by Rebecca West
“I don’t believe it will be the piano,” Mamma said, scrutinizing him narrowly, as if it were written in the grain of one’s skin what instrument one would play. And there was some sense in it. Even then one could not imagine Richard Quin sitting down in front of a piano, which is a forthright, monumental instrument, bigger than the person who plays it, and resistant to all relationships except those affected through the keyboard, though one could imagine him picking up a violin or a clarinet. “And you, Mary and Rose,” she went on, “the Erard in the corner is old but it is in tune. There is a man comes out from Pennycuick every six months and tunes it. Fate is on our side. The Weirs say that you can play it when you like except on Sundays. Let there be no excuses, you must practise just as regularly as you do at home. And while we are here I will give you lessons five times a week instead of three. I will have more time.”
“And what about me?” said Cordelia.
Mary and I looked at her tenderly, though we so often hated her, and there was a pause before Mamma answered, “Oh, you will have your lessons like the others, never fear.”
Cordelia had no idea that she was not musical. When Mamma had stopped giving her piano lessons, a little girl in the house next door was studying the violin, and she had insisted on learning too, and had ever since then shown an extreme and mistaken industry. She had a true ear, indeed she had absolute pitch, which neither Mamma nor Mary nor I had, which was a terrible waste, and she had supple fingers, she could bend them right back to the wrist, and she could read anything at sight. But Mamma’s face crumpled, first with rage, and then, just in time, with pity, every time she heard Cordelia laying the bow over the strings. Her tone was horribly greasy, and her phrasing always sounded like a stupid grown-up explaining something to a child. Also she did not know good music from bad, as we did, as we had always done.
It was not Cordelia’s fault that she was unmusical. Mamma had often explained that to us. Children were like their father’s family or their mother’s, and Cordelia had taken her inheritance from Papa. That gave her some advantages, it did indeed. Mary had black hair and I had brown, and so had many other little girls. But though Papa was so dark, there was red hair in his family, and Cordelia’s head was covered with short red-gold curls, which shone in the light and made people turn round in the street. There was something more to it than mere heredity, too, which made it harder to bear. It was at Papa’s insistence that Mamma kept Cordelia’s hair short at a time when that was a long-forgotten fashion, not to be renewed for years. At his home in Ireland there had been a portrait of his Aunt Lucy, who went to Paris just after the Napoleonic wars and had herself painted by Baron Gérard in a chiton and a leopard-skin, with her hair dressed in the fashion known as à la Bacchante, and as Cordelia was very like her he got Mamma to get her curls cut in as nearly the same style as puzzled hairdressers in South Africa and Edinburgh could manage.
Mary and I were not pleased about this. It made us feel that Cordelia was not only closer to Papa than we were, owing to an unfair decision of nature, but that she was also an object on which he had worked to bring her up to the standards of his taste. He had not done that to us. Nor were we worked on by anybody else. With all this piano-playing, Mary and I had no time, and Mamma had no time either, to subject us to any process that would turn us into finished articles, we were raw material. It really was cruel that we had to play the piano as well as do so much, that Mamma had to go shopping and help with the housework and deal with Papa’s worries so that she was never composed and dressed like other mammas, that we had to go to school and always struck our teachers as careless and hurried. Yet it was piano-playing that set our accounts right. For though there was red hair in Papa’s family, there was not a shred of musical talent, and we would rather have been musical with Mamma than have red-gold curls and make utter fools of ourselves by playing the violin as Cordelia did. We were sorry for Cordelia, particularly now, when Papa, from whom she derived such interest as she possessed, had gone away for six weeks. But all the same she was an ass to think she could play the violin, it was as if Mary and I thought we had red-gold curls.
