by Rebecca West
“Would a schoolmistress not be glad to see an Encyclopaedia Britannica in any room?” asked Mamma.
Mary and I stuck our tongues out at Cordelia, and made quite hideous faces, she knew quite well that we had to have the Encyclopaedia Britannica in the drawing room, because Papa had to have the third downstairs room for his study. We also wanted to stop her making any other comments on the look of the room. We knew that Mamma grieved perpetually over the horrid furniture she had instead of Aunt Clara’s, so we made really horrible faces. Cordelia said mechanically, “Mamma, make Mary and Rose behave,” but just at that moment Miss Beevor arrived.
We instinctively knew that we hated her and hoped we would never see her again. She was not at all as Mamma had imagined her, being a tall and sallow woman, with a battered Pre-Raphaelite look to her, wearing a sage-green coat and dress and a wide felt hat of a darker green, and a long string of amber beads. In those days, when skirts reached the ground, a big woman in badly cut and sad-coloured clothes had a massively depressing effect hard to imagine today. She was carrying a white hide handbag stamped with the word “Bayreuth” in pokerwork. She did nothing to recommend herself when we had got used to her appearance, for though she was civil enough to Mamma her eyes went at once to Cordelia and stayed there, fixed in lustre. She evidently liked her very much. It was a great effort for her to force her attention back to Mamma, and an even greater one to make it stay there, for through no fault of hers she was perplexed by what Mamma was saying to her. She seemed puzzled as to why brioches and babas should have been procured for her, and it turned out that she had never lived in Paris, or in any other part of France. She did not even teach French, but she had taken some sort of diploma in the subject long ago, so that when Miss Raine the senior French mistress had been borne away, with the new complaint of appendicitis, she had taken some of her classes.
“But,” she said, after an exchange of humorous glances with Cordelia, “your little girl will tell you that very often I had to fall back on Dick Tay.”
“Who is Dick Tay?” asked Mamma stupidly.
“Dictée,” whispered Cordelia savagely.
My mother grew red with shame. “You must excuse me,” she said. “The children will tell you how very deaf I am.” She went on to invent some ridiculous mistakes that she said she had made through deafness, then to explain how happy we all three seemed to be at school, and how much she and Papa liked being at Lovegrove, but then she stopped talking, because Miss Beevor was not listening to her, but kept on looking at Cordelia. With a distracted gesture she put a baba on her plate when we had nearly all finished, and had to eat it all by herself, while the silence grew more oppressive, and it became more and more obvious that Cordelia and Miss Beevor were giving each other signals. Presently Kate came in to take away the tea things, and Cordelia made an excuse to go out with her.
Miss Beevor cleared her throat and said, “It was in the French class I first met Cordelia. I wouldn’t wish poor Miss Raine to have had appendicitis on my account, but that is how I came to meet Cordelia, and I can’t help being very grateful. Of course I saw at once that there was something special about her.”
“You think there is?” said Mamma hopefully.
“I was so sure she was an exceptional child that I asked her to stay behind instead of going down to the eleven o’clock break,” Miss Beevor continued, her eyes misted.
“Well, is she exceptional?” asked Mamma with interest
“Oh, of course she is!” exclaimed Miss Beevor, clapping her hands, indignant and smiling at the same time. “And what was so exciting, as you can imagine, was finding that her special talent was for my very own subject!”
“What is your subject?” asked Mamma urgently.
“Why, I teach the violin,” said Miss Beevor with proud modesty.
Mamma was unable to speak, and presently Miss Beevor continued, “Your little girl has remarkable musical gifts.”
“But Cordelia has no musical gift at all,” said Mamma. “She couldn’t tell the difference between Beethoven and Tchaikovski.”
“But you are quite mistaken,” said Miss Beevor. “It is amazing, truly amazing, how many classical compositions our little Cordelia can recognize.”
“I didn’t say,” my mother corrected her waspishly, “that poor Cordelia couldn’t tell Beethoven from Tchaikovski, I said she couldn’t tell the difference between them.” She waved a tragic hand at us. “Mary, Rose, go away.”
