by Rebecca West
There was a geography mistress whom we rather liked, Miss Furness, one of the few teachers we could imagine ourselves choosing to go on knowing when we had grown up. She had a timid, wavering voice, and green eyes, with flecks of dark green on a light green iris, like gooseberries, and sandy hair which curved across the front of her head in a high hollow crescent, the shape of a boat turned upside down. We used to imagine her walking across England and coming to the Severn or the Wye or the Ouse, and taking off this crescent and launching it the right way up and floating in it to the opposite shore, shading her green eyes and calling apologetically, “Ahoy, there.” She obviously wanted to be nice, she flushed and had to force her voice when it came to saying, “And now for those girls who failed,” and she taught her subject in a quite interesting, gasping way. Even physical geography, which tells so many things one does not want to know, such as why there is night and day, was interesting because she spoke of the stars with such wistful respect. So we were very pleased when she asked us to tea, particularly as she lived in a part of Lovegrove we liked very much, where a dozen early-Victorian villas stood white and betowered and battlemented round a three-corned scrap of village green, shaded by a row of tall old limes.
The house was as nice as we had expected. Miss Furness’s grandfather had bought it from the builder and her father and mother had moved there when he had given up teaching epigraphy at Oxford. There was a feeling that the same people had always lived there, and that there had always been enough money, which we liked very much. Nothing was shabby. She showed us everything, moving and speaking as hesitantly as if she were not hostess but guest. She put a timid forefinger to the curtains, to the wallpapers, which alike were a rich-coloured paste of little flowers, and told us that they were the work of William Morris; and she took us to the fireplaces, where huge fires glowed orange, and pointed down at the tiles, which showed windmills and castles and men in armour, and said they were made by the clever Mr. William de Morgan, who made tiles better than anybody had made them for hundreds of years. There was much furniture, so highly polished that its very solidity made it the more airy, there were such broad surfaces reflecting the warmed and ruddy light. The winter day, which was blanched and cold, was annulled; and we were happy, particularly when Miss Furness took us to see her mother, who now never left her room. She wore a huge silver chignon, through which ran some streaks as sandy as her daughter’s hair. We had always known that the other girls were talking nonsense when they said that the curious hollow crescent across Miss Furness’s head was a transformation. Mrs. Furness had had a relative who was one of the first English amateur photographers, and she showed us some portraits, very sharp and linear and refined, almost like drawings, except for the pale, milky blacks, of Lewis Carroll and some little girls at a tea-party he gave to celebrate the publication of Alice in Wonderland. What amused us so much that we could hardly keep our minds on the photographs was that Mrs. Furness had an asthmatic pug lying beside her which was exactly like the pug we had made up when we were younger and had first come to Lovegrove Place. Finally we had to tell her, in case she thought we were rude, and she and her daughter quite understood.
Then we went down to tea in the dining room. It was a very good tea, with cherry cake that had cherries all the way through, and not just at the bottom. It was a pity that Mrs. Furness could not come down, we had liked her so much. There was a big clock on the chimney-piece, with a beautiful tick, almost like a purr, but this room was not as nice as the others, for it was hung with large photographs, framed in reddish oak, of stones bearing inscriptions in ancient languages, with notices in black letters underneath saying where they had been found. They introduced a look of schoolroom squalor. When we had finished, Miss Furness did not rise, we just went on sitting at the table. We listened to the agreeable tick of the clock, and we looked round the room. Mary asked Miss Furness if the inscriptions had ever turned out to be interesting when they had been translated. Miss Furness looked embarrassed, and then smiled, and said with an air of daring, “Do you know, never. Never to me. The most interesting are laws. But such dull laws.” Then she relapsed into silence again. We did not mind, this was such a very safe, well-cared-for house, we liked being there.
