The Fountain Overflows

by Rebecca West

  We hurried along a corridor where there were many statues representing statesmen and many frescoes representing historical events, all in the spirit of a school play, while my father grumbled comments on the past sounding like curses and based on quite another conception of history than this innocent painting and sculpture. He suggested that in the hall we had seen fools and brutes, forced to this meeting by mutual treacheries; sometimes one snake had its head in the other’s mouth, and sometimes change about; under the pressure of reality each time they met they discovered some truth relating to the fundamental problem of politics, which was, he hoped I knew, what the state might ask of the individual, what the individual might ask of the state. The approximation to the truth thus attained was beautiful, but how unbeautiful the instrument of its discovery. Give them the chance, he grumbled, their foul hands would destroy the fair things they had made, half by accident. Even then I realized that a corridor decorated by sculptors and mural painters who adhered to my father’s conception of history would have been a most uncomfortable place.

  We sat in the round central lobby for quite a long time after my father sent his name in to Mr. Pennington. It was like sitting in the midst of a tureen full of gravy soup. I was growing up at the end of an age which, partly by necessity and partly by choice, was very brown. In the towns chimneys poured out smoke from open fires and kitchen ranges, and light itself was permanently stained; and town-dwellers, who then so largely set the way of thinking, romanticized the obscurity to which they grew accustomed. Such sights as a narrow shaft of light struggling through a heavy mullioned window and laying a thread of sunlight over a broad dark passage aroused none of the impatience we would feel today, but rather a sense that here was something as acceptable as a succession of major chords or a properly scanned line of verse. The House of Commons was a supreme effort of brownness. I can remember looking at one such needle-broad shaft of sunlight that afternoon, struggling through an interior brown in itself, what with brown wood, brown paint, and brown upholstery, and made more brown because the struggling rays of defeated natural light were supplemented by the molasses of shaded gaslight. There passed through the opacity before us and the other suppliants waiting in the seat round the circular hall a number of men whom I remember as being far more corpulent than the mass of men today; and the older ones wore beards which seemed to be corpulent too. My father noted that a number of the younger men were clean shaven and said that when he first came to the House of Commons there was not a single man with a bare face on either side of the House. Some of these passers-by nodded to my father, a few stopped to greet him. Most of these, he told me, were Members of Parliament for Ulster constituencies. “Poor men, they will probably be betrayed,” he said. “They are loyal to the British Empire, but this is Judas’s holiday.” His head began to nod.

  A man halted in front of us and looked down on my father and saw that he slept. His lips parted, he raised his eyebrows cynically, he swung his weight to his back foot. I knew he was saying to himself, “I never wanted to see this man, and since I have this unlooked-for opportunity to get away I might as well take it.” That would have been a cruel thing to do to my father, and to the schoolgirl who sat beside him. Yet Mr. Pennington did not look cruel. Abundant brown hair fell back from his forehead, a deep wave forcing itself forward in spite of brilliantine, and a fine moustache covered his handsomely curved upper lip; he had a clean bright skin; and his clothes were beautiful. He made the pleasant impression of a well-bred well-trained dog in good condition, wearing a handsome collar. A thought simple enough to have passed through a dog’s head made him wish to leave us to our troubles. Still, he did not give way to it. Something in my father’s sleeping face surprised him and aroused his curiosity, and he continued to look down on him.

  I tugged at Papa’s coat, and he was on his feet at once, like a swordsman who feared ambush and went to sleep with his rapier in his hand. He greeted Mr. Pennington politely, introduced me and explained that he had brought me to this unsuitable place because he felt too ill to come alone, and then said, “I have not come to you for the reason you might fear.”

  “Oh that,” said Mr. Pennington. He gave me a sideways glance, and then assumed a very amiable expression. It was evidently his theory that if he said something disagreeable to Papa and looked bluff and hearty when he said it, the meaning of his words would escape me. “It would be discourteous,” he said in a roistering way, “to say that it would have been quite useless if you had. Yet I am glad to see you after all this time. Upon my word, it is an extraordinary thing, I am almost as glad as I was during the first weeks of our acquaintance. A lot of people would think that impossible, after all that happened.”

