by Rebecca West
‘But he cannot help being what he is,’ said Mamma.
‘And if you had sent for the police you could not have helped that either,’ said Kate.
‘That is what I am saying,’ said Mamma. ‘We all act as we are made.’
‘If we are all as we are made, why have you tried, year after year, sun and shine, to make the young ladies less wild and hasty and to get Master Richard Quin to work at his books?’ asked Richard Quin.
‘Oh, training is another thing,’ said Mamma. ‘But I do not suppose that old Tom Partridge had much training.’
‘He had as much training as the laundry-man and his wife,’ said Kate, ‘and they are sick of his thieving, sneaking ways.’
‘It is not only the question of whether people can help doing what they do,’ said Mamma. ‘One must be kind to them whatever they do, when things have gone wrong that is the only way of getting them right.’
‘But it would be far better if you were kind to the laundry-man and his wife,’ said Kate.
‘I will be kind to them if they need it and if I can give them what they need,’ said Mamma. ‘But they probably do not require my help. It is the terrible thing about the other people, the ones like Tom Partridge who are gripped by this desire to do fatal things, that they get themselves into positions where they are lost if they are not helped.’
‘But such people could stop doing all these foolish things the minute they wanted to,’ said Kate. ‘Old Tom Partridge chooses to steal lead off roofs, the laundry-man and his wife choose to be honest and decent, and that is what makes the difference between them, and nothing else.’
‘Oh, Kate, do not believe it is as simple as that,’ my mother begged.
‘What is this argument about?’ enquired Mr Morpurgo. He had been knocking at the front door for some time, but we had been too deeply interested in the discussion of Tom Partridge to hear him. In the end Mary had let him in, and they were standing together in the doorway. ‘Who is old Tom Partridge, and what have the laundry-man and his wife been doing?’ He had often the air, when he came to our house, of a child who wanted to be told a story.
‘Mamma is saying that people are good and bad because they are born like that,’ explained Richard Quin, ‘and Kate is saying that they are good and bad because they choose to be, she thinks they only do it to annoy because they know it teases.’
‘Oh, that is what they are arguing about, are they!’ exclaimed Mr Morpurgo. ‘I can myself make only one small contribution to that argument. I can tell you that it is most unlikely that you will settle it before luncheon. It has been going on elsewhere for some time now. Come, we must start.’
II
THE LARGE SQUARE ROOM of Mr Morpurgo’s car trundled us across the Thames and past the Houses of Parliament into the part of London south of Hyde Park, where the squares are faced with stucco and the tall houses are white cliffs round the green gardens; and he grew very cheerful. ‘Now we are near home,’ he said, ‘and I am quite looking forward to meeting my wife at luncheon. Though she has been back for two days I have hardly seen her. Unhappily her journey has given her one of those agonising headaches which are the curse of her life. They make it absolutely impossible for her to talk to anybody, and while they last she simply has to shut herself up in her bedroom and pull down the blinds, and that’s what she has been doing ever since she came back. We had a long talk together on her arrival, and suddenly the old pain started. No, no, there was no question of putting you off. I would have been quite ruthless in asking you to come another day if it had been necessary. But I asked her yesterday evening, and she said that if she dined in bed and took a sleeping draught she would be quite fit for the party today.’
‘Travel has been unlucky for you both lately,’ said Mamma. ‘You really looked quite ill when you came back from that Continental journey which you said you hadn’t enjoyed.’
‘Ah, yes,’ he sighed, sobered by the memory. ‘But that, as you realised, was because of all the cooking in oil. See, this is where I live, the big house, the very big house, lying crossways at the corner of the square, and not at all in keeping. There is nothing one can do about that. As the Almighty pointed out to Job, nothing can be done about behemoth and leviathan. No, do not get out yet, the footman will open the door.’
