by Rebecca West
“Bless you, you are so good,” said Mamma. “Rose, get your father a nice tea and give it to him in his study.” And she went to listen to Aunt Lily.
Papa was passing his hand backwards and forwards over his head, and really looked quite old. I said to him, “What would you like for tea, Papa?”
“Some anchovy toast,” he said. “And ask Kate to make the tea strong. Stronger than your Mamma likes it. We have it very strong in Ireland. And did any new books come for me this morning after I left?”
“Three,” I said. “One is the French one you have been angry about because it did not come. Mamma put them on your desk.”
Down in the kitchen Kate grumbled at what I told her. When there was trouble in the house she always grew fierce against the servants who had looked after Papa and Mamma when they were little. All this week she had been scolding a long-dead Scotch nurse who had spoiled Mamma’s appetite by making her eat fat and serving it up to her at meal after meal till she ate it, though it had turned bad. Now she said, “Your Papa wants his tea black, the way it takes an hour to stew, and what he really wants is somebody who will wet it for him that way that likes to please him but doesn’t care about his inside. I suppose there are plenty of that flattering and cruel sort in Ireland. And anchovy paste, it is far too sharp to be good for such a thin gentleman, but he has been allowed it since he was a child, more’s the pity.”
I took the tray up to him, and found him reading the French book that had come that morning, bending over the pages like a thirsting animal at a pool. He turned on me an eye which was not indifferent, for he considered it imperative to impress the truth on me, but which perhaps did not inform him with certainty who I actually was. I might have been the audience whom he had addressed the previous night or was to address the next night, and I also might have been any one of my two sisters instead of myself. But with absolute certainty he said, “The French make the single tax more logical and more elegant, but it is still the single tax, it will not impose itself, it is not of the order of conceptions which impose themselves. You will see, multiple taxation will be one of the chief instruments by which humanity gladly imposes on itself the slavery of the state.”
He retreated into the savage peace which he found in the contemplation of doom. I left him and went into the sitting room and found Aunt Lily in the full spate of a description of the judge, and Mamma said, “Oh, not before Rose, please.” Then there was a knock at the door, and Kate came in, and had hardly spoken before she was pushed aside by a man. Mamma asked him what he wanted, but he did not answer, he stood silent with his eyes on the top of Aunt Lily’s head, which was all he could see of her, as she sat huddled in her armchair. She did not turn round to see who it was, because she had picked up her empty cup and was scrutinizing the tea-leaves at the bottom of the cup. She evidently remembered Mamma’s emphatic disapproval of this method of divination and had seized her opportunity while Mamma’s attention was distracted.
“What do you want?” Mamma asked the man again.
He was turning a peaked cap round and round in his hands, and he jerked it towards Aunt Lily.
“It is Mr. Phillips’s chauffeur,” I told Mamma.
Aunt Lily put down the cup and said, starting to turn her head and then giving up from sheer weariness, “Oh, it’s you, George.”
“I come,” he said, “to say I hope you don’t blame me for telling the truth.”
“No, George, I don’t blame you,” she answered. “You were on your oath, and you weren’t a relative, you had to tell the truth.”
She fell to weeping silently, breaking off once to say, “Mind you, I think there was something unlucky about that house, there wasn’t any reason why we shouldn’t all have been happy there.”
George stood still, turning his cap round and round, and at length he said, “I wish to God I had been nicer to the little bastard when he was alive. It was his motor-car. Why didn’t I let him do what he wanted with it?” looked round the room, saw the french windows, opened them, and walked down the iron steps into the garden. He lay down on the lawn and stretched himself out with his face pressed against the grass. It must have been damp for him, spring had set some green leaves on the soot-black branches of the trees and bushes, but it had not dried the earth. Mamma washed out her cup with hot water, filled it with tea, hesitated, said, “There is no way of finding out if he takes sugar,” put two lumps on the saucer, said, “Open the french window, dear,” and went out into the garden and put down the cup and saucer within George’s reach on the lawn. Then she came back and persuaded Aunt Lily to go to bed, and told me to go on with my practising. I had played for about half an hour when George knocked on the french windows and handed in the empty cup and said thank you and went away by the path round the house.
