Sunflower

by Rebecca West

  That had been Essington’s thought; it was now hers. Though she rebelled against him, she was a part of him. How could she leave him? How can one leave oneself? And she had nobody to go to. Marty was dead. She could not go back to the people she had come from, the people who were round her now in this street, because of everything that had happened to her in the last twelve years. She did not mean the sexual things, for she knew, as all women know, that these are of the slightest importance. She meant the things that had made her public and exalted. As she walked along she looked up at the big red building as one who saw the towers of a forbidden city, obscure, mediocre, sacred.

  It was guarded at all its three doors by policemen. That made her remember something. Mr Justice Sandbury had lunched at Clussingford on Sunday and had taken her a little walk in the afternoon to see the famous white cattle at the home farm. She nearly always liked judges: as a class they were far preferable to retired prime ministers, who were inclined to pinch. This one was specially nice, quite elderly with silver hair and a voice at once rich and thin, like a bell of pure metal worn down by time to paper-thickness; and he had that old-fashioned way of treating a woman as if she were a flower in a vase, which is very pleasant for a little while, though tiresome if it goes on too long, since one is not a flower in a vase. He had told her the old man’s story of the stage of the past: of Henry Irving who, with his queer legs that looked like long legs seen through a refracting depth of water, and the ragged plume of stuttered, booming speech that he crazily held between his clenched teeth, somehow made a comprehensive hieroglyphic that expressed all noble variations of romantic passion; of Ellen Terry, who stands for ever in old men’s memories in a long white gown holding out paper flowers that have indeed been for remembrance, her face crisped with plaintiveness like a clear pool crisped by the wind; of Adelaide Neilson, who was beautiful, who died young, and in gaiety, dressed in her best, walking on Sunday in a sunny park in Paris with some splendid lover. From conflicting timbres in his voice she could guess that he himself had longed to step on to that stage, but that he was refraining from telling her so lest he should have to explain that he had not done so because in those days it was considered social suicide for a man of his class to become an actor. That made her smile, it was so delicate and so foolish, for of course a gentleman ought not to go on the stage. In the manner of one counting up what is not gain but merely compensation, the nice old man went on to tell her wistfully that of course there was a great deal of drama in his own profession, and to describe some curious cases in which he had taken part as counsel or judge. She had listened very attentively, partly to help him in his task of persuading himself that he had had as interesting a life as he possibly could have had, and partly because she loved to hear anything about real people, so long as it was true and not publicity. So when he said goodbye he had told her, pleased with her listening, that on Monday he would be trying the Assizes at Packbury, and that if she came in to the court for an hour on the way back he would be delighted to see her.

  That would be a good thing to do. For one thing she would like to see the old man again. He was so very well-bred; one felt he would place the pleasantest interpretation on everything that was said or done so that life would be nice all round him. One could not imagine him putting a woman in a humiliating position. And it would keep her mind busy watching the trials, though she hoped everybody would be acquitted. She crossed the road and went past the policeman at the main door.

  Inside there was a lobby and a stone staircase, with an ugly iron balustrade and a fat policeman with a blue-black moustache looking down from the landing above. She mounted the steps in a sudden glow of tender, familiar amusement, because the prevailing mode of ugliness, and in particular the yellow plaster walls, reminded her of the elementary school she had gone to in Chiswick. The prevailing smell, too, which puzzled the nostrils with a simultaneous suggestion of fustiness and funny astringency, reminded her of school; though indeed it belonged to all places—even the stage sometimes—where charwomen were given plentiful supplies of cleansing agents but kept faith with their deeper natures by applying them with filthy cloths. Funny old things, charwomen! Funny old things, fat policemen with blue-black moustaches! This one was just like the constable that had chased Lily and her all along the Mall after they had picked the syringa from the garden of the empty house in Duke’s Avenue, though goodness knows why they shouldn’t have taken it, since nobody was getting any good out of it where it was. She felt refreshed, as if instead of being cast in the dreadful, difficult plays that came her way nowadays, like that awful thing by Claudel she had had to play in last Sunday to please Brenda Burton, she had been put back into musical comedy. She supposed it was getting back among ordinary people. This place belonged to them. There was a crowd of them in the big hall at the top of the staircase, standing about in groups. Not one of them was beautiful, their squarish faces were for the most part fair, but negatively, without radiance. Yet they were somehow more moving to look upon than if they had been beautiful. There was a sturdiness about them that seemed the bodily sign of a strong instinct for keeping faith, and on most of the faces was a look of fatigue and patience, like the look on the face of a woman who is going to have a baby very soon. She respected them for what they were doing, which was stupid and obstinate, and yet sensible; for they were evidently talking over the cases that they were concerned in, saying for the hundredth time what they had said from the beginning and saying it too late, since the court was already sitting. Yet it was the right thing to do, it observed the appropriate rhythm. They had talked more and more of whatever their individual scandal and vexation might be as it came nearer the crisis of its trial, and they would talk less and less of it when it had passed that crisis. The tide had risen, it would ebb. Now, when Essington was going to Versailles he had known quite well that he would probably be thrown overboard there and his career broken, but he had not spoken of it. A leader must be proud and impersonal. When it did happen he hardly spoke of it, though night after night he gave way to childlike gusts of angry weeping in her bed. And now he never spoke of it: though he talked perpetually about the ruin that had come in Europe because they would not listen to him at the Peace Conference, he never distorted the logic of his argument to avenge his disappointment. But the thing was in his mind like an abscess that would not mature, so that he danced about in agony, unreasonable, complaining, cruel: perhaps more cruel than could be borne. She wished that he had not been called upon to be a great man, they might have been so happy together. Wistfully she gazed at the crowd, who in their dull clothes looked dark and strong, like trees in winter. Down amongst them, from the tops of the long windows on one side of the hall, there slanted down shafts of pale, dusty sunlight, like blessings from gods that were benign but had begun to doubt their own omnipotence, to vacillate; that could not now match their own creations in sturdiness …

