The Fountain Overflows

by Rebecca West

  We watched her give her encore. At the end she spread out her arms as she curtsied, and she made such a charming, symmetrical emblem of prettiness that I could imagine some absent-minded woman of the future calling some flower a Cordelia as my mother called a fuchsia a Taglioni.

  “I tell you she’s sure, absolutely sure to get married,” said Mary. “I shouldn’t be surprised if it happened quite soon. After all we are nearly old enough.”

  “Yes, she is absolutely lovely,” said Richard Quin. At once he added, with his usual anxiety that nobody should be hurt, “It isn’t that you two aren’t pretty too. You’re just as pretty, really. But somehow it’s more noticeable in her.”

  “It would be grand, it would stop all this nonsense with Miss Beevor,” I said, “and she would probably have a lovely big house, and she could give concerts, and we could play for her for nothing.”

  At the end of the concert we sought her out in the artist’s room, and we were so full of our new admiration and goodwill that we did not really mind finding her impersonating a genius exhausted by having given her all. She was sitting limp before the mirror, breathing languidly while Miss Beevor applied pads soaked in eau de cologne to her temples, and she was playing for an unseen audience as well, by giving tiny indications that Miss Beevor was not being as neat-handed as she might have been, and that she herself was exhibiting the possession of moral as well as artistic gifts of a high order by not expressing impatience. Because she did not want to spoil her concert finery by wearing it on the bus and train she was about to change into a cotton dress, but instead of just changing from one to the other, she had brought a wrapper and was sitting in it, as if to give this least of all artist’s rooms the glamour of a dressing room in a theatre. When we came in she gave us a glazed look, intended to suggest that, lost in art, she had forgotten all earthly ties. This was succeeded by a smile of too celestial sweetness, with overtones of courage and gravity, of refusal to show panic before the appalling responsibilities had thought fit to burden one who might well have been left free like the nightingale or firefly. But who knows, did not this quiet acceptance of duty lift her far above those who were merely beautiful, merely brilliant, merely gifted? I have never known anybody whose secret thoughts had such carrying-power as Cordelia’s. We did not care a bit. We now knew that if she could not play the violin she had another attribute that was rare and splendid; and we had always known that she was really all right. She did not always join in the same fights that we did, but when she did she was very good indeed. She had been splendidly rude to all the girls at school who were horrid about the Phillipses.

  We said we had seen the concert from an unusual viewpoint, and Richard Quin said, “Yes, through a window, high up. You looked lovely, and the people all thought so, the ladies in their flowery hats all knew they were none of them as lovely as you.” She was pleased; but her desire to provide another appealing scene for her imaginary audience made her assume the expression of one in the last stage of fatigue, who wanted nothing less than a noisy tribute from a boisterous young brother, but who would rather have died than let any trace of her suffering be detected. Our possession of our new discovery about her future kept us benevolent, but we left after a moment or two, pleading that we must get back to do our homework and our practice, because Miss Beevor asked us with a certain archness whether we had liked the encore, and we guessed there was a salient point on which she expected we would have a comment. It had probably been some adaptation of a classical composition signally unsuited to the violin, the poor creature, as Mamma had once sighed, having a weakness for that kind of thing. We were in no hurry to explain that the window through which we viewed the concert had been closed, so we were soon on our way to a bus-stop.

  “Oh, how I wish we were going back to practice and not to homework,” sighed Mary. “How I should like to work and work on Schumann’s Carnaval.”

  “I say, are you ready for that yet?” I asked. “I’m not. I have had a go at it, but I’m not there.”

  “No, I can’t really play it, not as Mamma does,” said Mary. “But that’s an absurd way of putting it, if we studied for a hundred years we should never play like her. But I can’t play it even by lower standards, but I think I would have got there by now if only I could give all my time to my work.”

  “But what fun it will be when you are great concert pianists,” said Richard Quin, “everybody liking you everywhere.”

  “Yes,” I said, “fancy having a full orchestra to play with.”

  “Or the pick of the violinists to play all the sonatas for piano and violin.”

  “It will be heaven.”

  “That was our bus that went by and stopped lower down,” said Mary. “How stupid of us, we are like something in that old beast La Fontaine, not getting our bus because we are talking of the time when we will be great. He was horrid, the way he liked ants better than grasshoppers, and frogs that wanted to be big, though surely that’s harmless enough, and wretched dairymaids who break jugs of milk, he was always kicking what’s down.”

