The Fountain Overflows

by Rebecca West

  7

  THERE THEN BEGAN a period when, for the first time, I would have described myself as unhappy at home. I thought Mamma ought not to have allowed Miss Beevor to bring out Cordelia as a schoolgirl prodigy, partly because I was really a musician, and disliked having my sister get up on a platform and make a fool of herself, and partly because Cordelia had expressed contempt for Mary and me and I wanted her punished by frustration. But when I tackled Mamma I got an answer which seemed to me weak indeed.

  “You see,” she said, “supposing that you had a young musical genius of the magnitude of Mozart, and you had a wise and courageous teacher willing to give his life to save this genius from a cruel and unappreciative family …” She paused, letting her mouth fall open, and looking, I could not help thinking, rather foolish.

  “Yes?” I said impatiently.

  “Well, they would feel just like Cordelia and Miss Beevor.”

  “But we know that Cordelia isn’t a genius and Miss Beevor’s awful.”

  “Yes, but they do not know that. They feel just like Mozart and a guardian angel.”

  “Well, tell them, tell them!”

  “But they will not believe me. Why should they? And you know, it would be a bad thing if people always believed other people who said they were not geniuses. Many geniuses have been told at some stage or other that they were no good at all. Really, nature is very foolish. I do not see that there is much need for all of us to be able to distinguish in a second between a lion and a tiger, or a giraffe and a zebra, but there you are, it requires no knowledge of zoology to tell the difference at a glance. But only a good musician with a lot of time can tell the difference between a bad and a good musician.”

  “Well, you’re a good musician and you’ve had lots of time,” I persisted, “and you know that Cordelia can’t play for toffee. You ought to stop her. Really you should.”

  “How can I dam up all that force?” sighed Mamma.

  I thought she ought to try. Mary had once said to me that the adjectives which really suited grown-ups were “lily-livered” and “chicken-hearted.” They were incapable of taking decisive action when it was needed. For the first time it occurred to me that Mamma was infected with this vice. When Mamma found out about Aunt Clara’s furniture’s having gone she should not have come to Lovegrove, she should have gone to some strange place without leaving an address, and gone with us to work in a factory, surely the four of us could have made enough to live on, and Papa would have been broken-hearted, and he would have got the police to trace us, and then he would have begged Mamma to bring us to Lovegrove, and she should have consented only on condition he promised never to gamble on the Stock Exchange again. But here we all were, with Mamma worrying all summer lest the gas be cut off, all winter lest the coal-merchant stop supplies. And here was Cordelia, who surely ought to have been whipped till she promised never to play the violin again. Whipping was, of course, wrong. It was a gross abuse of the physical advantage that grown-ups so unfairly enjoyed over children. But surely this was the one exception in which it would have been permissible.

  I grew the more angry with Mamma because I detected that she had relaxed her attitude of hostility to Miss Beevor, whom I saw simply as the architect of our family disgrace, was beginning to regard her with compassion and even with amusement. She was always receiving little notes signed “Beatrice Beevor” which announced triumphantly such news as that the Beckenham Freemasons had been so delighted with our little wonder-child’s performance that the day after they had written to engage her for next year’s banquet. Once, after Cordelia had appeared with dazzling success between Lisa Lehmann’s “In a Persian Garden” and a selection from Amy Woodforde Finden’s Indian Love Lyrics, she inquired whether the usual note had come; and on hearing that it had not, she said, with deliberate nonchalance, “I can’t understand it, Aunt Bay-ah-tree-chay was most eager you should hear all about the reception I got.”

  Mamma’s eyebrows lifted at the news that Miss Beevor had joined our family, but a wanton light flamed up in her eye. “Bay-ah-tree-chay?” she inquired.

  “It is the Italian form of Beatrice,” Cordelia informed her.

  “Yes, I know,” said Mamma. “But why should Miss Beevor be called by an Italian name? I never met a woman more soundly English.”

  “Of course she’s English,” said Cordelia pettishly. “This is just a name that people call her if they know her awfully well. It seems that there’s a very beautiful picture of Dante and some of his friends meeting Beatrice and some of her friends walking by the Arno, and just staring at each other because they don’t know each other, and of course they didn’t ever meet, which makes it all the more wonderful, and when Miss Beevor was young lots of people thought she looked just like Beatrice in the picture, so they started calling her Bay-ah-tree-chay.”

  A series of expressions passed over my mother’s face, the sum of which was, I recognized, pleasure. I thought this ridiculous. I knew the picture, and Miss Beevor could not be telling the truth, she could never have looked anything like the Beatrice in it. I was shocked because my mother did not point this out, and on later occasions asked Cordelia for details of Miss Beevor’s life with the shamefaced air of one seeking pleasure recognized as disgraceful. Beyond all doubt Mamma was not taking Miss Beevor seriously.