  My father seemed to be sadly remembering that in more favourable circumstances he might have let himself answer angrily. Then he looked disconcerted, as if he had been arguing with a friend over an arithmetical problem and had worked it out for himself and found that he was wrong. “You are of course quite right,” he said. “But I have nothing. Believe me, I have nothing.” Mr. Pennington nodded humourously, as if that were so well known it hardly needed to be repeated. But light was now shining on my father’s face. He was possessed by the cause which had brought him here.

  He said, “I have come to see you about the Phillips case. I have some interest in it. Mrs. Phillips’s girl is at school with this daughter of mine here. When the woman went away my wife took in the Phillips girl and Mrs. Phillips’s sister, an excellent woman. The girl has now gone to a relative but the sister we still have with us.”

  “Have you indeed?” said Mr. Pennington, dropping his affectation. “That’s very kind of you. That’s very kind of you indeed. I say, what extraordinary things happen to you, old man!”

  “One does not read of murderers’ relatives sleeping in the street, though murders commonly destroy homes as well as lives,” said my father. “Somebody takes them in. So many people do what you call extraordinary things that you must be wrong in calling them extraordinary. You should remember that. But the point is this. You have seen that there is an outcry in the press against the way Queenie Phillips was tried, and a demand that she should be reprieved?”

  “Yes, indeed,” said Mr. Pennington.

  “I thought it would have come under your notice,” said Papa, “since you are a nephew of Mr. Brackenbird, and he is so conscientious a Home Secretary, and you have been seeing so much of him lately. Of late I have been reading the Court Circular in The Times, as attentively as if I were a general’s widow living in Bath.”

  “Well, anyway,” said Mr. Pennington, who seemed displeased with the turn the conversation had taken, “there can’t be much hope of a reprieve. The woman was as guilty as Lucrezia Borgia.”

  “Guiltier than that,” said Papa impatiently. I knew he would have liked to stop and explain that to class Lucrezia Borgia as a murderess was a vulgar error, unsupported by serious historians. But he continued, “I would ask you to consider that there are two separate strands in this agitation for Mrs. Phillips’s reprieve. Everything framed by the popular mind is impure. There are a number of imbeciles who believe that Mrs. Phillips did not poison her husband, that the nurse mixed up the medicines, and that the servants entered into a conspiracy to give false evidence against a mistress whom they detested. Of course, that is nonsense. But not entirely nonsense. The popular mind cannot even get its nonsense pure. For the servants did in fact detest Mrs. Phillips, and did in fact give perjured evidence against her till my blood ran cold, wondering what black outcrop of hell had produced the wretches. But there is another strand to the agitation. A number of people claim that Mrs. Phillips should be reprieved because she did not have a fair trial. That claim is justified. I sat in court with the woman’s sister from the moment she was brought into the dock till the moment she went down to the cells under sentence of death. She did not get a fair trial. Mr. Justice Ludost conducted the trial like a lunatic, because he is a lunatic. He interrupted the counsel for the def
ence times without number. He intervened to bully her witnesses. He interjected remarks designed to create a prejudice against her on issues not before the court. His summing-up presented her to the jury as a person to whom they did not need to do justice; and, even worse, he instructed the jury on matters of fact as well as matters of law. And this he did because he is as much a raving lunatic as any man in Bedlam today.”

  “Oh, old Ludost!” sighed Mr. Pennington. “Such a brilliant man!”

  “Why, how did you know that?” asked Papa.

  “I’ve been told,” said Mr. Pennington, with great simplicity. “And, of course, the news about him not being himself is getting round. We’ve had that in my own constituency. He’s been round the Northern Circuit just lately, you know. My uncle was worried about that when it happened. He’s getting old, of course.”

  “Age did not account for what happened at the Phillips trial,” said Papa. “Let me tell you what I heard and saw.”