The air of the room swayed with the tides of liking and dislike, forgiveness and resentment, and then the farmer’s wife came in and asked if we would like to see the mare and foal which her husband had just brought back from a sale at a hill farm, and we passed over into the world of the animals. But here too there were tides, nothing was stable. First of all we were introduced to the collie dogs, who were made to sniff us and lick us, so that they would recognize us as members of the household and give us neither bark nor bite. This we did not enjoy because we disapproved of animals so abandoned to ill will that ceremonies had to be performed before they would consent to show common civility to inoffensive people like Mamma and us. “But they are watch-dogs,” Mamma reminded us, “they protect the farm from thieves,” but we jeered, “What thieves?” and looked round the amphitheatre of the clear green hills triumphantly, as if the innocence of the stage-setting proved the innocence of the drama. It is strange how it was in the air in those days, the belief that war, crime, and all cruelty were about to vanish from the face of the earth, even little girls knew it to be a promise that was going to be kept.
Then the farmer’s wife pointed to some fields on the hillside, spotted brown with cattle, and told us not to go there, because a bull was running with the cows. We had no quarrel with that, we must have felt that the mysterious safe-conduct we had been given by the universe did not extend to bulls, our mouths went dry when we thought of what it would be like to be caught in those fields, particularly if we had Richard Quin with us. But in the byres the young stock stood, the calves that were not yet yearlings, as civilized and friendly as we could have wished to be ourselves, and there was a two-day-old calf, lax on the ground like a great skein of fawn-coloured silk, which was frightened of us as we would have been of the dogs and the bull, had we not anaesthetized fear in us, from fear that we might give support to the lie that girls are not so brave as boys. Feminism too was in the air, even in the nursery air. But the farm cats spat at us, and we had to draw back our hands, brave or not, while they glared at us, coarse as burglars, coarse as Charles Peace, not like cats at all. “Remember,” cried Mamma, “the poor things have to fight rats, they could not do it if they let themselves be gentle. It would be a luxury they cannot have.” Was the world kind or was it not, was the farm going to be a safe place for Richard Quin?
But in a loose-box we found the new mare and her foal and knew there was hope. Her long straight forelock, falling between her two big ears, gave her the look of a plain woman wearing an ugly hat, her gaze was anxious as if she were human and could count, she towered over us but it was not imaginable that she would organize her strength against us, her long-legged foal was shy as if it had been warned not to make a noise and irritate the people in this new place where their lot must lie. She made me think of a widow with her orphan child, unresentful and willing to serve, but sad, whom I had once seen in one of the registry offices which my mother sometimes visited. (For though we had so little money we had a servant, in those days even poor households had servants, they shared their poverty with some girl quite destitute.) We went on into the stables, and could see nothing through the darkness except the white stars on the standing horses’ foreheads, the long white blazes on their faces, their white stockings, and a white pattern of light traced high on the wall by a mullioned window. This farm had been built among the ruins of a medieval castle which had been a meeting-place of the Knights Templar, and this stable was where they had dined. After a time we could see the rolling of the mild nervous eyes which showed these horses had wills if they chose to use them, the barrel-bulk of their girdled bodies, the tree-trunk straightness of their forelegs, the cunning elastic spring of their hind legs, the huge spread of their round feet, all the strength that stirred so little and so much more mildly than it might have, had there been malice here. These were kind creatures. We saw two mice
dallying in the litter underneath one giant, and knew it was proved.
The journey, and parting from Papa, and meeting all these animals, made us so tired that we went to bed only a little later than Richard Quin, while it was still light, though usually we stayed up to the last moment that we were allowed. Cordelia and Mary and I slept in the same room, Mary and I in a double bed with a high mahogany headboard carved with plump fruit and flowers, and Cordelia in a camp-bed at its foot. Nobody could sleep with Cordelia, she so often threw herself about in her dreams, calling out orders. Mary and I were very comfortable at night, we used to snuggle down with one of us burying her face in the other’s back and pressing her tummy against the other’s behind, and both knowing nothing more till morning. Mary was tall and slim, in a way she looked grown-up though she was a child, she was collected and calculating, at the piano she could work out any problem of fingering quietly while I would rush at it and get excited and cry; but with me she was always soft and yielding, we were like two little bears together.