  “Yes, he was awful,” said Richard Quin. “We are just learning ‘Le Corbeau et le Fromage.’ He’s positively pleased because a poor wretched bird does itself out of a bit of cheese.”

  “Ruskin was a beast too,” I said. “Sesame and Lilies has made this term disgusting. It’s all about how every woman ought to behave like a queen. Why should she, when there are such lots of exciting things to do?”

  “Think of spoiling our minds with all this sort of rubbish when we might be playing the piano,” said Mary.

  Indeed, the family was getting on very well. Mary and I were in the state of monomania proper to our destiny, and our relations with Cordelia were much improved by our certainty, which was as absolute as if we had read the news in The Times, that Cordelia would shortly stop playing the violin and get married, Mamma was quite pleased with us all, though Richard Quin did not always make her wholly happy. I remember her once passing her hand over her brow and saying apprehensively, “He is like quicksilver.” But often he made her supremely happy, more ecstatically happy than any of the rest of us could do, particularly when he consented to show what he could do if he worked at his music. The social restrictions of Lovegrove never cramped Richard Quin, who would by mysterious means discover the existence of interesting groups in the dreariest social landscape, and though they were total strangers would establish connection with them by means that never struck them as odd. He unearthed some amateur musicians who practised chamber music in their homes and though they were adult and he was still a schoolboy, became their flautist. My mother went to hear one of their practices and we jeered at her because she came home and said, quite indignantly, “I wish Mozart could have heard Richard Quin play the flute.” It seemed that Mozart had once complained (as others among the great have done) that flautists are never in tune; and it seemed to her for one idiotic maternal moment as if he had shown gross carelessness in not being prophetically aware of her son’s perfect ear and astonishing, idle, gay technique.

  But the ground cracked under our feet again. Papa at last set himself the task of writing a book: not just a pamphlet but a full-length book. At first he was very happy in this enterprise and wondered why he had left it so long. He reread many old books and read many new ones, and talked them over with himself as he paced the garden; and on his desk a pile of manuscript grew higher through the weeks. But after a certain time it grew no higher, and though reading was a function he could no more abandon than breathing, he read much less than before. Then a change came over him which we recognized with alarm. He became self-confident and worldly in manner, he dressed with a perfunctory effort at care, he took to going out a great deal, and he brought home a number of strangers. It was quite clear to us that our father had once again fallen into despair at the state of the world, and had once again resolved to set aside the useless tool of the intellect and trust himself to blind chance, which he imagined was the presiding genius responsible fo
r the successes of those who had another sort of intelligence than his.

  Once again we foresaw distress for our mother, and privation for all of us, no holidays, no new clothes, no concerts, and we had not long to wait for that catastrophe. But it struck us in an even fiercer form than we had yet experienced. For about a week half a dozen angry men kept on driving up in cabs and going away and coming back still angry. Not for one moment do I think my father had done anything criminal or illegal. He had simply done something infuriating. But he had never before infuriated so many people at the same time. One night they all came together, and did not go till all all of us children were in bed. At last the front door banged and we heard for hours, from the room below ours, Mamma’s astonished voice asking questions, many questions, and when Papa had answered them with his sneering laugh, pressing for another answer. Then Papa’s voice swept up and down the scale, an assurance that a fuss was being made about nothing. We knew he was not telling the truth, for when we lied it was in those very cadences. Suddenly it was daylight, and Mamma was standing at the door, telling us that we must hurry or we would be late for school, somehow everybody had overslept.

  That crisis passed. Our crises always passed. Mary and I nodded wisely at each other and said, “You see, in the end it turned out all right.” In those days, when the Navy led a more leisured life, a certain number of naval officers read enormously when they were afloat and picked up some very strange notions; and as soon as they retired became evangelists for some religious or political movement of the more eccentric kind. An old admiral who had formed an admiration of my father’s writings on the high seas came to his rescue. We felt gratitude to the admiral but were not much interested, for the rescue was incomplete. As usual, Papa immediately effaced from his mind the memory of this skirmish with ruin, he was unembarrassed, he felt the contempt for the world natural in one who, so far as he remembered, had never known failure. But the ruin he refused to acknowledge would not consent to leave him and was visible. It was his hands which distressed me. They were beautiful in shape, and had always been alive and busy, even when he was reading, for then they twisted and turned according to the course of his argument with the writer. One had only to look at them to see that he could carve and paint and chisel. But now they were immobile and dirty, not as if he had failed to wash them but as if some internal dinginess were working outward. He had always some dark hairs on the back of his hands, now they were longer and thicker and greyish. Now, too, his wrists were thin, they looked worn like the cuffs of his old suit, and his sleeves hung loose.

