by Rebecca West
It occurred to Sunflower, with a sense of having been sold into a desolate country, that since she had left Chiswick and moved into the centre of London nobody had told her anything that would have been of use to Francis Pitt in his trouble. She felt a sense of guilt about this, as if she had broken a tradition, had done something like moving out of her place during a church service. She couldn’t have helped being an actress, so far as she could see. It had just happened to her. But all the same it didn’t seem right she should be one; not really right. And she felt that possibly he might have done something wrong of the same indefinable sort in becoming a very rich man and a politician. That might account for the faint sense she got now and then that he was not perfectly good. They should neither of them have been standing in this formal and enclosed garden, the air of which was melancholy. They should have been somewhere else, cosy and less tidy.
Because of his grief she felt a bodily pain, a bruise over the heart. Through the darkness and behind him, so that certainly he could not see her, she moved her hand as if to stroke his stooping shoulders. She could not even say anything, lest she should seem to be making capital out of his sorrow, to be using it as an avenue to intimacy with him. In any case she was nearly paralysed by stage-fright. She felt as if everything she did or said when she was with this man had to be weighed on very delicate scales, and if it were too light he would turn away, and if it were too heavy he would stand by and be courteous and gloomily decide not to see her any more. It was lovely to be with him, but it was torturing, exhausting.
He was looking at her as he smoked. Evidently he thought that as there was only moonlight she would not be able to see that he was doing it. She could not bear that for long, so she put up her hand in front of her face on the pretence of smoothing her hair. At that he took the cigar from his mouth, and said, not at all casually, but as if a long train of thought were coming to the surface, ‘What was that play you acted in where you went to a man’s rooms at night, wrapped in a great silver cloak?’ He spoke gloatingly; his little hands greedily described the way the silver folds had fallen. ‘You made a most beautiful picture. I have never forgotten it. Can you remember what I mean?’
‘Why,’ she answered in a little, weak voice. ‘I don’t know which that would be, I’m sure I’ve acted in such a lot of plays. It must have been some years ago if I went to a man’s rooms at night. Nowadays all that happens before the curtain goes up, and it isn’t considered specially interesting …’ She found it difficult to speak to him, but not because she was feeling the boredom and embarrassment that usually came on her when people praised her beauty. Instead she was feeling as if this was the first time that anyone had ever praised her beauty. It was as if an utterly new thing were happening to her, and had taken away her breath. She murmured, ‘Oh, I think I know … That would be “The Nightingale”. It was by Mr John Richard Smith, and he’s ever so old, so those sort of things go on happening in his plays …’
‘Well, whether he’s old or not, he wrote a play that had one wonderfully lovely scene,’ pronounced Francis Pitt solemnly, shaking his head for emphasis, ‘a wonderfully lovely scene …’ He went on smoking with an air of rumination, till with an abrupt, twitching movement, as if his high spirits had suddenly flared up, he threw his cigar high in the air over the flowerbeds and exclaimed in a voice full of good humour, ‘My God, why did I bring you into this gloomy old garden where I come and have the dumps! I’ve lots of other things here I needn’t be ashamed of! Come and see my chestnut walk.’
He was indeed very happy, far happier than she could ever have thought he would be while this trouble was hanging over him. They had to walk quite a little way, through the passage in the yew hedge, across the gravel in front of the house, which was the colour of india-rubber in the moonlight and had coarse blunt edges to all its copings and angles like the edges of hot water bottles, and up a winding path through a shrubbery of all those plants whose leaves set out to be shiny and are dull, laurel and rhododendra, but his mood held. He moved lightly and springily on his little feet and made broken, grunting, satisfied noises, and sometimes whistled tunelessly and exultantly through his teeth.
At the last turn of the path he stopped and said proudly, ‘Now!’