  I had of course some happiness at this time. I derived it less than ever before or ever after from my sister Mary, who had grown silent and serious, and kept on writing fugues. It was my companionship with Richard Quin and Rosamund which irradiated my days with light. I never needed to feel jealous of their love for each other, as for the first moment of their meeting I feared I would, for when they were together without me they spent the time making our imagined world so solid that when I joined them it was a shelter and a joy about me. They would be sitting on the lawn, both fair, both visibly children of light, Rosamund so golden, Richard fair over dark, and Richard Quin would call to me, “I say, you know Rosamund’s hare?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Well, you know it never will tell us its real name. We’ve found out why.”

  “What is its reason? It’ll be something silly. I never knew a sissier hare.”

  “It is a silly reason. It told Rosamund it hoped that so long as we didn’t know its name we would call it the Mysterious Stranger. It hasn’t the least idea we call it Flopears.”

  “Really, how ridiculous it is! It thinks it’s romantic and like Lord Byron, and it’s just old Flopears.”

  But sometimes, like all made-up animals, that hare got out of hand and did more than we meant.

  “What’s it doing now?”

  “Crouching down and rolling its eyes and waving its ears as if it wanted to show us something.”

  “I can’t think. And what’s that coming out of the grass all round it?”

  “Wheat, isn’t it? It’s trying to tell us that it once lived in a cornfield.”

  “Yes, that’s a poppy over there, behind its great tail. And there’s some cornflowers.”

  “So pretty. But Flopears looks so frightened.”

  But I knew suddenly what he was trying to tell us. I remembered our days on the Pentland Hills and knew that he had been killed, as so many of his kind are killed, at harvest time. He had been nibbling among the wheat when the cutter had started working round the edges of the field, and he had run to the middle because it was farthest from the sound, and thought himself safe. Then as the cutter went round the field in a closing spiral, the sound came nearer and nearer; and he and all the wild things that had gathered with him in the dwindling island of wheat must have been shaken by one pulse of fear. At last, when he could see the light through the stalks that had at first seemed solid as a wall, and when the cutter was a riot in his twitching ears, he left his island and ran for it across the raw stubble, and somebody lifted a gun and there was a bang, and he died, stretched out in a straight line because he had been running so fast. I got out my handkerchief and wiped my lips. I wi
shed the hare had not brought this up in front of Richard Quin.

  Rosamund said, “Oh, I know why he’s showing us the cornfield. As a matter of fact, it’s one I know. It’s by the seaside where Papa’s cousin has that house. It’s right beside the shore, and the sea is flat and blue and the cornfield is flat and yellow, and they both look like different kinds of water.”

  “I know,” said Richard Quin, “the fishermen are always making mistakes. They take out their boats to sail on the cornfield instead of the water.”

  “And that’s how they catch goldfish.”

  “Yes, but they caught old Flopears too. They kept on hauling him up in a lobster-pot, and he kept on saying, ‘Sir! Sir! I would have you know—’ and they kept on putting him back before he had time to tell them what he wanted them to know. That’s why he wants to tell us about it now.”

  “He says he could have sent them to the Tower. It’s absurd.”

  Very silly, of course, and I was really too old for that sort of thing, but it was a refuge from my teasing doubts about Mamma’s wisdom, and my resentment against Cordelia; and I felt stripped and deprived when Rosamund was taken from us. But an old aunt who lived in Scotland got very ill, and so Constance went north and took Rosamund with her and sent her for a term to a Scotch school. Without her I was quite unable to deal with what circumstances turned into my formidable emotions. I know that Massenet and Gounod are really much better composers than is generally allowed today, and that Massenet’s “Si tu veux, mignonne,” and Gounod’s “Venise” would be conceded by everybody but the worst snobs to be lyric masterpieces, and that the two laid foundations on which Debussy and Fauré built much better; but when my sister Cordelia played arrangements of the less inspired works of these not infallible composers I suffered such agony as a bishop would feel if a brother of his habitually got drunk and staggered down the aisle during matins. I was wounded in my worldly and my more spiritual self. I hated a member of my family to be such a fool, and I felt that music was being profaned. Moreover Papa’s finances were not improving and Mamma had had to tell us that we could not afford to go away to the seaside that year; and ever since then Cordelia had been explaining to us that someday we would understand how hard she had worked and not had the pleasures the rest of us enjoyed, so that someday Mamma need not worry about money and we could all have happier lives. But since she had become a professional Mamma had had to buy her a second concert dress, and both had frequently to be cleaned; and Mary and I calculated that this ate so much into the profits that, by the time Cordelia had put by enough to pay for her musical education, and got on to providing us with a happier life, we should all be unable to worry about money, because we should be dead of old age.

