by Rebecca West
Oh God, but why should she think of ugly things? Everything was good, everything was simple. Francis Pitt was a man; men found love-making easy and delicious, beauty was the source of its ease and delight, and she had beauty. What could be simpler? She flung back the sheet and lay in her nightgown with her arms stretched wide across the bed, joy like a wild dancer springing and whirling in her body, because it certainly had beauty, and because it had already felt his great mouth at several places, on her throat, on her shoulders, in the crook of her left elbow, where he had halted at the little tangle of blue veins, which he had claimed, in a whisper that was low as if he prayed but shook with laughter, to be his monogram. Oh, making love to somebody one really loved was so interesting! She blessed her beauty, she laid her lips to her arms in gratitude, she drew her long yellow hair across her mouth and kissed it. No, nothing in her life had been wasted, not even her beauty, which had sometimes seemed to be wasteful in its essence, to be as fruitless as it was prodigious. The idea had come to her quite terrifyingly one afternoon, when she was sitting in the darkness that was as unrestful as hard daylight because the people who arranged it stood about breathing hard and anxiously, of a spring opening at one of the big dressmakers’. Across the lighted stage had passed the lovely mannequins, slim and polished like Malacca canes, with smooth heads which shone as the top of a cane where it is rubbed by the palm, and delicate plucked eyebrows which made it seem as if an artist sitting at a table in a sunlit garden had spent the time while the coffee dripped down into the glass from the silver strainer in changing his friends’ canes to pretty women with a pencil-point, yet with something ardent and moist like sap about their eyes and lips, as if the wood of which these canes were cut was remembering that it had had a habit of coming to flower about this time of year. What they were doing was not as good as what they were. The clothes they were showing were horrid. Like so many English dresses they demonstrated the real disposition of life to take away as much as it gives, for one felt that the designer would never have reached his present position had he not been brought up in the stern nursery of English provincial life, which had taught him habits of diligence and punctuality, but had also unfitted him to make full use of that position since it had left him with a sense that the highest possible destiny for a dress is to be worn on Sunday or at high teas. She had shuddered because life was never easy for anybody, and because these girls were wasting their youth and sweetness on futility, and had sat back in her chair and distracted her thoughts by looking about her and trying to put names to the vague shapes she saw about her in the darkness. That was certainly Germaine Peyton just in front of her. Even in the dim light one could immediately recognise that broad, offering blandness that was like a shallow saucer of thick cream. She had wondered why nearly all actresses, including herself, were so naturally recognisable. It wasn’t that they were chosen for that, because they didn’t have that quality at the start. It grew on them in the course of their careers, and there was something forced and uneasy about it, as if their appearances were struggling to make as clear a statement of themselves as possible. It was, she supposed, because nearly all actresses were bad actresses, having been chosen to practise an art because of physical qualifications that have nothing to do with that or any other art; and it is the way of the inferior artist to make a bid for personal conspicuousness; the Montparnasse painter with his velvet coat and his coloured scarf; the mediocre pianist with his long hair; the second-rate prima donna with the exaggerated set back of her shoulders. There was something piteous about it. It was a throwing up of the hands and a lifting of the voice of someone who has been swept away from the shores of normal life into a rough sea and finds he cannot swim. ‘What I am doing with my art is not noticeable! I must be noticed or I must die, being human! But surely this thing I am doing with myself is noticeable!’ Again she shuddered, and looked away, at a woman who sat on her right. It was Mina Victoria, the Duke’s third wife. She was a lively little thing, but she did look silly. All the society women looked silly nowadays because all of them that were at all in the running as beauties had adopted two fashions that really didn’t go together. First, about ten years ago, they all began dropping their jaws and pushing their chins as far back as possible, because Lady Artemis Merals did that to fix attention on the marvellous purity of her brows, the mermaid blankness of her eyes. Then about five years later they had all wanted to look like Corton, the great Parisian cocotte and dressmaker, and because she wore a small hat that covered her forehead and shadowed her eyes in order to hide an expression of financial genius that would otherwise have made the men she met climb trees, they all did the same. To stylise their beauty in the manner of one woman they had got rid of their chins, to stylise it in the manner of another they had got rid of their foreheads and their eyes, so now there was nothing left of them except their noses and sleek mouths, except lovely little snouts. They looked like a lot of silly animals. And since they looked like that they behaved like that. If one made a gesture expressive of an emotion one felt that emotion; she knew that from her acting. The Duchess of Victoria had acted like a greedy little fool when she divorced the Duke. Beauty had put her in the way of doing that, and beauty had placed Germaine Peyton and herself and God knows how many other women in the ridiculous position of bad actresses. And beauty had set the mannequins ambling in these clumsy clothes. She had clenched her hands and muttered aloud, ‘Charlock! Charlock!’ There had come to her the memory of something that had happened long ago, when she and her sister Lily had gone down to stay for a fortnight after measles with a cousin of her mother’s who had married a stationmaster in a Devonshire village. One afternoon he had taken them for a walk up a lane that wound higher and higher between tall hedges until there was a gate and they stepped out on to a heathy moor and saw half of the countryside lying beneath them, checkered out over its hills and valleys with different coloured fields that were like a patchwork quilt stretched over the limbs of a sleeper. She and her sister had cried out at the sight, and then again, because these were more beautiful than any others, being bright. ‘Oh! Look at that pretty yellow stuff!’ they had squealed, running along the hilltop ridge with their long hair and their pinafores blowing round them in the upland wind. And from behind them had come the soft voice of the old man, seeing the catch in things as grown up people do: ‘Why, that’s charlock, the nasty stuff. Nothing won’t grow where charlock is, it kills all good growing.’ That had brought her to a standstill. Surely it was sign of something like being naughty in the universe that anything so beautiful should not be useful! Well, it might be that the universe had been naughty in a more fundamental point than that. Beauty, the nasty stuff! Nothing won’t grow where beauty is, it kills all good growing. The thought had haunted her. Once, lying half-asleep in Essington’s arms, she had moaned aloud, ‘Charlock, charlock!’ and he had cried in fury, ‘Oh God, Sunflower! The mess your mind is in! The ragbag of meaningless bits and scraps! Imagine interrupting me with imbecile mutterings of “charlock, charlock”, when I was thinking out proportional representation!’
But beauty was not a weed, it was not waste. It had made Francis Pitt say those things when she had turned her face to him in the moonlight, it had brought her life with Francis Pitt. She was not a field cursed with charlock, she was good pastureland. Lying there, she fell into a dream of how it would feel to be a meadow, to have a body of smooth wet earth pricked upwards with a million blades of growing grass. Someone would open a gate, there would run in a flock of young lambs, they would pound the wet earth with their strong little hooves, they would drop their little twitching muzzles to the grass and tug it up by the roots. Smiling and murmuring with pleasure, she took her own arms to her bosom and laid her lips to her own hands. They were like satin. He had thought so too the night before when he had laid his lips to them. For a moment he had stopped kissing them to murmur deeply to himself, ‘So soft, so soft!’ Oh, what a blessing her career had been to her, making her ready for him, lifting her ou
t of her first ugly circumstances! She looked back at herself as she had been in 69 Tyndrum Road, getting up on a winter morning, washing at a deal wash-stand in cold water that left her hands all rough and red, not powdering her face or her body, not smoothing her elbows and her knees with lotion to make them ivory like the rest of her flesh; putting on coarse underclothes that left red marks on her with their thick armholes, creaking stays with high husks that rubbed her in between her breasts, black woollen stockings, and a rough serge dress that would not have been nice for a lover to touch and was not very clean, because one could not send it to the cleaners very often; brushing one’s hair not enough to burnish it because one had to be at the Jennings’ shop on time, and anyway the brush was cheap and had no grip; calling downstairs to warn Mum one was ready for breakfast in a Cockney whine. She lay breathless, panting thanks to God who had thrust on her, against her silly will, in spite of her stupid incapacity to imagine how gorgeous life might be, the gift of being fit to give herself to Francis Pitt. But her heart contracted suddenly, and she cried out, ‘But I am not young! I am thirty! He is only having the fag-end of my beauty! Why did he not come to me when I was nineteen!’ She sat up in bed and sobbed, having to make to herself the admission that however good her life was it still was not quite so good as it might have been, which was somehow frightful, like having to admit one’s Mother hadn’t loved you very much and hadn’t done her best for you. A protective power had failed. But she cried out in answer to herself, ‘Ah, now that I am going to be happy I shall keep young! I shall not grow old for ever so long!’ She looked sharply about her, at the cupboards which were full of dresses which would still make people think of fine tincture and bright colours when she came by even if her skin and hair lost theirs, which would give her beauty form and style even if middle age confused the definite image she now presented; and at the bathroom door which was ajar and showed the tall mirror held by golden eagles where the light was strongest, so that she should see the first calamities immediately they befell, and the blue and green marbled shelves where the bubble-tinted Venetian jars and bowls held the balms and astringents she had not yet begun to use. Her career had given her full command over the second chance that a rich woman can give her beauty. Nevertheless she felt a wild impatience to get on with the story of her happiness at once. Her hand fluttered towards the telephone, though she knew it was utterly the wrong hour to find Mr Isaacson and ask him if her understudy could play tonight; he would have left his house at Walton Heath and not yet arrived at the office. She made herself lie down again, and closed her eyes, and thought how pleasant it would be to be a meadow, to feel the hooves of the young lambs kick on one’s body and the little muzzles tug the grass by its roots.
Mr Isaacson would let her do it. He might reasonably say that though the management wanted to see the Manbury girl play the part they ought to have had longer notice, but he would not stick to that if she spoke with any of the urgency she felt. She did like Mr Isaacson. He was always the same, sitting at his desk, very slim, very rigid, very calm, with his long, white fingers crooked stiffly round the telephone, the thick discs of his strong glasses giving back the light steadily in front of his blindish, melancholy black eyes, his hair very smooth with brilliantine and his linen discreetly perfect, his skin preserving unflushed the strange discoloured pallor of the Northern Jew, which looks as if the race had daubed itself with the juice of a dark berry for disguise and now that happier circumstances have come were letting it wear off. When he spoke of his wife and his children he became more rigid, more calm than ever. Only one saw rise suddenly in front of the Walton Heath villa the immensely high and thick secretive and defensive walls of an oriental city. In a sentimental world he was a realist. He did not believe that this is particularly delicious, but he knew that if one does not eat one starves, and if one is not clothed one is cold, and if one does not marry and have children one is desolate. He did not believe that it is particularly agreeable to spend all one’s money on keeping a family, but he knew that if men did not do these things the bottom would fall out of life. Of course he would let Sunflower off if she gave him the slightest hint of where she was going. When he heard definitely he would congratulate her in formal and unexcited phrases, but his eyes would glow with a sombre and splendid fantaticism, seeing a woman whom he liked passing behind those walls within which is protection and honour and increase. It was a pity he was not quite happy. You could tell that he wasn’t from looking at him as he sat at his desk. There was a kind of strain across his shoulders as if he held his head high only by an effort. Of course he hated being subordinate to men so greatly inferior to him as Guggenheim, who was not a Jew but a Yid, and Madison, that fat old dandy with his tight clothes and his unshaded leer which looked as if his lashes had been burned off when some girl upset the lamp in the struggle. But it could not be helped. There was some weakness in Mr Isaacson which, beasts though they were, the other two had not got; when he said, ‘Go,’ nobody went. So he reconciled himself to the position, sat at his desk, and dealt justly with his work, his clever sensitive head inclined to droop, but his backbone forbidding that.