Mary came in and said it was her turn for practice now, though I think she was at least five minutes too early, if not ten. But she was tired as we all were, and I did not care to take it up with her. I went into Papa’s study, though I knew he wanted to go on reading, because I wanted to be more sure that we were right in thinking that Mrs. Phillips would not be hanged. He began at once to tell me, because he never concurred in the insulting pretence that the young must watch things happen without being told the explanation: a pretence which imposes on them a peculiar suffering, as of the carted animal, which few adults could support. But I noticed he was keeping his finger in his book, which did not look comfortable, so I said, “Where is your bookmark?” He had a favourite one that had come from Mamma’s home, of a type that was popular in early Victorian days, a spatula of ivory cut in the shape of the sole of a ballet-shoe, so thin that it could be used as both a paper-knife and a bookmark.
“Somebody has taken it, it has gone, and I must keep my place, the air in the court was so bad that I am stupid,” he said miserably. We can always find lost things for other people, because we are free of the discontent with life that makes them push out of their own sight the possessions it has let them wilt. I saw the bookmark hardly hidden by the papers on his desk. So Papa was able to lay down his book and set himself to explaining why it was very unlikely that the sentence on Mrs. Phillips would be carried out.
It was the judge, he said, and laughed suddenly. I must have noticed, he went on, that Mrs. Phillips differed in many respects from that admirable woman, her sister. It happened that the judge who tried her had been an unusual sort of person for a judge. Mr. Justice Ludost was cleverer than most judges, having a mind that might be called great. His writings on political history and theory were on an eighteenth-century level.
“An eighteenth-century level?” I asked. “But Mr. Herbert Spencer is alive today, and I thought you considered him as good as anybody.”
“No, no,” said Papa, in quick, muted tones. “Poor Mr. Spencer cannot write at all. He has intimated his ideas to us, and we can see that they are of the first order of importance, but he has unfortunately never been able to express them. So they do not live.” He stared before him at the dark disorder of his study, then went on to explain that the judge’s conduct of the trial had been curiously incompetent. It was as if there was more in him than could be contained by the procedure of the court. He was—well, not like other people.
“Like somebody in Shakespeare?” I suggested. It was our way of describing people who, while not musicians, showed in their speech and actions that they had inside them the mass of things that are in music. Papa agreed, and said, in dragging tones, as if speaking of a secret he was reluctant to share, that the judge was a very evil man. But he added, speaking now more like an outsider who was trying to be fair, that the judge did not like being evil, and indeed had probably performed only a few of the evil deeds he had imagined. His intellect was incorruptible; and a baser side of him was against corruption too, for he greatly loved power and wealth and feared lest he should strip himself of all his honour by falling into detectable offences. When he saw Mrs. Phillips in the dock the evil in him recognized her for what she wa
s, the same stuff as himself, while his intellect detested her as a pollution and his worldliness feared her as impoverishment. But she was so strongly what she was that the evil in him grew strong at the sight of her, and his detestation and his fear grew at the same rate of strength, and there was confusion in him, and he raved. “Like King Lear?” I breathed, full of the shocking sorrow that children feel for grown-ups who throw away their authority.
Papa considered the question seriously. The old man’s harrying of the counsel for the defence, the sneer with which he had listened to her statement from the dock, though it had had its dignity, the rambling savagery of his summing-up, the gusto with which he had sentenced her to death: all this, Papa thought, amounted to something, to something, yes, if I thought of King Lear, I would realize the prodigious excess of the old man’s disorder. He doubted if an English law-court had been the scene of such scandalous abandonment of passion for a hundred years. He set his head back against his tall chair, shut his eyes, and laughed silently. Now, he told me, I could see what humanity was worth. It could form the conception of justice, but could not trust its flesh to provide judges. Whatever it started was likely to end in old men raving. There was ruin everywhere and we should see more of it. He fell again into silent laughter and shut his eyes. Mary was playing over and over again ten bars out of a Mozart sonata. She was trying to get it clear enough, though really she had got it very clear. Papa opened his eyes and said, “What is that? It is really very pretty. She is playing the same thing over and over again, is she not?”