  But more had altered than his body. Whenever I read the word “estrangement” I think of my father’s relations with us at this time. It is a word misused as a synonym for hostility; its pure meaning describes our situation. My father had no enmity towards any of us, but he had become a stranger. There was no warmth between us. He would still approve of us, tell us that we were walking well and had straight backs, and warn us that whatever looks we had would go for nothing if we stooped or poked our chins, he would bowl to Richard Quin in the garden and would note how his batting was coming on, but it was as if what he had found to praise in us was the only recommendation we had to his favour. We felt ourselves obliged to suspect that he would have passed us by if we had been plain and clumsy. He still had some interest in Richard Quin and in Rosamund, but we were not jealous. We knew that among a crowd of adolescents who meant nothing to him, he could pick these out most easily, for Richard was his only son and good at games, and Rosamund was tall and fair—he liked women to be. They were themselves aware that there was no stronger reason for his preference, and were careful not to confuse him by too warm a response.

  But sometimes Rosamund was of special use for him. In the evening she and her mother always brought their sewing down to the sitting room, and settled down on the sofa and worked on the lapfuls of delicate stuff without making a sound while Mamma gave Mary and me our lessons. Sometimes, as one or other of us played, Mamma would suddenly say, “Stop, dear.” However intent on the music she had seemed, she knew at once when Papa had come into the room. He would stand in the doorway, his quill pen a long pale feather in his hands, and would say in a tired voice that he could not go on with his writing, and would be glad if Rosamund could play a game of chess with him. Constance would answer in her prim voice that it would be a pleasure for Rosamund, who would gather up the pale garments from her lap, roll them in a woollen cloth, lay them on the table, and, rising carefully, so that no pins fell on the carpet, and follow him into the study. If I had finished all my lessons, I would go with them, though my father’s study, like everything else about him, was no longer as pleasant as it had been. It had always been apparently disordered. When he was writing an article there were papers and open books spread out on his desk and the deep window-ledge and even on the floor. But when the article was finished the papers were gathered up and the books closed and put back in the shelves, and though their place was immediately taken by others, there was real order there, we would have known that anybody who thought Papa’s study untidy was uneducated. But now the disorder of the room was real. The books and papers were never cleared up nor replaced by others. They lay one on the other, overlapping under dust, and in the shelves they were treated with a new and shocking disrespect. A Blue Book, something about South Africa, had been thrust into the case back upwards, the pages crushed down in a roll on the shelf. I watched it day by day and noted that though Papa sometimes took books from the same shelf, he never set this maltreated volume to rights.

  When Rosamund had seated herself he would sweep clear his desk, open the chess-board, and take the pieces out of the dark lacquer box, faintly patterned with gold figures, which his own father had given him when he was a boy. I do not like the game; all such exercises of ingenuity make me feel as though the mind is being treated like a performing animal and forced to do tricks. But to watch these players was to consider a mystery peculiar to themselves. Usually my father’s speech and movements were swift to the point of fierceness. But now he moved more slowly than slow Rosamund. There would be long periods when he sat staring at the chess-board in silence, so long that my thoughts would settle in a standing pool. I would not think or feel, I would be aware of the sound of the wind, of Cordelia playing the violin upstairs, or Mary playing the piano across the hall, and it would seem as if they were all the sounds I should ever hear, and they would become charged with significance. I would expect a revelation, until my father’s stained and wasted hand shot forward from his frayed cuff and contentiously moved a piece. Then it would be Rosamund’s turn for deliberation, but hers was of a different character from his. He plainly thought out every move. When my sisters and I were little we had noticed that grownups’ foreheads were often hot and dry, and were sure it had something to do with the way they worried. It seemed certain that my father’s forehead must have been hotter and drier when he played chess.

