Sunflower

by Rebecca West

  Essington’s long hands motioned her to go at once. She turned and went towards the window. Sir John called after her. ‘Yes, go and say a word to my little daughter Billie. Get her to show you the diamond ring her father’s given her for her birthday. I have five beautiful daughters—Billie, Rhoda, Fay, Myrtle, and—ah, I was forgetting—and my little Fay. And I grudge them nothing …’

  As her father spoke her name the girl in the chair opened her speedwell blue eyes and lifted her tousled golden hair, so Sunflower had to go to her. She sat down beside her in a higher chair and murmured a greeting. She was all of a tremble. She hadn’t liked Sir John Murphy at all. He might think he was paying compliments, but it was like having your face licked.

  The girl did not return her greeting, but looked at her for a minute in a hard, rather hostile way before she spoke. ‘I’ve seen you at the Embassy sometimes with Maxine Tempest at lunch.’

  ‘Why, yes, we do go sometimes,’ said Sunflower. ‘She’s my best friend. She’s a sweet girl.’

  ‘Hm,’ said the girl, disagreeably and portentously. Sunflower saw that she too was drunk. Her golden head was nodding, her blue eyes were vacillating, like buttercups and speedwells swung by the stream in a flooded water-meadow.

  Sunflower exclaimed, ‘Oh!’ She wished she could have got the girl some coffee. It was difficult in someone else’s house.

  The girl said, as if making conversation with a bore: ‘We’ve been out seeing Ted Dawkins training at his quarters at St Albans.’ As Sunflower looked enquiringly she explained irritably, ‘Oh, the heavyweight! He’s fighting Larodier at Olympia on the third of June. I thought everybody knew that!’ She flung herself back into the chair, and shut her eyes again. ‘I’ve got such a head,’ she grumbled. ‘Dawkins’ manager gave us a new long drink of his. The Tired Tart’s Refresher, it’s called. Filthy stuff.’

  ‘I’ve got an aspirin in my bag,’ said Sunflower.

  It didn’t seem right that the poor thing should wash it down with another cocktail from the vast shaker, which her own father must have left at her elbow. Sunflower looked for help towards the two men, but Sir John was describing with gestures how he had once saved someone’s life with a lasso, and Essington was looking at him with the expression of a cat which sees a bird too wet and muddy for its fastidious claws to kill. She looked back at the girl and found her staring shakily at Essington with a tipsy, exaggerated smile of contempt. For a minute she closed her eyes, but opened them again and said, as if she must find a vent for her scorn, ‘I’ve seen you with him too.’ She jerked her head at Essington. ‘At the Berkeley and places. I suppose you think he’s wonderful.’ She laughed bitterly. ‘Well, you should have heard Canterton this afternoon while we were at St Albans. Showing him up. Saying what rot all this business about the League of Nations was. Nature red in tooth and claw. Oh, he was brilliant …’

  She drained her glass, drew her hand across her mouth, which had become loose, leaned forward, and tapped Sunflower on the knee. ‘Now, there is a really great man, Canterton!’

  ‘I’m sure,’ said Sunflower.

  ‘Marvellous memory. Read everything. The other night he sat in the Embassy reciting Keats till three in the morning. Made me cry. Far the best speaker they’ve ever had in Parliament. Making a most marvellous success of his ministry.’ She glared at Sunflower, trying to make her little flower-like face as much like a bulldog’s muzzle as possible. ‘Essington’s a failure.’

  ‘Well, he is and he isn’t,’ said Sunflower, ‘it all depends on the way you look at it.’

  But the girl had dropped back into her chair again and closed her eyes. ‘My head does hurt,’ she grumbled.

  ‘I’ve another aspirin, if you’d like it.’

  ‘It’s no use,’ refused the girl crossly. ‘I wish I could be sick, but I never can.’

  On the other side of the room Sir John cried, ‘Ah, my dear Francis!’