I laughed at him. “Clever Papa! Clever Papa! Is she playing the same thing over and over again?”
“I know what Lear felt, I have an impudent daughter who mocks me,” he answered, smiling, and playing with my long hair. He continued, “But I have not told you why I have some hope for Miss Moon. God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform. This detestable old man, who has let the immortal part of him be rotted by his mortality, will serve a purpose. His attack on Queenie’s witnesses, his attack on her in his summing-up, his last attack on her when he sentenced her, when he had got the jury to give him his verdict and then savaged his kill. Yes indeed, the beast painted himself in bright colours on a banner and carried it about himself, between his brutish paws, for all men to see. There was something heraldic about it. All that, I think, should make it possible to get the woman reprieved.”
“Who will see to that?” I asked.
“Who?” answered Papa. “Oh, I will do it if I have the strength. But I am very tired. Still, I will probably feel better when I have rested.” His eyes dropped back to the refreshment he so oddly found in the single tax. I left him and called Mary out of the sitting room to tell her that it was all right, ran upstairs to give the news to Cordelia, and went down to the basement and gave them to Kate. All alike nodded with relief, completely convinced of the power of my beggared father to intervene in the affairs of state.
12
FOR THE NEXT three days, except for an afternoon when Aunt Lily had to be taken to Holloway Jail to see her sister, Papa followed a routine which we had often seen him adopt before. He rose late; through the day a shadow grew blacker round his jaw for lack of shaving, and he shuffled about the house in carpet slippers, or paced the garden, talking to himself or droning “The Wearing of the Green”; in the late afternoon he went to his study and worked there through the evening, through the night, into the morning. At such times a stranger would have thought him a seedy eccentric, whose life had been a failure and whose substance was now failing, and might have pitied Mamma and even his children for having to live with him. But it was then that he was most like Mamma in vigorous purpose; for it always meant that he was writing something less ephemeral than his usual journalism, a pamphlet or an essay to be included in a book. We felt a special reverence for him then, though we were always sensible that he was not lucky. No creation was painless, Mamma had told us, the composers also wrestled with angels by night and by day. But surely they had kindlier adversaries, who, when they succumbed, embraced and were reconciled. Surely they were not left as hollow-eyed, as hollow-cheeked, as dusty with fatigue, and subject to the horrible obligation of beginning the conflict all over again tomorrow. Could Papa not write stories or plays or poems, something as unargumentative as music?
The days passed. Mamma tended Aunt Lily, who developed, as suffering people do, a minor ailment, and wheezed with not very grave bronchitis. There was an outcry in the press about her sister; it was then not such a serious matter to criticize a judge as it is today, and there were protests against the sentence which brought a lot of letters to Papa, asking him to write or speak on her behalf, which Cordelia and I answered, signing them P. Golightly, secretary, saying that Papa was attending to the matter in another way. Some people called, though nobody was admitted save Mr. Langham, who through the years went on fetching and carrying for Papa. Many of them took their exclusion badly, especially a deputation from a society of working-class anti-socialist revolutionaries, side-whiskered men who wore string round the knees of their corduroy trousers and carried on a tall pole a banner announcing that they were the Sons of Freedom, and asked to see Papa, because the older ones among them had fought for the Tichborne Claimant and they were not going to see justice defeated twice. When we told them that Papa was not in they got very angry and said that it was not true. That was of course correct, but we felt no sense of guilt, for they would have said it anyway. They went off with the banner bobbing angrily, and the one with the fiercest whiskers reciting, “Just for a handful of silver he left us.” We gave out to the messengers of the Lovegrove Gazette the leaders he was supposed to have just written, though they had been prepared beforehand in a gamble on what the news would be. We all grew nervous. “How’s your Papa getting on?” Aunt Lily would ask. “Queenie’s only got a fortnight to turn round in.” This was true.
