by Rebecca West
When we heard the front door close we looked out of the basement window and saw that the man was walking out of the garden to his brougham, openly wiping his eyes with his handkerchief, and we hoped that Mamma had simply been comforting him for a trouble which had nothing to do with us. But Mamma’s face was white when we went upstairs, and she did not have luncheon with us, she told us that she had a headache and must lie down. We more or less forgot about the enigmatic incident when we were out for our walk and at our practice, for we never would have succeeded in getting through our childhood if we had not cultivated the art of ignoring the unpleasant till it was forced on our attention. She came down into the sitting room about four, and when Kate rang the bell to tell us that tea was ready in the dining room, we all went together into the hall, and found a strange and handsome lady talking to Kate at the open front door. When she saw Mamma she stepped past Kate into the hall and said, in an affected tone, as if she were reciting in an elocution class, “I think my husband called on you this morning. I would be glad if you could give me a little of your time.” She had blue-black hair and big brown eyes and red cheeks, and it was all too much; and though she seemed excited she gave an impression of being fundamentally lethargic, it was like seeing a cow running fast. Her hat was too romantic for her round face. Mamma scrutinized her and sighed deeply, and told Kate to give us tea.
When we had finished, Kate kept us in the dining room; and after an hour or so Mamma came into the room, exclaiming, “Charbovari! Charbovari! It is most extraordinary!” Though the word sounded funny she spoke it tragically.
“What is Charbovari?” we asked.
“Somebody in a book,” she explained wildly. “His real name was Charles Bovary, they called him Charbovari at school to make fun of him, everybody was always horrible to him. And Emma too. It is all most extraordinary. I am looking for the book they are in.”
“We will find it,” said Mary. We were always finding books for Papa. “What is it called?”
“It is called Madame Bovary, it is by Gustave Flaubert. Did we not put all the French books together in one of the bookcases, or did I only mean to do it?”
We found it for her, and Kate asked her if she would not like some tea, and she said that she wanted nothing, and, with the book open in her hand, went back to the sitting room. When we halted at the door and asked her if she would rather we stayed with Kate in the kitchen, she said no, that we were never to think we were a trouble to her, but she did not lift her eyes from the page. She sat deep in an armchair, looking very small, and went on reading while we sat on the floor and built castles for Richard Quin with some German bricks she had had when she was little. She was plainly quite unconscious that we were there, which never happened; and she never remembered that it was Saturday night, and that every Saturday night she read the Arabian Nights to us. At first I wondered if we ought to remind her, for she was not enjoying her book, and from time to time uttered exclamations which seemed to express recognition of a distasteful object. But presently she liked it, indeed, she liked it very much, for she uttered the same cries of pleasure we often heard when she was playing music which she thought beautiful. At length we heard the front door open, and Papa came into the room. We stopped our game, and after wishing him a subdued good evening we fell silent, expecting that Mamma would tell us to go away, so that she could tell him about this mysterious trouble which involved the Mayor and Mayoress of Lovegrove.
But when Papa announced his presence to Mamma by bending over her she stared absently up at him, smiled brilliantly, and said, “Madame Bovary is really a wonderful book.”
Papa casually agreed. “Yes. Much better than L’Education Sentimentale, though few French people will say so.”
“I had not read it for years,” Mamma continued happily, “and I had forgotten how good it is! The famous scene at the prize-giving I find not half as remarkable as I used to think it. He satirizes things not worth satirizing, but how good is the passage describing Emma’s state of mind when she took up life at home after the visit to the château at La Vaubyessard!”
“I don’t remember that,” said Papa. “What has always remained in my mind is a chapter where he first gives you the dreams of Charles Bovary and then Emma’s dream, and builds up their characters quite solidly out of that.”
“I haven’t come to that yet,” said Mamma. “But this passage about her life after the visit to the château is the same sort of trick, an inspired list of little things. Emma takes the vicomte’s green silk cigar-case out of a cupboard where she has hidden it and inhales the smell, and she buys a map of Paris and goes walking on it with her fingertips, and at the end of the chapter you’re convinced that reality has gone from the poor creature’s mind forever, she is lost.”
“I never could make up my mind whether there is or is not too much of the pharmacien,” said Papa. “Well, I shall go and see if there are any letters in my study,” said Papa, and went out of the room.
“But there is one thing,” Mamma said to us, “that I cannot understand. When Emma and her husband went to stay at the nobleman’s château a great many people came to luncheon the day after the ball, and the repast lasted ten minutes. Charles Bovary was surprised because no liqueurs were served after the meal, but apparently he wasn’t surprised because it only lasted ten minutes. But don’t you think that was very strange, children? I do.” She looked inquiringly round the circle of our faces, and then, smiling, lowered her eyes to the page again. But then she put her hand to her forehead. “How did I come to start reading this book?” she asked us, and then drew a deep breath. “Oh, I had quite forgotten. I like the book so much that I had quite forgotten. I am really very heartless,” she cried, rising to her feet. “But art is so much more real than life. Some art is much more real than some life, I mean.”
