by Rebecca West
‘My dear, sweet, clean little Sunflower, I don’t think you need to be frightened,’ he said; and stopped to give her a tender kiss. ‘You don’t belong to the same breed of animal as Miss Billie, and the things that happen to her won’t happen to you. And don’t worry your dear muddled head about Aunt Emma. All this talk about heredity in these matters is bunkum. If Aunt Emma hadn’t lived in a dreary little warren like Chiswick—’
‘Oh, it wasn’t so bad,’ she murmured. ‘It wasn’t hardly ever so bad as this …’
‘—she probably wouldn’t have had to get the colour and romance she wanted out of the whisky bottle. But these people! These people! Sunflower, that man’s a thief. He’s robbed decent people all over the world. There are men and women living on crusts in garrets because of his knaveries. And he spends his loot on this guzzling and swilling, this belching and reeling—’
‘Wasn’t it dreadful for poor Mr Pitt!’
‘But why does he have such people in his house? If he’s got friends like these it isn’t any sort of place for us. I wish we hadn’t come. You didn’t specially want to come, did you?’ He looked at her plaintively and searchingly. ‘You didn’t specially want to come, did you, Sunflower?’
She hesitated. ‘I did … rather. I … liked the look of Miss Pitt.’
‘Yes, yes!’ he assented heartily. ‘You two did seem to get on very well together, I remember noticing that. I dare say you’ll be able to pull off quite a jolly friendship with—’
‘Also,’ she added, ‘you wanted to see Mr Hurrell.’
‘Yes, of course, of course, that was really why we came. I wish to God he’d turn up.’ He looked at his watch and gave it an irritable shake, as he always did; for whatever hour it might be, he always wished it different. ‘Well, I don’t know that I particularly want to see him after all. I learned at Versailles that he isn’t as scrupulous as I am, but he’s even less scrupulous than I thought if he can bear to come here and be smacked and elbowed by the Hiccuping Wing of the Tory Party.’
Now that he was not standing right beside her she began to think of Francis Pitt’s face as it had looked when he first came into the room. After a moment she cried out to Essington, though he was still walking about speaking angrily of politics. ‘Who can it be that’s ill? It must be someone that he’s very fond of, he looked so awful. Who can it be?’
He said acrimoniously, ‘And in any case Hurrell was one of the cabinet who gave this rogue his baronetcy. Sunflower, it can’t be borne! Of course honours have always been bought—both parties have sold them by the score, by the hundreds!—but never till now to men who could not turn up at the accolade without special permission from the Governor of Portland Jail! That verminous little shyster got his baronetcy from Bryce Atkin’s coalition just after I left, and they gave it to him knowing what he was—’
‘You could see Mr Pitt didn’t think much of him, if you watched him closely,’ said Sunflower, nodding wisely.
‘They knew his whole record. Birtley came to me about it and I went to Bryce Atkin myself. He knew—’
‘It must be awful to have friends that you can’t very well turn from the door, can you, and yet know they’ll carry on like this. But I do wonder who’s ill. They said it was a he …’
‘I told Bryce Atkin the whole story with my own lips. And he used a lot of his filthy tobacconist’s girl-charm on me, and swore he’d do something about it. And the next week it was in the Birthday—’
There was a soft thud against the door, and it was opened with a sound of scuffling. No one came in and the handle rattled as if someone were making a counter-attempt to shut it again. A pretentious voice, foppishly powdered with a lisp, declaimed: ‘Let me get at Ethington. I want to talk to him. Abthurd that a man of hith talent shouldn’t be with uth … Thethe mad ideath, nothing in them. Nature red in tooth and claw. I could ecthplain it all to him in five minuteth …’ Pitt’s voice cut in, rough and humiliated, ‘For God’s sake, Canterton!’ and the door banged.
