The Fountain Overflows

by Rebecca West

  In the room behind us Cordelia said, “Mamma, the removal men have broken a chair.”

  Mamma said absently, “If they have left us enough to sit on, do not worry, this stuff is all rubbish.”

  A chill fell. It was as if I had grown heavy in my father’s arms. Of course I had had to tell Cordelia and Mary what had happened to Aunt Clara’s furniture. But we all loved Papa so much that somehow Mamma’s saying that seemed worse than Papa’s selling the furniture, and Mamma felt that too. She turned to him with a desperate movement and cried in tearful gaiety, “Take us round the garden. Did you play here with the other Richard Quin?”

  Papa shifted me to his other shoulder and, shambling a little as if he were old, led us out into the garden. He pointed to some straggling thickets on the wall and told us they were peach trees. Their branches hung down like trailing curtains, Cordelia ran and pushed them back and underneath were the neat trunks given them by early care. My mother exclaimed in distress at the neglect which they had suffered since and expressed the fear that they would bear no fruit for us. My father did not seem concerned. He told us how large and juicy the peaches had been, and how he and his brother had always had one each with cream and sugar for dessert with their supper. “We called our ponies Cream and Sugar,” he said. “They were not really our ponies, the old man in the big house lent them to us when we were staying here for our holidays. But we stabled them here.”

  “In those very stables?” said Mamma.

  “In those very stables,” said Papa. He put back his head and looked through his narrowed eyes at the roofs we could see over the wall, the ruined roofs. “‘Change and decay in all around I see.’” He gave a sneering laugh, set me down on the ground, and strolled towards a door in the wall, and sneered again because the rusty latch broke in his hand. Beyond was a courtyard feathered green underfoot with the camomile which grew thick between the cobblestones, buildings round it which stared with the blank eyes of glass-less windows. My father pushed back a door which hung squint on its hinges, and sauntered into a stable where more motes danced in the sunlight than had danced in that room in Edinburgh which had been so empty, because Aunt Clara’s furniture had gone out of it. The floor was strewn with pale wisps of litter, and where the walls met there were hundreds of brackets made by the dark velvet of old cobwebs. There were four stalls, and a door on which my father laid his hand and said, “This was a loose-box. Grand-Aunt Willoughby had a son called George, he was a naval officer, his horse Sultan was stabled in here, it was a black gelding.” He wheeled about, looking very grave, and called urgently, “Cordelia. Mary. Rose. Do you all understand that you must never go into a loose-box? You can do nothing more dangerous. The horse can get between you and the door in a second, and if he savages you, you are done. You must always remember that. Always.”

  Every now and then he used to give us counsels of this sort, which might have been relevant to his childhood, but were not to ours, and I think, from my recollections of his bearing at such moments, that he then felt pride because for once he was properly discharging his duties as a father.

  Leaving the dangerous territory, be said to Mamma in an undertone, “By the way, I am afraid that Manchester business came to nothing.”

  Softly she answered, “I am sorry for your sake, but what does it matter? You have a good position here.”

  Circling round the stalls, he said, “Pompey and Caesar were here. They were the carriage pair. They were fat old dapple-greys and groomed like satin, they always reminded us of one of our mother’s ball-gowns. This is where Cream and Sugar were. I rode Cream, Richard Quin rode Sugar, so did my brother Barry when he was here, but he hardly ever came. He had left Harrow by then and gone to the India Office. It was usually Richard Quin and I that were here by ourselves, and that was the way I liked it, we always ran well together in double harness. We had some wonderful times here. Those were the days when we had that French tutor I have told you about, my dear. . . .”

