by Rebecca West
‘But you have it from them,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘I do not see why you cannot go on with your playing, because you are a musician, and music is a part of you, you are your mother’s daughter, and at the same time take what Len and Milly and Lily and the rest of us can give you.’ His sharp, connoisseur look lit on me for a second. ‘You have not got it clear yet.’
He was right. There was another terror in my mind I had not recognised before. ‘It is the people, I tell you. The people I play to, and, oh, yes, the people I have to work with. I am frightened of them. I said they gave me nothing but money, nothing but presents, nothing but admiration, and that what I value is not that, but what I get from the people here, at the Dog and Duck. But what I would hate most of all would be if these people I play to, these people I work with, started to try and give me what I get here. I could not bear it if they stretched out their hands to me, and touched me, and tried to come near me - oh, I should be sick, I could not bear it, if they persisted I should kill myself.’
‘I wonder what you really mean,’ said Mr Morpurgo, frowning into the distance.
‘I mean what I say,’ I cried, raising my voice angrily. ‘I could not bear the thought of these people laying hold of me, feeling they have rights over me.’
Aunt Lily was standing beside my chair, and she bent down and kissed me. ‘I saw my Rose when I came out to pick a sprig of mint for the high tea, and I had to come down to give her a hug. Thought she wasn’t coming down till tomorrow.’ She smoothed my hair, which was no doubt disordered, and looked about at the calm afternoon, the level river, the reflections of the brightly painted rowing-boats and launches, the August uprush of grasses and flowers and dark enrichment of foliage on every tree. Funny that with everything so lovely and abundant people should want to eat rock cakes. Miserable things. But you can’t give them enough.’
She was gone. I repeated in a lower voice, ‘I tell you I cannot bear the thought of these people coming nearer to me. Mixing me up with their affairs. And such disgusting affairs. Only the people I have always known are clean and innocent.’
‘Oh, come, Rose,’ he said, gently. ‘You will understand how much you may be misjudging the people you do not know if you reflect how hard it might be to convince strangers that the Dog and Duck is the home of purity. If anyone knew only the beginnings of Len and Milly and Lily they might harbour a good many doubts about them. And there is Queenie.’
‘But that would be only because they did not know,’ I objected. ‘Just because some people would make a mistake and think that Len and Milly and Lily and Queenie are bad, it does not follow that no people are bad. “Goats and monkeys,” you said that Shakespeare was right when he wrote that. Why do you not believe me when I say that I want to run away from people? I want to give up playing, I want just to live here, never seeing anybody but us.’
‘My poor Rose, how long have you felt like this?’
‘For a long time,’ I said. I was lying but I could not tell the truth, it was clouded in my mind. ‘It comes to me when I am playing. I look at the audience, and I think how detestable I am and I am afraid they will rush the platform and take me to themselves, and I go blind with disgust.’ It sounded as if I were mad. I wished I had not told this silly lie, because my distress was sane. I was right to fear the unknown thing I feared.
‘I would not have thought your professionalism would ever break down to that extent,’ said Mr Morpurgo, with a puzzled air.
‘Well, it is not quite like that,’ I owned. ‘I invented that. But of course you knew it. But you see,’ I said, weeping again, ‘I am so terribly miserable, and I do not know why. And what I said is roughly the truth. I want to have nothing to do with anybody except the people here. I should like to give up my playing and never see any strangers. Why will you not believe me? Why do you force me to go on?’
‘My little pet runaway steam engine, I have never forced you to do anything in my life,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘I do not think that in all my life I have ever forced anybody to do anything they did not want to, except by the means of money, an instrument which could not be used on you. If you want to give up playing and come and live here, there is nothing to stop you. But you are not talking entire nonsense. It is certainly true that you are very troubled. Let us go for a walk along the river and we can find out what it is all about. There is a thing so pretty there just now that it will help me to understand.’
