Sunflower

by Rebecca West

  From thoughts such as these she was always called by her need, which was as insistent as a drugtaker’s desire for his dose, to look at Francis Pitt; and every time she looked at him his eyes had just slid away from her face. Surely he was always thinking of her just as she was always thinking of him. Every now and then he would say something that showed he had been furtively watching her all that evening and all the other evenings. ‘Miss Fassendyll doesn’t like endive salad. Take it away. Remember she likes lettuce.’ Sometimes it made her quite sure that he loved her. Sometimes she thought she was under the spell or a delusion, for it seemed to her that Essington also was furtively watching her; and even Etta too. But that was understandable, for when Etta looked at her she also looked sorry for her. Sunflower knew that she was thinking of how dreadfully Essington had behaved at that first dinner, and she was probably imagining that he was like that all the time whereas he had been so much, much better lately. She used to smile at Etta reassuringly. But fortunately at that stage in the dinner there would come suddenly a burst of that good fellowship which was drawing them together night after night to the exclusion of all other friends. As if a whip had been cracked as a signal the two men became extravagantly genial, they brought the women into the conversation, they teased them, they made a fuss of them. Francis Pitt told stories that illustrated Etta’s Marthadom, Essington demonstrated, but was nice about Sunflower’s stupidity. ‘It isn’t that the dear creature’s stupid, she’s guileless. She can’t believe that anybody can say anything that they don’t mean. It’s astonishing how that incapacity eats through modern life …’

  But it had all been different, it had not been so breathless, so torturing, since the night which was the last they had spent together. After dinner Etta had gone to telephone the nurse’s ten o’clock report to the doctor, and the rest of them had gone up as they always did to try to help Hurrell through the period before midnight, which was the worst time in the twenty-four hours for him, because he woke from the doze of exhaustion which followed the effort of eating his supper and lay tossing and sweating in a state that was as different as sleep from ordinary wakefulness, that was as if bright lights had been turned on inside his brain. Essington was sitting by his bed, twirling his moustache in his fussy way, and purring scandalous insinuations against all the more respectable members of the Liberal Party when the smile died on Hurrell’s face, which was now so terribly thin that it was just a cage for his spirit, and there was a queer rattling noise as if his spirit had run in terror to the bars of its cage and was shaking them. Francis Pitt, who had been sitting hunched on the other side of the bed, sprang up with an air of coming into his own, saying, ‘Go out, go out.’ Sunflower ran out on to the landing and called over the banisters, ‘Nurse! Nurse!’ and Essington came and stood beside her, breathing quickly. The nurse ran upstairs with a flouncing of starched petticoats and asked an unnecessary question without waiting for an answer. Essington muttered squeamishly, ‘The human machine, the human machine,’ and covered his mouth with his hand. She murmured, ‘Go downstairs and get some brandy for yourself, dear,’ keeping her eyes on the door. Presently it opened and Francis Pitt came out. He remembered to shut it very gently, and then leaned heavily against the latch. She went to him and put out her arms for him to take, and said, ‘Come away with me.’ Without speaking he lifted his head so that she could see what had happened. His shirt-front was soaked with the sick man’s blood. His great mouth was working with disgust, but his loyalty to his friend was making him choke back all sound. She felt angry with Hurrell. She said, ‘Which is your bedroom?’ She hated not knowing. He wagged his head towards one of the mahogany doors, and she led him to it. There was blood on his hands too, so she had to open the door. It was a very ugly room with nothing personal about it; poor dear, he had not been able to furnish even his own room. Without turning on the light in case he wanted to cry she took him to the bed and said, ‘Lie down, lie down.’ Afterwards she was quite sure she had not called him dear. He obeyed and lay down across the bed. He was so little that he did not reach all the way across it. She went to the dressing-table and found a pair of scissors, calling comforting things to him softly over her shoulder. He whimpered just so that she could hear it, as if to ask her to go on, as if to tell her there was need of it. Then she went back and cut the starched front of his shirt away from the soft linen body. All the while he was shuddering with disgust and making these little whimpering sounds. It struck her as queer that he should love his friend and yet get into such a state over contact with his blood, particularly as it wasn’t really very bad, for the blood had not soaked through the starched shirt-front, it had not stained his vest, much less touched his skin. It did seem odd that unless men were trained to it as doctors, they cannot do what almost any woman can, and perform a kind of alchemy in their minds which takes the horror away from any substance provided that it belongs to somebody one is looking after, so that when one is minding a baby or a sick person one never thinks of that sort of thing. He loved Hurrell, but he simply could not do that for him. As her hands worked over him, slipping down between his flesh and his collar so that she could pull out the stud and free the shirt-front, she realised that there were many things which, like this, he simply could not do. Even should it happen that he loved her, if they went on a journey together and met with hardship he would not be able to go on being sweet to her; if she made herself ridiculous in front of other people he would not be able to be loyal; if he had to choose between hurting her or himself he would not be able to choose to hurt himself. But all that was not really of the slightest importance. She had strength enough for both of them. Seeing that he was straining to lift his head and brace himself, she murmured, ‘Don’t try, faint if you want to, it won’t do you any harm, it’s trying not to that makes you feel so bad, just shut your eyes and let go. Pretend you’re asleep …’ His body loosened, he lay quite still. She had to slip her hand under his neck to take out his back collar-stud, and his big head wobbled. It was funny having him this way. It was like undressing a drowsy baby; one felt that the next thing to be done was to pick him up and carry him with his little tummy against one’s shoulder and his big mouth uttering woeful sleepy cries into a steaming bathroom full of warm fleecy towels. She had cut away all the bloodstained linen by now, but she continued to stand and look down on him, for she knew she would never have him this way again. It was safe for her to do that, since his eyes were shut. She bent quite low over him, trying to note all the dear oddness of his appearance through the darkness that the wedge of light from the open door just raised to twilight. Then she saw that his eyes were not shut. He was lying there looking up at her. For a long time they stayed so. Then Essington’s voice spoke meekly from the door. ‘Can’t I do anything?’ She turned and saw him standing on the threshold, the light striking on his bowed head, and his long, fine, wrinkled hand, which he was resting on the door-post, very high, above his head, as if that helped him to pull up his bowed shoulders. She answered, ‘I know, I know, I shall be out in a minute.’ Francis Pitt rolled over on his side and lay with his cheek on his folded hands. Now his eyes were shut. She lifted his dressing-gown from the chair where it had been left ready for the night and laid it over him, whispering, ‘We’ll go. You needn’t come downstairs again. I hope everything’ll be all right.’ He did not seem to hear. A long deep breath shook him. She took the bloodstained linen in her hand, in case the sight of it should upset him when he rose and turned on the light, and went out on to the landing to Essington. He was leaning on the banisters. Looking down into the hall, he said, ‘Stay with him if there’s anything you can do.’ She answered, ‘No, I want to go home.’ He turned and ran very quickly down the stairs, saying, ‘I hope Harrowby is ready, I hope the car is there …’

