Sunflower

by Rebecca West

  But it was not possible.

  ‘Are you guilty or not guilty?’

  ‘Guilty,’ she said. Though one could clearly hear the word, it seemed to spin feebly and fall in mid-air, like a quoit thrown by too feeble a hand. Her pale old mouth opened suddenly, and within its vault her tongue could be seen quivering like the tongue of an asp. The wardress gave her a glass of water. She minded to thank the giver before she drank, like a well-taught child. Then she sat with the glass on her lap, shaking her head and murmuring protestingly to herself. She was not rebelling against whatever injustice had brought her into the dock, neither was she feeling fear. Rather was she expressing the embarrassment of one who comes up to town to go to the Horse Show with a friend, and is let in by her for attending a wedding or some ceremony that required other clothes. She had prepared for one event and been precipitated into another. Why, the event she had prepared for was death. This woman would move mildly towards the innermost things.

  ‘Now, what is all this about?’ asked Mr Justice Sandbury.

  A wigged and gowned figure rose from the bench of his fellows in the well of the court and said in an embarrassed, here-it-is-but-it-is-none-of-my-doing voice, ‘The facts of the case are quite straightforward, my lord. Fifty years ago the prisoner married an agricultural labourer who is now in Southend workhouse. Last March she went through a form of marriage with this other man, who has since died.’

  ‘Who has since died?’

  ‘I am informed by the police that he died a few days after the bigamous marriage.’

  ‘Was there any question of fraudulent motive, of inheriting anything from this man that would come to her only if she was his wife, any pension or so on?’

  ‘No, my lord. So far as the police know there was no such motive.’

  The judge put his fine white hand to his mouth, and looked deliberately at the prisoner. Sunflower almost hated him, because she knew that he was savouring the quality of this good old woman as he had savoured the quality of Irving or Ellen Terry. It was not right. He might let her go at once.

  Kindly he said to her: ‘Have you any statement to make? Is there anything you want to tell us, about the reason why you did this thing?’

  They heard her remote old voice exclaim to herself, ‘O mercy, I must speak now.’ She stood up, steadying herself by resting her hands, which were like grey skeleton leaves, on the ledge of the dock; and after curtseying she began to speak. Oh, that one could watch and watch and listen and listen harder and harder, so that one could get everything possible out of the moment. This was a real thing. Everybody in court was feeling it, for there was a hush, and the thin stream of her words might have been trickling through a wood at night.

  She said: ‘Sir, ‘tis true what the policeman says I did. I have been treated fairly, and I make no complaint. But I could not help doing what I did, though I meant no harm. ‘Twas this way. My first man was not a good man to me. ‘Twas not his fault. He had a mother who came from Foulness Island, and ‘tis well known the folks there are outlandish and don’t know how to do things right, so he’d had a bad home. Before ever we’d wedded he was used to drinking and that. And ‘twas hard on him, too, we had so many little ones. Ten we had before I was thirty, and we had only twelve shillings a week to bring them up on, and our cottage was a poor sort of place. ‘Twas not his fault. But when he had been drinking he did knock me and the children about so that it could not be borne, though they was very good children. Then he got tired of it all, and tried to make us go into the workhouse, and I had to stand out against him. None of my folks had ever gone into the workhouse, and I could not let my little ones go there. So we came to having hard words over it, and one night he came home drunk, and he made me get up and dress the little ones, and he turned us all out of the house. We stood in the garden for a while and then he come and drive us into the lane with an old rook rifle my father had given him. ‘Twas only because he was in drink. He was a kind man sometimes when he was himself.

  ‘So we walked up and down the lane, for I thought we might go back later when he had fallen asleep. But my little ones cried, and the young fellow who was ploughman at the same farm where my man was, he woke up in his bed where he slept in his cottage across the road, and he came down after us, with a lantern. I had not spoken to him before but to be civil. But he spoke to me kindly as he picked up two of my littlest ones and he took us to the barn, and we slept on the hay, and he stayed by me and begged me not to carry on so. And in the morning he brought us two loaves and some water, and then he took me up to the cottage before he went to work. But my husband had gone. I haven’t seen him since. And I did not know what to do; for the cottage belonged to the farmer, and he wanted it for the man he hired to take my husband’s place. So it looked as if he had got us into the workhouse, for all I had done against it. But this young fellow said I must not go for to do that, and he wrote to his uncle who lived up over Patchloy in these parts to find a place for him, and said he had married a widow. So we all come over here, and we had another little one of our own, and all was nice and decent for forty years. There was no drinking and not a cross word. He always treated me right, and he was kind to my little ones.