“Well, if you don’t want to go on reading it, read us the Arabian Nights,” suggested Mary.
“No, no,” said Mamma. “I must go and talk to your Papa. At once.” She moved to the door, then turned back. “It will be so difficult to start talking to him after I have done this idiotic thing,” she said, and wrung her hands, but forced herself to go. We did not see her again that day, Kate came and told us we were to have our suppers with her, and she put us to bed.
We were at first puzzled by the nature of the calamity that had struck our household. We had read a great part of Shakespeare and a good many novels but nothing in them had modified our conviction that Papa and Mamma could not have any very strong interest in each other, as they were not related by blood. I am sure that I then took it for granted that it would have been unnatural if Papa had not felt far deeper emotion for his dead brother Richard Quin, and if it had been put to me I should even have thought that Mamma might be more distressed at a final estrangement with her cousin Constance than if she lost Papa. But as the weeks went on we children were educated on this point. Sometimes it seemed as if nothing unusual were happening, and then Mamma would receive another visit from the mayor, and, as we lay in bed at night, we would hear the voices of my father and mother grinding quietly against each other in an interminable argument. Every now and then one of them would burst into high and violent speech, and then would be hushed by the other, and for a time they would whisper. Mary and I would have to pretend to be asleep at such time, for Cordelia always seized the opportunity to be an eldest sister, and would accuse us of eavesdropping and say that she would fetch Mamma if we did not lie down and close our eyes at once. But Mary and I slept in beds that were side by side, and when we heard these outbursts and their suppressions she and I stretched out our arms over the gap and held hands in the darkness. They were very touching, these efforts of our father and mother to protect us from knowledge of their conflict, with which we were as familiar as with anything on earth. Finally we would hear my father’s lazy, scornful, grating laugh, and the door of the room downstairs was shut sharply as he used to shut it. We knew that our mother was probably still standing with her arm on th
e chimney-piece, looking down on the fire, as she often did when she was worried. She seemed to draw fresh courage from the sight of flame. Soon we fell asleep.
But it was better when the year grew into December, when an anxiety that had been gnawing her was resolved. We always had a lovely Christmas, far lovelier than would have been thought possible in our circumstances. Of the many strange things about my father one of the strangest was his gift for making toys. An old carpenter on his father’s estate in Ireland had taught him the elements of his craft when he was still a little boy, and he had kept up the habit of working with wood all his life. Except for his wit, which turned things upside down, there was no trace of fancy in his speech or his writing, but his fingers dripped with it. We children were not allowed to go into his study or his bedroom after the first week of December lest we should see what he was making for us, and we did not want to break this rule; it would have been as foolish to see the things he made before they were finished as it would have been to hear half a movement of a sonata, half a song. He had already made for each of us girls a beautiful dolls’ house, a Tudor palace for Cordelia, a Queen Anne mansion for Mary, a Victorian Gothic domestic abbey for me. Now he was filling them not only with furniture but with inhabitants, little wooden figures, whose names and entire lives were given to us by a common revelation delivered piecemeal through the years, after he had started it with the first hint. He would lay a finger on an archway and say to Cordelia, “This is where young Sir Thomas Champernowne escaped from his guards and made his way to the West Country”; he would say to Mary, “That was Lydia Monument’s bedroom”; and he would say to me, “In that saloon Tarquin Katerfelto performed some of his most extraordinary conjuring tricks, which some say were real magic”; and what we learned later of these people was surely not invented but recovered. Even today if I now went and stood among the ruins of the house on the burned spot which was our sitting room, and looked down on the place by the hearth where we put our dolls’ houses on trays, I might still learn more about Sir Thomas Champernowne, Lydia Monument, Tarquin Katerfelto.
Mamma was also a creator of this world, and indeed she performed the very important feat of making us visibly a part of it. She had kept many of the dresses she had worn when she was young, and she had found some very fine ones packed away in the drawers of Aunt Clara’s furniture, and every year she opened her “rubbish trunk” and found the material for fancy dresses which had some relation to the toys Papa was making for us, and which we wore on Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve and on Twelfth Night. She was under grave handicaps as a dressmaker, for the nervous force in her fingers made it torture for her to handle needles, but she would sit down at the sewing machine and with wild slashes of the scissors and demoniacal driving of the wheel produce romantic garments which pleased her sense of beauty and gave us happiness and brought her nearer to Papa. Now I come to think of it, this Christmas dressmaking, and nothing else I can remember in their life as they had come to live it at that time, gave her access to the vein of imagination in my father which he was now repudiating, but which must have been what made him fall in love with her in spite of her inconvenient genius and integrity.