The pug waddled in, and we asked if we might give him the last piece of bread-and-butter. She did not answer, but cleared her throat and said that she was much too fond of us to want us to be anything but happy, and a little bird had whispered to her that we had not been very happy lately. Mary and I stiffened. But of course everybody in Lovegrove knew about Papa’s debts, lots of little things had told us that; and anyway, whatever Miss Furness was trying to say, she meant to be kind, her face was flushed and her voice was forced as it was when she had to give out the list of girls who had failed in the examination. Both of us began to assure her that we did not really mind being poor, that Mamma and Papa were wonderful to us, and that as to money, in a few years we would be pianists, and it would be all right. We really quite liked the turn the conversation had taken, though it was unexpected. Obviously both Miss Furness and the old lady upstairs would find great difficulty in imagining the day-to-day hazards of life with our Papa, no dun had ever waited in this room among the highly polished furniture, listening to the purring tick of the clock on the mantelpiece. But we felt that both these women were on the side of what was good, they would admire our Mamma for being so brave and never giving up, and we saw them inviting her to the house, and making her free for an hour of its ease and safety. We even thought they might approve of us, for between school and our piano we worked hard.
But Miss Furness would not let us speak. She closed her eyes and pressed on with the delicate task her goodness had forced her to undertake. Wincing, as one who uncovers a wound, she said she had reason to sympathize with us in our troubles, for she had two sisters who in every way far outshone her. She knew therefore too well what it was to hear a sister win praise and admiration and to receive none oneself. But what a pity it would be to stop loving a sister only because she had gifts which made her specially worth loving! That would be a waste of what was most precious—most precious here on earth, that was—and one must not let anything go so wrong, even if to put it right one had to conquer one’s foolish pride and be brave enough, brave like a soldier, to admit that when one’s sister got praise which was withheld from oneself, it was because she alone deserved it.
Very clearly Mary and I were not to receive any such benison of approval as we had for a moment imagined. It had been significant that when Miss Furness had begun to speak her voice and bearing had reminded me of the occasions when she read out the list of girls who had failed. Miss Beevor, I supposed, had been talking: and perhaps we had too honestly failed to respond when our teachers and schoolfellows talked of Cordelia’s local triumphs. It also occurred to me for the first time that nobody at school knew that Mary and I were studying seriously to become professional pianists. We did not take piano lessons at school, and though Mamma had sent us in for the usual local examinations and we had always passed with honours, we had never thought this worth mentioning. I tried for a minute or two to think of some way to dispel Miss Furness’s misinterpretation of the musical situation in our home. There was a Broadwood baby grand in the drawing room, and I had thought of asking if Mary and I might go upstairs and play a duet. Mamma was quite pleased with the way we played some of Schubert’s “Marches Héroiques.” But it occurred to me that probably Miss Furness understood nothing of music. I realized that, nice as she was, understanding on quite a number of subjects was probably not what one should ask of her; it was not in the bond. Also I realized that a drama about me and my family had been composed by someone and had for some time been in the course of performance, and it would be no use for me to walk on the stage and protest that the truth had been perverted, for every member of the audience had had his mind made up for him by what he had already heard. If at this moment Mary and I offered to play the piano for Miss Furness it would be taken as
a sign that obstinate envy still kicked against the pricks. I suffered both as a child and an adult, for I heard in my memory that abominable thing that my eldest sister made of the opening strains of Godard’s “Berceuse”; and the craftsmanship that my mother had built hour after hour into my hands crisped my fingers in impersonal anger. I sat quite still, and so did Mary, while the blood mounted under her skin, which I had never seen before but white; and Miss Furness raised her freckled hand to finger a small seed-pearl cross suspended from her throat and begged us, her green eyes crystalline with tears, to remember that if we went to Jesus, He would help us.