  ‘Then last winter he got a pain in his innards. His food did roar up in him, no matter what I give him. And last February the doctor told him he must go into hospital and be cut. And he came back, and he told me that, and he said, “There is just one thing I would like to do before I go into hospital. I might die, and I would like to be married to you before I die.” I knew quite well that it was not right to do it, for my sister who lives in Prittlewell had told me my first was in the workhouse over there and I had sent him some money for baccy and that to be slipped to him private-like without my name. But I knew my man was like to die, and I could see his heart was set on this thing, so I told him I would do it. The pity of it was that my sister’s grandson Tom was stopping in the house with us, him not being liked in his own parish. He is kind of queer. He does no good at school and goes about all day playing on a penny whistle and doing what he ought not to do. ‘Tis not his fault. His mother was frightened by a ferret when he was on the way. I heard a board creak and I said to myself he had been listening at the door. And I was sure he knew there was something funny about me and my old man, for people had talked in front of him as they should not, and though he is kind of dull he remembers everything. But what could I do, with my man wanting it so bad?

  ‘So we told the registrar we wanted to marry, and then when the day came we went to the office. And all the way going through the streets from the house to the office I heard someone playing a penny whistle just behind me. But I did not turn round, for with my man set on marrying me, what could I do? And while the registrar was writing our names in the big book I heard someone playing a penny whistle out in the street just under the window. But what could I do? And then my man went into the county hospital and the doctors cut him and he died. And as he lay dying he was main pleased he was married to me. So when the policeman came for me I knew it was right he should take me to the station. But what could I do?’

  She asked it with her eyes set steadily on the judge, as if she really wanted an answer. It had seemed to her that life had made it impossible for her not to do wrong, and she was grieved by it. She would like to have that disproved, even if the explanation meant that she would have to blame herself. So kind was she, and so honest, that she was willing to clear God’s character at the expense of her own.

  Sunflower had taken off her gloves and was rubbing her hands, which seemed as if they were charged with electricity. Looking at this old woman made her feel as she sometimes did in church when she looked up at the cross over the altar; only this feeling did not run up and lose itself in the empty sky. Looking at Alice Hester one looked down, towards the ground, and one’s feelings seemed to run along the earth, to delve into it, to shoot up into the light, triumphant … She found herself living again a moment at her mother’s funeral, which at the time
had made her jaw drop with amazement. They had lowered her mother’s body into the grave. It lay there in its coffin, finished. And round the hole in the earth stood four black figures, Lily, Mabel, Maurice and herself, who but for that body would not have been there. Who had been made by it out of nothing! And now they were putting this marvel-making body in the ground, as if the proper time to sow was after it had germinated and engendered its plant. She had gaped at that extraordinary rite. It had seemed to bring to the surface of life a process that nobody talked about, that could hardly be seen, that she could not have told Essington about at all; that was the most important thing in the world. She didn’t know what it was or what it did, but she knew what it was like. It was savagely persistent, it was at once miraculous and the soul of the natural, it went on and on to some aim … She could have burst out crying because she was not taking part in the process, and never could do so, since she did not understand what it was, nor how she could force herself into it. She was so stupid! There swept over her a tide of that emotion which Essington most loathed in her, but which she recognised shamefacedly as the most fundamental emotion she ever knew: a desire to be passive which was as acute as thirst. Indignantly she felt that she ought not to be calling on her own will and thought to find a way into this process. Someone ought to have done it for her. She felt cheated because they had not.

  Because of that final sagging conviction of betrayal, she had remembered as rarely as she could that queer moment beside the grave: which was a pity, because it was something real, and almost the only thing she had ever found out for herself. But now this old woman made her think of it; and added to her thought the news that if you did this—this thing, without rebelling because it was so hard and feeling love for everybody from the idiot boy who betrayed you up to the God who made you, you got something that was like religion. But better. Religion was like everything that men made. It was all very fine but it didn’t work. It was like Essington’s ideas which were all wonderful but which didn’t get carried into effect and didn’t make him happy. It did not work. Religion vanishes out of a building without a spire, as scent vanishes out of a bottle without a stopper. It has to be tethered to people’s attention by pretty services with incense and vestments and music; by creeds that men can argue about without coming to any conclusion that has to be acted on; by priests and vicars and district visitors and all. What men do is thin as paper, dry as dust. But this other thing … Without being reinforced by being talked about, since it could not be put into words, it had survived for seventy years within this body that had never been beautiful, that had been starved and chilled, vexed with rough clothing, hurt by blows, deformed and torn by baby and baby, laid waste altogether by age. And it had worked. How it had worked!

  Mr Justice Sandbury was saying, ‘Well, you mustn’t do that sort of thing, you know …’

  If she were punished it could not be borne.

  But he went on: ‘Still, you’ve had a very hard life, and you’ve been through a great deal of trouble just lately, and I see that you may not have known what you were doing at the time. So I am going to bind you over on your own recognisances to come up for judgment when you are called.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ said Alice Hester. Yet she would rather have had the answer that proved herself and not life at fault. She took trouble to look grateful, for not to do so would have been unkind to the old gentleman, who had done his best for her; but as she turned aside, leaning on the wardress’s arm, the interest flowed out of her old face, as if she felt that now she had dealt with this situation she could continue to drift quietly towards death. As she went out of the dock and into the well of the court the wardress and the policeman kept on laying their hands upon her and guiding her, as if she were weightless as a dead leaf and might be whirled by any current of air away from the place to which she ought to go. They brought her to the big book at the table, but there was a hitch in the proceedings. Her bonneted head bobbed up, her tilted face offered some mild objection to the giants above her; their bullet heads bobbed down and offered some reassurance, passing broad explanatory fingers along the page. It seemed that she could not sign her name, but had to make her mark. So she also was stupid.