Miss Beevor left the house about half an hour later, and Mamma came into the dining room, where Mary and I were doing our homework, and asked sternly, “Did either of you know this was going on?”
“Of course not,” we protested. “We would have told you about it, Mamma.”
“To think of Cordelia going off every morning to the school and playing the violin with that woman day after day, and I here, without the slightest suspicion,” said poor Mamma, covering her face with her hands. “Oh, this had been a season of deceit.”
Papa came in, dazed with preoccupation, and when he saw us children hid what he had in his hand behind his back. “That stuff doesn’t take paint,” he told Mamma sadly.
“Kate thought it might not,” said Mamma, caught up into happiness by his presence. “We will find something else.” Before she left the room she turned to us and said gravely, “I had to be very plain with that woman, I told her she must not fill poor Cordelia’s head with all that nonsense. So if your poor sister seems unhappy you must be kind to her.”
But Cordelia did not seem at all unhappy. Nobody seemed unhappy in our house as Christmas came towards us, bearing its sure and certain rapture. Mamma was so much restored by her communion with Papa that she dealt courageously with a grief which might have turned to something else and been a deprivation for all of us. She said to me one day, “Rose, you are little, but you are very sensible. I showed you the letter I had from my cousin Constance. Do you think it would do any harm if I sent presents to her and the little girl?”
I told her that I did not believe it could ever do any harm to send people presents. So she cut up a dress of some light, washable material she had worn to play at a summer concert in Berlin seventeen years before, and made it into an apron which Constance might like to wear when she was doing housework; Constance’s husband did not give her much money, she had to do a lot of housework. For Rosamund she got Papa to carve a wooden angel copied from a photograph of a group in a church at Nuremberg. He said it was very difficult and he could only give a rough impression of the statue, but he made a little figure that looked as if it were bending down to save someone. Mamma mentioned Berlin and Nuremberg so often in connection with these presents that I asked her if Constance and Rosamund had lived much in Germany, but she told me that so far as she knew they had never been there. These presents had just suggested themselves as suitable, and they had associations with these two places she had known well, so she had talked of them. That was all.
In case these two presents should arrive a long time before Christmas, and Constance should feel obliged to send presents in return, Mamma arranged for the apron and the doll to be delivered at Constance’s home on the other side of South London by one of those local carrier wagons which still crawled all over the suburbs, and she made the carrier promise that they should be held back till Christmas Eve itself, so that Constance would have no time to send presents in response. And while we were spending Christmas Eve as we always did, by having our hair washed and drying it before the fire while we roasted chestnuts and drank milk, my mother had one of the most intense moments of pleasure that I ever saw her experience. Suddenly we heard the clack of hooves and the jingle of bells. Instantly my mother knew that on the other side of London an equal delicacy had been practised on the inspiration, she at once believed, of an equal love. Constance had sent us presents by her local carrier. Mother told us what she believed to have happened in a recitative like a long trumpet call and rushed out to test her faith. She was right. When we followed
her to the front door, stumbling over our dressing-gowns, we found her taking in the parcels, which looked as if they had come from a far country, for they were tied up with a peculiar white braid with a red cross-stitch pattern on it, very pretty and old-fashioned. Mother would not let us open them, of course. She ran with them into Papa’s study and put them with the rest of the presents we were to be given on Christmas morning, and then she hurried us back to the fireside, because our hair was still damp. She sat down beside us and wept with joy because Constance was still fond of her. That evening we lay in our beds and listened to the voices of our father and mother as they dressed the Christmas tree in the room below, and my mother’s voice came fresh and eager like a thrush’s song. Once or twice they laughed for quite a long time.