She had said to us several times, “I do not know what sort of Christmas you are going to have this year. Your poor Papa is very busy.” We had not been able to tell her outright that we thought she was wrong, and that Papa would make us our toys as usual, because that would have betrayed how much we knew. But we took care to say in front of Papa that Richard Quin had stopped breaking things very early, and we thought that if anybody gave him a fortress he would know how to play with it; and of course it was all right. By the first week in December Papa and Mamma were at work together sharing secrets and hiding things. Mamma looked more than happy, she was uplifted. I fancy she was not only enjoying the renewed companionship with him, she was telling herself that she had been wrong in fearing that he was wholly given over to cruelty, since he had come back to his duties rather than spoil our Christmas. But of course it was not so. I, who loved him too and can see him from a better distance, am sure that he had left the Mayoress of Lovegrove with an abruptness that broke the poor silly’s heart, because his fingers were itching for the pleasure they were always given at this time of year, his imprisoned imagination insisted on its annual holiday.
But my mother did not enjoy complete peace of mind. She was worried, Mary and I could see, about Cordelia. We did not wonder, for we were worried about her too. When we had been smaller we had loved her very much as a sister, although we realized that she was an eldest sister, and therefore it was our duty to kick and scratch and bite her quite often, first of all for our own sake, to defend our rights, but also for her sake, to protect her from the moral deterioration which we could see would overtake all eldest sisters who were not checked. But since we had come to Lovegrove we had realized that there was something wrong with her. We were finding it easy to be happy, for though there was this queer thing about the mayor and the mayoress, we knew it would be all right in the end, and this new servant Kate was someone we loved at once; but Cordelia was miserable. I remember sitting up in bed one morning and looking at her while she was still asleep, and thinking how very pretty she was with her red-gold curls and her white skin, which was quite blue on her eyelids and in the delicate hollows of her temple, and then as I looked, wakefulness came into her face, and it was the same as resentment. She rolled her head from side to side, screwing up her eyes for quite a long time before she could bear to open them, and then she stared about her, seeking to find a way of turning what she saw to her advantage. When her eyes reached the clothes lying on my chair, she started up, pointed a forefinger at me, and began to scold me for my untidiness.
“Cross beast,” I said, “your own clothes are just as untidy.” It was true; and if it had been Mary who had been in a temper with me she would have recognized the truth and stopped. But Cordelia went on scolding me.
At school, we noticed, she got on discreditably well. The wrong sort of teacher liked her in the wrong sort of way, and they were constantly giving her what they called “little tasks” and mentioning her as an example of “esprit de corps”; and she spoke to them with an air of professed insipidity which we took seriously as a betrayal of childhood. Of course grown-ups wanted children to be blanks, but no decent child, with parents like ours, would encourage them. We saw her paying too high a price for the approval of people who were not like Papa and Mamma, and we felt about her as a soldier in a besieged citadel might feel about a comrade who is meditating desertion. Quite often we hated her. But the love of the flesh which binds a family together in its infancy was still strong. I hated the cold much more than anybody else in the family, and she used sometimes to take me into her bed if she heard me tossing and grumbling in the night, although she was a light sleeper and it was a sacrifice. Often we loved her.
But even so we recognized Cordelia as a complicated problem, and it distressed us that Mamma, though regarding her as a problem, saw it as simple. To her Cordelia was someone who could not play the violin and who insisted on doing so. She saw the problem as half solved when Cordelia took her violin to school, saying vaguely she had a chance to practise there, and ceased to ask her for evening lessons. It even appeared to her possible that this might be a subterfuge, and that Cordelia had recognized her lack of talent and had adopted this way of quietly giving up her studies. Mamma’s optimism made her find further food for hope in Cordelia’s request, which was made at the beginning of December, that she should be allowed to bring one of her teachers, a Miss Beevor, home to tea. Mamma asked what subject she taught and Cordelia replied, “Advanced French,” and Mamma was delighted, thinking that perhaps Cordelia was developing her own talent for languages. We knew well enough that Cordelia was only in with what we called the scum of the teachers, but we could not tell tales, and we knew Mamma would grasp the situation as soon as Miss Beevor arrived. But we became alarmed when we saw how vigorously Mamma had imagined a visi
t and a visitor that were going to solve completely the problem of her eldest daughter. Because of the advanced French, Mamma had that morning travelled some distance to a bakery that sold brioches and babas, and she put on her best clothes in order not to be disgraced before Miss Beevor, whom she pictured as being unusually elegant for a suburban schoolmistress, as a result of long residence in Paris. As half-past four approached she walked restlessly about the sitting room, filling the vases with Parma violets, a flower which she always associated with France, and speaking with incredible bravery her ambitious thoughts. “If Papa goes on doing so well, we should be able to afford to send Cordelia for six months to France, and six months to Germany, and then to Girton or Newnham.”
Just then Cordelia came in, looking the perfect schoolgirl as our teachers would have had her, neat and submissive. She looked round the room and at Mamma, and her face expressed anguish; and indeed if one had not been told that my mother was wearing her best clothes one would never have guessed it. Cordelia pointed at the revolving bookcase containing our Encyclopædia Britannica and asked solemnly, “Can that not be put somewhere else?”
“Why should it, dear?” inquired Mamma.
“Miss Beevor will think it very odd to see an Encyclopaedia Britannica in the drawing room,” said Cordelia.
