by Rebecca West
I called to them, really for help, though what I said was, “We must go back to the house, it is too cold,” and it sounded cheerful enough.
“Yes,” said Richard Quin, “it is too cold, and silly sister came out without a coat.”
We all ran out of the stable shivering and hissing through our teeth and slapping ourselves. Rosamund said, the words jolted out of her by her running, “It is so cold, I did not bring my hare.”
“He is well off underground,” said Richard Quin. “You should not disturb him. He is all right down in that brown passage, lying curled up on himself, his ears folding back on him like a fur rug, his whiskers fanned by his breath, in-out, in-out, in-out, the whole winter long, till the spring comes.”
“Oh, he does well anywhere,” said Rosamund.
When we got to the iron steps up to the drawing room Richard Quin ran up, and I held Rosamund back.
“Did you see your Great-Aunt Jean die?” I asked. I wanted her to tell me that it was all right.
She answered, “No, she died at noon, when I was at school.”
“But you saw her every day until she died,” I persevered. “You must have seen her that very day.”
“Yes,” she said, “I carried in her breakfast. She took her porridge the same as any other morning. Do you know they all call porridge ‘them’ instead of ‘it’ in Scotland. I thought it was only my Papa who did that.”
“Did it hurt her to die?” I wanted so much to hear that it had not.
She stammered, “Y-yes, it hurt her.”
I looked up at the steel-grey winter sky. I prayed for her to speak the word that would break the metal prison round the earth. “It must be terrible to die?” I said.
She did not say anything at all. Looking as if she saw a horrible event in the far distance, she shuddered. Then she turned to me and gave me the assurance I needed with her eyes, in which I saw fear fade and serenity return.
I asked in awe, “Did you see her afterwards?”
“Yes,” she answered, hesitantly. “Mamma did not want me to, but I had to go into the room when she was shopping, the kitten had got in through the window, I heard it mewing so I went to let it out. But that was nothing. She only lay there looking very white.”
“I don’t mean that,” I said impatiently. “Have you seen her, her, I mean her ghost?”
“Oh, no!” breathed Rosamund, coming as near to disgust as I ever knew her. “Aunt Jean was very sensible, why would she have a ghost?”
I could go no further. There was a vast pyramid, a vast temple, a vast church, built across the path I had proposed to follow into the mysterious woods. I was disappointed. Mamma and Constance, Rosamund and I, had surely driven one poltergeist out of the house in Knightlily Road because we four possessed supernatural powers, and I had hoped to have my fears about death dispelled by something beneficent but as obvious as the careering saucepans, the flying curtains, which the powers we had defeated had used to manifest themselves. Now, as an adult, I realize that I have never been subtle about anything but music.
But all the same my fears about death were dispelled, though I hardly knew how; and a few minutes later I met Mary in the passage and she said, “I do not mind about Cordelia, now that Rosamund is here.” So the next day, when Rosamund and I started off for Nancy Phillips’s party, we were both quite happy, except for a slight anxiety about Richard Quin, who had awakened with a touch of fever and been kept in bed. We felt conscience-stricken lest he had caught a chill in the stables, though he was always allowed to go where he willed out of doors provided he had his greatcoat on. Anyway we supposed he would be all right the next day, we all got over things very quickly. I was pleased to go to this party because Nancy Phillips was older than I was, she was in Cordelia’s class, and I did not really know her, so I had never been able to satisfy a long-standing curiosity about her. She was tall for her age and had a mass of smooth yellow hair, not golden like Rosamund’s, rather the yellow of wild mustard; but she showed none of the confidence which is usually felt by tall schoolgirls with pretty and tidy hair. Against this bright yellow extravagance, her face was pale and reticent and even resentful, and she moved languidly. But at the same time the frills and tucks of her gaily coloured blouses, and her numerous brooches and bangles, which annoyed the teachers by their unsuitability for school, spoke of a frivolity she never manifested in any other way. I felt there was something mysterious about her, and I fully expected to find her living in peculiar circumstances, perhaps with a cruel and crazed stepmother in a richly furnished but cobwebbed mansion. It had, indeed, been quite a shock to me the day before to hear that she had spoken of her Mamma.
Her home did in fact strike me as peculiar. It was a large red brick villa in an avenue of such houses, and no family could have lived there had they not been quite rich. But inside the house could not have been more horrid if the Phillipses had been very poor. In the hall and the little room where we took off our outdoor things, which would have been a study if our sort of family had lived there, were hung pictures which had thick gold frames as if they were real pictures, but were just jokes. Most of them showed men and women in the huge coats and peaked caps which were worn by motorists then, either having breakdowns or driving into ponds or hedges or telephone poles; and others showed dogs and cats and monkeys driving motor-cars and wearing motoring costume. Not a single picture was pretty, they were the sort of thing which sometimes got into our house as calendars sent us by shops at Christmas, and if they came to Mamma she used to say, “Tchk! Tchk!” and tear them across, though her hands were hardly strong enough, and throw them in the wastepaper basket, and if it was Papa who found them he would talk angrily about how he was not bringing us up in the world to which we belonged.
