by Rebecca West
Sunflower went and stood at Essington’s shoulder.
‘That’s real wit in his line,’ said Essington; and laughed.
Sunflower went back to her seat. ‘Horrid,’ she said to Etta, who pulled up a chair and went and sat beside her.
‘Wit and beauty,’ gloated Francis Pitt. ‘And look at the lovely little writing round the edge. “The brute creation contrasted with man (made in His image)". It’s as exquisite as the drawing. But don’t I look a loathsome brute? Don’t I look a monster?’
‘Of course,’ said Sunflower to Etta, ‘I don’t ever see the sense of caricature, really. What’s the good of drawing people as they aren’t?’
‘In any case he’s very difficult to do,’ said Etta. ‘Even photographs. I’ve got lots, but he never takes well.’
‘Neither does he,’ said Sunflower.
‘They always leave out his character.’
‘So they do his, too.’
Patiently they watched the two men.
‘Yes, this is genius,’ muttered Essington. ‘Wit and beauty and ingenuity. Look at the way he’s given a gothic touch to the dog’s ears, setting up a suggestion of spirituality in the eye of the beholder. Ten to one he did that unconsciously, probably he doesn’t know to this day that he did it. That’s why in my hearts of hearts I loathe art. It’s done so blindly, so uncontrollably. It’s the best thing we’ve got, but we can’t yoke it to the world’s service.’
‘You certainly can’t yoke Goleath to the world’s service,’ chuckled Francis Pitt. He was very happy. He had liked Essington admiring what was evidently one of his cherished possessions; and now he was going to talk about Goleath, who was evidently one of his pet subjects. ‘Did you ever meet the fellow?’
‘Yes. He drew me during my brief visit to Versailles. We were all drawn then. Roughly speaking, anything that happened to a musical comedy star happened to us great statesmen then. I constantly had an impression a face cream was being named after me, but I may have been wrong …’
‘Didn’t he strike you as a horrible fellow?’
‘Odd, odd. I remember he told me some story of a widow in some French town who had refused to yield to his embraces till they had visited her late husband’s grave and prayed. The results of their embraces showed her to be a woman of a strong but rather unpleasant sense of humour. Not the sort of thing I should have told a stranger … No …’
‘That was Goleath all over. He has no shame in him.’ He set back his huge head and roared with laughter. ‘God, what a man! I’ll never forget what he did to me in Paris. Never. It led to a lot of trouble, some of which is going on still. I had a job in Paris, you know, and part of my duties was being polite to British subjects who were doing war-work there. Soothing duchesses who were running hospitals and thought they weren’t being appreciated, and assuring little men with glasses and independent means who were running billiard rooms that the British Empire was sensible of the sacrifices they were making in staying up two hours later than they used to at home in Bournemouth. And when we were winding up the thing I had to give a dinner party to the whole damned lot of them. By that time I was sick of my job. I wished that every one of them were at the bottom of the sea. And that very afternoon I was sitting in my office, feeling I’d go mad before I had done with it, and who should come in but Goleath. He wanted me, not for the first time, nor the last, to lend him some money. He’d met a negress whom he assured me was far more beautiful than the Venus de Milo and I didn’t feel competent to dispute the point with him and apparently she’d been exorbitant in her demands. So I gave him some money and, God forgive me, I asked him to my party.’ Choked with silent laughter, he strutted a few steps on the hearthrug with his feet wide apart and a proud expression of conscious wickedness gleaming in his eyes; he looked ragged and muddy and young: he seemed to be changing into the naughtiest boy in the district strutting at the street corner while the rest of the gang gape respectfully from against the paling. ‘And God and all His saints forgive me, I put him next to a duchess. I’d never fancied the woman, and she’d given me a lot of trouble, treating me as one of those low little men who make money. She’s the sort of duchess who gets her clothes where Queen Mary does, and she was a great big woman with masses of hair piled up under a tiara that was obviously made by the same man who built Euston station.’
‘It wasn’t the Duchess of Grantham, was it?’ asked Essington.
‘That’s the woman. Well, it all went quite all right till we got to the ice and then there was a yell. My God, there was a yell. And there was Goleath tearing down the duchess’s hair.’