  So she had been right when she had guessed outside that something awful had happened in this house. He had been shocked, shocked right out of that thorough clumsy neatness, which she suddenly perceived, now that she was faced with its absence, to be piteous and lovable, since it was a defence he had built between his odd appearance and the world. His fox-coloured hair was wild about his ears; his shirt-front was bulging so that his queer lion body looked more top-heavy than ever; even his features seemed not so tidy as they had been, for his mouth was gaping in amazement. It was as if a violent emotion had been thrown over him like a jugful of water. There must be something terrible, something terrible. When he tried to give all these people he found in his room a general greeting he could not lift his face into a smile, for the strong anguish in him had moulded it into a heavy mask, a massive symbol. He was uglier than ever, the poor dear, for he was thrusting out his lower lip and stiffening his upper, like a child trying not to cry, and this made the creases between his nose and his mouth prodigiously heavy, like folds in a rhinoceros’s hide. That look he had had of vigilant, missionary mockery, watching life lest it crystallised into seriousness and had to be set moving again with laughter, had gone as completely as his neatness. His defences had failed, he wore instead the astonished look of a captive who right up to the moment of capture had believed in his luck. It had been his intention to have his life lit only by such flames as the azaleas that were set in the four corners of the room, and there had come on him this fire that had burned him till his flesh was ashen. Puck might have looked like this if he had stayed out in open country too long after dawn, been snared by mortals, christened though he kicked, and forcibly acquainted with human grief. At his sorrow something came alive in her. She got up to go across the room and comfort him.

  She stopped because he had seen her. He had seen her and he had been enormously interested. His interest ran through him like an electric shock, jerking his chin up from his shirt-front, lifting his loose eyelids. He looked straight at her, and it was as if he had shoved in front of her for her signature a printed statement that she had risen to come and comfort, because he wanted to keep forever a record of her kindness to him. Helplessly she looked back at him, and it was as if she had signed that statement, and would never be able to go back on it now. Well, she was not ashamed. If a person was in trouble you wanted to do what you could for them. Nevertheless she began to blush. It was the second time that she had blushed in his company, one of her awful blushes which could be seen a mile off, which ended by travelling right down over her shoulders. She drooped her head and felt a fool, lifted it again and smiled as foolishly at the top of the walls, at the bowls of roses on the bookshelves. But of course he did something kind about it and stopped looking at her immediately, and busied himself with greeting Essington and Sir John. Of course she had been wrong in her moment of resentful feeling that though it was subtlety he had been displaying he had forced her to take notice of the display with a compulsive gesture that was the very opposite of subtle, that was bullying and detective. Really he was the soul of protectiveness. He gave her quite a lot of time to get right before he ranged the men one on each side of him with an authoritative gesture of his pawlike hands and crossed the room towards the women.

  To her he said heavily, ‘I am very glad you have not disappointed me,’ and then looked down on the girl who was stirring stupidly in the deep armchair, wanting to get up but having so much trouble shifting her glass from her right hand to her left that she could not give her mind to it. His eyebrows drew together and his lips tightened. He was evidently surprised and grieved to see that she was drunk. But he said kindly, as if to a child, ‘And how are you, Billie?’ Probably he did not know these horrid people at all well, but was just nice to them when they pushed in on him. She knew what it was. Often enough people she hardly knew pretended to be great friends of hers and rushed at her when they met, and really it was very hard to know what to do.

  ‘Me dear Francis!’ answered Sir John. ‘How goes it?’

  ‘Badly, Jack,’ answered Francis, shaking
his head, ‘badly.’

  ‘Now isn’t that truly tragic, truly tragic!’ continued Sir John, happily and expansively. ‘I just had to come up and see how you were. I said to Billie, “I shan’t be able to eat my dinner till I know how Frank is,” and she believed me, for she knows her dad. It’s you I’m feeling for, my lad, more than him. Ah you’ve a great gift for friendship, Francis Pitt! And I always say so too. For I myself can stick up for my friends.’

  ‘That I know well!’ said Francis Pitt.

  The girl blurted out, “S’pose it’s hopeless?’

  There was sweat on his forehead. He moistened his lips before he answered patiently, ‘Why, yes, Billie, that’s what they say. It’s hopeless.’ He was evidently schooling himself to speak without expression, lest he should seem to be rebuking this poor tipsy child for the tactlessness that was caused by her condition.