  “Oh, you needn’t trouble,” said Mr. Pennington. “I read it all in the papers.”

  “What you read in the papers was not written by me,” said Papa. “I may have something to tell you which my inferiors could not. Wait here, Rose.”

  He and Mr. Pennington walked to the centre of the great round lobby, and they stood for perhaps a quarter of an hour, while my father had his hand on the other’s arm, and, to my surprise, looked very calm as he told his story. When he talked to himself in the garden, his gestures were often wild and, if he paused to repeat a phrase, laughing with satisfaction, it seemed certain that it had satisfied him by its violence. But now the words were coming from him in a moderate flow, evidently adapted to Mr. Pennington’s more placid disposition; for Mr. Pennington, being the taller of the two, had bent his head down to hear better, and turned it sideways, so that I was able to watch his expression. Though he sometimes looked saddened by what my father said, he never looked incredulous, or as people often did when any member of our family told them something, as if we were taking it too hard. Papa had evidently found the right note for his audience. I sat in the middle of the huge tureen of gravy soup, and looked through its brown depths at my father as he saved Mrs. Phillips’s life, and thereby spared Aunt Lily and Nancy the shocking grief they feared, and I was lifted up by pride. I looked at the passers-by, who sometimes stared at me, surprised to see a schoolgirl sitting alone in a place where, at that time, there were few women. I gave them pitying glances, because they were not the children of my father.

  At last they strolled back to the bench, Mr. Pennington saying gravely, “So that is how it was.”

  “Yes,” said Papa, and suddenly he became more like his violent self, though he talked quietly through his teeth. “And it is the unanswerable argument for the establishment of a Court of Appeal. I cannot think why your uncle is so obstinately opposed to it. The conception of a judiciary independent of the executive is one of the main foundations of our liberties. But the flesh-and-blood figure of a judge who has free rein for his will stinks to heaven, because human flesh and blood stink and the human will stinks. We have the faculty of secreting political wisdom and voiding it in the form of systems exquisite in their logic and their pertinence to our needs. But we remain illogical and impertinent, so all our systems are realized in gross imperfection, since we have to operate them. So we build up the common law of England and we place the judge on his bench at the correct point of the constitution, but there comes a day when time and, I suspect, a stroke of misfortune convert a judge into a senile and enraged Pan, his goat-leg visible under his robe, his horns piercing his full-bottomed wig. It is ridiculous to make judges independent of all control. If we exempt a judge from political control we can still set a judge to catch a judge. Not one judge alone to correct another judge. Then you will have stinking flesh and blood and will rolling in the dust with stinking flesh and blood and will. You must have three judges acting together, so that each can think of the system, which he will do chiefly to abash the other, but which will nevertheless compel them to the proper service of the law. But you must know all about the scheme, your uncle has been so busy in blinding his eyes to these undoubted truths.”

  “I say, what a chap you are!” protested Mr. Pennington. “You run on so. Nobody else thinks of this proposed Court of Appeal as you do. Even the strongest supporters of the scheme among the people I know in the House don’t think of it as you do. They simply think that a poor chap may come up before a judge that’s too old, or before a jury of fatheads, or has a lawyer that’s no good, and then in that case it’s only fair he should have another chance. And my uncle doesn’t agree with them. He says that one way of helping people is to keep them from committing crimes in the first place, and that one way of doing that is to make them respect the law, and that if you admit that judges can do wrong you weaken the respect for a very important part of the law. That’s how he sees it, and you’ve got to be practical, you know. That’s your weakness, isn’t it, old chap? You can’t say you’re practical, can you? I mean to say!”

  “You will be surprised to see how practical I am,” said my father. “Now listen. About a year ago you were with your uncle in the Strangers’ Dining Room, giving a party for some Frenchman, when I was dining with Cresson. We greeted one another. Afterwards I saw out of the corner of my eye that he asked you who I was, and you told him. What did you tell him about me?”

