The Fountain Overflows

by Rebecca West

  Before I passed through the blue-grey door in the wall I could hear the piping of Richard Quin’s flageolet. He was playing, “Believe me, if all those endearing young charms,” at least he was playing half of it, that was all he had got. I was sorry to hear that he had come to that tiresome time which happens when one is little. He had got past the stage of being contented with the things that are easy and natural because one was really born able to do them, and learning them was only a matter of teaching one’s fingers what they knew they ought to do, and he had come to the stage when one realizes how difficult playing is going to be, but one cannot go back and not be musical, that is how one hears things and there is no help for it. I could tell that he was feeling like that, partly because he sounded as if he were pushing against each note, in a fit of obstinacy, and partly because Mary and Richard Quin and I were not really separate beings. I passed through the yard, which was a little tidier than it had been when we came, but not much, for we were all so terribly busy, and I found him just inside the stable door, close by Sultan’s loose-box and facing Pompey and Caesar and Cream and Sugar. He was looking very little, his baby fingers solemnly busy on the stops, a frown of concentration on his baby brow. In this faded and dusty place his fairness was of another world. He was right in thinking the horses liked his music.

  The horses had become made-up animals. I could nearly hear them stirring lightly on their hooves and munching their fodder in quiet content. Richard Quin finished the phrase he was playing, turned to me and nodded, then went from stall to stall, saying good-bye to the horses and patting them with that tactful touch necessary for caressing made-up animals, one has to touch them enough to show one is fond of them but one must not press so hard that it has to be admitted all round that they are insubstantial. When he was rubbing his head against Sugar’s neck and Sugar whinnied, he turned his eyes on me and laughed, as if to say this seeing what is not to be seen and hearing sounds not uttered in this world was a lovely game, like finding the dyed eggs that Papa and Mamma always hid in the garden on Easter Day. I told him that Mamma was unhappy, and we wanted him to make her forget what was bothering her. He took my hand and we went back through the garden, putting our tongues out to taste the rain.

  In the sitting room Mamma was saying, “So you see, Mary dear, even you did not realize what tempo rubato is and what it is not, and though I don’t want you to think that your playing is anything more than elementary as yet, you probably know as much about the fine points of playing as Miss Beevor, so there was no harm in telling her what tempo rubato really means, though you must respect her, you must all respect her, she is doing her best, see what she has done for Cordelia.” Tears were running down each side of her long, thin nose.

  Richard Quin carefully laid down his flageolet in a place where he thought it would not be touched, and then ran to Mamma and hugged her knees and kissed her, boisterously, as if he felt compelled to do it by love, but not so much that it was difficult for her to go on holding her teacup. “I want a treat,” he said, nuzzling into her.

  “What does my bad lamb want?” she asked, looking down at him in adoration. Of course she loved him more than the rest of us, anybody who ever saw him would know it had to be so.

  “I want not to sit up during tea and behave properly,” he begged. “I want to drink my milk on the floor and have the sisters read ‘The City of Brass’ to me.”

  “But you can learn to read,” Mamma chided him. “All your sisters were reading long books at your age.”

  “Yes,” he answered with a shout of laughter great for his little body, “they learned to read, so I needn’t, it was kind of them.”

  “But we shall have to work harder and harder at our playing, and then we don’t have time to read to you,” said Mary, and I said, “Besides, it’s faster, you like things to go fast, you could read things to yourself far quicker than we can read them aloud.”

  But as we spoke Mary was getting the Arabian Nights out of the bookcase and was finding the place, while I filled his mug with milk and buttered him some toast and put the mug and the plate on the tray he used when he ate sitting on the floor. It was a small eighteenth-century tray we had bought him one Christmas from a rag-and-bone shop, and it was painted with a Turkish scene of mosques and palaces and willow-hung canals. It was so pretty that he let us keep it in the sitting room, leaning against the wall on the top of the bookcase. With the made-up dogs, Ponto and Fido and Tray, lying in a semicircle round him, he ate and drank earnestly, for he was always very hungry, pausing sometimes to trace the minarets of the mosques and the domes of the palaces with the end of a crust. People who did not know him would have thought that he was not listening, but if one left out anything he cried out at once. If one skipped any of the marvels on which the moonlight was shining when the travellers came on the City of Brass, he would put it in, and to tease him we would sometimes leave out some of the languages in which the old sheikh spoke to the motionless sentinels when they did not answer Arabic greetings. “Greek you said, and the language of Hind, and Hebrew and Persian and Ethiopian, but you have not said Sudanese,” he would shrill. “It spoils it all if you do not say Sudanese.”