  ‘Well, me dear boy,’ rattled on Sir John, his iron will keeping him to the matter of condolence, though his drunkenness was dissolving him into a confusion of glittering, unaimed smiles and springy, happy, wavering movements. ‘I’m sure nobody in God’s own world could be doing more for him than you are. Well I do know it. I was telling Thurston and Laidlaw so at lunch at the Savoy today, I was saying to them, “If there’s a way of saving him depend on it my old friend Francis Pitt will find it.” Yes, that’s what I said to them. I said, “I have known Francis Pitt since the old days in San Francisco, and let me tell you …” ’

  There seemed no reason why conversation based on this formula should ever come to an end. Not knowing what had happened to him was making her feel faint. She would have turned aside from the group had she not been anxious to prove to him that though she had been so silly and impulsive the first time they met she was really as calm and collected as anybody who wasn’t on the stage, who wasn’t living with somebody they weren’t married to. So she stood smiling politely, though every moment made it less easy. It struck her that now Francis Pitt was speaking to Murphy his American accent became much more marked than it had been when he talked with her and Essington, and that made her realise sharply how little she knew of his past, and that lots of people, some of them quite horrid people like Murphy, had shared in it and would know more than she ever would even if she got to know him quite well and he told her everything. She was annoyed to notice that Murphy also was speaking with a stronger American accent than he had used before Francis Pitt had come. These two wrought upon each other, they gave each other responses, there was a real comradeship. That was dreadful, because Murphy was a really bad man. It was loathsome the way that as he was talking to Francis Pitt he kept on patting and pawing him with insincere gestures of affection which distressed the eye with their falsity as a note sung out of tune distresses the ear. They were exactly the kind of gestures that she had made when she first went on the stage, that Essington was always saying she still made, that she would perhaps make as often as he had pretended had she not remembered what old Frederick Turner had taught her. He had always said that no gesture was valid unless when it was exaggerated it led straight to the climax of the emotion it was meant to illustrate. If a gesture of hate were really appropriate it should, performed with violence, become the motion of a blow or a dagger-thrust or a strangle-hold, and a gesture of love should bring friends side by side or man and woman breast to breast. But if these movements of false goodfellowship had been exaggerated absolutely nothing would happen. The two men would simply have toppled to and fro like those Russian skittle-shaped dolls that are weighted with lead in their feet, if Sir John had put all his force into clapping his left hand on Francis Pitt’s shoulder and Francis Pitt had put all his into clapping his right hand on Sir John’s upper arm …

  For Francis Pitt was doing it too. He was returning these false gestures in their own kind with adeptness, without repugnance. She shivered. It was as if behind her she had heard a whistling, a crazy whistling, that warned her that the enterprise on which she had come out was not safe.

  A feeling of resistant doggedness came on her. She compressed her lips and to shift her thoughts she turned her head away from the two men. Her eyes fell on the girl in the armchair, who was pressing a little handkerchief against her lips and looking as if, though she was so sulky that she did not want to call anything by its right name, she would soon have to admit that she was feeling sick. Sunflower sent an imploring glance at Francis Pitt and found his eyes just shifting from her face. With deliberate, canny, good humour he said, ‘But true friend as you’ve been to me, Jack, I refuse to take on the burden of all your friendships. I see no reason at all why I should have your friend Canterton parked in my hall!’

  The pleasantness was suddenly sponged off Murphy’s face. ‘And what’s wrong with Canterton?’

  ‘God knows, God knows!’ chuckled Francis Pitt. ‘Something that cost about twenty-seven shillings a bottle, I expect. Lanson ’11, I should think, if he’s been in your company for some hours. Anyway, Jack, it’s time you took him out of my hall.’

  Drunkenness was at last dissolving the iron will’s determination to be currying. ‘I’d like to know since when Canterton stopped being good enough for you! Let me tell you he’s my friend, and I am loyal to my friends …’

  Francis Pitt swung round so that his back was turned to Essington and Sunflower, but they could see from the thrust of his head and shoulders that he was ramming a steady stare into the other’s flushed, brawling face as he might have rammed a revolver muzzle. After a second he chuckled again, shifted his weight to one foot and said easily, ‘Yes, yes, I know well that Canterton’s a grand fellow, but just at the moment he seems to me not so good as I’ve seen him. So take him home, take him home.’