  He was gone from us again, but not, as so often happened, on a dangerous journey, from which he would come back not simply empty-handed, but bearing a loss that was positive. This time he had gone back to his childhood. We listened, our mouths open as if we were singing a hymn in his praise. Mamma was watching him as people watch fireworks. About us another autumn morning was hazy, a little later in another year. My father and his brother had not been able to go back to Harrow at the beginning of term because they had had measles and were being allowed some convalescent weeks. They had ridden a lot with their French tutor, who had to ride Sultan. This was not the hardship that might be imagined, when it was said that a French tutor had to take the mount that belonged to the son of an English household. For this French tutor was a man of mark, member of a gentlemanly Belgian family, who had become a geographer and held a lectureship in Paris when he was expelled from France as an atheist and an anarchist by Louis Napoleon after the coup d’état of 1851. My grandmother met him some years later, when she was travelling to forget the pain of her widowhood, and engaged him as tutor to her orphaned sons in the mistaken belief that he had been exiled from France as a Protestant rebel against Catholicism. He had discovered her error shortly after he arrived at her home in County Kerry, and had handled the situation sensitively and honourably, for he gave no hint of his real beliefs while he was under her roof, and taught her boys the elements of the classics and the French language and scientific method, without giving his instruction any peculiar character except a certain mid-nineteenth-century humanitarianism. My father, though very cruel, was very kind.

  All this I learned later. That morning Papa simply explained that the tutor knew how to ride, though he was a scholar and not a passionate horseman, and that George Willoughby, like many another naval officer, had his reasons for liking a quiet mount, and Sultan got very little exercise when his master was at sea and had grown thoroughly lazy. He waddled along, and the tutor had no trouble except when his charges got out of sight, for Cream and Sugar were very fast, they were fine spirited creatures and were well exercised during the boys’ term time when they went back to their owners’ stables. That day the tutor had angered the two boys by making them deal more scrupulously with their daily ten lines of Virgil than they thought fair on their holidays, so they lost him in the first few minutes of their ride, where there was a bridge and then a sharp turn and a canter up a hill. Not only were Cream and Sugar neat on their feet as ballet-dancers, they understood every word you said to them. So the two boys were able to dismount and get the two ponies to leave the road and scramble up a steep wooded bank, and keep dead quiet, at a word’s command, when the tutor jogged along the lane beneath, calling his charges’ names.

  I have seen miniatures of my father and his brother at that age; they were very lovely with their olive skins, and their light eyes fiery under long lashes, their dark hair streaked with gold, and their air of proud incompatibility with any sort of defeat. Human relations are essentially imperfect. Supposing that Papa had been the best of fathers, I would still have been hungry. Because I was his daughter I could not have known all of him, there was that continent in which I could not travel, the waste of time before I was born and he already existed. I could not have been a child with him, I could not have been with him and his brother when they knelt on the dry red beech leaves, with their laughing faces pressed against the pulsing silken necks of their crouched and panting ponies, the tree trunks rising sharp silver above them to the blue October haze.

  When Sultan’s hooves had clop-clopped up the lane the boys had their laughter out aloud and then led the ponies to the top. There they found some uplands which they did not know, and they followed the gates and came to a farm. An old woman wearing a mob-cap threw open a window and called them by their names, and told them to tie up their ponies in the yard and sit down to the wedding feast. This was a farm called Pinchbeck Hall, and the farmer’s daughter was marrying a London milkman. The boys obeyed her and went into one of the barns and found a lo
ng table set out, covered with food, with people sitting round it who were comfortable, ordinary people, mixed with others who had come out of a fairy tale. There were men wearing queerly cut broadcloth suits and women wearing tall hats and plaid shawls. For the milkman, like most London milkmen then and for long after, was Welsh. Papa did not remember the bride and bridegroom at all, so entranced was he by these fairy-tale people and by the food. That had been coarser and more impressive than the refined dishes he was accustomed to eat at his widowed mother’s table, or the spiced dishes enjoyed by Grand-Aunt Willoughby, who had spent most of her life in India. Here there were huge joints of beef, marbled with broad veins of fat, pork with splendid crackling, shining moulds of brawn, and great tongues lolling back on themselves, golden-crusted pies, jewel-bright jellies, foamy syllabubs, pitchers of solid cream, cheeses big as millstones, of sorts not known today. There was a great deal of laughter: these people made more noise when they laughed than the boys could have believed possible, they used to practise in the stables afterwards. And after the food was eaten there was singing. The Surrey people sang comically, all but one very young, flat-chested girl with big eyes, out of whose bony little body there had come a strong, languid, rich voice. “I wonder,” said Papa, “what happened to her afterwards,” and for a moment he paused and brooded.