We were received in the drawing room by Nancy, who gave us a faint, sweet smile, and said to Rosamund, “You’re taller than me.” She did indeed look foolishly tall, in a white silk dress with a flounced skirt, embroidered with pink rosebuds. Then we were greeted by a grown-up who strangely said, “This is Nancy’s old Aunt Lily, we’re ever so glad you kiddies have put on your best tatas and come through the wild and stormy to do us honour.” For a moment this grown-up gave the impression of being very pretty, for she had bright golden hair, blue eyes, and pink cheeks, and these were then considered the essential ingredients of prettiness. But almost at once this impression disappeared, her colouring recalled a doll left out in the rain, she had the dislocated profile of a camel. Still she meant to be nice. There were about fifteen of us, all from school, and we stood about in the awkwardness of a party that has not yet become a party, looking about us at the room, which was indeed strange. It was completely furnished in the Japanese style, which was then fashionable. The end of the room was taken up by a gilded extension of the chimney-piece which rose in tiers to the ceiling, each shelf divided into several compartments, in each of which was a single curio, a Japanese cup and saucer, a vase, a carving in jade or rose quartz or ivory; and about the room were lacquered tables and flimsy chairs with cushions of Oriental fabric. But on the walls, which were covered with straw wallpaper striped with fine gold thread, there hung, alongside Japanese prints and Canton enamel dishes, more of those pictures in heavy gold frames representing motor-cars in ditches and cats and dogs dressed in motoring clothes. Nancy passed amongst us, holding out a plate of very large pink and white fondants in fluted paper cases, and I asked her whether her father had lived long in Japan. She made it plain that she thought this rather a stupid question. “No, why should he? Mamma got tired of the drawing room as it was. It was buhl. All this came down from Maple’s. There’s nothing here has anything to do with Papa except those pictures of motor-cars. We have a motor-car, you know. It’s in the coach-house. You could see it if you liked.”
I had been wondering why, if Nancy had a Mamma, she was not at the party; and as Nancy turned away from me she said, “Oh, Rose, here’s Mamma,” and I held out my hand to a dark and handsome woman, very tall, who did not
see it. She had not come to receive her daughter’s guests, at whom she was looking with an intense though impersonal dislike, as if we were intruders crowding in on her when she desired to think of something else. She was wearing a kind of elaborate dressing-gown of a sort then called a matinée, made of pleated purple silk, and she told us, with an insincere smile which hardly disturbed the heavy mask of her preoccupation, that she was so glad to see us all but she was very tired, she had been doing too much, and she had to put her feet up. She was sure Nancy and Aunt Lily would look after us better than she would. As she spoke her eyes were ranging over the room, and suddenly she made a predatory gesture, her loose sleeve falling back and displaying a bare beautiful arm which seemed in itself to be bad-tempered, and snatched from a table a book that had had a chocolate box laid down on top of it. “Lily,” she said, and over by the chimney-piece her sister spun round as if she had heard a shot. “Lily, I just found that new Elinor Glyn you and that girl said wasn’t anywhere in this room. Now perhaps I can get my lie-down,” said Mrs. Phillips, terribly, and left the room without giving any of us another glance.
I shook with rage so that Rosamund laid a calming hand on my arm. Almost all grown-ups were constantly rude to children, but of late they had been going too far. I felt again the anguish I had experienced when Miss Furness had launched her insult against Mary and me. But I knew she had meant to be kind, I could not remember her freckled and unaccomplished hand, feeling for the little seed-pearl cross, without knowing that she had poured out something like love on my sister and myself. Besides she had been misled by Cordelia and Miss Beevor. But though Mrs. Phillips was a woman of many possessions I instinctively knew that a small seed-pearl cross was not among them, and low as I placed the plane on which Miss Beevor and Cordelia were I knew that Mrs. Phillips lived somewhere lower still. It gave me no consolation to realize that she had not singled me out as a victim of her insolence, that all her daughter’s guests had been included in the scope of her offensiveness. This only showed that she had not bothered to discriminate. I was in a state of anger that I can hardly account for, save by remembering that Mamma had of late tried to dissuade me from my fierce efforts to master Mozart’s “Gigue in G” by telling me that I was overworking, and supposing that I was more jarred by the humiliations of our poverty than I admitted. Certainly there ran through my head all that afternoon resentment against the awkward and ungracious wealth of this house.
At first we all sat, most of us on the floor, and played games. But that did not go well, perhaps because there was an unpleasant scene before we had really got going with Postman’s Knock. The fire flagged, and Aunt Lily rang for more logs, and the bell was answered by a tall, pale, queenly parlourmaid, very handsome in the manner of a Tennysonian princess, who made her coronet cap and its long starched streamers seem medieval wear. But on hearing what was required this lily maid became brutally incensed, saying such things ought to be thought of while the boy was still about. Later she came back and dumped down a basket of logs with the clownish emphasis of the horribly funny people in pantomimes. The interchange between this big, coarse, beautiful girl in her becoming black and white dress and little, ugly Aunt Lily in her sky-blue taffeta blouse and her trailing skirt of flounces and ruches had indeed the air of a theatrical scene, for it was played on the hearthrug before the strange Oriental extension of the chimney-piece, the gilded shelves on which were little lolling Buddhas, ivory monkeys and elephants, and lumps of brilliantly coloured stone, all perfectly irrelevant to the two contending women.