  ‘Sure, I’ll do that,’ responded Sir John, suddenly genial. ‘And I’m sorry it’s happened like this. ‘Tis his sense of the responsibilities that weigh too heavy on him at times and then he just helps himself over the stile, that’s what it is, he just helps himself over the stile. Let’s not forget that with all his weakness he’s a great man, a great man.’

  ‘Hurry along, Jack,’ said Francis Pitt, firmly. ‘The morals of my butler and my footman are going down by inches every time your friend snores.’

  Sir John shook hands exhaustively with Essington, who emitted a faint, distasteful, mewing sound. ‘It’s been one of the best days of my life, and mind you I mean what I say and am no flatterer, that I first met the man whom by and large I admire as much as any man who’s alive today.’ With an air of having been brought up to behave politely to ladies when he was young and never having forgotten it, he was careful to reassume an expression of urgent concupiscence when saying goodbye to Sunflower. Then he called, ‘Come on, Billie!’ in a tone that dreadfully expressed the minimum to which the relationship between father and child could be cut down. There was a sort of loyalty in it, as if the grizzled wolf would fight for his cub against the rest of the pack, a sort of kindness, as if he would let her bury her fangs in one flank of the carcase of his kill; and there was nothing more. With such late human inventions as her honour he would not concern himself.

  The girl stood up. The stubborn little golden moon of her face was preternaturally blank and stolid, and her body swayed to and fro like an inverted pendulum above her pony-like stance. She said contentiously to nobody, ‘I’m all right.’ They all, except her father, who was walking with a jockey’s springy tread to the door, watched her in agony. It seemed as if at any moment she would fall forward on the floor. Sunflower heard the breath hiss through Francis Pitt’s teeth as he moved forward to the rescue. He must be feeling awful. If you had these people carrying on like this in your house you would want to send everything away to the cleaners, they were so sort of dirty. And it was so dreadful for him that it had happened when he had got visitors, and one of them was Essington, whom he respected and would want to have everything nice for. She remembered how poor little Mummie had cried after she had the insurance manager’s wife who lived at the big house at the corner in to
tea and Aunt Emma had come in in the middle smelling of whisky and asking riddles. It was lovely of Francis Pitt to be so patient with the girl, to take her arm so gently and say so kindly as he led her out of the room, ‘You must come some day soon and tell me what you think of the new hard court.’ And he looked over his shoulder with a most apologetic air when he passed Sir John, who had paused at the open door to shout, ‘And I shall expect you and Miss Fassendyll at me party next Wednesday. Number one hundred Carlton House Terrace! ‘Tis slightly larger than the other houses in the Terrace. I’m giving this party for the Rajah of Kuda Tala, who’s a very old friend of mine, and we’re going to have a grand time—I’m having the Embassy band to dance to and Tetrazzini and Pachmann and Chaliapin and Nora Bayes for a spot of music, and me secretary—Pearl La Salle—ah, she’s a fine woman—’ he waved a hand at Sunflower as if to explain what he meant, ‘she’s thought out a colossal scheme of floral decoration! There’s going to be nothing on our tables but the best champagne and nothing on the walls but the finest orchids! And in my house, let me tell you, we allow a magnum of champagne for each person! So goodbye to you till then! From now on, Lord Essington and Miss Fassendyll, I count you as among my friends!’

  ‘Oh, too good of you!’ wailed Essington; and at last Francis’s short bearish arm came round the door, plucked Sir John by the coat sleeve and turned the handle.

  In the sudden peace Sunflower and Essington drew close together and slipped their hands into each other’s. They were both breathing deeply, as if they had been involved in a brawl.

  ‘Say what you like, it’s worse for a woman to get drunk than a man.’ She shuddered. Supposing it had been she whom Francis Pitt had seen flushed and staggering … She went on gravely, ‘I really oughtn’t to touch anything at all. You know, Ess, I had an aunt who used to take a drop too much, I did tell you that before we began.’