by Rebecca West
Sunflower
Rebecca West
To my friend
G.B. Stern
Contents
I
II
III
IV
V
I
SHE never could understand machinery. So when the chauffeur tried to explain what was so seriously the matter with the automobile that it would take a whole two hours to repair, she cut him short and said, ‘Never mind, Harrowby. Accidents will happen, and anyway it’s much nicer than travelling by train.’ She noticed a look of real perturbation round his nice eyes, and was puzzled till a flash of comprehension came to her, and she hastily explained, ‘Oh, it’s all right about my being late. I’m not expecting—anyone.’ But she did wish Essington would not get so angry when she was late that the servants noticed. It wasn’t her dignity she was thinking of; she was too tired to think of that. But it dug away her defences. For if nobody else knew how he behaved, then when she woke in the middle of the night and felt like a trapped rat she could pretend that things weren’t so bad, she could say to herself, ‘I expect I imagine most of it. For he’s awfully fond of me, really. He can’t get on without me. Look how he always wants me to go away with him for his holidays. Yes, I’m silly, that’s what I am.’ But if other people knew about it she couldn’t fool herself, and had to go on feeling like a trapped rat.
She shivered, and said, ‘Well, I suppose I can’t go on sitting here if you’re going to do all that to her. I’ll go for a walk,’ and stepped out of the automobile. The garage yard was full of the clear light of May, and it was a pleasanter place than most of its kind, for it had evidently been an old livery-stable and its walks were of mellow red brick, patterned with streaks of moss and golden patches like freckles where time and sunshine had toasted away the surface. In the end wall was an archway barred by an iron gate, through which one could see a green country garden that was as much orchard as garden, with fruit trees standing in grass too long and strong for a lawn, and rows of rhubarb. It made her think of the orchards round Chiswick when she was a little girl. They had been so pretty; and she had had time to look at them, for then her days had been too empty as now they were too full. She was glad that this breakdown which gave her an hour to herself had happened in this little market town, where there were orchards.
‘Harrowby,’ she asked, ‘didn’t we pass a pretty place with water, just before we came into the town?’
‘Yes, Miss, a kind of big pond it was, with lily pools. A gentleman’s estate left to the district for a park, I should say it was. There were seats. About three quarters of a mile back, it was.’
‘Oh, dear! That’s too far. I’d have to walk a mile and a half in all. I suppose I won’t have time. And it was so pretty. It seems as if one never could do anything one wanted, doesn’t it?’ She felt like crying. Nowadays she was all to pieces.
‘But you said, Miss, that you hadn’t got to hurry. And I could run you back to town in an hour and a half from here. This is Packbury, you know. I should go if I were you, Miss. It’ll do you good.’
It was all right. There was really no reason at all why she should not go. It was simply that she was so unused to liberty, so seldom free from the leash that jerked her back to heel whenever she was doing anything she enjoyed, that she felt at a loss when she was on her own. She pulled herself together and said gaily, ‘All right. I’ll come back here. Don’t try to fetch me, for I’ll take a footpath if I can.’ She hadn’t been on a footpath for years. He tuned up his engine and took the car, calling over his shoulder, ‘Never known you have an hour to yourself before, Miss!’ She smiled and waved her hand, and turned towards the street. She meant to buy some fruit and chocolate, and eat it sitting by the pond.
But a young man in overalls, the man Harrowby had been talking to about the car, stopped her. ‘I’m proud to have your car in my garage, Miss Fassendyll.’
She did so want to buy that fruit and get away by herself to the pretty place. But she had to pause and look pleased, since he meant to be kind. ‘Oh, that’s very nice of you. Fancy your knowing me!’
‘Well, who wouldn’t? My wife—’ he gave a broad, shy smile, ‘she’ll be real sorry she isn’t down to see you, she’s laid up just now. Some people say she could pass herself off as you any day. Quite a joke it is among our friends.’
‘Isn’t that interesting! I do wish I’d seen her. But I expect she’s far nicer than me really. Tell her I’m ever so sorry I didn’t see her, won’t you?’
‘I will, Miss. I can’t tell you how disappointed she’ll be, for you’re her favourite actress. When we were passing through London last year on our honeymoon we went and saw you. She wouldn’t hear of going and seeing anybody else. “I want to see Miss Sybil Fassendyll,” she said, and that was that. Rosalind you were.’