When the door had shut on silence Aunt Lily rushed to the piano and started playing “The Bees’ Wedding,” very quickly, so quickly that the bees could never have been sure whether they were married or not, dipping her head over the keys and nodding till her hairpins dropped out, to convey that she was not at all embarrassed and was able to lose herself in music. We passed from games to accomplishments, greatly to my pleasure. Then and now I can enjoy almost any performance in any sphere except my own; if any musician plays to me I am precipitated back into my particular combat with the angels, but if anybody acts or recites or dances I am there on my knees, there is isolated for me another specimen of the hopeless and idiotic and divine desire of imperfect beings to achieve perfection. That afternoon I was irritated when a girl played Chopin’s “Nocturne in F,” and indeed with some reason, for she had been taught an old-fashioned aberrant practice of giving the last note in every slurred phrase half its value; also the piano was slightly out of tune. On the other hand, I enjoyed the accompaniments and voluntaries which Aunt Lily zestfully proffered. She played so badly that her performance was not within the scope of criticism, nor could evoke any emotion except amusement. She made the instrument sound like a barrel-organ; her trills and runs had a Cockney accent; and when she had sounded a volley of chords it was her habit to wink at her audience and say, “Hi tiddly pom pom,” absently, as if obeying some recognized convention. And I certainly enjoyed it when a fat girl called Elsie Biglow recited “Lasca,” a poem we had learned in elocution class, about a man who had been in love with a girl on a ranch out in South America, and one day the cattle stampeded, and she saved his life by shielding him with her body and was killed. Papa was very fond of this poem, and said that if Lasca really performed this feat she must have been a yard or two wide and made of some substance like corrugated iron, but all the same as a man he was glad to hear that such self-sacrifice was held up to young girls as exemplary conduct. But Elsie believed in “Lasca” and for the moment I was glad to share her belief. Then somebody danced an Irish jig and somebody else danced a skirt dance. But after that the tide of talent ebbed.
In a half-hearted way somebody asked, “Doesn’t Rose play the piano?” All heads were turned towards me but I shook my head. They would never hear me play. I was afraid they were all so stupid about music that even after they had heard me they might still think Cordelia played better than I did, and would misunderstand our family tragedy. I knew I was conceding power to their opinion which my independence should have disputed; but it would have been hard for me, with this uneasiness in my mind, to play at that piano. Yet I was a little troubled by my failure to be sociable, and I turned to Rosamund and murmured, “I really can’t play here.”
“No, indeed,” she answered softly, “you could not be expected to, as the piano is out of tune.”
This astonished me. The piano was only slightly out of tune, and I had thought Rosamund quite unmusical. I felt as if someone understood to be stone-deaf had suddenly joined in a general conversation.
The hitch in the entertainment continued. I heard it suggested that some of the girls should play a scene from As You Like It, which their form had been doing that term. This distressed me. The world is against me on this point, but it has always seemed to me that the exiles in the Forest of Arden must have been rejected by their communities on conversational grounds. I looked about me, and was repelled again by the pictures of motoring accidents and animals in motoring clothes, such unworthy company for the Oriental dishes, with their bright flowers shining in everlasting summer against milky backgrounds, and the prints in which a deer or a fish or a dragon disengaged itself just sufficiently from the surface of the paper to indicate the existence of a totally graceful world. I was incensed for another reason by the straw wallpaper, so faintly striped by a designer who used gold without ostentation, without thought for its secondary value as a sign of wealth, simply for its beauty. Lately the rain had got into Mamma’s room through a faulty gutter, and Mamma had had to have it redecorated with the plainest paper because it was the cheapest. I looked round the room and made certain what I would have guessed, that every girl there had a nicer party-dress than mine; and at the same time I heard a girl sitting in the row in front of us say to her neighbour, “I went to a party the other day, over in Croydon, and there was a girl who did the most curious thought-reading trick. She put her hands on each side of your face and told you to think of a number, and then she t
old you what number you had thought of.”
Immediately I knew I could do this trick. It was as if it had been waiting for years that I should hear of it and perform it. I had, after all, certain advantages over my schoolfellows, over Nancy’s horrible Mamma, who had been so rude to us all, her idiotic Papa who hung up these ugly pictures among the lovely plates and prints and wallpaper that he had acquired by no better right than by being able to pay for them. I had even advantages over Miss Furness and her mother. For I belonged to a family which had magical powers, there was no doubt of that. Did not everybody who knew our household well say that Mamma had second sight? And had not Mamma and Constance, Rosamund and I, driven the evil spirits out of the house in Knightlily Road by our mere presence? And Rosamund knew something about death that made it not terrible. Of course I could undertake this small interference with the ordinary processes of life, and everybody in the room would have to admit that I was a superior being.
I said to Rosamund in an excited whisper, “I am going to do a thought-reading trick.”