At those last words I was stricken with terror. Like all people brought up in households destitute of menservants, we regarded them as implacable enemies of the human kind, who could implement their ill-will by means of supernatural powers which enabled them to see through a guest’s pretensions as soon as they let him into the house and to denounce him to the rest of the company without the use of speech. We hurried past the footman with our eyes on the ground and thus were unaware till we had entered the hall that this was not just a large house, such as we had expected Mr Morpurgo to possess, it was large like a theatre or a concert-hall. We stood washed by the strong light that poured from a glass dome far above us, on a shining floor set with a geometric pattern of black and white marble squares and triangles and crescents; a staircase swept down with the curve of a broad, slow waterfall; the walls were so wide that one took a tapestry where two armies fought it out on land round a disputed city in the foreground, and in the background two navies fought it out among an archipelago lying where a sea and estuary met; and on the facing wall a towering Renaissance chimneypiece rose into a stone forest honeycombed by several hunts. When Mr Morpurgo had had his hat and coat taken from him, he wheeled round and faced us, his little arms spread out, his little legs wide apart.
‘Of course,’ he said gravely, ‘we have no need for a house as large as this, there are only five of us. But a man must have a house he can turn round in.’ We remained silent, and he went to Mamma and took her hand and kissed it. ‘Clare, you have brought up your children beautifully. Not one of them laughed. So I will tell you about this house, and why you must not laugh at it.’
The butler and the footman all suddenly looked as remote as if they had taken a drug, and shifted on their feet. They did not look like the devils I had expected; rather they recalled Shakespearean courtiers dealing with what must have been the chief problems of their lives, how to stand within earshot of their loquacious betters and seem not to be listening, and how to find a stance which would carry them comfortably through soliloquies. ‘The truth is,’ said Mr Morpurgo, ‘I have too much house, as I am apt to have too much everything. But there is reason to be kind about the excess of this place. My father built it, because he was a Jew, one of a persecuted people, and he was entertained by King Edward the Seventh, on an occasion which really deserves to be remembered. Nobody said anything about it the other day when he died, I suppose it was impossible because we want to keep the peace among the nations. But it may in the future be remembered as an example of a thing that only a king could do, and a thing that you would not expect to be within the range of a Hanoverian king, for it had wit. As you are sure to know, the Tsar of Russia hates his Jewish subjects. He has been furiously anti-Semitic ever since the time when he was a young man travelling in Japan and a waiter who had gone mad hit him on the head with a heavy tray; and it does not merely happen that there are pogroms in Russia, they are promoted by the government, that is to say, by the Tsar. Well, when the Tsar came to England in 1894 the Prince of Wales administered a rebuke to his niece’s young husband. He invited him to spend a weekend at Sandringham, and when the Tsar got there he found that nearly all his fellow-guests were Jews. One of them was my father, and he was profoundly impressed. It is true that many people, on hearing this story, are less impressed, and point out that the Prince of Wales had borrowed a great deal of money from those Jews which he had never repaid. But such people are always Gentiles. We Jews know that there are many people who borrow money from us and do not repay it, and that it is not really very usual for such borrowers to make beautiful and courteous gestures in defence of our race. So my father, having been asked to Sandringham on this auspicious occasion, built this house, because he
felt exalted and wanted to make a visible symbol that our race is honoured on earth as we have always been perhaps a little too certain that it is honoured in heaven. Therefore, children, think gently of this house, and forget, as I try to forget, that my father should really have understood that it is ridiculous to build in the Renaissance style with machine-cut stone—’
He suddenly came to a halt and his smile faded. ‘Manning,’ he said, and the butler came forward. Mr Morpurgo pointed to a Homburg hat that was lying on the hall-table, and asked, ‘Does that mean that we have another guest for luncheon?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said the butler. ‘Mr Weissbach is in the drawing-room.’
Mr Morpurgo repeated, ‘Mr Weissbach? But why has he come? I did not ask him.’ He passed his hand across his forehead. ‘There must be some mistake. I must have asked him for another day. Yet I can’t remember doing anything of the sort.’