We went into the adjoining meadow where he always fished, passing first by a tangle of meadowsweet and purple loosestrife, and then to an open path on the river’s edge. A steamer full of people went by, with the harpist that all Thames boats used to carry, making the thinnest music possible, that sounded as if the strings had got hoarse in the damp air, that somehow gave the crowded boat an air of ceremony, that made it dignified like the swans. We walked in silence till those waif-notes and the plumper gush of the wake could no longer be heard, and then I burst out, ‘I want to stop living, I have had enough of life, I want to shut myself up with what is left of Papa’s and Mamma’s life, everything else is detestable.’
‘You may be right,’ he said. ‘But I doubt if your mother would have gone to the trouble of having four children if she had wanted life to stop with her.’
‘She went to the trouble of having four children,’ I said bitterly, ‘and one, the best, died before she did, and before he had time to do anything or enjoy anything.’
‘Oh, what Richard Quin did was infinite, and what he enjoyed was the absolute of enjoyment, which could not have been increased if he had lived to be a thousand years,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘You are not going to be vulgar and think his life was not accomplished because he left nothing that could go into an inventory for insurance?’
‘But he died,’ I raged. ‘He died, while vicious people, gross people go on living. Let the whole thing stop, let me detach myself from the whole hideous business.’
‘As you will,’ he said. ‘But why are you arguing about it if you are sure that is what you want? I am not stopping you. I do not think that I have ever really succeeded in penetrating life myself, so I am not likely to take great trouble to keep you there, or be very effective if I should do so. But perhaps we had better find out who is the other party to your argument, since it is not I.’
‘Yes, Mamma would have wanted me to go on playing. She would not have liked me to settle down and hide myself and be nothing. She believed in life, but I cannot imagine why. Oh, we in our family know much more than other people, we know there is a life after death, and that mind can speak to mind through walls and that there is a war between good and evil, but still we do not know the meaning of it. If we live for ever does that give life a meaning? How can good win the war, what then, when human beings are what the war is fought through, and they are so vile? How cruel Mamma was not to let Papa go on his way to death long before he did! Oh, poor, poor Papa!’
‘The thing I want to show you is this,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘Oh, it means nothing, it is not a symbol. It is just so pretty.’ At a certain point on the riverbank the purple loosestrife grew in a thick hedge between the water and the bank, level and neat as if the pruner’s hook had disciplined it.
‘Yes, that is beautiful,’ I said. ‘I could be content to live down here with Uncle Len and Aunt Milly and Aunt Lily and Queenie, and you as a constant visitor, and see lovely things like this. This is enough, and so it ought to be, for it is so much.’
I looked at the way the sun, now it was sinking, struck on the silver under-edge of the willow leaves, and on the coarse long grasses that stood higher than the rest, so that the trees seemed interpenetrated by light, and the ground too. And the river, how calm it was!
‘How I love the river!’ I said. ‘It is something I have known all my life. It flows back to London where I was a child. I feel as if I could get into a boat and glide down till I came back into my childhood, and Rosamund would be there.’
‘But nothing of the sort could possibly happen,’ said Mr Morp
urgo.
‘No, but I could come here again and again and think it might,’ I said. ‘You see, you are against me. You do not like me to do what I want to do and come here and see nobody I did not know when I was a child.’
‘I am sure it is not what your mother would have liked you to do,’ he said with quiet obstinacy.
‘Why, because she was cruel to my father, should she be cruel to me too? Why did she marry him? Why did she get mixed up with all this horror?’
‘You rave if you question the wisdom of your mother’s life,’ he said, without anger.
I looked over the river, over the meadow, to the clear yellow western sky. ‘So I do,’ I said.
‘It is a measure of your unhappiness, poor Rose,’ he said.
‘But why am I so unhappy?’ I wept.
‘I wish I knew,’ he said.
‘What do I want?’ I asked him.
He shook his head in perplexity.
‘It is so dreadful, I cannot go forward or back,’ I whispered hoarsely.
‘What did all your mother do mean except that there is a God, as they said in the past?’