  Sunflower wanted to move on, to go some place where she would be distracted and would not think. Since she was stupid, there was no good her thinking. Turning on her charm again, she told the policeman why she was there, and he called a man who took her a way round the building that led out of little rooms where ledgers bound in marbled covers lay on dusty tables, and glass doors swung open in front of shelves of crumbling volumes because the key was gone, and there was an air of something just less than disease, as if ageing little men sat there all day in the drowse that comes from security of tenure. It occurred to her that she would have enjoyed spending the afternoon in dusting and tidying up the place; but of course that could not be. So at length she went through a door and found herself behind two chairs, so massive that they formed a kind of screen, on the other side of which Mr Justice Sandbury’s voice was sounding clear but very weak, like a fountain whose reservoir is running dry. She turned to the left as she had been told and found herself at the end of a short row of seats that faced the court. As she sat down she smiled over her shoulder at the Bench, and was shocked by the tired o
ld face that smiled back at her, so yellow did it seem between the white wig and the scarlet robe, and as wrinkled as if the tired flesh had fallen back against the bone and was letting the skin fare as it would. She remembered that he had told her that he was going to retire quite soon, because his health had been broken by years of overwork at the Bar. These great men, they hurt themselves so by being great. She wished that some magic power would make him quite little, so that she could go and lift him out of his big chair, his robe flapping round him like a baby’s long clothes, and carry him to some comfortable place where he could rest. She looked round the court with hostility, as the place of his martyrdom, and was immediately disarmed. That there was here some honourable work to which a man might think it worth while to give himself, even so that he was spent before his time, was somehow borne in upon her. She forgot her fear that people were looking at her in her intention of taking all this in so that she would not forget it: the court room, which was older than the rest of the building and was planned with the sober grace of the Georgian genius, making its adaptations to its special purpose, its jury-box, its dock, its barriers, with such propriety that they seemed embellishments, declarations of the austere magnificence of discipline, the shining darkness of the oak-panelled walls which looked down on the proceedings with that air of vigilance and criticism that old wood always seems to have in human habitations, as if nature that cannot speak or do were challenging nature that can to match its worth and beauty; the gaping rows of fairish ordinary people at the back of the court, and the huddled others who craned from the galleries with a gracelessness that was a sign of sincerity, since it showed that they did not condition their expression of what they felt by any thought of how they might look; the jury, their gentle, stupid faces perturbed with conscientiousness; the barristers, sitting just below her in two opposing lines, nearly all of them darker than the ordinary people, more alert, one might say more peevish; the young man in the dock. He made her heart turn over. His pallor seemed to be cast upon him from above by a ray that disclosed at once that this was an end of him, and that all his enemies had said was true; and that in some ultimate sense he was in the right, and that the world could not atone for what it had done to him. Just thus tiresome Aunt Emma who drank had looked when she lay dead.