‘Oh, it’s a shame, it really is!’ said Sunflower. ‘When he’s got visitors, and there’s trouble in the house! If he were a woman he’d burst out crying. Why, of course he’s been crying. That’s why his face looks all funny … Oh …’
Essington sat down as if he had suddenly grown very tired. ‘Sunflower, I wish that drunkard Canterton hadn’t got my job.’ He spoke with a kind of noble peevishness that was at once complaining and selfless. ‘There are good people in that ministry, steady little people who’ve given their lives to building it up. People who always made me feel rather ashamed when I got any credit, as they’d done twice the work I ever did, and never got their names in the papers since they weren’t—’ he smiled up at her as if this were a joke that would perhaps strike her as funnier than he quite liked, ‘great like me. And now they’re under this fuddled oaf, and one day there will be such a mess. There’ll be some act of tipsy impudence—of quarrelsome instructions to one of the tipsy cads he has as secretaries—and there’ll be a row that’ll bring the sky down with the trade unions or whatever it is he’s lurched up against. Think of that lout butting into a delicate negotiation with the Triple Alliance, the pet plan of some spectacled little man who was ordinated to the job by Sidney and Beatrice Webb and has done nothing else all his good little life destroyed with a hiccup …’ He closed his eyes, took her young hand and held it to his forehead; and for a moment was silent. ‘Only … it’s his kind of man England seems to want nowadays … not mine …’
‘Oh, lovie, don’t fret, don’t fret,’ she said; and found something to say that might have comforted him, if she had not at once forgotten it, turning her head to listen if there were not the sounds of an automobile engine starting outside the drive.
He did not raise his wrinkled old lids. ‘And when his lot go out the country still won’t want us. They’ll call in the Labour Party … which isn’t a Party but a bazaar of ideas got up by a vegetarian mothers’ meeting … Bolshevism … anti-vaccination … lunacy reform … mm … the sad case of Comrade A. at Peckham … trivial special cases …’
‘They’ve gone,’ she said exultantly. A car had rolled down the drive. ‘He’ll be back in a moment.’ She drew away her hand.
He sat up, rubbing his tired eyes. ‘Anyway it all works out in dinner being preposterously late.’ He groped for the hand she had taken away, but started and exclaimed, ‘Sunflower, how beautiful you look! Such a lovely, tender, grave Sunflower it is tonight! And yet she’s wearing her little girl face too! Really, you don’t look a day older than you did when I first met you twelve years ago, only far, far lovelier. And you’ve such a glowing colour! You haven’t been putting things on your face, have you? No, it’s natural!’
She smiled at him, happily, shyly, turning the rings on her fingers.
‘Oh, such a beautiful Madonna Sunflower it is!’ he went on proudly. ‘What queer beasts women are! They put on different degrees of beauty as they might put on different dresses. Lately you’ve been just a handsome woman. I haven’t thought the kind of dresses women have to wear nowadays suited you particularly. But tonight you’re astonishing, you are a queen of beauty. And there’s no reason for it …’
She turned away from him, because Francis Pitt came back into the room.
All the commotion he had had to go through to get rid of these horrid people had left him more dishevelled than ever, with his tie slipping round to one side and his hair straggling right down over his ears, so that he looked like a flop-eared spaniel pup which had been rolling about in the dust with the other puppies. It was queer how he kept on making one think of some sort of an animal. It would be lovely to touch him, his body would be warm like an animal’s. If you found him lying asleep and woke him he would make funny whimpering little noises just as a puppy would. But there was more than that to him, he was far more than just dear and fubsy. As he crossed the room to them, his massive head down on his chest, his half-shut eyes just glinting grey under his heavy brows, force seemed t
o pour out of him. He was great, like Essington. And there was something pleasanter than greatness pouring out of him … She had heard the phrase, ‘A wind from the Spice Islands’ … It was like that, a rumour of things hot and sweet in the mouth, or gentle pungencies … He was a fragrance, and he was a time: the hour when people say, ‘The tide has turned, now we can start’, or, ‘It will not hurt any more’, the hour after which all things are fortunate and easy. She would be happier for days because of the little time she was going to have with him this evening, she would not mind Essington so much. It was so wonderful of him to do all this for a person when he was utterly miserable; he must be very miserable, for his face was all crumpled with crying, and though men did cry a lot, much more than you were warned beforehand, he wasn’t the sort that would cry easily. She wished she could put out her hands as he came near and take his grief from him. She saw it as a warm bundle, of a size that would be easy for her to carry in her arms.