But in the early afternoon of the fourth day Papa came into the sitting room, looking very thin and tired, and carrying two rolls of manuscript in his hand. Would Cordelia take them to the printer? He already had his orders. He must strike two thousand of the one, two thousand of the other. Cordelia rose to do the errand, very smug, and I was left with my jealousy. Papa had got into the way of giving Cordelia his manuscripts to take to the office or to the printer when Mary and I were still little and she was the only one who was sensible. It was a practice which, as our history books said, had “crept in.” But then Papa said that he hardly liked to trouble Mamma, but the business did not finish with the pamphlets, there was much to be done, he had to go up to the House of Commons and see a man who had influence with Brackenbird, the Home Secretary, who was a relative of his indeed. He knew Mamma had to stay with poor Aunt Lily, but he would be glad if either Mary or Rose could come with him, so that if he felt faint someone could fetch a cab. “Mary has not done her practice,” said Mamma, “it must be Rose. Rose, go up and put on your coat, your best coat. And, Piers, my dear, you must take a cup of soup before you go. Oh, if we only had a carriage.”
The soup was what he needed. He was much restored, and he slept in the train, his coat-collar turned up round his lean face. He was cheerful enough when we walked across Westminster Bridge and called on me to admire the fretted majesty of the Houses of Parliament, dark against a spring sky of mackerel clouds floating on pale bright space. A spring wind dappled the river and blew in our faces with a force I would have thought more than his fatigue would have liked. But he strode on happily, his eyes set on the great Gothic mass. “That is the terrace,” he said. “You have heard of people having tea on the terrace? Well, there it is.”
Surely this was what he really liked. “Papa,” I said, “would you have liked to be a Member of Parliament?”
“More than anything in the world,” he said.
Rage against the world silenced me for a step or two. If Papa wanted to be a Member of Parliament, why should people not have let him have his wish? “You would be a wonderful Prime Minister,” I s
aid.
“Well, I am so far from being Prime Minister that if I say I would have made a good one it is not immodest,” said Papa, “for if my claim has anything in it, then I am very guilty in not having come nearer to the post.”
“But could you not still become at least a Member of Parliament?” I asked.
“No,” said Papa. “Almost anybody can become a Member of Parliament. The rabble is pouring in. But I could not become a Member of Parliament. I have no party. Only a handful of men in all England believe what I believe. Many people read me, and seem to think well of my writings. But almost nobody credits a word I say. It is a very curious feeling, my dear. I exist and I do not exist. Sometimes I think I know as well as any man that ever lived what it is to be a ghost before death. I hope nothing like this happens to you, my dear. But your Mamma has made a musician of you, and I suppose things go more easily in that world, you either play well or you do not.”
We were off the bridge now, and turning round by Palace Yard. “That is where we would go in if I were a Member,” he said, and sighed. “But it is the Strangers’ Entrance for us.”
Papa showed the attendant at the door his press ticket and added that he had come to see a Member of the House of Commons, Mr. Oswald Pennington. The name was familiar to me, as many names were familiar to me in my childhood. He had been a great friend of my father’s for some months, then we heard no more of him, and if Mamma mentioned him Papa laughed contemptuously. No figure was continuously present in my father’s life except, strangely enough, the chirruping Mr. Langham, who certainly would not have been expected to stay the course. We went up the stairs, and then Papa said, “Stop, you must see this,” and I looked down for the first time on Westminster Hall. We had entered a Victorian building and had come on Shakespeare. The stone chamber was splendid like blank verse, the golden angels who held up the roof matched the poetry of earth with heavenly hymns, great embodiments of the passions had gone out a minute before, trailing their gold and crimson cloaks on the staircase that leads up the wall and into the end of the play. “We must hurry, we have business to do,” said Papa. “But you are right, there is nothing more beautiful in all the world, not in Paris, not in Rome. And nearly all that is worth calling political science came to being in that hall.”