  Poor, silly dears. The lanky, whitish, celery-like young man who had tried to kill himself by putting his head in a gas-stove, because he had not filled up the proper paper when he moved to a new district, and so had not received his pension and found himself a burden on his family. The funny little puckish man with the curl in the middle of his forehead like a smile done in hair, who had spent his whole life stealing suitcases, so artlessly that he was always detected, but who was not quite mad enough to be put away. The tired old thing with bags under his eyes and the dark iridescence of hair dye on his bowed head, the manager of a boot-store, who had muddled his books and run away so stupidly that they had caught him at once. None of these people would have got into all this trouble if only they had had someone who really loved them helping them to run their lives. She was thinking of them with a wide-eyed and slightly condescending pity, as if they were in an exceptional case which was the antithesis of her own, until she suddenly discovered in her mind, complete and established, the knowledge that her own case was the same. She had nobody who really loved her and would stand by her. Essington pretended to do so but he did not. When anything went wrong he always made it worse. A great many of her rehearsals were dreadful, for though dramatists sought her out on account of her supremacy as a box-office attraction, they were invariably embittered by her rendering of their lines. When she came back from these ordeals and Essington saw her tear-stains he would nag at her for being so stupid and tell her that she must hurry up and learn to act because she was thirty now and would not be able to hold the public by her beauty much longer. If she should fall into any form of this police-court disgrace he would pay the very best lawyers to get her off and then he would take her home and scold and scold and scold her till she would have to go out and kill herself. She was as much alone as any of these people. There opened before her a sense of some danger to which she was liable by reason of her situation. It was so strong that it became a hallucination and it seemed to her as if the floor had been cut away in front of her chair and she looked down at a blue depth where some time she would be shattered. She pushed back her chair and drew her knuckles over her eyes.

  She must not think of Essington. Present or absent, he made all things unquiet and unhappy. She looked about her for something on which her mind might come to rest, and found her eyes dwelling, with such pleasure that she instantly smiled, on the face of an old woman. It was such a nice old face; but terribly pale. It struck her with horror that this was the dock-pallor that she had noted in all the prisoners she had seen tried that afternoon. The old woman was actually standing in the dock, with the sallow, cubist wardress at her elbow. But that was wrong. She was a good old woman. One could see that by the way that the dock-pallor made her merely pale, not guilty. The ray of which it was the end had proved the other prisoners right in eternity but wrong in time: it proved this old woman right in eternity and right in time. She was a very good old woman. Sunflower resolved that if there was any need of money for a fine or lawyer’s fees she would pay it and not tell Essington. It was so very obvious that she was a very good old woman. But the strange thing was that when one had got over the shock of seeing her standing there as if she were a criminal one ceased to think of what one could do for her but thought enviously of how much she would have done for one if one had had the luck to belong to her. Though she was standing in the dock it seemed ridiculous to think that one could help anybody who was so rich. She was like a barn full of grain.

  The judge, who had been bending forward and talking to his clerk, straightened himself, caught sight of her, and exclaimed, ‘Oh! Let the prisoner sit, if she wishes.’ Sunflower gave him a smile of partisanship. Mr Sandbury was a real gentleman.

  She could not make out why this old woman was having this effect on her. She could not even see her face very clearly, for she was so astigmatic that had it not been for the obligations of her beauty she would have worn glasses. Now, Essington could have told her all about this old woman at once. He had a joyless comprehension of all humanity. He could say, ‘This man is a liar, but he cares for knowledge, and one can get good work out of him if one gives him enough praise,’ and every word of it would be true; only before he had finished saying it he would lose all interest, and turn away irritably. She was so stupid, she could only feel. But there was one way of understanding what was going on inside people. She had discovered it in the course of her struggle with her profession. She had always terribly wanted to find out how one did act; and she had found out that if she imitated the facial expression and bodily motions of a really good actor she began to experience feelings that were evidently what he was feeling since they were not her own and made her understand his conception of the part. Often she had stood in the darkness of a stage-box and mimicked someone great, and found it work; though she had never gone on with it very long, for she found that the feelings that were roused in her were such as she wanted to use not on the stage but in real life, and she stopped in a dark, confused, rebellious dismay. At last this device was really going to come in useful. She looked over at the old woman and noted how she was seated in the chair, and tried to reproduce her pose. The body, which was at once coarse and frail, like earthenware that time had worn to the thinness of delicate china, was held very straight; the bonneted head was held low, so that the onlooker’s eye fell first on the puckered brownish silk of her brow and downcast eyelids. As Sunflower assumed the pose a sense of its rightness flowed like water through her body. It meant that about those things concerning which it is right to be proud and hard the old woman was proud and hard, and about those things concerning which it is right to be humble and soft she was utterly humble and soft. But now she was making queer passes with h
er poor gnarled hands: sometimes making scuffling movements with the fingers of each hand gathered together. What was that? Ah, this one was knitting, the other sewing. That meant that her ordinary life had been so full of goodness that when she was frightened she tried to get in touch with it again by pretending she was doing all the little things she did every day in the household, as a pious person might make the sign of the cross. This was a marvellously good woman.

  But they were reading the indictment against her.

  ‘Alice Hester, you are charged with bigamy and the particulars are that on the fourteenth day of March nineteen hundred and twenty-three you went through a ceremony of marriage with Robert Stallibrass, your lawful husband Amos Bullen being then alive.’