Sunflower

by Rebecca West

  She suddenly dropped her towel and stared at the picture of her nakedness held by the eagles. It occurred to her for the first time that now she had quarrelled with Essington she would not be going with him to see Francis Pitt on Friday. With tears in her eyes, with water in her mouth, she remembered the pungent promise of satisfaction there had been about him, which had reminded her before of the smell of food when one was hungry. It was as if a curtain had dropped between her and a conjuror when he was in the very middle of his tricks. She could see him standing there behind the dropped curtain, his vast mouth open on some unfinished turn of his patter, one curious little paw-hand arrested in the middle of a charlatanish gesture, prevented from making for her again that materialisation of spring more actual than the real spring, from concentrating within the trick top-hat he held in his other hand a tiny vision of those lakeside woods crackling with the green fire which crackled too within her body when she thought of it. It could not be borne that this should be the last time she ever saw him. But though he had given her assurances all through the evening that he felt the extremes of kindliness, admiration, and protectiveness for her, he had given her none that he wished to see her again. Though he had spoken of their coming visit to his house with pleasure, it was obvious that it was Essington who was the important guest in his view, though he might be the less liked. He would never think of asking her by herself. Well, she must ring up Etta, and get near him that way. But that would not do, for he would see through it. And as they were sure to have thought her coarse and awful because of the way she had talked at dinner she must be careful not to frighten them. There was nothing to do but let the matter rest. Very probably she would never see him again. She went back to her bedroom and pulled out the little drawer under the mirror again, and sat for a long time looking down with hurt eyes at the box which held Marty’s letter, as if this disappointment were a violation of some promise written in that large, round hand.

  There was no use worrying about people. That side of life always seemed to go wrong. The thing was to think of one’s work. She must try to be more like Brenda Burton, who, when she talked of her life, talked not of her husband and children but of the hundred and fifty Shakespearean parts she had played, investing the achievement with a sort of athletic pride, so that one imagined her being covered with grease by her trainers before she started, and followed by a tug throughout, and fed with Oxo through a tube. It was high time she really began to work hard at acting. Which reminded her, there was a book on the table by her bed she had got out of the London Library specially because it was about acting and it was by that man A. B. Walkley whose notice of her Rosalind had made Essington laugh so much; and she hadn’t looked at it yet. She climbed in between the sheets and lay for a minute with closed eyes; and saw the wheeling faces of Alice Hester, of the hideous and beloved girl, of Essington, of Harrowby, of Marty Lomax, of Francis Pitt, whom she would not see again. They would not make a pattern, yet she felt they should. She sat bolt upright, and took up the book. The tip of her tongue began to protrude, as it always did when she read very earnestly.

  This question of temperament is interesting enough to warrant closer examination. Every stage character consists of two parts, one determinate (call it a) indicated by the text, the stage directions, and nothing else, the other (x) vague and varying, representing the rest of the character, as it is behind the scenes and was before the curtain went up. The reader of the play forms a mental image of x by deductions from a, and so gets his conception of the whole character of x and a. I may say in passing, that the vice of academic criticism of Shakespeare in this country, as in Germany, is to discuss a x as an actual person, forgetting or ignoring that a is the only part of the character for which we have the poet’s warranty and that x is merely our own surmise. But that is ‘another story’. The point here is that, while we all have to give a value to x, we none of us give the same value, since no two imaginations coincide. That is why the student of Shakespeare is always disconcerted when first he sees a favourite play either illustrated in a picture or performed on the stage. This, he says, is all very well, but it is not my Romeo or my Cordelia. Now the actor’s business with a is comparatively simple. He has to speak the words and do the things set down for him. It is with x that his real difficulties begin; for in place of our vague, floating notion of the character as a whole he has to offer us his own real person and temperament. Here the acting side of him is in the long run far less important than what the man naturally is. For it is, of course, flagrantly untrue, though often spoken of as true, that an actor can divest himself of his own personality and put on the personality of someone else. Just as an author is always really identical with his work (‘for after all’, as Walter Bagshot said, ‘we know that authors don’t keep tame steam engines to write their books’) so the actor’s histrionic is always part and parcel of his real everyday self. You may so paint wrinkles on your brow, so modulate your voice and order your bearing as to pass, behind the footlights, for a mad old King of Britain, but the fact remains that you are Mr Brunn, a taxpayer of today, with an address in the London postal directory, and a pretty taste in claret and cigars. This fact will for ever prevent you from absolutely realising x. It may even do so in some obvious physical way. (‘His weak, white, genteel hands, and the shape of his stomach,’ said Tolstoy on his visit to Siegfried, ‘betrayed the actor.’) But even though your disguise be perfect, the fact that the soul within you is not the soul of Lear—or rather the soul of Shakespeare as projected in Lear—but the soul of Mr Brunn must forever mark off a measurable distance between x and your impersonation. The measure of that difference is, inversely, the measure of your success in the part. On the other hand, your reality (the Mr Brunn in you) while it prevents you from fully and satisfactorily representing x—that is to say, coinciding with the spectator’s mental image of your part—will give you the great advantage over that pale image of definiteness and substance. What is lost in harmony and perfect propriety of conception is gained in precision and intensity of effect—provided always that your personality is not absolutely at variance with the spectator’s conception. You are able to offer him a real man for an imaginary one.