  And he would get restless, sentences before we came to the bit about the travellers finding the beautiful princess sleeping on the bed spread with silken carpets on the ivory dais supported by golden pillars, with two statues of slaves, one black and one white, standing at the head of the bed. Then when we actually got to the sentence which tells how one of the travellers climbed on the dais and tried to kiss the sleeping princess, he would whisper loudly and urgently, “Leave out, leave out.” For he could not bear it when the two statues moved and pierced the traveller’s head and heart with their pikes. He hated all violence. So Mary left that bit out and we went on to the best part, where the travellers went down to the seashore and found the black fishermen mending their nets. Mamma liked that bit very much, particularly when the eldest fisherman was asked to explain the mystery of the City of Brass and he answered, “The people of the City of Brass have been enchanted since the beginning of time and will remain as they are until the Judgment Day.” She told us that it was a very good thing to say about almost anybody. She also liked the bit about the copper jars in which the Jinns who rebelled against King Solomon were imprisoned, and how they were sealed with his seal (Papa drew it for us) and thrown into the depths of the boiling sea, and how the fishermen used to unseal the jars because they wanted them to cook fish in, and told the travellers it was all right if one slapped the jars with one’s hand before unsealing them and made the Jinns inside confess that there was but one Allah and Mohammed was his prophet. When Kate made jelly we also used to slap the mould and force the jelly to acknowledge Allah and Mohammed before we turned it out.

  We were just getting to this bit when Cordelia came in and banged the door and threw her satchel down on the sofa and stood and looked at Mamma and stamped.

  She said, “I have seen Miss Beevor and she has told me what you have done. Why do you hate me so? Why are you so cruel to me?”

  Mamma said, “Go and take off your school dress and we will talk of this quietly.” She put down her cup because her hand was trembling.

  Cordelia screamed, “How can I talk quietly about this? You are ruining my life.”

  Mamma said, “You mean because I have told Miss Beevor that you must not take professional engagements? That is not ruining your life. It is making sure that it will not be ruined. There is nothing worse for a musician, any sort of musician, than to perform in public too soon. It fixes a player at the stage she is at the time of her first appearance, and it is very hard to struggle on to the next stage.”

  Mary and I looked at each other in bewilderment. Mamma got terribly angry with us when we made mistakes, and the whole of Cordelia’s playing was a mistake. But she was speaking to her quite gently about this horrible proposal. This was another instance of Mamma’s curious tenderness towards her, which we could not understand.
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  Cordelia screamed again. “It would not hurt my playing. Miss Beevor says she would go on teaching me all the time. It is not fair. You are only doing this because you cannot bear me to have more than the others.”

  From the floor Richard cried, his light eyes on fire with anger, “Go on with the story. The mermaids come next.”

  Mamma said, “But why do you want to play at these concerts? Wait, and if you are good enough you will play to audiences who really know what good music is, it will help you to have them listening to you. But these are second-rate affairs, it is impossible to think why you want to appear at them.”

  Cordelia was still screaming when she answered, “Why do I want to play at these concerts? Because I want the money.”

  “But they will pay you very little,” said Mamma.

  “Have we so much money that I can afford to refuse any?” asked Cordelia bitterly. She spoke so like a grown-up that we stared at her; she had the bitterness of grown-ups, the sort of shrewdness which never gets them anywhere. “Mamma,” she said more gently but desperately, “what is to happen to us all? We haven’t any money. We children know that, we know there isn’t the money to pay the gas and the school fees, and even if you get the money from somewhere this time there will come a time when you won’t.” Her face became a blue-white triangle, because of her intense fear. “How can it possibly happen that the time won’t come when Papa gambles everything away on the Stock Exchange and we won’t have anywhere to go, anything to eat?”