‘Pitt, you are an excellent fellow,’ said Essington, ‘I have detested that woman for years. She was one of the Ulster lot. Gracious Englishwomen. Who came up to one all the time one was in office and bullied one as if one was an insolent footman because one wasn’t shooting some large class of God’s creatures without trial—trade unionists, the Irish Nationalists, Hindus …’
‘Well, this night she wanted to shoot Goleath without trial. You should have seen that woman with her tiara over one eye and Goleath going at her hair, not vindictively, you understand, but as if he was giving the negress a rough-house before they got friendly again. And there was such a shouting and such a hullaballoo as you never heard outside a low-class pub. Then suddenly Goleath stood up, looking like a king, and quieted them all with one wave of his hand, and said, very gravely and impressively, “I see that I have done wrong. I must apologise. My only excuse is that at present I am living with a woman who adores brutality.” And with that the devil went out and left me to settle up with the duchess. You can guess how easy it was for a man of my size, and my unfortunate air of not minding very much if things do go wrong so long as they’re funny, to placate that rearing carthorse of outraged virtue. But I smoothed her down all right, and lied like blazes, and said it was a secretary of mine who’d asked Goleath, and that I’d known nothing about it, and that my heart was broken, and finally I got her pretty quiet. So we finished our dinner, and then we all went into the ballroom and listened to music, the real right stuff that experts had got in for me. And all my Mutts and Jeffs were sitting like lambs drinking in some Italian woman when—yowp!’—his eyes were like eddies in the wicked grey Thames that flows under London bridges—‘Goleath had come back, and he’d come up behind some damned woman who’d taken two million colonial troops to hear organ recitals in the Invalides, or provided them with some such entertainment that would naturally appeal to colonial troops on leave, and he’d smacked her hard where one doesn’t smack ladies, though it’s convenient enough. He said he’d gone out into the streets and that suddenly he’d felt that we were all going to have a dull time, so he’d come back to make the party go. And, by God, it did. It went within the next half hour. We couldn’t get him out. He’s over six feet, you know, and as strong as a bull. So the rest of them went instead. There wasn’t a soul in the place by eleven o’clock barring me and the waiters. I didn’t mind. In a way it was the best party I ever gave. But I got hauled over the coals for it finely before I was done. Hurrell was furious—’
He stopped.
The glee went out of his face, it became again a mask of sullen misery. His eyes, old under his reddened lids, above the baggy pouches, passed from one to other of his listeners as if in resentment that they had seduced him into forgetting even for a little. He turned his back on them and walked draggingly into the shadows of the room, looking down as people do at funerals. There was a bell-rope hanging near the door. He felt for it as if he were blind, tugged it, and leaned back against the wall. Through the darkness they could see his face as a still patch of sallowness, not so high on the wall as one would expect. Essington began to say something in a high, nonchalant voice, but the words caught in his throat.
When the butler came in Francis Pitt said, ‘Frederick, will you ask Nurse Vyner if we can see Mr Hurrell now?’
‘She’s just been down to say that she’d be obliged if you’d come up
as soon as possible, sir, so that Mr Hurrell won’t be kept awake too late.’
He came back to them, pouting out his lips as if he were trying to make a thick, solid mouth to stabilise his face, which was in danger of becoming muddled with tears. ‘Will you come, Essington?’ he asked humbly.
‘I should be very sorry if you did not let me,’ said Essington gently.
‘And you, Miss Fassendyll? He was saying today he’d never seen you, and that he’d like to.’
‘I’d love to see him.’
‘You’re sure you’re not afraid of infection?’
‘He’s used to horrid women!’ she thought savagely; and clenched her fists as there passed before her mind’s eye certain faceless women’s figures; and said aloud, ‘Thank you. I don’t ever catch anything.’
‘That’ll be good of you. You’re being very good to me, you two …’ Mumbling, he led them to the door and held it open for them. It was dreadful to pass so close to him and not be able to touch him, to see quite close by one’s shoulder his earthy, pudgy little face downcast to hide the working of his mouth, so that it looked all bulging forehead and angry eyes, and not be able to tell him that it didn’t matter if he did cry, everybody cried sometimes. ‘I’d better go first …’ It was as if his grief was a fluid interpenetrating his body and making it immensely heavy. Shuffling up the staircase in front of them, his hands in his trouser pockets, his head well down in his collar, he moved as if his limbs were leaden, he almost waddled. And in this part of the house he looked smaller than ever, for here things were even more monstrously swollen. All the way up the stairs hung subject pictures vaster than his others, with Saxon princesses and Dutch fisher-girls eight feet high, and gold frames thick as a ship’s cable; and on the landing the banisters became a kind of reredos, and at each side of the three stained glass windows were curtains which, had they fallen on a child, would have stifled it before it could beat its way out. The door at which he knocked with such a meek, tense bridling of his strength, towered up and up above his little crouching back.
He put his fingers to his lips. ‘Remember he doesn’t know … He hasn’t the least idea …’
As the nurse went out her cap was reflected half a dozen times in shining cliffs of mahogany. It wasn’t a homely room; and that broad bed must be dreadful for the servants to make; and it was heart-rendingly too broad for the man who lay in it. He made so little of a mound under the bedclothes that he must be nearly as spare as the rain-polished bones one sees lying on the turf on the Downs. Blue shadows lay like pennies on his closed eyelids, and on his high cheekbones was a flush like firelight seen through the hands. There was on his long Scotch face a look as if he were nourishing something within himself at the cost of a continual physical sacrifice. It was the same look that is on the face of a woman who is going to have a baby. Only there were these colours painted on his skin, like a plague sign daubed on a door, as warning that what he was cherishing within him was not life but a disease, that its birth would be a death.
He raised his blue lids and stared up with huge, brilliant eyes. Avariciously Francis Pitt bent over him to receive his gaze. After some seconds of stillness the man in bed gave a weak, sweet smile.
‘Well, Gordon, how are you?’ asked Francis Pitt. ‘Are you feeling any better?’