With an encircling movement of his little paws he seemed to draw them together into a ring of intimacy that excluded everybody else in the world. He conveyed to them with a spent smile, that, though miserable, he was now enjoying the relative relief of being with people that he really liked; and he said very simply, ‘You folks must be dying for your dinner. I should have chased those rogues out long before you came but for—what’s happened here.’
Soothingly she asked what she felt he wanted to tell them. ‘Why, whatever’s happened?’
He looked down. His face worked.
‘Why … Hurrell’s dying.’
Essington exclaimed testily, ‘Hurrell! Hurrell dying! He can’t be dying! Why, he’s no older than I am!’
Francis Pitt said dexterously, ‘That’s the devil of it. He’s no age at all!’ and then turning to Sunflower and looking on the ground at her feet, he repeated, slowly and pitifully, ‘Yes, Hurrell’s dying!’
It seemed to hurt her hand that she could not lift it to stroke his ravaged face. She murmured, ‘Oh, I am so sorry! Then you won’t want us about. Hadn’t we better go away?’ It would be dreadful if he said yes. She did not want to go away from him.
His eyes shot up to hers, and he exclaimed: ‘For God’s sake, no! I have been looking forward to this all day!’ He gave her a deliberate, pressing glance that was a reminder of the other glance he had given her when she first came into the room, and held out one hand towards her, as if he would have liked to go on talking to her and wanted her to stay there so that he could get back to her at the first possible moment, while he turned to deal with Essington, who was complaining irritably, ‘But he can’t be dying! He wasn’t dying when you dined with us on Monday night!’ She watched him fiercely, wishing she could get the grief out of him by some simple, violent physical act, as one sucks poison out of a wound, while he answered grimly and patiently, ‘He is dying now, and he was dying then. Of a thing called galloping consumption which I daresay you thought, as I did, a handy device of the novelists. Which is rare enough in real life, which is nearly unknown in a man of his age. “Acute miliary tuberculosis”, the doctors call it. It got its teeth into him six weeks ago, when he got a chill speaking in a draughty marquee down at some damned women’s Liberal federation in Sussex. It will finish him, they say, in six weeks’ time. Of course he doesn’t know. We’ve kept it from him …’
She loved the way he loved his friend. She had to keep her lids lowered in case she cried too. ‘I don’t know what I shall do without him. I’ve known him ever since I came to London. I’ve lived by him ever since I came to London. I don’t know what I shall do …’ She wished that she could have pressed his dear hideous grief-ruddled face against the warm flesh at the base of her throat, not that she wanted to be familiar, but because that used to quiet Essington when he had his crying-fits after Versailles. Looking hard at him, partly in case she might read in his expression some way she might help him, and partly in order that she might remember him as completely as possible after they parted that night, she noticed that the brownish tints of his hair and skin were the colour of fireside shadows. Something at the back of her mind which had not been impressed by any of this scene, which was refusing to attach any serious importance to an emotion felt by a man about another man, seized on this note of warmth exultantly and prophesied that there would come a time when all this nonsense would be given up and the real business of living would begin, satisfyingly, nutritiously. Shocked, she forced herself back to her loyal duty of pity and distress. Pitching his voice deeper and deeper lest it should squeak up into tears, he was saying: ‘It was easy to move him out of his stuffy little hole of a flat in the Temple and get him out here. You see, he’s practically had a bedroom here for years. I used to keep him talking so late at nights, I hope to God it wasn’t bad for him …’ Now, Essington had hardly any close friends, and none that he loved like this. He was kept from it by the dreadful justice of his mind. It was really justice and not mere censoriousness, even now it was making him say very clearly and distinctly, so that the meaning disadvantageous to himself should not be missed, ‘It’s plucky of you to have him here. I … should have been afraid of the infection.’ But it kept him from friendship just as much as the meaner quality might have done, because it never let him pass through the first phase when you are silly about people, when you believe that they are perfect and want to be with them all the time, and get so fond of them that it doesn’t matter much when you find they’ve got their faults like anybody else. There had been a time when she’d been an idiot about Maxine, and would have told anybody that she was unselfish, though really old Maxi was dog-lazy and never did a stroke if she could put it on somebody else; but by the time she had found out that she had found also that you could tell old Maxi anything and she would understand and not say that you hadn’t any self-respect because you stayed with Essington though he was cruel to one; and anyway she had by then got so used to seeing Maxi’s face about that it had a special value like places that one has known all one’s life. She expected Francis Pitt had been silly about Hurrell like that when he first met him, and that it had worked out all right. He had pretended that the old man had got everything, and in the course of the pretence he had found out what he had got. But Essington could not go through such a process, for by merely looking at people he knew the truth about them. His eyes would close up from below like a cat’s, and he would purr a phrase which would record the bad in them without malice and the good in them without affection, and that was that. So he had no friends as she had Maxine, as Francis Pitt had Hurrell. Yet he was not unloving. If you got to know him, you could see that often he had an aching feeling in his heart like anybody else. He had wanted dreadfully to make up his misunderstanding with Hurrell, he was minding it that Hurrell was going to die. Querulously, he was now trying to alter that fact by talk. ‘But can’t anything be done for him? Is Cornelliss the best man, do you think? … Doctors are always such fools … Mind you, I was told thirty years ago that I had just six months to live …’ He was always like this when he heard that anybody was dying. Indeed he was always like this when he was faced with any evil which could not be brought to an end by being clever about it, or for that matter with any good which couldn’t be completely accounted for and controlled by reason. That was why he was so horrid to her, although he loved her. Their love wasn’t reasonable. It wasn’t logical that he should have grown really to care for a woman who was quite stupid, who couldn’t be of any real use to him except to make love to, so he was constantly examining this state of affairs with distrust and suspecting that he must be allowing himself to be governed by appetite and base emotion like the bad leaders who were responsible for most of the woes of the world. Also the situation arising out of their being in love vexed him because he had worked it all out cut and dried and everything in the garden should have been lovely. They lived together without being married because they did not believe in the institution of matrimony; they lived together openly enough for it to be generally known because it was w
rong to be hypocritical; they did not live together quite publicly because that would have been to violate other people’s susceptibilities unnecessarily; they did not have children because it would have been difficult with servants and governesses. They ought to have been perfectly happy. It was unreasonable that she should mind what quite negligible people said about her; it was unreasonable she should mind doing without things that if she had had them would have caused endless trouble. It was his sense of her unreason that made him go bickering about her house—or was there another twist to it? Did he mind her unreasonably minding those things or did he mind the still more unreasonable way he minded her minding them? Did it not turn a sword in his heart when he saw her grieving, and was not his bickering half a squeal at his own pain and half a quarrel with the fate that had hurt his beloved woman and not at all the sheer callousness it pretended to be? She looked at his fine, fretful face and knew that she was right. Here, as always, his soreness was sweetness tortured into the likeness of the opposite. But she did not feel, as she always used to when she had found out some excuse for him, any flush of tenderness. It did not take away from her that feeling that she was caught in a trap, that she would die starving …
It was like food to be with Francis Pitt. He did not deny the death of his friend, though to admit it was anguish to him. The truth was wringing out of him in sullen phrases … ‘There is no hope. None at all. The only thing is to get him through it as easily as possible. There are little things one can do …’ He narrowed his eyes and lowered his head as if he talked of some way of cheating in a game, and that the other player might overhear. ‘Keeping him quiet at the time when the haemorrhages are most likely to come …’ She could see him standing by a campfire in defence of something that lay long and white and still, drawing himself to his full little height as death came down on them from the dark sky, his long arms crooked and his little paw hands stretched out flat in front of him ready to do things more cunning than direct blows, his eyes a little open so that he could watch his enemy but nearly closed so that his enemy should not see what he planned, his feet set dancing-light so that he could dodge and feint. The first men in the world must have looked like him. They too would have no need to be tall. For hunting and snaring it would be better if they were little …