a little wrong. Though of course it would come right in a minute or two. ‘Alice Hester wasn’t a bit unhappy. She didn’t stand up there complaining of all that happened. I’ve told it you all wrong if I’ve made you think that. She’d loved it all. She was awfully happy.’

  ‘Sentimental Sunflower.’ Caressingly his voice lingered on the syllables, he shook his head at her ever so playfully. ‘Of course she couldn’t be happy. Unless she was just an animal.’

  ‘She wasn’t a bit an animal. She was lovely.’

  ‘Then her life must have been one long misery. Think of having child after child in those conditions. Think of the way it went on, year in, year out. The last child must have been the last straw. What drudgery …’

  ‘Oh, no! Oh, no!’ She was amazed that Essington, who was generally so right about human motives, should be wrong about anything so self-evident as this. Since she knew that he wanted above all things to know the truth about everything, she felt pleased and proud at being able to tell him something true that he had not known before. Importantly, a little fussily, like a dog racing after its master with something he has dropped safe in its mouth, she put it before him. ‘It was that child she specially liked having! She loved having it. You see, she loved the ploughman …’

  It struck her how oddly, beautifully solvent the love of Alice Hester and that man had been. Town love, the love of the kind of people she knew, the people who were News, had the alarming slippery quality of sudden wealth. Either a man liked a woman because she fitted in with some notion of womanhood he had always held, which made the affair like inheriting money; or he liked her because she surprised him by being something that he had no notion womanhood could be, which was like taking a chance on the stock exchange. One does not feel confident that either the legatee or the specu
lator will stay rich, since he will have gained no technique in getting his money that will help him to keep it; and for a like reason these sudden lovers did not keep their love. It was well known that Alan Campbell would go crazy over any girl with real ash-blonde hair and an old-fashioned look that came into his chorus; he was one of those men who like women to do nothing else but that and yet insist on them looking as if they wouldn’t on any account do it, which was silly and must make it so confusing for a girl. It was well known, too, that Lord Dunnottar would go crazy over any headliner he met, whether she was an actress or a singer or a dancer; they said he had stood in front of the Nelly sisters, who were identical twins, with his tongue out, not knowing where to begin. Well, she had known of seven girls who had gone with Campbell to what, being an American, he called Cannes-france; and Dunnottar had a standing agreement with the telephone people to change his number every six weeks. She thought of the Embassy Club where she had seen these men with their women; the sallow light reflected from the purple and green walls made all the women pale and alike, as if they were orphans in some funny kind of institution that dressed its charges in fantastic clothes but made them live meanly and monotonously all the same. She shivered, as she sometimes did when it occurred to her that lots of people were starving and that if she had ill luck she might starve too.

  But Alice Hester and her man were not like that. What they had had, had lasted their time and more, because of the way they earned it. When peasants make money out of the land, by giving the field what it demands of seeds and strength through all weathers, by reaping all day long though the noon is like a hard thumb of light pressed down on the earth, by driving the wagons to market at sunrise and being craftier than the crafty middlemen until sundown, one does not fear that they will let that money slip through their fingers. Essington had taught her that, telling her why France was reluctant to pay her debts; he would not be unfair even to militarist France. Dear Essington, how he helped her to understand things; even, so miraculously clever was he, to understand Alice Hester, whom he would not trouble to understand. For Alice Hester and her man had earned their love as peasants earn their money; by slow industrious kindness, by the stern will of sweetness not to let itself be soured by hardship, by the patient and wily dodging of circumstances that seem like a rabbit trap for all lovely things. Love earned like that would not let itself be spent too quickly. It must have been slow in its pace, that love, like a runner who knows that he has to run too far to dare to run too fast. Slowly, slowly it had come to them. Sunflower could see, could feel, Alice Hester standing in that Essex lane, with her baby warm on her breast and the others dark, whimpering little things nuzzling and pulling round her skirts. Nothing anywhere was kind. The blackness all about her put out thorny hands; wild things on night errands through the fields made little unchristened cries; the air, so much more tangible than by day, caught on her face like a cold veil; the earth underfoot was cut into cake-hard ruts that might bring her small ones down stumbling. ‘Oh, Mammy, I want to go back to my lil bed.’ ‘Mammy, why was Daddy so bothered at us?’ The poor little things … She would be able to take them on in one moment, when she had got her breath again after that run down the garden; and when she had fought down the tears that gushed up from the immense desolation that filled her heart at being alone with her children, at having to be a mother without a father to help her. ‘Oh, lovies, quiet all. We mustn’t disturb the folks over the road. They’ll have to wake early and go to work.’ Then came the sound of a window-sash slowly thrown up in the cottage, and she braced herself to move for the woman of that cottage was not kind, and had a good man, and she did not feel strong enough yet to face her and own how bad her man had been. ‘Hush, lovies, hush! You’ve wakened ’em! Come away, we’ll go and lie down by the haystack.’ So she had gathered them together, and made Jimmie take little Louisa’s hand lest she fell in the rut, and bade Mary take care of Tommy, and had picked up Annie to sprawl on her shoulder, though she was all weighed down with her baby, who was so big for his age, and then cried almost petulantly, since she did not want to talk to that woman, ‘Hurry, lovies!’ for she had heard the cottage door bang. But Annie had been too heavy for her, and she had had to pause to set her down for a minute, and then Jimmie had cried, ‘Mammy, there’s someone coming after us!’ and she had turned, and seen the bobbing lantern.