‘I’m feeling fine, thank you, Francis,’ answered the man in bed, with a slight Scotch accent. There was a little weariness mixed with his sweetness. It was apparent that Francis Pitt had asked him this question several times before during that day, and during the preceding day also.
‘I’ve brought some people to see you, Gordon.’ He spoke with exaggerated distinctness. Evidently his sense that his friend was every moment being borne further and further made him want to shout at him, as one would at someone who was moving physically away from one; and as that plainly could not be done in a sickroom he tried to get the same effect by speaking very clearly. It could be seen, from a little irritable twitch of the head on the pillow, that this puzzled and annoyed Hurrell, who however made no reference to it, but said with the same sweetness: ‘If it’s who I think it is, I’m glad.’
‘Yes, it’s the folks I spoke of, right enough. Here’s the famous Miss Fassendyll …’
He gave her one of those beautiful looks which men who have had nothing unworthy to do with women all their lives can give women when they are old; looks that are half holy memories. He was smiling at Sunflower, he was smiling at some girl who had looked lovely when the wind blew her full skirts round her at a street corner in a Lowland village fifty years before. He said, ‘It’s very good of a young lady like you, who must have such a quantity of gay engagements, to come and see an invalid.’
Remembering that he was out of office, and that Francis Pitt had said that he hated exile, she told him, ‘Oh, I wanted to! You see, you’re one of the few great men I’d never met.’
Gently he laughed and took away his hot, damp hand, and said, ‘Well, I’m afraid you must have found us a poor lot.’
‘But I wish you hadn’t been like this,’ she went on. ‘I’m sorry you’ve been bad.’
With that piercing sweetness he said, ‘It’s nothing. Nothing but a feverish chill of sorts. A kind of ague you might call it. I make the most of it, I’m afraid, because I’ve always enjoyed unusually good health, and now when a little real pain and discomfort comes my way I make a terrible fuss. And Francis here spoils me and encourages me to get good treatment by malingering. It’s no wonder that it’s got about that I’ve got galloping consumption.’ He gave a mild laugh. ‘That was how they put it in—Francis, what was the paper? I showed it to you the day before you made me come out here.’
‘The Chicago Standard was the fool thing’s name,’ said Francis Pitt heartily.
‘The silly things they put in papers!’ marvelled Sunflower, and stepped back.
‘And there’s someone else,’ said Francis Pitt.
‘My dear Hurrell …’ mewed Essington. She was proud of him. He was at his best in emergencies like that. Nobody could have told from his demeanour that there was any shadow on the occasion. He moved towards the bed with the slow grace of a cat, put his head on one side like a cat wondering if it is safe to jump on a stranger’s lap, and laid his hand on the quilt very lightly and tentatively, as a cat puts a paw through a railing towards a bird. ‘Tell me … am I your dear Essington?’ His tone suggested, ‘If not I shall run away and play by myself, it’s of no real consequence. But I should like …’
Hurrell’s fingers closed over the offered hand. Huskily he said, ‘You are my dear Essington … indeed. There’s a saying we have in Scotland … It sounds foolish in English … A sight for sore eyes …’
‘It certainly does sound wrong,’ said Essington querulously, dropping into an armchair by the bed. ‘Sore eyes … It reminds me of the days we were in opposition together and used to join forces to bully that ass Prester when he was at the Home Office. We used to allege that he exposed Russian immigrants to stricter eye tests than the other immigrants because they were free-spirited rebels against the Tsardom. I wonder now if that was true …’
‘Let not two politicians in the autumn of their days sit down and distress themselves by discussing how much of what they used to say was true,’ objected Hurrell, ‘particularly what they used to say when they were in opposition.’ He got back to what was evidently a little prepared speech. ‘But I couldn’t tell you you were a sicht for sair een, for I would never dare use Scottish dialect to you after an evening we spent at a play by a compatriot of mine called Sir James Barrie. Your comments were most unsympathetic. Do you not remember? We were taken in a party by Lucille Oppenshaw.’
‘How I detest that woman,’ said Essington. ‘We Liberals brought our own ruin on ourselves. We ought to have seen that no man was fit to lead a Party who had been fool enough to marry that woman. There were no sensuous inducements. That toasting-fork figure makes celibacy seem a life of riotous self-indulgence.’
H
urrell said ‘Tchk! Tchk!’ in a shocked, delighted way, and laughed into his pillow. Sunflower moved to a sofa that was set against the wall, facing the end of the bed. Francis Pitt was standing looking at the two men with a gratified yet wistful expression, as if he had arranged this meeting and was very glad that it was going off well, but that he had not wished it to go so well that they would both forget all about him. Presently he strolled over to his sister, who was sitting by a table near the sofa, and lounged over the back of a chair. Suddenly he caught sight of a bottle on the table and started up right, exclaiming in a vehement undertone: ‘But he’s still taking that French stuff! You know Cornelliss said he was to have the German brand! Oh, Etta, Etta!’
‘It’s only because the German brand hadn’t come when it was time for him to have his last dose. But very likely the German has come by now, and he can have it next time. I’ll see if you like.’