  She did not know what had happened then; only that something had happened. When one is falling from a great height one knows nothing except that one is falling. But after that she had never worried so much about how things were bet
ween them. Why should he have lain like that, little and not moving, unless he felt happy at being looked after by her? And what could one want more than that? Anyway it was lovely to remember, particularly that little time when he had just lain still and looked up at her, and perhaps it was as well that she had never been back to the house by night, because now she never thought of it with darkness among its heavy hangings and in its raw-toned rooms without feeling again that atmosphere which had throbbed with grief, and tenderness, and gratitude. But of course when her play had first started she had not felt that way, she had missed going up to dine with him quite dreadfully. That first night she had sat in her dressing-gown in front of her mirror, pinning her orchid to her shoulder-strap, because that was the sort of thing nobody could do for you, not properly, and thinking, ‘If I did not have to act, I would be driving up to his house now, the car would be going through that funny garden, I should be going to see him in a few minutes, if I did not have to act.’ And as she stared into the glass she suddenly perceived that there was looking back at her a face haggard with hunger. Two great lines were stamped upright between her eyebrows, her lips were thin and drawn backwards. In fear she exclaimed to herself, ‘What, do I care as much as all that?’ It could not be wise to care as much as all that. There stirred in her mind a recollection of how one day when she was so small that she still played on the floor a woman carrying in her arms a new loaf which smelt nice had come and stood for ever so long with Mother at the front door, while they talked in low voices of someone who was in a bad way, a very bad way, because a soldier had left her. She trembled with fear, she opened her powder box and shut it again, and pulled the lid off a jar of cold cream without looking what she was doing, as if her flesh, more foolish than her eyes, hoped there was something really useful kept in these little china things, something magic that one could eat and be happy. She was even glad when the call-boy came and she had to go on the stage and play that silly part.