  Slowly, slowly, the lantern had bobbed along the lane. Slowly the kind voice had spoken. ‘Why, Mrs Bullen …’ ‘Oh, ‘tis Mr Stallibrass …’

  Slowly he had lifted Annie up in his arms.

  Those were the first of kindnesses that were always slow, and therefore certified to have been really meant. When he first told her that he wanted her it must have been with a slow, ashamed drooping of the eyelids, by speech dammed more and more by shyness till there was a heartbeat between every word, and at the end only by deep breaths so delayed that after each one it seemed as though the next would never come. That must have been lovely, for it told her that this was no sudden hunger that would die in sudden satisfaction, but a desire that during its long growth had become part of his nature like his need for air. One would be out of scale with such a lover if one gave him just that silly ridiculous brief thing which town lovers like. One would want to answer him by some slower motion of the body, some motion that would last not minutes, but hours, days, weeks, months, that would end as protractedly in some worthily vast convulsion, lasting not seconds, like the climax of the other, but minutes, hours, perhaps a day, perhaps a day and night. The difference in time would change that culmination perilously, would change it from pleasure into pain. But it would still keep its character of ecstasy.

  She cried out, ‘But don’t you see that if she and the ploughman loved each other so much, they’d have to have a child! They couldn’t have borne not to!’

  Immediately she saw that more had happened to the moment than she meant. Etta had lost her downcast, servant-like expression and was looking straight at her; and Francis Pitt had let his cigar sprawl in his coffee-saucer. They were both pointing at her with that gun-muzzle attention that an audience gives to a really great actress in her big scene. She could not think why they were staring at her like that. With exasperation she supposed that she was looking more beautiful than usual. It was tiresome, because they had listened to what she had said, so that if they agreed with her they could back her up.

  But Essington laughed, so loudly that they all turned to him.

  ‘I must explain to you exactly what has happened,’ he said to Etta and Francis Pitt. ‘Sunflower has a rival called Maxine Tempest—’

  ‘A rival!’ exclaimed Sunflower. ‘Why, she’s my best friend.’

  ‘Exactly. As actresses have greatest friends,’ said Essington.

  ‘But—’ began Sunflower, and was quelled by a patient lift of his eyebrows which conveyed that she was committing the unforgivable offence and spoiling one of his stories, which everybody knows is a dreadful thing for a stupid woman to do to a clever man. She folded her hands, looked down on them, and waited.

  ‘They were in the chorus of “Farandole” together. Sweet children of eighteen. It was then that I met Sunflower.’ He laid a slight humorous emphasis on the ‘then’ which made it more than a mere statement of time. It was as if he had said, you know how attractive girls of eighteen are, to men of our sort; well, that’s how I got involved. And then came a little good-natured laugh, as if to add, and really you know, I’m not sorry; she’s a good creature, and, you know, I do get extraordinarily fond of people. ‘Well, Sunflower is the more comely of the two, but Maxine is decorative enough in her way. And she has perhaps a leetle more understanding of the essentials of her art than dear Sunflower has ever acquired.’ He looked at her sideways, with that playfulness. ‘Well, ever since “Farandole” there has been a continuous rivalry between the two. Not on the stage, which in their lives, as in the lives of so many young actresses, has never been allowed to assume a disproportionate importance. But in the photogr
apher’s studio. In the Sketch and the Tatler. Once, but not so much recently, on picture postcards. There is a kind of war of pictorial accessories between them that has gone on for years. Maxine has rather the more inventive photographer. He it was who first put Maxine with tulle round her shoulders looking up at a branch of apple blossom. Immediately dear Sunflower put some tulle round her shoulders and looked competitively up at another bigger and better bunch of apple-blossom. And she won, bless her, at a canter. Those were your very best days, my dear. Then Maxine bought a dog. A horrid little dog. A kind of angry powder-puff. This she held up against her face, thus making an agreeable contrast. Then Sunflower went out and bought another little dog, a worse little dog, a more awful little dog. And she held it up beside her lovelier face, thus making an even more agreeable contrast. So Maxine had to find another line, and this time it led her into the kitchen. She was photographed there baking a cake. But Sunflower, though an undomesticated creature, was not to be beaten. Immediately she was photographed making a pie—probably out of the discarded dog—’

  The others laughed. She did not, for she knew what this rising tide of geniality usually meant. She sat with her shoulders lifted, as if she expected a lash to fall on them.

  ‘I forget the next stage. Ah, there was gardening. You should have seen Sunflower standing on the edge of a pond with a watering-can, watering—watering—watering—’ his falsetto laughter climbed higher and higher, it seemed as if the tears would roll down his puckered cheeks, ‘watering a water-lily …’

  Sunflower protested, ‘But we knew that was funny. It was only to use up the last plate. The print was published by mistake.’ But no one seemed to hear her.

  He went on, his face turned away from her. ‘But at last the time came when Maxine got Sunflower beaten. Such a shame! A year or two ago Maxine took to herself a husband. Some sort of actor thing. And the consequence is that now Maxine is photographed with an infant daughter. A preposterous child with a photographic face, the sort of ad hoc baby an actress would have. And that, you see, Sunflower can’t match. And poor Sunflower’s so cross.’ At last he looked at her directly, with a smile that would have been easy and rallying if it had not been taut and twitching. ‘Poor Sunflower, she’s always complaining about it …’ His voice cracked.