They were at the end of an avenue of chestnut trees, that drove along a flat terrace on the hillside to something too distant for anything to be known of it in this light save that it was high, and white, and stamped with the mould of human fancy: a statue, a fountain. Wide bays of brightness scalloped the pathway, for there were but half the number of trees on the valley side that there were on the side of the rising ground, so that at her elbow were wide windows of landscape, a landscape of vague radiant woods that seemed to be adhering to hills sticky with moonlight in the manner of treacle-caught moths, and of sky, the dark sky that is always a little strange to human eyes, since though it is more lawless than the land with its unmarshalled, moving clouds, it is by night more formal, pricked out with the patterns of the hard stars. There were floating here and there silver vapours that might have been passing over the world on some alchemic task of making beauty of what was not, a changing the character of what was beautiful to something rarer. The hideous house below them now served the eye, for its slate roofs looked like shining waters; and the candles on the unpartnered chestnut trees, lit by the full light of the moon, which the fine matt surface of the petals did not reflect, seemed to have the short, crumbling texture of snow.
‘Oh, it is lovely!’ breathed Sunflower.
He was innocently pleased, he was childishly proud of his possessions. ‘Ah, you must come and see it by day! It’s a fine view over to Harrow, and the candles on my chestnuts are at their best. Pink and white they are, the flowers we’re walking on.’ He ploughed them up with his feet, whistling as if it gave him a sense of luxury to be treading on fallen flowers.
‘I love them when they’re mixed,’ said Sunflower. ‘There was an avenue of them in a park where I lived when I was little. Strawberries and cream, we used to call the flowers on the ground.’
With gleeful, generous inconsequence he asked, ‘Do you like strawberries and cream? We might have had some tonight. My gardener forces them in some corner hereabouts, though God knows I have to go on my knees to get some of what I pay him to grow on my land with my money. But it’s a pity we didn’t have some for you tonight.’
‘It’s awfully kind of you, but they’re no good to me, ever. I like them, but they don’t like me—’
She bit her lip. This was one of the phrases that drove Essington into a frenzy. But Francis Pitt seemed not to be offended by it, for he went on happily, as if to talk of trivial things were a holiday. ‘Mm. Now I loathe asparagus, and we’re in the thick of the season now. How I hate those weeks every year when I have to sit in front of a plate that’s stocked with that anaemic, water-logged timber …’ No, he hadn’t minded her being common. It was a rest to be with a man who wasn’t porcupinish with different subtle sorts of fastidiousness. One could tell him anything. She remembered suddenly something that had been a lump in her throat ever since the morning because she couldn’t get it out of her system by telling somebody. In the automobile coming there she had felt quite sick because she didn’t dare say anything about it to Essington. She wondered if she could possibly tell Francis Pitt.
She paused, and stood looking over the moonlit landscape. He checked his walk and came to a halt beside her and asked, ‘Not cold, are you?’ with so obvious a desire to do everything he could for her, that she felt a rush of confidence, and began penitently, ‘I did make such a silly of myself today.’
‘How was that?’
‘Well, you see, I’m rehearsing a new play of Mr Trentham’s just now, and I’m playing a person who isn’t very well educated, not quite what you’d call a lady, really. Well, in the first act I have to say, “My husband’s uncle’s got mines in the Andes, not that I know where that is, I never was good at geography.” Well, that’s how I’ve always sai
d it till today. But this morning Mr Childs, who’s our producer, stopped me while I was saying the line and said, “Miss Fassendyll, if I were you I should say Jography.” Well, naturally, when he said that, I thought I’d been saying it wrong and that it ought to be Jography. Well, I’m not the sort of person who pretends to know more than I do and never have, so I said, “Thank you very much, Mr Childs, and I’m sure I’m very sorry but I always thought it was Geography.” Well, you could have heard a pin drop, and then they all laughed, and what’s worse, they all stopped themselves. Well, wasn’t it awful of me?’
‘Awful of you? No, by God, it was not. It was awful of them. The fools, the silly little fools. Such a little thing to snigger about.’
‘Oh, but it was a dreadfully stupid mistake.’