  It was queer that people liked her better in this than in anything else she had ever done, because she had never hated acting so violently before nor gone through a performance so blindly. She could not keep her mind on what she was saying, she walked about the stage in a fluid, desperate state, never holding a pose because she had no clear sense of what pose she was taking nor confidence that any of them were relevant, speaking and moving with a special intensity because of her need to work off the restlessness that nowadays was always tormenting her like prickly heat felt inside instead of outside the skin. But it was true that though you would have thought that going on like this you wouldn’t get anywhere, she found herself establishing a relationship with her audience which had more life in it than anything she’d ever got before. When she cried out those lines in the third act, her mind blank of all sense of what they meant and dizzy with the effort to keep from abandoning itself to thoughts of Francis Pitt, she felt an extraordinary effect of strong impact with the audience. It was as if she had become hysterical and done something violent and satisfying with her hand and then heard the smash of breaking china. What she was doing could not be quite right, for though this was just the same passionate effect that great actors got they knew what they were doing as they did it, and achieved a serenity contemporaneous and co-equal with their passion. But at any rate she had broken out of her old stupidity. She was not being bad any more in the way that Essington had always laughed at. She was not imagining this, other people felt it just as well. The papers said quite a lot about reversing their opinion. There had been several marvellous notices, some of them so good in this new allusive way that you had to go and look things up in the encyclopaedia. One young man who, she learned on enquiry, had been considered very clever at Oxford, wrote in one of the evening papers: ‘In her difficult moments we hail the great, glowing, grape-golden compeer of El Greco and Scriabin, with this and that of the simple magic of Michelangelo and Bach, when she has but to sweep loveliness from the ambient air with common motions of her fingertips and the flatter remarks of the not ever nearly worthy (as who could be, save maybe Euripides and WWerfel) dramatist.’ Essington himself had said after the first night, petulantly and yet with a kind of awe in his voice, ‘You’ve changed, Sunflower. I don’t know that you’ll do any good by confusing your public …’ And Francis Pitt had seen it too. He had not been at the first night, for she had begged him to stay away in case she made a silly of herself, but he had sat in a box all by himself on the second night and came round afterwards to take her out to supper at the Embassy. He had stood in her dressing-room, rather silent and awkward, which she quite understood for it was the first time they had met since that queer time when she had cut out his shirt-front. She had been immensely amused to see how his queer shy eyes which appraised everything within sight, not avariciously but in the spirit of a child waiting with its mother in a greengrocer’s shop who pinches the fruit just to see what it feels like, lingered on the tubes of greasepaint in front of her mirror, the stage costumes hanging on the pegs, the gold silk wrapper lying in a semi-circle on the floor where she had stepped out of it, the flowers, the telegrams pinned on the wall, the dresser in her tight black gown eyeing the visitor with a flattering air of discretion. She fancied she saw him holding himself with a self-conscious swagger, pouting out his lips into a bad man’s expression. Naively, childishly, it seemed to her, he was saying, ‘I am in an actress’s dressing-room.’ Then she remembered the stories about him and Dolores Methuen and the Nelly Sisters and she perceived that what was thrilling him about the scene was not its novelty but its familiarity, its association with past private delights. For a minute she looked away from him and continued to powder her neck and arms, trying to bring back to mind various sermons against jealousy that Essington had read her from time to time, particularly in the middle period of their life together, when she had cared more for him than he did for her. But it wasn’t any good, she couldn’t bear it, she found herself doing what one so queerly does towards men, and appealed to him for help against the hurt he himself was inflicting on her. She twisted round in her chair and cried out to him vehemently, through something ordinary he was saying about the play, ‘But what did you really think of me? What did you really think of me?’ He seemed embarrassed by her importunity. He thrust out his chin, lowered his eyelids, and said stiffly, like a man who has been begged by a woman to speak of intimate matters that he himself would have been too delicate to raise, ‘You’re acting quite differently from the way you’ve acted in any other play I’ve seen you in. You’ve … altered completely.’ Oh, he hadn’t liked her! There was something disagreeable, something resistant, almost a sneer in his tone. She dropped her powder-puff and clasped her hands and cried out, ‘Then you didn’t like it!’ His face changed. For a minute he looked at her with an expression that was startled and honest and kindly. Then his eyes flickered, and the blood rose under his skin, and he said in that thick voice he often used to her, which sounded as if he were tasting good wine, eating delicious food, ‘I never liked anything better in my life.’ She had a curious feeling that in saying that he had abandoned himself to a temptation which he had meant to resist.