‘How does that help?’ I said. ‘Of course what she did must mean just that. But she never talked as if that meant that everything went well. It only says in the Bible that are not two sparrows sold for a farthing, and not one shall fall on the ground without your Father. That is all it says. The Father does not save the sparrow. He only knows it has fallen.’
‘But He may be calling the sparrow to great things,’ he muttered. ‘Your mother was not something we were told about, she lived.’
The fish were rising, there were silver circles on the dark waters. ‘I love this field, I love walking here, let me live at the Dog and Duck,’ I said.
‘Look at those trees across the river,’ he said absently. ‘That line of poplars at the back, then the beeches below, then those weeping willows, with their tumbled branches in front of them, and in the foreground the flat meadow, and the same hedge of loosestrife on the water’s edge as we have, and then the water. It is a composition!’
‘It is so beautiful,’ I said. ‘But I am so unhappy.’
‘Has your unhappiness anything to do with the beauty?’
‘I think it has,’ I said uncertainly.
‘It has often seemed to me when I have been very unhappy and looked at beautiful things that there was a relevance,’ he said. ‘But I am babbling. Why have I made my collection if I do not know it is an answer to the pit? Why do you play if you do not know music is an answer to the pit?’
‘I do not want to make that answer any more,’ I said. ‘Oh, my dear, I would like it if this dark water was flowing over me, if the meadows on each side were far above where I lay.’
He put his arms round me and his connoisseur look came on him. ‘No,’ he said, letting me go, ‘there is nothing of death about you. But let us go back. It hurts me that I cannot help you.’
I bent down and kissed the curiously loose flesh of his face. ‘I would give the last drop from my veins for you, or any of her children,’ he whispered. ‘I mean it. I longed to die instead of Richard Quin and keep that grief from her. But the idea of sacrifice is a myth, we make it to keep ourselves happy, delightful to imagine a god that can be bought off. Oh, Rose, Rose, what a woman your mother was! If she had been any other woman, it would have been right to say that I was nothing to her. But being what she was, she gave me such kindness, such grace, she spread such light in my darkness.
My mother was huge across the skies, the peaceful fields, the peaceful waters were her footstool; I wanted always to be here.
‘Rose, she would not want me to think of her when you are suffering. But all I find to say is, let us go back. You want to be at the Dog and Duck, then sit there quietly. You want to be near them. You will be near them. It may calm you, and I am doing nothing for you. Oh, Rose, I have never seen anybody crying as you are crying.’
‘It must be horrible,’ I said.
‘No, there is a certain style about it.’
‘But that I am crying is so strange at my time of life,’ I said.
‘You tell them about Barbados Hall, they will find it natural enough that you should have wept with rage.’
On the way home I paused all the time to take handfuls of meadowsweet and sniff them, to bend down and strip the leaves from the peppermint stalks and crush them on my palms. ‘Yes, scent is a kind of medicine,’ said Mr Morpurgo absently.
‘But I am not ill,’ I wept, ‘I am only unhappy.’
‘Even so,’ he said, nodding. ‘Even so.’
In the garden we sat down at the little table at the water’s edge and looked up at the inn, which was now not so busy as it had been. The teas had gone, scampering away in their multicoloured simplicity. There were now only a few people who were having drinks before an early dinner. Of a more sedate sort, they were mostly couples, and there was one pair, a man and a woman about my own age, and of our kind, the sort of people one sees at concerts, the man with a nice smile, the woman in a rough silk dress of a sympathetic shade of lavender grey, who were evidently not married, for they looked at each other with amused and delighted surprise. Either I had met one or both, or people who resembled them, in unpleasant circumstances, which my distracted state prevented me from recalling, for I felt great distaste at the sight of them, I had to turn away.