‘Oh, was I!’ She sighed. ‘The papers said I was awful.’
‘We thought it was lovely. Never enjoyed an evening at the theatre more, particularly considering it was Shakespeare. I suppose there’s a lot of jealousy and that to account for what they write in the papers.’
‘No, I don’t think it’s that. They’re kind, most people. I didn’t know anybody when I started, and look how they’ve let me get on. But sometimes it’s hard to understand what they want you to do …’ Her eyes wandered vacantly round the yard. She became absorbed in contemplation of this mystery which nowadays was constantly vexing her, as to what the art of living could possibly be. One went on to the stage properly dressed and made up as the character and said the words as they would be said in real life. How could there be anything more to it? Yet it seemed, from the way that people went on, as if there was. She wished this man would not go on forever standing between her and oranges, and the pretty place with water, and rest. Apart from making her think of uncomfortable things he was horrid with his flat, smug, deliberate voice, his characterless, genteel phrases, and his peculiarly wide smile, which showed a gold-crowned tooth in his lower jaw. But there he stood in her path, quite undislodgeable, slowly turning a spanner in his hand, and smiling fixedly and over-broadly. She looked away again, and a spike of white lilac, thrusting above the tortoiseshell reds and golds of the wall, caught her wandering eye. Absently she said, ‘You’ve got a nice place here. It looks old, too.’
‘As old as you can think, Miss,’ he said, still turning the spanner, still smiling. ‘This was the stable yard of the White-Faced Stag Inn before it was burned down, and nobody knows how old that was. Queen Elizabeth slept there, anyway.’ It seemed that he must be about to stop, for the pause was long, but he did not. ‘We had an awful job to get the place right. Had to take up all the old cobblestones, for one thing.’
‘Isn’t that a shame! I always think they look so pretty.’
His smile grew broader. ‘That’s just what my wife says. But you wouldn’t like to drive into a garage all bumpitty-bumpitty, would you?’ He laughed tenderly, as if something in that feeling about the cobblestones struck him as very comic and lovable; labouring the point ridiculously. Then he began to tell her interminably how much it had cost to set the place in order, how he had spent every penny of his gratuity on it, to which she said wearily, remembering the cloud-marbled surface of that pond, ‘Well, I hope you’re doing well now.’
In a moment during which she nearly groaned aloud, he did not reply. Then he muttered, ‘Well, we were able to get married on it a year ago,’ and looked at her with shining eyes and a smile that was not fixed at all but trembled on the tide of a deep feeling. He opened his mouth, and closed it. He had ceased to turn the spanner in his hand, and was holding it away from him stiffly, exhibitingly, like a priest holding a reliquary; it might have been the symbol of something sacred that he possessed and wanted to tell her about and could
not because he was overcome by reverence. It came to her suddenly, for she was clever about people though she could get the hang of nothing else, that he had been telling her all these dreary things about the cost of removing cobblestones and the price of petrol-pumps because they were part of a story that he knew to be wonderful; and from a kind of glow of love about him, that was as real and perceptible as might have been the flush of rage or the pallor of despair, she knew that he was right and that the story was really wonderful. This man and this woman were in love, and it was lasting though they had got each other; they were living a marvellous life. This aroused in her feelings not only of happy sympathy but of partisanship, for she had been accustomed though not resigned to a world where everything—politics, business, the arts and sciences—were esteemed above life. ‘Why do they make such a fuss about Shakespeare because of “Romeo and Juliet”? It’s more wonderful to be “Romeo and Juliet”, like these people, than just to write it down,’ she thought contentiously while she smiled into the man’s blindish, radiant gaze, and cried, ‘Isn’t that lovely! Isn’t that lovely!’ She felt a little guilty, because she used what they had taught her about modulating her voice to help herself to sound really glad. It seemed to her—and the thought was painful, as if dwelling upon it would force her to the realisation of some immense loss—that had they both been inarticulate they might have found it easier to understand each other. For it was not as if she were wholly articulate. That would have been all right. But though they had taught her to say a lot of things, these were chiefly passwords that made possible entrance into restricted circles, like saying ‘gehl’ instead of ‘gurl’, so that rather than widen her power of communicating with her fellow-beings they had narrowed it. ‘I’ve been muckered about,’ she thought resentfully. It was a sign of the general incalculable queerness of things that her clear, rounded sentences and definite gestures should proceed from a condition that was not at all satisfying, while the completion of this man who was happy with his wife expressed itself in these broken, inadequate, stockish mutterings. ‘You see,’ he was saying, ‘I had to have enough and a bit more, for she came from a good home, a very good home. Much better people than me she comes from …’
‘Yes, yes, I know what you mean,’ she nodded sagely.