‘But such a tiny mistake. It just shows what small minds people have. It’s a mistake anybody might have made. My God, the words in the dictionary I can’t pronounce …’
‘Really?’ she asked, very pleased. ‘Do you have trouble that way? Oh, but you aren’t stupid. You see, it isn’t just that I’m ignorant, I do such silly things. I suppose you heard about the interview I gave the Evening Mail when I first signed up to play in “As You Like It”?’
‘Not a word,’ he told her stoutly.
‘That was awful. I told the young man I was looking forward to it because it was the first time I’d acted in a Barrie play. Wasn’t it dreadful of me? And he went and put it in the papers, though he had stayed on and had his tea. I never heard the last of it. But really it wasn’t such an out of the way mistake to make, because Barrie did write a play called “Rosalind”. All the same, people laughed.’
‘The fools, the damned fools,’ he said with mounting indignation. ‘As if all that stuff mattered. But I hate to think of you exposed to all this spite and jealousy and meanness. I wish to God you weren’t on the stage.’
She began to move on along the avenue. ‘I don’t like it much,’ she murmured.
‘A woman like you,’ he said gravely, ‘ought to be at home, ought to be …’
He did not finish his sentence. They walked in silence, ploughing up the flowers, looking down at them. She felt ever so much better. How this little man understood things. He saw how horrid it was for her to be laughed at; he would realise how she felt when people talked about her and Essington. She felt a sense of gratitude and affection not only for him but for this place where so many lovely things were happening: where a great man was waiting sweetly for death, and this little man was loving him so warmly, and Etta was serving them both with such devotion, and where, when she had come in for an hour or two, they had cured her of a worry that would have choked her for days, just by being simple and kind. She stopped and leaned against a tree-trunk, and looked at the pale hills and the roof that was shining like water, so that she would never forget them, and this night.
‘It’s nice here,’ she said huskily.
He stood beside her, his feet wide apart and his shoulders hunched, a kind little Napoleon. ‘Yes, it’s nice.’
They stood in silence for a little while. Her eyes brimmed with tears, but not because she felt unhappy. It was part of the relaxation brought about by the place. Of late she had always had a few tears just under the surface and now that she was all loosened these flowed, but none took their place behind her eyes. She was utterly happy, utterly at peace.
Suddenly she felt very shy, and wondered if he were not thinking her odd, and boring, and silly. She began to move away.
‘Wait a moment,’ he said very softly. ‘That’s a London tree-trunk you’ve been leaning against. Most likely it’s left a mark on your frock. Turn round and let me see.’ She watched him over her shoulder while he peered at the silk. He was very careful not to touch her. There was a beautiful decorum, a respect for physical reserves, about all his movements, though they were so friendly and cherishing. ‘No, not a thing. I am glad. It’s a very lovely frock.’ He was speaking very, very softly and she answered him as they moved on in a whisper. A cloud was passing before the moon, and it seemed right that all other things should be muted like the light.
But suddenly she uttered a loud cry.
‘My flower! I’ve lost my flower!’
‘What flower?’
‘The flower you gave me at dinner! I’ve let it fall.’
‘But there are lots more in the house. I’ll give you another—’
‘That wouldn’t be the same! I want this one! Oh, I had it this very minute!’