When Mamma said good night to us I noticed that since she had been talking to the farm people her Scots accent had become much broader than usual, the line of her sentences had only to be exaggerated for them to be like the phrases of a song. It sounded very pretty. She told us that if we wanted anything in the night we were to rouse her, and we need not even go out into the passage, the door by the window was not a cupboard door as we might think, it led into the room where she and Richard Quin were sleeping. She was always saying things like that, but we never wanted any help, we were so independent, so old for our age. But it was nice of her, we thought, as we sank into our sleep.
Suddenly we were all awake. I was as alert as if I had never slept. I put out my hand and I found that Mary was sitting erect with her back braced against the headboard; and the camp-bed creaked under Cordelia as she started up. It was quite dark, and there was a terrible noise. It was as if the night were frightened of itself. Someone or something was beating on a drum. The noise was not very loud, but the resonance was total, it was as if the drum were the earth itself. It made us feel as sad as Papa’s departure, as Mamma’s occasional tears. It meant nothing but sadness, it stated it again and again.
It stopped. Mary’s hand came into mine. I moistened my lips and breathed, “I wonder what that was.” After all, Cordelia was older than we were, she might know something we did not.
Cordelia said, “It is nothing. It can’t be anything. The farm people must hear it too. They would come and warn us if it were anything dangerous.”
“But it might be something that has never happened before,” said Mary.
“Yes, this may be part of the end of the world,” I said.
“Nonsense,” said Cordelia, “the world won’t come to an end in our time.”
“Why shouldn’t it?” I asked. “It will have to come to an end in somebody’s time.”
“And in a way it would be exciting to be there,” said Mary.
“Go to sleep,” said Cordelia.
“We will, if we want to,” said Mary, “but do not tell us to.”
“I am the eldest,” said Cordelia.
It started again, this beating on the huge drum.
“Mary, Mamma said there was a candle by your side,” I said. “Light it, and then we can get to the window and see if anything is happening.”
Through the darkness we heard the rasp of matches on the box, but no light came. “I cannot think,” said Cordelia, “why Mamma didn’t leave the candle with me.”
“Because there isn’t a table by you, you ass,” said Mary. “And I think the matches are wet, they won’t strike.”
“You are making excuses because you are clumsy,” said Cordelia.
“You are getting cross because you are frightened,” said Mary.
The noise swelled up to a wild proclamation of loss and doom; but suddenly the darkness melted into pale and wavering light, for the door in the wall opened and Mamma came in, holding a candlestick in one hand and rubbing her eyes with the other. “Children, what are you doing, talking so loud at this time of night?” she asked. “We are not alone as we are at home, you might waken the Weirs, and they work so hard.”
“Mamma, what is that terrible noise?”
“A terrible noise! What terrible noise?” she asked, her eyes and mouth stupid with sleep.
“Why, what we are hearing now,” said Mary.
Mamma murmured, “Can something else extraordinary be happening?” With an effort she set herself to listen, and her face lightened. “Why, children, that is the horses stamping in their stalls.”
We were astonished. “What, just those horses that we saw this afternoon?”
“Yes, those. Oh, why, now I listen, I do not wonder you were frightened. It is a tremendous noise to be made by horses’ hooves.”
“But why does it sound so sad?”
Yawning, she answered, “Well, so does thunder, sad as if everything had gone wrong for the last time. And the sea often sounds sad, and the wind in the trees nearly always. Go to sleep, my lambs.”
“But how can a horse’s hoof stamping down on a stable floor sound so sad?” I asked.
“Well, why should Mamma’s fingers coming down on ivory keys sometimes sound so very sad?” asked Mary.
“We will think of that tomorrow, please,” said Mamma, “though really I do not know why I should promise you that we will think to any purpose. If you ask me tomorrow or any other day why some sounds are sad and others glad I shall not be able to tell you. Not even your Papa could tell you that. Why, what a thing to ask, my pets! If you knew that, you would know everything. Good night, my dears, good night.”