He began again to turn the spanner in his hand, looking down at it. ‘It’s a queer thing you should have come like this. It’s always been something remarkable like, you being so like my wife. We’ve often talked about it.’ He spoke with great gravity, and she understood why. She could not have found it out for herself, it was a little too difficult for her. But it had been explained to her by Essington, in one of those rare moments when he stood back and looked at her and thought about her, instead of just crying out for her with closed eyes, utterly dependent and quite uninterested in how she might be, like a very young baby with its mother. One night after dinner he had been very kind and happy, she could not at first think why, till she remembered that it was from no more substantial cause than a walk along the Row, tender and melancholy and achingly contenting, with the pale coin of dead leaves spinning down the aisles of dark wet earth, under trees that were but bare tracery, as if the year, crazed with her losses, were playing pitch and toss with her last wealth in a ruined church, and the blue mist above the Serpentine making it look like the place where the dead of London might go the night they die and linger, wistful but too drowsy to be afraid; while the warm lights came out in the houses overlooking the park and one remembered that one was not dead, and that at home there would be toast. They had hurried home, skipping when there was nobody about because the cold air was working on them like wine, and had muffins for tea, and she had played Farnaby and Purcell to him on the pianola all evening, and there had been a perfect little dinner with a pheasant that was just right. It showed how really good he was, and how sweet, that it was only simple things like that which made him happy. His successes did not; it was part of his tryingness that he would come back from all his big political meetings in an itching fury of self-loathing, as if he had looked down into the abyss of vanity and hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty that engulfs those who believe the people when it praises them. But that night he had been very happy. He had made her sit on the little stool at his feet in front of the wood fire, and had actually asked her about her work, which as a rule he resentfully ignored in the same spirit that an old-fashioned housewife ignores the follower who prevents her servant from giving all her time and energy to her domestic duties. She went to her desk and brought out some photographs that she had been wanting to show him for some days, but had not dared to because he had been going through one of his bad times. Two girls, one a mill-girl in Oldham, the other the manageress of a sweet-shop in Huddersfield, had spent what must have been a lot of money to them on being photographed in the poses of her own best-known portraits, and they had sent her their own photographs and the ones they had copied with long letters exultantly pointing out the closeness of the resemblance, and asked her to sign her own, so that they could put them together in the same frame for their sweethearts. ‘Isn’t it funny,’ she had wondered, ‘that anybody should be proud of being like somebody else? Wouldn’t you think everyone would want to be just like themselves? It’s so modest of the poor things.’
Essington had taken the photographs, though he did not look at them for more than a second. Nowadays it seemed as if hardly anything concerning personality could hold his attention; he cared only for thick books, for interminable talks about ideas that would go on being true if the human body had no flesh on its bones, if trees were not green in summer, if there were no such thing in the world as sound. It made him terribly difficult to amuse in the times when his brain was tired and he had to rest from work. But he looked down at her, as she sat on the stool at his feet, for quite a long time. When he spoke his china blue eyes were wet. ‘It’s because you’re one of the two or three people in every century, Sunflower, that are more than what they are. You’re supposed to be the most beautiful woman in the world—’ ‘Isn’t it funny!’ she had interjected, ‘They never notice that my nose isn’t straight.’ At that he gravely felt her nose all the way from the bridge to the tip, and said he thought that it was straight enough, and told her that, whether she truly was or not, the people liked to think of her as the most beautiful woman in the world; and that they liked too how she had risen to her acclamation out of nothing, for everybody knew that only a month before her famous appearance in ‘Farandole’ she had been serving in a stationer’s shop in Chiswick High Street. Indeed, she contained within herself two of the great legendary figures that man has invented everywhere and in all times: Venus and Cinderella. And they were not—he bade her remember—invented idly. They fed desires that must be fed if man is not to lose heart and die. For Venus promises him that there shall be absolute beauty in this world, that the universe shall bring forth perfection which shall