The little packet still lay on the table among its wrappings, and Mr Morpurgo sighed when he saw it, and slipped it into his pocket. As he was such a virtuoso in benevolence I did not draw attention to his failure by seeking to know what this object might be, but I asked how Queenie was, and I got a grave headshake. She was helping in the kitchen, it seemed, at the moment. Housework bored and tormented her; her past was too much for her, she could not set about to clean a room without baring her teeth as if at any moment a wardress would come to censure her. But Mr Morpurgo told me what I had not known, that of late she had taken to baking and made excellent though extravagant scones and simple cakes, and quite elaborate breads. ‘Bread,’ said Mr Morpurgo, in the belief that he was telling me something, ‘still made with yeast, one of those things one thinks must nowadays only be metaphors. She greatly enjoys working with it, I have watched her. One has to make the dough with it. It behaves like a living thing, and that has to be beaten, she hits it with her fists quite hard, and then it is put in a warm place and it rises, oh, incredibly. Then it has to be kneaded again and put into tins, and it rises again, and she puts it in the oven, and it is a great victory when it comes out good bread.’
I could understand that, and I was glad as I was whenever I heard of Queenie being happy, for I was still quite well aware that I was responsible for Queenie’s crime. I might have been a child when I teased her with my power of fortune-telling and inflamed her with the idea that the universe is not so rigid as she supposed, had inspired her violent and impulsive mind with the aspiration to change it in such a way as would favour her desires; but I was a child who had been warned. I knew I was trafficking in forbidden things, and I knew there was a justice in the prohibition. I was a murderess by proxy; and I had condemned the woman who did the murder for me to a life of torment. Yet it seemed to me at that moment that had I been able to go back to my childhood I would not have been able to refrain from committing that crime. For that would have altered my childhood, which I loved so much that I could not bear it to be different in the smallest respect. If Queenie had not killed her husband the light from the gas-jet in our hall at Lovegrove might not have fallen on my father’s high cheekbones as it had when he brought in Aunt Lily after a day in court, and holding her by the shoulders, disregarded her babbled absurdities about the unfairness of the judge and told her softly, almost in a whisper, to go and lie down and not to talk, Mamma could wait till afterwards to hear about it all. Usually when I thought of my childhood it was Mamma who appeared with the solidity of real forms, Papa was only a dark presence, but now it was he whom I could nearly touch, and for wh
om I so longed that not to touch him was a sweet pain.
I had not noticed that Mr Morpurgo had left me, but we were drinking double sherries. I said, ‘But Uncle Len does not like women to have more than one glass of sherry,’ but Mr Morpurgo said, ‘It will be all right tonight. I will explain.’
I had had no lunch, so the world grew liquid as I drank. ‘How wonderful those scarlet snapdragons look in this light,’ I said.
‘And better still the mixed crimson and scarlet ones Len has in the beds beyond the bar,’ said Mr Morpurgo. ‘Look at all that flaming and smouldering colour, that precise form to every flower, the splendid bravura lift to the first, inaugurating the design of later stems and lesser supporting growths, all that to be stored up in an annual, it is not possible, it is against the principle of the conservation of matter. Look, dear Rose, you will like them.’
I turned in my seat and, though I liked the sight, my heart still was sore; and then the potboy lit the Chinese lanterns that were hung above the tables and I became subject to the strange law by which the spectacle of lights burning by daylight, in agreeable surroundings where people have gathered together to take their pleasure, causes an aching hunger for the past.
I kept my face turned away from Mr Morpurgo so that he would not see that I had begun to weep again. But he knew, his gentle voice advised, ‘Look, Rose, at this company of swans, how they seem whiter than ever now the twilight is falling.’
I cleared my throat and said, ‘Here is Queenie.’ She had come out of the house and was strolling down the lawn, towards the river, not towards us. We were not in her mind, she was absorbed in her own lack of ease. She did not present her usual careful copy of elegance. Her hair (and how astonishing it was that it was still dark) was a little disordered, and as she came nearer we could see a streak of flour across her shirt. She was frowning, and her hands looked discontented. For a little time she had forgotten her misery in the work of baking, and now tea was over and no more scones were needed, and she was back again where she had started. There was no grey in her hair, she was unbowed, she walked loose-limbed like a girl, her face surprised with the virility of its sullenness. It was probable that she would live for many years to come.