  She straightened herself and curtseyed to the judge. The giants turned her about and patted her, as one pats a ball through water, towards a door in the wall near the witness box, where there waited a bearded man. Embarrassment was on his face like a flickering light. ‘It must be horrid to have one’s children knowing that one once was loved,’ thought Sunflower. But the old woman went straight up to him, laid her hand on his arm, and spoke to him, not, as one might have foretold, brokenly, but chidingly. Peace and docility came into his face. She had done the right thing: she had asserted her authority, and they were back as they ought to be, mother and son. But of course she would always know what was the right thing to do, in any conceivable phase of every possible human relationship. She was inspired. Sunflower thought of all the times in the theatre when she had failed to save situations, when she had let a scene drop or an actor’s blunder show across the footlights, because she had not known the right thing to do, because she was not inspired, because she was empty as this woman was full. Hungrily she looked at the door which was now closing on Alice Hester and her son. He looked about forty. Perhaps he was the youngest child. It must have been wonderful, when she had child after child by the husband she did not love, at last to have a child by the man she loved. There could be no child of hers she would not love; but this one must have been covered at its birth with a special sort of love like a caul of light.

  The tears were streaming down Sunflower’s face. She was amazed by them as by any other sudden and prodigious shower. She dried them with her gloves, for she had lost her handkerchief, as Essington said she always did, and she got up and pushed away the chairs, which seemed interested and resistant, and went out of the gallery into the passage. There she leaned against the yellow plaster wall, whose cold surface was like an admonition to be sensible, and tried to stop this independent weeping. Why should she cry! It was so foolish when Alice Hester had proved that everything was all right if only one had love, which meant that everything was really all right with her and Essington for they loved each other. If she told Essington about Alice Hester it would make him understand that they must stop being unkind to one another. She wished that she could tell him at once, without having to wait to get home. And then her heart sank, for she remembered that he had told her he would stay down at Evescote till Tuesday afternoon, which meant that she would not see him for another twenty-four hours. She could have cried again for disappointment. Things were always happening like this. If she found something in the newspapers that might make him laugh he was never there, and if she clipped it out and kept it then somehow it mattered too much if it turned out not funny enough to make him laugh; and when she woke up and laid her arm across the other pillow and said, ‘I have had such a lovely dream,’ it was always one of the nights he was not there. And his return to her house was never simple, like the coming home of an ordinary man, but always had to be announced, confirmed, altered, and maybe postponed by that maddening telephone, or to be waited for without any trust that any special hour would bring him. But these were little, little things compared with the adversities against which Alice Hester’s love had struggled and survived. She would never think of them again. And at any rate she could go and tell Harrowby. He was not married, she had often wondered why, for he was a very nice man. Perhaps he would get married when he heard this story.

  She hurried back through the little rooms, whose drowsiness now seemed a curious affectation in view of the real, rushing nature of life. The hall was still full of groups of ordinary people, standing talking, their good heads lowered. For a little she stood and looked at them, smiling as one might at children who were taking some game very seriously but also wrung with pity because their own seriousness was paining them, and impatient because they had stood there looking down on th
e ugly linoleum when just behind the courtroom doors a woman had proved to all who cared to listen that no matter what happened life was all right. Regretfully she stroked her useless throat, thinking how bitter it was that with her trained voice she could have made them all hear every word she might have said, but that her stupid brain could not put two words together to convey the brightness that possessed her. But at any rate she could tell Harrowby. She hurried down the stairs and past the policemen, on whom she smiled with dazzling gratitude, since they had upheld the gates of her entrance into everlasting happiness, and she went out into one of these stage-scene hours that sometimes come between a sunlit day and its twilight. The townsfolk were walking in radiance over prodigiously lengthened shadows, like bold and happy souls not awed by any consequences; and in the upper windows of one half of the marketplace blazed a piecemeal sunset more glorious than that in the opposing sky. Under the assault of the strong slanting shafts of light no house-fronts seemed much more solid than canvas; the lit shops seemed factitious, sets for the harlequinade; pale householders stepped out of their doors and had ruddiness clapped on their faces as a mask. These appearances seemed to her confirmation of her belief that everything in the world had suddenly been changed by the disclosure of some knowledge, and that now all was well; and she almost ran to the garage to tell her news.

  The yard also was wrought on by the hour. The two sides of it, the proprietor’s house and the opposite wall, were tepid in shadow, colder than one would have thought anything red could be; but the wall at the end glowed like the wings of a Painted Lady butterfly, and the gate in it seemed to have had its iron convolutions veneered with strips of sunset. The blossom on the lilac bough that bobbed over from the next garden had been dipped in a honey of thick yellow light. Pulled out into the middle of the yard was the Wolseley, its glossy sides suffused with fire in which reflections swam as dilating and contracting islets; and in it sat Harrowby, reading Captain Coe.