make its imperfection a little thing, lightly to be borne; and Cinderella promises him that this harsh order of things which is life may be only temporary and subject to reversal at any time, so that the mighty may be put down from their seats and those of low degree exalted. These things are not understood by the people, but they are felt by them. The mill-girl in Oldham, the sweet-shop girl in Huddersfield, believing themselves to be like Sybil Fassendyll, obscurely know themselves to be by that resemblance related to some system which proved Oldham and Huddersfield a dream, and the waking a fair one. And their sweethearts, obscurely too but more intensely, because only the most passionate egoist can love himself as one loves others, rejoiced in that conviction. ‘Think of it, Sunflower! There’s a cotton operative in Oldham, a railway clerk in Huddersfield, who feels like a pious Catholic in the Middle Ages who fell in love with a woman who was like some miracle-working Madonna, just because his girl is like you …’
And Essington had been right. This little man, with his shy, flickering, devout smile and the solemn, ritualistic movement of his hands as they turned and turned t
hat spanner, was plainly thinking of the resemblance between his wife and her as proof of some imminent sacredness. It was astonishing that Essington, the brilliant and important Essington, whom only the jealous denied to have the greatest mind in the world, who with an almost vicious fastidiousness desired to know as little as possible of all those minds that were not nearly equal to his, should have known the heart of a stupid, flat-spoken little man who kept a garage in Packbury! It showed the power of love. He understood this lover because he himself loved her. Ecstasy shook her. She wished that they could all four be standing here in this yard within the red-gold walls, a group of kindly, friendly lovers, she, Essington, this little man who had so much in his heart, and his wife whom she conceived as a younger, lovelier sister of her own, with a nose that was quite straight …
There interrupted the happy grazing of her mind one of those sudden, splintering, ripping noises that are apt to break out whenever there are men in overalls. She clapped her hands over her ears and spun round protestingly, because her nerves were so broken that any loud noise made the tears stand in her eyes, and she had so greatly liked the quietness in which she had been standing with the little man. A mechanic was breaking open a large packing-case just inside the garage, with an immense appearance of gusto, and flinging himself upon the crust-coloured boards, tearing off strips of sallow sacking, releasing innumerable shavings to the mercy of the draughts. She marvelled at the way that men did not mind noise, till it struck her that she herself had not minded noise before she was with Essington, and that as a rule single girls could bear what troubles their ears brought them with calmness. ‘They wear one down,’ she muttered, and drooped; for if they wore one down, well, one had to be worn down. But she was diverted from that sad strain of thought by the nature of the object which was being disclosed by the mechanic’s onslaught. It was a perambulator, a new and really prodigious perambulator. Its navy blue body was varnished till it was glossy as water sliding to a weir; its spokes gleamed with the sober but even brightness of the very best japanning, and there were foppishly white rubber tyres; the experienced eye could note that the leather hood was the kind that really washes and does not crack. ‘C-springs, stops, a safety-chain and all!’ she breathed, ‘A really nice one!’ She knew a great deal about prams. It had been part of her duty at the stationer’s shop in Chiswick High Street to take out baby Doris in her pram every afternoon. That one had not had ball-bearings. This one had. Somebody wouldn’t have to break her back pushing the thing when there was bad weather. With that nasty cheap thing the Jenningses had, into which it was a shame to put a pretty little dear like baby Doris, she had often halted in front of baby-carriage shops and gazed enviously at the really nice ones in the windows, and indeed had indulged in dreams of buying the most expensive one on her own account some day, for she had then never doubted but that her future would hold a pram. Oddly enough, as it had turned out, that future was to hold nearly every other kind of manufactured article—telephones, Rolls-Royces, fitted dressing-cases, Paris-to-London aeroplanes, there didn’t seem any limit to what she might buy or use—but never a pram. Yet say what you like, there was something nice about a good pram, about this one, for instance, as the man wheeled it off the floor of its case and on to the concrete, where it stood quivering as Essington’s greyhounds sometimes did, evidently so resilient that it would run nicely over the bumps, so stable that it would not overturn too easily. ‘I don’t say it mightn’t be better finished,’ she pronounced, ‘I don’t suppose it’s one of Hitchings’, but I do say it’s well-built and handy …’