  Mamma stood up, then dropped back into her chair, her eyes staring stupidly, her jaw dropping. Mary and I drew nearer to her, to protect her, to dissociate ourselves from Cordelia. We were very much shocked. Of course we talked about our parents’ affairs among ourselves; a child has a right to wonder what is going to become of it. But for children to speak of their parents’ affairs in front of them was like going into the bathroom and finding either of them having a bath. We could not stop Cordelia with our angry looks. She went on, “It isn’t only the rent and the school fees, even as it is. We have horrible clothes, my boots are worn out, and I should not have been expected to wear them anyway, they are cheap and clumsy. Everybody laughs at us at school because we are so badly dressed. Mary and Rose do not notice it, there is only me to worry about us.”

  “We do notice it,” I said, “but we do not care.”

  Cordelia waved at me impatiently. Her face was getting whiter and whiter. I thought she might faint as some of the girls at school did at prayers, and despised her. In our family we did not faint. “We have nothing, nothing,” she said, “and now that I have a chance to make something you will not let me take it because you love the others best. I want to make money and save it so that I can get a scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music or the Guildhall and have something to live on— “I do not think she had heard our mother’s cry, she paused only because her desire for fame was like a winnowing fan in her throat— “then I will make some money and study at Prague and then I will really make a lot of money and if I hurry up before the others get too old I will be able to help them. If I don’t,” she cried, “who will? Mary and Rose,” she said, after a pause, staring sadly at us, “must do something to earn their living, they must teach or go into the post office, I will be able to pay for their trainings, and Richard Quin, something must, it must, be done for him.” With a tragic gesture of her whole arm she pointed at him as he sat on the floor by his tray. “It’s worse for him, because he’s a boy. He must go to a good school, he’s so dreadfully spoiled, he must go to a proper school,” she said, looking at him with her upper lip curled in worried distaste, “or he will be worse than Papa.”

  Richard Quin brought his spoon down on his plate with a bang, and cried happily, trying to echo a phrase that my mother often used in argumentative crises, “Change a subject. Change a subject. Silly Cordelia, change a subject.”

  “See how he speaks to me,” said Cordelia hotly, “and I am the eldest.” Suddenly she began to scream again. “Oh, Mamma,” she shrieked, “we are being so badly brought up.”

  Mamma moved her lips, but we could not hear any words.

  “I do not mean to be rude, Mamma,” said Cordelia, her voice dropping suddenly to a murmur. “It is not your fault, it is Papa’s”—again Mamma’s lips moved, but she was still inaudible— “but we are being so very badly brought up. Everybody at school,” she said, shivering, “thinks Mary and Rose so odd.”

  “Change a subject, change a subject,” advised Richard Quin robustly from the floor.

  “We must be more like other people,” she went on frantically, “we must fit in better, and you will not let me do anything to help, and if we only had ordinary clothes it would be better. If I made anything, anything at all, it would be something. Oh, let me earn what I can”—she wept— “I am so miserable, and I am the only one that can do anything for us.”

  She could speak no longer, and we all watched her in silence. We had to respect her tears because she had been painfully wounded by her destiny. But it was also true that she had inflicted wounds, which would never completely heal, on everybody in that room, except Richard, who was, for a particular reason of which neither she nor any of the rest of us was aware, proof against such injury. Mary slipped her left hand into my right. We had known the people at school did not like us, and we had wished it was not so; I had spoken of that very misery to Rosamund. But we had thought that some of the dislike felt against us was to our credit. Because of Papa and Mamma we knew the meaning of long words and were forward in our French and tried to speak it with a proper accent, and we recognized the pictures the art mistress put up on the walls, and of course the people who were good at gymnastics and hockey thought we were silly, and many teachers are irredeemably cross by nature. Some of our unpopularity was our own fault, we knew that. We were often awkward and bumped up against things, and we often came out of our thoughts and found that something was expected of us and we had no idea what, and then everybody laughed. And of course it is funny when everybody has sat down and only two people are left standing up, though perhaps they laughed rather a long time over it, for it is funny but not very funny. But now Cordelia had suggested to us that if people did not like us it was a sentence passed on our serious faults, and we were not merely absent-minded, there was a real flaw, a censurable unpleasantness, in our behaviour.