4
WE NEVER had a better Christmas, up till four o’clock. We woke up quite late, of course, because we had been so long in going to sleep, and found the stockings at the ends of our beds. But before we could see what Papa and Mamma had put in them, Richard Quin staggered in, holding in front of him the big stocking Mamma had lent him because his socks were too small to hold anything. He could not bear to look into it for fear of his own delight. He asked hoarsely, “Would there be soldiers, do you think?” He always wanted tin soldiers, for Christmas and birthdays, and whenever anybody gave him any money to spend. We told him there certainly would. But he could not bear to deal with the stocking, he was all to pieces at the prospect of exquisite pleasure piling on exquisite pleasure, all day long. We urged him to be a man and start taking out his presents, but he sat down on Mary’s bed and rocked himself and gasped, his eyes glazed. “And there are better presents downstairs, aren’t there?”
We told him that there would be in the sitting room, where the Christmas tree was, the same as there had been last year in Edinburgh.
“Then why,” he panted, “don’t we go downstairs and get those in case anything happens to them and then hurry back to these?”
“Why should we do that?” asked Mary, cuddling him to her. “There’s all the time in the world.” It was a phrase that my mother often used when we hurried a bar.
His face grew piteous and he cried, “There’s not, there’s not.”
Mary hugged him closer and they rocked together, tic-toc, tic-toc, while she sang, “There’s all the time in the world,” and he sang back, “There’s not, there’s not, there’s not,” his downy face easing into unmalicious mischief, his grey eyes sending coquettish glances under his black lashes at his three sisters.
Cordelia and I went and knelt before him, and she kissed his left foot and I kissed the right, while Mary went on singing, “There’s all the time in the world,” and he sang back, “There’s not, there’s not,” bubbles of laughter forming on his lips, which were a pale but very bright pink. We all wished the moment could last forever.
Then Kate our servant came in and bent her tall body over us, so that we could kiss her, which we did all at once, Richard Quin scrambling up her bodice from Mary’s arms till she took him to her. We all loved Kate very much, and she loved us, particularly Mamma, although she seemed a little frightened of her, and we realized that there was something about Kate which grieved Mamma. She had given us lovely presents, for each of us girls a handkerchief hemstitched by herself and embroidered with our names, not just initials, in raised white letters, and for Richard two sentry-boxes with two Guardsmen sentinels in busbies. We gave her hatpins; we had covered the heads with sealing-wax which Papa had helped us to make look like flowers. She ran upstairs and brought down her hat, which was enormous. In those days women of all classes wore large hats, and women like Kate, who was something a little more gipsyish than an ordinary servant, wore hats as big as cartwheels, adorned with feathers. She put the huge plumy circle on her head and pierced it with our pins, and turned round and round, still looking like a decent sailor lad dressed in skirts. I do not think there was any aspiration towards beauty expressed in her possession of that hat. She had simply got into uniform.
I said, “Kate, how strange it is to think that last Christmas we did not know you and you did not know us!”
Looking at the image of her wooden face under the great hat in the mirror on our wardrobe, she said, “Last Christmas I was in the town where I was born, and I’ll never go there again.”
We saw that tears were slowly running down her cheeks and we said that it was a shame, and wanted to know who would not let her go back, but she replied, “Nobody could keep me out if I wanted to go back, nor my mother neither. Only I like it better here with you and your Papa and your Mamma.” Then we realized that she was grave not because she was sad but because she was happy, like the great dogs at the Pentland farm when they sat at Mr. Weir’s feet by the hearth in the evening, and, as if she had been a great dog, we patted her. But we were without condescension. We respected her deeply, for we had seen her put her hand in the oven, with a batch of pastry on the kitchen table behind her ready to be put in, and take her hand out in a second, and shake her head, and say sternly, “Not yet,” and do it three or four times and always say, “Not yet,” and then suddenly say, “Now,” and the pastry was always better than anybody else’s. Also her mother had been a washerwoman at Portsmouth for thirty years, before, for reasons we could never quite understand, she had had to move to Wimbledon that summer; and Kate knew many mysterious secrets about laundry work. She could even wash our horrible winter underclothing so that it did not scratch. She had the same relations with everything in the kitchen that Mamma had with her piano.