She hurried back to the place where they had been standing and knelt down on the ground and scrabbled among the fallen flowers, the other flowers that were not valuable. He stooped over her but did not help her in her search. Almost at once she looked up into his face and called out happily, ‘Look, I’ve found it! I knew I had it when we were here!’ She rose to her feet and he straightened himself to his little lesser height. She stood smiling at him and twirling the flower in her fingers, wondering why he did not say he was glad that she had found it. It was lovely that he was so small, it gave him the charm of a child as well as a man. Yet in a queer way it had been nice when she had been kneeling and he had been standing. She would have liked not to have got up but to kneel in front of him and take his hands and kiss them. Then perhaps he might have bent down and kissed her on the lips. It came to her like a thunderclap that there was nothing that a man can do to a woman in the way of love which she did not wish him to do to her. She was in love with Francis Pitt. Pleasure swept over her, pricking the palms of her hands; and she seemed to have been promised the kind of peace she had always longed for, an end to the fretfulness of using the will, passivity. She felt as if she had become as stable, as immovable as one of the chestnut trees. But this passivity would be more passionate than any activity, for like a tree she had a root, force was driving down through her body into the earth. It would work there in the darkness, it would tear violently up through the soil again and victoriously come into the light. She thought of that moment at her mother’s funeral when the four dark figures stood beside the hole in the ground where there lay a black box holding the body which had caused them all. The ground, the ground, she had at last become part of the process that gets life out of the ground. She felt so grateful to him for somehow doing this for her that she could have licked his hands as the dogs had done.
It seemed to her inevitable that he should say something in his deep voice that would tell her what to do, that would bring her the beginning of her passivity. But he said nothing, standing turned sideways to her, his head down, his hand covering his mouth, till he was caught away from her by another of those rushes of good spirits. All of a sudden he was striding along in front of her with his hands in his pockets and a lift in his tread, crying out in a ringing, hearty tone, not so deep as his ordinary voice but more ordinary and jolly, ‘Well, we must go back to the house now! That nurse woman will have turned Essington out long ago! Poor Essington! Poor Essington!’ He flung his head back and laughed loudly. Sunflower wondered what sort of a woman the nurse might be that he found the thought of an encounter between her and Essington so exquisitely amusing.
Following him was a pleasure, but she looked over her shoulder regretfully. ‘What’s that … that white thing we were walking towards?’
‘A statue of love!’ he called gaily and perfunctorily. ‘I’ll take you there some other time! You’ll be coming here often, you know!’ He was hurrying, he might have been an excited boy who had found something wonderful in the garden and wanted to show it to the people at home. When they came to the steps down through the shrubbery and she had to go slowly, because she did not know the way, he showed what would have been impatience had it not been so utterly unclouded by anything like ill temper.
‘You do seem happy all of a sudden,’ she said as they crossed the gravel square. She had to say something. She felt as if a great bird were beating its wings within her breast.
‘I am happy. I am happy!’ he answered gravely. ‘How should I
not be happy, when you have lifted a load off my mind? You have done that for me by what you said about Hurrell.’ Whistling softly, he ran up the steps to the front door. He liked her, at least he liked her.
On the threshold he came to a halt and laughed aloud.
Over his shoulder she saw Essington sitting in the hall alone, stretched out very low in an armchair, his face nearly hidden.
Francis Pitt strolled across the room, rubbing his hands, and stood looking down on him with an indulgent air. ‘So you’ve been turned out by that nurse woman.’
‘Yes. Yes. With a great show of efficiency and womanly spirit. Odd that the profession of attending the sick is so often taken up by the female equivalent of the more powerful and relentless type of prizefighter …’ He did not show them his face, but he sounded very tired and querulous. ‘Sunflower we must go home. I’m tired. And I have to do something tomorrow. I don’t remember what it is. Don’t you remember, Sunflower? I’m sure I told you.’
‘Well, you can go home,’ Francis Pitt told him good-humouredly. ‘Your car’s outside and your chauffeur’s standing by it, admiring the stars.’
‘Was he out there?’ asked Sunflower. She had noticed nothing.
‘We nearly fell over him,’ said Francis Pitt. ‘Have a drink before you go, Essington? Whisky? Or some brandy? The brandy’s the best thing I’ve got.’
‘No. No. Yes. I’d like some brandy. I feel cold.’
Francis Pitt went over to a tray on the table and poured out some brandy with steady easy movements. He was amazingly better than he had been when they had arrived; better even than he had been that first night at dinner at her house. He offered the glass to Sunflower.
‘No, I don’t touch it, ever,’ she said. Because he gave her a straight, deep look, she became uncertain that she was so very beautiful after all.