  We did not quite believe her. We knew that she had always been silly and always would be. She was showing that by talking such nonsense about money. She would never be able to help us very much about that, and there would be no need, because we would earn all we needed as soon as we were grown up. But we could not quite disbelieve her, for we knew that she was far nearer to the people at school than we were, and perhaps it is true that numbers count, it is not quite natural that two people should be right and hundreds of people wrong. So it happened that from this hour Mary and I had less power than before to make friends. Till that day we had supposed that the coldness strangers showed us could be broken down if we were nice to them, but forever after we were impeded in our dealings with any but our familiars by the suspicion that the more they saw of us the more they were bound to dislike us.

  I thought, Really Cordelia should not have done this to us, and returned the pressure of Mary’s hand. But we forgot our pain when Mamma rose to her feet. She seemed to have grown even thinner during the last few moments and her eyes were protruding. We wished she did not look so ugly when she was distressed, we knew that Cordelia would be feeling as horrid about it as if she were a stranger. But mercifully Mamma’s voice was always much more beautiful when she was distressed. It became a thin, silver thread, rather high, spinning from behind her high forehead. The sound was quite lovely when she turned her face towards Cordelia and said, her eyes looking blank as if she did not see her, “I will put on my bonnet and go and make my peace with Miss Beevor and she can accept all the professional engagements for you that you like.”

  Cordelia cried, “Oh, Mamma, t
hank you, thank you.” She glowed at having scored a point. But we were not sure. We knew that Mamma had been so hurt that she was astonished at her own pain, yet she looked also as if she were inflicting pain. When she went to the door her fingers came down on the handle as if she were reluctantly going out to perform some agonizing mystery. She seemed very tired.

  After she had gone Cordelia sighed with satisfaction and began to take off her gloves. Mary said, “Come, Richard Quin, pick up your cup and plate.”

  “It is not his bedtime,” said Cordelia.

  “We are going down to sit in the kitchen till Mamma comes back,” said Mary.

  After a moment’s silence Cordelia said with an air of thrift, “It will mean burning two gases.”

  “I will give Mamma the half-crown Mr. Langham gave me last time he was here,” said Mary. “That will pay for a great deal of gas.”

  “The book, the Brass City,” said Richard Quin. “You did not get to the mermaids, you must read me the bit about the mermaids, I will have mermaids, lots and lots of mermaids, when I am grown up.”

  We three went down the steep stairs to the kitchen and I stood on the chair and lit the gas. It was more poetic than electric light, and I am sorry that so many children of today never see it. Over the gas-jet, inside the inverted glass bell, was a thing called an incandescent mantle, which, when you delicately turned on the tap in the gas-bracket and held a lit match over it, glimmered with a pale unsteady whiteness, like a little man risen from the dead whose cerements partook in the light of his immortality. There was also a faint pop as if a spirit were bursting its material bonds. Then you turned the tap full on and the shrouded man shone with the steady light of the angels, and you did not notice him any more, eternity had set in. Kate had left the kitchen looking very nice, she always did. The fire in the range was out because it was early summer and we did most of our cooking on a gas stove, but she had blackleaded it so that it gave out brightness from its highlights. It was a huge range, but coal was so cheap in those days that we could afford to use it though we were so very poor. On the clean straw-coloured wooden table there were some folded sheets which Kate had been ironing before she went out, the strong, businesslike smell of the iron still rising from them. On the dresser there were the plates of our dinner service, which was a Mason Ironstone set, with three red and orange and gold Chinamen against a primrose background with little bits of deep blue scattered over it. On the top of the dresser were the polished copper moulds in which the blancmanges and jellies were made, we sometimes used them as castles in a game on the kitchen table. By gaslight it could not be seen that we had not had enough money to have the place properly done up since we moved into it, and coal ranges made kitchens very dirty. Mary sat down at the table and rested the Arabian Nights on the folded sheets, and turned over the leaves to find “The City of Brass,” while Richard Quin took a piece of kitchen paper out of a dresser drawer and a pencil out of his pocket. He enjoyed drawing while he was being read to; he always liked to do two things at once. I got some of our stockings out of Kate’s workbasket and sat in the creaky wicker armchair on the rag hearthrug and mended them. We all wished very much that this had not happened when both Rosamund and Kate were out. We would not have told either of them exactly what was wrong, but they would have understood, and the time would have passed more quickly while we were waiting for our Mamma to come back.