We were telling Kate that we thought the hat needed still another hatpin to look really grand, and that we would make it on Boxing Day, when Mamma came in, brilliant and flashing, as if she were about to give a performance on the stage. She was not looking very well. The loss of Aunt Clara’s furniture, and the embarrassing circumstances of the move from Edinburgh to Lovegrove, and the trouble about the mayor and mayoress, whatever that might have been, had left her very thin. Also she had been working too hard over our toys. But this was Christmas morning, and she made herself a star by her strong will. We gathered round her and kissed her with adoration, and she bade us dress quickly and hurry down to breakfast, we were already late, we would not have time to be given our presents and enjoy them before we went to church. Then she whisked out, making the queer noise which she always made when she remembered something that must be done at once, which years afterwards I recognized as very much like the sound a flock of starlings makes before it leaves the ground. Kate took away Richard Quin to wash and dress him, and we girls took turns to wash in the bathroom, the ones who were waiting their turn unpacking our stockings, which were full of the best things we had had at any Christmas yet, we thought: little dolls, for though we did not exactly play with dolls any more, we were getting too old, we liked to have dolls about, wreaths made of shells and sealing-wax to wear when we played at going to the balls Father had been to at Buckingham Palace and the Hofburg in Vienna and the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg when he was young, pretty painted pencil-boxes, each of us had a new one in our stocking every Christmas, with the year on it in gold, and packets of sugar almonds in different colours. Then we put on our best clothes, which, like Mamma’s, would not have been recognized as such by any stranger.
The rooms of course were changed to apartments in a green palace. Papa and Mamma had bedecked them with holly and mistletoe and the fuzzed branches of witch-hazel that they had found in the garden. At the head of the breakfast table sat Papa, looking very handsome. It is not considered complimentary to say that a human being resembles a horse; but sometimes a fine horse has a star in its eye that tells of its capacity for speed, its inexhaustible spirit, and there was that sort of light in my father’s eye. We all kissed him, and he lingered over the greeting of each one of us. Then Kate came into the dining room, carrying Richard, who looked at Papa and spread out his arms and said simply “O.” The meanest intelligence would have known at once that if that sound had to be p
ut down on paper it would have to be spelled without an h. It was a pure circle, filled with adoration. Papa smiled back at him with the same adoration and said, “Merry Christmas, Richard Quin.” My mother stood behind them, quite free of her habitual frenzy, soft and serene, brooding over the smiling pair.
There was nothing by our plates except the headgear we would wear in the house that day: a Lifeguard’s helmet made in gilded cardboard for Richard Quin, and for us girls different-coloured stars set on hairpins. The present-giving ceremony was elaborate and followed in about half an hour, for Mamma had to clear the table and tell Kate what she wanted done to start the preparations for dinner. We went upstairs to our room and collected the presents we had made for Papa and Mamma and waited there till we were called. Then we stood outside the dining room until Mamma began to play a piano arrangement of Bach’s “Shepherd’s Christmas Music,” and then we marched in in single file, followed by Kate, and stood round the Christmas tree with our backs to it and sang a carol. That year it was “Silent Night, Holy Night.” Then we handed over our presents to Papa and Mamma. I know what they were, for Mary and I wrote them down in a little book, which somehow never got lost. Cordelia had knitted Papa a silk necktie and had made Mamma a set of muslin collars and cuffs. She was the best needlewoman of the three of us. Mary had practised considerable deception over the money given her for milk and buns at eleven, and had gone to a junk shop we passed on our way to school and bought Papa a little eighteenth-century book about the sights of Paris with pretty coloured pictures and Mamma a water-colour of Capri, where she had spent a wonderful holiday when she was young. I had painted a wooden box to hold big matches for Papa to keep in his study and had made a shopping bag for Mamma out of plaited straw. Richard Quin had given the matches to put in my match-box and to Mamma a bright pink cake of scented soap which he had chosen himself. We were hampered because we had almost no pocket-money, but really these presents were not quite rubbish. All except the necktie and the soap were still in the house when, many years later, we left it, and I do not think they had been preserved simply because Mamma loved us, I believe they survived because of their usefulness and prettiness. We were not specially accomplished or sensible children, but, with Papa and Mamma and Kate in the house, we were propelled along the groove of a competent tradition.