  But then the Welsh guests stood up all together, stiff as soldiers, and sang like the sea, like the wind, like falling waters. Somebody asked if the two boys could sing. My father could not, he had from babyhood felt a fear that if he studied music he would grow up into a woman. But Richard Quin liked to sing, and was not shy, and he gave them “I Know that My Redeemer Liveth,” which he had been taught by his Aunt Florence, who afterwards broke the family’s heart by leaving the Low Church—like all Anglo-Irish, my father’s family were very Low Church—and joining Miss Sellon’s Sisterhood at Plymouth. He had a beautiful voice, and of course he was a most beautiful child, and the wedding party sat and dried their eyes. He was going to sing again, when a lad ran in shouting, and everybody poured out into the farmyard just as a russet streak flashed through it, throwing up before it a spray of squawking poultry. “It must be fun to be a fox,” said Papa dreamily. “To be a fox and kill poor things, and in the end be hunted.”

  “Fun?” asked Mamma in wonder.

  “Yes, in a way,” said Papa, but went on with his story. Then the horns were heard, while people hurried to open the gates on each side of the farmyard, and in a moment the hounds were through in a chanting white flood. Then came the thud of the hunt’s hooves, louder and louder, a fine sound, like thunder, and the sweating hunters brought along the sweating men in pink, but they did not turn into the farmyard, the horses had their heads so well set on the lane running past the farmyard and were going so hard that the riders could not turn aside, and looked over their shoulders with speed-glazed eyes as they were carried past the open gates. It struck Papa and Richard Quin as strange, as a little frightening that the people in the farmyard were shaken with their own huge kind of laughter because the hunt had lost their fox and their pack. These were the gentry. It served them right to have a bit of ill luck, for once.

  They were all going back to the barn to sing and drink some more when another horse came up the lane. It was rolling stiffly backwards and forwards like a rocking-horse. It was Sultan. The boys shouted and ran forward to stop him, which was not difficult, and they found their tutor unable to dismount. He went on sitting in the saddle, his eyes closed, saying, “Je meurs, je meurs, je meurs.” While the poor man had been searching the lanes for his charges the hunt had crossed his track, and Sultan had suddenly remembered his youth and joined the field. Nothing would stop him and he had cleared several hedges and a water-jump. It was no wonder that the French tutor, who had never hunted before, could say nothing but “Je meurs, je meurs, je meurs.” But it all worked out well, for the farm people had never heard of such a joke as a Frenchman who had been caught up into a hunt, and they stuffed him with food and brought him flagons of drink, and he ended by singing too. He gave them “La Marseillaise” and “Ça ira,” and had the Welsh people la-la-ing a fine chorus to them.

  At that Papa suddenly left the past. The story stopped. He was sad, we knew it, we moved away. He sauntered about the stable, humming “La Marseillaise,” which insensibly turned into “The Wearing of the Green,” the only tune he was really sure of, and poking with the worn toe of his shoe at such evidence of decay as a rusted bucket without a bottom, a birch broom which had retained only a few of its twigs, but making no move to alter their position. He was always making such movements, which spoke of an intense but inactive fastidiousness. For a time we lost him, and Mamma found him in a little room where there were three saddles hanging on the wall, half transmuted into a blue-green mould.

  My mother slipped her arm into his. “How lovely it will be, for you to work on this newspaper,” she said. “They have been so kind. They are sending a man to put up the beds this afternoon. The manager’s wife has found us a servant.” My father said nothing. He was often kind, but he was also ungrateful. My mother went on, “If this is a success it might lead to all sorts of things. The children,” she said after a pause, her voice rising bravely to hope, but muting its hope because she had known so much disappointment— “the children might have ponies. You would like that.”

  My father did not answer. “Like Cream and Sugar,” she mildly persisted.

  He pointed at the mouldy saddles. “That stuff is wonderful for cuts,” he said.

  “What?” exclaimed my mother.

  “Yes,” said my father. “There was an old saddle like this in the saddleroom at home, and whenever any of us boys cut ourselves Micky McGuire the groom used to take us in there, and rub the mould deep into the cut, and it always healed in no time.”