The butler licked his lips. ‘Mr Weissbach rang up this morning just after you left, sir, and said that he had just come back from abroad, and was very anxious to see you, and I put him through to Madam, who spoke to him and then told me there would be another guest for luncheon.’
He spoke with gloating discretion. Mr Morpurgo seemed stupefied by what he heard. There was the same atmosphere that there used to be at school when there was trouble between the teachers. Only Mamma did not realise that something had gone wrong. Her eyes were wandering among the handsome valour of the lances and pennants of the armies in the tapestries, the compressed churches and palaces in the city they disputed, she was softly humming some music that seemed to her appropriate.
Mr Morpurgo continued to stare at the Homburg hat. At last he said, in the voice of a reasonable and unperturbed man, ‘It seems that my wife has arranged for you to meet Mr Mortimer Weissbach. An art dealer, a famous art dealer. Not one of the dealers I took you to see, Clare, when we had your pictures to sell. He specialises in Italian art. God has thought fit to take the Holy Land away from my people, but of late years He has done much to compensate for this by giving some of them the Quattrocento to cultivate instead. Come, let us go up my staircase, my enormous staircase.’
He halted us on the landing. A single picture hung between two doors, presented with pomp, set in a gilt panel carved with pilasters and adjoining arch; a Madonna and child painted in flat bright colours with much gold. ‘My Simone Martini,’ he said tenderly. As he gazed on it he might have been sucking toffee. Shyly he added, ‘Hardly a painting, I’ve often thought, more a mosaic made of tiles taken up from the floor of heaven. New tiles. I’ve got another picture, my Gentile de Fabriano, who did the trick with some of the worn tiles from the same place. I don’t know which I like better.’
‘Beautiful, beautiful,’ Mamma murmured and passed into a trance. She opened her mouth, and Mr Morpurgo drew nearer to hear what comment his treasure had drawn from her. She said, ‘I wish Piers had been more interested in pictures. It would have given him such a nice rest from politics, and he would have enjoyed painting had he turned his mind to it, he had quite a feeling for painting.’
‘Indeed he had,’ said Richard Quin. ‘We have lots of sketchbooks of his, you know, with water-colours he did in Ireland and Ceylon and South Africa.’
‘Where are those sketch-books now?’ asked Cordelia in sudden panic. ‘We must not lose them, we lose everything.’
‘I have them, dear,’ said Mamma meekly, and continued, ‘He had no ear for music, and anyway music would not have been right for him. But painting is a calm art, and he needs calm.’
‘Well, calm can come to a man in many ways,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘And what a family it is!’ he groaned. ‘You look at a picture, and you appreciate it, I can see by the way you keep your eyes on this one that you get its form and its colours, yet they all turn into thoughts of Piers. But for you everything, absolutely everything, turns into thoughts of Piers, doesn’t it?’
‘You must forgive us,’ said Mamma, ‘we cannot help it. And really—’ she added impatiently, and then checked herself and smiled. For an instant she had supposed Mr Morpurgo was being silly, but of course he was so nice that it was wrong to admit that, even when it was true. ‘And really it isn’t a fault. Even if it wasn’t Piers we’re talking about, and of course he stands head and shoulders above anyone else, isn’t it natural for a wife to think of her husband, for children to think of their father?’
‘Yes,’ agreed Mr Morpurgo, ‘it is natural. One might go further and say it is nearly the whole of nature.’ The idea seemed to please him. He warmed himself at it for a moment, then said gravely, ‘And now, come and meet the people of whom I naturally think. Come and meet my wife and daughters.’