8
WHEN WE GOT HOME we said that we had enjoyed the tea-party with Miss Furness very much. Even to each other we did not speak of what had really happened, and enclosed ourselves in very diligent work at at the piano. Shortly before, Mamma had pronounced Mozart’s “Gigue in G” too difficult for me (and indeed it is very tricky) but I set myself to master it and within a few days I had learned it so thoroughly that though I have rarely played it in my adult life, it is to this day at the end of my fingers, I sometimes come out of my sleep remembering it note by note. But I was working in a desert. I was hungry and thirsty. Nothing seemed to be right in my life, for I was still a disagreeable egotist, and I resented Miss Furness’s assault on my pride without reflecting that Mamma must have a hundred wounds to my one. But all would be well when Rosamund came back; and though I thought I distrusted Mamma I believed that Rosamund would be with us before the end of the year because Mamma had said so.
And a few days before Christmas, there was a knock at the door, and Kate called for Mamma, and then Mamma cried out, and Constance’s voice, precise and level, sleepy and yet vigilant, gave a placid answer. I jumped up from the piano and Mary threw down her harmony book and Cordelia clattered down the stairs, and there they were in the hall, Mamma embracing them, the two so tall and calm, so shyly smiling. Richard Quin pushed past us and flung his arms round Rosamund, pulling her height down to him, crying, “I have just found out, the gas comes from the gas-works.”
“Oh,” she said, slowly, opening her eyes wide. “Those round things?”
“Yes,” he said. “They look like castles, I never guessed.”
We all went into the sitting room and they gave us the presents people bring from Scotland, Edinburgh rock and shortbread, and hair-ribbon for us, in Mamma’s tartan. Then Mamma said to Constance, “Is Aunt Jean gone?” and Constance said, “Yes, a week ago,” and Mamma threw back her head and made a sweeping gesture, as if she were following the path of a falling star. “Was it hard?” she said.
“Yes,” said Constance. “But with all she knew it was not like going blindfold.”
“To be sure,” sighed Mamma, “but even so … And it must have been wearying for you.”
“The nights were very long sometimes,” said Constance. “I do not know what I would have done without Rosamund.”
Mamma looked at Rosamund with more respect than adults usually feel for a schoolgirl, and said, “Yes, Rosamund would be a great help.”
It had already struck me that Rosamund had changed. I did not altogether like the change, for it took her further away from me. She had never been quite like any other girl I had ever seen. I was to realize as an adult how unique her appearance was. It was the peculiarity of her mother and herself that if they had been suddenly deprived of colour they would have been exactly like statues. This was not because they were lifeless but because they had an intense life which was independent of physical motion. In Constance this was a little funny. She was so like what a Victorian sculptor would have wanted to create that it was as if she were on holiday from the façade of a town hall. But Rosamund was like a Greek statue. Surely she stammered because stone should not be asked to speak, and she had been given by sculpture another sort of eloquence. Even as a child I realized that by simply existing, by simply having the face and body that she had, she conveyed a meaning of a sort that I found in music. Now she had come back from Scotland she meant still more. There was a veil about her face, made by what she knew and I did not know. I was full of wonder, I put out my hand and touched her as if I could learn her secret through my skin.
“Can you not come and stay with us?” said Mamma fondly. “You know I have to put you in an attic up beside Kate, but you have been comfortable up there before.” We did not need to join our pleading with hers, for Constance and Rosamund looked at each other and smiled shyly, and owned that on their return they had found that Jock was to be away in the West Country for three days, and that they had come over in hopes of being invited to stay, but in case it was not convenient they had left their bag at the station. Then there was great happiness, and it was arranged that after luncheon Rosamund and Richard Quin and I would go to the station and fetch the bag, and Richard Quin told Rosamund that if we were lucky we could get the cab with a driver who was very proud because his horse had a brother who had won the Derby. I thought this delightfully childish of him, but it occurred to me that when we had first come to Lovegrove I too had believed this story, which must have been invented by the owner of that particular cab-horse in a spirit of despairing irony. We change, I thought, and Rosamund has changed. But she had not gone from me. It is hard to express the totality of Rosamund’s effect; but in her it was not only the eyes and the mouth, which are communicators by profession, but physical attribute, the heavy golden ringlets on her shoulders, her fair skin, which stopped the light like the petal of a large flower, the firm line of her flesh where it fell from the wide cheekbone to her sweeping jaw, her stooping and diffident body, her meditative hands, which promised me eternal friendship.