When one came to think of it, all the people one liked fell into that attitude sooner or later. Mum had done it all the time, working about the house. She’d never had enough fun, and she did so love a good laugh. (Oh, if only Mum had been alive to know how happy she was going to be!) Maxine had sat like that every night at Ciro’s and the Embassy in the dreadful time after Jerry, her face emptied of all blood, her eyes emptied of all meaning, but her body bravely braced in her lovely, carefully worn clothes, offering her beauty silently and passively to the love of men as a target offers itself to the arrow. It was funny to think that if she had given up and taken to going home early there would never have been that baby. (She must tell Maxine all about it the minute all the arrangements were made.) And years ago, at Tyndrum Road when Aunt Clara was so bad with pneumonia, Aunt Emma, who drank, begged so hard to be allowed to sit up with her one night that they let her; and when they took a cup of tea to her in the early morning they found her sitting in the basket-chair by the bed in just that pose. Her face, bruised with drunkenness, though she had not touched a drop since her sister got ill, had fallen forward so that her pointed chin dug into her bosom; but her eyes blinked vigilantly among the rheum and turkeyish red ruffles of flesh, and her shrivelled little body was held like a ramrod as if she were a little girl who wanted to show that though she was naughty sometimes she could be good when it was necessary. Poor Aunt Emma, dear Aunt Emma. It was a sign she was really nice that whenever she had one of her bad times one of the first things she did was to go off and buy people presents. And that was the way the nice old stage-door keeper at the Palladium used to sit. The one who was so kind to all the girls, who interpreted everything that happened in a lovely well-bred way, and with such silvery definiteness and precision that his interpretation became the truth, since everybody acted on it; and who went home one day to die quietly of a cancer that must have torn him for years. Oh, human beings were splendid things! And this pose was a symbol of their splendour, of their mad bravery when the odds were against them. The head, which was clever, which knew too well what was happening to it, hung down; but the spine, which was stupid, which only knew it had to go on living, bent only for a moment, and then stiffened straighter than it was before its bending. It was as if a link in a chain should be struck again and again by a vast hammer and doubly resolved, ‘I will not break, the chain’s the thing, the chain must hold, I will not break!’ It was lovely that at the party last night there had been only that kind of person, nobody like Billie Murphy or Lord Canterton, only people who did good work without being News: Farquharson, the little Australian cartoonist, who held his mousy head on one side all the time to make sure he was seeing things all right, because one must tell the truth, and Mackinnon, who went humbly, with an air of raising his hand and coughing behind it, into the furthest and most perilous places of the earth, their nice
dowdy wives who smiled at one irrelevantly just to show they liked one, and a lot of young people who worked in Francis Pitt’s office. (But he did not seem to have made it up with poor young Mr Harrop and Miss Wycherley. There was not a sign of them.) They were having all sorts of nice feelings about the occasion that made a lovely atmosphere in which to be happy. For they were clever enough to see how funny the musty mid-Victorian house and furnishings were, to look up and laugh at the preposterous mouldings and copings and cosy corners of soap-cornered timber carved into a confused richness like that of pickles seen through the glass jar; and they were simple enough to enjoy the champagne and the very good dance music, and to be a little impressed because they had been asked out by the little man about whom there hung this heavy scent of greatness; and they were so good, with such gestures, as of those who checked themselves perpetually lest they should make some promise they could not perform, lest they should break any growing thing. It was marvellous to feel that though one was about to enjoy the most extravagant delights of love, that though henceforth one’s life was going to be saturated with pleasure, one was not going out into any desert of dissipation but would therefore range oneself forever with these sober people. For it was with their rhythm that he had moved when he laid his hand on her arm as they were watching the dear clumsy dancers, and had looked into her eyes so steadily, and spoken so solemnly, irrevocably committing himself to his question, and her to her answer.