All of us were happy at that farm for the first ten days or so. We children were drunk on the hill air, for till then we had never spent more than a few hours above sea-level. “And it is better still in the real mountains,” Mamma told us. “Oh, children, when you have made your way in the world, you must go to Switzerland. Up there at Davos, the air was so clear that everything looks as if it had been polished with a soft cloth.” We said doubtfully, “Switzerland?” and declared it our intention to go farther, to Kilimanjaro, to Popocatepetl, to Mount Everest. Yes, we would wait until Richard Quin was old enough, and we would be the first party to climb Mount Everest. “No, no,” said Mamma, not at all pleased, “not Everest. Once you are doing well, you will find you have enough on your hands with your concerts, and indeed too much.” That answer, given gravely, was of a kind commonly made by her, which caused one of the main inconveniences of our lives. Ordinary people often spoke to Mamma for a short time and then went away, thinking her silly and even mad, because of just such remarks. But she was showing the most splendid sense. She knew she would have climbed Mount Everest if she had had the chance, and she supposed, with the world changing as quickly as it was, that the chance might come to us; she had nearly become a famous pianist and she thought it probable that with our talents we might succeed where only ill luck had given her failure; and in any case she was talking to children, and so she talked as a child, as one played Bach in the manner of Bach, and Brahms in the manner of Brahms.
We made this holiday a rehearsal for Everest, a trial of strength, and again she was sympathetic but applied a principle of moderation. We had supposed we would spend the part of the day left over from our practising in taking long walks over the moors, but we found it more amusing to help on the farm, doing things that the farmer and his wife would not have thought we were strong enough or grown-up enough to do. We would take a forgotten basket of bannocks down to the men working on the farthest field, away beyond the pass; we would polish the horse-brasses the day before the cart was to go down to the market; we stripped the lavender flowers from the bushes in the garden and laid them on boards to dry in the sun under muslin. Mamma let us do what we liked, provided we got in our proper hours at the piano; and that was no hardship, for we always played better during the holidays, when there was not all that idiotic homework, and
now that we were so well our fingers were twice as intelligent as usual. But as soon as we had all had our lessons Mamma joined us in this lovely, boastful, new, exciting work on the farm, though at first the farmer and his wife had kept her at a distance. We had seen her make another of those mistakes that made people think her odd, the morning after we got there. Gaily she had spilled on the kitchen table, in a jumble of Bank of Scotland notes and sovereigns, the whole amount she had contracted to pay for the six weeks of our holiday. The Weirs, bony, sandy, grave people, had looked at her with narrow and imbecile glances of suspicion. They could not understand why anybody should want to pay in advance when there was no need; and still less could they understand why a middle-aged woman should laugh like a young girl going to a ball when she did this uncalled-for thing. We understood. It was a delight for her to snatch this money from the mysterious force that acted on all money in our family, annulling it as if it had never been; it was such an indulgence as she had not enjoyed for years to make a payment and prevent it from being even for a moment a debt. But that could not be explained. We could see the Weirs thinking that she was probably a silly, feckless woman, who had only herself to blame for being so shabby. Soon it was all right. She helped Mrs. Weir one day in the dairy, she had learned to make butter when she was a child and it came back to her; and the rightness of her hands, which was as remarkable anywhere else as it was on the keyboard, proved to the countrywoman that she had been wrong. They began to like her even better than they liked us, and every day she seemed younger, and ate more, and her eyes did not stare so much.
But it did not last. Soon she looked ill again, and did not enjoy her food, and was milder with us when she gave us our lessons.
“What do you think is worrying her?” Mary asked me one day when we were picking runner beans in the kitchen-garden. Mamma had passed us with Richard Quin in her arms; I did not say so, but she had made me think of the new mare and its foal though she was still fierce and quick.