by Rebecca West
‘Will you come with me and see the statue at the end of my chestnut alley? I told you, it is a statue of love.’
Remembering the words made her feel exactly as hearing them had done: as if a little silver hammer had struck her nerves and shattered them into a thousand splinters of ecstasy. She wanted to hear his voice now, and be disintegrated by the shock of her love for him, and come together again so that she might again be disintegrated, and so on forever. She wondered how soon he would telephone her. It occurred to her, and her breath stopped with panic, that he might call her up when she was speaking to Mr Isaacson. She must make that call at once. Picking up the receiver, she said, ‘Gerrard 773612.’ Her eyes moved about the room. That slit of sea-coloured bathroom visible through the open door. She had a nice house. Below was the Chinese room, that cube of perfection. Above were the servants’ rooms, which were really quite pretty; that unpolished oak furniture looked so clean, and the sheets were linen though she had bought them unbleached and lavender-scented. Outside the house was London; outside London was England. The fine setting for the fine play. All the colours in the world seemed to have grown much brighter. It was as if someone had passed a silk handkerchief over the surface of the globe.
Parkyns said, ‘Please madam, there’s something in the garden that Cook thought you might like to see.’
She dropped the pen with which she had been writing a letter to her sister Lily. She had felt like writing to her this morning, though for some years there hadn’t been much between them except at Christmas and the children’s birthdays, all that about Essington making it so difficult; and now she had fixed it up with Mr Isaacson that she need not play tonight there wasn’t anything to do but wait.
She put her face against the window-pane. ‘I don’t see nothing, anything.’
‘It’s ever so small,’ said Parkyns, smiling.
‘Oh, it isn’t a kitten, is it?’
‘It isn’t a kitten’ said Parkyns. ‘I don’t remember ever having seen one of what it is before.’
Sunflower opened the French window and ran down the iron steps into the garden. It wasn’t such a bad place. She had done what she could with it by paving a good deal of it, and having just four big flower-beds, with all sorts of old-fashioned sweet-smelling herbs round the edge of them, because people always liked to touch the green stuff if you took them out there after dinner, and they seemed specially pleased when they found lavender and rosemary and southernwood on their hands.
Cook and Martyn were leaning out of the kitchen window, resting their busts on their folded arms, smiling at the thought of the surprise they had found for her. But she could not see anything. The beds were full of dwarf snapdragon, that flower which always looks furry and red-blooded, like a plump, bustling, high-coloured little woman, the sort who wears plain dresses that button tightly down the front but has her warm, romantic moments; the widow who inherits the public house and runs it herself, and is liked by all the men and suspected by all their wives, with much reason. But otherwise there was nothing.
‘It’s here, Madam!’ said Cook. ‘Just in front of us.’
There, on the paving-stones, lay a loosely assembled collection of knitting needles, making feeble gestures of rejection, like an old man who has no longer the strength to be as disagreeable as he once was refusing to be introduced to somebody.
‘Oh!’ cried Sunflower. ‘It’s a hedgehog! Isn’t London a funny country sort of place!’
‘We thought you’d like to have a look at it,’ said Cook importantly.
‘Of course I do! Oh, thank you ever so much for telling me! Oh, what a funny little thing. Who found it?’
‘Martyn did,’ said Cook.
‘Yes, madam, I found it when I was putting out the white brocade bag to air after I’d washed it with petrol.’ She giggled. ‘Thought of keeping it to myself and slipping it into Cook’s bed for a surprise.’
Cook’s elbow nudged her in the ribs. ‘You’d have found something in your soup that would have surprised you!’
There were more giggles. Those two were good friends; but Parkyns always seemed a bit out of it. That was the worst of keeping three. It was apt to happen that way, not that any of them meant to be unkind. She beckoned Parkyns to come closer to her.
‘How do you suppose it ever got here? From one of the parks? Oh, look, look, you can see little winking eyes!’
The door between the front and the back garden slammed. It was Harrowby. He took off his coat and grunted some salutation and propped himself against the wall by the acacia tree. As always now, he looked terribly ill.
She called out to him, ‘Good morning, Harrowby! Look, we’ve got a visitor!’
His eyes went to it, but disregarding it and what she said he asked gruffly, ‘When will you be wanting me?’
That was surly, but you couldn’t blame him when he felt as bad as he evidently did. ‘Oh, Harrowby, not till tonight. I want to be up at Mr Pitt’s at eight.’ She was a little confused. Surely her happiness must be written all over her, they were all looking at her with a certain interested fixity, Parkyns, the two at the window, Harrowby with his cap half across his face. She bent over the hedgehog and cried out, in animation that was not feigned, because now the whole of life was so lovely to her that she had only to bend her attention to any part of it to become immediately enchanted. ‘Isn’t it silly to stick out its quills like that, when we don’t mean it any harm? Oh, I wish it was more like a kitten or puppy, and one could pick it up and make a fuss of it! Aren’t you silly to have a lot of quills instead of nice soft fur or a nice short coat! Oh, Parkyns, aren’t its little eyes funny?’
Parkyns, at her elbow, murmured benignantly, ‘They are indeed, madam.’