  Her hand sought the switch; there was darkness.

  She wished she could marry someone really nice.

  She said, ‘I will not open. I will not open.’ Then it crossed her mind, ‘He may be ill.’

  But he was not ill, only dabbled with tears. They stared at each other desolately across the threshold. The lit staircase above them creaked as if a knot of ghosts were leaning over the banisters to watch them.

  He turned his face to the doorpost and burst into a fit of noisy weeping.

  Well, he could not stay like that all night, she supposed. ‘Oh, lovie, don’t get into such a state,’ she begged him. ‘You’ll have such a headache in the morning if you go on like this, you know you will. Where’s your hankie?’

  He felt about in his rumpled pyjamas, in his flapping dressing-gown. ‘Lost it,’ he said, and choked.

  ‘Come in and I’ll find you one,’ she told him wearily. The sudden wrench of her awakening had made her feel sick.

  He stood beside her, shaken by whimpering breaths, while she sat down in front of her dressing-table and searched for one of the nice big soft hankies she kept for his colds. Suddenly he cast himself down on his knees and buried his head in her lap, sobbing, ‘Sunflower, Sunflower, forgive me for being such a brute to you! Why do you let me do such awful things to you, why do you let me say these dreadful things! You don’t look after me, Sunflower. A woman ought to look after her man, keep him safe when he goes mad and wicked. Oh, Sunflower, Sunflower …’

  Turning, she smoothed his disordered crest of grey hairs, and let him have his cry out. Her eyes wandered to the clock. It was half past three; she probably would not get to sleep again for hours, as she would have to quiet him down; and the rehearsal was called at eleven.

  Nothing came alive in her at his weeping.r />
  III

  IT made her feel hot and cold all over to think of meeting Francis Pitt again after the fool she had made of herself the other evening at dinner, but it did not really matter because there was bubbling up in her causeless joy. She slipped her hand into Essington’s and began to hum, beating time with their linked hands, and looking out of the limousine windows at St John’s Wood, and liking it all. She liked the neat little stone houses, their whiteness tinted two colours by the evening, bluish with shadow on one side of the road and peachy with reflected sunset on the other and she liked the green pluminess of the spring rising above the garden walls. She liked the young men and girls walking along in light things and carrying tennis rackets, though they made her feel lonely, which was queer, as she was with Essington. It was odd to think that it was only a few hours since she had felt like killing herself because of that tiresome thing that had happened at rehearsal. Well, she didn’t care if they did start telling another funny story about her. Let them. She raised Essington’s knuckles to her lips, but his hand stiffened, and he drew it away.

  ‘What have you got on, Sunflower?’ he asked with querulousness.

  ‘That kind of Greek thing I got from Louise Conlanger. You know, the green one.’ She held back her cloak so that he could see it.

  ‘Mm …’ He looked away, pursed his lips behind his silver feelers, then came back to it. ‘Isn’t it rather … mm … dressed up for a quiet little dinner like tonight?’