  But when it was time for Rosamund to make a move it was as if the game already existed, and she was waiting for her senses to tell her not what the next move should be, but what it unalterably was. She would stretch out her hand to the board, and her loose sleeve would fall back and show her milky wrist and forearm; she had nice arms and a nice neck, and always looked well in her petticoat when she was dressing. She and her mother were like statues, we had often remarked it. Now she was like one of the Greek statues in the British Museum, she was like stone that dreamed. Her hand had a sleeping look as it travelled across the board and moved the piece that was foreordained to move.

  Then, if the game were drawing near to the close, Papa would throw himself back in his chair with an exclamation of bewilderment, for she was always right. He never won now. He would try. I could see him consciously reviving his fires, commanding his mind to be acute and powerful, and prophetic about little things, as it had been before; but Rosamund, firm behind the veil of trance, would establish the fact of her game, and it would be other than the game he tried to
enforce. Sooner or later he would scatter the pieces and close the board, saying that she had grown far too clever for him. He said it in many ways, all of them kind and well-mannered, but she nearly always answered in the same words: “No, I am not clever.” Then they would together put the chessmen back in the box, and we would sit together for a little time longer, as if the game were still going on, Papa black and lean, Rosamund giving out light from her fairness.

  I could not understand it at all. What they had been playing was stranger than a game, for here was Papa thinking out each move, obviously often choosing between two or three alternatives and altering his mind at the last minute, yet here was Rosamund, not using her reason at all, simply knowing what moves succeeded each other in a game that existed somewhere in full completion, even before they had sat down to play it. How could there be one game which Papa made up as he went along, and another which existed before it began, and how could they both be the same game? I would ask myself that question, and various passages of music would come into my mind, until Papa would begin to mutter phrases and feel for his quill pen, though he dropped it as soon as he had found it, and Rosamund’s hand would twitch as if she missed her needle. Papa would rise and thank her for having given him such a good game, and force himself to find some action which would assure me that I also meant something to him, running his hand through my hair and telling me that I was like some relative of whom I had never heard. When we returned to the sitting room Mamma always asked, “Did you have a nice game with Papa?” It was her habit now to question us whenever we had been with him, as if he lived a long way away from her, and she wished for news of him.

  14

  IN SPITE of everything, all our family, even Cordelia, who plainly was the most discontented of us, remained conscious of Papa’s enormous worth, of the good fortune we enjoyed in contrast to the predicament of poor Rosamund, who had to call Cousin Jock Papa. We realized this very strongly when he paid us a visit one summer night, just after supper, without warning. I opened the door to him. In those distant days it shamed a household not to have a servant on hand to open the door to visitors, but, as a generation younger than mine was to rediscover, the host gained an advantage if he did it himself. After a visitor has rung the bell or dropped the knocker he falls into a dream about what he is going to do or say when he is admitted to the house; so if it be the host who opens the door to him he will have a second before the visitor comes out of his dream during which he can divine the purpose of the visit. Through the light summer dusk I saw the curious fair beauty, the slender Mercury look, of this objectionable elderly man, and I had an impression that he had come to us because he had been hurt and wanted help. Nothing seemed more unlikely, he was of proven malignancy, and I then took it for granted that malignant people do not need help. Very doubtfully I stared at him. He had very strongly the air of belonging to the century we had just left, even to the beginning of it. I had thought years ago that he resembled an old portrait of a poet, and I could imagine him an enigmatic and transient companion of the Lake Poets, a promising young man who stayed a night with Wordsworth and made a nuisance of himself, wandered off uncivilly the next morning, reappeared as getting on well with de Quincey, and died in a garret, with lots of laudanum. I thought authors foolish people who gave themselves airs, for they permitted themselves to behave as foolishly as the most foolish musicians, though their product was manifestly so much less important. But then I noticed that he had his flute-case under his arm and his gloved fingers were moving as if on the stops. He was a musician. He was even a very fine musician. Since I had opened the door, I not only had been identifying him as a sensitive poet too sensitive to write any poetry, I had been childishly wondering if it would be any good shutting it again in his face and telling Mamma that it had been a drunk man, for I feared that he had come to take away Constance and Rosamund, who were on what had been promised as a long visit to us. Between my views of him, I did not ask him to come in. But in a second he assumed his chosen clownishness and pushed his way into the hall with the bowlegged stride of the Scottish comedian, the pointless leer.