  “W-what did I say about you?” stammered Mr. Pennington, with a sideways glance at me.

  “What did you say about me?”

  “Why, that you are the most brilliant controversial writer of your time, and that you edited a small suburban newspaper, but the national newspapers quoted your leaders, and I reminded him that it was you who had written the Turner pamphlet. Well, of course, he didn’t like that.”

  “I am sure he didn’t. I thought myself that if I got Turner out of Calcutta Jail it would have been enough. All that compensation was not necessary. The man was a scoundrel. I refused to receive him on his return to England. But the public demanded it. And in principle they were right. He had been the victim of completely unconstitutional practices. But go on. What else did you tell him?”

  “I said,” sighed Mr. Pennington, “that you were incorruptible.”

  “I think you probably put it some other way. Tell me your exact words.”

  “A year ago,” pleaded Mr. Pennington, “how can I remember? Oh, well, I said you were incorruptible, that if you took a bribe you would be too intellectually honest to give value for it.”

  “Why, that’s almost an epigram, Pennington,” said Papa. “You’re coming on nicely. But I could not be better pleased that you etched my portrait on the tablet of your uncle’s mind; and I am even gratified to imagine that you employed fiercer acids than you own. But now listen, I have written a pamphlet on the trial of Queenie Phillips. I have described it exactly as I have described it to you, but I write a good deal better than I speak. The pamphlet is as good as anything Swift wrote. It will not be the talk of London, but it will be the talk of Fleet Street, which is a better thing. I have not said that Queenie Phillips is innocent, because she is not. But I have related how her servants perjured themselves in their evidence against her so that my young daughter here would have known they lied; and I have related how the judge nearly fell off the bench in his slavering desire to whip them on from perjury to perjury. I have related how, from day to day, the old satyr raved against what has destroyed him, and that if Queenie Phillips is hanged she will be the victim of a judicial murder, for what happened in the Central Criminal Court when she stood in the dock was not a trial.”

  “But, I say, you’ll stand trial yourself if you publish that!” exclaimed Mr. Pennington.

  “Yes, indeed,” said my father. “I will be sent to prison.”

  I have never known such ecstasy. My father was all we thought him. A thousand candles were lit in my head, the blood rushed hot and icy through my veins, and my eyes were full of tears. But as my vision cle
ared, I saw that Mr. Pennington was not gazing at my father, awed by his courage, as I had thought he must, but was looking at me; and there was pity in his face. Smiling, I wondered why. Then it occurred to me that I had no idea what would happen to Mamma and the rest of us if Papa went to prison. Certainly Papa would not be able to go on editing the Lovegrove Gazette in a cell; and though Mamma had often said that she could not understand why Mr. Morpurgo continued to employ Papa in view of his frequent derelictions of duty, and had said he must either admire Papa very much or care not at all what happened to the Lovegrove Gazette, he would surely rebel at paying a salary to an editor who was so completely prevented from even appearing to perform his functions. Neither Mary nor I was anything like ready to be a concert pianist, and we had learned in the last year or so that our confidence in our powers to support ourselves and our family in comfort by going into factories or shops was unfounded. I looked through Mr. Pennington’s kind face into bleakness, and had to force myself to hold my head high, and say, “Mamma and my sisters and my little brother will be very proud if Papa goes to prison.”

  Well, that was true. Papa must be doing the right thing, if it averted horror from Aunt Lily and Nancy. And as for the principle involved, of course it was right to go to prison for the sake of a cause. That I felt so strongly that my feeling was localized, I could touch it, somewhere near the breastbone; and this was one of the rare cases where grown-ups did not contradict one’s instincts but actually confirmed them. Our history books were full of people like John Bunyan, who had, as the historians put it in their particular English, “languished in dungeons” rather than renounce their beliefs. If Papa went to prison to save Queenie, and it meant that we were suddenly left with nothing to live on, well, this was the application of that principle to us. Any sufferings that came to us would be martyrdom of the same order as my father’s, though less, as we ourselves were less than he.