  ‘Dressed up? Gracious, no. It’s what I wore the other night when we went and dined with old Lord Barrogh, and you said how just right it was for that sort of thing. That’s why I put it on tonight.’

  ‘Oh, I dare say it’s all right. I dare say it’s all right.’ After a pause he added plaintively, ‘Be a quiet little Sunflower tonight, won’t she? Not go peacocking about too much and looking too beautiful. Hang up her little ‘Reserved’ card. I’ve been hearing things about our little host.’

  ‘What sort of things?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. He’s evidently apt to be tiresome with women. Mechanically and promiscuously attentive. There have been several great affairs. One with a musical comedy actress, I forget her name. Anyway she weighed a lot, and it was all passionate.’

  ‘You mean Dolores Methuen. Well, that must have been a good time ago. For years now she’s looked like somebody’s rich aunt.’

  ‘Then there was something mysterious with Lady Juliet Lynn. Nobody knows quite what happened but for some years a good deal of money passed.’

  ‘I used to see a lot of her at one time,’ said Sunflower. ‘Charity matinées and that. She did a lot of war-work posing as the Madonna. She’s very lovely. For a titled person.’

  ‘And there have been others,’ Essington went on, ‘the little creature’s evidently an ardent woman-hunter. I thought I’d better tell you so that you could be careful.’

  ‘Who else have there been?’

  ‘I really don’t remember. One of the Nelly sisters, I think; and that tiresome young woman with protruding eyes whose husband was one of my supporters over Versailles, Mrs Lovatt, and Veronica Fawcett. Oh, a long list.’

  ‘Well, let’s be thankful that he seems to have spared the royal family as yet,’ said Sunflower crossly. ‘Who told you all this?’

  ‘Young Bramley. He’s reliable as a rule.’

  ‘Yes, he is,’ she agreed. ‘Still, we all know how these things are. You ought to know if anyone does how women crowd round men who’ve got famous. That Mrs Holtby been ringing you up today again?’

  ‘As a matter of fact she did,’ Essington admitted with an elaborate air of nonchalance. ‘But it was only about her pet crank.’

  ‘Ah, she may say it’s the suffering of Transylvanian Magyars under Roumania that’s worrying her,’ said Sunflower, darkly, ‘but if she goes on ringing up you’ll find it’s the same old thing she’s after.’

  She sank back in her seat, for the streets now seemed not so attractive as those through which they had passed earlier. But when the car had climbed Church Street and the ground began to fall away from each side of the road, her causeless joy had its way with her, and she pulled at his hand again, crying out, ‘Look what a pretty place! Why, you can see right down into the middle of London that side, and it’s all a goldy haze. And look at the other side. Why, there’s real country quite close. Is this Hampstead Heath? Why haven’t we come here before? Oh, did you see that dog running along and everybody getting out of its way? There were lots of people making their dogs swim in that pond we passed a second ago. I wish you liked dogs, I would so love one. But you hated little Li Hung Chang, you did.’ She remembered the last time he had spoken of the Pekinese, and there was a second’s silence. But the place and her mood carried her on, ‘Look, there’s a sort of Monkey’s Parade, like what we used to have down Hammersmith Broadway and Chiswick High Street, all the boys and girls walking up and down. Oh, I do think it’s lovely that almost everybody looks nice when they’re young anyway!’

  ‘Silly little Sunflower, who loves her kind.’

  ‘Well, what else is there to love?’

  ‘Me.’

  There fell between them one of those moments of embarrassment which happened always, ever since they had had that dreadful quarrel, whenever love was mentioned. It was invariably he who spoke of it now, whereas before it had been more common on her lips; and she could never think how to answer him, but found herself smiling insincerely. To hurry by the moment she said, seeing that the car had stopped outside a public-house, and the chauffeur was asking his way. ‘Mr Pitt does seem to live in an out-of-the-way place for a busy man.’

  ‘It’s likely to be rather an odd corner. I’m prepared for anything. I have a sort of idea that though our little friend’s personality seems so strong to us, it doesn’t seem so to him. He probably feels that if he went and lived in an ordinary row of houses he wouldn’t be noticed. This out-of-the-way house may be some queer attempt to rivet distinction on himself, to find a style. I don’t mean to advertise himself. It’s very likely to himself that he’s most anxious to make himself clear.’