  It unfortunately happened that just at this time one of the relatives who had till now refused to have anything to do with us rescinded that decision. This was my Uncle Barry’s widow, Aunt Theodora. A study of the memoirs of the period I am describing will show that the most admired women were large and unfeminine and severe, like women policemen, with passionate faces suggesting that they might presently be discharged from the force as a result of emotional complications. My Aunt Theodora was the wreck of such a woman, with pouches under her eyes and folds hanging from her jowls, and this disordered contour was due not to the destruction of her tissues by age but to the stamp left by an expression indicating outraged common sense. She saw the whole world as abandoned to improvident courses, and suspected it of allowing itself this irresponsibility because it counted on her to support it in the end. One of the most curious features of the age of plenty which ended with the First World War was the terror which rich people felt about their continued possession of their wealth. So when she came to see us it was very terrible. Most adults are rude to children, and many rich people are rude to the poor. We were children, we were poor, so we were victims of a double assault; and though we were bigger than we had been, we were still small, and she was very big. On entering our sitting room she would say to Mamma, “Well, you’re still here, I see,” as if it surprised her that we had not been swept away into some abyss, which, however, might yet receive us. Her conversation consisted of comments on our circumstances too bluff and too indelicate to be called sympathetic, though if they were not that they could have no purpose, and when she could think of no more she used to turn her pouches and her jowls on us children, and inquire whether we realized we must earn our livings as soon as possible, adding, “And there’ll have to be no nonsense about it either.” This phrase was surely as destitute of meaning as the baying of a dog; and indeed we felt as if we were strayed alpine travellers, sunk in the snow, who found our faces snuffed by a huge St. Bernard, come not to bring us brandy but to take away any we might have.

  One day during the holidays it happened that Mamma had gone out shopping with Richard Quin, Cordelia was in our bedroom making a sickly mess of the “Berceuse” from Godard’s Jocelyn, I was playing my arpeggios in the sitting room and Mary was on the sofa doing her harmony lesson, and Papa was in his study working on his leader. There was a rat-tat on the door, and we knew at once that it was a telegram, for the telegraph boys who then dashed about England on red bicycles had a fine sense of the dramatic and had a bravura touch on the door-knocker. Kate was in the dining room, so she took the telegram straight into the study, and then we heard Papa rush out into the hall and tear his coat and hat off the stand so that it fell over, and bang the front door behind him.

  “He can’t have lost any more money on the Stock Exchange,” said Mary. “There can’t be any left to lose.”

  “Perhaps it is only politics,” I said.

  Then Kate came in and said with a certain meaning, “It’s my day out. I could take you over to Wimbledon to have tea with my mother, if you wanted to go.”

  We really did not have the time, Mamma was working with both of us on special pieces. But Kate repeated, her eyes dark like prunes, “I did promise my Mum I would be taking you all one of these days.”

  So we said we would, knowing there was something up, and just then Mamma came back, and Kate said to her, “I have just told Miss Mary and Miss Rose that my mother would be glad to have all of them, Miss Cordelia and Mr. Richard Quin too, for tea this afternoon. And, oh, ma’am, a telegram came when you were out, and I took it to the master and he went straight out. But I think he said it was for you really, and it’s on his desk now.”

  Mamma said that of course she would be very pleased for us to go, and it was very kind of Kate and her mother, and went off to the study. Later she came back and said that Aunt Theodora was coming to tea, but she had promised Kate she might take us out, so that must stand.

  Absolutely no deception had been practised by anybody. By a refinement of honesty, Kate’s manner had informed Mamma that there was another interpretation of the events she had recited, if she cared to inquire into it, though it was to be hoped she would not do so, as nothing would be gained. So there was not too much discussion of the situation before we three girls and Richard Quin and Kate started off for Wimbledon. It was a pleasant bus-ride, though there was a horrid moment when an old lady on the top of the bus, delighted by Richard Quin’s appearance, gave him a bright yellow cake out of a paper bag, the sort of cake that Mamma thought would kill us at once, and we all held our breaths until Richard Quin thanked her with a smile in which candid rapture came to its full tide, saying, “Thank you, I am not hungry now, I must keep it for my tea, when I will really enjoy it”; and when she had got off the bus he handed the cake to Kate and made impudent use of a formula she often applied regarding unfavoured foods: “You will oblige me by finding a poor child who would be glad of this.” And of course we had a nice time at Kate’s mother’s cottage, it was a special place.

  She was tall and sailorly like her daughter and her home looked as if it were beside the sea. She lived in one of four cottages, some centuries old, on a cobbled causeway which was all that survived of some village street long since erased to make room for the gard
ens of two Italianate Victorian villas, the walls of which now towered above the little cottages. There was a great deal of holystoning, and a strong smell of tar; and the nets Kate’s father had taken to sea now hung on the raspberry canes and the black-currant bushes. There was a ship’s figurehead out in the garden, a lady carrying a lamb. It had come off the Merciful Flora, the ship Kate’s father and grandfather had sailed in till she broke up off Sark in 1888. Inside the house were ships in bottles, and carved ivories of monkeys and elephants, and a kingfisher-feather headdress, and a straw-coloured shawl with birds and flowers and ladies with little black pages holding high coloured parasols over them; and all these things Kate’s mother told us we could handle as we liked, giving us a smile as prim and slow as Kate’s, as she told us that if we should break anything it would not matter, there would be always another of her family to bring something to take its place. So we never broke anything. This visit was particularly enjoyable because the Merciful Flora needed repainting, and we were able to help by scraping all the old paint off her with sandpaper, so that when Kate’s brother came next week he could put the paint straight on. We worked away and quite forgot how worried about money Papa and Mamma were; and I forgot all about Cordelia’s playing, because she was really very nice when she was doing something she really could do, in circumstances which made her forget her need to prove her superiority.