She appealed to Cook and Martyn. ‘Can’t we give it something to eat? Perhaps it’ll stay then. What does a hedgehog like to eat?’
They looked doubtful, indisposed to make suggestions. The initial discovery of the animal had put them in a strong position, they did not want to weaken it by any confession of ignorance about its diet.
‘There’s always lettuce leaves,’ said Parkyns, timidly.
‘It doesn’t look very vegetarian to me,’ said Cook coldly.
Harrowby spoke suddenly. ‘We had a lot of them at home, down at Warleigh, where my father is head keeper. We don’t think anything of them there.’ He said it sourly and desperately, and added contemptuously, ‘But them that take any notice of them give them milk.’
Illness took people such different ways. ‘Milk? Oh, thank you, Harrowby,’ said Sunflower. ‘Cook, give me some milk, please.’
Cook turned away. The white ‘X’ drawn on her broad flowered back by her apron straps showed for a minute in the interior dusk. Sunflower went to the window and laid her fingers on the ledge, doing a dance step to pass the time and singing over her shoulder to the knitting needles, ‘Oh, Mr Hereward, don’t run away!’ Parkyns and Martyn laughed slowly, happily, fondly.
‘Mind you don’t mess your dress, Madam,’ said Cook indulgently. ‘I’ve filled the saucer rather full.’
Sunflower set it down on the stones. ‘No, that isn’t what he wants. He isn’t taking a bit of notice. Oh, yes, he is. Harrowby, you were quite right. What lots of things you must know, being brought up in the country. Oh, look how he’s drinking it up. The poor thing must have been hungry. Now he’s put down all his quills. You’d hardly know he had any. I wonder whether you could ever make him fond of you if you gave him milk regularly, and if he would ever let you pick him up. Oh, look at the funny, funny way his nose works when he drinks.’
It was queer to be living life in two parallel columns, to be bending over the hedgehog and seeing that like anybody else it was divided and distraught, acting far more grown-up and self-possessed than it felt inside itself. For though in what it did with its quills it was like a testy old man, its winking eyes showed it piteous and playful as little animals are; and at the same time remembering with all one’s mind and one’s flesh what
had happened beside the statue at the end of the chestnut alley.
When they had gone out of the house the night had seemed like a great, stirring snake, because of a young moon behind quick clouds, which perpetually cast on the earth faint, gleaming, changing patterns of black and white. All, all was movement, though it was very still. They did not speak a word, yet they were travelling fast as falling stars into a new relationship. When they came to the place where the path rose in steep steps between high walls of shrubs he put his hand on her arm to guide her, pressing his fingers into her flesh, not violently but gently, generously, dependently, to fuse the warmth that was in both their bodies, to share with her what he had that was good, to beg from her what she had that was good. From sheer habit she steeled herself against this delight, and leaned away from him. His fingers stiffened, he was hurt. Then she remembered she was free and moved back close to him, letting her body droop and her breath come softly, so that through the darkness he could feel her submission. His hand was contented again, closed on her arm, ran down it, made a bracelet round her wrist. She had never known him so utterly without laughter. That must mean that at last he felt safe, for his humour was a kind of knuckleduster he carried about with him, a method of defence. Gravity was his tonight, and an immense pride which towered above him like a strong pillar. When they were passing through the dark places in the chestnut alley, where two lines of trees made a tunnel, he was like her breathing hardly at all, moving as if his body were steeped in tenderness as in a softening fluid; but when they stepped into the bright places where there were no trees on the south side, and the moon watched them and the house looked up from the hollow with lighted windows, he walked like a very tall man. Twice his fingers tightened on her wrist and he stood still, drawing her towards him so that they looked into each other’s faces. Then it was as if she were bearing the weight of his soul on hers. There was no thought in that moment, and no feeling. Afterwards, she did not know whether she had been able to see his face through the dusk. All she had known was that he was giving himself to her, and she was taking him. The second time he did this it was as if he had said to himself that it could not really have happened the first time, he seemed to be standing a little way back from the experience in a verifying wonder. Then he pointed to the half-seen whiteness ahead of them and muttered urgently, ‘The statue! The statue!’ and hurried her on, as if since they had done so much they must do more.
On a square pedestal, shoulder-high, stood a boy with wings. He was a child, so that his limbs were round; but he was grown enough to have a hollow back and proudly carried loins. A cloud dressed him in their darkness.
She murmured, ‘Oh … I thought there was a fountain here.’
He answered, ‘No. Only this statue. Of love.’
He had loosened his hold of her. She was not sure if she could stand alone. Swaying, she looked up at the boy and her head fell back on her throat. She stretched up her arms and moulded in the air the childish roundness of his limbs, whispering, ‘I would like to be a sculptor … I would like to make figures out of wet clay …’
Francis Pitt struck down her hands, not cruelly, not kindly. Simply he wanted them for himself, to fold in his, to put to his great mouth. Then, as if he were making an immense trial of strength, he stepped backwards and stood apart from her, and shook himself, and made a soft, roaring noise of triumph, because though they were separate they were still as linked as if the same blood were flowing by some canal through both their hearts. And solemnly he said, ‘Sunflower, I love you very, very much.’