Now the butler, who had maintained his character as a Shakespearean courtier by moving a couple of paces away from us with an air of withdrawing to another part of the forest, came forward and opened a door at a blank verse pace. We found ourselves in a large room which seemed to us glittering and confused. The light that streamed in from high windows was given back by chandeliers, brocaded hangings, the glass on pictures and in display cabinets, and a number of crystal and silver objects; and among the buhl chairs and tables there stood several great screens of flowers, four or five feet high. At the end of the room, dark against a window, stood a group of people, from which, after too long a pause, a tall and rounded figure detached itself. It was Mrs Morpurgo, and she was extremely surprised. She wore a hat; at that time all women of position wore hats when they entertained their friends to luncheon. Her hat was huge, and under it her thick ginger-gold hair was piled up in the shape of a Phrygian cap, and this gave her a preternaturally massive head, so it could clearly be seen that she had drawn it back, as people do when faced with something they simply cannot understand. Her body too was magnified by her puffed sleeves and her rich, self-supporting, flounced skirt, and so the questioning shrug of her shoulders, the hesitation of her gait, were magnified too. It was nothing about us which had startled her; her glance had not examined us. She seemed not to have expected anybody, anybody at all, to have come in by that particular door; and as there were two other doors in the room, and as the three young girls behind her were smiling as if they were witnessing a ridiculously familiar scene, I supposed that Mr Morpurgo obstinately entered this room by a door which for some reason should not be used, just as Papa always left the gas burning in his study when he went to bed. But it was odd of Mrs Morpurgo to make a fuss about so small a matter at this moment, for her husband was caught up in solemn exaltation. If his eyes had met mine I would not have dared to smile. He said, ‘Herminie, this is my old friend, Clare Aubrey.’ His voice wavered, and he cleared his throat. The wife,’ he explained, ‘of Piers Aubrey, whom I so much admire. And here are her Cordelia, and Rose and Richard Quin.’ As he slowly spoke our names he spread out his arms around us in a patriarchal gesture which announced his hope that his family and ours should be welded together for ever in the shelter of his affection. But he immediately curbed his gesture. Had it been completed, it must have included within its scope Mr Weissbach, who at that moment stepped from behind a pyramid of gladioli and roses and took up a position beside the young girls. The manner in which Mr Morpurgo exclaimed, ‘Ah, Weissbach!’ conveyed too brutally just where the project of adoption he had declared left off. Though Mr Weissbach plainly did not need to be adopted since he was an elegantly dressed gentleman in middle life, silver-haired and neatly bearded and closely resembling King Edward the Seventh, he might well have felt hurt. Mr Morpurgo began again, ‘You remember, Herminie, I have so often talked of these young people,’ but the remark broke against the hard surfaces of his wife’s total bewilderment. His voice cracked, his hands made fluttering, coaxing movements, and then were still. He sighed something kind which could hardly be heard.
I had mistaken the cause of Mrs Morpurgo’s surprise. We had not come into the room by the wrong door. But her husband had come into the room, and had brought us with him, and she was surprised by that, because everything h
er husband did struck her as inexplicable. This I realised very soon, for Mrs Morpurgo had no secrets. She controlled her words well enough, saying the same sort of things that the mothers of our school-fellows said when we went to tea with them, but as she spoke the truth was blared aloud by the intonations of her commanding voice, the expressions which passed over her face, legible as the words on a poster, and her vigorous movements. ‘This is Marguerite,’ she told my mother, ‘and this is Marie Louise, nearly grown-up, just grown-up, which should I say? Just like your Cordelia and Rose. Oh, yes, terribly dignified, aren’t you, my pets? And here’s our baby, Stephanie. Is your boy as young?’ But her clear, protruding, astonishingly bright grey-green eyes were saying, ‘Well, I am doing what he wants, but why should he want me to do it? Who can these people be that he thrusts them on me?’ She went on, ‘Ah, then there are three months between them, but he is inches taller,’ and her accents asked, ‘What can possibly come of it if I am as nice to them as he insists? We have nothing in common with them, how am I to carry on a relationship even if I begin it?’ In the midst of a pleasant remark about Cordelia and myself, she bit her lip in annoyance and shuddered, ‘It is always the same,’ she might as well have said aloud, ‘he never stops doing this sort of thing, it is insupportable.’