  My mother sighed with impatience at what was not to sound a reasonable remark until half a century had passed, and turned away. “Children, children,” she called. “You must have some luncheon and we must find some way of getting poor Richard Quin a place to rest. Oh, how good he has been!”

  All parts of the puzzle fell into place before nightfall. The man who came in the afternoon was, as Mamma put it in the language of the day, very civil, and he hammered up our beds and put up the dining-room table and moved the bookcases into Papa’s study, so Mamma was able to get him out of the way, for she told him that the best way he could help would be to unpack his books, though she knew he would only sit down and read them. But it was necessary to keep him in his study, for poor Mamma could not help groaning over the horrid furniture which was now all she had for the downstairs rooms. It was too shabby, even by our standards. There was a particularly dreadful set of chairs covered with red Spanish leather so worn that the surface was flaking off and leaving bare pinkish patches. We grieved with her, and we were surprised when she said that she had decided that the three copies of family portraits which had hung in our Edinburgh drawing room should go upstairs and that each of us girls should have one to hang over her bed. We could not imagine anything nicer, but we thought it a pity that, when she had to make a new drawing room without her good furniture, she should choose to do without these pictures too. But she said, speaking with some distaste, that she did not want to hang them where visitors could see them, lest it should appear that she was trying to make a grand impression by passing off as originals what were only copies.

  That seemed strange, for they were really very pretty, and surely Mamma could have explained what they were to anybody who seemed specially impressed. They were very good copies. Indeed, when they had been left to Mamma by a relative of Papa’s who had come out to South Africa just before he died and had liked her very much, there had been some hope that they were originals, which had been dismissed forever by a dealer when we got to Edinburgh. The one that would have been most valuable had it been what it seemed was a portrait by Gainsborough of our great-great-grandmother, which made its reference to the mystery of that artist�
�s career. She looked out of the canvas with narrowed eyes; it would have seemed natural if fine feelers had grown from her pursed little mouth; a feather headdress gave the illusion that she had two high-pricked ears set very high; and she was dressed in the faint fawns and blues a persian cat would choose to wear if it were changed into a woman. How was a fashionable portrait-painter able to persuade his clients, in an age not given to fantasy, to let him represent all their women as looking like cats? He might have been telling the truth about our ancestress, since Papa looked so like a great cat, but really there cannot ever have existed all over England and Scotland at one time a number of women all feline in appearance and all so wealthy that they could commission Gainsborough. Mamma could never understand it. Mary and I at once proposed that Cordelia should have this portrait hanging over her bed because we knew that otherwise she would be given first choice because she was the eldest, and we always thought that was bad for her.

  There was no question which picture could hang over Mary’s bed. Sir Thomas Lawrence had painted my grandfather’s eldest sister, Arabella, in a high-waisted gown of white satin, and with her smooth black hair, her oval face, her arched eyebrows, her undisturbed mouth, her long neck, and her air of being coolly herself within her clothes, she was exactly like Mary. She was said to have had a sad life, and it was true that she had early been left a widow, childless except for one daughter, from whom she was divided by one of those quarrels that were so frequent in my father’s family. There was no wrangling in these quarrels, they were merely silent and final separations. It was as if the people involved had looked into each other’s faces and been appalled at what they saw, and had turned away to walk in opposite directions. But there was no sign of sadness, no threat that she ever could be sad, she just looked like Mary, who never laughed aloud and rarely wept. That left for me Sir Martin Archer Shee’s portrait of our grand-aunt, who had been a clergyman’s wife, though that would not have been guessed from her costume. She wore a classical robe which left bare one arm and shoulder and shoulderblade, and she held a gold cup of antique design, to show off the beauty of her hands. Papa said she had been a mischievous woman. She had persuaded her foolish husband, who was much older than herself, to press an imaginary claim to an extinct barony, which had been warmly supported by one of the royal dukes, for reasons that made Papa and Mamma shake their heads. But you could see how it all happened. The cup she held, and the bracelet she wore around her upper arm, and the fillet binding her short golden curls, were studded with enormous jewels like crystallized fruits. An extinct barony, a royal duke, would be to her something she might find in Aladdin’s cave, and therefore hers by licence derived from a magic lamp or magic ring.