Remembering this, she felt again that silver hammer strike her nerves and shatter them into a thousand splinters of ecstasy. She drowned in a deep sea, and in the depths was given back her life, and slowly floated up, and up, and up, into the light, into the sunshine of the garden, into the sunshine where the hedgehog was wriggling its nose on the bottom of the saucer and making it jump on its base, and the three women in the print dresses smiled at her with their nice country faces, and poor Harrowby leaned against the wall, turning his head towards his own shadow, as if he found the noon brightness a little trying. She had never really been away from these things, she had been looking down at the saucer, at the diminishing circle of milk and thinking, ‘Now that’s too yellow for nature, yellow down to the last drop, country milk’s whiter, but there, what are you to do, all London milk is dyed with that annatto stuff, and it’s no use changing the dairy, for they all belong to the same combine and one’s the same as another.’ Yet at the same time she had been with Francis out in the night that was like a stirring snake, she had felt him give her his soul and herself take it, she had heard him say, ‘Sunflower, I love you very, very much.’ She supposed that it would always be so now. That beside the plain buff surface of life there would be the golden stripe of what happened to her with him, and she could always put out her hand from any dreary place where she might be and touch it with her memory and relive its loveliness. It was a pity she did not go to church now, for she could think of him during the sermon. There was nothing he was not doing for her, he was putting her on a ledge in the universe where she would never be fatigued or bored, he was making her, he was saving her.
She wondered if the others had noticed how far away she had gone that minute. She glanced shyly from face to face. Harrowby had seen nothing. He looked as if he were blind with a sick headache. But the three women were smiling at her with a hushed, steady kindliness. She was afraid they noticed she was very happy. It was nice of them to be glad. They must like her! But it made her feel confused, that they should have seen signs of this most private thing. She smiled back at them partly out of gratitude, partly to hide her embarrassment, and tried to think of some remark that would shift their attention from herself. She looked behind her at the garden and thought that the streaked dark red snapdragons were just the same colour as the juice on one’s plate when one had eaten damson tart and cream, and was not sure she really liked lavender, you felt it was aware that it was plain but very fragrant, and had the same acid sense of superiority over mere flowers that character actresses of ability have over all actresses, able or not, who play straight parts. That was no use, she turned round and looked up at the house: her house, that was at last free of Essington, in which she no longer needed to sit despondently like the stupid pupil of an irascible tutor, in which she could now lead her own life and do all the silly, funny things she wanted.
She called out, ‘I think I shall buy a dog!’
All three exclaimed, ‘Ooh yes!’ and Cook said handsomely, as if giving her full permission, ‘Yes, we’d like a bow-wow in the house again.’
‘You mustn’t steal him though!’ she warned them. ‘I don’t ever see Pussy, he’s always in the kitchen with you!’
At that moment, as if he had heard himself being spoken of, and wanted to see that no liberties were taken, Sambo thrust his three-cornered black velvet nose between the two print elbows on the window-ledge, closed his eyes as if to announce that he saw nothing worth seeing, let the exquisite moulding of his muzzle be delicately severed in two by a yawn, waved a pink strip of tongue, closed up all with a snap, and then did a brief, derisive, twitching dance with his ears, as if to make it quite plain that that had indeed been all he thought of the matter.
‘Oh, you know, he’s rude!’ exclaimed Sunflower.
‘Bless his Almightiness,’ said Cook, giving him a pat which he accepted with the tolerance of a young man who has married for money, and found that there is quite a lot of money. ‘He knows who his friends are.’
Parkyns said, in rather a low tone, so as to make the other two feel out of it, ‘What breed were you thinking of having, Madam?’
‘Oh, let’s have another peke!’ said Martyn.
Sunflower shook her head. She had cried so when she had had to give up Li Hung Chang. ‘A terrier would be nice … a Sealyham …’
She stopped. She had remembered that Francis Pitt had promised her one of the borzoi pups.
T
he night before drew her back to itself. There they had stood, and he had said those words about loving her. The cloud had travelled past the moon and as it passed unwound the veil of darkness from the statue, as if it were a scarf that had trailed from its hand. A rack of it remained for a little about the child’s right shoulder, and right arm, then he gleamed wholly white and dominant, the governor of this clearing. Putting her palms together under her chin, she answered, ‘Francis, I love you very, very much.’
He had held up his hand with one of his queer, pompous, great actor gestures. Heavily and conscientiously, like a rich merchant sitting in his office behind a vast mahogany desk and explaining the terms of a contract to one about to sign it whom he wished not to deceive, both because of his sense of honour and a matter of liking, he said: ‘Sunflower, I do not mean I love you as a friend. I do love my friends, I am loyal to my friends. But you, Sunflower, I love as a man loves a woman.’
His voice sounded false, it was so deep and laboured. She smiled to herself in the dark at this seeming falseness, it was so strangely at variance with his impassioned honesty, and it sprang from so dear a cause. For he was forcing his voice down as low as it could go, down far below where he could manage it, so that he should sound male.