There was a ring at the front door, Cordelia was called out, and came back as fussy as the worst kind of grown-up. “That was Nancy Phillips, leaving my algebra book, she took it home by mistake. She was rather upset because I had to tell her that I could not come to her party tomorrow. But I have this unexpected engagement at Richmond. I never,” she said consequentially to Rosamund and Constance, “have any little pleasures now, it is all work.”
My mother’s lips tightened and she made an irritable movement of the hand. Cordelia responded by an old-maidish jerk of the head. In effect Mamma had said, “Then do not play at the concert, you know that I loathe you to take these ridiculous professional engagements,” and Cordelia had replied, “What is to become of all of us if I do not go on with my career?” I was blind with hatred; I saw Miss Furness’s freckled hand playing with the small seed-pearl cross.
Cordelia went on to say, “Nancy was very disappointed at hearing that I was not coming to the party. You know Mary had to refuse because she promised to go to tea with Ida Oppenheimer. Well, it seems Nancy’s Mamma gets cross if anybody doesn’t come, she says it is not worth while giving parties except for a large number, it is all such a bother. So could Rosamund go?”
“What a strange thing for a woman to tell her daughter,” said Mamma. “I would so much like to give proper parties for you, but perhaps there is some trouble in the family that is on her mind. Anyway, Rosamund, you would be doing Nancy a kindness if you go with Rose tomorrow.”
Rosamund said politely that she would like it very much, and went back to the drawings Richard Quin was showing her. These were quite good, especially the ones of the ghost of Napoleon laughing at the Duke of Wellington, when the mob broke his windows on the anniversary of Waterloo, because he wanted them not to have votes. It was funny, Richard Quin was old enough to have understood most of what Papa told us about the Duke of Wellington, but he was so excited about gasometers that he had drawn one in the window of the room in which Napoleon’s ghost was appearing.
“It must have happened,” said Richard Quin. “It is so natural for it to happen, Napoleon’s ghost must have felt like that, it must have happened, I wonder if anybody else knows about it.”
When Rosamund came to the last drawing she sat back and sighed. “Oh, how I have missed you all.”
“Did you miss
the horses?” asked Richard Quin. “They have asked after you. Regularly. Let’s go and see them now.”
We crossed the garden, which was metallic with winter. Our breaths were smoke before us, our heels rang on the iron-hard gravel path, on its waterlogged side the thin ice cracked like glass as we took turns in breaking it, above it the bare branches were fine smithy work. Richard Quin stopped before he opened the door in the wall, and said, “You hear them whinnying?”
Slowly Rosamund nodded, slowly smiling. “It’s nice to be remembered. But how do they know it’s me?”
“How do they know things?” Richard Quin shrugged.
In the stable they went from stall to stall, palms spread under unseen muzzles, offering unseen sugar, they plaited unseen manes with their fingers, they slapped and stroked unseen smoothness, answered unheard neighing. I watched them from the doorway, remembering the first night we had spent at Lovegrove, when Mamma and I had stood in the empty stable and had heard stamping hooves, and at last had seen luminous shapes about us; or I had dreamed it so. Surely these two others were also seeing what cannot be seen? I could even persuade myself that I saw the images which their eyes recovered from space, and it surprised me that though Cream and Sugar were as I had imagined since I had received the hint of those luminous shapes, with long curled lovelocks tumbling down their high foreheads and shining, docile eyes, and two rounded shining mounds on their chests, they were not cream-coloured but pearly grey. Soon, however, I could watch no longer, I was so bitterly cold. I had made Richard Quin put on his greatcoat and had come out without my coat or my gloves. The tips of my fingers were blue and numb. I breathed on them, and then held them away from me in distaste, thinking, “This is how my whole body will be when I am dead.” And there might come a time when there would be no living hand anywhere, no hand that could play music, and no music, nor even, so long the reach of death, any remembered music.