  ‘I dare say,’ murmured Sunflower. But surely Essington was not being as clever as usual, for if there was one thing certain about Francis Pitt it was that he was strong and settled and definite. It was abundance of these qualities that made him able to be so protective.

  ‘Well, I may have been wrong,’ said Essington, a few moments later, as the car turned off the deep headlong swoop of the North End Road past wrought iron gates into an avenue of chestnut trees, which confused the seasons as trees of that sort do, being bright with white candles celebrating spring, but casting beneath them a shadow damp with the rich, rotting airs of autumn, in which the downward thrusting spears of sunshine seem to be forged of the strong light of midsummer. ‘I may be wrong. This looks as if the little scoundrel had found quite a good Georgian house lying about unwatched. No, by God, I wasn’t wrong Sunflower, did you ever see anything so odd? Isn’t it queer?’ he exclaimed exultantly, ‘Isn’t it queer?”

  She exclaimed, ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ and pressed defensively first to one window and then to the other, but there was no denying the queerness of the place. On what seemed, from the tall old trees and the unconfused blossoming of the land, to have been a park, someone had dropped a suburban garden. Wherever there were a few yards on the flat the gardener had put something trim and mean. In a glade of silver birches that at this hour, sunset-flushed, looked like nymphs, there was laid a star-shaped flower-bed planted with geraniums, calceolarias, and lobelias; at the foot of one great cedar there was a clock-golf green, and at the foot of another a clump of pampas-grass; and here and there, at the summit of knolls on whose sides grew flame-coloured azaleas, were plaster urns containing aloes and yuccas. There had evidently been some curious catastrophe here at some time or another; and its traces had not been removed but instead heavily ornamented. After two hundred yards or so the drive passed between two sections of a rui
ned brick wall, which was so thickly covered with rock-plants, that Sunflower pointed them out to Essington and said, laughing nervously, ‘Oh, someone feels over a seedman’s catalogue as I do over a shoe-shop—wants to buy the lot! That’ll be Miss Pitt! Women do buy like that, don’t they!’ And beyond it were signs of the same thing, for there was a garden which had probably been enclosed and levelled at the same time that the trees outside had been planted, but which now had a surface broken by all sorts of irregularities. There was a turf-lined, terraced pit which might have been a sunken garden; there were low banks on which had grown hedges at some time; there were grooves that marked the draining of an obliterated path; and over all these was flung an extravagance of star-shaped, circular and rhomboidal flower-beds containing bedded-out plants in acid tints, mauve petunias, magenta begonias, which the powerful oblique shafts of evening sunshine made so bright that they soured the mouth.

  ‘Oh, isn’t it awful!’ she giggled, and lifted up her arm in front of the window so that the folds of her cloak should prevent Essington from looking through it; but he looked out from his own side, and there was at any rate no keeping the house from him. And that, she found as the car stopped at the base of a wide flight of clipped stone steps with lace-work stucco banisters, and a footman opened the door, was worst of all. It was a villa of the sort that edge Wimbledon Common or Putney Heath, faced with a grey mixture of cement and sand the colour of cold porridge, and surmounted with a useless Italianate tower; but monstrously swollen beyond the size ordinary in its type. She felt curiously reluctant to climb the steps. There was something about the distension of the house and its hideousness that was a condemnation of everybody who had anything to do with it. ‘Somebody’s been proud,’ she thought, looking up at it; and she remembered the pig-face of the grocer her mother dealt with in Chiswick, who had inherited a little fortune and spent most of it building such a corpulent villa as this. One could imagine that it had been built by a man so brutishly stupid that when he was left a legacy that increased his income threefold he could think of nothing better to do than to get himself a house exactly like the one he was living in but three times as big. That accounted for the building of it; but there was no conceivable explanation why anyone who had the money to live there should not live somewhere else. It must, she feared, be another manifestation of that obvious male principle of unreason which made Essington prefer to live with her unpleasantly rather than pleasantly, which made him punish her for revealing intimacies to strangers by going on and on revealing to them things more intimate still …